For years I’ve considered investors and executives in the fossil fuel industry to be lazy and stupid. They could make more money in the long term with clean energy, and yet they entrench themselves in their ways and opt to poison our discourse and slow down human progress.
I apologize if this thought experiment is messy. I got out of the shower with these thoughts and started writing. To separate clean energy from renewable energy, I will define the following:
- Renewable items can be “farmed” on demand, using natural processes that exist on the planet
- Non renewable items are created slowly, at a fixed rate, and cannot be created on demand. This includes fossil fuels and precious metals.
Those entrenched in fossil fuels oppose the alternatives that take away their power. Since fossil fuels are extractive and non renewable items, there exists a fixed amount of it on the planet. There is value and power from controlling this scarce resource.
Renewable energy can be created on demand by anyone with the means to do so. Solar and wind energy cannot be monopolized as both can be harvested planet wide by anyone with the resources to set up a “farm”.
In an alternate universe, if it was possible to harvest and store energy in the form of oil and gas, it would not be as attractive. Likewise, if it was possible to limit access to wind or sunlight, the rich and powerful would have an incentive to do that.
If people can recognize this difference, they will be more likely to ignore fossil fuel talking points and not act against their own self interest
If renewable energy had the lobbyist capital of non-renewable energy, things would change. Until then, very little.
For the rich and powerful, it’s not about making the world better, it’s about making my world better, and getting paid in oil money does that well enough.
“Touched” with the front end of a highway velocity Kenworth Semi truck towing final destination logs.
You’re right that this has been a big reason for this resistance. It is not only that controlling the means of supply drives long term profits, but that the supply infrastructure generates huge profits as well. The largest portion of your home electricity cost is not the production but the delivery. If we could free everyone from both these costs almost everyone would be a lot happier.
You should extend this way of looking at it to the rest of the capitalist system we are being subjected to. Poorer quality goods lead to higher repurchase rates and more waste. Company mergers stifle new technology and slow human progress. These systems need heavy regulation and even extermination.
It’s simpler than that: the current rich support the industries that enabled them to get rich, whatever they are; and when a new industry finally does supplant them, a new group will get rich and oppose the next advance.
That’s the cost of privatized infrastructure.
Changing your business model costs money and carries some inherent risk, and businesses hate risk. Its why theres so many sequels, spinoffs, and adaptions in theaters. Sure they could fund more Sinners’… but Fast and the Furious 35: Wheelchair Wheelies has a guaranteed audience.
Solution seems pretty simple get rid of the rich
Renewable energy (at least wind and solar) is decentralized.
It doesn’t need a huge corporation to build it, with enough bargaining power to blackmail the state.This feels a little truer than OP’s take. Even if oil were renewable, the steps to transform it from crude to something usable are beyond “normal” peoples abilities to just set up in the backyard.
The rich oppose anything that has a a smaller return of investment.
LINE MUST GO UP!
The rich oppose any enablement of the masses.
It’s not just that though. Sure it’s a decent rate of return but what is keeping your market cap/share high enough to maintain high investment?
Making money is secondary to selling stock
High stocks tend to be tied to high ROI. Meme stocks excluded.
Bingo, what you are explaining is a single Capitalist (or should I be saying Feudalism) principle of how to make even greater wealth-believing it is possible to make endless ever greater wealths.
Someone has been watching Technology Connections :p
It allows money to flow outside of the institutions they are heavily invested in. That’s why the rich don’t like renewables
Why do you think they are pushing for Hydrogen?
It’s made from oil.I completely forgot about hydrogen cars. What a strange middle man between electricity and oil.
You realise hydrogen comes from water right? You know, the thing made of hydrogen and oxygen? H2O? Why would it come from oil?
Because it’s cheaper to pull it from fossil fuels.
At present, approximately 96% of global hydrogen production relies on fossil fuels, contributing to substantial emissions, while only 4% comes from water electrolysis. Green hydrogen, produced via electrolysis with 55–80% efficiency, remains expensive at $2.28–7.39/kg, compared to grey hydrogen at $0.67–1.31/kg, which generates 8.5 kg CO₂ per kg of hydrogen production.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360319925000382
If you were Shell or BP would you spend billions developing new production facilities to split Hydrogen off stuff or use your existing multibillion euro fossil fuel production facilities?
As solar and wind power becomes more popular so does green hydrogen because it’s a good place to dump excess production when no other storage is available.
The rich oppose clean energy…
Bit of an broad generalization.
Also you can transport and sell a barrel of oil to anywhere on the planet, but you cant bottle wind or solar energy and transport it outside of your powergrid.
