Comment by ordu
5 hours ago
> The difficult thing is that most old folks grew up thinking that oil, coal, and gas were great, and it is hard to teach old dogs new tricks.
Doesn't seem cynical enough to me. Some people make money on oil, coal, and gas, and it doesn't matter what they believe about the climate, they would do anything to continue enriching themselves. It is even worse, really, because they are not just some individuals, it is a big network of organizations. And some states too have their GDP dependent on a fossil fuel trade. You can probably talk a capitalist into surrendering their money-making practices, if they are damaging the Earth, but you can't convince an organization to dissolve or a state to go into a deep recession.
I agree about the incentives, but I wouldn't go as far as saying organizations can't change
But oil, gas and coal are indeed cool, you get some of the highest chemical energy density substances on Earth for the price of digging. It sucks that burning them reverts the atmosphere to something life isn't really adapted anymore, but the substances themselves are still pretty cool.
I still believe that in the future synthetic hydrocarbons will retain an important role for the long-term storage of energy, for which batteries are inappropriate, due to self-discharging, and also for aerospace applications.
Producing synthetic hydrocarbons is already old technology, which was used at large scale before the decreasing price of oil made that non-competitive.
Today the most inefficient part remains the capture of the diluted CO2 from air and its conversion into concentrated CO2, which is easy to process further, e.g. by electrolytic methods that are more efficient than the hydrocarbon synthesizing methods used in the past.
If only a small fraction of the money that has been spent for much more frivolous purposes, like AI investment, had been directed to goals like improving the methods for concentrating CO2, we would have been in a much better situation today.