Quote:
Originally Posted by PepsiFree
Can we call people who underestimate/can’t comprehend human ingenuity “humanity illiterate idiots”?
“If we do this! It will be a disaster!”
Or, wait... if we do it, we’ll figure out a way to make it not a disaster, because that’s literally the entire history of humanity. We use our brains to find ourselves better ways to do things. It’s almost unbelievable that people are so ignorant as to not understand, so I have to assume there are weak ulterior motives there. How can one not understand humanity, technology, or innovation so much?
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To your opening question, I think we could most certainly. Perhaps I may even be one. However I bet you’d be surprised at how much I genuinely believe in the changing energy supply picture in the coming decades. But it can’t be so sudden, if can’t happen in under 10 or even 20 years. Research and development takes time.
Carbon engineering’s pilot has been operating for 3 years but it still costs them $1/L for synthetic blending fuels. That’s still an outrageously high price! But I believe in them and in basic economic principles. Wood Mackenzie, IEA, all the forecasts suggest renewables are where the torque on growth will be. But they also say that coal, oil, gas and even wood for example will continue to be significant raw materials for humanity in the coming decades. Experts almost universally agree that hydrocarbons will make up a large portion (VERY large portion) of the energy mix into the future. These energy sources will be shrinking as part of the energy mix, but they’ll still be important. When we think about fertilizers, feed stocks, plastics, textiles, chemicals, petrochemicals, blending agents, gasolines and diesels, propane, ethane, butane, condensates, and all the derivative products therefrom- sorry- windmills don’t do what these literally thousands of other products do.
So when I hear people talk about how hydrocarbons will be phased out in a few short decades yes, I do think they are energy illiterate. They are. They are ignorant of our lifestyle. Of how if you look around you, almost everything we have is interconnected to hydrocarbons. That’s why we use 100MM bbls every single day worldwide. How do people heat their homes, grow crops properly, etc etc etc etc etc without oil and gas. Yes you are absolutely right that human ingenuity is a beautiful and incredible thing. And people can and will do amazing and incredible things. We already are! Look at some of the research and technologies being developed in the energy arena, it’s incredible. And it’ll escalate. But you know what?
We will still be using oil and gas in the future. Lots of it. And the whole world just is not going to die from climate change. That is histrionic hyperbolic ridiculousness and it just simply isn’t going to happen. It’ll be bad. People will die. It’ll get expensive, it’ll drive economic expansion and growth in new technologies and renewables and new forms of energy. But you know what? We aren’t convincing the modern world to just give up oil and gas on a dime. It just isn’t happening.