i’ll wager, from an armchair mind you, that this is because decrepeit Scrooges see it as a plus that the people from the regions most affected as “lesser people”, while also holding on to money and ensuring states militarize to defend that money from increasingly pissed of people.

so TLDR ig racist old dudes appreciating what fascism does for 'em.

this is just an armchair assessment fron me though. why is fossil fuel still being used?

  • Crozekiel@lemmy.zipEnglish
    6·
    23 hours ago

    There are so many factors playing into this. Also, I don’t want you to think this post is suggesting we should give up on alternatives, because that is not my belief. We need to transition to something, and really we should have started this process much earlier. This is more to illustrate why it is a slow process.

    1. Energy density is unbeatable. Around 100 pounds of gasoline (15-ish gallons) will push most small road cars 300-400 miles. To get close to that range from an electric car you are going to need 1500-2000 lbs of batteries.
    2. Transportability. We have yet to really figure out how to get several thousand kilowatts of electricity from where it is easy to produce to where it is needed without losing a good percentage of it. You can fill a tank with Gasoline and haul it across the planet and lose basically none of it.
    3. Safety. Batteries can be very nasty things if damaged, the fires they can cause are astronomically harder to put out compared to traditional gasoline fires after a nasty car accident. Hydrogen is so much more violent in a fire/explosion than gasoline as well.
    4. Economics. Yes, Oil Companies have a huge grip on massive chunks of the world. MANY countries entire economies would collapse if fossil fuels were removed from the equation. And those countries are powerful, and scared, which is a dangerous combo. They are fighting tooth and nail to maintain their GDP as there is not a good replacement. It could be a civilization crumbling event if all money tied to fossil fuels just stopped in an instant.

    Our habits need to drastically change as a society. Fossil Fuels are not the only problem we need to change, as an example, industrial farming is also pretty catastrophically bad for the environment (as we are currently doing it). We need to consume less (both power and stuff), we need to travel less, we need to eat less meat, and we need world governments on board for these changes in a meaningful and peaceful way. Or we need someone to invent a way for us all to survive the problem or reverse it without us changing a damn thing, but that sounds like magic.