After the Apocalypse

I think this post deserves the record for how long it's been put off. I think I wrote this stuff down in the summer, and It's taken me until now to finally post about it.
So, for a while, I've been building up a story idea, which I think I might work on after Katani. I got the idea from some of Miyazaki's movies, like Nausicaa, that take place after the end of society. Actually, I think that "Origin: Spirits of the Past" is what made me decide to make my own story based in a world after society has broken down.
Since I'm an environmentalist, this society will have broken down because of our destroying the environment, especially our reliance on fossil fuels, which are severely depleting. It will also be suffering from other environmental and societal problems, like climate change and resource degradation and overpopulation.
Sounds nice and cheerful, huh?
So, I'd had this idea for just a little while, but I hadn't really done anything with it because I had no ideas about what such a society would be like.
Then I saw this TV show which I decided to watch (I watch random TV shows maybe 5 times a year, one of which was last night, which leads to a random digression: I watched the first episode of something called "Once Upon a Time" as I was working on a picture for DA. It's interesting. I may watch more).
Anyway, the TV series I saw that helped me with my story was called Aftermath. I'd seen one episode of it before about what would happen to the planet if all humans suddenly vanished. There's some interesting insights (basically at this point, the planet could heal itself almost totally in about 100 years or something like that). But I couldn't help wondering what would happen to all the nonnative species we've imported everywhere. Would the native species regain control? Or would the invasive species continue to spread and wreak havoc until something happened to control them?
So, this Aftermath series has some strange scenarios, like what would humans do if Earth suddenly stopped rotating?
But the episode I saw was what would happen if all of the fossil fuel wells suddenly went dry. It gave me the first ideas of what a society would have to do without if the fossil fuels we depend on so heavily were suddenly torn away. The planet continues to consume fossil fuels while making very little progress in developing renewable energy sources. The closer we get to running out of fossil fuels without developing alternatives, the harder it will be to make the big transition. Because as the amount of oil in the ground decreases, it's harder to get the last bits of it out. Unfortunately, it's already too late to make a smooth transition, but the longer we wait, the worse the change will become.
I'm just gonna list some of the effects of a sudden decrease in fossil fuels that they had in that TV episode (with some of my own notes).

Jobs would be slaughtered.
Energy would be severely regulated. Electricity, phones, ex, would be cut off. Only emergency services would be kept running on what little renewable energy there is.
Ships and trains would be stopped for lack of fuel. Airplanes? I don't think so. They use tons of fuel.
Gas for cars would be really hard to get.
Even the gas you save for emergencies would go bad before long.
You could still use diesel trucks though, and ethanol and electric cars (if you had somewhere to plug them in).
How would you get to a hospital if there was an emergency?
Disease would spread.
No garbage pickup.
Groceries wouldn't get delivered. People would have to start growing their own food.
Livestock wouldn't get fed.
A lot of stuff is made out of fossil fuels, like toothpaste, lipstick, and plastic. But pesticides and fertilizers we use for our crops include fossil fuels too.
Cities could get abandoned.
We'd use sugar cane, corn, and soybeans to make ethanol and diesel. Which means those plants aren't used as food.
Their given solution is that we'd used algae as our primary energy source, but that would take a while to implement. We'd probably have to use a mix of renewable energy sources though, not just rely on algae.

Actually, I thought this series was prong pretty generous. They didn't mention the millions of people on the planet that are only alive because of fossil fuels (remember what I said about agriculture? That's the food that keeps the billions-large population alive).

Does this sort of stuff scare you guys as much as it scares me?

I have another post about further development of this story which maybe I'll do tomorrow.