Sure fossil fuel was necessary for some time but the only reason we kept going and still dependent on it despite the technological advancements and available alternatives is because of big corporations and some politicians who benefit from the industry (either financially or politically).
We could’ve stopped contributing to climate change some time ago but we choose not to. We can even do it today but we won’t. Change has been painstakingly way slower than necessary because some rich people decided it was not worth the effort.
It’s amazing what humans can achieve when we work together. We stopped using Chlorofluorocarbons and found viable alternatives when we decided it was worth the effort. We’ve eradicated smallpox ffs and we could’ve eradicated more diseases if we choose to.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That’s simply not true. We don’t even have the technology and resources today to achieve a zero carbon economy. We need a ton of new investment across a ton of industries.
I think the average person believes that we can just switch gasoline cars over to EVs and we’re done. That’s not even close! Less than 1/6th of emissions come from transport (all cars, trucks, trains, and ships combined).
Since CO2 emissions grow by about 0.9% per year, even if we eliminated all emissions from transport overnight (but did nothing else) it would buy us less than 20 years before emissions were back where we started.
There’s no silver bullet that billionaires are somehow hiding from us. Curbing emissions is going to take huge investments across many different sectors of the economy and new technologies in many different industries. Take solar panels for example. We could not have achieved their modern levels of efficiency and production capacity without going through decades of advancement in semiconductor technology. No one was holding that technology back. It has seen enormous investment since the mid 20th century for the development of faster CPUs and GPUs. Solar simply rode on the coattails of the computer revolution. It could not have advanced the way it has on its own.