It IS relevant right now. If the "lifecycle emissions" of near-term renewables is used to argue against deploying them and instead using existing carbon-emittin

It IS relevant right now. If the "lifecycle emissions" of near-term renewables is used to argue against deploying them and instead using existing carbon-emitting sources, then you've delayed progress and made things impossible to resolve except by basically shutting down everything (which would kill people and is politically infeasible). Decarbonization compounds. That means that "lifecycle emissions" analysis can end up being too pessimistic if you consider changes made in a vacuum. Electric cars require steel and electricity to make, so considered by themselves (while still definitely worth it) don't look as good as they do when you consider we will need to be decarbonizing steel and electricity as well. Power plants need vehicles and steel as well, so decarbonizing transport and steel also reduces the lifecycle emissions of power plants! I think people resist this type of thinking because of a different kind of magical thinking: a sort of anti-silver-bullet magic. They have the idea of fossil fuels as fundamental to civilization, like we can't actually get rid of them. But this isn't true. We can eliminate fossil fuel usage just fine. We should consider fossil fuel as the seed corn. Instead of feeling bad that it takes fossil fuels to do the initial manufacture of geothermal (or whatever), consider it as simply priming the pump, as seed corn. There is no better use for fossil fuels than assisting in manufacturing their total replacements.