Are they taking into account the side benefit of fossil fuels? The more you use them, the less you need to worry about the cold in the future. It's like a two birds with one stone thing.
Choice 1: Burn lots and lots of coal + Fischer Tropsch + electric vehicles.
Choice 2: Thorium reactors + electric vehicles.
That's about it.
BTW, The "Peak Oil Community" are 5% oil and gas industry people, and 5% energy policy wonk want-to-bes.
The rest are radical environmentalists eagerly anticipating the ecological-Malthusian-doom rapture (see dieoff.org, etc) and are not interested in practical solutions and are just sitting in front of their computers waiting to be raptured up into their ecological-hand-tools-subsistence-agriculture wonderland.
Remember the choice isn't between dirty oil/gas and a wonderful future of clean/green fuel and no damage to the environment. Transitioning to alternative energy sources is incredibly expensive - it will be a major drain on the economy to do so because alt fuels are still struggling to hit grid parity and we still don't have a serious way to reduce oil consumption for gasoline.
So the choice is really between
1) Oil and gas extraction using new technologies with all the attendant risks (and there many)
2) Forget the new technologies and continue to rely more and more on unstable oppressive regimes (Middle East, Russia, etc)
3) Take a major hit to economic growth and aggressively push alternative fuels.
I would recommend (1). Option (2) leads to greater geopolitical instability and very significant long-term risks. Option (3) will undermine economic growth at a time when there is consensus that growth is a priority.
Obviously, this is grossly simplified, but my general point is that we have a limited option set and in truth, none are very attractive. Three rotten apples, we're starving and we must eat one, let's pick the least rotten one.
I'm in favor of radical curtailment of the burning of all fossil fuels. Anything short of that is going to be catastrophic. Yes, I know this is a pipe dream at this point. But a boy can still dream.
Deciding whether or not to burn this methane is kind of like being adrift on the north Atlantic and deciding whether or not to burn the ship to stay warm.
The coal-brain in my family keeps telling me that we can't stop with coal and natural gas because they're realiable in the winter. People will freeze without them! If the wind doesn't blow, if the sun isn't up, we can't rely on that.
..and then came the grid scale batteries
...and then came the heat pump technology that works in deeply cold outside temperatures
All of a sudden it's like...wait...why do we prefer fossil fuels again?
One could argue that, if people freeze to death because of brownouts due to wintry overcast skies in December (weeks of freezing weather probably would be something different), there's something wrong with the way houses are built.
Getting rid of oil addiction doesn't solely mean replacing oil with wind and solar; it also means thinking rationally about why we need so much energy.
Fossil fuel usage will end itself once other more convenient energy sources become relevant. You can't possibly suggest leaving vulnerable people without shelter, heat or food because there's an impending apocalypse brewing. Fossil fuels be banned sounds like a quote from the nutcake realm. You're probably using ICE engines for transportation, gas and electricity for indoor lighting and heating like everybody else. Imagine if these were turned off for your own good and the survival of modern society.
They aren't opposites, they're different things. My energy hungry lifestyle contributes to global warming and it is comfortable in the short term. What's good now and has been good for me in the past causes something bad in the future. The decline of easy energy is bad for my current lifestyle, and I don't think it can be avoided.
But what would be even worse is trying to avoid the decline of easy energy. Because even if there's petrol and coal and gas left in the ground, we should stop burning it, because we have to mitigate climate change. That's the tragedy.
We're faced with a choice: maximizing short-term comfort by putting back the consequences of reducing available energy, or minimizing long-term discomfort (might be a euphemism) by deliberately cutting down on still available energy.
Have you stopped using fossil fuels and consuming products that required fossil fuels for their production and transportation? I'm guessing not since you haven't starved to death and have access to the Internet.
It's not possible to stop this juggernaut through individuals choosing to opt out of fossil fuels.
Thing is - global warming is indubitably happening, and, although the mix of causes is unclear, human fossil fuel usage is one of them. Getting off fossil fuels is also the economically sensible thing to do.
Sure, but you seem willing to instead get something high in carbon that’s economically valueless and pay to bury it in the ground. That seems unlikely to be more carbon-efficient than curtailing someone else’s use of the fuel of last resort.
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