At this point it's also a national security concern.
Remaining dependent on fossil fuels ties us to interests that are fundamentally counter to our values and to the interests of our allies.
We should be doubling and trippling down on developing easy to build out green energy infrastructure and deploying it rapidly to replace fossil infrastructure where possible to be placed in emergency only maintenance for a freak situation where it might be needed to keep the lights on until proper energy infrastructure can be turned back on.
Oil is the poison in the veins of the democratic world and taking the antidote is a necessary step to solidify the ability of the democratic world to keep a strong hand against the authoritarians and their fossil monopolies.
At this point it’s also a national security concern.
"Yeah, we should fix it by doing more fracking!" -- right-wing suicide cultists
We should be in planetary emergency mode right now. Even if we did stop the fossil fuel industry right now completely, we would still feel the effects for a few more decades or a century or two.
Instead, we keep going worried that we might disrupt the financial markets instead.
The stock market will still be functioning in a hundred years ...... but we'll be fighting for scraps of land and water by then.
Back in the 1890s scientists discovered some rocks were extra spicy and the energy inside could power everything, everywhere, forever. The last 100+ years have been a concerted effort all across the globe to ignore that in favor of invasive and destructive drilling, clouds of smog in our cities and massive spills of toxic black sludge for our seafood to swim in. We are not a wise species.
The green party in Germany is still happy that they finally managed to get the last nuclear reactors offline. In April 2023. Imagine fighting something for 50 years and never adjusting your world view at all despite the masses of new data or "new" issues.
Those reactors were ancient and, even without the nuclear power phaseout, they would've needed to be replaced. And contrary to popular belief, they were replaced with renewables, not fossil fuels. The choice was build wind turbines and solar panels and upgrade the grid or spend the same amount of money on building nuclear reactors that still rely on imported fuel that needs to be mined in some third world country in an extremely environmentally destructive way and that, regardless of design, produce nuclear waste.
Fermi paradox in action
I find it fascinating that we're all here on lemmy to be part of a more distributed social media since monopolies obviously come with serious consequences.
And then there are still tons of people who'd prefer nuclear, which usually means some big company having a lot of power on a basic need for society, as if there it suddenly does make sense to want huge companies have all the power.
Regardless of whether nuclear is safe or not, or if the waste is a problem or not, the entire reason you're on lemmy and not on reddit should be the same reason why you'd prefer solar & wind over nuclear.
You are making a LOT of really bad assumptions on why people are on Lemmy and why some think Nuclear energy has a place in the entry supply chains for at least the next several hundred years ( unless the current paradigm changes radically).
at what point can i start chucking molotov cocktails? i feel like chucking one at least once in my life.
Oh shit! It's Dr Tran!
So, serious question, how do you think dismantling the fossil fuel industry would work? As of the last available data world energy consumption is still about 80% from fossil fuels. It is not possible to replace those energy inputs with renewables. "There is simply just not enough time, nor resources to do this by the current target set by the World’s most influential nations. What may be required, therefore, is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds. This implies a very different social contract and a radically different system of governance to what is in place today."
So, since they can't be substituted with other energy sources, to eliminate fossil fuels voluntarily would mean everyone, everywhere agreeing to give up a large part of the comfort we have become accustomed to. Setting aside for the moment the inequity of the global energy usage distribution, how would you go about convincing people that we all need to stop using the majority of the gas and electricity we currently do? What would that look like? We have built entire societies dependent on on endless low cost energy. What happens in places that can't function without it?
It's going to happen eventually. Fossil fuels are non-renewable. Once we use them up they're gone. I just don't see any way we will agree to an organized, cooperative, managed decline in usage. I think we instead we will fight for what's left and pretend everything is fine until it all just collapses. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine what that will look like.
Serious answer: the oil dependent society is barely a century old.
We are all just selfish assholes.
A lot of coal was used for another 100 years or so before that. Lower global population back then.
Start with a carbon tax. It's crazy that the one thing in the world that's free everywhere is air pollution that destroys the whole planet. And many of the activities that contribute to it are heavily subsidized. Just make things cost what they should cost, and the rest solves itself.
This thread right below this one is giving me whiplash https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/17620489
