[credit_guy]

> is acceptable in the short term

It's actually acceptable in the long term as well.

To take the US. The forests absorb 13% of all the emissions. That's a whopping amount. We could retain all the current natural gas plants (and build some more) and if that were the only source of greenhouse emissions, we'd be below net zero.

This would be more than enough to smooth out any intermittency from solar and wind. You'd need zero batteries and zero hydrogen storage. Just the combination of the current nuclear and hydro, the solar and wind that we'd build at the rate of the last decade for 3 decades in the future, and the current natural gas, and we'd be well below net zero. No need for new nuclear, or hydro, we could shut down all coal power plants, we could transition to electric transportation, zero emissions steel, concrete and fertilizers, all with just keeping the current trajectory of building solar and wind.

And I'm as pro-nuke as they come. I'd like to see a nuclear renaissance, I really hope we'll do that, but we don't really need it to get to net zero by 2050.