Didn't provide a link to the Google Research RE<C paper. Here it is:

https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...

Well worth a careful read. This is the paper that shook me out of blindly accepting what I was being told. From there I decided I needed to know much more, at many levels, in order to understand. This led to about a year of work digging for root-cause understanding, identifying a baseline from which to compare solutions and, in general, being able to have a clear view of where we are and what we can and cannot achieve.

We are being bombarded with false solutions, all of which are hand-wavy in nature, which is to say they do not provide an honest accounting of the energy, resource and materials they will require and pollution they will inject into the ecosystem. They all treat planetary scale projects as though they were miniature no-impact tasks.

For example, digging up five billion tons of something, processing and delivering it all around the world never mentions energy requirements, resources (oil, fuel, chemicals, water, transportation, etc.), ecosystem damage and CO2 (and other pollutants) the process will contribute to the planet --at a planetary scale. Never.

A few quotes from the paper:

"Google’s boldest energy move was an effort known as RE<C, which aimed to develop renewable energy sources that would generate electricity more cheaply than coal-fired power plants do."

"In 2011, the company decided that RE<C was not on track to meet its target and shut down the initiative. The two of us, who worked as engineers on the internal RE<C projects, were then forced
to reexamine our assumptions. "

"we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change."

"We now know that to be a false hope"

"even if we shut down every fossil-fueled power plant today, existing CO2 will continue to warm the planet."

"Suppose for a moment that it had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking"

"if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now,
we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take centuries for atmospheric levels to return to normal, which means centuries of warming and instability."

"To reverse climate change, our society requires something beyond today’s renewable energy technologies."

We need to focus on the physics-driven reality of the task and stop with the fantasies.

Every single purported solution ought to come with a specifications document that lists requirements, inputs and outputs, at planetary scale. Time to a 100 ppm CO2 reduction at planetary scale. Energy. Materials. Resources. Fuel. Transportation. CO2 and other emissions. Environmental/ecological effects. Etc.

A standard format could be developed. This should not take more than a single page. Something like this would make it brutally easy to separate the nonsense from things we might actually want to focus on.