I agree we exist for energy, thanks for posting.

But the reason you think we need fuel is profit.

Most people, especially those most conventionally educated (we), seem restricted to thinking only in terms of profit.

Hence we can’t get our heads around the idea of energy without fuel, except maybe in the special case of fusion, which outside the sun, is an impossibility as we come to understand, eventually.

All of your analysis is classic thinking in terms of profit.

We are conditioned by the profit driven system to think only in terms of profit.

We even have conceptual instruments like Occam’s razor to keep us on the path of profitable thinking.

Why waste time thinking about anything else, if it isn’t towards profit for us individually, or for our tribe, or for the stakeholders of our scientific department, or even just for the cause of science itself?

So we just don’t think about anything else, we are literally blind to it.

The same characteristic appears in almost every story we read about environment, written by the conventional mindset, including and especially by most environmental scientists.

The system of profit requires all things to be in a closed box, the zero-sum game.

In that system, for every winner of energy there has to be losers.

Whoever can exert scarcity wins (profits).

It kind of worked on Earth for a few thousand years.

But all the time we have been consuming the energy and resources in the closed box, we have been extracting all things from a pretty much finite, fixed amount of it, the energy resources of Earth.

And in the last 150 years we’ve honed that extraction to a fine art with the practice of profit, and for-profit technology.

The rate that we can now consume energy vastly outpaces the rate it is put on Earth, for all of life besides us, by plants feeding from the sun.

So of course we are starting to see some real problems, which look like the end of the road if we can’t see the way out.

The battery of energy resources on Earth are beginning to show signs of loading.

The battery is running out.

The extraction loading characteristic is 1/x, it is a reciprocal exponential, rising steeply towards a brick wall.

We are just on the knee of that curve, the flat part of which was only 150 years or so, of the millions of years it took to charge the battery, by the sun.

The way out can only be seen by ditching the profit driven thinking.

Energy as fuel was never a primary source of energy, but it is something we can take possesion of and scarcify from others, so as to profit from.

As always it started as energy from the sun, which still shines on us now, as strong as ever.

In fact, thousands of times more sun energy falls on Earth continuously, uninterrupted, for all of time, than we can possibly use, even tens of billions of us.

Because there is much more than we can use, it is a kind of ideal source, that we can’t change by loading, we can’t even come close, so it is effectively an infinite source.

Like a mains socket, compared with the battery of Earth.

This is standard scientific knowledge, and yet we still don’t see this as the way out.

Because we can’t load the sun so as to scarcify it from others, therefore we can’t profit from it.

It is actually quite ludicrous to think or claim we can’t use our technology to capture enough energy from the sun, the original source of all energy, to power all of humanity.

We can do it easily, with loads to spare.

After that is done, humanity becomes like plants, feeding from the sun, adding value to the Earth in the form of various kinds of additive worked energy, quickly replacing what we took out.

Just one catch, it has to happen as a species, not as an individual, or a tribe, or a corporation, or a country, but as a whole species.

As you pointed out, we aren’t quite ready to do that, as evidenced by the covid response fiasco, but the fact we can see that now means we know how to fix it.

Ditch profit.

To think about humanity as a whole, we have to ditch profit, otherwise there have to be losers.

Humanity can’t be whole until then.

It is starting to happen, if you know what to look for in the technology of solar powered proof-of-work tokens, like Bitcoin.

Much more about that if you search for “Kardashev Hinge”, or “Grand Energy Ponzi”.