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To be clear, fossil fuels are already insufficient to power a modern day economy without trillions of artificial subsidies. We are not in a mode where we can w
by dymk 7y ago
To be clear, fossil fuels are already insufficient to power a modern day economy without trillions of artificial subsidies.
We are not in a mode where we can wait to deploy perfect technology. We will also not be going solar 100% anytime soon, but perhaps in the next few decades. The atmosphere and ocean are already unhappy, and maybe if we also invest in carbon sequestration technology we can roll back a century or so worth of damage.
You're in this mindset that immediately it's all or nothing, and that's not the case. But we do need to start investing large sums of money now instead of making oil cheaper than it would normally be on a free market.
- coldtea 7y ago>To be clear, fossil fuels are already insufficient to power a modern day economy without trillions of artificial subsidies. The subsidies are part of the economy too, so clearly fossil fuels are capable to power a modern day economy. Else the economy would have gone down (due to the subsidies cost). The problem with solar/wind is that even with the same or larger subsidies we haven't yet solved many problems for powering a modern economy with them. Even if we had a huge budget to do so with just the proviso that no fossil/nuclear is used. And that doesn't even include the problem of replacing the fossil fuel based infrastructure itself. We don't even have enough electric battery making capacity for double the insignificant amount of electric cars sold now for example, much less for replacing every gas based car with an electric equivalent... The