[HOWITZER]

Originally Posted by SeeGeeWhy

(...)We take for granted things like reading by a lightbulb when the sun goes down, or having a refrigerator for perishable food, or having a washing machine that will work in our homes instead of going to a filthy river. LOTS of people in the world still live to this standard, and want what we have (...) we still aren't satisfied and are driving for more innovation to improve quality of life, and to have that high quality of life for an extended period of time. IT ALL NEEDS ENERGY.

(...) If people only understood what goes into delivering our energy, or the true nature of the demand (...) Renewables are expensive, unreliable, will have a huge footprint and have a tremendous amount of radioactive and chemically toxic co-product when made. None of the promoters of this "grand solution" seem to take that into account and discuss a serious plan for addressing these problems.

You had quite a number of excellent points! Even the amount of energy required to have this conversation is staggering once you take into account all of the background processes. I definitely agree with your point on renewables, but one of the points I'm trying to make is that using renewable energy as a way to displace traditional resource extraction itself is more complex; As we understand systems to this point, increasing complexity increases required energy, much the same way fracking/oil sands is more complex than old gusher oil. The notion that we can replace all of our current energy demands with a different source is not reasonable.

Originally Posted by heep223

I have a friend who did his masters degree in environmental science. He said to me the other day: "I mean, let's just replace all fossil fuels with renewable energy. It's so simple but it's BS oil companies and politicians won't let that happen. So we have to protest the pipelines."

This highlights a major problem in a conversation like climate change, and large systems of systems: not all of the stakeholders are properly educated and aware of secondary, tertiary, etc. impacts of changes. I'm not advocating that status quo is better, but without considering the holistic impacts it is difficult to advocate a position when the people you're advocating to have information that doesn't match yours.

Originally Posted by Regorium

The issue is that no other industry considers upstream/downstream impacts.

Thanks god someone brought this up. You can put me in the camp of people that think that someone making a proposal should carry the burden to reasonably illustrate upstream/downstream impacts resulting from their project and justify why their project is okay regardless. It is the responsibility of the government to review these impacts, analyze if the company has properly prepared their information and approve/reject accordingly. It's no different than writing an academic paper for review by a journal.