I’m 42 and I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t obvious that we needed to phase out fossil fuels. Global warming was already known. The 70’s oil crises had even convinced conservative politicians that “energy independence” was an important goal even if they couldn’t grasp the concept of an energy transition. The Exxon Valdez spill happened when I was in elementary school. (We did a “science experiment” where we put canola oil and water in containers and used different materials to remove the oil.)
Fossil fuels have been obviously awful for at least 5 decades. Imagine how much less CO2 would be in the air if in 1985, we got on the good timeline instead of the “Biff becomes president” timeline.
Have you ever considered that first world nations are just going to use whatever energy source is the cheapest until it is no longer the cheapest?
Then we’d be doing fission. Fossil fuels aren’t required to pay for their externalities the way nuclear is, not to mention that the fossil companies have spent decades lobbying and campaigning to keep from having to be responsible for their own bullshit, as well as campaigning to make other forms of energy seem / be less viable (either through PR messaging or regulatory capture).
Nuclear fission is not paying for the biggest externality either, its waste products. That for some reason seems to be the people’s problem. And even then there doesn’t exist a permanent storage solution for it as of today anywhere on the planet (yes, I know Finland thinks they have it figured out next year, but at a capacity of 5500t it will only hold the waste of the 5 Finnish reactors). It’s absolute insanity to me how this gets brushed away so easily.
Sadly it affected profits.
