No matter what, they will still be taking our money for hydrogen as they have with wind and solar.

Hydrogen is expensive and dangerous. Ian Plimer has said that he would rather live near a nuclear reactor than a hydrogen power plant any day.

Unless we get a few more pandemics before then there will not be many people left around by 2050.
We are breeding ourselves out of existence.

Clarification:
If we get a few more pandemics before then, coupled with our rampant over breeding, there will not be many people around by 2050.

plantagenet,

Come off it mate! You're a hell of a lot older than 60.

No one as addled brained as you could be only 60.

I suspect the greenies are well aware that 2050 is just plain silly.
That is why they are promoting the Great Reset !
I notice one of their new clauses in the whole scheme is no private cars.
No doubt no private air conditioners. Has anybody seen their detailed
plan for the new order ? I am sure they are working on it.
Probably mud brick houses as well.
Hydrogen, I have read a number of times, has such a poor energy cycle
that it is simply a no goer.
Used with fuel cells in buses the system is inefficient and the work
life of the fuel cells is uneconomic.

From memory Eastern Australia's maximum demand is 50 Gigawatts.
The number of operational wind turbines, each 50 Megawatt means
50,000/50x3 = 3000 turbines allowing for 33% availability
average over a year. Some later turbines I believe are 100 megawatt.
Then because it might be winter and a very widespread still night
the next morning you need another 3000 turbines to recharge
the big battery you installed to run that load all night.
You cannot recharge using the first 3000 turbines because they
are flat out busy running the country, provided the morning does
not have a lack of wind.

Can you see anything wrong with that reasoning ? I know some people
object to it but where have I got it wrong ?
Sure you can use larger turbines but they will cost more anyway.
A more computer driven grid will be able to shuffle power around but
it cannot make more power, it can only smooth out variations in wind.
However some argue that the number of turbines has to be multiplied by
a factor somewhere between three and twelve.
How can all that be built on a declining co2 emission.
Fusion is still 60 years away.

As someone who probably will still be around in 2050, I consider both this and the Vaclav Smil paper it's based on, to be lazy articles displaying a lack of thought. They're basically saying the task is big so we need more time, but disregarding the environmental effects of failing to act rapidly. It* compares the pace to that of historical energy transitions, yet it fails to even mention the one that was even remotely comparable (the urgent need to reduce the need for human power when slavery ended) and ignores the biggest societal difference between now and the times of the historical transitions: we now have an education system producing millions of scientists and engineers!

The downplaying of the innovations shows ignorance of their significance. Even with the technology that's already in commercial use, decarbonising the production of steel and ammonia becomes easy once the hydrogen is available - and we know how to make hydrogen! In Whyalla they're about to build a direct reduction plant (to make sponge iron, from which steel can be made more cheaply) and a solar farm to power it.

* Aitkin quotes Smil's article so much, and so much of Smil's article, that there's really no point in treating them as separate works. The only significant difference I noticed was that Aitkin didn't mention nuclear power, while Smil mentioned it in passing but seemingly failed to comprehend that it could be part of the solution.