When I was in elementary school, the cafeteria switched to disposable plastic trays because the paper ones hurt trees. Stupid, I know… but are today’s initiatives any better?
I’m not opposed to renewables at all, the progress in solar power has been awesome.
But I think the scalability is hard, both in providing a reliable baseload, and also producing all of the solar panels for example. I don’t think it’s insurmountable though.
Ideally we use all of them - we need more electricity than ever. “Degrowth” is the real enemy.
I think the scalability, in production as well as in installation, is the biggest plus for pv. You can build 0.25 kW PV or 1 GW. Nuclear reactors that are not even in the construction phase are, in my opinion, a waste of money and resources that could be invested in building renewables.
Renewables will never replace stable energy production until the storage problem as been solved. At present there are no practical mass storage solutions available. So on days when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow, there isn’t sufficient energy generation without LNG/coal/nuclear. This will be true for decades. Nuclear is currently the best option of those three. Some places are lucky with hydro generation, but even this is subject to variable rainfall. Tidal generation has come a long way, but it’s still not ready for prime time, and it also suffers from variability.
Maybe spend some time reading about the actual market situation.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/12/23/global-solar-capacity-additions-hit-268-gw-in-2022-says-bnef/
