Citation needed. Would it have killed you to add a link to said Biden video? Not like Trump's "grab them" audio recording changed any minds, though... And no matter how bad Hillary was, (Yes, I agree strongly she was bad,) Trump was clearly planning on driving the last nails in humanity's carbon coffin. That should be a no brainer.

When a president attacks both science (the whole basis of nerd-dom) and truth.

Natural CO2 emissions may have been neutral in 1900, but we've cut enough down enough trees and increased the forest fire rate enough that it'd be out of balance even without considering fossil fuel combustion or volcanoes.

EVs do make a difference. Being 90% efficient, compared to the 30% efficiency of an ICE, is a huge energy savings. Even if it's charged by electricity from a fossil fuel plant, the fossil fuel plant can scrub pollutants out of the emissions, unlike the particulates and NOx that come out of a tailpipe. Increasing electrical demand also shows that new energy sources need to be built, and local governments can be smart about building renewables as opposed to more coal plants. Further, there are large portions of the US in which charging from the electrical grid cuts emissions 50%-75% for driving the same distance. Even getting a good PHEV that lets you do 80%-90% of your driving in full-electric is a huge benefit. Both EVs and PHEVs can take advantage of greening up the electrical supply, if we can ever get control of our government again.

You may be right on that idea of burying yard waste and healthy trees. I've been wondering if it'd be useful to throw the trees in the coal mines, but it might be too CO2 intensive shipping the trees to the mines. (It would give coal miners some new work that's more environmentally friendly.) Or start building new housing for folks that will be displaced by more-frequent weather events, like the more unfortunate residents of Houston, Texas that look like they're going to get flooded out every 3-5 years. Being wise about which trees to cut can reduce forest fire rates. I suspect we still need forest fires, but we just can't let them get out of hand like in Paradise, CA and South Australia.

That'd be fine, if the forest grew back overnight, recapturing all that CO2. Instead, it takes a decade or two for the new growth to recapture all that smoke. Not to mention, it'd be even better if we found some place for that new growth without burning down the original forest in the first place...

Major refugee crisis. 11 million Syrians needed to find new homes: half of those left the country. Imagine 400 million needing to find new homes, just from sea level rise. Add in refugees from the places that will get too hot to be habitable: 10s or 100s of millions from India and neighboring countries. Add in the food and water shortages due to drought. Do you want a fair allocation of that many homeless and malnourished people in your country? Do you want your government taxing the heck out of your paycheck to buy out the homes of the people that are getting flooded repeatedly? Ounce of prevention and all that. Oh, and sea level rise doesn't stop automatically at year 2100: it'll continue, so you'll have more millions of homeless and malnourished people each year.

This would be like responding, "That's ok. My body is changing all the time."

The US is averaging 10 $1B climate disasters a year. In the 1980s, the average was 3/year. Yes, the $1B metric has been corrected for inflation. Do you want to start doing something when there's 20 $1B events? 50 $1B events?

The fossil fuel industry gets more in subsidies than the Pentagon spends. Do you want to wait until the FF industry is getting $1T in subsidies? $10T in subsidies? $100T?

Two towns are relocating due to rising waters. A town in the Florida Keys is seeing near continuous flooding. Do you want to wait until Miami is underwater? New York City? Boston?

We lock all that in if we continue on our current path for the next 30 years.

Not a gun nut either, but rule number two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you aren't willing to destroy. (I think I heard that in an illusion by Penn & Teller.) So yes, if someone is pointing a gun at me, I'll assume the person is ready to kill me, even if only in their own self-defense.

We already have working solar and wind generation. We're working on storage. We don't have the ability to construct enough nuclear reactors to cut our emissions 50% by 2030. Japan built many new reactors before 2011, with each reactor taking 6 years to construct. The US alone would need to build 400 or so 1GW reactors by 2030. Do you see that happening? So yes, I'm for solar, wind, storage, and nuclear.

Maybe in other countries, but the US seems to be going backwards.

To meet the 50% reduction by 2030 goal, the US would need to replace existing fossil fuel energy use by installing 400 (+/- 50) 1GW nuclear power plants or their equivalent in renewables and storage. We installed 12GW of renewables in 2017, which is probably the equivalent of 6 1GW nuclear plants after taking capacity factor differences into account. We have 2-4 nuclear plants under construction; outside of that, don't expect any new US nuclear plants to be online by 2030. I haven't bothered to look at how we're doing on storage needed for 24/7 power from intermittent renewables.

We'd need to replace 130 million personal vehicles with EVs. Tesla looks like they might produce 600K a year. No other US car seller has ramped up EV sales. VW might be there in a couple years, but will VW and Tesla be able to sell 130M cars in 10 years? That doesn't touch the air travel or cargo or freight portions of the transportation emissions.

Those two items alone seem to indicate this is a difficult challenge. Given the current administration's (and 40% of the population's) bullheadedness on gutting the EPA and rolling back environmental regulations, it will be extremely difficult for the US to meet the 2030 number. Not because we don't have the technology, but because too many of us just don't believe this needs to be done.

So yes, this seems rather dire.

I think GP's point was that even using less stuff, including energy, you're still using stuff. At some point, there won't be any more stuff to use. We'll have millions of years of solar power, but what happens when all other resources are used up and all waste is too degraded to efficiently produce new items?

Actually, this study disagrees with the chart you mention for the second link. Wind has the same life cycle emissions as nuclear, and solar appears to be twice the LCE of nuclear. Your link shows wind having twice the LCE, and solar having 10 times the LCE of nuclear.

Bah, forgot to upgrade a prefix. Those 200 1MW and 500 1MW reactor counts should be 200 1GW and 500 1GW.

Also looks like you missed my comment about using clean energy for mining and manufacturing renewables, which brings down the indirect parts on that chart.

The problem is getting contractors to do it correctly. Westinghouse's initial estimate for Vogtle: $14B. Current estimate: $25B, but even that might not be enough. I have no confidence in a contractor that is that far off on the construction costs. The US has commissioned only two reactors since 1990: one was 1996, the other 2016. Both of those started construction in 1973 . Get me a contractor that builds it correctly the first time, at a reasonable cost, and in under 5 years, and I'll be with you. I'll accept reputable foreign contractors: Japan seems to know what they are doing with respect to construction, barring a tsunami: seems like they average 5-7 years for construction. Not sure if that includes the initial proposal, siting, permitting, etc., so that may still be too long. Until we find that contractor, I'm going renewables and storage. Large quantities of those can be built and brought online each year, and if someone screws up, you don't end up with a multiple-mile disaster area with a half-life of hundreds of millions of years.

Remember: we have to cut our GHG output 50% by 2030. We won't do that if new reactors won't be commissioned until 2030. Basically, we'd need to bring 200 1MW reactors online by 2030 just to cut 50% of GHG emissions from electrical generation. Given that electricity only accounts for 40% of our GHG emissions, you'd need to bring 500 1MW reactors online by 2030. Worldwide, only 454 power reactors are running, and there are another 226 research reactors. Those were built over a span of 60 years, so roughly 110 per decade worldwide. Do you really want to try commissioning 500 new reactors in the U.S. alone by 2030? I could see ramping up nuclear reactor production so that we could bring as many reactors as possible online between 2030 and 2040 for the other 50%, but it's too difficult to do that by 2030. Much easier to expand solar/wind in the short term, while at the same time expanding reactor manufacturing for the 2030-2040 run.