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Comment by neaanopri | Hacker News Reader

Fossil fuel companies aren't greedy monopoly men burning oil for no reason. Oil companies sell oil to consumers.

Imagine if US gas prices went up overnight to $10/gallon. There would be riots. Jan 6th would look like a warm-up.

But does anybody realistically think that they can carbon-capture 1 gallon of gas's worth of carbon emissions for $7? How much would it realistically cost?

It's willful ignorance to think that we can continue to use the same amount of energy while waiting for technology to improve and become greener. We have the choice between immediate, painful cuts to energy usage ($20/gal gas), or doing irreparable harm to our planet. We are choosing the latter.

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I think this is too fatalistic. There are tons of things which can be done to reduce CO2 and the sooner we do the more time we gain for bigger transformations.

The big thing would be sending a strong public message that gas will only get more expensive every year: that discourages sales of inefficient vehicles which will be polluting for a couple of decades, pushes businesses to invest in major capital investments now, etc. Every time that’s happened, the cost to industry has been far less than the naysayers predicted.

The best way to cut down on oil use is to personally use less electricity and enjoy a lower standard of living.... suing people will mot help... only solution is accepting a lower stanndard of living.

This is the personal responsibility narrative which is pushed by industry because it conveniently absolves them of responsibility for setting up a system which locks in high carbon usage.

Most of the necessary changes are too big for individual people: we don’t have direct control over heavy polluting companies, a large fraction of our personal energy footprints are things like inefficient transportation and housing designs which are strongly encouraged if not required by public policy, etc. For businesses, there’s a prisoner’s dilemma where nobody wants to take on the cost of rearchitecting ahead of their competitors.

This is especially important with the fossil fuel companies who don’t just sell materials but actively work to prevent alternatives. Companies like Exxon have known about the risks since the 1970s, when their own scientists concluded global warming would happen, and their response was to lobby hard against efforts to use less CO2 and astroturf an entire network of faux-experts whose talking points are all over the news. Just as with the tobacco companies, suing is appropriate and effective.

There is no need to accept anything. Can you imagine how much energy would be generated if we somehow replaced every roof with solar panels? I doubt there are enough batteries around to store it all.

A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously.

That’s more than 10,000 times the world’s total energy use.

We can transition to solar and wind power.

> Fossil fuel companies aren't greedy monopoly men burning oil for no reason.

But, as in this court case, they are greedy monopoly men advertising dangerous lies to the public to keep selling their product.

We should all just switch to electric vehicles already. It'll suck at first but eventually it will be normal.

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