By the way, I don't think we probably need to do much of anything different than we are doing.
Fossil fuels will begin to dwindle, their prices will rise. As soon as those prices begin to go even a penny or two above that of currently (but not when oil starts running out!) less efficient solar, etc., huge solar farms will suddenly get built in a year or two all on their own, due to being more profitable, just like the original fossil plants were built in only a couple of years. And then R&D will get poured into solar at 10x the current rate as well.
As plastics run out, people will replace plastics in the least needed applications with already existing alternatives that will become more profitable and efficient (and thus market-fueled) all on their own.
If brownouts start plaguing a country, they'll start to relax their opinions on things like nuclear all on their own. Fears have a funny way of melting away in the face of $200 electric bills.
A lot of people would probably die simply because they weren't prepared for living in a world where we had to actually grow our own food in our own area.
Yeah sure, if for some reason, oil disappeared over the span of 5 minutes.
Fortunately in the real world, these things happen gradually over decades, and learning skills is not actually particularly daunting at all.
Besides, most of what I wrote was referring to local (
professional) farmers, not people growing their own food. Sure, gardening is a nice penny pincher, and a lot of people might do it in the future compared to now, but that's not a lynchpin of the plan. All of what I'm talking about can be done by professional specialists who enter/switch markets over years as profits available shift due to resource change. You mostly only need to learn your new profession. Nothing about this implies any need for every citizen being a swiss army knife. Replace anywhere that i casually mentioned gardens with "farmer's markets" and you get the same picture.