No disrespect intended, but really, this is you answer?
Well, it is like 5000 lawyers on the bottom of the sea: a start.
Have you done any calculations, (Henry Ford did), to see how much energy insulating and then insulating again would save?
I did. At least for my house, half of which is 200 years old, atm uses 2500m3 NG / year on average. It is partly isolated. If I get the insulation up to today's standards, that will go down at least 40%. Joules you do not have to put in don't have to be generated. If I get the energy use down by that a heatpump will supply the heating easily.
You do realize we subsidize the solar and wind industry. Energy from coal is more expensive then solar and wind. We will probably never go back to using coal.
You do realize that we subsidize fossil fuels way more than we do renewables? According to the IMF:
https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-07/imf-true-cost-fossil-fuels-53-trillion-yearNatural gas is so inexpensive right now, it’s almost being given away.
That is because we do not pay for the pollution created by burning that gas. 1m3 = 33MJ = 10kWh = 1.78 kg CO2
We have been investing in electricty storage for over 100 year.
I beg to differ. Due to the availability of dead cheap energy there was no push at all to look into ways of generating and storing large amounts of electrical energy. Portable computing is the biggest driver behind developments in storage. That is why a Tesla is (still) filled with 7000+ silly 18650 lithium cells. I dare say that had we been developing batteries for a century that would not have been the case.
The laws of physics and thermodynamics are exactly the same as they were then, as they are now.
Yep. Man said it could not be done. And still planes do fly.
Do you have any idea how much energy can be stored in batteries, hydrogen, formic acid, compressed air, flywheels? Have you done or seen the calculation? It’s not much. If all of the batteries in the world were to be used to store and provide electricty it would supply less than 5 minutes of our electrical needs.
We don't need months of storage. Electricity is easily transported and over great distances. As they say, the sun always shines somewhere, as does the wid blow. Smart use of available energy (smart grids, price driven use-it-when-it's-there) brings the amount of storage needed down. Do we need batteries? Only for mobile systems. For grid connected storage something like
https://www.ecn.nl/news/item/floating-train-at-2000-kmh-set-to-store-10-of-dutch-electricity/ would be nice. Far off? So is clean nuclear.
Yes we can conserve, but only 1/8 of the world is using 90% of the energy. Are you going to deprive the other 7/8s of the world who need electricty for clean drinking water and cooking that electricty?
No, I'm not. Good thing that these other countries seem to learn from our mistakes. Partly because their population is coughing their lungs out and partly because it is the cheapest option atm they install and use more renewables than our so-called civilized part of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Indiahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_ChinaBut hey, we feel it is much more necessary to go on a holiday 3 times a year to a sunny island to take a look at the dying coral reefs than to pay for a couple of solar panels on our roofs.
All humans are addicted to the burning of hydrocarbons.
No. Only our part of the world is addicted to fossil fuels. Which is the reason we react so strongly when confronted with the biggest part of the solution: conservation. Use Less Energy. A junkies worst nightmare, that is.
So what’s the solution? Not what you have suggested. Gas, oil, coal, wind, geothermal wave, solar, hydro, chemical - Nope none of these will supply enough energy within causing additional problems forhuman life on earth. Just leaves one.... Nuclear. It’s clean, It’s green, and renewable and far more energy dense than fossil fuels.
Uranium is a finite fuel, even if we manage to make it from seawater. Thorium is vaporware. Fission is vaporware. Building a nuclear reactor costs at least 10 years. In those 10 years so much will be changed in our energy use that the energy from nuclear will be unaffordable.
And a pity that you seem to have missed my remark about nuclear. I am not dead against it, but I feel it is only fair to ask from a nuclear power plant the same as we ask from people who erect a wind generator: make sure you insure against disaster and include the removal after decommissioning in the price for a kWh so the taxpayer is not left with the bill.