Wind energy potential dwarfs today's electricity use, report says

[hunter]

32. That's not good news, it's terrifying.

Even if we quit coal then natural gas, especially fracked natural gas, will ruin us.

Gas is not a "transition" fuel in this case, there's no foreseeable future where wind and solar completely displace fossil fuels, as there might be with either nuclear power and/or the abandonment of high energy industrial consumer lifestyles.

Hybrid gas-wind systems do not make me feel optimistic about the future. If the entire world, billions of humans, adopts that energy model we are still cooked.

Talk about Texas? We know Texas tends to be politically regressive outside the more liberal urban areas, and beholden to the fossil fuel industry. If the fossil fuel industry thought wind and solar were an existential threat they would not tolerate it. But the gas industry recognizes wind and solar systems lock them into a controlling share of the electricity market simply because the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. For every megawatt of wind and solar capacity installed you have to have a megawatt of gas capacity installed, and it's likely those gas plants will provide more than half the electric demand.

Nobody likes coal, especially when natural gas costs less, but fracked natural gas is hardly any better.than coal, even with a substantial wind and solar assist.

I remember a cartoon, Gary Larsen's Far Side I think but I can't find it, where Hansel and Gretel's parents are standing indignantly outside the wicked witch's gingerbread house exclaiming to the witch "You ate them BOTH???" as if eating only one child wouldn't have been quite so reprehensible.