"Oil is not dominant" -- except that it meets the largest share of our energy needs. And "electricity, not oil, powers our civilization," except that electricity has to come from SOMEWHERE!

If I'm supposed to read the whole thing, whoppers like these shouldn't be in the first few paragraphs.

You're wrong. Read on all the way to the very start of the second graf:

Oil is not the dominant fuel of our modern economy. Oil supplies about 40 percent of the raw energy we use, and we use it mainly in our cars. Coal, uranium, gas, and hydroelectric power supply the other 60 percent or so.

I read the whole thing but can't see what this has to do with Star Wars figures.

Be aware that energy is not the only destination for oil. Plastics and carbon-fiber composites come from oil; really, any synthetic material that isn't ceramic has oil somewhere in its ancestry. Even if we converted completely to electric cars charged by nuclear fission plants, we'd still need oil.

I don't doubt Huber is correct to say that we will find ingenious ways of harnessing energy to meet future demand. However, the article says nothing about the economics or the political obstacles to doing so. Maybe those topics are addressed in his book, but for an article put in the "policy" section of Slate, their absence was glaring.

If the cost balance between oil and energy shifted by a factor of 5 towards energy being cheaper, we wouldn't use oil as a hydrocarbon source for synthetics. It's not the only source of hydrocarbons, it's just the cheapest right now.

That would be a huge shift in the economics of it, though.