Everything we burn except fission power is bottled sunshine. I couldn’t have given you a working business plan for Tesla motors ten years ago, and yet it exists. I can’t right now give you a plan to transition entirely off oil and coal, but we are going to have to, or die in the attempt. If we try hard enough we could capture several times the Earth’s cross section in solar energy. Vastly more than is available to us from fossil fuels.
It is a question of how much energy we collect, and how it is stored, transported, and used. Methane is pretty easy to make. Its a simple molecule. Its fairly easy to store and is used in transportation right now. The manufacturing process is wasteful, but we have (in theory) the entire output of the sun to work with.
