It all comes back to "Peak Oil"... we haven't left the oil industry in fact most of the so-called renewables are derivatives of oil in that they require a preexisting oil infrastructure to be stood up and maintained in the first place.
If you look at modern financial and economic systems and things like fractional reserve banking, quantitative easing, the concept of interest rates and debt=money creation, etc then its obvious that the modern system depends on ever increasingly supplies of cheap, abundant AND higher EROEI energy sources, and frankly even if we could instantly covert to 100% renewables overnight, it still would come at the cost of bankrupting much of the globalized world that is solely dependant upon the sort of cheap credit afforded to us by petroleum and hydrocarbons... the top crude low sulfer sweet oil stuff... the energy ratio just isn't the same, not to mention this is a best case and the world right now is well less than 10% total renewables and with oil production in massive decline with nothing else like fusion or fast breeders or zero-point-energy on the horizon (the next immediate ten years) to pick up the slack..
What's a sure sign of collapse and cannibalization? Having money on paper but increasingly not being able to buy anything and things getting more expensive... also no society has ever been able to legislate nor print its way to wealth or riches... there is no cheating the second lawy of thermodynamics and the energy/entropy equations...
Back in 2014 I bought a then top of the line state of the art flagship Nvidia GPU graphics card for $599 at Frys electronics (GTX980) and that was the very high end of that era. CPU has not been improving at Moores laws rates since at least the early 2010... and only GPU was barely able to catch up or stay in line with the Moores law doubling.... but the price and power ratios have not been kept constant, the top of line GPU today from Nvidia costs about three times as much (if you can even find them), at the shelves at Fry's were barren/empty until recently Fry's itself went lights out and belly up... Not to mention the top graphics cards these days use a lot more power watts and so not only has it hit Dennard scaling issues but also economic issues (price skyrocketing) not to mention supply/inventory issues (even at inflated prices the last couple of Nvidia GPU launches have been paper launches with near zero inventory and one can only grab it on craiglists from scaplers for like $2299 for what used to be just $599 half a decade ago)....
So you say well this is in part due to the bitcoin craze or work from home? Well first off using GPU to mine bitcoins hasn't been profitable since around 2013, and there are dedicated ASIC miners specifically for the job, and while COVID has force a lot of work from home, the vast majority of the employees don't need a dedicate GPU for their work, and besides that couldn't explain why GPUs are now more power hungry than ever irrespective of costs...
Take joysticks for example, many years ago I bought a Thrustmaster Hotas combo for $45, now the same on amazon (when available) is over $100+, even more on ebay. Higher end joysticks have been inflated even more in price, and what used to cost $150 is now like $450... trust me the vast majority of people do not need a joystick to work at home... so the pundits blame it on the fact that Microsoft came out with the new Flight Simulator 2020, except Flight Simulator franchise has exists longer than Windows itself and it never caused a joystick shortage every other time there was a new version of Flight Simulator before!
I talked about recently upgrading late last year from Intel i7-4790k (from 2014) to a much newer Intel i9-9900k (eight cores, 16 threads) which affords me using the newer motherboard chipset that lets me go up to 128GB system memory compared to my cap of 32GB when on the older CPU. But in terms of performance benchmarks, it gave me overall on average maybe 3% framerate boost. Sure most games are GPU bound these days and CPU is not the bottleneck but even for non-gaming applications its not been following Moores Law for a long time now... only other option I looked at was getting the top AMD Threadripper with 32 cores, exciting but still not keeping up with Moores law in terms of performance and the price is 6x jump... the 32core Threadripper costs $2000 just for the CPU alone, just the one chip, nothing else.... so a computer build these days would end up costing several times what it used to cost, which is ironic since traditionally computers and electronics were one area in which costs only lowered over time, but even inflation is hitting electronics now too... and this cannot be blamed on the TSMC chip shortage because TSMC doesn't make Intel or desktop CPU chips...
