I guess. I’m just sceptical that people will actually not cut them down later.

I want carbon dioxyde turned into something less profitable to turn into coal again.

Not that this is a bad thought, it’s great and we should do that, but it’s not enough. We essentially burned the growth of millions of years of broken down stuff as oil, and that carbon went into the atmosphere. We need to retrieve millions of years of organic growth and put it back into the ground.

I’ve seen ideas of seaweed farms with the purpose of growing them and then sinking them in the ocean depths to get them out of the cycle. I suspect something would learn to live off them though.

If we had a way to make oil from the carbon in the air directly plus an energy input, and then a way to pump that back where we got it is what we need. Maybe there could be a crop that makes this conversion somehow. Like maybe grow something to make ethanol and then convert that. Labor and energy intensive but that’s what it will take since we just used all the energy.

HEPA would remove particulate but not CO2 or methane emissions, which are what drive climate change.

We’d have some clean ass air for sure though.

The key is to have something that the masses would use. Something disguised as another product, powered by renewables.

Radical, but probably expensive AF

Actual raw panel cost is way below that and has been for years. It’s the rest of the supporting infrastructure and critically the skilled labor required to install it that keeps the overall cost annoyingly sticky above $2/w

They already are affordable enough to be the cheapest source of energy in many places

Cheapest as in “over the lifecycle”, not initial investment.

I recall that some asian country (I can’t remember if it was Japan or China) used recycled glass to make solar road tiles that work like chain LEDs. These were porous enough to let water seep through, yet strong enough to handle several years of being a road surface. The practical upshots of this are myriad; The dark color aids in snow melt, the tiles are easy to replace, and cheap to produce, they can have other infrastructure wired to their reverse side, such as data fibre, or even battery packs to store excess charge and most importantly, when applied at scale they are both the the power generator and distribution network combined. There was even talk of making them piezoelectric, so that traffic driving over them would also generate useable current.

Perovskites is the answer rn, there are several perovskite products from Poland.

Well, at least the earlier ones resembled a logistic curve, which is how you would model something like this, like population there is some ceiling that will slow things down, whatever the ceiling might be. So the others at least shaped their model correctly, with an incorrect ceiling.

The last one is just a weird assumption that a flat ceiling has been hit with zero slowdown, which would demand a pretty particular explanation as to why they think such a weird shape would happen.

TBF we’re talking about the industry that tricked the entire globe into thinking leaded gasoline was safe. Falsified data. Hired scientists to lie in congress. All while fully knowing the dangers.

This is much more sinister than copium.

They might look like they’re exploding in the US, but not at all compared to what could have been happening in the same time period had Trump allowed even the milquetoast Biden-era policies to continue (to say nothing of expanding on them). China, who has invested heavily in solar and battery R&D and manufacturing, installed more solar power than the rest of the world combined in 2025 and holds over 80% of the global market share for solar panels. They are the world leaders in the nearline battery chemistries that already make solar+battery the cheapest form of power by a longshot, and have half of the world’s installed capacity of battery storage systems. We could have had a seat at that table, but we’re now a decade behind in tech R&D and manufacturing capability. The private sector knows this, which is why they won’t touch it without strong federal support.

a toddler with a sharpie you say?

Especially 2012-2020 seems ridiculous. “Its been an exponential growth until now but it will probably instantly stop here and stay constant”.

Generally yes. Although technically, there could be some species that won’t be affected by changing climates as much as us humans and our fragile infrastructure.

My quip was mostly about the O&G industry constantly using “energy” to mean the “fossil fuels” subset.

Aren’t they mostly running on fossil fuels?

Regardless of that, if he/his government can accelerate clean energy, he’d have saved many lives anyway.

Also this is proof as light of day that planned economies are better at allocating resources than the market. While the market in liberal democracies were busy spending billions on crypto, NFTs, gambling and LLMs, China has been making solar and EVs more affordable than ever.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Do you react the same way when someone says Biden is responsible for all the good the FTC did during his admin?

For the life of me I can never figure out how countries don’t see renewables, and solar in particular, as a national security issue.

Distributed electricity? Yes please.

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