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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Petrochemicals and the energy from fossil fuels did provide the needed food and energy to boost our standard of living.
HOWEVER
By the time we knew they were affecting the climate, we had the technology to move off of them and didn't because of assholes like this.
The sad part is that he may be right because the urgency to transition off fossils is lost in our desire not to be inconvenienced. Don’t mention the bribes (some call them donations) to political parties, candidates and Supreme Court judges.
We still don't have the technology to move of them. Energy storage is severely lacking.
I bet if we had started the process in the 1970s like Carter wanted we'd be a lot further along by now.
It's possible, but it's not like technology halted in that time and there has been a big energy independence drive regardless of Reagan.
The harsh truth is that we still need fossil fuels today.
We're probably going to need them for decades to come, even if we have massive green energy drives.
This is a great weasel word. "Energy independence." Like we're going to hook cables up to George Washington and run on carbon-neutral Freedom Juice.™
"Energy independence" still means using fossil fuels. Just maybe different ones like natural gas instead of coal. There's less emissions, sure, but it's not anything like what Carter envisioned: Solar power stations in LEO, beaming gigawatts of carbon neutral power down from space.
Carter also embraced nuclear energy, IIRC. Meanwhile, you've got California trying desperately to shut down Diablo Canyon but kicking the can down the road every two years because, surprise surprise, energy demand went up and they can't afford to take DCNP offline. As I recall, DCNP's reactor core was due for decommissioning twelve years ago, we just keep stringing it along like "c'mon bro, just two more years, I swear I'll shut you down then. We won't need your 2,000 gigawatts by then, bro, I promise, c'mon bro, please don't fuck up on me, just hold on for two more years". It's stupid. We could've replaced the goddamn reactor by now, but we gotta play stupid games and win stupid prizes.
Carter specifically avoided nuclear energy. He was involved in a nuclear accident, so he knew the risks and favored building massive solar panels.
To quote the linked article: "The project was not continued with the change in administrations after the 1980 United States elections."
That fucker Reagan also took Carter's solar panels off the White House.
3 mile island happened at the end of his tenure, but yeah
Actually, his anti-nuclear stance started when he was in the Navy working on nuclear reactors. In 1952 a Canadian reactor melted down and he was on the team that fixed it.
And suffered radiation poisoning for months, if not years, after. An actual hero rather than a B movie star.
It also meant reducing imports of oil by being more efficient and investing in green tech by lots of parties across the country.
Green tech like clean coal? Green tech like fracking to get natural gas? Which "green" tech are we talking about here?
Green tech like wind, hydro, solar, and geothermal. The big deal was the fact you don't need to import oil to run them.
The US is the largest producer of both crude oil and natural gas in the world. That's what they mean when they say "energy independence:" Not importing foreign oil.
It is today after a massive fracking boom that largely happened independent of the big oil companies (they're starting to go gobble up the fracking pioneers nowadays).
But up until then nobody was sure of what to do and every independence was a pipe dream. That effort absolutely came with investment into green energy.
So energy independence was a pipe dream until we had a massive boom in the production of a fossil fuel.
And that is apparently "green energy."
No, but the investments into stuff like geothermal was.
Read this:
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2005/04/20050427-9.html
You mean the document that starts off with "Expanding Refining Capacity," "Domestic Production Of Oil From ANWR," "Natural Gas Offers New Opportunities," and "Make Clean Use Of Our Coal Supply?"
The one that crows about $1.9 billion over 10 years for clean energy, but also mentions $52 billion in investment in coal?
That document on "green energy?"
Keep reading.
This is literally Bush - Republican president - creating green energy incentives and promoting nuclear power.
Energy independence movement absolutely included green energy, even if you are too blinded by the other stuff to see it.
I had a professor who was intimately involved in the Texas wind farms built under this program. So yeah, renewable energy (I read an article on hydrogen sourcing the other day and colors confuse me now) was definitely part of it.
If this was truly what Carter envisioned, then he was an unbelievable moron. "Sunsats", are not practical or environmentally efficient. The mere fact that you have to place and maintain them via spacelaunch is a huge penalty, then you have to account for radiation loss to the atmosphere.
