It's been seemingly impossible to motivate the world to switch to alternatives to fuel. We're between a rock and a hard place with society and the environment.
It seems like there isn't even a conspiracy, it's just a combination of poor choices, greed, and new technology. Solar is great, but often it's more expensive than just consuming grid power or has unpredictable payoffs. Wind has a lot of upfront costs. Massive batteries are just starting to roll out. Energy companies are trying to keep prices low in the short-term and keep things reliable, so they mostly use cheap and plentiful fuel. Consumers without a lot of money can't put the capital down for a new car, so they buy used or cheap. It happens that most used/cheap cars use petrol-based fuel. Additionally, car companies have a product that sells, why risk that or their reputation?
Finally, you have the government deciding policy based on much more than just the environment.
Perhaps this will create a better storage mechanism, but addressing getting to carbon neutrality feels very dreary.
> It's been seemingly impossible to motivate the world to switch to alternatives to fuel.
The impossible part is we have yet to discover a density/cost comparison to hydrocarbons.
No one is going to “switch” to something that isn’t as good as the existing option. Couple this with “but electric cars!” that often are still just coal powered.
Plastics, military, actual logistics, China, we’re going to burn every drop of oil. We all better hope someone is working on sequestering options!
If you're taking what I said to mean "of course individuals should just do better," I definitely didn't mean to imply that. Exactly the opposite, actually.
It's a bunch of smaller decisions that are hampered by new technology and lack of economies of scale, among many other compounding factors that result in poor consumer/business/utility/government choices (for the environment). I think sequestering may be an important part of that, but it's still new technology.
If it was really an issue, wouldn't free market forces have paved the way to widespread fuel alternative consumption a long time ago? Sure you can force everyone to stop using gasoline and buy an electric car but there are costs to that. I think most people believe there are more dire issues that need fixing and funding.
I think the issue is that the costs of using fossil fuels are “external” to the purchaser, so a market solution doesn’t work until the negative externality of pumping co2 into our shared atmosphere can be accounted for.
It would be like expecting people who dump their industrial waste upstream in a river to be corrected by market forces - the market will probably choose that people don’t care about the down river people as long as they get their goods slightly cheaper.
Also a wrinkle in a pure market based solution is that the US substantially subsidizes fossil fuels because I think the 70’s taught politicians that fuel price shocks will get them voted out immediately.
https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...
I'm not sure I understand your point. The free market is slowly moving toward alternative fuels, albeit slowly. That's part of why your local energy utility is likely using a combination of sources. It's why you can see solar panels when you drive around any non-shaded resident affluent communities. Many governments around the world see the issue and have made agreements to address it, insofar as they can and on a timeline of a century.
The capitalist solution to climate change is building condos in Antarctica. Capitalist markets are probably the most short-term problem solving mechanism you could ever find for an economy.
> I think most people believe there are more dire issues that need fixing and funding.
No, they're stuck in a shitty system that doesn't allow them to price resources according to their externalities. People aren't going to opt to pay more for fossil fuels than they have to because it would require a critical mass of buy-in. The only solution is taxation, but that doesn't work either because the system offers no safety nets and gasoline suddenly jumping to $20/gallon (which is what it should cost now) would be financially devastating to citizens.
Markets work great at lower populations, and now we're beginning to see their failure modes when population has skyrocketed and rampant resource consumption causes existential damage. Everyone knows it's a problem, but there's no systemic way of solving it.
We're now at a point in humanity where supply and demand alone are insufficient mechanisms to organize an economy.
It seems like there isn't even a conspiracy, it's just a combination of poor choices, greed, and new technology. Solar is great, but often it's more expensive than just consuming grid power or has unpredictable payoffs. Wind has a lot of upfront costs. Massive batteries are just starting to roll out. Energy companies are trying to keep prices low in the short-term and keep things reliable, so they mostly use cheap and plentiful fuel. Consumers without a lot of money can't put the capital down for a new car, so they buy used or cheap. It happens that most used/cheap cars use petrol-based fuel. Additionally, car companies have a product that sells, why risk that or their reputation?
Finally, you have the government deciding policy based on much more than just the environment.
Perhaps this will create a better storage mechanism, but addressing getting to carbon neutrality feels very dreary.