If only we could move the production of solar or wind energy closer to where it’s needed. In a different comment you ask how we would ship solar energy from the Americas to Australia. This is a huge problem and may never be solved, if only the sun was shining in Australia maybe we could just harvest the energy there…
Sell a barrel of oil to a man and he will soon buy a another. Sell a solar panel for a man and he wont need another one.
Yes you can, using batteries, but in most cases it makes more sense to just run cables between the power grids and transmit power that way, since you expend hardly any energy just transporting it.
How do you propose you make those power cables from lets say USA to Australia? And if suddenly some other country wants to make a better deal for that energy you cant just redirect those cables to lets say Italy.
Or with batteries. What happens to those expensive batteries containing rare-earthminerals after whom ever has used them? Do you just let them have those or do you buy them back and transport them empty or what?
Im not advocating for fossil fuels here. Im just stating why its more convinient for big oil to sell easily transportable oil barrels that can be packed in to basically free steel sheets or plastics and are easy to redirect towards whom ever pays the best.
Well yes I agree running power cables between continents is generally unviable(I was thinking more along a neighboring country/state scale). For your example, it would make the most sense to just build seperate infrastructure and have both countries be energy independent imo.
Allow me to address the battery concerns though. There are batteries that do not require rare earth minerals, and even if you do use ones that require them, once they’ve been used past their lifespan(which is still 1000s of times more uses than gas, which is single use), those rare earth minerals don’t just vaporise and go away(like gas), they can be recycled into newer batteries, and for a fraction of the overall effort of mining new rare earth minerals.
In any case, my original point is that you can in fact “bottle” and transport renewable energy, even across continents, even if it makes no sense to do so.
And honestly, If every country had enough oil reserves, it probably wouldn’t make much sense for oil either
Well the cant was more in the terms of “you cant have a viable business” than “its physically impossible”. I mean in a theory it would be possible to create moonbase and power it up with AA-batteries, but its just not something that can be done.
Also with batteries you did not say anything about what would happen to the empty ones. There would be logistical hurdle to overcome with those. Even the cheapest industrial sized battery would still be leagues more expensive than the sheetmetal used to transport oil.
Again, not talking trying to defend fossilfuels. Just making points why big companies are fighting against the change.
All fair points, though I would argue that the main reason we transport oil isn’t because it’s cheap, it’s because we kind of have to. You can generate electricity pretty much anywhere, oil has to come from specific holes in the ground.
Gas stations, tanker trucks, oil pipelines, ect were all originally built because we needed those things in order to make the things that use them go, including most of the things that bring the finished oil products to us.
And yes, it would be costly and impractical to move uncharged batteries back to where they are charged.
If anything, I think this comversation highlights the absurdity of modern oil infrastructure when compared to electric.
With electricity you can build machines that sustainably harvest it, keep the power generation away from the things it’s used for, and transmit it efficiency at a low cost(albeit not overseas). While on the other hand, oil must be mined in a specific location, transported, refined, transported again, and burned at the appliance, never to be used again. I know I’m preaching to the choir here but I really think the only thing holding renewable electric power back is politics, like oil subsidies and the like.
Gas stations, tanker trucks, oil pipelines, ect
These are big reason for the push back also. Companies have spend hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars building the infrastructure for fossil fuels and they will fight for keeping those investments alive.
Another thing slowing down clean energy is that wind and solarpower arent yet as reliable as coal power. Cities and nations can calculate how much coal or fossil fuel they need to keep lights on and stockpile fossile fuels for future use easily and they work even if there is no wind or sky is cloudy.
Hydroelectric is renewable and quite reliable, but its not neccessarilly good for enviroment either. Geothermal would be great, but its really expensive and its not possible to harvest everywhere in the world.
My personal opinion is that nuclear power with auxilary solar, wind and hydroelectrics would be best compination. Especially since battery technology is currently taking big leap with solid state batteries and it seems we might soon have electric vechicles with reasonable range. Even more so if the new batteries are as safe as manufactorers claim and in case of accident there is less of an risk of the unholy hellfire batteryfires are currently.
There are batteries, recent advances have resulted in cheaper batteries that can store more power.
Alternatively the energy can be used to create hydrogen and that can be transported.
What happens to those expensive batteries containing rare-earthminerals after whom ever has used them? Do you just let them have those or do you buy them back and transport them empty or what?
Converting energy to create hydrogen is fairly inefficient and transporting it need lot of preparations and the buyer has to have magnitudes more expensive equipment to use it limiting the markets where to sell it.
Im not advocating for fossil fuels here. Im just stating why its more convinient for big oil to sell easily transportable oil barrels that can be packed in to basically free steel sheets or plastics and are easy to redirect towards whom ever pays the best.
Correct. Scarcity increases the value of a commodity. Which means renewable energy simply isn’t profitable enough.
