WE CAN BID ADIEU TO FOSSIL FUELS WITHIN A DECADE

[anigbrowl]

4. A problem with this argument...

He states that the shift from wood to coal in Europe took between 96 and 160 years. Mainstream adoption of electricity, meanwhile, took 47 to 69 years.

...is that the increased utility of coal vs wood or electricity vs burning your own fuel is very very obvious to the consumer, and the consumer is the driver of market forces. Now the benefits of clean power over fossil fuels are great, but that utility is not as obvious to the consumer because they're just getting the same old electricity and it's not so easy for the consumer to measure the (hopefully) lower CO2 content of the air and resultant impact on the greenhouse effect. So even though consumers may know about that from the media or first principles, and even though some consumers care deeply about that issue, it just doesn't have the same sort of demand effect because the impact on quality of life is distant and diffuse rather than immediate and personal, compared to the historical examples.