BURGUM: When the sun goes down, solar produces zero electricity HUFFMAN: I want to enter into the record this amazing

[NNadir]

62. I have spent decades in the primary scientific literature and as a result, I have very little patience for handwaving.

First of all, wind and solar are trivial, essentially useless, forms of energy. On a planet with a rising energy demand of over 650 Exajoules of energy eac year, solar and wind garbage produces, combined, 18 of them. This has taken place with the expenditure, in the last 10 years alone of well over 5 trillion dollars, for no result other than the acceleration of the destruction of the planetary atmosphere.

The land and material intensity is atrocious and unsustainable already.

There is always some grand "fix" proposed in public handwaving; sodium batteries, being just one. Whence the copper to connect all these batteries, which would only be accessible a short period of time? If the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine for months at a time, a condition for which a German word has been coined, Dunkelflaute, how big must a mountain of sodium batteries must be?

Decades into this wishful thinking exercise, the conditions are growing more and more dire.

Reliance on the weather for energy was abandoned in the 19th century for a reason, that being most human beings, even more so than today, lived short miserable lives of dire poverty. The effort to return to these conditions is reactionary, not at all "progressive," whatever "progressive" might mean.

Playing "whack a mole" with the periodic table is neither wise nor viable. Solar and wind are already mass and land intensive; the destruction of virgin wilderness to make industrial parks for this crap is a crime against the future.

There are a whole lot of issues that handwaving doesn't cover for any battery, the chemistry of electrolytes, the transport of materials to make them, the temperatures required, etc.

It's not solely about cobalt or nickel, although I think the handwaving that they're unnecessary is bullshit. I note that the automobile, one of the greatest environmental disasters of all time, was invented and promoted to solve the problem of horse manure in city streets. It's true that horse manure is now rare in major city streets, but I'm not sure that the collapse of the planetary atmosphere is an easier problem to solve. The automobile, much as tearing the shit out of virgin wilderness for solar and wind garbage that will be landfill before todays toddlers can finish college, only made things worse, not better.

The planet is burning. If we don't face reality, the size and scale of the fires will be worse.