re: #8 watching you tiny alien kittens are

China is already far ahead of us in both wind and solar energy installations. They are the worlds biggest maker of wind turbines and solar panels and enjoy the lowest cost on these items on the planet.

Meanwhile we do next to nothing and invariably when attempts are made to point that out, someone else always brings up how useless our efforts are unless China and India are doing even more. Whether or not they do anything does not justify our own lack of action, we should be leading the world on this, not China. I guess we will just continue to watch China take over world leadership especially as they get more and more low cost renewable energy.

The longer we sit on our ass and complain about all the reasons it would be hard to do something about this the further behind the rest of the civilized world we will be.

Our efforts have their uses. But the most effective thing we could do would be to work harder at bending down the cost curve. The technology is hardly mature. China and the U.S. are toward the front of the pack in R&D here, though there are others in the running.

If China beats us to low cost renewable energy, I will wish we had got there even faster, but the getting there is the main thing. More likely, it will take a combination of advances. Designing and building green energy installations on a scale sufficient to run much or most of our industrial civilization is a big task, and there’s work enough to go around.

We aren’t that bad at renewable. We’ve got probably more wind power installed than anybody else. At least, that was what the director of the federal wind energy R&D center said at a talk I attended a couple of years back.

We’re also reducing our carbon emissions. China is increasing theirs. This is not to say we’re clean and they’re dirty. We still use more per capita than they do. But there are things they could learn from us as well as the other way around. We really need to cooperate with China on this.

McKibben is, I fear, right that the world is just not politically able to grasp the nettle and switch over cold turkey to renewables, not while the scale of the disasters we must endure is still embryonic compared to what is to come, and not while the cost curve remains inconveniently high compared to coal. (Compared to coal with the true costs not counted, just the cost of mining, transportation, and burning.) So, building green on a heroic scale right now is just not going to happen. That leaves R&D and improvements to efficiency.

If we can drive the cost of “green” down to half what it now is, (that should be doable in 10 years), then the time it will take to build on a major scale should be more or less halved. Plus, the political difficulty of getting everybody on board would be much reduced.

Committing now to building a few trillion dollars worth of current-technology stuff would be a mistake. Most of it would be obsolete before we ever got it built. The point of our current efforts is partly mitigation, but mostly, it’s so we can move up the learning curve. We should be spending billions on the effort, and tens of billions. Or more. But not trillions. Not just yet.

It’s just like not building a mass of battleships for an upcoming carrier war. They’d be useful, a little, and you do need the shipyards to remain going concerns, but carriers is what you really want. And you have to build some starter models to learn how that should go.