The vast majority of scientists believe that temperatures are getting hotter as an average in the world, the debate mostly comes about whether it is manmade, or a natural cycle of occurrence that we can do little to stop. I am going to purposely leave what I believe out of this article, because In my opinion it shouldn’t matter which side is right because economically cycling out fossil fuels is a better option. While it might not seem that way now, I want to explain why this is the case.
The major benefit for fossil fuels right now is the cost and the efficiency brought with that cost. As it stands gas,oil, ect are extremely cheap and the average person needs to do little to actually implement their uses in daily life. Solar which many people claim as the best alternative is still, for the most part, expensive and requires implementation of upgrades and work into modern houses to be used properly. This won’t always be the case though as we have seen with Moore’s law, which says through economies of scale, better manufacturing practices ect, new technology gets exponentially cheaper over time. While solar panels aren’t exactly new technology, the investment into companies that are creating them on a large scale is.
Companies like Tesla are purposely building large factories for solar panel and electric battery production because they believe in the long run if they can get the costs cheap enough, they can release it on a scale en masse. Doing so would not only make them a large amount of money, but they would be helping the environment as well. This is the main point I am trying to make, the greatest incentive to actually bring change to anything is money. If costs can be brought down to a level where it makes sense to replace fossil fuels with solar, it will be done. The efficiency will come in time as well. Solar isn’t the only alternative to fossil fuels either, nuclear energy is actually one of the safest and least harmful sources of power out there as well.
So why should we get rid of fossil fuels in the first place? I did say that it didn’t matter if you believe global warming is manmade or not. Fossil fuels are not bad for the environment, but they are bad for you and me, this is proven and fact. The burning of coal and oil has lead to pollution in places like China which now is seeing lung cancer on average levels far above the rest of the world. People in cities like Shenzhen, where many tech factories are located, have to see doctors on a monthly basis for sickness like bronchitis directly related to the smog. Waste from fossil fuels kill ecosystems, make land unusable and pollute our country. Many times the pollution ends up hurting the towns and families of the people around the factories that employ them.
The final point I want to make about why we should move off of fossil fuels is that doing so is simply a good hedging strategy. Say there is only a 10% chance that global warming is manmade and 90% chance that it is the cause of natural cycles. Should we move off of fossil fuels and incentivize cleaner energy for only 10%? The answer is yes because of the consequences. Even if it were a 5% chance or a 2% chance, the risk of doing nothing is that humanity dies. Short term economic loss for moving to cleaner energy is a small price to pay in the grand scheme of things. Making the change is just a good hedging strategy.
In 100 years we are suffering the effects of higher temperatures and we realize that we could have stopped it in the past by offering a bit of efficiency and money, are we going to say it wasn’t worth it? We need to look past money, politics and all the bullshit to realize that we as human beings have only one meaning, to reproduce and survive as a species. Ensuring that happens in the long term should be worth any amount of money.