an awful lot of people just dont understand the sheer scale of a lot of these problems

Sheer scale is why we’re in this mess to begin with. Coal power for a population of 50M people living on either side of the Atlantic isn’t what caused climate change. It’s the scale up to provide power for 8B people that’s broiling the planet.

“Ah, but you don’t understand! There will be engineering obstacles to upgrading the grid!” is shit you can say when you aren’t spending billions to maintain the existing fossil fuel infrastructure that’s currently in place.

We have the capacity to reorient our economy around a predictable daily regionally glut of solar electricity. We already exploit time variable ecological events to optimize consumption. And we built out a global grid 40 years ago to handle logistics at this scale. You can move electricity from coast to coast and we routinely do. This isn’t an impossible problem, it’s just one that Western financial centers in particular don’t want to invest in solving.