First I am sorry if you felt I was calling you specifically wrong, I try to use one for the generic you but it does not come naturally.No where in my statement did I advocated for diverting funding away from solar and wind, the only other competition for solar and wind for bulk generation is hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear (The former two relies on geography). Given what I have on the table right now, I don't see solar and wind to be efficient and reliable enough to be used as a base load power plant when the power output of a solar power plant and wind farms have fluctuating outputs that's dependent on the weather, time of day, and season thus cannot be relied upon to use for electric generation 24/7. Compared to a nuclear power plant, a solar plant has less uptime due to the factors I've already outlined (Season, weather, and time of day). Given the choice, I'd much prefer going for nuclear energy for my base load power needs and use solar facilities as peaker plants. Saying that "I'm getting the economics/science wrong" is just going into ad hominem territory (no where in my post did I placed in an economic argument when my argument is centered around capacity factor and uptime). I know what I am talking about because I live in the region and we don't get as much sunlight during the winter compared places like Arizona. We do have some photovoltaic arrays, but they don't replace base load power plants. There’s a reason why we don’t have thermal solar plants in the northeastern United Stated (and places outside southwestern US) and good luck having any solar power during the winter months up in Alaska.
If there’s advancements in which fluids within a thermal solar plant (especially concentrated solar power plants) can hold heat for 24 hours with minimal loss of heat during the heat exchange when the sun is down. Then I would be for it, especially since it’s using the same concept of a thermal power plant (e.g. using a boiler to generate steam to turn a turbine connecting to a generator) and don’t need any additional facilities and/or devices to convert DC to AC (Photovoltaics, I would need not only space for battery storage to store and distribute power during months with long nights, but also take into account needing a DC to AC inverter).
I do not think base load makes much sense in a renewable focused energy grid. Base load used to mean the stuff that is always on and produces the bulk of the power that is needed around the clock. In a renewable focused energy grid that is the renewables when they can. What you need is on demand power, when demand peaks or when both wind and sun are low. Nuclear is really bad for that.
There are loads of good ideas for energy storage, we really should be putting more effort into them. Some will fail, but some will not.
That is not really the situation though. A better analogy would be the people before still chugging the wine as fast as they can, while telling those who come late to go easy on the few drops they have got. Except the big guy who came late and grabbed a load of the booze.Saying it's not fair that Germany and the UK burned all this coal and now we can't is a bit like showing up late to a party where there's only one bottle of wine left and it gets split evenly and everyone gets half a glass of what's left, and then complaining that the people who were there before you already had two glasses. Unless Jesus shows up to turn some water into wine, there's only so much wine available, and there's no way that all the latecomers can get two glasses apiece. The math doesn't work.
This is going to be a hard one. I wonder if fast ships may be able to meet the residual demand of intercontinental travel.And airline travel. Does total phase-out mean no airline travel?
This is where I argue about the maths. How does carbon capture "offset" air travel? We may need to do carbon capture, but unless the air travel somehow enables the capture I do not see how they are related.Or do we replace as much as we realistically can with rail, and use carbon-capture to offset the remainder? This is where I'm assuming "total phase-out" actually means "net zero after accounting for carbon capture" rather than "absolute zero no matter what"; as much as carbon capture still needs to prove itself, should we make it even somewhat economical, it can play a role in countering those toughest-to-phase-out areas.