Food will be the final deciding factor about what survives. It always is. The US corn crop is approximately 40% for cars to burn ethanol, and the majority of the remainder is for cattle feed. The net energy gained is almost a washout, but when considering the damage to soil, wildlife, water systems and contamination (not to forget plastics used for the pesticide distribution), then we have a lot of failures to look forward to.

When calling to "save civilization", we have to carefully define what "civilization" actually is. By definition, "civil" means city-based. That means it's a resource extraction system that favors those who do the extracting over those who either produce (labor) or consume (cheap cannon fodder population). There's no part of what human civilization has become that will be inclined to reversing the extraction process and becoming useful to Earthy places. Civilization as we know it is a system of making people useless to the future of places in order to make money for owners of other places (creating false scarcities).

Our governments have been set up to encourage growth of such a system for the sake of Perpetual Growth (investments), not to nurture anything that would build unprofitable infrastructure or resources for future people at the expense of the present ownership class.

You are either Money or Life: civilization can't be both.

As far as humanity's future is concerned, only the Money matters to committees.

The simplest solution is to tax all monetary transactions at the decision point (sales tax) and use the revenue to pay people to nurture places and each other. Value would be determined in the amount of degrowth (less demand for purchased items and more local production of food, tools, shelter and energy (labor, solar, wind).