Efficiency can in some cases be enough to achieve sustainability but not always.
No matter how efficiently you use the oil, it WILL run out.
So the actual solution is to use the natural resources efficiently and with care while we look for an alternative way that is sustainable.
And a rising price is the signal to do both.
No, because our knee-jerk reaction is to just move on to consume other stuff in the same way we did with the old stuff.
The whole market works this way.
It is why we have fished too much, simply because there was a way too big demand.
It was only after we created international agreements to limit fishing that it became more sustainable.
The market would have hunted for every single fish in the oceans simply because there is a large enough demand for food.
As i said, the only way to change the market is to change the participants.
The reason we overfished is because nobody owned the oceans. They weren't anybody's fish, so nobody felt responsible to make sure there were always fish to catch.
You know where the largest breeding heard of Scimitar-horned Oryx are? Not in Africa. On the plains held in "common," they've all been killed. The largest extant breeding herd is in
. On a private hunting reserve.