Quote:
Originally Posted by Mathgod
The deification of fossil fuels in this thread is extremely cringe.
Humans needed an energy source to do things they wanted to do. They used fossil fuels because there was nothing better at the time. Simple as that. Once something better comes along, it should be used instead of the worse thing that was used previously.
Indeed, there should be a process of phasing out fossil fuels, and it needs to happen relatively quickly.
Why aren't we further along in this process than we currently are, stems from decades of climate change denial funded by big oil. There are all kinds of green technologies being worked on atm; it's not hard to find out what these are. It would be foolish to suggest that we wouldn't have been at the stage of innovation we are at now, much sooner, if not for the obnoxious lies spread by big oil.
As for the "going back to 3rd world conditions" argument, that is an absurd false dichotomy. Asking people to curb their greed is not the same as "knocking them back to the stone age".
|
Fossil fuels no longer offer the excessive net energy production they did during the coal and oil revolutions. The good and easily gotten stuff is gone. Gas is plentiful but also becoming ever more difficult and energetically expensive to maintain as a globally traded commodity. This, well before climate change, is the reason we need to be racing as hard as we can to replace it as our primary energy source.
Other green tech is not the panacea media portrays it to be. It also has poor net energy contributions on a system level and have not led to meaningful reductions in emission intensity or other important impact measures such as land use or human mortality. Those problems scale exponentially as the penetration of these technologies increase.
Do not take the spectre of reducing net energy lightly. It is not “giving up a few excesses and luxuries”. For you, perhaps. For most of the planet, absolutely the difference between life and death. Allowing the bottom to fall out for ideological reasons is a sure fire recipe for human civilization to cannibalize itself completely, and in my mind is equivalent to advocating for the immediate death of billions of people and this is no exaggeration.