Thanks so much for the thoughtful and incisive post. I appreciate you taking the time to share these ideas.

I grew up in Oregon, but have lived in Arizona since the 1980's. Solar would not work in Oregon very well at all, but they have lots of moving water. Water is heavy and moving water is very powerful. OSU has been making some interesting power generation prototypes that have not gotten very much media attention. I don't have a URL handy, but you might do a search.

Here in Arizona real estate developers tired to avoid integrating solar panels with new homes because they thought they were unattractive. They are, but blighting the beautiful desert with fields of solar panels is even more unattractive.

They have started moving in the right direction recently though. Most new houses have solar panels on the roof, and the next step is plant desert friendly trees everywhere possible and consider putting roofs with solar collectors over homes and entire neighborhoods. They are already doing the former, and the possibility of doing the later is getting some attention.

As for Vietnam, there are some good lessons to be learned, but government intervention isn't one of them. Socialism works great until the money runs out then everything collapses. Failed states like Venezuelan, Cuba and the DRC are examples of that. Like it or not we are stuck with capitalism. Doesn't means we can't make reforms, though. Adam Smith was right about a lot of things, but his world was almost three centuries ago.