Our politicians need to accept that oil is a dying industry..

[pbmus]

Politicians may try to save it, but the reality is "the global oil industry is in denial about the bigger trends disrupting energy markets as we know them."

Renewable energy is cheap, it's here, and it's rising.

https://motherboard.vice.com/read/we-need-to-accept-that-oil-is-a-dying-industry

The physical fight between dirty energy and climate is the titanic struggle of this century...with the winner being either quality of life or hell on earth.

The spiritual fight between greed and compassion is the megalithic challenge that is really at the heart of the universe and the point of the fight.

i wish I could write to tell you that this will all end well...??
We just elected one of the "-----------."

[msongs]

1. trump oil will hold on to the bitter end because profit over life on earth nt

[pbmus]

2. He will be in the top 5 on Forbes greediest list

By the end of his 3rd year...

[Dream Girl]

3. As far as I'm concerned, if we can have an energy breakthrough in 5

Years we will be looking at a very different reality. Cheap abundant, renewable energy is their nightmare. The utter corruption that seems to go hand and hand with fossil fuels and all the wars fought over its control not to mention the havoc its wrought on the environment. An energy breakthrough would also mean cheap water desalinization so that we might avoid water wars which is next on the horizon...

[GreydeeThos]

4. The chemicals derived from petroleum is not a dying industry

[Vogon_Glory]

5. I'm inclined to agree. Petrochemicals will remain important

I'm inclined to agree. Petrochemicals will remain important. Even if border-line fantasy devices like "Mister Fusion" or the Shipstone energy storage devices alluded to in Robert Heinlein's novel Friday hit the market 5 years from now ( Extremely unlikely ), petroleum would still be a desired resource--just not so much.

[pbmus]

8. Not so much is an understatement...

There are not enough container ships to carry what they are pumping now...the current pricing is somewhere between inflated and imaginary...

[NNadir]

6. So called "renewable energy" isn't cheap; it isn't useful; it isn't clean; and it isn't safe; it...

...is not even "renewable," as it is highly dependent on increasing rare and often toxic materials.

For my entire adult life I've been hearing how it would save the day, and I'm not young. It didn't; it isn't; it won't.

We spent more than two trillion dollars on this planet in just ten years on solar and wind energy, with the result that the fastest growing source of energy on this planet is dangerous natural gas.

After this expenditure, the rate of increase in carbon dioxide is faster than what has been observed at any point since records started being kept, now over 3.00 ppm a year.

Predictions about oil - a few years ago "peak oil" was the rage - have all proved to be wrong. The only way to stop oil is to ban it; and that obviously won't happen; there's no political will to do it.

So called "renewable energy" has not worked; it is not working; it will not work because it requires redundancy and an extremely low energy to mass ratio.

The idea that it will work is, in fact, our creationism.

It will never be as clean, as safe, as sustainable as nuclear energy, which many of us - certainly not me - have been programmed to despise by the application of deliberate ignorance.

Have a nice Sunday.

[pbmus]

7. Starting to use sand for solar, which I think you are referring

To rare materials. There are many innovations coming...and many countries are using much more renewable than USA ...nuclear is here and will get even more efficient..oil is dying slowly but it will die in this century ...hopefully sooner.....

[NNadir]

9. The world consumes approximately 570 exajoules of energy each year. Solar and wind...

...combined don't produce 5 of them.

They are a huge waste of money and all they do is to entrench dangerous natural gas use, since solar and wind are useless without redundant fast access power back up.

If we spent the same two trillion dollars on nuclear energy that we spent on so called "renewable energy," we'd be talking about producing ten or twenty exajoules of primary energy each year, with a lifetime of better than half a century, compared to 20 years for the renewable junk that will soon be landfill.

The faith based bet that we on the left made on so called "renewable energy" just wasted time. And frankly there isn't any time left. We are way past 400 ppm and this misplaced faith in "innovations" is tiresome, old, and frankly delusional.

It's a very glib remark you make about "sand," and it betrays a low level awareness of the details of process chemistry. In any case, accepting lower efficiency from an already failed and expensive industry - if addressing climate change was the goal, the solar industry's money sucking efforts are a grotesque failure - is dubious, especially since solar back up requires dangerous natural gas.

The most efficient solar cells on this planet, often hailed in the ridiculous "breakthrough" lexicon that's followed the solar industry for decades while we surged to 403 ppm (as of today), is the CIGS cell, copper indium gallium selenium, the middle two constituent elements being easily subject to depletion, the latter being toxic. Other solar cells involve cadmium and tellurium, the distribution of which is a crime against all future generations who will need to clean up this crap, assuming their minds are not destroyed first by the neurological toxicity of cadmium.

I have spent tens of thousands of hours in scientific libraries reading about energy and, um, "innovation," and I have quite a different perspective on lab scale "innovation" and their translation into industrial scale processes.

Getting rid of oil "this century" is poor thinking. We needed to be well on our way to getting rid of oil twenty years ago.

I've listened to enthusiasms such as you've offered for at least 30 years. Repeating them over and over and over is not helpful.