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.
"It's called Megawatt charging because it delivers 1,000 kilowatts of electrical power at 1,000 volts, which is twice as powerful as the fastest chargers we have here in the United States."
That makes fast, long-range travel quite practical in an electric vehicle.
While this model greatly improves the charging speed, other electric cars introduced this year use sodium-ion batteries, which are heavier than lithium-ion batteries, but they have the advantage that in cold climates they do not lose either capacity or charging speed down to temperatures as low as minus 40 Celsius degrees, removing other limitation of electric cars.
So hydrocarbon fuels are likely to remain non-replaceable only in aircraft and spacecraft, where weight really matters.
The US grid is still 57% coal and gas.
For our use-case, 95% of our trips are to the shops, to various kids sports, to school, to the bus/train station, visiting (local) family, and all are very short trips easily within the relatively short range of the Leaf: ~100km. We still have our existing cars, they just get used less in favour of the cheapest option for the job at hand.
Even with our son being newly able to drive independently (so essentially needing to have three cars, rather than two, on the go at any one time), over the 18 months of owning the Leaf we've saved about 25% of the purchase price of the Leaf in spending less on petrol (including the electricity cost to charge the Leaf - which gets charged using the solar panels during the day, but more commonly using cheaper grid electricity non-peak overnight - yes, likely primarily off fossil fuels but from what I've read is more energy efficient than using petrol to power the car).
My point being, analogous to the "right answer" being to only using energy-dense fuels when necessary, we use the cheaper electric vehicle option when applicable, and only burn the expensive stuff when the better option is unavailable.
P.S. Looking at buying a newer EV with longer range, so there are additional and more flexible "better options", plus coming up to having a daughter who is also able to drive unaccompanied (four cars? :grimacing face:)
Humans really do not like change, the problems you have now are swept under the rug but tiny new problems are made into massive, insurmountable ones.
We had an emissions trading scheme[0] in 2012 meant to help in a transition to clean energy sources that was aggressively lobbied against by Australia's largest polluters and lasted only 2 years before being repealed by the incoming government by labeling it a "tax" that citizens would pay for. This led to a decade of policy stagnation[1] where we could've been transitioning away from fossil fuels.
So while energy density is definitely a factor, political lobbying is absolutely a factor.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Pollution_Reduction_Sch...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/0a453f5c-e859-4300-9355-46822c451...
It’s probably the hardest thing to replace but if we can’t we will be okay.
Long haul trucking and shipping and remote site power are probably the next hardest things, and maybe coal for metallurgy, but these are also small compared to emissions from electricity generation and routine car transit. The big sources can be completely converted.
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.
It's always far cheaper to keep status quo X than move to new thing Y. Until it isn't. Especially if you don't take into account externalities. Increased instances of flooding, cyclones, and wildfires gets pretty expensive pretty quickly. Losing ground to competitors can be fatally expensive in the long term.
Such things require the ability and will to think and prepare long-term, and it feels as if humanity has been migrating in the opposite direction since the 70's.
$150/barrel, much higher prices everywhere, less fertilizer, and less oil available could spur a faster turnover.
I would encourage anyone to look into what fossil fuels are actually used for because energy is only part of it. Some energy is for fuel (eg ships, planes) for which we currently have no substitute. A big chunk is electricity generation but there are so many other non-energy uses of fossil fuels eg fertilizers, construction, roads, plastics and other industrial uses.
China has undergone a decades long project to get to the point where they are the world leader (and almost sole supplier) of renewable energy tech. The plunging cost of solar happened because of China. This is a national project for them and no other country that I can think of has the willpower, organization and commitment for the deacdes-long quest to wean oneself off of fossil fuels.
Just between the rollout of EVs and power generation, you need a massive amount of infrastructure associated with it. Upgraded power lines, chargers, etc. Plus all the vehicles. Plus all the materials for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, etc. Those supply chains are completely dominated by China.
Just look at the LA to SF HSR project. This will likely take 20+ years and cost $100-200B, if it ever even happens. 20 years ago, China had a single HSR line in Shanghai to the airport. Now it has a 30,000+ mile network that carries 4M+ passengers a day and I've seen estimates that the entire network cost less than $1T. California HSR is 10-20% of that budget. For one line.
They reformed every level of government for this project. There is no expensive and corrupt procurement process for every city, every region, every line. They use the same rolling stock everywhere. Permitting for building the tracks and stations is streamlined. They make their own trains.
