KlaxonCow wrote:And, as I've said, malaria is not a virus, so why should we think that it has any effect on viruses?
Because it's been shown to have a positive effect on other viruses, including coronaviruses, in the past. For example, here's an extract from the abstract of a 2003 paper
Chloroquine is a 9-aminoquinoline known since 1934. Apart from its well-known antimalarial effects, the drug has interesting biochemical properties that might be applied against some viral infections. Chloroquine exerts direct antiviral effects, inhibiting pH-dependent steps of the replication of several viruses including members of the flaviviruses, retroviruses, and coronaviruses. Its best-studied effects are those against HIV replication, which are being tested in clinical trials. Moreover, chloroquine has immunomodulatory effects, suppressing the production/release of tumour necrosis factor alpha and interleukin 6, which mediate the inflammatory complications of several viral diseases.
You'll notice that they mention modulation of the immune system (which is why it's used for treating lupus) - all the more reason to think it might be a good candidate against COVID-19.
The only problem is that it turned out not to be so good against COVID-19.
"massive retard™", "full of shit™", "tiny bitch™", "retarted™", "a bit of a one trick pony™", "petty™", "simple minded idealistic twat™", "miserable humourless fucker™"
"Let's see what we can get him to say. You got him to say he's taking Chloroquine, but watch this! We'll get him to claim we are making a missile called the "super duper missile"
incoherent word salad.
"massive retard™", "full of shit™", "tiny bitch™", "retarted™", "a bit of a one trick pony™", "petty™", "simple minded idealistic twat™", "miserable humourless fucker™"
Don't know if it's the same. To me he seems to betting weirder.
Besides i don't know about the latest versions of chloroquines but the earlier ones had a limit of how many could be taken. It was 5 or 7 days as far as I remember. I saw him on the press conference stating he was taking it for 2 weeks now.
Besides the other one who continues advocating chloroquine is Jair Bolsonaro and he seems to be getting weirder by the minute too.
Don't know if it's the same. To me he seems to betting weirder.
Besides i don't know about the latest versions of chloroquines but the earlier ones had a limit of how many could be taken. It was 5 or 7 days as far as I remember. I saw him on the press conference stating he was taking it for 2 weeks now.
Besides the other one who continues advocating chloroquine is Jair Bolsonaro and he seems to be getting weirder by the minute too.
This sounds a bit like "this washing powder gives you 7 more shades of white" ( more white than what ? ) or "gives the appearence of a faster speed reduces the appearences of wrinkles in the space time" ...
So .. we are again at "we make super mega missles that we could not possibly ever use unless we want a total nuclear war ( or "total shit war" even if it's not nuclear ) because Russia has 5 and China has 7 so we have 17" ...
.. also with "and this is going to cost a fuckload of money that we could have used for example for a public NHS - GOD FORBID THAT IS NOT AMERICAN - and it will cost even more money in the future to maintain when it's going to fall apart cause it's never going to be used and it's going to cause even more troubles in a not so far future to our next generations becuase it'll have very dangerous decaying materials that we'll never know what other good use we could make of them and will be a mega hassle to deal with" ?
I always wondered "how many of those nuclear warheads are actually not working" .. as in "you are never going to launch them, you can't test them for real, what if I put something in that makes it LOOK like 'they are going to work' but in reality they don't and I charge you all the gazillions I want for the job I've done ?".
If those nuclear warheads would be made in Italy that "yellowcake" could be well done with safran and polenta, that "Plutonium" would be some filings from an old bycicle shop and there would be "some weird super shit cheapaer readioactive thing" just to make the instrument measure "there's something radioactive in".
I am sure "some expert in Naples" could even find a non-radioactive material that can make a geiger counter count
Actually I'd wish all those bombs would be made in Italy like that, that's probably why as far as I know there are no nuclear bombs factories in Italy
So .. when North Korea is going to come out with missiles that goes 18 times faster ? Tomorrow ? Or they already have it !
