I feel that you have not defined investment well enough. Nor have you defined what I might term as “Mal-Investment”. We all invest our time and lives in something.

MI examples, which you and just about everyone else knows and mentions, include the global arms race, the USA global deployment of a thousand bases, its patrolling ships, drones and satellites. And those pointless war conflicts of mutual destruction. There goes so many invested lives and treasure up in smoke, with extra greenhouse gas emissions in a negative sum game.

There are the mining investments that consume more non-renewable resources, that eats our global resources cake pyramid down to the useless low quality stuff, that require mining ever more non-renewable energy, to get the extra energy, to mine more rocks to get even the same amount of throw-away consumption. That is a bad exponential. Ditto for the growing rate of accumulation of pollution waste. Also known as the “red queen” effect. Churn by destruction of higher quality resources ever faster to stay in the same place. We measure the churn as GDP and name its growth as progress.

At our overheated stage of making things worse by going faster, the productivity of Idleness is fantastic in comparison. Paying people to do nothing, instead of harmful churn, is the only progress possible now. Now the world is sick, and sick entities get better with enforced rest. Like the CORVID virus spread can be only halted by stopping so much of our churn interactions, so the climate emergency can only be halted by bringing down churn activity to the very passive.

That the growth in renewable energy technology is only a small fraction of current consumption of fossil fuel energy, is a simple measure of present achievable sustainable energy supply. It is the global rest condition to which we should be aspiring. Physical, mental and social life, and people, will continue on, but with more serious, rationed purpose, making the best use of local renewable resources.

Our renewable energy “deficit” should not be an indication we should continue to burn remaining hydrocarbons as fast as possible, in order to have global trade growth that we try to sustain until suddenly we can’t. and then collapse with dead exhaustion. Too much global trade is, like our military MI, an exercise in creating and maintaining social inequality by having the most rapid systems exploitation and exhaustion. To have more renewable energy capture, we have to reduce the rate of turning non-renewable resources and biosphere life into obsolete junk and widespread pollution. Anti – CORVID best practice and climate emergency says we need lock-down and power-down.