There was a point at which solar power was the same percentage of the energy mix as these things are a percentage of the CO2-suck needed for net-zero. And lots of people who were all in favor renewable energy were saying the same kind of things. It’s a pipe dream, it’s inefficient, it’s a boondoggle, it’s not compatible with how we’ve always done things, it’s more expensive than paying people to reduce energy use, etc.
And you know what? They could have been right! It’s just that they weren’t. As things happened, solar got better and cheaper fast enough to make it a winning bet. But it was always a good bet, because the potential upside vastly outweighed the immediate drawbacks.
Likewise: building these things is objectively harmless from a CO2 standpoint. You could run them on coal and that would still be true. The only cost is a theoretical opportunity cost—what if a better, incompatible solution comes around next year but we’ve already committed to these things?—and that only matters if the Next Big Thing is a tiny smidge incrementally better. (In which case it won’t matter at all.) If the Next Big Thing is much better, than scrap the now-stupid obsolete CO2-suckers and do that instead!
