I have maybe an unfair advantage, with complexity management, and the formal tools needed for that being my usual bread and butter as a consultant systems Engineer, though they are not perfect either, and expensive, they usually give us a much better result than with nothing.
The key development, which most analyses miss, (or maybe even deliberately omit), is proof-of-work tokens in the solar energy reception chain.
That changes everything, it means there comes a critical point in any solar infrastructure development, where the money generated becomes equal to or more than is being spent from conventional funding, beyond which it becomes independent of any such funding, therefore removing its load from the system of capital extraction.
After that, the particular solar infrastructure development becomes like a tree in nature, everything needed for its growth comes from the sun, rather than from the Earth, to which instead it donates the nutrients that empower all of life.
Contrast that with how we currently operate, de-creating everything created by the sun, it is the opposite, with opposite effects when it comes to pollution.
It is indicative that the fuel we can create from solar power, green hydrogen, with no pollution in its creation, burns with no toxic or other pollutive output, we can literally breath the exhaust fumes from it if we wished or needed to.
So we should see it is ok for us to de-create things we created ourselves from the energy of the sun, but not so good to de-create the things created by nature, from the sun. We might see a pretty solid, easy to follow rule there.
On the issue of not adding to, or even undoing pollution from "the old world", again we see solar is infinitely capable, in solar concentrator arrays we can easily achieve the high temperatures needed for manufacturing the silicon of solar panels, and also to destroy any waste by-products if they happen to be toxic, and can be used solely for the reduction of CO2 to harmless solid carbon if we wished.
See the US company Heliogen for example, they know all about this.
Btw, there is no requirement to have rare elements in solar panels, only in batteries, but the need for more of those than exist already is removed by being able to create green hydrogen from solar.
Why have electric cars when we can have hydrogen cars, and even hydrogen planes and spacecraft?
See hyperion x1 for a preview of what is possible with hydrogen powered cars.
