I wish I could agree. But reliable solar energy, at industrial scale, including battery storage, will require a huge initial investment of embodied net energy in mining of rare earth minerals (i.e. child slavery and ecocide in Africa and elsewhere), transportation, and manufacturing facilities. And when it all adds up, the initial investment of this net energy is likely to vastly exceed return on that investment from harvested solar, wind, and geothermal energy far into the future.

At present, the only available sources for cheap, reliable, and easily transportable net energy are fossil fuels, which are already heating up the climate rapidly toward potentially catastrophic tipping points, where that heating will become self-accelerating through positive feedback and hence irreversible. Curtains, in other words.

The only other alternative I see is radical relocalization of the economy, starting with agriculture (first and foremost) and locally sourced, sustainable manufacturing (going back to the etymological origin of the word “manufacture” — “making by hand.”) That means, for example, passive solar, via thermal mass from black-painted water tanks on the south side of a house, and via solar design. In short, it means Permaculture — an Earth-friendly design methodology with built-in redundancy, where every element has multiple functions, and every function has multiple elements. Hence my oft-repeated recommendation in a nutshell: grow gardens, grow community, and grow awareness. And it also means a culture that values learning, teaching, healing, and creating above the acquisition of toys!