[TheOtherHobbes]

A reminder that 40% of the world's shipping is just there to move oil and gas around.

If someone was starting from scratch and looking at fossils, the arguments against would be so obvious and compelling that any arguments for would look insane. Nukes aren't much better.

The arguments against renewables are purely opportunistic and political.

We need clean energy now, not 10/20/50 years from now. We could have clean energy with some fairly cheap local build out - panels over carparks, for example - combined with regional power farms, and buffered with existing storage technologies and an improved grid.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nishandegnarain/2020/09/25/loud...

[nradov]

Sounds good, but even in the most optimistic scenario it will take decades to build out significant storage capacity and the supporting grid improvements. None of that will be cheap. Expect electricity prices to continue rising even as the cost of solar generation falls.

[Retric]

It may be decades to hit 100%, but the grid can be 90% carbon free reasonably quickly at which point there’s far less need to hurry.

Further, the economics will dictate what happens not just our current predictions. It makes a real difference if solar panels are 25% or 30% efficient in 2035+ similarly how flexible demand for charging EV’s is and how expensive battery storage ends up being etc.