I always wondered "how many of those nuclear warheads are actually not working" .. as in "you are never going to launch them, you can't test them for real, what if I put something in that makes it LOOK like 'they are going to work' but in reality they don't and I charge you all the gazillions I want for the job I've done ?".
If those nuclear warheads would be made in Italy that "yellowcake" could be well done with safran and polenta, that "Plutonium" would be some filings from an old bycicle shop and there would be "some weird super shit cheapaer readioactive thing" just to make the instrument measure "there's something radioactive in".
I am sure "some expert in Naples" could even find a non-radioactive material that can make a geiger counter count
Actually I'd wish all those bombs would be made in Italy like that, that's probably why as far as I know there are no nuclear bombs factories in Italy
So .. when North Korea is going to come out with missiles that goes 18 times faster ? Tomorrow ? Or they already have it !
Does Italy have any nuclear reactors? Finland has four and a fifth about to be completed, the largest one ever constructed in the world. Finland has no coal or oil, so has gone nuclear very early. I am sure they (the army of 900,000 people, yes that is not misspelling, the army including reservists is nearly one million strong) could build a bomb in fairly short timescale.
Orava wrote:Does Italy have any nuclear reactors? Finland has four and a fifth about to be completed, the largest one ever constructed in the world. Finland has no coal or oil, so has gone nuclear very early. I am sure they (the army of 900,000 people, yes that is not misspelling, the army including reservists is nearly one million strong) could build a bomb in fairly short timescale.
Wikipedia wrote:Nuclear power is the largest source of electricity in France, with a generation of 379.1 TWh, or 71.6%[1] of the country's total electricity production of 519.4 TWh, the highest percentage in the world.[2]
Emoticon and contraction free since... quite a while ago.
France != Italy, as I am sure Giles will be more than happy to tell you.
France is already a nuclear power, FWIW.
"massive retard™", "full of shit™", "tiny bitch™", "retarted™", "a bit of a one trick pony™", "petty™", "simple minded idealistic twat™", "miserable humourless fucker™"
At current rates of usage, the world's uranium will run out about the same time that the world's natural gas supplies will run out. Coal will outlive uranium by a century or so.
To be clear, uranium is the heaviest - thus, rarest - naturally-occurring element in the entire universe. Only the largest of supernovae can forge elements that far up the periodic table, at the most maximal extremes of nature.
There's not a lot of it about.
Usefully so, of course, for us living creatures, because it's radioactive. The uranium atom is so big and heavy, it barely holds itself together. In fact, it doesn't, really. That's why it's radioactive because bits of this massive atom can't be held onto and they fall off - radioactive decay - and that can be slightly problematic, at the atomic scale, to have this big atom randomly firing out atomic "wrecking balls" in all directions. It generally fucks things up.
The crucial words above though were "at current rates of usage". If America and Russia get "nuke crazy", and the rest of the world decides, like France, that nuclear fission is "the fuel of the future" and goes ham with generating all our electricity, the world over, using rods of uranium, then what little this planet has will be gone even more rapidly. If rates of usage greatly increase, then it won't just be coal that outlasts uranium, but also natural gas.
Uranium and natural gas are about level pegging in the race to extinction right now, so any increase in use of uranium will mean natural gas also beats it too.
Nuclear weapons are not just a strategically dumb weapon, predicated on the idea that, actually, no-one can use them without potentially triggering a cascade that'll end up wiping out all life on Earth. It's also a horrible waste of uranium, of which there really isn't as much of it left as you might imagine.
Indeed, though you might see me advocating for renewables, you might wonder why you never find me advocating for nuclear fission. Because, in the battle against climate change, surely nuclear is awesome for producing so much energy in a carbon-free way.
Well, personally, my advocacy for renewables and electric vehicles and such is not really motivated by climate change - though, hey, that is definitely a thing that we should very much be also very concerned about - but more the idea of humanity being able to "keep the lights on" for modern civilisation and technological progress, going forward.
So nuclear fission, for me, ultimately doesn't solve anything. It's another non-renewable. If we put all our eggs in that basket, then we'll just eventually be back here again - at "the Energy Crisis" - wondering how the fuck we can keep everything powered once more. It's a delaying tactic, at best.
