Quote:
Originally Posted by iggy_oi
Yes. The technology has improved over time due to investment, as has every advancement in oil and gas extraction technology. It costs money for research and development.
You’re going to have to specify how you define the word endless in this context.
We can probably agree that fossil fuels provide a lot of energy relatively inexpensively compared to a number of alternatives, and that if you didn’t know there was a long term downside to its use there’d be no reason to invest in a cleaner form of energy.
Research and development requires investment capital. Had the truth been known earlier it’s almost a certainty that you would have seen an earlier uptick in the investment of green technology, much like we’ve been seeing recently. Think of how much even internal combustion engines have evolved in the last 100 years, 50 years, 25 years or even the last 10 years and ask yourself do you seriously think even as little as an extra 5 years of earlier research in a green tech wouldn’t have had an impact? Because if that’s the case it sounds like you’re essentially arguing that green energy technology hasn’t advanced at all in the past 5 years. Which is certainly not the case.
|
The truth has been known for a long time. People preferred to believe in the narrative that allowed them to consume. In the absence of the oil companies governments would have just ignored the problem because election cycles are 4 years not 40 years.
It is only when people can see real affects (and these are really just increased probabilities and magnitudes) of climate change that peoples attitude change. The current unlucky sequence of more probable and more extreme events is what is driving climate change.
Politics doesn’t allow for future planning.