I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
It is not a hypothesis without merit. Those civilizations were not built on the meteoric extraction and burning of fossil fuels, which will not be replenished for millions of years, if that. If we exhaust those fuels, or any resource really, at a global-industrial scale, it becomes dubious whether or not a follow-up civilization will be able to leverage those resources for their own advancement.