What problem did cell phones or the internet solve from an unexpected direction? I remember seeing huge potential in the internet as early as 1990 (my wife and I even started a short-lived internet company in 1993) but it was always about information sharing - email, making files available, etc.

Energy is absolutely the central problem of the century - Richard Smalley's been giving some excellent talks on this that go way beyond the sort of "latest news" summary in the link you posted. I reviewed one of them here:
http://www.sciscoop.com/story/2004/11/3/20322/6497
(the link might not work as the site has been having trouble lately - supposed to be fixed in the next couple of days). Hydrogen is just a storage mechanism, like batteries - it doesn't help the fundamental problem. Recycling CO2 happens all the time now - usually these are called biofuels. I have no idea where underground bio-organisms would gather energy to process CO2 though, usually that takes a lot of sunlight. But above ground or underground, the energy available from biofuels is produced at too low a rate to fully solve the problem (though they can help).

As Smalley points out in his talk, just doing the math (and physics) shows there are a very limited number of long-term scalable solutions - basically nuclear and solar. If any of those directions from which a solution comes (such as space solar) is unexpected, it's because people haven't been paying attention.