There are a lot of options for dealing with that, including the possibility of burying bodies for a century or three, and subsequently moving any bones to an ossuary.

There’s a deep human need to engage in death-related rituals, and burial is one that’s been around for a very very long time. I do not expect to end the use of burial.

The problem is that idle time is something the rich have aplenty, but the poor don’t.

I’ll take electrical power from the heavens any day.

That funny dot was deliberate; on most browsers, it bypasses the paywall.

I’ve changed it out for a gift link now that one is available, since that seems to cause fewer problems for people.

They’re fracking, but in granite, rather than in an oil and gas deposit. So you shouldn’t see the same kinds of hydrocarbon releases and contamination that go with fracking for oil and gas, or the same huge production of contaminated wastewater that needs to be disposed of.

That’s an inherent problem in any capitalist economy; competitive pressures mean that the owners are always trying to push down wages as much as possible. Without unionization (and few of the clean energy companies are unionized) there’s very little to resist it.

Utility-scale lithium batteries currently deployed have almost all been designed so that they kick out some number of watts for four hours. (How many depends on the facility)

It means that the economic benefits of being the world’s low-cost producer go to people in China instead of the US.

No; it’s a fairly distant thing with there being some aircraft design happening.

It’s not a “next tuesday thing”

Ammonia, steel, and some petrochemicals could be moved much sooner.

Make the utility responsible for the bonds and have them go bankrupt.

The IRA is absolutely a bill which uses capitalist mechanisms to achieve some decarbonization.

The problem is that electricity will be free intermittently. This means it’s going to require finding ways to use it that are not capital-intensive.

For sure. The challenge is that there’s a cost of capital, and intermittently available excess power is difficult to use cost-effectively with anything like current technology.

The issue with biofuels is that we can’t actually produce enough of them to support anything like current levels of aviation, at least not without substantially displacing food production.

The issue with chemical synthesis is that it’s quite expensive.

So there’s a possibility that we’ll end up using hydrogen still.

Yes, there are times when there is excess, but big capital expenditures like an industrial-sized electrolyzer come with ongoing interest payments, so there’s a huge financial incentive to run them 24/7. Running it only sometimes means sharply higher capital costs for each mole of hydrogen produced. It’s a nasty balancing act.

They’re doing it in places with no oil to just get the heat.

There may be issues with what’s used for fracking granite, bit probably won’t be the issues with hydrocarbon leakage or waste injection

Actually making it work means not just drilling a hole, but drilling two holes and then connecting them with a network of cracks which doesn’t leak too much. This lets you circulate water through a huge volume of rock and engage in depletionary extraction of the accumulated heat. This wasn’t really possible before the advent of fracking, and even then, it required a bunch of additional research to figure out how to make it work in the kinds of igneous rocks you find in the craton instead of the sedimentary rocks you find oil deposits in.

Yes, because phase transitions involve absolutely huge amounts of energy.

To actually do the volumes that make pumped hydro practical you need not just a hill but a space which can hold a truly huge volume of water.