I don't know about you, but modern transportation, the green revolution (cheap and abundant food) and antibiotics, to name just a few of the advances enabled by hydrocarbons, are nothing to be sneezed at.
Yeah, and if petroleum is exhausted to the point of becoming unaffordable, all of those advances will be lost unless we transition to something that doesn't rely on fossil fuels. At the very least, modern transportation as we know it (especially overseas shipping and aircraft-- there's a reason why the Pentagon is taking this seriously) will grind to a halt, and much of the cheap and abundant food we enjoy today will either become impossible to cultivate locally (no artificial fertilizer), or impossible to ship from Peru/Chile.
What's desperately needed are transition fuels for ships and aircraft, to serve as stopgaps before and when the oil crunch hits. Biodiesel works for highway-based freight in temperate climates, so we need the equivalents for heavy fuel oil and kerosene-- and we shouldn't have to sacrifice food/feedstock for it, since several algal species can generate oil on a large scale. We just haven't gotten to the point where we have a strong aquaculture.
Solar and wind energy cannot yet replace our energy needs, not even close. Even if we squeeze every last efficiency gain that we can reasonably get, it still won't be enough.
Solar energy, as current silicon photovoltaics (10-15% efficiency on a good day), can't replace fossil fuel, but they can supplement or offset some of it-- and the offset will only grow when you factor in newer tech like thin-film (20-30%), as well as economies of scale driving down the investment price.
For that matter, there's solar thermal using molten salt, which could power millions of homes and not go offline when the sun goes down. Spain's invested heavily in this, and now their solar facilities are producing practically free energy. Shame it's not offsetting their financial troubles, though. There's also waste to energy conversion and many other technologies that can chip away at the use of fossil fuels-- it's not all about solar and wind.
The point was never that one or two renewable energy techs would completely and immediately replace oil; the point is that a comprehensive strategy involving solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, tidal, hydro, biofuel, and whatever else we can come up with would reduce our consumption of coal and oil to something more manageable. Then we can seriously think about cutting-edge technologies (like fusion) that could take us off fossil fuel, or change the process to one that's carbon-neutral.
Of course, all of this costs money up-front, and the fossil-fuel-enriched legislators are far more willing to save subsidies on coal and oil, than they are willing to ensure a more stable economy. For that matter, the average investor still thinks "energy = oil|coal"...