Bill Gates on 60 Minutes just now.

[NNadir]

32. I remarked on them as energy. We obviously disagree mightily on how impressive less than 2 EJ...

of energy available at random times over a twenty year period that will end around the time babies born today get out of college is compared to 2 exajoules available continuously for over half a century is, this in a country of 1.4 billion people.

You may not think that dumped energy available when no one needs it is not counted in China, but there is no evidence for that. For the last 50 years, exaggeration has characterized pretty much every account of so called "renewable energy" there is. The entire industry is an exercise is selective attention.

In almost 20 years here, I will wish I had a dollar bill for every "Wind power provides (insert large percentage) of country x's power" usually referring to a few hours on a windy day.

It is notable that in almost every country, particularly a country where there are 100 million electric vehicles - most of them being scooters - peak power demand is late afternoon, early evening.

This is certainly true if one regularly checks the demand/supply curves at the CAISO website. I do this for cynical laughs to see what a rising disaster looks like, and California is an energy disaster because of appeals to and enthusiasm for insipid popular ideas. They often approach or exceed 10,000 MW of instantaneous solar power around 11 am -12 noon and all that "capacity" disappears usually by 6 pm, precisely when the demand curve is peaking. The price of solar power at midnight is infinite, something our Ayn Rand type "solar is competitive" people ignore, since they do not include either the internal or external costs of redundant systems in their dishonest calculations.

If one is comparing the total energy of a system that is unreliable and will be short lived, with a system that is completely reliable and is likely to be in place for half a century, one is engaged in bad thinking.

Again, and again, and again, and again, China will not need to replace all of its existing nuclear plants in 2040. They will need to replace every damned piece of material intense so called "renewable energy" and then, if possible, without killing large numbers of people with mining operations (which they probably won't do) and then add any new capacity.

The fact that humanity has spent half a century dancing in the streets trying to compare reliable continuous plants, like nuclear plants and for that matter plants that kill people whenever they operate, coal, gas and petroleum plants, with unreliable redundant so called "renewable" junk is a very, very, very, very clear and unambiguous answer to why we are failing completely and totally to address climate change.