I don't like the taste of this, I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly why, but it's something like:
We depend on oil, because we depend on oil. I can say I "need" my phone but I bet I'd be just like anybody else in the 60s if I didn't have my phone. I "need" the BART but only because I live in a city that exists in its current state because of the existence of public transit. Etc. Feel where I'm going on this?
Modern society would absolutely collapse if oil just suddenly vanished. Obviously. But how could that possibly happen? It's impossible. And it's also, I think, absurd to suggest there's no possible way to quickly and intelligently transition off oil dependency, barring the fight against the Oil lobby, which I'll get to.
Also, I postulate modern society could absolutely exist in an almost identical form to how it does today, if it hadn't become addicted to oil from the get go. It's feasible from an economic and engineering standpoint that we could have transitioned our entire electrical grid to nuclear, with some trickles of hydro and wind here and there, in the 1980s. Sure electric cars haven't really been entirely feasible until recently, but electrified public transit absolutely has been, and maybe we would have gotten better electrified vehicles sooner if there wasn't as much oil available.
My basic point is that Oil is not "necessary" for modern society, either in its formation or in its current iteration, and that we can absolutely get by without it, EXCEPT for the fact that would hurt some shareholders in a very big way and so they will fight tooth and nail to prevent them. With them out of the way, the obstacles would be so much less.