I think the decision to allow fossil fuel users to poison us all is motivated, at least in the case of electricity, historically, by the improvement in air quality as people moved away from burning wood for heating and cooking.

The small city I live in, ~100k population, is powered almost entirely by hydro electricity. Some small percentage still burn wood for heating and even that makes the air around town hazy, I'd hate to think what it would be like if everyone was still doing it.

It's interesting to think about this. Those burning wood for heating are polluting the air locally -and globablly- and aren't paying a premium for the privilege, and at the same time all new hydro electricity in Australia was permanently shelved after the Franklin River Dam project was successfully blocked by The Wilderness Society 1983.[1]

So Australian's can thank the 'environmental movement' for pushing us toward being one of the world leaders in CO2 polluters per capita - I think we're the OECD leader, if I remember correctly.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Dam_controversy

(Edit: a letter)

I thought the historical motivation was just that there was not much of a concept of pollution harming people far away, so this sort of activity has traditionally been allowed by default. For thousands of years, you could burn your wood on your land and everybody was fine with that. At most you might have some trouble with your neighbors if they don't like your smoke. But the idea you'd cause diffuse harm to millions is pretty new, and has a lot of inertia to overcome.

This is actually incorrect. When I was digging through old new york times articles from the 1900s and 1930s (using the online search) I stumbled across numerous articles expressing concern about the pollutants being released by factories and combustion-engine automobiles, and how they not only affect the immediate area but surrounding towns. Don't have links to the sources at the moment, or the time right now to pull it up, will check back later, but if you search on nytimes.com you should be able to pull them up.

I'm thinking an order of magnitude or two farther back. Humanity spent thousands of years making fires, but widespread awareness of how the pollution it emits can hurt people is only a century or two old.

Yes, certsinly that also. DI meant in the context of the more recent past as the source of pollution was moved out of the city centre people probably lost interest in pollution as it affected them less directly. Prior to that people were either too sparsely populated to be affected or there was no alternative.

Or something. I guess I speculating given there's other factors I'm not taking into account like automobile emissions and the advent of emissions standards due to air quality concerns.

Let us not forget that the Sierra Club proudly proclaims on their website that, "2014 was a monumental year for dam removal projects. A record-setting 72 dams were removed across 19 states...While the best reasons to do away with old dams are certainly the ecological ones, it doesn’t hurt that the massive detonations involved are pretty dam fun to watch."

http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2015-2-march-april/green-li...

These people are not anti-fossil fuels or anti-hydro or anti-nuclear; they are anti-development as such. They reap the rewards of an industrialized energy-rich economy which can provide them lives past 70, decreased child mortality, eradication of most disease, incredible mobility, plentiful food, etc., while they decry the means by which this life is made possible.

Many removed dams aren't really worth a damn. I looked up the first one on the list, it was providing power to a single residence.

http://www.westcoast.fisheries.noaa.gov/stories/2015/03_0303...

Thanks for doing that. I like how the parent comment made some assumptions about motives, which I'm sure we're all guilty of -I know I am, a lot- and then someone provides the balance.

It's interesting how any group of motivated people can and will have their motives questioned and recontextualised to suit whatever agenda some other group are pushing. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that process, just interesting to observe the different camps adding their own spin and observing my changing option as I gain greater understanding - well, so the theory goes.

(Edit: speeling and gramah)

There are many small dams that really are obsolete or of little benefit, but Sierra Club also opposes some that have clearer benefits.

There are heavy human costs, too, when you consider that mining and oil extraction can leave their laborers handicapped and often dependent on the welfare system, and when it becomes unprofitable to extract from a given area, these companies will disappear and leave the communities they supported to collapse.

The fossil fuel subsidy is even more twisted than direct subsidies and externalities.

Yes, oil and energy are directly related to productive capacity. To the extent that gas and coal can substitute for oil in electricity generation and industrial production means that the near-term prospect of an oil crunch isn't a net energy crisis (ignoring climate impacts), but it does have a massive impact on transport.

But:

⚫ Energy is used to substitute for human labour in production functions. So it hugely increases output capacity.

⚫ We price oil not at its replacement cost, but at its cost of extraction. It's as if you had access to a bank account and were making withdrawals from it, but costed those at the rate of bus fare to the bank, rather than the full value of withdrawn funds.

⚫ Which means that not only does oil hugely accelerate industrial productivity, but it skews all economic prices downward hugely. It's not that oil companies have been greedy, but that oil's been under-priced for the past century and a half.

Biodiesel -- hemp or canola oil -- runs about $1,000/bbl, roughly 25x the longt-erm price of oil (about $40/bbl), and 10x the price of "expensive" oil ($100/bbl).

End of cheap, abundant oil is going to change a hell of a lot.

Rare earth mineral mining also gets that subsidy as does the manufacture of PV panels.

True, but the scale doesn't come anywhere close. Renewables production isn't changing the climate, poisoning seafood, or giving millions of people lung diseases.

Well it is because it depends on heavy industry to manufacture it. I'm curios, are there stats on the energy that goes into manufacturing a windmill + battery setup vs the expected energy output over the lifetime?

In other words, are they at least self sustaining? Haul trucks and crushers for mining take massive amounts of energy that are currently being driven by fossil fuels. So renewables are subsidized by fossil fuels and the question is how much?

There is a lot of research into this. The terminology is the energy return on energy invested, or ERoEI. And yes, wind power is definitely self sustaining. Wind turbines are pretty simple, cheap, and tend to last a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inve...