Why Are Fossil Fuels So Hard to Quit?
The answer tells us what we need to do
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The climate doom headed our way calls for one giant solution — stop burning fossil fuels. As much as deforestation in the Amazon, beef production, and the melting permafrost in the Arctic contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, there is no way to stop climate change while burning fossil fuels the way we do. We know this.
As a result, many activists say we just need to quit fossil fuels. But “just quitting” turns out to be much harder to do than it is to say. Look at the trouble Europe is having as the Russian oil spigots have been turned off. Observe the political trouble in the US caused by this year’s rapid rise in gasoline prices. Economies that don’t have the fossil fuel energy their people need tend toward chaos.
Likewise, look at what happened in 2020 when the world economy was shut down by COVID. All at once, people “just quit” driving. Demand for oil plummeted. Ships full of oil were stuck outside of ports whose terminals were too full to take the oil. Owners were paying others to take the oil — eventually near $40 a barrel. The oil could not be sold.
But oil market chaos is not the story. The story for quitting oil is that the only way we could quit it was to shut down the entire economy. Cars disappeared from the roads. Grocery store shelves were empty for some products, and many other products were in short supply. Everyone stayed home. Social life stopped, and businesses failed. Schools and churches shut their doors. A multi-trillion dollar bailout of everyone — businesses, individuals, families, and governments — was required, and still, many businesses did not survive. COVID and its closed economy showed us what life without fossil fuels would look like.
Yet none of this tells us why quitting these fuels is so difficult. Three factors are the core problem, and they show us what needs to be addressed if we are ever to get off of these fuels.
Factor 1: Dependence on what they provide
Fossil fuels are essential to contemporary life because they provide for the essentials of life. That’s what COVID taught us. We don’t need fossil fuels if we don’t drive our cars, transport goods, or travel. We don’t need fossil fuels if we don’t need to heat our homes or businesses. We don’t need fossil fuels if we don’t use manufactured products, if we don’t process, transport, and preserve foods, or if we don’t turn on our lights or operate our computers. Today, the energy to accomplish all these things derive from fossil fuels.
While some on the fringe say, “so what!”, most people in industrialized societies can’t live without transportation, heating, cooling, food, and computers. The same is true for many in developing societies. The benefits of cheap energy through fossil fuel usage come to us in these forms. The connection to burning fossil fuels isn’t always clear to everyone, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. We feel it only when prices for these benefits go up — gas prices, electricity prices, heating oil and natural gas prices, and food prices. Those increased prices reflect fossil fuels actually being “left in the ground,” as many activists like to call for. While good environmentally, such increases become untenable socially and economically, especially for those who are economically precarious. Small increases in such prices can mean very difficult choices between competing needs that make life a living hell for these people. And many others don’t like the higher prices either.
In other words, fossil fuels are woven into the fabric of how we provide the basic and not-so-basic needs of society — which is to say, you, me, and the billions of other residents of the planet. We are utterly dependent on what they provide, and this makes them extremely difficult to quit.
Factor 2: The lack of viable alternatives
The second factor making fossil fuels hard to quit is the lack of viable alternatives. While there are solutions that may work technologically, the alternatives must be able to work economically as well. That’s what “viable” means. Most of society is at some level of economic precarity, especially when you look at it globally, so unless the alternative can keep the price of energy and its benefits the same as they are for fossil fuels, that alternative is not viable.
Total price, however, is not the only way to look at viability — we must also consider the impact on cash flow. Rooftop solar electric generating systems, for example, can get the “levelized cost of energy” down to $0.05/kwh or lower over the life of the system. However, the upfront cost of installing such a system is prohibitive to most homeowners, apartment building owners, businesses, and condominium associations. Successful and relatively well-healed individuals can make such an investment, whereas most of society cannot. Hence, even with the current incentives in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, rooftop solar is not viable for most people. Their economic lives are too precarious to be able to afford such a large investment.