But it's still a case of taking a rare natural resource - and, indeed, in this case, it happens to be the rarest natural resource in the entire universe, in fact - and then using it up in a one-way process from which it never comes back. Granted, there is the positive that at least it's not another "BURN EVERYTHING!!" fuel, like coal, oil or natural gas. So at least it's avoiding those problematic carbon emissions that are keeping too much of the Sun's energy trapped in the atmosphere.
But it ultimately doesn't solve anything, as it'll also just run out eventually and then we're back to square one. And, as I say, I don't think people appreciate how little uranium there actually is on planet Earth - or, for that matter, the whole entire universe - and how soon "the fuel of the future" fails to extend that far into the future. Coal and natural gas might be horrible "burn everything" fuels, but they will actually end up outlasting fission. In coal's case, by quite a margin, as there's a good century more of the black stuff than the radioactive stuff.
My logic is really simple. Non-renewables run out. The clue is in the question, as that's basically what "non-renewable" means.
And when they do, the only things remaining will be renewable technologies. Because, again, that's what the word "renewable" means - that it keeps coming back and so you don't end up exhausting it completely.
So, basically, as we already know this shit well in advance, why waste our time, effort and great expense (very great expense, as nuclear power stations are completely economically unviable, if it's not bankrolled by perpetual government subsidies - how much is the price tag on Hinkley Point C these days?) on what's nothing more than a "delaying tactic" that won't actually solve the base problem in any way?
If we switch what we can over to, say, solar power then - that's it - we're good for the next 5 billion years (estimated remaining lifespan of the Sun - it's about halfway through its life right now and "middle aged"). And, you know, as the ultimate death of the Sun is also the ultimate death of planet Earth then, for all human intents and purposes, this is "forever".
Can we bundle everything onto solar power by a week next Tuesday? Of course not. Don't be daft. We didn't bundle the whole world to depend on fossil fuels in such timescales either.
But the basic point is that everything that's shifted to solar (or wind or geothermal or tidal and so forth) is then "problem solved" for the next 5 billion years.
And it is more than theoretically possible for the Sun to do it all. In a day, the Sun delivers to the surface of the Earth more energy than all of humanity uses in a year. In a year, the Sun delivers more energy than all the coal, oil, natural gas and uranium that's ever existed on planet Earth - in totality - COMBINED.
(I mean, this is logical. Because ultimately where all the energy we burn out of coal, oil and gas was the Sun in the first place. Plants capture sunlight and breathe in carbon dioxide, and then use the carbon to, well, build themselves. When a tree grows, its wood is (primarily) made of atmospheric carbon. Trees don't wander around looking for something to eat - they actually "eat" the air and "drink" the rain. So the stuff we're burning for energy is really "concentrated sunlight" anyway. The remnant scraps of all the sunlight that's rained down on the planet for millions of years, made physical by plants, possibly eaten by animals (and those animals eating each other) then finally dropping dead and depositing that carbon into the earth, where gravity compacts it into a handy little "carbon pellet" or "hydrocarbon liquid / gas", where water also gets involved, that we can burn for warmth and power. So there's the logic of "skipping the middle man" - and the hundreds of millions of years that it takes for this process to complete - and just going straight to the ultimate source of the energy directly.)
There's plenty available, if it's only exploited correctly. And it won't run out for 5 billion years. And it's as regularly obtainable as, well, quite literally the Sun rising and setting every day.
And the best bit is that it actually costs nothing. Sure, the solar panels cost money to install, but the energy itself - the fuel - is completely free. The Sun doesn't send out electricity bills.
There are folks out there already exploiting this, by driving electric cars, and then parking them up in a garage that's got solar on the roof, filling up a battery during the day (when they're likely at work anyway) and then, when they park up overnight, the battery at home charges up the car battery, ready to power their commute the next morning. And so they can drive back and forth every day - for the next 5 billion years or until they no longer have a job, as they're dead, whichever comes first - without paying a single cent in "fuel costs". And causing no "carbon emission" to fuck up the planet, or noxious fumes out the exhaust to tickle the increasingly levels of asthma in the school children they pass.
