The paper is linked in the Oak Ridge release. That's what I am reading. I can't say anything intelligent about it yet. I do have a full time job that consumes 12 hours a day, almost 7 days a week (the life of an entrepreneur). Posting here takes far longer than I should devote to this.

The fallacy with the commonly used argument about how much solar energy comes into the planet is one that ignores the fact that this energy isn't, for lack of a better term, doing nothing.

A silly comparison would be to say something like "look at how much energy I have in my Tesla" and then attempt to use it both to drive the car and power your home. Sure, you can theoretically do both, yet the car's range will be greatly reduced and your home will go dark in less than a day.

The assumption that we have so much energy often treats this as excess energy. Well, it isn't. We can only tap into it so much before we start to affect other things. It's Conservation of Energy at its most based: It can't be created. It is transformed. Right now, all of that energy from the sun is in use. It is being transformed into so many things it is impossible to list them.

The estimates for just how much energy is required to extract CO2 from the atmosphere at a global scale are not very accurate. This is to be expected. No technology exists today that can do this at that scale. The numbers range from a requirement of 25% of all the electrical energy produced in the world to somewhere around eight times the worlds electric power production.

Either end of that scale is a disaster of global scale waiting to happen. We can't go there. We probably have to quadruple energy production world-wide and might still be short. Not to mention the massive consequences of producing that much energy. Energy is transformed from one form to another and every time you do that. Heat, for example, is a byproduct of almost any transformation.

And yet, there's another reality. All of this is absolutely futile unless we stop generating CO2. It would be a sad joke to quadruple world power generation (not sure it is even possible) only to add more CO2 than we can extract in the process.

You don't quadruple anything at a global scale without producing an unimaginably large amount of CO2 and waste material.

Restricting this to the US. We have to convert our entire ground transportation system to electric power. Sounds great. So long as one does not run through some of the basic physics of what that would mean.

A few years ago I wrote a simulation in order to try and understand just how much more energy the US would need to go 100% electric. I divided the population into time zones, created thousands of behavioral patterns based on such things as drive distance, fast and slow charging, urban vs. rural, etc.

The simulation resulted in a range between 900 GW and 1400 GW. This is additional power, over and above what the US produces today.

How much is that? We produce 1200 GW of power today. That means a vast nation like the US would need to create a full duplicate (in terms of power) of the current power system. And I do mean this in the full sense of the term. The wires we have carrying power today could not handle transporting twice as much. The entire power distribution grid needs to be rebuilt to double its transport capacity.

It is important to have a sense of proportion for things at this scale. A typical nuclear power plant produces 1 GW. In other words, the US would need to construct over a thousand nuclear power plants just to enable electric cars.

This will not get us to zero carbon emissions. Not even close.

And then we have to produce even more power to eventually run carbon capture systems. That could very well mean adding another 500 to 1000 GW to the power grid. Nobody knows.

Once you start looking at the subject while exploring all the requisite tentacles, it is hard to avoid the thought that, at best there's a high level of hubris involved. An honest analysis of the matter includes conclusions such as the cost of oil having to come down to $20~$40 a barrel. This sounds crazy, until one looks at the cost of infrastructure and carbon capture systems at a global scale, all of which are driven by transportation and other costs that are inextricably linked to the cost of oil. Simply put, in the US alone, we cannot afford to engage in infrastructure construction at such a scale...with fuel at these prices it is impossible to pay for it.

This topic isn't simple at all. And it sure as heck does not benefit from people coming at it from a blind ideological perspective, as many (most?) do today.