The notion of a viable alternative, therefore, is most easily seen from the eyes of the consumer or business customer — it is in the comparative cost and cash outlay of the benefit received. The ability to drive places the way we do today at a similar or lower cost makes a solution viable. Hence, electric vehicles will not become widely adopted until this cost comparison is essentially equal. Heating our homes with renewable electricity must meet the same viability criteria. Until we achieve viability, society-wide adoption will not occur, and that is another reason we cannot just quit fossil fuels.
I should note one more thing. Some have argued that because viability is a challenge, governments need to mandate the solutions. However, such mandates lead to uprisings. Economic desperation tends to drive social and political instability. Mandates could help get over a small hump, but governments that preside over 2x, 3x, or 4x price increases simply don’t survive. When such a government falls, we will be back to square one, probably with a government far less amenable to climate actions at all.
Factor 3: The inertia of investment and infrastructure
The energy infrastructure of modern society is built as a massive long-term investment. Oil refineries have payback periods of 15 years or more. Oil fields are developed for multi-decade time horizons. Pipelines are 10–20 year paybacks. But these are just for the fossil fuel industry per se.
There is equally massive investment in industries that use fossil fuels. Automotive and truck manufacturing, HVAC equipment manufacturing, and home appliance manufacturing are all built to use fossil fuel-based energy, both in the actual manufacturing and also in their end uses in homes and businesses around the world. Then there is fuel delivery for gas stations, home heating, electric power plants, and other buildings, which include massive fleets of trucks, railroad cars, pipelines, terminals, and more. Finally, there is the conversion of fossil fuel into electricity by way of massive coal and gas-fired electricity generating plants, which also reflect huge investments.
These investments constitute, whether we like it or not, a large inertia against quitting fossil fuels. Consumers know how to use this infrastructure, and investors need a return on their investments. But even more importantly, they illustrate the new investments that need to be made to replace the fossil fuel infrastructure. A new network of charging stations must be built for EVs, together with new kinds of service stations. Appliances and manufacturing equipment must all turn to electricity, both for the manufacturing and for the use of the products, which means retrofitted factories and redesigned homes. Solar, wind, and geothermal electricity generation capacity and storage must be built to replace the fossil-fuel-based system we have today, and a massive upgrade in electric distribution via the grid must be accomplished to replace the fuel delivery system.
Why we can’t quit and what to do
When you have a very high-cost, long-term infrastructure built to serve the essential needs of society and alternatives are not yet viable to replace it, it is impossible to quit the existing system. This is what we are up against. From a climate action standpoint, this is why “Just leave it in the ground,” is a losing proposal; it would have devastating consequences to suddenly stop producing fossil fuels. This is why arguments like “We don’t care about those investments… let the rich lose their money,” may feel good, but that doesn’t answer how the new infrastructure gets built. This is also why a loss of faith in technological development rather than a big commitment to it is another losing strategy. When it comes to solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and probably nuclear, what other choices do we have? Energy needs must be met. If they are not, the catastrophic impact on society will be every bit as serious as climate change itself; it will just come faster and more suddenly.
Knowing what makes it so difficult to quit fossil fuels should enable us to see what needs to be done. We need to see clearly that human society needs cheap energy to operate. We need a clear-eyed view that while most alternatives are not yet completely viable, a massive collective effort to create viable alternatives is required. We need to commit ourselves to the huge investments needed to change how we use, access, generate, and distribute the energy we need.
All of these efforts also offer places to participate. Managing our carbon footprints is helpful, but real individual commitment lies in bringing talents to make these things happen — developing alternatives, leading investments, engineering new products and systems, selling acceptance of the new way, and so on. We cannot expect someone else to do it. We can’t throw our hands up and say, “It’s just too big.” We can’t simply rally around simplistic slogans. Rather, everyone needs to step forward and play a part with their specific skills. Work in an industry-leading the change, for making this change is the defining challenge of our era.
Anthony Signorelli
Ideas, insights, and imagination to help you live better in a worsening world.
Another thoughtful article. Thanks for showing us the way