False equivalence. If we had been working towards this goal since the 70s then more focus, both financial and science/engineering, would have been put into it and progress we’re making now might have happened 20 or 30 years ago.
Oil companies did everything they could to stop it, instead of positioning themselves as research leaders they went for short term profits. After all, they swam in pools of money for the rest of their lives and we’ll all be here when all the crops die and the mountains become the shores.
So anyway, that’s why I love communism now.
Imagine the Republicans controlling not only the government funding but also private funding. That's what you'd get under communism.
Or imagine lowest common denominator tragedy of the commons with cheap fuel ousting all other forms of energy with no state to stop it.
Communism is a stupid ideal that doesn't work in the real world.
"Instead of positioning themselves as research leaders"
Why would they? If researching new ways of replacing oil is in everyone's benefit then why does it fall on oil companies to do it? And not also everyone else?
Ah yes, the Soviet Union was well-known for its production of renewable power.
The Soviet Union never transitioned to communism, they stopped at an authoritarian state.
Just how much money has been spent on fossil fuel extraction that could have been spent of tech development instead?
We had the technology to start. Photovoltaic panels, windmills, etc aren't new technology; the Carter administration actually installed photovoltaics on the white house and they stayed there until three guesses which president (yep, Reagan) took them down. Florida voted to start building a high speed rail project in their state (which would have decreased interstate and short-haul airline dependency, thereby decreasing oil dependency) and it was going to happen until Mr. State's Rights himself, Ronald Reagan, blocked any state from launching a high speed rail initiative. More people believed in global warming and climate change in the 90's than now, but in the 2000's, the small government W Bush administration forbade government officials from talking about climate change, gutted government research on climate change, and collaborated with big oil lobbyists on pivoting to using softer, more nebulous terms to address global warming (this is actually where the widespread use of 'climate change' comes from). We've basically kicked the can down the road for forty years and only started taking it kinda seriously in the last ten or fifteen. If we'd been developing and implementing these technologies gradually over the last fifty years, it would have been a lot less painful and we'd have made a lot more progress for a lot more value on the money spent. Since we're trying to speedrun the last fifty years of implementation and development into the last decade or so, that's going to be really economically painful and not nearly as smooth as it would have been under the long implementation. But, it's gotta get done, or we're going to keep fucking up the same ecology we depend on to stay alive, getting in endless wars, and giving money to jackass countries to feed our voluntary fossil fuel addiction.
As for storage, that's not an unsolvable problem. Probably the most practical solution is a nuclear fission backbone, imo, but there's several approaches that are in various stages of development and viability.
The big modern efficient and cheap ones are.
I'm looking at a Gallup poll showing 30 percent of Americans worried about global warming in 1990.
Modern day is 61 percent.
Which is a good idea because you get idiots showing up in Congress with a snowball, and was not a term just created out of thin air by big oil.
We have been. Technology and it's development rarely is some targeted thing. Big projects that get results tend to happen only once the base work has been completed and the investment will show hefty returns. The Manhattan project didn't happen until the means to create nuclear power was discovered, for example.
As another big example, most of our ability to have electric cars? It's thanks to cell phone battery research.
Without question these oil companies have stood in the way of progress, but don't think even for a second that we would be in some magic fantasy land if it weren't for them.
All things match along and very frequently the decisions we made are much less impactful than you would think.
OTOH, demand for something generally increases the amount of funding available for developing the technology associated with that thing. Yes, we're more advanced now than we were in the 70s, but we probably lost a solid twenty-thirty years of demand-driven gradual progress due to regressive administrations prioritizing and subsidizing fossil dependency.
As evidence of this, take note of the dramatic decline in the price of photovoltaic power since people actually started investing in it in 2009.
I imagine we'd have had that sort of drop in the late 1980s if we didn't elect the senile movie star.
We can imagine as much as we like. The technology and manufacturing processes simply didn't exist back then.
Isn't big oil holding and not using a bunch of battery patents leaving us with limited options for what they can be made of?
Definitely not. They apparently had a nimh patent but it expired and that battery tech is old news in the modern day.