At first sight this might not seem very 'biological' but it is part of an attempt to encourage us bugs in a bottle to develop some sort of intelligent strategy to avoid the inevitable crash as resources run out.

Assume an oilfield has the energy equivalent of (say) 1 million megaWatt years.
Currently the 'cost' of the oil is the cost of extraction.
If the cost of the oil were increased to include a requirement to create a sustainable power supply equal in magnitude to the magnitude of the energy extracted then there is some sort of global payback (even advantage) to extracting the oil. At the notional point when all the oil is gone there will (ideally) be sufficient sustainable power schemes to make further oil redundant.

Sustainable energy sources suffer from high initial costs and long times to pay back the initial investment. IF the cost of the competing energy supply (eg oil) included the high initial cost then (clearly) the payback time would rapidly even itself out.

I am sure there are better ideas - let's hear them.

-C2.

Governments would like to do this but how do you make all governments do the same? So if say UK did this but no other country did it, the goods being produced in the UK would reflect this extra tax and be more expensive. Any technology would just be copied by the non-cooperating countries in the long run.

These things will happen naturally as the cost of fuel continues to rise.

Oil as a demand should be 70$ a barrel(global demand).
there is attempts to push to nat gas.But the obama administration wants wind ,solar or electric.IMO oil prices are high at this moment because the government still has stake in GM.their idea is to push GM's electric volt.Think about it, oil prices are high, you see a lot of GM's electric volt commercials.and also, the government(obama) is doing what ever they can to stop extra oil productions into the U.S.A from canada's oil sands,which means they are trying there hardest to stop that pipe line being built,and U.S supplies it's self.IMO, nat gas is the best solution, its creates jobs by building infrastructures for it and such,plus there's enough supply locally(U.S.A),plus we could limit up on export of nat gas.

I suspect the replies have identified the important issues and this isn't one of them. -C2.