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toasty228

> What's special about fossil fuel?

Is this a real question?

- just bend down to harvest, nature has done all the work over millions of years

- energy dense as fuck

- reliable, it doesn't matter if you have sun, wind, if it's winter or summer

- easy to store and transport

- can be transformed into fertiliser, which allowed us to feed more people, for cheaper and more easily

- literal building block of everything that made what the world is today: plastics, medicine, synthetic fibers, etc.

- allowed us to transform materials which required high temperatures: metal, glas, etc.

We're quite literally a fossil fuel society...

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All that is historically true, but most new energy being added to the grid is now renewable. Solar and batteries continue to get cheaper and it's already the cheapest source of new power in sunny places.

I have seen this raised as yet another interesting Fermi paradox idea: maybe our planet is unusual in that it stored up a giant store of easily exploitable energy to bootstrap a technological civilization.

> All that is historically true, but most new energy being added to the grid is now renewable

Cool, "added" is doing a lot of work here. We're still mostly relying on fossils, about ~70% of our mix.

> Solar and batteries continue to get cheaper

Bonus question: how much does it cost to build a solar panel or wind mill when fossils get 2x, 5x, 10x more expensive? When we run our of fossils?

It's impossible to run out of fossil fuels. There are always more places to look. But the cost of extraction may continue to rise if there's not another technical breakthrough on the scale of fracking or horizontal drilling.

> just bend down to harvest

Ah yes, oil extraction, refinement, and transport is a famously simple and low-capital process.

It's a fraction of what it would have cost us to make the oil itself, like not even close

I mean doesn’t this apply to solar too? How much would it have cost us to produce the Sun itself?

This specific point sure, the rest not really. Peetrol is like 50x more energy dense than common batteries for example. Peak sun doesn't coincide with peak demand at all, it's a pain in the ass to store long term, it's unreliable when you need it the most, it's not as easy to transform into fertilizers/plastics/medicine

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