Is it because of the interests of fossil fuel companies and their lobbying, or am I missing some economic factor?
We can switch to hydrogen for lots of stuff that requires carrying your fuel on your back, but some things get tougher because the density is just not the same as a hydrocarbon.
These are all surmountable (biodiesel, carbon capture->fuel cycles, bioreactors, etc), but they take time and money.
In the end, what will push us to get there are economic shocks. We're getting there, it's just painful.
Fuel density is logistically important and the US geographical position means that density is more important to the US than other nations. In other words, if we forecast that we'll be fighting foreign wars, fuel transport is an logistical problem that optimises for density.
The US grid is still 57% coal and gas.
And in the U.S., Republicans have done everything they can to hamstring the transition and destroy the billions of dollars invested by automakers into EVs prior to 2025. But even that can only postpone the transition.
The bureaucracy was moving the right direction - towards renewables - until the conservatives in this country deliberately changed strategy to emphasize fossil fuels again.
You can draw your own conclusions about motive, but this isn’t an accident.
We might always need some for various materials and industrial process, but wasting it on ground transportation is beyond absurd at this point.
There are other storage options, but they require even more space than batteries.
Oil and gasoline require very little space, have easy to handle failure modes, and aren’t that expensive to operate. Not expensive enough to justify changing nationwide logistics and support.
It’s also far cheaper to keep using fossil fuels for a year than build out entirely new infrastructure.
$150/barrel, much higher prices everywhere, less fertilizer, and less oil available could spur a faster turnover.
It would take a while to retool the plastics industry to use organic sources, but it's not at all impossible.
It's probably one of the last things to be created that way because it's one of the places where methane is used more efficiently than burning it... But fundamentally there's no issue here except energy availability and a short term supply shock.
If we're talking about renewables, one has to talk about China [1]:
> In 2024 alone, China installed 360 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar capacity. That’s more than half of global additions that year, and it brings total installed capacity to 1.4 terawatts (TW) – that’s roughly a third of the entire world’s 4.5 TW
And in 2025 [2]:
> Clean-energy sectors contributed a record 15.4tn yuan ($2.1tn) in 2025, some 11.4% of China’s gross domestic product (GDP) – comparable to the economies of Brazil or Canada.
and
> In 2025, China achieved another new record of wind and solar capacity additions. The country installed a total of 315GW solar and 119GW wind capacity, adding more solar and two times as much wind as the rest of the world combined.
China has decided long ago that this was of national security interest and it has become a national project to move to renewable energy in a way that I don't think any other country is capable of and on a scale that's hard to conceptualize.
Europe and the US have shown themselves to be completely incapable of planning long term and acting in national interest with regards for fossil fuels. There's no poliitical will. Both are captured by the interests of enriching the billionaire class in the short term. When it all goes to shit, which it will, they'll all leave and/or the rest of us will pay for this lack of foresight.
[1]: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/12/china-adding-more-re...
[2]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-drove-more...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47437516 Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence (reuters.com)
~3 days prior, 447+ commments
oldnetguy•30m ago