I hate to break it to you, but natural gas IS a fossil fuel. Using it does release carbon.
In that article where you accused me of cherry picking (again) I DID mention that his alternatives might work for Australia. The problem being that, of the three he mentioned, only geothermal can be used for base load. Australia might have enough geothermal for their base load for all I know, but we certainly don’t.
I worked for a couple of years in a lab that was focused on solar water splitting, and also has a guy working on supercapacitors, so I am very probably more familiar with the state of the art in energy storage than you are. The fact that you bring up supercapacitors in this context confirms that, because the benefit of capacitors over chemical energy storage (batteries, etc.), is in power output, not in energy density. That means they might be great for electric vehicles and other uses that require high output, but there are technologies that are inherently far better for large scale energy storage in power plants. As someone who has actually worked in the field, I can tell you that a couple of overblown press releases (and the press releases are always overblown) don’t make an energy revolution.
The chart you show for Boulder doesn’t contradict anything I said. You can get to a point where you have about 40% of your power as base load (for a residential city, that percentage would be higher for an industrial center), which they are planning to be getting from fossil fuels. I’m suggesting that cutting our emissions by ~50% (including industry), as the rest of the world industrializes, may not be enough.
I think maybe you don’t understand what “base load” means. You seem to have completely ignored the fact that I presented repeatedly, which is that, as a scalable (meaning we can get as much of it as we need) source of BASE LOAD power, nuclear is prohibitively expensive COMPARED TO FOSSIL FUELS. Even the idealized best case scenario for a residential town that you present still involves getting 39% of our energy from fossil fuels in 2037. You have also repeatedly failed to provide numbers (physical, not economic). Considering the growth in our energy usage, we need something that can provide ~50% of 30TW in the next twenty years as base load. The other 50% we can realistically provide with solar and wind, but we need something for that base load (which is almost as much as our total energy usage now). If we assume Boulder can actually pull that off, and that we really get to it and can pull off a migration like that worldwide, the best case scenario you present involves us cutting carbon emissions to only slightly below current levels, which means we will still be rapidly increasing the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
In short, please have numbers on you next reply. Where do we get 15TW of base load that’s not fossil fuels?
Edit: This is, of course predicated on an assumption that continuing carbon emissions at our current rate is more dangerous than nuclear power. If the consensus among climate scientists about the effects of carbon is right (which I think it very likely is) then carbon is almost certainly the more dangerous of the two, but there are a whole lot of unknowns in that equation.
