Oil still has the potential to be a big issue. There are several factors, which build on one another...

- Oil is finite. Hard to say how much is left, could be 100+ years, but it will run out. Yes there is a far-out theory that oil is produced by chemical and heat processes deep in the earth and is renewable but the predominant body of evidence indicates that you need dead dinosaurs (actually dead swamps) as a raw material.
- Alternative exist, but for many industrial transportation applications (ex trucks, planes, trains, ships) the infrastructure does not exist. Petroleum has a vast infrastructure which was vastly expensive to build.
- The first symptom of running out will be spiraling prices, which will catastrophically damage the global economy thus sabotaging the means to execute a manhattan-project deployment of alternative infrastructure.
- The global meltdown will lead to collapse of industrial civilization in some areas , and inevtibale armed conflict at least on a regional scale.

The good news for the the US and Canada that they have enough coal, natural gas, and arable land to be self-sustaining, it will just require isolationism and an army deployed along the southern border to keep out the starving masses.

The problem here is convincing everyone who needs to (not just the western democracies) to invest in expensive alternative infrastructure while a global industrial society still exists to pay for it.