This is what I mean by "problem solved". Is it an expense and a pain in the arse to set all this infrastructure up in the first place? Yes, definitely. But, hey, it was even worse when humanity set up the fossil fuel infrastructure before it, so that is just ignoring that, you know, sticking oil drilling platforms in the middle of the ocean is hardly cheap and easy either. Yeah, once all that infrastructure's already in place, it's easy to take it for granted and ignore the vast, vast expense and effort that was required to set up all this shit in the first place. Yeah, "it's cheap" now, but only because we've gone and set it up that way already. If it were a fair race - having no infrastructure whatsoever, so they're both starting from scratch - then we'd never economically consider fossil fuels over renewables. It's only stood this long because it had the unfair advantage of getting out of the gate first. And, yes, it is cheaper to use the thing that's already there, in comparison to building a brand new thing from scratch. But once they've both been built then we'll all see that there honestly is no comparison - renewables are ridiculously cheaper. Indeed, solar already has "price parity" in many places around the world and, in the grand scheme of things, we've barely even touched this technology so far.
It also has some really nice advantages. For example, we don't have to smile at the Saudis and pretend like we're okay with their theocratic shithole and morally look away when they stone people to death or refuse to let women drive cars. This horrid morally repugnant "realpolitik" of pretending like these backward arseholes are our "best friends forever", just because we want them to keep supply us oil.
The other nice attribute about solar is that you don't have to go anywhere, you don't have to transport anything around - the Sun comes to you every day.
During this pandemic, many people have noticed. While oil prices have collapsed and there's all sorts of problems in how the hell do we transport these physical goods in a "socially distanced" way, absolutely nothing whatsoever happened at the solar farms and the wind farms. They just carried on.
They have a somewhat perfect "energy security" to them and while that was previously a nebulous theory about how that might one day come in handy, maybe, should some disaster befall the world, we've now actually got that global disaster on our heads and we can directly see that benefit. The renewables were not phased (pardon the mild pun) by any of this. While the fossil fuel industry is going into spasms and meltdown and panic and price collapse, running around like headless chickens.
But, ultimately, the "bottom line" point is this. Non-renewables will run out. Renewables won't.
One day, all that will be left is the renewables anyway. The idea that we have any choice in the matter is perfectly illusionary.
So I say let's not waste time and money and effort on shit that we know is not going to last anyway. Skip the middle man. Don't bother with "delaying tactics" that'll only land us back exactly where we are right now anyway. Let's just get the infrastructure up and running now, and get it to the point where it can take over - because, one day, it will have to take over. If we start now, then we might get it all working by the time it's needed. The investment will fund R&D to make it even better. Economies of scale will make it cheaper.
This is - unavoidably so - where humanity will ultimately end up anyway. If we start now, then we can totally make this work - and work really well - in plenty of time before, simply, there's no other options left anyway.
So, I mean, yeah, nuclear weapons and nuclear fission power stations are a thing. But I don't find them a terribly interesting thing. The former is a pointless "weapon we can never use" - and, indeed, who knows how many of the vast arsenal actually works? There's got to be some duds in there, but the whole backwards strategy here is that we hopefully never find out - and the latter is, at best, a stupidly expensive "delaying tactic" by rich people who realise that renewables will also likely bring decentralised energy generation, so they won't be able to charge you "rent" on your energy usage anymore.
Oh, and there's nuclear waste. What the fuck are we going to do with that, eh? Totally unsolved problem that's pretty much guaranteed to bite humanity on the arse in the distant future (if we make it that far, what with all these pointless "thousands of weapons which we build for the purpose of never using them").
For me, it's just logical. Renewable tech is better in about a hundred ways - even before we consider "climate change" which, for me, ain't remotely the main reason for considering it (though, yes, it is a thing because, weirdly, one has to actually say that out loud, in a world of mad "climate deniers" who also think 5G causes viruses and shit, to make clear you're not a nutter) - and the sooner we shift to the "problem solved" technology, the better.
