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If nukes and fossil fuels aren't bridge tech we are doomed to revert to pre industrial life anyways.
Hydro is nice, but most the good spots are already taken, and environmentalists oppose it as well.
Geothermal is proving hard. Again, we need bridge tech, which is nukes and fossil fuels. This isn't like a parachute. The environmental movement is like stabbing yourself in the leg in the middle of the desert and pouring out your canteen. Maybe it's impossible to make it to fusion or cheap, reliable, high capacity batteries. But you should try. And trying means growth.
Plus, climate change concerns are silly if greens are correct about green energy. If the tech actually worked we could set CO2 levels to whatever we wanted on a yearly basis.
To use a metaphor from elsewhere in the rationalist space, picture yourself at the bottom of a mountain range, the high peaks covered with clouds and impossible to clearly see from the ground. You have enough supplies to climb up one or two of the mountains - how confident are you that you're going to climb up a mountain which has a rest-area that allows you to recover and resupply before journeying further upwards? If it turns out that fusion is indeed a boondoggle which cannot support society, then spending energy and resources trying to reach it is a terrible idea when those resources could be saved for another, more promising project.
How confident are you that nuclear is the technology of the future, as opposed to something like finding a way to use zero point energy? How certain are you that nuclear power isn't something that can only be economically exploited by a society with access to far more energy and technology than we have now? From where I'm standing you have an awful lot of work ahead of you if you want to actually make the claim that it is nuclear or bust, and that claim seems to me like it is at the heart of your position here. If we live in the kind of world that I'm positing (and there's a decent chance we are!) then just "trying" like you're suggesting is actually the path to primitive existence that you've been trying to avoid.
If we reach that level then there is no point discussing energy because we have effectively become a post scarcity society and can just do whatever we want. That hypothetical future is effectively post singularity and impossible to talk about in any real way.
In your mountain range analogy, you have to add the caveat that you also starve to death if you just stay in the valley. Which is what you are proposing.
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