As the world grapples with the existential crisis of climate change, environmental activists want President Joe Biden to phase out the oil industry, and Republicans argue he’s already doing that. Meanwhile, the surprising reality is the United States is pumping oil at a blistering pace and is on track to produce more oil than any country has in history.
The investments could have been made to get us to where we are now a lot sooner. We chose not to make that investment.
pray tell, what 1980s tech could have swept in, I’m genuinely curious what you know.
Technology doesn’t have an era attached to it. It is whatever is created in its time. More investment means faster advancement of technology. The capabilities of the solar of today don’t have anything inherently “modern” about it. It’s just that it exists today, but could have existed decades ago or decades from now, depending on how quickly technology progressed, which is mostly a factor of how much time/money/effort are invested into it.
see the illusion there is if we had just invested enough directly into solar that we could have gotten to today’s tech faster. but today’s tech is a mishmash of pv, materials development, photolithography and a ton of other processes that took the intervening 40 years to achieve. Some of it could have been accelerated but I honestly can’t see how that would have changed the state we’re in.
Now, changing the narrative in 1979 - that’s a what-if book I’d fucking read. Carter hits Reagan for colluding with Iran and america wakes up to the scientists first warnings - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/ - https://e360.yale.edu/features/they-knew-how-the-u-s-government-helped-cause-the-climate-crisis - instead of helping big petroleum by subsidizing it to the tune of billions of dollars every year continuing today - we could have taken a turn towards the inevitable change, well we might have saved the ecosystem.
Today it’d take ww2 levels of focus around the world to avert the worst. But changing the narrative back then, oof. That would have been powerful.