We are already using the most economically viable option. The trouble is that it's not sustainable long term. The solution then will not be the most economical one.
Solar, Wind, more/better batteries and nuclear are our best paths forward if we want to take the immediate action we need to take. If crap like this gets traction we'll just have a greenwashed future where all the coal and natural gas plants will be gone, but global emissions will still be high and power will be many times more expensive. Maybe then people will start to do math.
Back when I was in college the Environmental Science majors were a joke because the chemistry classes they took senior year were the same classes the Chemical Engineers took freshman year. I thought my university just had a crappy environmental science program, but after reading a number of articles like this one I'm thinking it might be a more pervasive issue.
I was taught that, in part, by a fed-up engineering professor.
I would hope Environmental Scientists, who are purportedly concerned with things like ocean acidity, pollution, atmospheric makeup, etc would have the chemical knowledge necessary to understand what they're looking at. Apparently whoever designed their curriculum at my almamater thought it was unnecessary.
But this fact causes large scale confusion on all sides. For those invested in the existing system, this is a threat. But for those who think it will be some other kind of green technology, this means admitting they were betting on the wrong horse the whole time.
Arguably we always are doing that, by definition. Investment is spending money on current non-optimal returns in exchange for much greater returns later.
If an investment had guaranteed success; if it had no flaws, then it would already have been made. There is nothing flawless in this world - not you or me, not Facebook or Messi, not oil or iron or renewables or nuclear.