"Third is generating the electrical power required to do the charging while decomissioning most of the generating capacity required to simply keep the lights on at the moment, without factoring in a huge increase in capacity to deal with millions of electric vehicles requiring huge amounts of power. The joke is that the people protesting against building new power plants are generally those for electric vehicles."
if you do the math, you'll see that eliminating carbon-based heating (ie: oil and gas furnaces/boilers) and as much carbon-based transport as possible, along with moving carbon-intensive industrial processes to electric heat, you'll need an approximate 6-8 fold increase in electricity generation capacity.
There is simply no way that renewables can do this even with perfect windmils and 100% efficient solar panels(*) - and you can't pave the african deserts because the 1: economic transportation range of electricity is about 1500 miles at most (there are longer transportation lines, but they're used for grid balancing not bulk supply) and 2: There's more than enough demand south of the Sahara to take it all anyway. (Paving the american deserts won't produce enough electricity to make up the shortfall)
(*) the absolute best that renewables can do is more-or-less match existing electricity generation capacity
Any change in energy consumption patterns or population distribution is likely to increase carbon emissions, and there's enough pent-up demand int he developing world to completely eclipse current carbon emissions even if developed countries stopped emitting overnight.
Which means that in order to save the planet's ecosystem, "we" - as a species - are going to have to embrace civil nuclear power systems pretty much everywhere, and the longer we take to agree on that the worse things are going to get. An anoxic oceanic event won't play out in decades but if we trigger one (and it looks increasingly likely that we may have done already), you can look forward to extinction of most large (over 40kg) land animals over the next 10,000 years - and that includes us.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
