> Recycling batteries means there's lower usable lifetime.

Irrelevant, it's a cost reduction.

> The recycled batteries would be cheaper to source, but the more frequent replacement drives up labor costs.

Insignificant, and automatable.

> Recycling also doesn't alter the fundamental disparities in scale.

Unimportant, the scaling up is already occurring. Currently planned infrastructure gets us half way all by itself by 2030. There's no need to hypothesise about beyond that, that's a problem for investors and governments.

> Production needs to increase by close to two orders of magnitude to make any significant amount of grid storage.

Yes, and?

> We're struggling to keep pace with just EV demand for batteries,

Which is why Tesla is investing in mining and alternative chemistries.

> adding just one hour of grid storage for the USA (about 500GWh) would eat up an entire year's worth of batter production.

Unimportant, more factories and more mines are being built as fast as people can find investors. Assuming today's output is a constant going forward is only useful for extremely short time horizons; in this context, extremely short is in the order of 6-12 months, given how fast global capacity is changing.

> What alternatives are you talking about? The existing alternatives aren't presently being used because lithium based chemistries beats them in cost.

False: https://insideevs.com/news/575956/tesla-battery-chemistries-...

> Other storage systems like compressed air are in their infancy and it's unclear if they'll become cost effective enough.

Hydroelectric and hydrogen are both large scale, easy to make.

China recently finished a big hydroelectric plant. We have not run out of places we can fill will water, not even places that fill themselves with water.

Hydrogen electrolysis is so easy that it predates alternators and dynamos, and I did it myself when I was single-digit-years-old. There hasn't been much point to it until recently as it's a store rather than a source, but now we have solar cheaper than natural gas, it's trivial and obvious.

> Let me re-use your logic: we don't need solar, or wind, or storage. We'll just use fusion. Fusion is making big strides each year.

Logic without a connection to reality is not useful.

Fusion, to my personal frustration, is not making "big" strides each year, certainly not if you are defining the current growth rate of batteries (let alone renewables) as anything less than "extremely big".

Logic is also not useful when you ignore some of the consequences of your assumptions, e.g., the best current estimates for the quantity of superconductors needed to make 2 TW of fusion reactors (ITER magnet is ~1000 tons and the reactor is 500 MW-thermal) is also enough for a lossless global power grid.

> There's no limit to the number of ways we can squeeze together two hydrogen atoms, so if the tokamak doesn't work out there's too many alternatives for me to think about.

You are currently using a lithium ion or lithium polymer battery.

Demonstrate a working fusion reactor that makes more electricity than it consumes. You only get to count the sun if you're willing to use PV.

This is the crux of your mistake: you're treating all futures as equals, when the environmental goals need us to act as quickly as possible.

Fission is too slow to build, and we have working designs; fusion is too slow to build even the experimental reactors whose useful descendants are currently scheduled to arrive after it's too late. The new fusion startups? Well, good luck to them, I wish them the best, but any policy decisions that assume they will be ready to start building their own reactor factories before the already-planned-just-not-yet-built battery factories are finished, is wishful thinking.

Or do you think it's unfair to count "merely" planned battery factories and mines, even though there's nothing fundamentally novel about them?