Although the results are very similar, the motivation of energy independence is quite different that of climate change.

America has ample supplies of natural gas, oil etc. and so doesn't need to turn away from fossil fuels to be energy independent. Whereas in Europe we do as there isn't much natural gas or oil and even the coal that remains is difficult to extract and thus less economical.

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bluGill 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Even at that, America is rapidly turning away from oil as wind and solar are so much cheaper. The leaders are putting on the brakes, and the change is uneven - but there is a lot of wind and solar going up in the US even now and it has been happening for 15+years.

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tialaramex 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> America has ample supplies of natural gas, oil etc. and so doesn't need to turn away from fossil fuels to be energy independent.

In the short to medium term. The natural gas, oil etc. are in fact finite resources created over a tremendously long period of time in pre-history and so once they run out you're done.

You could run nuclear power plants much longer, perhaps even indefinitely, and of course wind and sunlight are renewable, Sol doesn't give a shit what we do, it's going to shine on the planet and cause winds here until long after we're dead. But the dinosaur juice runs out, it's a quick burst and then if you didn't transition too fucking bad game over.

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schnitzelstoat 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, exactly. We have a relatively short window of a few centuries, perhaps less, to master nuclear power (perhaps even nuclear fusion), photovoltaic panels, efficient wind turbines (including more complex offshore construction) and deploy them all at scale.

And to do it all before we cook ourselves in greenhouse gases.

I'm rather optimistic about it but it does seem that most people don't fully grasp the importance of such a transition.

	▲	tialaramex 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Ha. I wasn't talking about the cooking. We're well into "I hope we get lucky" territory on that, let alone in "a few centuries". I was talking about literally running out. The US is a large place with a lot of potential for extraction, so if you ignore the bit where the hostile climate kills them instead they could keep extracting at similar rates for maybe a century or more, but it does run out.