No Stupid Questions

Because the fossil fuel companies are breathtakingly rich and willing to share that wealth with politicians in return for policy decisions that favour fossil fuel companies.

See also "lobbying", "bribery", and "corruption".

There are so many factors playing into this. Also, I don't want you to think this post is suggesting we should give up on alternatives, because that is not my belief. We need to transition to something, and really we should have started this process much earlier. This is more to illustrate why it is a slow process.

1. Energy density is unbeatable. Around 100 pounds of gasoline (15-ish gallons) will push most small road cars 300-400 miles. To get close to that range from an electric car you are going to need 1500-2000 lbs of batteries.
2. Transportability. We have yet to really figure out how to get several thousand kilowatts of electricity from where it is easy to produce to where it is needed without losing a good percentage of it. You can fill a tank with Gasoline and haul it across the planet and lose basically none of it.
3. Safety. Batteries can be very nasty things if damaged, the fires they can cause are astronomically harder to put out compared to traditional gasoline fires after a nasty car accident. Hydrogen is so much more violent in a fire/explosion than gasoline as well.
4. Economics. Yes, Oil Companies have a huge grip on massive chunks of the world. MANY countries entire economies would collapse if fossil fuels were removed from the equation. And those countries are powerful, and scared, which is a dangerous combo. They are fighting tooth and nail to maintain their GDP as there is not a good replacement. It could be a civilization crumbling event if all money tied to fossil fuels just stopped in an instant.

Our habits need to drastically change as a society. Fossil Fuels are not the only problem we need to change, as an example, industrial farming is also pretty catastrophically bad for the environment (as we are currently doing it). We need to consume less (both power and stuff), we need to travel less, we need to eat less meat, and we need world governments on board for these changes in a meaningful and peaceful way. Or we need someone to invent a way for us all to survive the problem or reverse it without us changing a damn thing, but that sounds like magic.

Fun fact: Shell patented tons of alternatives to fossil fuel and then shelved them.

Sauce: worked there.

It has a higher energy density than most other substances. I think it's like double lithium ion batteries.

Because it's cheap and easy to produce. Biofuels compete with food and forests. Not sure how much waste products can cover. Either way the biodiesel is about twice the price of the regular stuff here and has a lower tax rate than regular diesel (~43% tax rate)

It has a very high energy density. First Google result approx 10x that of batteries in EVs.

All the infrastructure is already built. EVs are becoming better and better options but the grid needs to be upgraded and the generation capacity increased.

Cheap , fairly-easy, portable, storable source of energy, and the current supply chains are very high capacity. Lots of well understood methods and machines to use it. An oil tanker on sea or land moves a hell of a lot of energy to wherever people want it.

Population keeps growing. No way are all of those people going to leave that stuff in the ground, if "we" don't take the cheap stuff, "they" will. So it becomes like a race to find and extract it all.

Even if you don't want it personally, someone in your economy or military will be better off for it. Some people will go looking for it - and someone'll get rich if they find it.

Because money obviously, but not the way you seem to think.

For the last 150 years, there's been loads of the stuff more or less lying around. It doesn't require much effort to bring to a usable state, and a cup full can move you, your wife and kids, your dog, and your car to the top of that hill in the distance.

Until very, very recently that's been a pretty unbeatable deal.

Now we're just building out the infrastructure and developing the maintenance skills. We're in the midst of a transition.

Because we don't need to generate the energy, therefore it's got a cost advantage, even though the true cost of it is that it contributes massively to climate problems.

That is: batteries must be charged, the plants to make biofuels must absorb solar energy for at least half a year to have energy present, the solar panels to power the grid must sit and soak up that energy, generators must be physically turned for hydro.

the only things that have pre-existing energy that we just "tap for free" are oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear.

the best track for us to go on is to go for 3rd or 4th gen nuclear, and sodium ion batteries, imo. Solar is a close second. Hydro would be up there, but it's too disruptive ecologically.

two big reasons:

• we don't have replacement energy sources at scale (this is of course party caused by inflated demand eg. data centers, always-on electronics)

• energy production is heavily subsidized in that so-called external costs are paid by the public instead of the companies

Until we can both reduce demand and increase supply, while also making corporations pay the cost of the pollution they produce, we're stuck with this shit.

The mix of actual reasonable answers and "everyone here despises capitalism, so I'll just blame it on conspiracies involving the rich" answers is quite interesting.

The simplest answer is that almost everyone is motivated by what they can get out of a thing, and petroleum is cheaper than the alternatives. The infrastructure is already in place, and the downsides (including climate change) are paid for by everyone, not just the producers and biggest consumers.

Money.