World Appears on Track to Triple Renewable Power by 2030

We can't afford to pour more money into maybes when we have proven, simple, extremely safe, highly distributable technologies like solar and wind.

Nuclear is not the only carbon-free alternative for baseload.

Not so.

While my following suggestion is a fantasy from the POV of geopolitics, from the purely technical perspective it's dead simple to wrap the planet in a 1Ω wire that hooks up all the major deserts so that at least one of them is in daylight at any given moment.

It's a square meter cross section of aluminium costing a few hundred billion dollars at current prices, not that current prices are the real cost anyway as that would take several years of current global output.

But on paper it's fine.

> And we just don’t have the capacity to do grid scale batteries - we barely have enough for electric cars and we’re ramping that up as fast as we can.

Right now, sure. But that fast ramp-up is very fast, and once we have enough for cars, it's fairly straightforward to just reuse the worn down car batteries for another few thousand cycles in static power storage before they get fully recycled.

We could, in theory and with massive disruption, end emissions tomorrow. But even if we did, warming would continue for some time as the baked-in increases from the already high-levels of greenhouse gasses continued heating the planet (and this assumes that we haven't already triggered a tipping point such as melting permafrost releasing more gigatons of methane, further exacerbating warming).

Or, do you have some plan to eliminate warming instantly?

Correct.

Some reading.

No its not. How about we first just get rid of the coal power plants and replace them with nuclear/renewables? Then we can just have electric cars. Why is it that climate activists so often ignore the biggest polluters, while putting most of their energy into making the common man make sacrifices? "Get rid of cars, eat bugs, etc." Its almost as if its controlled opposition from the fossil fuel industry itself.

To become carbon negative it would have to suck carbon back from the air.

Well... I don't know what to tell you but it is. In the 2016 election both Biden and Warren (two candidates that proposed a "green manufacturing" plan for climate change) both admitted that in the short term their plans would lead to a net increase in emissions. And in fact, in 2022 we saw the EU emissions decrease by 2.5%, China's decrease by 0.2%, but the US increase by 0.8% in large part due to their approach to climate change solutions.

https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2022

> then the emissions required to build renewable infrastructure will be much smaller than the total emissions for all other causes

Let's look at electric vehicles as a more concrete example. A lot of people don't realize that around 10% of lifetime emissions of a vehicle are in its initial manufacturing... for an ICE vehicle. The production of an EV is much more expensive due to their batteries. And in fact over 30% of its lifetime emissions could be in the manufacturing of the battery alone. This is why, in the US, it takes around 28,069-68,160 miles before an EV is actually less polluting than an ICE vehicle.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/08/when-buying-a...

That's a technology-specific example, but similar dynamics play out in many other ways. One simple one is just... infrastructure. The simple fact that we already have gas stations. We need to invest massive amounts of resources in order to build all these new electric vehicle charging stations

Yes we will (hopefully) soon see something like "economies of scale for emissions" come into play but it's hard to deny that there's a massive upfront cost to simply "building new stuff"