For most countries around the world, sourcing energy entirely from wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower by 2050 would reduce their energy needs and costs, improve air quality, and help slow climate change, according to a study in Environmental Science & Technology.
Why does cost even mean anything when talking about keeping our planet livable?
Do both.
Because talking about carbon capture let’s emitting companies not do anything to reduce emissions and tell themselves and the public “ah, we’re just gonna do carbon capture in the future”. It’s the same with hydrogen btw., there won’t be enough of it for our current use of fossils, we know it, but we still tell ourselves “ah, we’ll just switch to green H2 as soon as it’s available” instead of working to reduce emissions and implement new processes.
Renewable energy being the cheapest energy really, really helps
Carbon capture being expensive is unfortunate. It would be nice if we could cheaply use fossil fuels and keep the carbon out of the biosphere, but we can’t, so we should just use renewable energy, and big countries can also use nuclear until we run out of fissile material
Put big balloons on the exhausts.
Yeah nuclear would be really great too for the time being.