I'd like people to shift the focus to that as much as possible where reasonable.

...that we have no choice except to stop burning fossil fuels (if we want life to continue), I guess we'll have to use all those things anyway until someone comes up with something better.

Of course, the unspoken issue is that we will be drastically reducing our energy use, whether by choice or not, no matter what happens (there's only 50 years of oil left in the ground), so it might be a good idea to get used to using far less energy now.

Seven million people per year more or less, the death toll from air pollution not including climate change.

The good old bomb paranoia is one I happily haven't seen for a while, but one should never expect any element of absurdity to go away completely.

Right now, in a country known as Ukraine, vicious bombing using fossil fuel weapons of mass destruction is going on, and the money for this enterprise was provided by antinuke paranoids, specifically the Russian oil, gas and coal sales to the German antinuke paranoids.

Ignorance and fear kills people.

At the turn of the century this bomb scenario was promoted by the actor Martin Sheen, using the 9/11 scenario in reference to Indian Point. If I recall correctly it was around 2008 that this exercise in extreme paranoia was floting around. If we assume I'm correct on the date, in the 15 years or so since this bit of extreme stupidity, around 100 million people were killed by air pollution, more than 5 times the population of New York State.

The reason the planetary atmosphere is collapsing is that people value their dark and often irrational fantasies over the observation of reality.

One again, in situations like this, fear and ignorance kills people.

Someone else just posted about Seattle and Berkley putting rules in place that seek to eliminate fossil fuels, specifically natural gas, as a home source of heat and cooking fuel over the coming decades. I think the way more locales should look at it also is require any new building, residential or commercial, to be at least 50% powered by on site solar or wind power generation including storage. This would lessen load on the grid, begin decentralization of energy production and bring solid alternatives to scale and thereby lower costs and efficiency as more and more in situ systems are brought on line

If those high density energy resources went away billions of us would suffer and die.

It's these high density energy resources (for all practical purposes fossil fuels) that sustain the current human population of eight billion.

The only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely is nuclear power.

I'm a pretty good mechanic. My favorite sort of car costs about $1,000 and I can make it reliable for $1,000 more in parts. (That's 2017 prices, which is the last time I did that.) That's probably why there are no electric cars in my future...

I bought a new car once in the early 'eighties, when I was young and full of myself, but I'll never do that again.

In the unlikely event I do end up with an electric car it will almost certainly be some kind of conversion that I can work on myself.

Hydrogen powered vehicles were always a bad idea, for thermodynamic reasons, and because hydrogen is such a squirrely gas to work with. Finding and fixing a leaky gasoline, diesel, or even LPG line is trivial compared to a high pressure hydrogen leak.

As it is now, by some planning and greater good fortune, I've managed to avoid the automobile commuter lifestyle for most of my adult life.

Generally the people with the smallest environmental footprints live in cities and don't own automobiles. I think we ought to be rebuilding our cities, turning them into attractive affordable places where car ownership is unnecessary.

nt/