And, no, this, for me, ain't about some hippy tree-hugging nonsense. Quite the opposite. This is how we ultimately keep our computers and lightbulbs and cars and fridges - and avoid ending up being thrown back to Medieval technologies - and maintain modern civilisation as it is (and, hopefully, endeavour to make it much better, but there are, indeed, plenty of ways in which it totally sucks and I won't disagree with you on that, but we need to do the fundamental thing of keeping the boat afloat first, before we can work on making it a much better boat).
Continuing to use fossil fuels, without any "backup plan", is what'll drive us back to Medieval technologies. If we stick with internal combustion engines then, when the oil runs out, they're just useless metal cages. We'll have to knock out the windscreen and tether horses in front of them. If you want "tree-hugging" and going back to nature, then just keep fucking up the planet by burning shit. It'll come soon enough.
I'm a "techno hippy" - let us get in balance with nature, so that we can keep on keeping on with the grand human adventure. I'm a coder, I want computers to stick around, thank you very much. I like a warm house and lights at night and my food not rotting away because the fridge preserves it. This is great stuff. Long may it continue.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
I always wondered "how many of those nuclear warheads are actually not working" .. as in "you are never going to launch them, you can't test them for real, what if I put something in that makes it LOOK like 'they are going to work' but in reality they don't and I charge you all the gazillions I want for the job I've done ?".
If those nuclear warheads would be made in Italy that "yellowcake" could be well done with safran and polenta, that "Plutonium" would be some filings from an old bycicle shop and there would be "some weird super shit cheapaer readioactive thing" just to make the instrument measure "there's something radioactive in".
I am sure "some expert in Naples" could even find a non-radioactive material that can make a geiger counter count
Actually I'd wish all those bombs would be made in Italy like that, that's probably why as far as I know there are no nuclear bombs factories in Italy
So .. when North Korea is going to come out with missiles that goes 18 times faster ? Tomorrow ? Or they already have it !
Does Italy have any nuclear reactors? Finland has four and a fifth about to be completed, the largest one ever constructed in the world. Finland has no coal or oil, so has gone nuclear very early. I am sure they (the army of 900,000 people, yes that is not misspelling, the army including reservists is nearly one million strong) could build a bomb in fairly short timescale.
Italy became what is known ( or was known ) as a "De-Nuclearised country" which means DOES NOT support/wants to have anything nuclear on its soil.
There's been *HUGE DEBATE* about those AMERICAN NATO bases in Italy that are known to have some nuclear weapons, not sure how that did end.
But I think it was around the end of '70s, beginning of '80s that was "a huge movement" about "NO NUCLEAR".
[edit] - here details :
Nuclear power in Italy is a controversial topic. Italy started to produce nuclear energy in the early 1960s, but all plants were closed by 1990 following the Italian nuclear power referendum. As of 2018, Italy is one of only two countries, along with Lithuania, that completely phased out nuclear power for electricity generation after having operational reactors.
An attempt to change the decision was made in 2008 by the government (see also nuclear power debate), which called the nuclear power phase-out a "terrible mistake, the cost of which totalled over €50 billion".[1] Minister of Economic Development Claudio Scajola proposed to build as many as 10 new reactors, with the goal of increasing the nuclear share of Italy's electricity supply to about 25% by 2030.[2]
However, following the 2011 Japanese nuclear accidents, the Italian government put a one-year moratorium on plans to revive nuclear power.[3] On 11—12 June 2011, Italian voters passed a referendum to cancel plans for new reactors. Over 94% of the electorate voted in favor of the construction ban, with 55% of the eligible voters participating, making the vote binding.[4]
[edit2] - you have to also keep in mind Italy been one of the places "most hit" by Chernobyl disaster
It's been quite scary for people, we had quite some fallout here, I remember it people being asked NOT to go outside, not to drink milk, not to eat veggies, they were talking about increase of cancer cases in the coming 20 years and lot of shit.
