It's not the energy to run a cell phone. It's the embodied energy of a cell phone and solar panel. It's the 20 kilo bags of grain which come off the boat in Egypt from Alberta. It's the cell towers, it's the bulk shipper which brings the grain, it's the container which transports the cell phones and panels.

A world in which anyone at all is flying around the world in dozens of passenger jets several times just in the course of living has an enormous amount of available energy relative to any time in history. If this is scarce, we don't have a word for what it was like before.