In most cases no(remember, hydrocarbons and the hydrogen produced by them are often industrial/chemical feedstocks for Si, lubricants, adhesives and polymers used in green mfg) so you're right.

The problem is right now these things do indeed depend on dirty energy. You're basically making the same fallacious argument as politicians do now. In the long run, everything will be green. That's not the point. The point is how we get there. You can't ignore the present or the engineering involved to get to the future.

We get there by a (very likely) short-term increase in current energy production and use as we ramp up manufacturing and deployment of the systems needed for clean energy production, and then see a tapering off of the current production methods as the new ones come online.

How did we get the first railroads built? By a combination of horses dragging materials so humans could lay the rail lines and then trains dragging materials as the initial lines were built. There was almost certainly an initial increase in horse power consumption, and then a decline as the new system came online. This isn't a new thing, this is how many replacement transitions that depend on the previous system play out.

> We get there by a (very likely) short-term increase in current energy production

Right. But right now we're incentivizing the opposite. We're telling fossil fuel companies we don't need them anymore long before we've actually figured out a way to live without them. Do you see the problem yet?

The only signal that matters is the price signal. At $80/bbl, fossil fuel companies are getting a very strong signal that they're needed.

Sorry, no. $80/bbl is a temporary price and not sufficient to drive infrastructure investments which take upwards of 3 decades to pay back(i.e. refineries). You can't expect private companies to invest in these things when states like CA are talking about banning the sale of IC cars in a decade.

You contradict yourself. The high prices are temporary because there is still demand. As demand falls off, price falls, and wells too expensive to operate are abandoned. The remaining wells will produce enough.

CA is not banning sale of ICE cars. They are banning sale of new ICE cars.

I see what you're saying-- Bootstrapping a green economy does, almost by definition, require the use of fossil fuels.

I think the easier way to look at it, though, isn't the upfront cost of the transition, but the outcomes that are 10-20 years down the line. A big "spend" right now should result in less overall carbon emitted (according to most of the lifecycle analyses that I'm familiar with, anyway).

It's a really good point that we need to optimize this, of course. It would be ideal to manufacture solar panels in places with a favorable energy mix versus somewhere that's still 100% coal. But in a lot of cases, it's better just to get the things out the door as fast as possible using the technology we have.

What do you mean by 'big spend'? The federal reserve can't print oil or copper. Those supply chains need to be built out and that requires a market sufficient to pay back those investments or government essentially subsidizing(more that currently done) the profits of those endeavors. You can't get a private company to build a refinery if you simultaneously tell them there won't be a market for the product before they've paid off half of the investment. If you think that the government should spend the money to secure enough dirty energy to complete the transition then I'm 100% in agreement.

We should be bringing Si mfg back to the US where we have plenty of methane("natural" gas) needed to do so. We should build more fission. We should continue to buy solar panels, rare earths and Li from China, as long as they're willing to sell it to us. But none of this is an either/or decision. We need a realistic path to the green future or we risk screwing up the transition, ruining our economy and setting ourselves up to have regressive political revolutions.

Building fission instead of spending those dollars building solar and wind brings climate catastrophe nearer.