I like most of your posts, but this one seems a little down on technology, and even a little misleading on energy in general, though I am sure you have the best of intentions.
Energy is an actual physically quantifiable thing, it can't come from nothing, we do need technology like physics and applied physics to account for it, and to work with it,to provide a minimum of 100 or so Joules per second of energy that each and every one of us processes, 24/7 to stay alive throughout our lives.
It isn't true that all development efforts are done with bad intention, there are many folk working non profit seeking genuine solutions to all things. I am a Systems Engineer working voluntarily on the global energy problem that I've seen coming for 6 years now, after stumbling across it during PhD candidate research on another technical subject (virtual worlds).
To me, analysing the system and stakeholders and our interactions with nature, tracing energy flows through all things, there is a common theme. We see the problem of the drive for profit behind all things with problems.
To me it isn't technology that is the problem, it is the drive for profit, and technology is often what is leveraged to obtain the profit, though not always.
Any for-profit business given absolute control over any market (by eliminating all competition) will ultimately enslave the market, and even cull "Customers" when they are producing less than optimal results.
The net transfer of energy via money in the for-profit relationship is always from the weaker to the stronger. Obviously the corporation is much stronger than the individual, and for the mechanism of profit by scarcity control to function, it is necessary for all energy to come from extraction.
So we are tied into energy by extraction by the for-profit business model, this made all the more complicated by all money now being issued as debt, which in the end are promises to do the work of extraction.
I agree with you we will never see fusion, the energy already used in the effort for fusion will probably never be obtained back out so a net energy gain is impossible.
The same thing applies to any form of energy by extraction, it is impossible to obtain net energy gain, only loss, where we are taliking about energy put to valuable use on Earth.
But there is one infinite source, the fusion generator beaming massive quantities of Joules down to us on Earth for free, the sun.
Though it was never possible to obtain net energy gain by processing only things on Earth, what we have done as if by instinct, is direct energy towards the development of the technology needed to put the energy of the sun to human technological use.
Now any and all individuals, communities, and organisations with access to sufficient capital can choose to go solar backed by hydrogen, to remove their dependence from grids.
We have proof this is happening, but as yet no money is issued to monetise those Joules of solar product, because Joules received for free, with no per-Joule work associated, can't be enumerated or represented by money issued as debt.
It has to be issued for free.
So there we see the problem causing inflation.
As solar continues to scale up, and extracted industries scale down, money is coming to represent nothing, and because we do not distinguish mathematically betwee energy from the sun (positive), and energy extracted from Earth (negative), there is a lot of confusion over what is good energy, what is bad energy, and who really owes who what.
By missing the fault of profit, you appear to be missing the benefit of the sun.