I read a lot of criticisms from doom and gloom climate change deniers who say that the wind turbines and solar arrays are polluting the Earth and blah-blah-blah. They have a hypercritical viewpoint of what is needed to get to zero carbon energy.
I think this concept never occurred to them. The craftsman needs to build a machine to make his new invention, the screw. But he doesn’t have screws to build the machines, obviously. So he must use the fasteners that he does have, rivets or pins or nails or dowels. These allow him to get to the objective of making screws, so the next generation of machines will be using screws.
The same applies to making fossil fuel-free energy. The tools available are not fossil fuel-free, but they are building the machines that make fossil fuel-free energy, until all the fossil fueled sources have been replaced. This will take years, but it must be done. The critics have to stop complaining and instead make sure that the makers of the fossil fuel-free machines give the highest priority to the machines that are replacing fossil fueled machines. These are the root of the greenhouse gas production and must be made fossil fuel-free before anything else.