But no one ever thinks about economic costs of trying to do so, no one thinks if it is even possible to do so in the near future. No one ever thinks if 100% electric and 100% wind and solar is really that friendly to the environment.
It seems many are replacing critical thinking and science with passion and ideology.
According to the current economic system the future is being discounted and considered unimportant. Anyone who tries to extend the lifetime of humanity or the planet is a lunatic because longevity counts for nothing.
If you were to account for the next 500 years, then the costs that we have to pay today would definitively be worth it. If you only account for the next 30 years, then sure collective suicide (hyperbole) is more efficient.
>no one thinks if it is even possible to do so in the near future.
Germany is doing everything on hard mode and yet its electric grid is already 50% renewable. The government did almost everything in its power to slow things down. It's certainly possible if you stop the analysis paralysis of pondering whether it is possible.
>No one ever thinks if 100% electric and 100% wind and solar is really that friendly to the environment.
Is this supposed to be an attempt at the nirvana fallacy? Taking the next step will reduce damage to the environment by x% where x is smaller than 100. After that we will have even more stringent environmental standards and then figure out how to implement those.
As a society—maybe, as human kind—maybe, as individuals—I highly doubt it.
The former two depend on how do we handle everything else on this planet. Looking at what happens in Ukraine, I’m sceptical. The latter: none of us is going to be here in 500 years. Maybe sone will, assuming we, the kind, don’t get wiped by other external factors.
I’m not saying it isn’t worth trying to make a change. I’m only discussing that single point.
Nuclear has produced a lot of electricity and avoided a lot of emissions. We should keep our existing nuclear fleets. But new nuclear is prohibitively expensive. (Our 1960s-70s nuclear fleet was super expensive too, the system was just set up in such a way that people building power plants didn't mind it being expensive.)
Meanwhile solar got real cheap real fast in the past decade, and wind has had a pretty good run of getting bigger and taller and cheaper too.
I think that wind and solar and batteries are the obvious path forward from where we are today, being the fastest and most economical route to decarbonize. Had the Build Back Better plan passed, I think the US would have been on-track to be about 65% wind+solar by 2035. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-futures-study
That said, decarbonizing with wind and solar alone becomes exponentially more difficult as you try to hit 100%. But 75%? Totally doable. 95%? Might be feasible.