I like Chris Turner's suggestion that the climate challenge is less like World War II and more like the post-war Marshall Plan. Right now the world depends on an energy infrastructure - oil wells, pipelines, oil tankers, refineries, gas stations, gas-powered vehicles - that gets 85% of its energy from fossil fuels. We need to build up a new energy infrastructure based on carbon-free energy, which means electrifying everything - especially transport and heating - and generating a lot more carbon-free electricity, whether that's hydro, nuclear, or renewable.
For consumers, not using fossil fuels (a concentrated and abundant form of energy) means that energy will be more expensive - that's unavoidable. Like using unleaded gas even though leaded is cheaper, because of the terrible effects of lead on children's brains.
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I like Chris Turner's suggestion that the climate challenge is less like World War II and more like the post-war Marshall Plan. Right now the world depends on an energy infrastructure - oil wells, pipelines, oil tankers, refineries, gas stations, gas-powered vehicles - that gets 85% of its energy from fossil fuels. We need to build up a new energy infrastructure based on carbon-free energy, which means electrifying everything - especially transport and heating - and generating a lot more carbon-free electricity, whether that's hydro, nuclear, or renewable.
For consumers, not using fossil fuels (a concentrated and abundant form of energy) means that energy will be more expensive - that's unavoidable. Like using unleaded gas even though leaded is cheaper, because of the terrible effects of lead on children's brains.
Turner is much, much more right about these things than almost anybody else writing about them.