“Digging in on dying technologies” is an interesting framing.
There is no appetite for oil alternatives that would stop this from meaning the deaths of hundreds of thousands or more people.
The fact is there is no effective way to power a stable grid with modern renewables. Increasing the energy mix sustainably is great. But if people truly want to divest from oil and coal there number one issue right now should be how to onboard nuclear energy effectively. This has been true for decades at this point, but purist policies on the right and the left have left it completely unrealized or actively dismantled it.
Solar and batteries get cheaper to build and maintain every year (almost to an absurd degree, seriously, look at the charts for the past 2 decades), while nuclear stays the same price.
That's not to say that nuclear power is bad to have, but there's an extremely obvious trajectory here of cheap battery-backed solar everywhere, with few regulatory hurdles and obvious incentives for people to have their own mini solar systems and batteries that take load off the larger grid.
We can debate how much nuclear is needed, but renewables can do a lot, and just hoping that AI will bring nuclear fusion in 5 years is not a great strategy
There is no appetite for oil alternatives that would stop this from meaning the deaths of hundreds of thousands or more people.
The fact is there is no effective way to power a stable grid with modern renewables. Increasing the energy mix sustainably is great. But if people truly want to divest from oil and coal there number one issue right now should be how to onboard nuclear energy effectively. This has been true for decades at this point, but purist policies on the right and the left have left it completely unrealized or actively dismantled it.