[quote=So Boerd]
So is the sun. The only question is when.Can you imagine how silly it would have been in the 1830s for government to invest in hydropower at the expense of oil? We shouldn't get ahead of ourselves. Coal and Oil to natural gas, natural gas to nuclear fission, fission to fusion. I suspect the renewable we know will never be nothing but a sideshow on the global stage.
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For all practical intents and purposes, the sun can provide us with a limitless amount of renewable energy. When the sun dies, we fucking die, so the energy it can provide will last until the death of humanity. I'm gonna just count that as infinite, here - it's renewable energy. Unlike oil and fossil fuels. Which will run out far before the death of Earth and humanity. Please, don't be ridiculous.

This isn't the 1830s. Arguing for what we should do now with what we should have done 200 years ago is ludicrous. Also, the linear way you view this hypothetical development of energy sources has already been fucked to high hell by the fact that we already use nuclear fission and are working towards nuclear fusion, and by the fact that that's just sort of not how things work. Neat, linear, orderly little progressions like you picture don't occur in real life, in which we are always pushing forwards to new frontiers, and someone is always trying to jump ahead of the curve. As for your assertion that renewable energy as we know it is somehow obsolete already, well, there are statistics all over the place that show the ridiculous amounts of power we could generate if we had X amount of solar panels or Y amount of hydroelectric plants - I'm sure you can find them yourself. They provide plenty of evidence that renewable energy as we know it is feasible.