Photovoltaics alone are efficient at levels that would have sounded preposterous when I was a kid.
This is over and above the fact that we’ve known how to build safe, reliable fission reactors for decades now. I want to believe that there’s a reason we don’t better than “nuclear reactor” shares a word with “nuclear weapon”, but when the planet you live on is substantially built out of raw fuel that doesn’t poison the skies, and you keep burning the kind that does?
I don’t know what your background is, it sort of sounds like you can tell I’m a US passport holder and are coming from a different POV.
A little inside baseball: during the entire 20th century and bleeding into the 21st, Americans did in fact enjoy a quality of life that most of the world did not. In some limited ways that’s even true today.
But in the ways that matter, it’s getting really rough for the average family here these days. Something like 70% of American households could be forced into the red over a broken car needed for work, and basically everyone here is either paying (one way or another) much/most of what they earn on artificially expensive healthcare that the rest of the civilized world takes for granted. People use the term “opioid crisis” because even that is easier to say than: “people are killing themselves at a rate we refuse to even print”.
There was an implied contract: on the one hand the US citizen got to burn a bunch more carbon and have a bigger TV, on the other hand that person was paying for the invention of everything from the transistor to the Internet, paying for the R&D on most important pharmaceuticals, policing the seas via the US Navy so all those container ships make it to their destination, keeping India and Pakistan’s nuclear aspirations in their lane, containing the only super states more authoritarian than the USA (e.g. you can buy a 5nm phone from foundries that you couldn’t absent wars my family members have fought and died in).
Ceteris paribus it’s still more advantageous to be born in Santa Barbara than Kinsasha.
But this “clueless, spoiled American” trope is wearing thin. It was the British Empire that did most of the ugly colonial stuff that we somehow got blamed for, and when the median person in a country is choosing between healthcare and heating oil: words like “wealthy” might not be the best to generalize with.