It's getting expensive but it used to be extremely cheap, in the middle east or even in the US you had natural oil springs where petroleum literally flowed out of the ground, same for coal before that, if we somehow fuck it up and go back 200 years in the past tech wise there will never be a new industrial revolution
Cost to lives is free here, same as cost for the future or cost to the environment. If we had to pay for these we'd be in deficit. The simple issue of old oil fields leaking methane would already render most of their operators bankrupt if they had to fix the problem
