No worries, in hindsight I'm vaguely being that :reddit-logo: nerd arguing with an expert on their own field so I can imagine how that wouldn't help lol

I hadn't considered the sheer expense and effort involved in those long-term storage solutions, and you are correct that it's hard to be sure that a water table is actually isolated especially over extremely long time periods. It's a shitshow, but I think our back is already against the wall with climate change and it seems like the lesser evil.

Other renewables are quickly getting better, but they still fundamentally fall into issues of not doing enough fast enough or being too dependent on good conditions. Photovoltaic solar cells have a frontloaded carbon footprint that takes a few years to "pay off" by replacing fossil fuels (admittedly this is getting much better than it used to be) and only works in sunlight, reflective solar plants are massively space-wasteful and only really work in desert settings and also only work in sunlight, hydroelectric exasperates water conflicts, wind farms are okay but have the same issues as reflective solar. Low-tech battery infrastructure is a hard requirement either way but I don't think you can entirely cover the required minimum load on the grid with water pumps and such; you need something that can pump out consistent loads no matter what at least until we figure out fusion. Nuclear is the only real option that I see there.

It is basically kicking the can down the road, but at least the can gets smaller and doesn't cause megahurricanes.