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Originally Posted by belsarius
I am not doing that because that's not how our society is built. It might be the cheapest, easiest and most energy dense, but it is also destroying our only planet. Such a stupid argument of trying to play "Gotcha!".
You don't have to look any further than any of the leaks from the 80s that companies like Exxon knew exactly the damage it was causing and burying it. Any talk of moving to something else has always been met with severe resistance and mega lobbying from those companies to keep other options down. It is hard to find another energy source, when the people behind our current source are doing their best to ensure it is the top.
Look at Frank Shuman's solar farm in Egypt at the turn of the century. You don't think solar power technology would not be infinitely better today had we not continued his type of research instead of shelving it for oil?
I'm not saying that we didn't start using oil because of the oil barons, you are right on the accessibility of it to fuel our world. But once we started to know the danger, instead of trying to find solutions, billions were spent to keep oil on top and prevent other sources from gaining traction. If we had spent as much R&D on figuring out green energy in the 80s that we did figuring out Sag-D we would be much farther ahead than we are.
Blame the people who have no options but to use the oil, instead of the people who refused to develop an alternative because it was "profitable"
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Now you are just complaining about capitalism. Why would Exxon spend hundreds of billions of dollars to develop an entirely new energy source, when they have a perfectly profitable one? Why is it their responsibility to point out all the flaws of their business model? If anything, it's a massive failure of governments. I never understood why oil companies take the blame for everything, when they are just functioning within the bounds of the system that exists for them.