There's been LOT OF SHIT you NEVER HEARD ABOUT and Italian media been also "silenced" about stuff that went during that time, including some "milk scandal" where TONS of radioactive milk been sent to "poor people in Africa", milk that should be been for NO living being cause it was too radioactive to be used ended up in feeding already starving people.
You talk about "nuclear" in Italy .. you are literally throwing "a nuclear bomb in the talkings", Italians don't want to know about nuclear power or nuclear installations.
No it doesn't. It's the main problem with solar, you can't count on it every day or need massive batteries to store energy over
long periods of insufficient illumination. Storing that energy to maintain constant output is still a major challenge.
Nuclear power is a false "good idea" as the countries using it "forget" to take into account the massive costs of dismantling
old reactors and storing nuclear waste with no one wanting that stuff anywhere near them of course. All this without realistic planning for
the nightmare of a nuclear accident where the costs are so huge that hardly anyone can predict the true total expense
of cleaning that kind of mess up (look at Fukushima). Pure short term delaying tactic to push back the inevitable as you mentioned.
But as they said after Chernobyl to a scientist denouncing the cover up of the real reason for the accident :
"Why worry about something that will never happen ?".
Also you would probably need to cover the whole of the Sahara with solar panels to compensate the power consumption of modern developed countries.
It just isn't feasible materially with current tech. So on we go with what's at hand...
noodles wrote:Also you would probably need to cover the whole of the Sahara with solar panels to compensate the power consumption of modern developed countries.
No, that's not the case. For most of yesterday the UK's relatively paltry existing solar installations were supplying a quarter of our power (7.2GW/30GW, https://gridwatch.co.uk/ ). That's at the UK's relatively high latitude. If every UK home had a mere 5kW system installed that would be 50GW+ with no new land area consumed at all. Of course, that was about the sunniest day of the year so far. It's absolutely not sufficient on its own, but the UK is also the best wind location in the world. Add that and off-grid storage and it would mostly work now if we can work out a protocol to handle the dozen days per year when wind and solar won't be sufficient to recharge the off-grid storage and the ones where there's a vast excess of electricity (although at least renewables handle that more gracefully than legacy technologies).
It just isn't feasible materially with current tech. So on we go with what's at hand...
Going to 90% renewable electricity is now totally feasible with current tech - only that demand control protocol needs working out. It's just it costs money. Spending that looks unattractive until the enormous fossil fuel subsidy goes away.
Electricity isn't the only problem, of course. Other industries have bigger issues. But if you have enough electricity generation you can solve those too (and since you'll have a vast excess of energy a decent percentage of the time, it'll be very cheap).
noodles wrote:*SNIP*
It just isn't feasible materially with current tech. So on we go with what's at hand...
Yes .. but more than ever is necessary to find/continue to look for/test NEW things.
Nuclear .. everyone seems to forget about :
- the nuclear waste that is a HUGE "hidden problem"
- all it takes to produce nuclear suitable material, costs and shit involved
- we can try to reduce also energy usage
- nothing of all this is going to last for very long, at least the sun is going to last for some millions years more, minerals won't
If we don't go renewable in some ways it just won't last, eventually even the radioactive materials will stop being radioactive
enough at some point cause decay.
The nuclear waste is also "costs that keep going even when the material is totally useless" (**).
Also .. I've been watching "the professor" ( Poliakoff : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyn_Poliakoff) he has some interesting story, especially one quite interesting made short that says that in essence "the current nuclear tech is NOT the best the could be but it's the one that came since the Atomic Bomb" ).
There are other radioactive materials that "would be more interesting and more environnement friendly" if studied more, Thorium is one, but "they aren't because the current tech keeps what they already have" that initially came out for purely miltary purposes and then as power generation "re-using some of the studies already done".
I think "the biggest problem" more than energy generation is energy storage, if we can find effective ways of storage then a lot of prolblems could be solved because you could use "not so constant energy sources" and yet have what you need.
