Political Memes

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.

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.

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!

This thread right below this one is giving me whiplash https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/17620489

Without the fossil fuel industry the medical system would look very different.

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.