Yeah. Or our descendants will be doomed. We have no idea.
This could be a good argument if the actual profits from coal and oil were really going to development of sustainable technologies (or poor people, in case of argument from streptomycin). In fact, that's precisely what the carbon tax proposals try to induce.
But I am not convinced; oil and coal companies fight this tooth and nail.
Profits are irrelevant. What matters are the benefits, which include the consumer surplus as well as the producer surplus. So long as coal and oil are the cheapest most reliable source of energy, using them makes the economy more efficient than not using them and an efficient, functioning economy buys us more safety margin for just about any conceivable future threats, not just climate-related ones. Whereas a crippled economy where we use less energy automatically makes us more vulnerable to many other conceivable future threats, even ones we didn't explicitly prepare for. (Getting hit by an asteroid, disease epidemics, global cooling...)
Switching to less CO2-intensive technologies will happen anyway regardless but if you want to push it along, how about removing some of the roadblocks to nuclear power? (Including recycling/reprocessing waste into more fuel, which has been illegal in the US since the 1970s)
This could be a good argument if the actual profits from coal and oil were really going to development of sustainable technologies (or poor people, in case of argument from streptomycin). In fact, that's precisely what the carbon tax proposals try to induce.
But I am not convinced; oil and coal companies fight this tooth and nail.