An alternative approach to solving the energy crisis: A society that provides for the universal opportunity for human self-actualization.
Evolution involves the process of adaptation - that is, those organisms of a particular species who have a better capability to adapt to changes in their environment are generally more successful at reproducing offspring who will likewise be more successful at adapting to similar environmental changes. The environmental changes currently facing our species involves a number of factors, the most influential of which include global warming and the energy crisis. The particular groups of humans of our species that will be most capable at adapting to the environmental and societal changes to come will be members of those societies that have secured (or made best use of) technology and energy resources to foster their adaptation. Let's face it, without technological solutions, we, humans, are simply ill-adapted to the natural environment as it is today, nevermind the future, potentially even harsher environment that will come due to further global warming. In other words, our survival is intertwined with how we will use energy and the technologies that are powered by it: the 'energy-based technologically adept societies' will survive whilst those lacking in technological and energy resources will, to put it bluntly, die off.
Imagine, if you will, a futuristic scenario 500 years in the future, where the oceans' avergage temperature has increased not by 10 degrees at the equator and 20 at the poles. The ocean's oxygen producing plankton has been rendered almost entirely extinct due to the higher water temperatures. The ice caps have almost entirely melted (except for a small region at the south pole), and sea levels have risen 30 meters. The equator's average air temperature at sea level frequently reaches 60 degrees Celcius, causing continuous cyclonic storms coined 'The Little Red Spots' to ravaged equatorial regions the extent where the few areas of natural vegetation yet surviving are frequently decimated, resulting in equatorial desertification. Due to the destruction of both the oxygen producing equatorial rain forests and oceanic plankton, the atomosphere's composition is less than 4% oxygen, leaving most of Planet Earth's animal species extinct, as they simply could not evolutionarily adapt quickly enough to this extremely rapid and unprecedented atmosphereic change. The arid, scorching and now uninhabited deserts have spread to the arctic and antarctic circles. And, finally, at the poles, where flora or fauna life as we know it could possibly survive, there is only a radioactive wasteland due to the nuclear bombs that were dropped on the last remaining planet-side human settlements - inhabited by those considered terrorists by the 'off-worlder' humans, who are descended from those who had always controlled the technology and energy resources of human society to satisfy their inbred fetish desire for POWER for POWER's sake, and took every conceivable measure regardless of the repercussions to other 'lesser' lifeforms - human or otherwise - to keep it.
Now, imagine, if you will, an alternative, futuristic scenario 500 years into the future, where life goes on pretty much as it is now, except just a little better: people drive flying hydrogen-powered cars faster than the speed of sound to work from their homes in the woods or on mountain peaks 600 + kms away from the office. Every human on the planet can easily afford such a flying car, as well as a nice home with ample space for a garden, which they are happy to tend during their 4 days off a week. Of course, there are a few people, who for the sake of enjoying their job so much, work 7 days a week and live closer to their places of work. It is such a society where those those who prefer not to work at all can easily pursue their self-actualization dreams and aspirations of traveling the world (or solar system), or learning languages, musical instruments, or yoga, or finite mathematics, or kungfu, or whatever it is they might like to learn or experience. They have their homes in a forest by a lake or on a mountain top or in a pleasant city, as well their own flying car just like most people in spite of not 'working', as all material necessities for the individual human life (nutrition and health, shelter, safety, sense of belonging, and self-actualization, and a clean and balanced environment) are made available by a new energy-matter-energy transference technology. This technology was not held before the masses as something for which they should have to fight, or work or die trying, but, rather, was made freely available to them by a compassionate and just political body void of members with such a psychotic neurotic lust for power as described in the first scenario.
What I suggest as a preliminary step towards this second, and, I would say, more desirable scenario, is to guide the direction our society is taking towards a more compassionate and just one, where individuals' opportunity to pursue their self-actualization is not dangled in front of their faces by some malevolent socio-economic system that seeks to make you work, pay taxes, and buy, buy, buy, until the day you die, but, rather, is fostered by a socio-economic system which through a process of its members conducting peaceful protest and, if necessary, civil disobedience, ensures that the barest levels of technology and energy necessary for human survival is easily obtainable by any person for a ever-DECREASING percentage of their price of labor. Then, when the vast majority of us have the leisure time available to educate and self-actualize ourselves, perhaps one of US will discover the technological advancement that will ensure the survival of us all.