But there are new batteries and that tech is improving quite a bit, it's getting maybe the point where "effective energy accumulators" could be a pretty useable reality.
(**) there is not even that much study about how these could be re-used
Now what pisses me off is that "it could be done much better with even what you say we have" .. but it's not done .. instead "mega super computers" are used to predict the decay of nuclear warheads and how to keep them fix or how to dispose of them and NO YOU CAN BE SURE that material will NOT be used for energy generation even if maybe it could with "some modifications".
But "my missiles are bigger than yours" will always be kept going.
noodles wrote:Also you would probably need to cover the whole of the Sahara with solar panels to compensate the power consumption of modern developed countries.
No, that's not the case. For most of yesterday the UK's relatively paltry existing solar installations were supplying a quarter of our power (7.2GW/30GW, https://gridwatch.co.uk/ ).
More over, the UK has, during lockdown, gone for a whole month without using any coal generation whatsoever:
This is the longest period without coal use since 1882.
Dio wrote:That's at the UK's relatively high latitude. If every UK home had a mere 5kW system installed that would be 50GW+ with no new land area consumed at all. Of course, that was about the sunniest day of the year so far. It's absolutely not sufficient on its own, but the UK is also the best wind location in the world. Add that and off-grid storage and it would mostly work now if we can work out a protocol to handle the dozen days per year when wind and solar won't be sufficient to recharge the off-grid storage and the ones where there's a vast excess of electricity (although at least renewables handle that more gracefully than legacy technologies).
Exactly. The numbers are definitely, without question, there.
What's missing is the political and social will to make it happen.
Again, in a day, the Sun delivers more energy to the surface of the Earth than all of humanity uses in a year. There is more than enough. An over-abundance. But we just let it all uselessly let it hit ordinary roof tiles to do nothing but warm them up. What else is your roof doing anyway? It's not as if solar roof tiles would be any imposition on anyone up there.
So even if what they bring isn't the whole caboodle - let's say you can only get 50% of your energy needs from your solar roof, then that's still your energy bills halved, that's still half the carbon emissions and so forth. Don't let some abstract ideal perfection be the enemy of the good.
And here's the thing. If half of our energy use was coming from solar and wind and other renewables, then FOSSIL FUELS LAST LONGER. Because we'd be using them at a reduced rate. As noted, the UK has gone over a month without coal so far - so we've just extended coal's lifespan by a month. If we can keep doing that, month after month, then coal usage can be put off until later.
If all cars were electric tomorrow, then oil's lifespan would be massively extended. And we could reserve it for, you know, the things that are derived from by-products of oil - certain plastics, fertiliser, bitumen for road surfaces, etc. - without pissing it up the wall on a million pointless journeys to the shops. It has way better uses than that, if we must use it at all.
The non-renewables are going to run out. When they run out, of course, depends on how much we're using them. Ergo, the transition of as much as possible over to renewables spares the non-renewables, so that they last longer.
It buys us more time. Who knows? Maybe it'll even buy us enough time for viable nuclear fusion reactors to come online. I like to follow the military thing of "plan for the worst, hope for the best", so let us behave as if nuclear fusion is still the technology that's always 40 years away. Just in case it doesn't get sorted in sufficient time. But if it does then - wahey! - abundant clean energy, on a "E=mc^2" nuclear level, from the most abundant element - hydrogen - in the entire universe. Now, that would definitely go a very long way towards "problem solved".
So, you know, even if you can't shift everything to solar or wind, then shift as much as we can. That stuff is then "problem solved" for the next 5 billion years. And the point is that we extend the length of fossil fuels, by removing that energy burden from them, to keep going for longer to deal with everything else, until we've got enough solar installations and house batteries everywhere to finally go 100% on this.
And, by the way, if you think 100% renewables isn't possible, then it's already happened - in the UK - on the Orkney Islands:
Granted, these are small islands. But this is a microcosm for what could entirely happen on the larger scale of the bigger island of Great Britain. If we could be arsed to be bothered to try.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
