[Tinordi]

Originally Posted by Mr.Coffee

Even according to very reputable sources, such as the EIA, their latest reports indicate fossil fuels will comprise >70% of energy use by 2040. This was a downward adjustment from just 2 years ago that was over 80%.

Two points here. 1) The EIA's reference case is basically taking current 20 year trends in energy use and projecting them out like a flywheel. They don't incorporate recent trends well enough. The reference case is also not a prediction of what they think will happen, but a projection based on those trends. To wit:

The Reference case, which incorporates only existing laws and policies, is not intended to be a most likely prediction of the future. EIA's approach to addressing the inherent uncertainty surrounding the country's energy future is to develop multiple cases that reflect different sets of internally consistent assumptions about key sources of uncertainty such as future world oil prices, macroeconomic growth, energy resources, technology costs, and policies.
http://www.oilvoice.com/n/EIAs-Annua...661e8e3e4.aspx

2) I don't think you've smartly appraised the data. If the reference case only two years ago had 80% fossil fuel share and that share dropped 10 percentage points, I wouldn't take that as good news or that everything was going to be alright. To me that shows there's considerable fluidity and change taking place in the system and working against fossil fuel consumption.

Regardless, oil and gas as an energy source will continue to grow... as a portion of overall human energy consumption, and, obviously, be a huge part of energy use into the future. I personally believe there will be a future with both increasing efficiency on energy use and achieving emission and global climate change targets. There is a balance that will be struck by humanity in my mind, and I think ultimately the technology and understanding will get to a point where the Earth can be bio-engineered to achieve some kind of equilibrium (or at least we think we will think we can, but there are, of course, so many other variables at play).

Very dubious to claim this so strongly. A number of fossil fuel majors are openly talking about peaking demand. The Financial Times even, probably the most conservative, investor focused paper had this editorial published last week.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/701c3...#axzz4APIBCnFM

Fossil fuel producers face a future of slow and steady decline

Rather than investing in potentially stranded oil and gas projects, or gambling on new technologies that they do not fully understand, the oil companies would do better to continue returning money to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks.

The commitments made by Chevron, BP and most other groups to maintaining their dividends during the downturn, even if they have to borrow to do so, is an encouraging acknowledgment of that reality, even if the companies do not put it in those terms.

Instead of railing against climate policies, or paying them lip-service while quietly defying them with investment decisions, the oil companies will serve their investors and society better if they accept the limits they face, and embrace a future of long-term decline.

I also think, related to my point above, that climate change is also a function of natural processes such as volcanoes, solar activity, regular natural changes in weather patterns like El Nino events, etc. These are all very frequently disregarded in favour of the more popular blame humans for everything campaigns by people largely trying to pat themselves on the back for being good people and claiming they know more than they actually do.

It's 2016. This denialist talking point is so wrong, dated, and unconvincing. Do you think that the thousands of peer reviewed articles and their reviewers just happened to collectively ignore the role of these natural processes? Seriously. Do you have any idea how climate science works? Evidently no, and therefore you point shall be treated with the same level of scrutiny.

Like everything in life, as it goes with this debate, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle of what the two sides muse over.

Lastly, to edit here quick, I always like how George Carlin described all of this. To paraphrase he said, at the end of the day the Earth will be just fine. Oil and gas in fact comes from the Earth. Earth is great... it will always be great. It's the people that are ####ed. And we probably will be anyway from an asteroid one day, just like the dinosaurs.

Fallacy of the false middle.