Just slowly increase taxes on anything not compostable and industry will find a way.

You could use plasma coating to put some Aluminium or SiO2 on a compostable plastic for instance. Non perishable, till it gets ground up.

Apple uses web content for training, but I don't think they have been caught using anything with registered copyrights. The use of Youtube transcripts for a research model is the worst they have been caught doing.

AFAICS they are content renting other people's technology till the Supreme Court has its say.

Deforestation is self limiting for emissions. Chop more and there's less to chop.

I don't wish for collapse, I just expect it ... and not because of global warming.

There's not a lot of surface coal any more and the amount of oil which could be pumped in an apocalyptical situation is minimal. Deforestation is self limiting.

Technologically advanced civilisation is also a luxury. If WMD, or epidemic, or demographic collapse, or ecological collapse drag down supply chains with them, we'll get pretty close to net zero.

PS. there are grid forming electronic statcoms in commercial service, that is a fact. It's complete fantasy that an electronic control system somehow couldn't respond fast enough to a fucking 60 Hz sine. Grid following systems obviously are dog slow, because they are designed to be. Grid forming ones are instant relative to 60 Hz, limited only by the self resonance of the gate drivers, a millisecond or so. A msec distortion on the sine at the source is not a spike, it's irrelevant, it will be low pass filtered away by the grid at negligible distance.

The advantage of distributed solar in a net zero situation is that it will always have sufficient backup for a blackstart ... no sun at night any way.

Societal collapse will get you pretty close.

Maybe 2050 is a bit optimistic/pessimistic, but we're going to be net zero in a couple decades one way or the other.

Spain and the rest of the world runs most inverters as grid following. That's not down to cost, but down to planning.

There is nothing magical about mechanical inertia which makes it impossible to do it electronically. Material wise any existing grid following inverter can move power arbitrarily across a single cycle, that's just the nature of a bidirectional DC/AC convertor. It's relatively cheap to add enough storage to give an inverter the same time-constant inertia as generator too ... what is lacking are incentives to build inverters that way.

Longer term storage is a fundamentally costly, inertia is not.

Solar is special in that there are has almost no limits on cost cutting material wise. The only relevant cost to solar will soon be land and backup.

Solar+hydrogen or nuclear, those are the options. Everything else will be niche (including wind).

Ad based electronic ecosystems will never work as long as Apple is out there, they are just going to slowly kill themselves.

Apple can move downwards in price much easier than some ad encrusted shitshow can move up.

In May they put observers in their driverless trucks a couple days after removing the safety drivers.

We've arrived at the finger pointing stage of the competition for most honest thieves.

Nothing which is needed for net zero by 2050 is wasted, because a little more or a little less emission savings in such a short timeframe are irrelevant. New England, the central U.S., and Tennessee need to get to net zero too a cross nation HVDC network making the whole US dependent on a couple southern states is probably not how those states want to get there.

So build more solar, build more electrolyzers, build more storage (straight hydrogen, or chemically stored in some other form) everywhere. That's how you get to net zero with renewables. The united states is already behind schedule, worrying about optimality of emission savings is missing the forest for the trees.

That's not a categorical difference, that's an appeal to emotion. I can do that too ...it could recommend A Serbian Film because their algorithm said it would keep you around (if they had it on the service). Personalised recommendations are not restricted by genre.

I'm conflating recommend with recommend? Netflix doesn't just recommend within a category, they have a ML personalised recommendation system, aka engagement algorithm. Of course movies and series have somewhat reliable age ratings and youtube videos don't.

Youtube is democratised media more than social media. A very low barrier to entry distributor.