Reply #5: Your choices are not relevant to the forces at work. [View All]

[kristopher]

Suppose you're first conclusion is adopted whole-scale immediately and we move away from coal to natural gas. If we consider resource availability there is more than enough to keep us going until we choke on the CO2. We can move away from coal to natural gas but even with fracking it is going to cost because natural gas as a fuel is pretty expensive. For bulk power wind is already significantly less expensive than natural gas and solar is currently competitive with natural gas for peak power in many markets. We can expect further declines in the cost of output from those technologies, while simultaneously there is no reason to think that natural gas will ever be significantly less expensive if we increase demand as you hypothesize.
The natural economic fit is bulk power from wind and solar with load shaped by a shifting set of technologies that are dispatchable such as natural gas/renewable biomethane, various storage techs, wave/current/tidal, geothermal, and biomass.