But it might make the inevitable crash more survivable.
So called "renewable energy" won't.
These articles are always written from the wrong perspective anyways. It's not about the affluent neighbor who can call someone up to have a $50,000 solar system installed on their property and then go out and buy a new Tesla.
The median household income worldwide is about $3,000 annually. A reliable twenty amp electric circuit, a few lights, a phone charger, an electric rice cooker or inductive hotplate... those things are civilization. Indoor plumbing and modern sewage treatment systems are civilization too. If we are able to maintain our world civilization we'll be better able to avoid the rapidly approaching climate catastrophe. It has to be all hands on deck. If civilization collapses, then yes, there will be a rapid and very horrible die-off of the human population.
The quickest, most effective, and least expensive way to accomplish this kind of civilization is by building big power plants. China knows this and is building coal fired power plants, nuclear power plants, and huge hydroelectric projects, possibly just as fast as they can. For all the talk of Chinese non-hydro "renewable energy" it's still a small fraction of the overall power supply. China is also doing it's best to reduce its dependence on imported oil and gas, for obvious reasons. Mostly they are doing that with coal. China imports coal, but that is easily stockpiled as a buffer against political instabilities beyond it's border. So is nuclear fuel.
In the last ten years coal has gone from supplying about 80 exajoules of China's primary energy to 90 exajoules. In comparison solar and wind energy are only a small fraction of that, about 5 exajoules, as I recall. (It's difficult to find the actual number in all the hype.) For a few brief moments every year solar and wind power exceed the output of China's thermal plants and everyone cheers but that's pretty meaningless. To maintain a stable economy electricity production must be continuous. Even with batteries this places a limit on what solar and wind are capable of. At a certain point adding additional wind and solar becomes a problem of diminishing returns and rapidly increasing prices for electricity.
To me the worst thing about wind and solar is the land use. Rooftop solar, parking lot solar, those don't bother me any more than all the other crap of our consumerist society. Bulldozing many square miles of previously undeveloped land for a few megawatts of intermittent energy bothers me a lot. Ripping apart the land for the massive volume of materials required to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, inverters, and batteries bothers me a lot. We're not going to save the world by trashing it.
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