No Stupid Questions

Despite the replies, the real answer is that it's not as simple as "stopping drilling".

The fossil fuel industry isn't just oil and fuel...it's quite literally everything.

• The vulkanized rubber in the tires of your electric vehicle...yep...petroleum based.

• The hard plastic that forms the interior panels, and the side walls, the steering wheel and literally everything else made of plastic on the planet? You guessed it...petroleum based.

• The lubricants that keep the chains chaining, the gears gearing, the whirligigs whirling and the moving parts moving....once again...petroleum based.

• Much of the cosmetics industry, as well as chapsticks, lotions, sunscreens, etc.... Yep...all have at least some petroleum based ingredients.

• The calking and rubber cement that keeps the tiles your walking on stuck to the floor...yep...you guessed it.

Are you starting to get it?

Hippies can complain all they want, and I ABSOLUTELY agree that we need to be moving away from the petroleum industry faster. But it's not a matter of switching to electric cars because EVERY part of modern life is from the roads we drive on to the keyboard I'm typing this one, is in some way or another making use of a petroleum based product.

We have a long hard road before that's not the case anymore.

Geopolitics. Coal is available in tons of places and cheap to use and extract.

Money mostly. It generates a lot of profit and it costs money to switch. In many of countries oil, gas, etc. are like a huge portion of their GDP. It's like trying to get people to eat less meat. It would be better and more environmentally friendly, but everyone is too dependent on meat.

Because a cabal of evil rich people are holding the human race hostage so they can extract money from everyone so they can rape children on private islands.

They is used because of ignorance

There are a couple of things about battery storage, a grid built on renewables needs ride through capacity and it needs to be able to meet surges in demand. In fact all grids do. Batteries do that and remove the need for hot standby gas generators but at the moment due to lack of capacity, not all fossil fuel generators. A lot of focus is on batteries as the backup for loss of wind or sun, the spread of renewables over a large geographical area and interconnected grids provides greater assurance.

Established supply chain, workforce knowledge. Energy density. Ease of use.

Most if not all power used is generated almost instantly as needed. So when you look at solar (which is a great renewable) you run into the fact that it only generates power while the sun is out, and a specific amount of power.

This causes the problem of, how do you generate power at night and what do you do on rainy days or if a cloud covers the panels. You can substitute this with other renewable energy sources: wind, hydro, and nuclear, but wind has similar issues as solar and hydro and nuclear have huge upfront costs and take years to build.

So this is where coal and natural gas come in. Coal has the downside of being really bad for the environment but can start up within 10ish minutes of being needed. Gas is better for emissions (not great), but takes more time to startup.

A lot of companies use a mix of things along with buying and selling power with other companies (similar to a stock market). There are thoughts of trying to store power or looking at small scale nuclear plants.

Solar chart through the day:

Power use throughout the day:

Source: I work for a large power company

$

Money, They cornered the market and then they started yielding the profits from it to exert political influence. That's why molten Salt Thorium Reactors were abandoned by american scientists in the 60s. With nuclear power it would mean the end of for profit energy consumption. That plus the surveillance network of the billionaire class is what's fueling all of the political tensions and far-right (See Fascism) around the world. Denmark is already capable of producing over 140% of its daily energy usage through wind alone. The guardian wrote an article about it in 2015. Wind is still less than 1% of all global energy production. Alberta gets 300 days of sun a year, but have been brainwashed by big oil to invent and reflexively disavow any information otherwise. Then the fossil fuel industry and tech industry launched the Brexit disinformation campaign to weaken the EU that same year. With the advent of China as well as Copenhagen Atomics producing working prototype reactors capable of producing staggeringly vast amounts of energy with less than 1000x the nuclear waste of traditional light water reactors, the change is inevitable. That's what all of this is for them the war in Ukraine, Trump, Italy, Romania. It's the fossil fuel industry. With the advent of nuclear power, the obviousness of the effects of climate change and advanced battery technology, the only way they can ensure a continuous demand is war. There are no electric tanks. Russia is a petro state, Saudi Arabia is a petro state, trump is trying to turn the US into an authoritarian petro state. It's oil, they are the reason for all of this bullshit. Coal power plants are the most dangerous form of energy production, they kill approximately 1,000,000 people a year. We've had the technology to move away from them for over 70 years. That's 70,000,000 dead people. That is more people than died in the entire second world war and we aren't even talking about it because we'd rather just fall into arguing about transgenderism online than actually stopping them. It all goes back to fossil fuels.

