I agree with those who say that it will be an evolution into new energy sources. And when I say “new”, I don’t necessarily mean “novel”, as in “never seen before”, but “newly economical” forms of energy.
Solar photovoltaics are improving direct conversion of sunlight to electricity for all kinds of uses, from domestic (household) energy use to light industry and even (potentially) automotive uses. (But the conversion rates have to be orders of magnitude better than they are now, because right now using photovoltaics for automotive uses is in absurdly small and lightweight vehicles traveling in places such as the Australian Outback where there is little traffic and endless sunlight.)
Wind-powered electricity generation is not going to provide more than about 5–7% of most energy needs; unless we find dramatic new improvements in the generators, we’ve pretty much tapped our potential there, I think, except for the ever-more-marginal places we attempt to build them.
Tide-powered electricity has some promise, but the engineering obstacles are enormous, in terms of reliability, maintainability and initial installation.
We’re not likely to improve nuclear fission much, or to accept the long-term transportation and storage issues of spent fuel, politically. But fusion still shows promise for implementation within the next 20 years or so.
We haven’t figured a way to tap any usable fraction of the Earth’s own electro-magnetic field. We’ve been using the magnetic poles for navigation for several hundred years, but the Earth itself is a huge generator—we just don’t know how to plug in to it. Ditto thunderstorms, which produce more electrical power in individual lightning strikes than whole cities use in a week. And there are estimates that at any given second on this planet there are approximately 1500 lightning strikes. We haven’t tapped the first one yet.
There’s also a possibility—far out on the horizon—of some combination of robotic and biological energy production and use. What if we could grow artificial muscle mass that could be grafted onto robots to perform simple repetitive tasks (even turning a generator, for example, to produce usable electric power), or if we find a way to generate electric power from some kind of artificial photosynthesis, as plants have been doing for millions hundreds of millions of years.
Once the energy problem is solved, then distillation of water becomes much less of an issue, and air pollution would be (one hopes) nothing more than an historical curiosity.
But even if we had those things today—right now—they wouldn’t be used by anyone rational, not with “actual costs” for fossil fuels being what they are. The oil has to run out first, and maybe the coal, too.