> It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale

The sad thing is, we still can if we want to. When Russia throttled down the natural gas pipelines into the EU, it took them mere weeks until the first new floating natural gas terminal was put into operation. And they've collectively dumped an astonishing number of new terminals into the North Sea since then, all at the same time. Germany alone spent $6B in infrastructure investments before that first winter without Russian gas.

We could if we wanted to. But by and large, we don't want to.