Energy bottleneck?

I was reading Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution (which I recommend as interesting, at least to those interested in complex systems and/or biology).

Along the way, when he was talking about the evolution of plants and the way that chloroplasts manufacture plant material and energy from sunlight, he said something to the effect that when we figure out just a few more details, we'll have the solution to the energy crisis.

This points up something interesting. The commentators on energy seem to fall into these main groups:

1. There isn't any problem, what peak oil? And anyway, if oil gets scarce, we'll invent something else.
   
2.  OMG, oil is running out and we are all doomed. We must give up driving, water in bottles and all sorts of extravagance to survive. Everyone should sit in sackcloth and ashes and do penance for the sins of the recent past.
   

So far as I can tell, each of these has a hold of some part of the elephant for their facts. Peak oil is real and in the short run, it is going to be of great importance and produce a huge bottleneck. The world has a huge amount of infrastructure that is tied to oil and, even more important, it has no alternative that is able to bridge the gap over the next decade or so. That is, there isn't any other source available that could inject enough energy into the system to replace the oil shortfall. Even if there were, the existing infrastructure could probably not manage an alternative form -- e.g. there is no way to power 18-wheeler trucks on electricity, even if there were a distribution system to deliver from, say, a wind farm, to them.

However, there is lots of energy that is potentially available and, given the resources, people are able to figure out technology to extract it from our environment and make it useful. Artificial chloroplasts are one idea, solar thermal is another. Wind power, solar panels, whatever. It can be done, but there is a form of activation energy, as it were, that is needed to develop such systems and build the infrastructure. It is apparent that this won't happen until peak oil is staring us in the face, and then it will take time to develop and deploy them.

Thus, there is a bottleneck in energy availability, which is coinciding with a time in which the population growth rate combined with population size is producing a rapid increase in absolute population size -- hence "interesting times".