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Are fossil fuels the only source of energy?

martin_drapeau 3y ago
Absolutely not! Hydro, nuclear fission, solar, wind, etc. Tons of other options. My point is you need energy to cook food and have hospitals. Without those basic needs covered, a society can't function. If we want to continue improving our lives, we need more energy.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  During my childhood we lit our homes with ridiculous incandescent lights that were powerful enough to fry an egg (a trick my friends and I used to pull off with a floodlight.) Our entertainment came from TVs that used enormous energy-hungry cathode ray tubes. Our home PCs used dozens of times more power than the iPhone I have in my hand, despite being a million times less powerful. Today I drive an electric car that is somewhere between 2-8x more efficient than the gasoline clunkers of my childhood. I could probably go on about heat pumps, but you get the point. At the same time, nearly everything I own or use is nicer and more luxurious than the things I had when I was a kid, even though those things are rose-tinted in my memories. Meanwhile the cost of energy is going down faster than at any time in my entire life. They’re building an 800MW offshore wind plant off my coast, and another 2000MW is scheduled to go in down in Virginia. The per-watt cost of solar is now below most fossil fuels, and continues to plummet each year. None of this is perfect - there are still challenges related to capacity and demand matching - but it’s hard to argue that we’ll be facing some kind of long term society-limiting energy crisis in my lifetime, absent a world war. If anything we’re about to enter a period of absurd energy abundance we don’t yet know what to do with.
faeriechangling 3y ago
There’s tons of energy out there. It’s not feasible to switch our infrastructure to using those forms of energy using them as effectively as cheaply as we do fossil fuels. One of the benefits to carbon taxes is unironically rationing. We will run out of oil slower. We value keeping oil in the ground WAY too lowly, that basically preserves it indefinitely for free, in a form that doesn’t result in environmental chaos. I don’t know why people don’t think of oil in the ground as a strategic reserve.

Absolutely not! Hydro, nuclear fission, solar, wind, etc. Tons of other options. My point is you need energy to cook food and have hospitals. Without those basic needs covered, a society can't function. If we want to continue improving our lives, we need more energy.

matthewdgreen 3y ago
During my childhood we lit our homes with ridiculous incandescent lights that were powerful enough to fry an egg (a trick my friends and I used to pull off with a floodlight.) Our entertainment came from TVs that used enormous energy-hungry cathode ray tubes. Our home PCs used dozens of times more power than the iPhone I have in my hand, despite being a million times less powerful. Today I drive an electric car that is somewhere between 2-8x more efficient than the gasoline clunkers of my childhood. I could probably go on about heat pumps, but you get the point. At the same time, nearly everything I own or use is nicer and more luxurious than the things I had when I was a kid, even though those things are rose-tinted in my memories. Meanwhile the cost of energy is going down faster than at any time in my entire life. They’re building an 800MW offshore wind plant off my coast, and another 2000MW is scheduled to go in down in Virginia. The per-watt cost of solar is now below most fossil fuels, and continues to plummet each year. None of this is perfect - there are still challenges related to capacity and demand matching - but it’s hard to argue that we’ll be facing some kind of long term society-limiting energy crisis in my lifetime, absent a world war. If anything we’re about to enter a period of absurd energy abundance we don’t yet know what to do with.

faeriechangling 3y ago

There’s tons of energy out there. It’s not feasible to switch our infrastructure to using those forms of energy using them as effectively as cheaply as we do fossil fuels. One of the benefits to carbon taxes is unironically rationing. We will run out of oil slower. We value keeping oil in the ground WAY too lowly, that basically preserves it indefinitely for free, in a form that doesn’t result in environmental chaos. I don’t know why people don’t think of oil in the ground as a strategic reserve.