I would have preferred to respond in public earlier, but was muted at the time.

I'm starting to remember why.

Here's crescent dunes. It's 1700 acres of mirrors, 2.6 square miles, in the middle of thousands of square miles of nothing. It's good for 500 GWh and cost about a billion dollars.

500GWh is a long road from 25,000 TWh. We'd need 50,000 of them to meet our yearly power requirements. That's a 50 trillion dollar investment. Nobody thinks we're going to do that.

Nobody thinks we're going to build a photovoltaic array a hundred miles on a side, either. Not you, not me, not Bob Mackay. Not anyone who has ever so much as paid $12 for a Radio Shack solar panel capable of generating half a watt. Those of us who have worked on solar-electric hybrids have a pretty firm grasp on the disappointments of solar. But 25 thousand TERAWATTS is a staggering number. It's Doc Brown's "Two point twenty one jigawatts!" with four more zeroes. It's the kind of math that makes you lose hope. Hundred miles on a side? You can wrap your head around that. You'll never build it - it's 3,000 times the size of that very-impressive heliostat out in the middle of the Nevada desert. But fuckin' A, we can build a few. And at the cost of the Iraq War, we could have built 1700 of them for a power generation of 850TWh. STILL a long goddamn way from 25 thousand terawatts but you know what?

It's a percentage.

It's a start.

And it's in human numbers, broken down to size that people who haven't read Bob Mackay can understand.

And that's my beef - I threw out a flippant comment to make a point that renewable energy is within the realm of contemplation. You're going to the mattresses to argue that people aren't allowed to be flippant because you read a book. "How big is that?" About as big as I said. Is it "simply a shape drawn on a map?" Fuck yes. Because without drawing a shape on a map it's all a bunch of fuzzy numbers. How fuzzy? Well, according to MIT there is more surface area of the United States covered by parking spaces than there is covered by Puerto Rico - 3500 square miles in fact. Fuck Nevada - let's put a panel on top of every garage and cut our energy needs in half.

And now we're back to your buddy Elon and realistic goals and nobody even had to call anybody else an asshole.