Seperating these two things is pointless, because they are inextricably linked together. Whatever path of energy generation you choose to do, your climate policy will follow, because how we create and use energy will lead to either a polluted or a clean environment.

Advocating for fossil fuels means you are advocating for dirty air, polluted water, and blighted landscaped. You cannot extract and burn fossil fuels without polluting the environment at every step of the process.

Extracting fossil fuels is costly, and will only become more costly over time and resources become harder to extract. It also damages landscapes: strip mining coal, fracking natural gas wells, levelling mountaintops for resources. It also costs more over time in myriad ways, from long-term health effects, to higher costs for fuel, to unpredictable climate change.

Advocating for renewable energy will naturally lead to a clean environment. There is no resource to extract once a renewable power source is installed... it just happens over time, for free. Why pay for something that nature already does for us? Because there is no resource extraction, there is no fuel, and no pollution at any step, except when creating the solar panel or wind turbine, for example.

There is also minimal costs over time, to maintain the equipment. There are no associated fuel costs to run the generator. There are minimal health effects due to operation of RE power sources.

Which do you want, then? Costly fossil fuel extraction, paying increasingly higher costs (both monetary and environmental) for continued use, and a degraded, dirty landscape that is unhealthy to live in, or a clean, cheap, easy to maintain system that doesn't damage the environment?
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Perhaps you don't care about the environment. Who gives a crap, right? Most of us posting here will be dead before climate change, as forcasted, gets really bad. Unless they find out how to make us live for a thousand years in that time.

That's fine. Maybe you care about democratic, free market ideals, though? Supporting a fossil fuel-powered economy means you support centralized, monopolistic generators that have vested interests in ensuring you use more and more energy. The more energy you use, the more money they make. This has been the method of energy generation for most of the world for 150 years and more. It's understandable why you would believe this to be the best method, because it's the only one you've ever known.

But there is now another way, in which you, yourself, are a power producer and you earn money from your house because it actually generates more power than it uses. This creates a positive feedback, where you are encouraged to save energy through efficiency and conservation. The more energy you save, the more money you make. This is possible now; there are jurisdictions that have already done it.

Germany generates almost 20% of it's total power usage from renewable sources, primarily solar. They are on track for at least 35% by 2020, eight short years from now. This will drive their GHG emissions well below 1990 levels. You know Germany, right? The saviour of Europe, the last, most sturdy partner in the Eurozone, with it's massive economy?

But you believe in the free market. You don't support any kind of government support for RE, because it has to stand on it's own first! (Even though fossil fuels are subsidized at a rate of 10 times that of RE.)

Not to worry. A simple feed-in tariff requires no government subsidy whatsoever. Indeed, in locations where subsidies were involved, it actually hampered the functioning of the marketplace, restricting it's growth and burdening the government with debts. The cost of the tariff is borne by every electricity user. In Germany, this has added approximately 50 Euros a year to the cost of their electricity bills, or approximately one cent per kilowatt-hour.

 

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Ambulances run on fossil fuels. When kids get run over by Hummers they are taken to the hospital in ambulances.

Without fossil fuels, those kids would die.

Why do you hate children?

 

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No its not. Energy is the fuel that runs modern civilization. Its not liberals jobs to manage the climate. They cant even manage the country and the economy let alone the climate

Talk about delusions of godhood

 

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Germany is moving itself into a dangerous position. Renewable energy is all fine and dandy, until the wind stops blowing and clouds cover the sun, while you need lots of power. Or when the wind is blowing strongly while you don't actually need that much energy.

Also in Germany most of the renewable energy is produced in the north, while it's actually needed in the south. The grid infrastructure that is needed to get an ever increasing amount of energy from the north to the south simply isn't there.

And finally, now that we decided to get rid of all nuclear energy in Germany after 3 people died in an accident in Japan, we may soon lose the ability to provide the necessary base load into the grid, and are dependent on importing energy from neighboring countries (mostly nuclear, ironically) and occasionally exporting energy at a negative price.

To fix this we need to do two (very expensive of course) things:

1) Expand and update the electrical grid.
2) Create massive amounts of storage capability for electric energy.

That will cost billions, and the latter may actually be physically impossible.

Both of these are constantly being stalled by the same eco-dumbasses who got us into this in the first place, the Greens, the NIMBYs and other enviro-whackos. They want wind energy, but please put the wind mills someplace else. Nuclear energy is evil, but we can't build that new pumped storage power station because some trees would die. They want to get us off fossil energy, but ZOMG don't build power lines near our house because it's ugly and gives us teh cancer!

People here are short sighted heart bleeding idiots who will end up getting us all killed, but at least they will die sitting on the high horse.

 

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The problem with that is government does not have the authority to set either items as policy





All fuel sources come with a price to the economy and the environment, that's why you must let the market choose freely what is the best not government pushing policies based on political donations and flawed ideological points-of-view





Not as costly as solar, wind, geo-thermal and alternative fuels .. hence the reason we are still using them.





Nothing wrong with avocation it when you cross the line an immorally impose it upon people without their consent is when it becomes a problem

I had forgotten how stupid EM was, then I read this post.

 

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If you mean they're equivalent in that the US has neither, you are correct.

 

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I won't support anything that raises my bill again. I pay too much as it is.

 

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I've got a pile of old tires out back that I burn for heat. Once in a while I'll go out and hack down some old-growth redwoods, but I only take the tops of them because I can only fit the top four feet into the car. The rest I just leave there.

 

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The OP is right about the two being connected, but who do you expect to change the policy? In a democracy, politicians do what those who got them elected want. There is very little money in renewables because there is no ongoing need for fuel. Wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, and hydro power have no fuel costs. After you build the power unit, you basically get free power. If we received all our energy from renewable sources, your energy bills would be about 1/4 what they are now. People don't see it, though. Too much interference being run by those who have money.


Fossil fuels on the other hand create piles of cash and create thousands of jobs just to produce the fuel needed to run them. All of which leads to political influence. So, fossil fuels will continue to be used until they are gone and our climate policy will be dictated by reacting and addressing those changes it creates instead of stopping the changes in the first place.


You get what you want, folks.

 

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