Throughout humanity’s history, our energy use has steadily increased, now reaching a point where it’s affecting the climate. Even if we do switch to renewable energy, we’ll continue to generate waste heat that will be put into the environment, continuing to warm our planet. Researchers calculated that if energy use increases by 1% per year, it would make a planet like Earth uninhabitable within 1,000 years. Going to space will be the only way to continue growth.
It shouldn’t be because an intelligent civilization can theoretically easily avoid this.
Even our own, for all the doom and gloom we are switching now rapidly to low carbon energy production. Solar and Wins installation is being adopted faster than any energy source in history. And later down the line we would move energy intensive processes off world either into orbit or to other parts of the solar system to preserve our environment.
The great filter would need to be something unavoidable or insurmountable.