Have you ever wondered what the beginning of the end of the oil era looks like? Look around, we are living in it!
This is a good collapse in many ways, except the resistance to it is driving genuinely bad collapse like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the US’s attempts to villainize and go to war with Venezuela. It used to all come back to oil, now it all comes back to having a secure, defendable way to make sure you can still sell your oil uninterrupted.
-The Moment The Music Stops In Oil Company Musical Chairs- would be my caption for this moment in history
The question is which collapse do we get? The collapse of fossil fuels or the collapse of everything else?
It is just simple physics that makes EVs and alternative energy competitive, not feel good handwaving like you suggest.
Also you are simplifying my argument to make it easier to dismiss, I am suggesting the beginning of a decoupling, not the overnight arrival of some magical tech that whisks away fossil fuels in one flourish.
How much time do you think we have, that focussing on “the beginning of decoupling” is actually meaningful? Especially since that is a move that should have been done decades ago? And how many scientists need to say we’ve blown it when it comes to emissions reductions getting us out of the hole we’ve dug ourselves into?
I just started watching a video with David Suzuki that addresses your point in the first 5 minutes: “In 2018 the IPCC…came out with a special report that said look, we must not allow temperatures to rise more than 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels…This is a critical point, after 1.5 degrees rise we can’t predict what’s going to happen but it’s going to be climate chaos…We passed 1.5 degrees in 2025…After 29 (COP) meetings, are we not ready to say " eh, it doesn’t work”?..Is it too late? Of course it’s too late! But what’ll we do? You know, people are saying every 0.1 degree matters, we got to keep working. But wait a minute now, we’ve had 29 COP meetings to try and limit it. At what point do you say it ain’t working, it doesn’t work that way…we’re still not operating as if we’re in an emergency"
If feeling positive about the “beginning of decoupling” helps you cope, good. But people addressing the reality that eclipses that are saying we will have at least 2C warming unless we implement geoengineering.
I think you misunderstand me, I believe the EV revolution is inveitable because the maintenance and fuel cost advantages of Electric Vehicles will categorically curbstop Internal Combustion Engine cars on a practical basis. That doesn’t mean I think environmentally that EVs will proliferate fast enough to stop catastrophic climate change.
The thing is before fossil fuel powers could claim practical EVs are a pipedream and impractical, now it is just plain factually incorrect when they do so. The proof is in the pudding and China by and large made that pudding.
Ah, it sounds like I have misunderstood you, although I think my question still stands with a bit of a different context–how much time do you think we have? Because, unless I am misunderstanding what you mean by EV revolution, it requires a long enough runway of climate, economic, energy, and social stability with sufficient material resources for infrastructure building and production.
As an aside, it makes me sad that the conversation is never that we should move away from cars and invest in public transportation. I know that you’re not comparing EVs to that, and I think there isn’t a sufficient runway for that either. But since I’m wistfully thinking of the things we should have done in decades past I decided to include it.