The Absurd GOP

[The Grand Nudger]

Wont ever happen.  Because somehow, for some reason, those poor southern countries that deserve to suffer will never change their circumstances

Combined GDP of developing countries is $44 trillion. They have money to pay for climate change.

Or they can say go fuck yourself, not pay for climate change, and consume their resources domestically rather than sell them to us.  What are we going to do about it?  

There are places in the US where cloudy weather can last for weeks and even months.

Places that stay cloudy, as in just too cloudy to make solar profitable for weeks and months are obviously, as arewethereyet already mentioned, maybe not the best places for relying exclusively on solar. I'd say no place is, we should never rely on a single source of energy anywhere - that's openly courting disaster.  OTOH, whatever is going on to create such a weather pattern is certainly going to benefit things like wind and hydro or tidal - possibly geo and other forms of thermoelectric. Then...there's the potential for moisture capture in such a scenario. I'm not seeing any downsides, personally, to windy and cloudy alot, not even for systems that incorporate some solar. Bonus, you'll have to manually clean the panels less.

Have you ever considered how much energy/work it takes to build a cloud?  Really cloudy places are super active, and the whole premise of alternative and sustainable energies is...basically...to skim off some of that work for our own needs/work. More than anything, imo, the problems we're going to have with alternatives aren't in finding one that works for a place. Those technological or engineering questions already have answers. It's in figuring out who's going to be building them and profiting from them. Here in my home state, for example..even though I'm neck deep in the sustainable infrastructure, I couldn't tell you who the go-to guys for solar are. If we have prominent LEED focused developers, I've never heard of them. I don't doubt that they exist, that there are guys out there trying to build that business...but, clearly, if we're going to make an energy transition we're going to need more of them, with more market visibility, with more resources and labor and financing. Here in the states, we don't even have enough crews and equipment hours to keep inventory rates at necessity levels. That's what's causing our current housing bubble. This is for conventional stick built houses premised on the current status quo - not the kinds of houses designed and built from the bottom up with energy efficiency and sustainable material availability in mind, using approriate technologies.