Even heat energy can be converted to mechanical or electrical energy. So what's the big issue?

Greed. If it can't be regulated and metered, it won't be marketed and that's the cold hard facts of the matter. Yes, there is an incredible amount of energy out there in the universe, and much of it is easily harvestable. However, if it cannot be profited from, mankind will not make it mainstream. Take Nikola Tesla's concept of the natural frequency of electrical charges within the earth, that when interrupted at specific frequencies would generate near limitless energy that could then (again in his concept) be transmitted wirelessly to anywhere in the world...all for free. Could you imagine the progress man could have made if that were actually implemented? However, many of Tesla's investors backed out of funding his research when they found out that there was no way to regulate, meter, and thus and profit from his idea. Big oil/gas and other industries that could be regulated went mainstream, and Tesla's research went dark. Sad in my opinion...in the modern world you'd basically add the cost of a monthly power bill back into every homeowner's pocket, businesses could thrive, 3rd world countries could break through many challenges...all because the regulators couldn't make their money.

Private property: good
Profit motive: bad

And by "free", I mean post-infrastructure investment...of course the world would need the infrastructure in order to harvest and distribute the energy, but after it's there it just does its thing and the people would benefit in a passive way. Maintenance would be the only cost, but compared to modern energy transmission it would be minimal.

Man. We need to start a movement to implement Tesla's ideas. Maybe we can get Elon Musk to do it.

Not judging a book by it's cover, but given his company's name I'd say he's probably already a fan :) Musk would be one crazy enough to actually try something like that, and I'd support him if his intensions were good.

Someone needs to pitch it to him, if he's not working on it already.

All part of the many false flags and fear mongering.

What's the energy crisis?

It's the big panic that we're gonna run out of fossil fuels and we're gonna hafta convert to wind and solar power and it's all somehow connected to climate change and I... really don't see what the whole panic is really about.

Well forgetting climate change (or lack thereof) for a moment

Yes, fossil fuels are finite. At some point we're gonna run out. I don't know when that point is but there's still a lot of oil we can still get out.
Now, it is true that energy is neither created nor destroyed, but there is entropy, which is how energy becomes less useful. So when we run an engine, some is converted to thermal energy and some into mechanical, which eventually ends up turning into thermal as well. It's still energy, but it's not useful cause it's just there now and doesn't really do anything, but it wasn't destroyed.

So I think alternatives are useful to look into. Nuclear is great, solar has potential for a supplement I think, wind is trash in my opinion, but maybe someone will figure out a good way to use it and it can supplement nuclear.
Wood is pretty much infinite too, but it's not practical to burn that much for energy.

Regarding nuclear, check out thorium and molten salt reactors. Not as profitable, but much safer.

Yeah I've seen stuff about that

Energy changes it's stores. When we burn fossil fuels, we turning the chemical energy into thermal energy, use it to boil water to create steam, which drives turbines through kinetic energy, which turn it into electrical energy. All of these processes lose energy to the surroundings. Then, when we use the energy, it slowly gets used up through its releasing of heat.

The heat then is dispersed so much that it makes a very small difference on the larger scale of things, and it is essentially lost to us. For thermal energy to be of any use to us in terms of converting to electrical energy, it has to be able to make a gas, because we are not that technologically advanced. That's why coal works as a fuel source. It has a very high energy density

Not at all; if the amount of energy in the universe remains constant, then we shouldn't we be able to still use it?

*then shouldn't we