Conversation

Efforts to develop renewable energy and shift away from coal, oil, and gas are hampered by the colossal amounts of money ? still waiting to be made by anyone who is willing to sacrifice the climate, the ecosphere, and the future in favor of profits.

Here's Bill McKibben, in the Rolling Stone...
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If we are to meet the climate targets set by scientists, we have to leave 90% of the fossil fuels that have been discovered underground. And at current prices, that means stranding about $100 trillion worth of assets in the soil. If you want to understand why the battle over climate progress is so fierce — why the fossil-fuel industry fights so hard, with all the political influence it can buy — remember that $100 trillion. It’s a lot of incentive.

Last year, we were hit with a staggering number — $2.8 billion — that's how much profit the fossil fuel industry has earned *daily* for the past 50 years. Which is a problem, because the people making that money have the motive and the means to try to keep it alive.

“It’s a huge amount of money,” Aviel Verbruggen, the academic who calculated that figure, points out. “You can buy every politician, every system with all this money. It protects [producers] from political interference that may limit their activities.”

You can see this happening at the highest levels — at last year’s global climate conference in Egypt, there were 636 fossil-fuel-connected people registered in attendance, dwarfing the delegations from almost every country. This year’s climate conference, COP28, is scheduled for Abu Dhabi, and its chair is also the CEO of its national oil company.

Fossil fuel was pretty cheap from the start, but it hasn’t gotten significantly cheaper. That’s because it’s less a technology than a commodity — and you have to work harder to find that commodity now that the easy stuff has been burned. The coal is farther back in the mine; the oil is down at the bottom of the ocean now, or under a polar ice cap.

The endless payoff can’t last forever — eventually the economics of renewable energy will prevail. Any delay in shifting away from fossil fuels is profitable to Big Oil and damaging to the rest of us. So we must build movements to speed up that transition.
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FULL ARTICLE -- https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-to-tackle-climate-change-math-bill-mckibben-1234691661/

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateEmergency #CO2 #Emissions #KeepItInTheGround #COP28