My point with this example is twofold:
1. EVs and electricity are only a fraction of the fossil fuel picture; and
2. Weaning ourselves off of that is a decades-long project in countries that have no track record or political will to pull that off.
Plastic ain't going anywhere, anytime soon (although many people wish it would).
If we stop burning fossil fuels and get energy from renewable sources, the remaining hydrocarbons will probably be used for plastics, chemicals and so on. If they aren't burnt this is fine.
It also probably makes more sense to use fossil fuels for applications where density is critical such as aviation, offset with carbon capture, rather than to leave oil in the ground and synthesize jet fuel using renewable energy.
Something like skin in the game. US (low), EU(moderate), China (high), Global South (high with caveats to leapfrog but financing crunch always there)
Renewables need front loaded funding compared to Oil & Gas which are the incumbents that make them sticky.
Otherwise is a lot of US consumers were rational and only price minded they would've run TCO calculators on EV vs ICE for day to day use even without subsidies
Global politics.
Switching to renewables is seen as capitulation to China because of their lead in tech in this area, especially when you consider that renewables generally introduce battery dependence.
They don't even try to hide this anymore. Watch US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick at the WEF:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY0t0h1gXzk
Explicitly stated: Don't be subservient to China.
Not vocalized, but the obvious alternative: Instead be subservient to the USA and various allied Persian Gulf (and hijacked Latin American) countries who will keep pushing the petrol alternative until it literally runs dry, even if they have to do it at gunpoint.
It will take a long time before the fossil fuel capacity we've already built gets phased out, and of course certain developing nations are still adding dirtier fuel sources, but renewables getting cheap is working.
These fit an energy niche that can't be replaced with any one thing. China is just now investing in an electric military, for instance. Shipping will remain difficult to electrify entirely (which is surmountable, but certainly not in production). Coal and natural gas plants provide on-demand power that is not straightforward to guarantee with renewable sources. And there are many (likely almost all) grids that are simply not up to the task of transmitting energy that used to be transmitted by physically moving fossil fuels. Air flight has no renewable alternative as of today—though, I suppose we technically do have renewable forms of jet fuel, it's extremely expensive.
& of course we will need byproducts for the forseeable future for fertilizer, materials, chip production, etc etc.
It'll take a couple generations. Of course we should be paying poor countries to not use fossil fuels, but instead we're trying to force switching back to fossil fuels ourselves for no explicable reason (as an american obv).
It would take a while to retool the plastics industry to use organic sources, but it's not at all impossible.
Arguably plastics are a stable, cheap and useful carbon sink and if climate is the overriding ecological priority we should be making as many as we can and recycling as few as possible.
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.
You can theoretically get it from water instead, but the energy cost is something like 3-4 times as high. It may be feasible at some point.
What I would consider different this time is that I think the US is in the looting stages of collapse and will be unable to credibly fight such a war even if a minority wanted to.
I have a bit of a conspiracy theory about Trump starting the Iran war as a grift to get $200B appropriated only to abandon the region and have the money disappear.
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...
The problem isn't conservatism per se. It's neoliberalism (IMHO). Even more broadly, it's capitalism. There's a meme in this space that basically goes something like "when you learn about capitalism, you become either a communist or a liar".
I read something recently about how people fetishize the 1950s, particularly on the political right. A big part of what made that possible was exploitation. Obviously we had a permanent underclass since segregation was still alive and well. A lot of these "middle class" families had "help" or "a girl". But another form of exploitation was oil. We were basically stealing oil from the Middle East for pennies on the dollar.
And then Iran came out and said "maybe we don't want you to steal our oil", we couped their government, we installed our own puppet government, we continued stealing oil and this all ultimately lead to the 1970s oil crisis and the Iranian Revolution. And here we are.
Back to the US political landscape, just look at the "opposition" to this war. It's either nonexistent or it's process-based ("Congress should've approved it"), not substantive. No mainstream political force is saying what we should be saying, which is that our Middle East policy is a crime, the sanctions on Iran were and are a crime and that continued exploitation of this region is unsustainable.
Both unchecked conservatism and unchecked socialism are toxic. Unchecked anything is toxic. That’s human nature, yet (to simplify massively) we still need both conservative and socialist elements in a balanced society.
If the big powers of the world had any competence a country with 0.5% of the worlds population would not be 3rd in total of grid connected battery storage and 8th in solar (note in total, not per capita). https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country for links.
Because of what Australia has done consumer power prices keep falling, even with the Iran war and datacenter build outs https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-19/power-prices-fall-but...