I don't think the average person truly understands exactly how much of the stuff they use every single day is a byproduct of the petroleum industry.

The obvious ones are oils as lubricants and fuel to burn for vehicles, but it goes soooooooooc much further than that.

Here are some quick examples of things many people do not realize use petroleum byproducts in one way or another.

So while we very well may be able to stop using traditional fuel to run vehicles in the future we still have to find alternatives for a lot of other things. The industry is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Source

the transformation takes time ;-)

Renewable power is increasing, yes, but power demand is also increasing. Most of the power to run those electric engines is still being generated by coal. Solar panels are actually kinda energy-intensive to produce, too, and most of that energy is also coming from coal.

Swapping entirely to renewable energy is cool and all but not as easy as "just use a bunch of solar panels???" The issue is that most renewables are some mix of a: unreliable, and b: geographical.

Wind isn't going to be blowing 24/7 in most places, so wind is unreliable. The sun isn't always shining in most places, so solar power is unreliable. Hydro is amazing if you have it, but it isn't the kind of thing you can just build anywhere. Geothermal is also great if you have it, but again isn't the kind of thing you can just build.

Meanwhile, the power grid requires reliability. It's incredibly important. The obvious kneejerk response is "but batteries?" which would work and all but you're basically suggesting we produce enough power during the day to cover usage overnight, which is a tall order. There's also the fact that the kind of battery banks we're talking about would be ruinously expensive, and probably some amount of dangerous.

Also, like other people have said: coal/gas are cheap and ubiquitous. Both of those words might as well be synonyms for 'more money'. Realistically, that's the primary reason.

cheap and easy.

It's many thousands of years of solar power , concentated in to a storable, portable and fairly accessible and transmutable form.

Countries don't "generate" coal and oil, they suck it out of the ground. It was generated by thousands to millions of years of life and accumulated geological processes.

Because it is still the least expensive power source

I think you're under estimated how much fossil fuel are used and the electricity production from solar and wind farm.

It's definitely possible to replace all fossil fuel by electricity, but it's a massive shift involving multiple nuclear power plants (or the green equivalent which is even more expensive/complicated) , not a few windfarm and solar panel over the parking lot. And today there is no political will to do such massive investment, let alone the NIMBY

I don't have the to write up a full explanation bc I am at the grocery store but this video covers it well Why Capitalism Loves Fossil Fuels

I recently set up some solar panels. Turned them on very close to noon. Well, look at that! So much power! Four hours later, i was getting 10 percent of that number.

I know that solar power levels change throughout the day. But when it’s put into concrete terms like “I can run my refrigerator on this … oh, only for 2 hours a day” it helped me really understand.

So to answer your question - we use fossil fuels in the grid to as a disposable battery to handle changes in demand and times when renewables aren’t available.

As for EVs - many train routes aren’t electrified. EV trucks are impractical for long-haul, and the infrastructure is nowhere to be seen. Even in EV friendly areas, it’s hard to find a charger that is easy to reach with a heavy-haul truck. That’s before we talk about whether there’s trucks to drive, and the cost of the truck. For individuals, an EV is simply beyond the finances of many people. Road trips are an edge case, but some people travel a lot for work and can’t afford to stop every 3 hrs for 30-60 min, if the charger is available, and twice as often in winter.

We are making progress on every front.

At least here (germany) its lobbyism and stability
the only way that fossils can compete to "basically free energy after setup" is that there is a law or something that raises the prices of renewables to that of fossils so that fossils can compete
also coal gets taxmoney to make it cheaper

fossil energy plants also cant like be put on or off at any time. They often need a day on start or something so if one turns them off they are off for a while.
so they are used as a "baseline" while renewables can be put on or down depending on need (or run extra low to increase energy prices but psssss as they are not allowed to do so)