Comment by alexanderstears

If even a huge portion of people voluntary lower consumption or energy usage, it frees up that energy to be consumed more cheaply by other people

Not really, oil extraction is capital intensive, oil wells have finite lives, and you can count on people extracting the cheapest oil first. As fossil fuel demand drops, the risk of operating a well increases and that makes borrowing more expensive, the capital costs will be amortized across less energy so the energy will have to be more expensive, and energy should naturally get more expensive as time goes on and the easiest oil is depleted. Sure, technology changes and reduces the cost of extraction but moving away from fossil fuels isn't an incentive for developing more extraction technology.

Not to mention that people's investments in alternative fuels / transportation brings the costs down for everyone else and as costs go down, more and more people will be willing to pay the eco-friendly premium until some day they're less expensive and people select eco-friendly consumption out of their own self-interest.

I think this day is closer than most people realize for electric cars. Gear heads and regular folks are going to love electric cars when the batteries get better, at some point, it's going to cost a lot extra to get a ICE vehicle and that's going to be a rent extraction on idiots who dream of rolling coal in F250s.