You are right to ask this question, thanks for posting.
Something not talked about much, yet, is that both food and clean fuel can be generated directly from sunlight with no pollution. (See the "Money-Fuel Tree" and "Solein").
To me it looks like we will be moving to those very soon, as it looks like there is no other way out.
The infrastructure to generate those for all people by distributed solar communities would take about a year, which is about a third of the development time of a grid to centralise that amount of solar power, and about a seventh of the time it takes to implement a nuclear power station by European standards. We would not need a grid after those are implemented. Everyone would have 24/7 power, free food, and free fuel, without even any batteries needed.
But no-one wants to invest in it, presumably because they can't see much profit in it.
However, they would save the planet and assure their own survival, as well as all of humanity.
I believe the reason we don't hear this talked about much is that it will upset capital, by diluting it, because technically fuel created by energy from off-planet would be a constant addition of more capital, this diluting what folk might have in bank accounts or investments.
But, in addition, by Austrian economics money would need to be issued, to reflect the receipt of that new added product.
Since the energy at the input is for free, the money would need to be issued for free, to maintain the value of the issued currency.
Failure to issue it would result in inflation.
And that is what we are seeing.
It doesn't even need to be converted to fuel, to warrant money issue, it still has the same value before and after the fuel is created.
So all of the solar energy already being put to use should be reflected by issue of free money to all people.
This is the real reason we saw the dollar going up (and the oil price going negative, the only time in history), when 4Tn per month stimulus was issued in US.
The standard assertion is that free money issue is harmful to the value of the issued currency. That might have been true before solar power, but now it isn't. By not issuing free money now, to put towards the required solar infrastructure, as well as feed people and keep them housed, there is occurring deliberate unnecessary enforcement of scarcity, it seems to me.
https://eric-bott.medium.com/the-reason-why-degrowth-is-not-what-is-needed-4416025899a2
