Comment by notahacker

Yeah. Feels like a "labour theory of value" but for energy, with the same drawbacks. Stock markets are imperfect measures of value but "it's the worst system of value allocation apart from all others that have been tried" applies here (and if you did want to come up with a "better" measure of value than stock prices, it would probably be a "hypothetical value created if the people making investment decisions made fewer mistakes and more broadly represented aggregate human wants" rather than assuming the impossibility of efficiency improvements and indexing value to commoditised energy and labour indices).

Another bold, unsupported claim in the OP is that renewables and nuclear cannot materially slow the effects of resource depletion. I mean, yes, there's not an infinite amount of land, rare earth metals and the sun won't last forever, but the resource depletion absolutely looks different from an internal combustion engine (and an efficient ICE or gas power station is the same outcome for lower material cost than an inefficient one, for that matter)