Make them obsolete, of course. Because physics.

“Today’s energy predicament is a strange situation that most modelers have never really considered. Let me explain some of the issues I see, using some charts."

This is the incipit of an interesting article about Today’s Energy Predicament that, among other things, makes the following, not new but increasingly crucial points:

• Instead of “running out” of oil supplies, our global, main big worry should be lack of the “demand” needed to keep oil and other energy prices up
• An economy like our current one can fail, and probably quickly collapse, if it cannot keep its energy prices (appetite) up
• [Indeed, today] Natural gas seems to have exactly the same problem as coal and oil: Prices are far too low for producers

And this is bad because…

In the language of physics, the world economy is a dissipative, self-organizing structure powered by energy; if it is not possible, or economically convenient, to produce it, it collapses.

Physicists know that dissipative structures [like human beings or societies] cannot last indefinitely. Too many economists [instead], too often continue to ignore, or negate, this reality. The economy is modeled as if it will grow indefinitely. But once energy resources become too depleted, energy prices are not likely to rise high enough for producers to make a profit, and this means that the overall system will tend to collapse.

Climate change models are applied to fossil fuel assumptions that are absurdly high, given the problems with low energy prices that we are currently encountering.

At the social and individual level this means that:

• [Since] consumers are also employees, if the wages of a significant share of the population fall too low (which is exactly what is happening right now with the COVID19 pandemic), then consumption will also tend to fall too low.
• If wage disparity gets to be too great a problem, commodity prices of all types will tend to fall too low

And this is bad, among other things, because we need fossil fuels to make and maintain solar panels, wind turbines, electric transmission lines, hydroelectric plants, and nuclear power plants. Not to produce even more plastic junk, overpowered mobile networks, dumb “smart” things, or millions of private cars.