system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I believe we are living in the best era of humanity, thanks to fossil fuels, and it is all downhill from here. CMV

By "era" I mean roughly a few centuries. We are somewhere within this era, unclear if beginning, middle or end.

Fossil fuels are "stored sunlight energy", from the past few billion years, which we are now burning through in a few centuries.
Fossil fuels are great not just because of the energy the give us for free, but also the ability for very light and space efficient "energy storage". An airplane can carry lots of usable, light energy in the form of fuel, which it couldn't with batteries.

While many like to point to technology, democracies, modern health care and other such things to credit the huge increase in our standard of living the past few centuries, I think those all pale in comparison, or are caused by, the discovery of fossil fuels.

I think climate change is somewhat beside the point. In the really long term, I don't really care if you flood some cities, send some species to extinction, and reshape Earth's geography a bit. It's sad, but we can get over it. Just reshape humanity to its new world, and get used to it. It is still nowhere near as bad as losing all our free energy, which we use exactly so we can live in whatever conditions Earth throws at us (i.e. heaters/air conditioners).

I think all renewable/sustainable energy efforts, while nice, will never give us the quality of life we enjoy today.

"Live", sustainable, sunlight energy will always be no match for fossil fuels.

Batteries suck, and always will. The chemistry is quite clear, in that gasoline stores far more energy for its weight than any comparable "technological" solution. Though nuclear energy can certainly win, it is far less "usable" - fit a "nuclear engine" on an airplane. (I might be wrong here - what do "nuclear submarines" do?)

Uranium will deplete just as fossil fuels will.

My only real hope is nuclear fusion. From the little I've heard of it, hopes are not very high.

This might be more of a scientific question than a "view"...

(In case anyone is worried - I'm not really depressed or worried by any of this, just... "Oh well...")
gpt
For perspective, you might look at the history of petroleum in the United States:  

Before petroleum, people lit their lamps every night with whale oil.  Yes, oil from slaughtered whales.  When the whale population got very low, the price of whale oil shot up and everyone started worrying.

The price kept going up, up, up and before long people were looking for ways to get rich.  One person spent a lot of time researching petroleum as an alternative.  People had known about petroleum for a while, but there were not very many good uses for it, so it was actually a very bad thing to have it bubble up on land you owned.  It would foul the land and make raising crops on that land difficult or impossible.

Well, this person found a way to refine petroleum into kerosene.  Kerosene burned brighter than whale oil and with less smoke.  It was a better product, and was very cheap to make.  Before people knew it, even the poor could afford to have oil lamps in their homes because of this technological breakthrough.

Petroleum is not the end-all fuel.  When the price of petroleum goes up high enough, due to high demand and low supply, there will be new breakthroughs.  This cycle has occurred many times throughout human history.