I think you are assuming the danger is the beam hitting the ground, whereas the most obvious danger is the plane no longer having power? Different scale of cour

I think you are assuming the danger is the beam hitting the ground, whereas the most obvious danger is the plane no longer having power? Different scale of course, but wireless power to a device that kills a hundred plus people if it loses power seems like a risky proposition. Seems farfetched compared to replacing the liquid fuels, and I'll stick by that, fully acknowledging that the liquid fuels don't (presently) have a perfectly closed carbon cycle. Don't focus on it being perfect in two decades when vastly better is available today... Of course that gets a lot better when fertilizer is made from renewable hydrogen instead of natural gas and the transportation is electric from renewables instead of gas cars, and if we used electric/solar heating for the thermal inputs it seems like the CO2 losses can get an awful lot better. Hydrogen is theoretically closed cycle (though displacing fossil fuel electricity on the grid is obviously superior most of the time), but only if you redesign and rebuild the entire fleet of commercial airplanes. I think as long as coal plants are operational a lot of these details are almost besides the point, and as soon as fossil fuel plants are all offline the solution will be obvious from the experience we gained in getting there. I maintain that swapping equivalent liquid fuels into the existing fleet is most likely to actually happen at scale.