What about the portion of the US populace that wants to maintain/increase fossil fuel usage because they think it's the best option they have? Is that not a valid viewpoint?

I think it's an uneducated viewpoint that is supported by the deliberate misinformation of the oil and gas lobby.

There are alternatives, there have always been alternatives. Better ones, cheaper ones.

It’s also uneducated to eliminate fossil fuels at the expense of all else. There is real impact to life by destroying economies[0]. This is not a one dimensional problem.

0 - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

No one is demanding to get rid of "fossil fuels at the expense of all else". That's a bit of a straw man.

We're far away from getting to the point where we've gotten rid of fossil fuels at the expense of everything else. We've not actually really started to get rid of fossil fuels, yet.

I posit that any deliberate misinformation by the oil and gas lobby can and will be equally matched by deliberate misinformation by the wind and solar lobby. There's no reason to believe that the former is composed of evil people who mislead for the sake of profit, and the latter of good people who just want the best for everybody.

If there are "better and cheaper" alternatives available right now, market forces will assure their dominance. The oil and gas lobby is not so omnipotent that millions of people looking out for their own best interests, despite the imperfection of their knowledge, will stick to an obviously inferior means of achieving their goals.

In other words, very few people will actually "maintain/increase fossil fuel usage just to stick it to their perceived enemies", as the GP said, if it hurts their pocketbooks to do so.

> I posit that any deliberate misinformation by the oil and gas lobby can and will be equally matched by deliberate misinformation by the wind and solar lobby. There's no reason to believe that the former is composed of evil people who mislead for the sake of profit

There is plenty of edvidence to the contrary. See e.g.

“Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt

“Tracing Big Oil’s PR war to delay action on climate change”

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/09/oil-companies...

“Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago”

“A new investigation shows the oil company understood the science before it became a public issue and spent millions to promote misinformation”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...

As for the market argument, it is costly because all historical capacity is in fossil fuel based systems. This is a major cost advantage to fossil fuel based solutions. Waiting for the market to adjust might be too little to late, climate change is path dependent, you can’t simply undo it.

> I posit that any deliberate misinformation by the oil and gas lobby can and will be equally matched

The economic and political power of the oil and gas lobby is magnitudes larger than the economic and political power of the wind and solar lobby. We're talking about entrenched interests here.

Also, wind and solar didn't spent more than fifty years spreading misinformation and denialism about an existential threat to our global human civilization, framing and defaming credible scientists.

If there's ever an existential threat to our global human civilization through wind and solar and the wind and solar lobby is found to spread misinformation, framing and defaming credible scientists, I'm willing to revisit the topic.

Until then I'm not playing this game "both-sideism". There's a real and actual culprit here.

> If there are "better and cheaper" alternatives available right now, market forces will assure their dominance.

That's the "free market" fallacy. But we don't have a free market. We have have trillions of yearly subsidies for oil and gas[0], we've had it for decades. We spent trillions building up oil and gas infrastructure. To expect wind and solar to compete on such an uneven playing field where even the rules of the game are written by the fossil fuel lobby is ludicrous[1].

Oh, by the way. Power generation through wind and solar has been lower then all and any fossil fuels, for years[2]. So much for "the market will solve it".

[0] https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...

[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/oil-lobbyists-use-r...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity

When discussing market forces and renewables keep in mind, Levelized cost of electricity is a largely useless metric because it doesn't take into account the prohibitively high costs of storage and redundant infrastructure needed for intermittent sources.

I'm not sure that this is completely true.

Yes, it's true that levelized cost is not giving the full picture. But that's not quite the point here. The point is to show that the "free market" is not the solution we're looking for and that waiting for the market to solve this will closely resemble Waiting for Godot.

So sure, that infrastructure needs to be built. But that was also the case for fossil fuels. Think of the massive infrastructure required to get gas to a power plant. Much of that infrastructure is subsidized, it's already there and thus any energy source trying to get into the market cannot just be slightly cheaper; the cost advantages of the established system is just to great.

So in a way, your statement supports my argument that the market will not able to fix this for us.

Before you read my detailed response below, my tl;dr point is not that wind and solar suck, or that we need to hold on to oil and gas forever. My most salient point is that proclaiming an "emergency" of an "existential threat" that requires centralized authority (held by decisionmakers who usually pay no cost for being wrong) is a playbook that's as old as history, and one that almost always resulted in great human toll.

I predict that more human misery will be generated by efforts to counter climate change that are predicated upon such centralized authority, than that generated by the status quo. Having said that:

> The economic and political power of the oil and gas lobby is magnitudes larger than the economic and political power of the wind and solar lobby. We're talking about entrenched interests here.

No arguments there from me, except I would like to add that the degree of entrenchment reflects how much modern society depends on oil and gas.

> If there's ever an existential threat to our global human civilization through wind and solar

You're presupposing that oil and gas is an existential threat to global human civilization. Evidence points the other way around, that humanity flourished more than ever with the usage of fossil fuels.

> We have have trillions of yearly subsidies for oil and gas[0], we've had it for decades.

$7T of subsidies around the world according to your source (including "implicit" subsidies; direct subsidies of $1.3T), out of a global GDP of ~$96T; a subsidy of around 7.3% for an energy source that comprises over 80% of the world's consumption[0]. I'd say that sounds like a good deal. I'm sure if and when wind and solar get to that level, they will have similarly vast subsidies behind them.

