one thing making climate change so tricky to fight is that many people have assumed advances in renewable energy would automatically lead to a decrease in fossil fuel use. but what's happened instead is we just consume more energy total. we take advantage of cheap renewables in order to consume more, and keep burning fossil fuels, too.
this is part of a bigger pattern: our society is oriented toward doing more of everything and calling that progress. what we need: reduce/replace harmful things.
@scott The US's fossil fuel consumption has been flat or declining for a decade, ditto for most of the developed world. All while our populations and GDPs continue to grow.
https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels
The growth in consumption basically all comes from the developing world, which is both good and bad. It's good because it means those people are no longer energy-impoverished (yay), but bad because we haven't driven costs down on zero/low-carbon energy enough that they aren't the *default* for a country building out its energy infrastructure.
scott f
Erica "digifox" Kovac 🌐⚛️⚡
