But is this just saving the planet from only the most pressing symptom of human over population? If we do get an abundance of cheap clean energy, what then?
If it turns out that the only way to bring down carbon emissions is to make low carbon energy much cheaper, then why would anyone think that we'd spend our newfound wealth on cleaning up our act in other matters?
There are a multitude of cases of human over-expansion proving catastrophic for other natural environments which have nothing at all to do with climate change yet have been totally eclipsed by the issue. I don't know why anyone would think that much cheaper energy would help those cases rather than make them worse.
Humans are consistently willing to devote some percentage of their wealth to nature preservation. That percentage is probably more or less fixed. Therefore bringing down the cost of doing so substantially increases the amount of nature preservation that can be achieved.
Many dont realise that it's projected to max out at 10bn and then we will have a perpetual declining population / demographic crises.
...and always, life has gotten better and resource starvation has always gotten rarer...
and still, Malthus won't die.
Oh that and often weird racism about how many people live in poor countries.
It can't just be those two things, though, because it's really big in the U.S. right now on the political left, and especially that part of the far-left that relentlessly mock the right for both their religion and their supposed racism/"whiteness".
In some ways, it's an anti-economic-growth, anti-capitalist sentiment that portrays the great conflict of the world as between "the world" and "human economic activity"
But there's a lot to unpack in the question "Why won't Malthus die" that I won't claim to understand at all.
If others have things you want then they are stealing from you. If others are poor then they are a threat because they might want to take what you have.
Belief in the neccessity of one's actions is one hell of a drug that sticks a magnet onto their moral compass ensuring it always points to "correct".
It might be running out of capacity to do so without changing in ways we care about. Possibly.
But I do note that there is a distinct lack of interest in any attempts to solve that problem other than shrinking the population or dismantling our economies or ending any semblance of liberty.
Indeed, most of the proposals are so extreme and draconian that they would lead to much more misery and death than simply doing nothing.
Nobody is interested in even considering alternatives. Research to solve the problem is ongoing, but barely funded at all -- and yet tons of things are possible.
Sure, fusion is interesting.
But, other things are too. Safe and plentiful fission power would help, and is available today.
Work on the chemistry of photosynthesis is promising -- imagine a truly carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuel (the carbon in the fuel having come out of the air through artificial "plants"), but is barely funded at all.
Direct carbon sequestration is an expensive, but possible, option (probably cheaper than just rolling society back to the middle ages!)
But 99.9% of the energy is instead spent on terrible fantasies like "fundamentally restructuring" the economy away from profit and liberty.
Because there is no desire to actually work the problem. Just like the original Malthus didn't care about the plight of the "surplus population," but instead had a political axe to grind.