> This is true - however we also need to recognize the technology is not ready today. It might be tomorrow, but throwing everything out and going full-in on green tech today is foolhardy.

It is ready today. Look at Denmark. It's more expensive than coal but it's cheaper if you factor in the externalities, and it's cheaper than nuclear. Therefore, it's ready. Also, your second sentence is a non-sequitur. If it really was true that it wasn't ready, that's all the more reason to throw even more money at it in order to figure out how to make it ready.

> That will just burn developing nations and make them less likely to trust us next time we come up with some amazing new solution to all their problems...

How are you burning developing nations by subsidizing their energy such that they are financially better off doing it than not doing it? This reasoning does not make sense.

> It's more expensive than coal but it's cheaper if you factor in the externalities

Developing nations do not care about your supposed externalities. Caring about these things is a luxury they cannot afford in the literal sense.

> and it's cheaper than nuclear.

This is almost entirely the fault of deliberately crushing regulation... but that's a political choice not a technical one.

> Therefore, it's ready

Hardly. Nobody as-of yet has developed a reasonably priced, long-lived and efficient means of storage. Without this missing key, all the wind farms in the world will not keep the lights on when the wind doesn't blow...

> This reasoning does not make sense.

You'd have burned them pretty badly if you compelled them to install solar even 10 years ago because of how inefficient it was compared to other cheaper means of energy production. Even in the past 10 years solar tech has come so very far... that is my point about it not being ready yet. We still have a long ways to go in renewables before they can realistically replace energy production in mandatory environments, ie. environments that don't have the luxury of trying out new expensive unproven tech and changing it as the technology develops.

> Developing nations do not care about your supposed externalities. Caring about these things is a luxury they cannot afford in the literal sense.

Then WE (the west) pay for the cost to eliminate the externalities. We will pay for them either way and the only reason they can't afford it is we stole all their shit.

> You'd have burned them pretty badly if you compelled them to install solar even 10 years ago because of how inefficient it was compared to other cheaper means of energy production. Even in the past 10 years solar tech has come so very far... that is my point about it not being ready yet.

Utter nonsense. Slap in a combined CSP + PV station and call it done. Where >50% of the people live it's more reliable than coal or nuclear, the marginal costs stay in the local economy rather than going to rio tinto and paying half (unconditionally, no loan) costs significantly less than the externalities that reach us from a coal plant.

There are areas where this doesn't work, but 1 coal, 1 wind, and 2 solar is cheaper than 2 coal, and having ~2 units of constant power and 1 unit of intermittent has more uses than 2 units of constant.

Developing nations don't need to care about externalities if wealthy countries subsidized their transition. I also note that we've pivoted from "problem countries", which I assumed to mean large countries like China or India, which themselves are fairly poor on a per-capita basis, to exclusively extremely poor countries, which excludes China and India probably because it's inconvenient for the narrative that they're transitioning by themselves.

> Nobody as-of yet has developed a reasonably priced, long-lived and efficient means of storage

You don't need storage to get the grid to 80%+ renewables. Storage as a blocker is a political talking point that is not substantiated and not true. Denmark is the case study that shows why. Also, storage costs are linear decreasing on a log scale.

> You'd have burned them pretty badly if you compelled them to install solar even 10 years ago because of how inefficient it was compared to other cheaper means of energy production. Even in the past 10 years solar tech has come so very far... that is my point about it not being ready yet. We still have a long ways to go in renewables before they can realistically replace energy production in mandatory environments, ie. environments that don't have the luxury of trying out new expensive unproven tech and changing it as the technology develops.

You're repeating the same things that I've already addressed. You're not "burning" poor countries if you're paying for it. You can't "burn" a country by making them financially better off. It is not a logically coherent point. Also, the tech is proven -- in actual practice, in reality, today, already implemented -- after you factor in the costs of externalities. And that picture will only get better and better as more money flows into R&D and the cost curve continues to decline as a direct consequence of that funding.

Who is throwing out non-green power? My electricity in the US comes from majority gas and coal as it ever has.

To make a significant change over 20-50 years requires big investments now. Making those investments does not mean we are throwing away everything else immediately.

I don't know what state you're in, but California is really struggling with this at the moment.

You can get green energy as-is (from your utility), but it's at a premium. Which means most don't opt-in for it.

This is going on while the state already struggles to keep itself energized year round. The current state of green energy will only exasperate California's problems, since storage tech still has a lot of catching up to do.

Is the root cause of California's energy issue because they are shutting down non-green energy production?

One could make a pretty darn strong case the root of California's energy issue is because they've refused to build anything except "green" energy production facilities, despite current-day needs.

No new hydro-electric dams in my lifetime. No new nuclear reactors (that I'm aware of at least) in my lifetime. Just either status-quo, or gobbles of unproven renewable tech that has yet to actually live up to expectations (affordable, always available renewable-power).

People like to throw around big numbers showing CA's increased production over the years... but they don't throw around storage capacity which is really what matters for renewables. There is no storage capacity to speak of...

So california brought online 30GW of gas since 2000, and it's the 5GW net of renewables that's the problem?

Sounds like the issue is the fossil fuel lobby. Weird that delaying new renewables by a decade to build new nuclear or hydro aligns exactly with their interests.

I would consider both hydro-electric and nuclear to be beneficial power sources if both local air quality and global climate effects are the primary factors.

I hear you that some "green" initiatives are poorly targeted but I don't think that means we should hit the brakes on regulating the things that are known climate issues (ie excess methane releases) or investment in improving our grid emissions.

In Tucson, with 350 days of Sun, until fairly recently, electricity was generated from COAL. Now natural gas.

China GDP/person 1/5 that of U.S. Don’t confuse the Chinese urban elite, who indeed have a Western level of income and wealth, with “China.”