It's all based on governance led by research (in particular the CSIRO, the Australian government's politically isolated research department) where the CSIRO wrote a peer reviewed report mathematically demonstrating the cheapest way to improve grid reliability and lower prices. This indicated various ways to encourage solar and battery build outs. The Australian senate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate) which is made up of many many parties due to preferential voting passed laws enabling this and here we are.
I think that it's true that China's beating the USA in government competence but they are far far from the ideal. In fact China looks really bad compared to any competant government of the world. It just looks good compared to the USA.
We spent an estimated $8 trillion on so-called "War on Terror". The Taliban were in charge of Afghanistan before we started. They're in charge now. For $8T. 1% of that would end homelessness. 1% of that annually would be free college. I would mention universal healthcare but that would actually save money vs what we now spend so I'm not sure how you count that.
The kind of transformation China has seen in recent decades is what you're talking about with $8 trillion.
A despite the 20 year quagmire that was Iraq and Afghanistan, IMHO this war on Iran is an even bigger geopolitical clown show and will be more consequential to the end of American Empire.
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
Think about that. Falling power prices during high inflation with an energy crisis at a time when datacenters are being built out everywhere. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-19/power-prices-fall-but...
You'll note on that link in 1 year prices have gone from $87 to $50. Pretty much all attributable to the massive grid connected battery installations and renewable rollouts which had minimal subsidies. They were merely encouraged by policy which created a shorter time for grid price changes and arbitration allowing high response batteries to drive grid efficiencies. https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba...
It's straightforward economics at this point. Want cheaper prices? Demand what Australia has.
And yes, solar energy is not only greener (less CO2, less PM2.5), but also frees us from dependency on other countries. The future can be less centralized.
Some countries (Russia included) will lose their bargaining chip. Other countries (USA included) will lose the incentive to 'democratize' the Middle East.
Please - tell us.
[1] Honestly probably only really viable in China and the U.S. plus maybe South Korea; nuclear is unpopular in Japan after Fukushima, and I doubt the E.U. would be able to coordinate everything. Everyone else is probably too poor outside of petrostates, which have the whole petro thing going on.
> Honestly probably only really viable in China and the U.S. plus maybe South Korea
Because it costs a lot of money.
For example, India quietly (by HN and Reddit standards) passed a nuclear energy megabill in December which has a TAM of $214 Billion [0]. French (EDF), American (Westinghouse, Holtec), and Russian (Rosatom) JVs will now be able to build and distribute nuclear energy and subsidize the buildout [1] using Green Bonds, which gives them access to around $56 Billion in capital [2].
These players will also be eligible for India's $2.5 Billion SMR subsidy [3]. This also helps India's $160 Billion data center buildout [4] which is being subsidized by the Indian government [5], and is part of India's $205 Billion infrastructure buildout [6].
Other countries can do that as well, but if they are fine spending tens of billions of dollars - that's where the blocker arises, but most of the players with this technology are now backfilled with orders from this buildout and other existing buildouts.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-08/india-see...
[1] - https://powermin.gov.in/sites/default/files/Seeking_comments...
[2] - https://www.climatebonds.net/news-events/press-room/press-re...
[3] - https://www.trade.gov/market-intelligence/india-energy-small...
[4] - https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2227953&re...
[5] - https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/01/india-offers-zero-taxes-th...
[6] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-06-12/india-...
Courtesy of Fox News.
We invested _heavily_ and prematurely in renewable energies -- see my comment from a couple of years ago [0]. Since then, our energy prices were high for a while and now they're not much lower than the EU's average because all that investment needs to be amortized [1]. Two years ago, we ran a whole month on renewables [2]. Despite this, our increase in energy prices since the Iran war started has been dramatic and the price of everything has been going up significantly. I can't help but think about the ROI on all those renewables if they can't help make our lives easier at a time like this. I'd much rather we go nuclear.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37719568
[1]: https://eco.sapo.pt/2026/03/11/precos-da-eletricidade-e-gas-...
[2]: https://www.portugalglobal.pt/en/news/2024/april/renewable-e...
I think/hope you mean "I'd rather we adopt/use nuclear energy."
It’s the best bang for buck. Australia, one of the world leaders in grid connected battery storage and it’s a reason prices keep falling there. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/19/power...
Can you imagine prices falling during an energy crisis, high inflation and datacenter build outs? Well it’s happening and pretty drastically in Australia.
oldnetguy•1h ago
Zigurd•31m ago
OneDonOne•7m ago
blackjack_•17m ago
OneDonOne•9m ago
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-start-commerci...