"The sheer audacity to claim that 'fossil fuel industry' has "created significantly more problems than it has actually solved""One of the problems of modern discourse is that an idea or meme takes hold and has a life of itself, it becomes the center of attraction without refence past history, past events, etc.
I'm not a climate change denier nor do I disagree that using fossil fuels has huge environmental consequences but no rational person could deny that we owe our whole modern life to fossil fuels. The Industrial Revolution absolutely depended on coal, it has been the lifeblood of modern society for at least 300 years. It is simply unimaginable to envisage modern life without its existence.
Moreover, what's lost in this debate is that coal is not just a source of energy, it is also the source of a many other useful materials. When I was learning about this decades ago we were taught that coal was the source of so many useful products that we round that number off to '1000' to signal its importance.
In fact, coal provides many more than a 1000 useful products, the pharmaceutical couldn't do without it. The previous poster should contemplate the fact that even common old aspirin comes from coal—in fact many pharmaceutical texts place aspirin in a class of drugs known as the coal-tar antipyretics.
Wild assertions of this type happen when we stop teaching history, how modern society came about and so on. A dose of philosophical reasoning and logic ought to be taught as well, that way reason may hold back many from uttering and spreading crap.