It being plentiful and cheap is a pretty damn important and redeeming quality.
In most western countries we can afford to transition to other solutions, and it is far healthier for both the people around it and the environment, but I don’t think most of the people on this site really understand the ramifications of not having cheap reliable power. There’s a reason people left the farms and flocked to dirty hellish cities during the industrial revolution and still flock to cities and build coal plants today. It’s less hellish than living without reliable modern amenities.
Southern California and the Midwest aren’t going to become uninhabitable even if we continue pumping out as much CO2 as we are currently. I know of no reasonable projections that predict anywhere near the human cost of just shutting off power completely if it’s not clean like people seem to want to do.
That does NOT mean we can’t reduce CO2 emissions while meeting increasing energy demands. But we should be striving to do both. And given a choice between living next to a coal plant and having reliable lighting, heating, air conditioning and food refrigeration or living next to a clean but unaffordable and unreliable plant, most people would choose the coal plant. We’ve been running that experiment globally since the industrial revolution, the answer is clear. Even when taking the health effects and climate change projections into account, that choice would be reasonable. Dying of cold, dying of disease due to unrefrigerated food, dying due to inability to call for help… these are all things very distant from the minds of most people fortunate enough to be on this site. They are very real ramifications of not having reliable power. And those severe ones I just mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg.
Lets just please, please, please finish the new stuff before turning the old stuff off. Build as many solar farms and wind turbines and nuclear and hydro and battery parks and hydro batteries and natural gas lines as we need, and only turn the old stuff off when we’re actually ready. If we turn off everything not clean preemptively we’re going to kill way more people than climate change. If we were reasonable and sought to actually solve emissions problems as fast as possible there is no reason not to aggressively pursue wind AND solar AND hydro AND nuclear fission AND natural gas.
It’s sad I can make this prediction about your opinion, but I’m assuming you are probably not an advocate of fracking or nuclear power or hydro. Please correct me if I’m wrong. A lot of people apocalyptic about climate change are quite picky and refuse to pursue solutions that don’t conform to a perfect vision of a star trek like future where everything looks like the apple campus. It’s delusional.
It speaks to the privilege of those advocating green energy “at all costs” (which is not actually at all costs and maximally translates to “at the cost of the poor” due to the aforementioned pickiness) and reflects a severe lack of appreciation for the ramifications of less reliable and more expensive power on the poor.
The fact that most people on this site are surrounded by opulence and excess is creating a severe disconnect with the reality of the wider world. That default reality is that the only reason the climate isn’t killing way more people in the here and now is cheap power.