> where even the rules of the game are written by the fossil fuel lobby is ludicrous

I'm not sure if I understand the point of your source for this. It says that availing yourself of the legal system is somehow wrong, and accuses O&G of lobbying "with the goal of putting their profits and pay above all else" (some real objective stuff there).

Big Pharma spends over 3x the amount of money lobbying every year, and depending on the year there's 3-7 other industries that spend more than oil and gas. The largest producer of wind and solar energy in the country, NextEra Energy, spent $6.2M in lobbying in 2021, about the same as ExxonMobil or Chevron that year. Nobody likes lobbying, but it appears that everyone does it. It's not especially bad only when it comes from the O&G industry.

Out of S&P 500 companies, CEO pay for the energy industry is about the middle of the pack[1]. The "green & renewable energy" industry has a higher EBITDA to sales as well as a higher SG&A expense to sales ratios than either the "coal & related energy" industry or the various types of "oil/gas" industries[2]. So if anyone's putting "profit and pay above all else", it would appear it is the renewable energy execs.

> Power generation through wind and solar has been lower then all and any fossil fuels, for years

LCOE is useless without storage costs. LCOE with storage costs included is comparable between gas, wind, and solar[3]. It is currently infeasible to supply baseload power with purely wind and solar. Even the countries that have a plurality of their total electricity consumption come from wind and solar (like Denmark), they import a lot of electricity from neighbors with stable baseload sources.

If the all-in cost of providing electricity, including costs of intermittency and storage, to the grid is lower for wind and solar than all other sources, then good news: you can become a gazillionaire by taking advantage of that market failure.

[0]: https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2021...

[1]: https://www.equilar.com/reports/101-equilar-associated-press...

[2]: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...

[3]: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....

Then please let me keep this topic focused on your most salient point. If you are interested, I'll happily also discuss your other points in other reply threads.

> My most salient point is that proclaiming an "emergency" of an "existential threat" that requires centralized authority (held by decisionmakers who usually pay no cost for being wrong) is a playbook that's as old as history, and one that almost always resulted in great human toll.

We've known for more than 100 years that there might be an impact on our global climate from our use of fossil fuels. We've known for almost 50 years that there is an impact from our use of fossil fuels. After years of stalling and ignoring the ever stronger signals that something is amiss, the world came together in 2015 and agreed to limit the warming of the climate to 1.5°C.

Now in 2023 we've blown through that self-imposed limit.

The list of likely and dreadful consequences is long and known. I won't repeat them here. Many of them have grave consequences to our global society, some of them are very threatening to social stability. This will have dire consequences.

Up to now we've not really been acting. And we should, because with every passing day, the potential outcome slowly but surely slides more and more into the direction of global systemic collapse.

For me this is not a "climate crisis". It's a climate crisis, period.

The oil and gas lobby literally masquerades as activists to torpedo wind and solar industries (see Trump's recent ramblings about wind farms hurting whales... there's almost zero evidence and the fishing industry is demonstrably worse).

They've been spreading false information for decades. I'm not sure there's ANY industry that has undercut competing industries to the extent that they have. This is especially damning considering the millions of gallons the oil industry has been responsible for dumping directly into the ocean. All this and they still get massive federal subsidies.

Worst I've seen solar and wind do is over-promise and support existing climate activists.

The solar and wind industries haven't even existed for as long as the oil and gas industries have been spreading misinformation. They're not even in the same league.

Come decision time, most people pick whatever meets their needs for the cheapest price.

The ideologically-driven people are a minority. A very vocal minority, but a minority.

Most people just choose what's cheap, convenient, and gets the job done. We can put our fingers on the scale by shifting subsidies and taxes around.

Of course it’s valid, and those people would not be in the “rolling coal to own the libs” population.

The current alternatives suck. Renewables are unreliable and produce massive waste themselves. What we need is nuclear, but I only ever hear the same people complaining about fossil fuels, complaining about nuclear. It's extremely safe. Like it's not even close.

If we can maintain the status quo with better technology, it will be adopted. It's just not there yet. Hence, we stick to what we have.

The liberal position on these societal problems is "take things away until the problem is fixed" which I find incredibly ironic, while the other's is "free market drives innovation when it's overwhelmingly necessary."

Energy capex is fungible, and nuclear energy is the most expensive. It is also carries the highest risk of cost overruns and underestimation of decommissioning costs.

Why spend a penny on fission nuclear when renewables are cheaper, have shorter lead times by decades, and are vastly less financially risky?

Demand too much minerals including, because they’re so much more diffuse metals like copper

High soil occupancy in competition with food crops and human activities

Cannot provide guaranteed baseline of supply without storage (more minerals)

Perhaps the Chernobyl exclusion zone could be covered with photovoltaic panels.

I always find the framing of these discussions very sad.

Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive, there are many historic examples of safe reactors built for very reasonable costs. (French and earlier American reactors especially.)

Unfortunately there seems to be zero appetite to discuss let alone fix the killing of nuclear power though an absolutely crazy regulatory framework.

The French underestimated their decommissioning costs by a large factor. They will spend decades paying that down with no power being generated from the plants they are closing down.

When "perceived enemies" don't care about this problem and exploit fossil fuel dependency to gain leverage over other countries it worsens the problem in realpolitik sense. It is unwise to just hand wave this aspect away.

That, plus not being willing to pay for infrastructure.