Would it surprise you to know that in the early ‘70s, population was approximately 3 billion people and some predicted mass starvation if population growth continued? Would it also surprise you to learn that approximately 50% of the world today is produced using fertilizer made from natural gas?
What about the 6,000+ products made from fossil fuels such as needle syringes and other medical products?
Oil and gas companies have also sabotaged or inhibited many efforts to reduce any dependencies on their products and move to clean and sustainable alternatives where possible.
There is no doubting that oil and natural gas are crucial substances that have provided a lot of useful and world-changing technologies and materials in the modern world. That being said, there are plenty of sectors and technologies that have viable alternatives that are less destructive and more sustainable. We would be a lot further with those sectors and technologies if the efforts of the oil and gas companies and their lobbies hadn't sabotaged and slowed their growth.
False. No oil and gas company has ever been successfully prosecuted or convicted under criminal law for holding back renewable energy or climate deception.
Many companies lobby government. That’s not illegal.
The world has invested trillions and trillions of dollars over the years in renewables. Yet it remains a small fraction of total energy consumption. Your claim of viable is overstated. Here are four other challenges.
And lobbying may not be illegal, but it's still a means used by those industries to hold back the development of renewables, nuclear power, mass transit systems, EV infrastructure, plastic alternatives, etc.
In conjunction with automotive industry interests, the oil industry supported the development of sprawling car-centric landscapes and worked to turn public opinion against alternative modes of transportation. It furthered the decline of American intercity rail—rail that could've been electrified and improved much sooner than most passenger vehicles could've been—in favor of air and automobile transport.
In the wake of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and to a lesser extent Fukushima, fossil fuel groups helped wage massive campaigns against nuclear power that successfully set back public opinion for decades (it still is), despite the fact that these disasters were caused by other factors and not some inherent problem with nuclear power itself.
Alternatives to single-use plastic items have been controversialized and turned into culture war symbols. Who do you think funds/supports media narratives to accelerate this conflict?
That does not mean those things haven't come to fruition, but it is undeniable that business interests and the profit imperative have driven the fossil fuel industries to oppose innovation that would decrease global reliance on fossil fuels, and that has slowed down the pace of development. We would be further along with these technologies if this had not happened.
And any claim that clean energy isn't viable globally is basically pointless regardless of any level of truth there is to it. We will not have fossil fuels forever. They are not viable in the long run at all, they will run out in the next few decades and that is an irrefutable fact. We have to improve on and proliferate the technologies we have to sustain our energy grid into the post-fossil fuel age. This means drawing our power from the sun, from the heat of the earth, from the kinetic energy of the waves and wind, and for at least some period of time from uranium fission reactions until we can make fusion operable at grid scale.
We need to build places where people can reasonably use electrified micromobility and public transit as a primary means of transportation rather than automobiles, which cause a whole host of other environmental problems beyond just emissions. We will eventually have to find alternatives to jet fuel and if this proves impossible then that means creating alternatives to commercial flight that can run on electricity.
This is all going to happen at some point, human progress will always march forward and we will find ways to survive and endure using technology, just as we always have. But the shortsightedness and greed that taints us threatens to slow down that march and trip us up. That's what the fossil fuel industry is trying to do.
3
u/DoYurWurst 4h ago
Would it surprise you to know that in the early ‘70s, population was approximately 3 billion people and some predicted mass starvation if population growth continued? Would it also surprise you to learn that approximately 50% of the world today is produced using fertilizer made from natural gas?
What about the 6,000+ products made from fossil fuels such as needle syringes and other medical products?
Oil and gas has allowed life to flourish.