Modern captialism and in fact all the current financial models are predicated upon the tenet of perpertual growth. Using the assuming of tomorrows growth as collateral for todays debt and expendatures.ERORI is diminishing but it's not the entire story.
1. It doesn't really apply when the energy source is practically unlimited (eg. Wind, Solar). So as long as the investment cost is low enough, it doesn't really matter if it is less efficient.
2. A 500W solar panel uses about 1000 KWh to produce. But in a sunny place like Saudi Arabia or many other places, it typically produces 785 KWh of electricity per year. Over a 25 year guaranteed lifespan with some degradation, you get 17.4 units of energy out. That is a decent return. And you could probably leave it out for another 5 years and get 3 more units of energy out, to get 20.4 units generated in total.
3. The technology and scaling continues to get better with renewables.
The global framework as is, and especially how America with its suburbs are structured, require as a prerequiste access to cheap and easy credit which was always propped up and underpined by HIGH thresholds of EROEI...
It is this threshold that has diminished, and will inevitably continue to diminish in the coming years and decades ahead... therefore the global order needs to drastically restructure to scale down and America itself needs to revert back to living within its means.
Any way you put it the Era of Abundance is over...
Please stop with the solar is infinite nonsense... hydrocarbons underground is in effect the suns power condensed for billions of years that humanity managed to burn through in just the blink of an eye...
There are essentially infinite stars in our universe too, yet we cant be powered by galatic starlight because only our sun is close enough. Infinite power source means nothing if EROEI isnt sufficently above 1. Or if other rate limit factors wall us in first. Imagine a rodent placed in a hypothetical infinte 2D plane surface with a peanut placed at x lengths apart in all directions forever, an infinite power supply, yet increase x beyond a certain distance and the rat still starves to death if it takes his body to consume more energy to get to, obtain, eat, digest and process that net energy than it takes for him to make the journey to the next peanut
Likewise, you are assuming we can even manage to outlay enough solar to power and maintain current global levels of civilization...in the first place., but due to what is known as the "Energy Trap", its unlikely this will even be possible... The inhabitants of Easter Island also had unlimited access to sun and wind on their island, and the earth is but a larger scaled 3D island floating in space. Once Easter Islanders hit Peak Trees it was game over for them as they were not able to bootstrap themselves into solving nuclear fusion nor advancing to a Type I Dyson sphere civilization.
If we had another 7 earths worth of clean air, water, sweet crude, uranium, untapped rare earths, all the low hanging fruit of unexploited resources to mine etc and other resources I would agree with you it can be done, however we are already overmargined, depleted, with popullation overshoot and tapped out... and so but as-is the peanuts are layed too far away...