The problem with looking to past energy crises is that humanity's largely solved that by turning to a less-sustainable alternative, either in terms of accessing a fixed stock (e.g., fossil fuels, literally, "fuels dug from the ground" --- fossil bones and remains are so called for similar reasons, though that definition has overtaken older meaning, see: https://www.etymonline.com/word/fossil#etymonline_v_11836).

Foraging and hunting (nomadic, low overall land impact) gave way to farming and forestry (soil depletion, deforestation, salination), gave way to peat (a living resource but extacted at rates greater than those of formation --- peat is something of a proto-coal), coal, oil, and gas.

Critics of limits ... ignore this fact, with stunning brashness and an utter lack of empirical basis or reason. An example from a 1978 lecture by Milton Friedman, to an audience of Standard Oil of Ohio employees (legacy of the benefactor of his alma mater, for what that's worth). After quoting a passage from William Stanley Jevons's 1865 book on the inevitable exhaustion of coal from Britain (production in fact peaked in the early 20th century), in which Jevons notes that the fairly recently-emerged petroleum was itself not only 1) finite but 2) less abundant than coal, Friedman, with a simpy grin and in absolute sincerity says:

We are now talking about how coal will save us from the shortage of oil, and he was talking about how oil could not save us from the shortage of coal.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150717170416/http://0055d26.ne... (PDF)

That is: "we're solving the problem of petroleum scarcity due to a fixed stock by looking to the solution of the previouse scarce, fixed-stock resource, which was identified as a finite and exhaustible resource well over a century before. (Jevons wasn't the first to remark on the finiteness of coal, that discussion traces back to the late 18th century.)

And wherever I've turned to cornucopians ... that's pretty much the tenor of what I've found --- logical absurdities, denial of empirical evidence, namecalling, cheap rhetorical tricks, and for the most part, dogding the question. And that's trying to steelman the arguments and find the strongest and most respected (among the cornucopians) advocates. See: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=cornucopians&r...

You're committing a similar set of fallacies in your own arguments, which are largely non sequitors.

The question is "can we find an abundant, renewable, or at the very least, inexhaustible over any possible course of consumption, store or stream of energy?".

- Britain (and before it, mainland Europe, Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, and the Levant) stripping themselves of forests are cases of overutilising a renewable resource. Coal, as a nonrenewable resource is not a sustainable solution, it's at best a stop-gap. By switching to coal and hugely increasing rates of energyconsumption, Britain made its eventual problem WORSE. (Note that the story of felling forests is literally the oldest written literature of humanity, in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Lebanon was where pharonic Egypt went for wood. There are no longer abundant forests there.)

- Petroleum lifting hunting pressures on whales does not make petroleum a renewable resource. It's completely irrelevant to the fact of petroleum scarcity.

- Fusion is a pipe dream and has been for nearly a century now. Practical fission energy systems were developed within two decades of the theory of sustainable fission reactions. In 1934 the possibility was first discussed, in 1938 the first "atomic pile" running a sustained nuclear fission reaction was created under the stadium of the University of Chicago (there it is again) by Enrico Fermi, and by 1954 nuclear power was operating the USS Nautilus submarine and the Obninsk nuclear power plant in the USSR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power Fusion power was proposed in the 1950s, and despite development as armaments, sustained energy-positive fusion remains out of reach some 70 years later. It is a vastly more difficult problem.

If you're interested in the history of energy and its impacts (for good and bad) on human history, Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History (1995) and Energy and Civilization (2017) are excellent (the former focuses a bit more on the history, the latter on the energy, latter is something of an update, though there's also a more recently released edition under the formal title). Smil writes on numerous resource topics in a non-ideological, technical manner. Bill Gates, not someone I always agree with, is a huge fan. His books are excellent.

They're also bookstops --- long and dense. I'd probably recommend the older title over the newer as the situation's changed little and the structure and presentation of the older is superior in my view. Both are worth reading, as are others by the author.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/...

https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-his...

An older title (1977, revised in 1994) is William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity. That's somewhat more strident, though IMO objective. The author is a former Foreign Service officer (US), awarded a PhD in political science from Yale. The book is based on his dissertation. Though the 1977 edition is slightly dated, it is valuable for making predictions (resources, population, energy, pollution, politics and geopolitics) whose track record can be traced. It is also exquisitely researched and its bibliographic notes are a wealth of references to discussion by both limits and no-limits voices dating from about the 1950s to its publication date. In particular, the book is written as a tightly-reasoned though readable argument and has some of the most concise presentations of the limits-to-growth argument (and various rebuttals) I've read anywhere. The discussion of political challenges, both within and among countries, in addressing limits, is excellent. (I'm re-reading that presently.)

I strongly recommend the book, as well as others by the author.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-s...

https://archive.org/search.php?query=ecology+politics+scarci...

http://libgen.rs/search.php?req=ophuls+ecology+politics+scar...