I love the approach you've taken with this story, it's good to look beyond "the leap".
Even if it's not the same as I see, you might be right, none of us can really see the future.
What I see is us moving from what was previously a destructive existence, to a completely creative existence.
By that I think we will not only rejuvenate the planet to something never seen since biblical days, but actually thousands of times more, if we accept this was always our purpose, what nature created us for.
Like every plant does, until it goes photosynthetic by forming leaves, we firstly ran up an energy overdraft from the planet. Then after the plant goes photosynthetic, it pays its energy overdraft back to the planet, so in the end the planet is the one that profits. We just formed our first leaves, now the next part we should be able to deduce from the plant - after we go photosynthetic as a species we will pay back our energy debt to the planet as a species, thousands of times over, and this will enrich our planet more than we can imagine.
Everything changes, all the old rules, when we move from energy extracted to energy added, our entire human machine starts to not only turn in the opposite direction, but will whizz, like one of those cars you pull back A few inches and it ratchets up tension inside, this car, when you let it go, it whizzes off for thousands of inches, this will be us after we make that change Ray.
The tension right now is the unmonetised economic product 'In the bank", It's trillions, in the bigger countries. And still we are trying to wind it back more, refusing to issue the funds representing it, because it has to be issued for free, like the energy that created it, from the sun.
We will have food directly from the sun by hydrogen converted to food (see "Solein") , relieving our load from the conventional food chain allowing that to recover, and everything done is reduction of temperature which will even undo desertification.
The greed that used to destroy will become greed for creation, and the more we do that, the more good we will be doing for the planet, all incentived towards the same outcome.
We'll not only keep all of aerospace airborne with hydrogen, we will have new craft never seen before as well as the return of old icons like concorde and the shuttle because we will quickly master the art of liquedising hydrogen at room temperature, and it has 3x the energy density realised from fossil fuels.
Everyone will produce hydrogen as excess backup, we will do it on a domestic and community basis from local solar infrastructure and we'll do this because we'll be incentivised to do it.
It all turns round, the instant solar indexed stimulus starts to be issued.
That will be us making the leap, from energy extracted, to energy added.
This is how I see it Ray :)