Editorial: Hoping fossil fuel giants will see the light on climate hasn't worked. Change only comes with mandates and force
Editorial: Hoping fossil fuel giants will see the light on climate hasn't worked. Change only comes with mandates and force
It’s becoming clearer to some environmental leaders that fossil fuel companies have no real plans to change in response to the climate crisis. The only way forward is without them.
Stop subsidizing them and incentivize renewables.
That combination only happens when you break their power first. We've gotten close enough in a lot of places to start incentivizing renewables, but not really to the point where we can stop subsidies for fossil fuels.
How this was not clear enough already ? Anyway, anyhow it is good people are wising up to these companies.
ps: Thanks for the archive version.
First of all at this point it is unreasonable for fossil fuel companies to invest into renewables. Renewables require a lot of money to be built on scale and for that companies borrow money. The thing is green finance makes it pretty cheap for a renewable only company to get loans and bonds, but expensive for fossil fuel companies. So fossil fuel companies are at a massive disadvantage in the field. Not that that is a bad thing, as it also makes borrowing for fossil fuels more expensive.
In terms of politics the more we shut down fossil fuels, the weaker the fossil fuel companies become. They have spend decades on building up relationsships with politicans and set up some of the biggest propaganda machines in history, but it does make them weaker. This is also true for individual countries and industries. It is just easier to do the right thing, if it costs you basicly nothing. We already see emissions and shares of fossil fuel going down in some regions and that is really good news. Honestly we might see the EU having lower per capita emissions then the world fairly soon.