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> That is an insane amount of land

If any of Texas, Thailand, or Botswana can singlehandedly power the entire planet's marketed energy consumption, which is what that "insane amount of land" adds up to, there's no land shortage for solar.

> If you're covering an area of 550 thousand km² with panels, there is an equivalent volume that you need to dig up somewhere else

550 thousand km² times "40 pounds" per m² is only ten billion tonnes, which is the weight of a 1-kilometer-radius sphere of rock. Botev Peak in Bulgaria, say, or the Matterhorn, although of course in practice you'd want to use ten or twenty billion tonnes of sand and bauxite that don't require climbing mountains to get them. Please do the math yourself before bringing up irrelevant trivialities like this.

> For all the talk about wind and solar being the energy of the future, I don't actually see where solar and wind are actually powering a modern economy.

Well, it's possible you're unaware of the relevant facts, so I'll explain.

Until four years ago, solar energy was more expensive than other sources of energy, so modern economies were built on those other sources of energy. Until about seven years ago, solar was much more expensive. Now, solar energy is cheaper. But most power plants are more than four years old; I think the median age is something like 15 years old, 30 years for nuclear plants, 40 years for both US nuclear plants and US coal plants. Typically planning and building a power plant is a process that takes a few years, too, and utilities and regulators are justifiably cautious about innovations.

So let's look at new installations rather than installed capacity.

For example, China built 38.4 GW of coal capacity last year https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal-idUSKBN2A308U and 71.7 GW of wind capacity and 48.2 GW of solar capacity https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-energy-climatechang.... Taking into account typical capacity factors of 40% for wind, 25% for solar, and 60% for coal, that adds up to 23 GW average new coal, 29 GW average new wind, and 12 GW average new solar. That last number doubles about once every three years. So I think it's fair to say that, even in the coal-heaviest country in the world, the transition to solar (and, I grudgingly admit, even more toward wind) is quite clear: the great majority of new power plants are running on renewable energy.

You may not be aware of this, but Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal company, went bankrupt in 02016. They've emerged from bankruptcy but their latest annual report says they lost US$211 million in 02019, after turning a profit briefly the year before — but nothing compared to how they lost US$2 billion in 02015.

https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1064728/0001...

Their latest quarterly report from 02020 has them losing US$1.6 billion in 9 months.

One of the factors in Peabody's problems is that in the Southwest of the USA, where some of their major customers are, continuing to operate already built coal power plants like the San Juan Generating Plant and the now-defunct Navajo Generating Station is no longer economic; solar energy has driven down prices (averaging US$26.58/MWh at the Palo Verde trading hub in 02019 according to this article) well below the coal plants' operating expenses (for example, US$44.90/MWh at the San Juan Generating Plant).

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/28/record-low-solar-ppas...

> I see Germany building pipelines to ship natural[sic] from Russia and signing multi-decade contracts with that nation while being held up as a model nation. Why not invest in solar and wind deployment instead,

This is another question I answered in the comment you are purportedly responding to: Germany's solar capacity factor is an abysmal 10%.

Let's unpack what that means. A 280Wp solar panel module in California with a 28.1% capacity factor produces 79 watts average (690 kWh/year, worth about US$28 at a wholesale price of US$40/MWh); the same module in Germany produces about 28 watts (245 kWh/year, worth about US$9.80 at wholesale). But the module costs about US$50 wholesale in both places, or US$300 if you buy it on Amazon. So, absent subsidies, a solar plant is a much worse investment in Germany than in, say, Qatar.

Why is Germany often held up as a model nation? Germany was an early pioneer in a variety of energy reforms (the "Energiewende"), including massive investment in utility-scale solar, rooftop solar, and utility-scale wind, as well as energy-efficiency programs like Passivhaus. Still, in Germany it's still cheaper to run existing coal and gas plants than to build new solar plants, so Germany is no longer a leader in this field; the leaders are now countries like China, India, Qatar, and Chile.

Also, I didn't mention this, but Germany uses about 80 gigawatts in only 357 thousand km² of land, largely due to its high population density of 230 people per km². By contrast, the world has about 50 people per km², using 18 terawatts in 150 million km². So Germany, despite its high efficiency, uses about 0.2 W/m², almost twice as high as the world's 0.12 W/m².

So, in summary, Germany has a higher energy demand, higher competition for land, and a terrible solar resource, so it's one of the last places in the world you'd expect solar to be cost-competitive.

> I look at all that, I shudder at the amount of solar and wind collectors that will be required to manufacture and deploy and the stress it will put on existing ecosystems.

If you were to chop down a forest to build a PV farm, it would put stress on an existing ecosystem, but in a desert it will provide shade and windbreaks, and in arable land it will return cultivated land to being a habitat usable by native plants and animals. And those are typically much cheaper than chopping down forests. (They also don't concrete over the site anymore. Too expensive.) And, as outlined above, the mining and manufacturing are of a trivial scale compared to the deployment. So there is no reason to suspect that the environmental effect of solar energy will be net negative in the next couple of decades, even if compared to a nuclear alternative.

It's likely that in 20–50 years, as solar energy production vastly exceeds current world energy production, that it will become environmentally devastating, as people desperately seek to cover any scrap of land or ocean with increasingly efficient solar panels to harness every last little bit of terrestrial insolation. Unless we have greener ways of making such decisions by then.

> we have an energy-dense alternative, with no engineering challenges to solve and with decades of experience

Now that solar is so cheap, the alternatives are too expensive except for niche uses, and most of the alternatives are also wrecking the climate — nuclear, hydro, and geothermal being the exceptions. Even in the 1970s, before Three Mile Island, nuclear power plants cost over US$1 per average watt, which is about twice what PV plants in favorable locations cost now.

> This kind of emotional appeal is not conducive to good discourse

You know what's conducive to good discourse? Basing your
discourse
on easily verifiable facts instead of easily falsified
nonsense is conducive to good discourse.
Rigorous arguments based on specific, easily checkable
calculations are conducive to good discourse.
Responding point by point
to what other people have actually said,
instead of baselessly accusing them of
"forgetting about" one of the primary topics
of their comments,
is conducive to good discourse.
Trying to inundate careful consideration of relevant points
with piles of nonsense you haven't done the most
basic consistency checks on,
thus challenging others to do your homework for you
if they want to disagree — that
is not conducive to good discourse.

And that is what you were doing.

I don't know how to appeal to you to step up your game,
if not emotionally.
It looks to me like you're trying to monkeywrench
good discourse and prevent it from happening, and you're
immune to appeals to your shame.