Spare me the Amory Lovins hand waving redux, please.
So called "renewable energy" in the form of solar and wind doesn't even produce 1% of the world's primary energy, after half a century of mindless cheering, in which, I participated for a time, until I grew up.
So called "renewable energy" hasn't worked; it isn't working; and it won't work.
If it was going to work, the two trillion bucks we just squandered on solar and wind in the last ten years would have at least allowed the accumulation of new dangerous fossil fuel waste in the atmosphere to slow. That's not what happened. What happened is that the rate accelerated. We're at 407 ppm today, and no one now living will see a level below 400 ppm.
The reason so called renewable energy is a dangerous fantasy - and nothing else - is physics. The energy to mass ratio is absurdly low and the thermodynamic cost of the storage to address its absurd lack of even a modicum of reliability is unbridgeable.
What will happen is that we will burn more gas than ever, and when that runs out - and it will - we'll go back to coal, not that we ever really left it. We'll make stupid statements like "renewable energy is the fastest growing source of new capacity" by pretending that capacity utilization doesn't matter. It does. A 10,000 MW plant that operates 20% of the time is a 2000 MW plant, not a 10,000 MW plant. In fact it's less than a 2000 MW plant, since it needs 8000 MW of back up.
As I noted elsewhere, we are now burning, as of 2015, 170% as much coal on this planet as we burned in 2000, less than 20 years ago. We're not going to stop burning coal until we have a system with a high energy to mass ratio, one comparable to that of coal, petroleum, or gas. There is only one system on scale that fits the bill. It's nuclear energy, which has the highest energy to mass ratio of any technologically demonstrated system.
However, if we're talking about Trumpian ignorance, there isn't really much difference between claiming that "nuclear power is dangerous" to my mind than announcing that "vaccines are dangerous." Both statements are incredibly, awfully, disturbingly ignorant, and that people believe this crap kills other people, and sometimes, in a rare burst of justice, the people who make these claims.
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