Most of those comparisons are done in bad faith. As you said, they compare the whole chain for renewables/electric cars/windmills (parts of that chain could be decarbonised down the line anyway) to just the burning of the fuel, forgetting about extraction, exploration, transport and refining. Before you even get to the stage where you're burning fuel in your engine, there's been multiples of the CO2 and other greenhouse gases emitted already.

And they're pretty big differences. Burning a cubic meter of natural gas produces 1.7kg of co2, but producing and transporting it adds another 0.3kg to that. (In the Netherlands, at least, ymmv).

For something like gasoline or diesel, co2 emissions from well to tank is something like a quarter of all emission.

They steel-manned the argument. They ignored the setup and supply of fossil fuels, while counting those for solar and battery, and even with giving the advantage to fossil fuels they showed solar and batteries both much better than fossil fuels

Sodium-ion are being applied in real world use cases.

https://youtube.com/@UndecidedMF

This guy does a ton of videos on battery technology that is prepping for the market. One of the biggest things he mentions in every battery video is that we need to stop looking for a silver bullet and that all of the technologies have their place. Flow batteries are amazing for industrial/grid-scale storage, lithium-ion is good for small consumer electronics, and betavoltaics could be used for low-power sensors that are becoming quite prevalent. It is going to be a challenge of figuring out the right answer for a given class of situations, not one of finding the best battery.

They found it, sodium

People are looking for alternative to lithium batteries. Unfortunately the world does not stop while we're looking.

The article focuses entirely on the CO2 spent, and uses a pretty high number for batteries, taking nearly a year of daily use and clean charging to offset versus gas

I don't see it discussed nearly enough that finding an alternative to lithium should be among the top priorities in research.

Like the Italian startup with their massive CO2 battery? It was reported a year ago.

has grease on it and can no longer be recycled

You're thinking of cardboard. They melt Al scraps down at like 1300°c and any organics burn off or are removed as slag. So go ahead and chuck your greasy tinfoil in the recycle bin.

Apparently just don't cover it in foil.

EDIT: just realised that's for turkey, so YMMV with chicken I dunno, I usually do a rack of lamb anyway lel

Use a baster like a master

Only if the grease is super baked on, I don't know how you roast your chickens but when I do the foil is fine to recycle

Of course it's possible recycle aluminum covered in grease. It has to be cleaned before recycling though. Incineration is often used for getting rid of the plastic layer in soda cans and it's possible to use the same method for fat too.