Re: LFTR time
"Wind and solar are fine, "
No they're not. Not by a long shot.
If you look at _actual_ installations and _actual_ outputs and scale them up to what's _actually_ possible (even discarding safety limits to allow for windmill blades going over a mile if they break off) and carpet the countryside in windmills and PV, you'll _just_ be able to match the existing electrical generation fleet.
And that's without even going into the issue that large windmills are eating gearboxes at a prodigious rate, such that pretty much the only way to make money off them - even with subsidies - is to be paid not to run them. Or the issue of the hydrofluric acid mess unfolding in China from manufacture of solar panels (putting the potable water of several tens of millions of people at risk)
Forget paving the Sahara. Firstly it's not ours and secondly the practical limit on electrical transmission systems before losses become excessive is about 1500 miles, unless someone's come up with some magic pixie dust that make ultra-low-loss Megavolt transmission lines practical (higher than that and they start arcing to ground) with the limit dropping to a few tens of miles for underwater links.
Chad, Morocco and others might be able to use it as a good power source but not Europe.
Now factor in that electricity accounts for 35-40% of carbon emission, with virtually all the rest being taken up in industrial processes (mainly heat), domestic heating (gas/oil) and transportation. Electrify those and you need to increase your generation capacity by a factor of _AT LEAST_ 6 to keep up, if not 8
Now factor in the developing world. You can't leave them out or their carbon emissions will simply rise to match what we reduce by, as they work to advance their economies.
To be serious about reducing carbon emissions and avoid an anoxic oceanic event, we need to have embarked on a crash nuclear building program a decade ago, but the problem with THAT is that there's nowhere near enough uranium available "off the shelf" to start the things and only enough reserves to run them for about 150-200 years at the scale required. Compare and contrast with _known_ thorium reserves at the scale required being about 200,000 years' worth and hundreds of thousands of tons available right now (it's a nuisance waste byproduct of rare earth mining and difficulty disposing of it is why most of the rare earth mines in the USA closed down)
Yes you need uranium or other fissiles to start a thorium reactor but think of it as a starter motor and once the thorium reactor is running you can syphon out enough fissiles to start a new one relatively easily.
The country which can build and distribute LFTR designs to the developing world over the next 2 decades is the one which will call the economic shots for the next 2-3 centuries.