Originally Posted by
CoffeeGrunt
The current system still makes a lot of money. Trust me as someone who works in the industry - it's glacial from an environmental perspective and many people genuinely own an exploitative view of the world. There's a lot of old, selfish men in the industry. Heck, the environmental company I work for attends a lot of conferences, and while we're not allowed to discuss clients, let's just say a certain well-known company that rhymes with "hell" is well known for client reps that simply don't give a damn.
There's been several industry summits recently trying to get an idea of what, exactly, to do. You get a wide spectrum. There's the, "stop everything immediately and save the world crew," who are often a load of hippies who propose this vehemently without proposing how. That's the problem, we can wean ourselves off oil but the infrastructure is built and bred for it. This view is seen as unrealistic by many because the dependence on oil is a fact of life, and despite using it with ever-increasing efficiency, the exploding numbers of people using it mean we're needing more and more each year.
Then there's the other end of the spectrum which you get a lot of people sitting at. Quite simply, "f*ck the environment." One of the guys I work with was at a conference where a rep honestly reacted to the problem in the industry where cetacean species are disrupted by the sonic booms used to map seabeds for oil deposits with, "well then they shouldn't get in the way of the oil then." These people are used to everything jumping at the click of their fingers, they don't consider working to another system. They're arrogant and callous in a way a movie director wold tone down for fear of being unrealistic, and they're in charge of a lot of oil production.
The majority sit in the middle, between the inevitability of our oil dependence, and our need to break away from it. The big question is...where? Solar and Wind aren't able to work to the yields we need, and coal would be even worse. Nuclear? If it could break the stigma, it'd be fine, but every proposed site is picketed into oblivion by, "concerned locals." The same kind of people who picketed wind farms a decade ago, actually. They don't care about the damage to the environment so long as it's out of sight and out of mind. Heck, the American people only really care because of Deepwater Horizon and largely because of the Gulf of Mexico's reliance on its biodiversity for fish stocks and tourism. The average person just wants someone else to deal with the issue, and the buck ends in some third world country to poor to pass up the money. Hence the reason why places like Myanmar are so popular right now as it stumbles out of a civil war in dire need of cash.
The only real option is Fusion, and that's still a scientific fairy tale until we finally design a reactor that puts out more than it takes in.