This week I listened to the podcast "The Single Best Guide to Decarbonization I’ve Heard" by The Ezra Klein Show. It made me wonder about a few things:
- How much have the projections changed since that aired? How much have we, as the human race, followed earlier projections made by different people? It seems like we keep beating ourselves (2023 being the hottest year recorded and all that). Why does that keep happening? And whatever the reason, how can we trust other projections and estimates?
- One thing that was just incredible is the scale of needed new infrastructure. Jenkins mentioned the US would need land the size of a number of states just for wind and solar farms! I was wondering how the proportions of the actual machinery work in terms of their physical size? Would it make sense to have a lot of smaller wind turbines and solar panels scattered all around? And also, is there a size to the farm for it to be sustainable? Like could small-sized countries just have proportionally smaller farms? What about places that just don't have the land for that? I wonder if eventually it'll create a green energy industry, same way as Saudi Arabia and Russia are providing oil for many other countries. I wonder if and how that could be encouraged and maybe make some companies try to move from oil and gas to wind and solar.
