> I see a lot of cynicism around renewable energy and electric cars and I frankly don't get it
So far, we have never globally replaced fossil fuels with renewable energy, only supplemented their usage (meaning you can't point to a single drop of oil that is designated to never be extracted due to the creation of renewables).
The energy required to build an electric car is massive and results in a lot of CO2 production and takes a fairly long time to balance out.
Here's the really important part: despite lots of progress in electric cars and more importantly tremendous (seriously very impressive) growth in renewables CO2 in the atmosphere is not only not decreasing, it is accelerating.
Ultimately massive renewables infrastructure projects and large scale adoption of electric vehicles are capitalist friendly ways of deluding yourself into thinking you're making change while actively making things much worse.
The only surefire way to slow climate change is degrowth but this is literally a forbidden topic. Most of the comments mentioning this on HN or anywhere else on the web are immediately downvoted into oblivion. Even though we know for a fact that economic contraction leads to decreased fossil fuel consumption and have no evidence that on a system level increased renewables reduces CO2.
And it's not just that capitalists don't like it, but nobody really wants to seriously consider degrowth. But here's the rub: climate change will bring massive degrowth either way, and in a much worse way.
The cynicism is because the optimism around renewables allows people to pretend the problem isn't getting worse, and silences any discussion about hard but real solutions.
It doesn't matter much either way, we've chosen violence and are going to play this out the hard way. If you want to pretend it's otherwise, I've given up on bothering to convince other people awhile ago. Have fun in your fantasy and let me know when the rate of atmospheric CO2 starts to even stop accelerating (forget actually dropping).