Is it me or is the whole world at this moment only in dire need of one thing:
a new high efficiency environmentally clean energy source and energystorage ?
Is it? That's a very complex question. On a superficial level, that sounds about right. (And that we are wasting a lot of time and resources on dead-ends and stupid tech, I agree with!)
Now, the fact that we are using essentially non-renewable sources of energy that are not environmentally-friendly at all has at least the benefit of being time-limited. It will stop us at some point, and we won't be able to do more damage. Of course, then things may not look pretty for us as a species (and for many other species), but there *will* be an end to it. And this won't be the end of the Earth. The remaining will just adapt to new conditions. We precisely do not have enough energy available (even if one could argue we have too much already) to do any drastic damage to the planet. We do to make drastic damage to ourselves though and modify our environment enough to change it significantly. But that's not the same.
If we suddenly had access to a clean and virtually unlimited source of energy (at least compared to what we have now), sure the immediate consequences of using this energy would not be nearly as bad, but the long-term consequences may be disastrous. The more energy we have at disposal, and the more damage we'll be able to make. Doesn't need to come directly from the energy source itself.
So, yeah, that's a mixed bag. Those thoughts are nothing new, and many leaders are fully aware of this. I'm pretty sure that if we finally elaborate this clean, almost unlimited energy source that we are all dreaming of, governments - or most likely supranational entities - will have to artificially limit its access and raise its prices considerably in order to avoid the chaos that I evoked just above. Which is likely to come with even more political and stability problems that we are living at the moment.
Just a few thoughts. Maybe we should focus on something else.
Shouldn't the whole scientific community first focus on this and continue with the rest after it has been realized ?
Notwithstanding the above point, this is something that in general I agree with. For instance, I've often said that focusing on makings craptons of EVs with the current technology (batteries that generate pollution whiile being made, that are difficult to recycle - and make additional pollution for doing so) and without a reasonably clean way of generating electricity (I think close to 80% of worldwide generation is currently still on fossil fuels), this is a dead-end approach and we'd better focus on covering the basics first. That doesn't seem to be a very popular opinion though. Also, some people will argue that we can do both in parallel, which is flawed and kinda the opposite of "focusing".
Whatever, I don't think we are doing anything right towards that goal at the moment.