Having more energy is intrinsically dangerous, though, because it's indiscriminate: more energy cannot enable bigger solutions without also enabling bigger problems. Energy is the limiting factor to how much damage we can do. If we have way more of it, all bets are off. For instance, the current issue may be that we are indirectly cooking the planet through CO2 emissions, so capturing that sounds like a good idea. But even with clean energy, there is a point where we would cook the planet directly via waste heat of AI and gizmos and factories and whatever unforeseen crap we'll conjure just because we can. And given our track record I'm far from confident that we wouldn't do precisely that.
This exactly. Every self replicating organism will eventually use all the energy available to it, there will never be an abundance. From the dawn of time, mankind has similarly used every bit of energy it generates. From the perspective of a subsistence farmer in the 1600s, if you told them how much energy would be available in 400s year they would think we surely must live in paradise with no labor. Here we are, still metaphorically tilling the land.
