I love how people who drive cars, fly on planes, use plastic, get goods delivered by truck, etc etc, act like oil companies just pump oil out of the ground for fun then light it on fire. The mental gymnastics are impressive.
Yes, people who refuse to recognize the problem beyond the greed of oil companies are a problem. Yes, oil companies are in fact a bigger problem. However, the biggest problem is if you want a government to stay in power long enough to actually do anything meaningful about eliminating carbon emissions, then announcing some kind of imminent intention to take away gasoline-powered cars and trucks is one of the worst things you can do.
The problem is when you slow gdp it's the most marginalized that are hit the hardest.
So, the CEO only makes 10M instead of 50M(or whatever number) but what about the poor farmer that was making just enough to run his tractor to get by and feed his family.
The correct approach is to outright ban gasoline.
There are cases where no alternative exists right now, such as flight. Those uses should be restricted away from casual use.
Yes, this means no flying on holiday, until they get hydrogen airplanes up and running.
I’m not defending the continued dependence on fossil fuels, but let’s be realistic about how (externalities aside) fossil fuels are very, very good at what they do. The problem is those externalities have turned out to be pretty bad, and our economic systems have been slow to respond.
The problems are much more specific and blatant than that:
* The externalities were known to be bad by the oil companies and this knowledge was suppressed.
* Our economic system is incapable of responding because there is no direct fiscal cost of the externalities that would make alternatives cheaper at the point-of-purchase decision point.
* Fossil fuels being good at what they do is exactly why external regulation is needed to get us out of that unhealthy addiction.
I was only trying to push back against the idea that we’re only using fossil fuels because of capitalism. We’re using fossil fuels because with our initial naive inspection they appear to be an excellent, bordering on miraculous, resource. I’m not denying that they’ve turned out to be very harmful and/or that people have done bad things to preserve the naive interpretation.
Your car or plane can't tell the difference between fossil hydrocarbons and biofuel hydrocarbons. (Though you might adjust a car to use ethanol instead of longer compounds.)
> Recently, a 5.54 fossil energy ratio (FER) was reported [1] which means one unit of fossil energy input is required to produce 5.54 units of biodiesel energy output. This FER shows a stunning energy return of biodiesel that surpasses other fuels [2].
Seems fine. And that's probably without even trying to use all electric equipment.