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  1. vektor
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    How do we do it? Use the tech we have now and scale it up. Don't wait for new stuff out of R&D departments. Windmills, Solar Panels, Battery Storage for your daily power grid needs. Electric...

    How do we do it? Use the tech we have now and scale it up. Don't wait for new stuff out of R&D departments. Windmills, Solar Panels, Battery Storage for your daily power grid needs. Electric transportation as much as you can. Hydrogen cars is a strong maybe in my book - I just don't see this panning out too well, too much fickle infrastructure. Hydrogen is just a good bit more complex than plain battery cars. That said, we need hydrogen as a precursor to synthetic methane. That in gas power plants will cover your power demands when it's dark and calm. Your supplies should be able to tide you over a few weeks.

    Is it a herculean task? Yeah, kinda. But so is getting an iPhone into every pocket or a car into every driveway. And we do that every few years. It's certainly not so extraordinarily hard we shouldn't even try. Gonna be expensive, but so is a global ecologic and later economic collapse. The order for an entire country is tall, but on a per-person basis it's a lot more manageable.

    Also, will the world be able to accomplish this in a reasonable amount of time?

    Only if we try hard enough. It's the kind of project with intense hysteresis: Not having your production scaled up already is probably going to cost you dearly, that's just how herculean industry feats work. Scaling up is half the problem. But I don't think any industrialized country should have trouble reducing their emissions to a small fraction of current levels in, say, 10 years or so... if they commit.

    (The last mile of eliminating niche or reserve usages of fossils is a different matter, but that's basically unimportant. If you have electric cars everywhere, you can afford to fire up natural gas plants a week or so a year because the batteries went dry.)

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