Even if every major government were to slap huge taxes on carbon fuels - which is not going to happen - it wouldn't do much to halt climate change any time soon. What it would do is cost us hundreds of billions - if not trillions - of dollars, because alternative energy technologies are not yet ready to take up the slack.
Even if we didn't have greenhouse gases, were going to have to move away from fossil fuels, as we're going to run out. They're finite, whereas solar and wind are infinite.
All scientists who've looked at it know we have to phase away from burning fossil fuels. That means we've got to put a lot of effort into alternate energy technologies, but we're still subsidizing fossil fuels and not subsidizing most of the alternatives. It's not going to be an easy transition.
Just as fossil fuels from conventional sources are finite and are becoming depleted, those from difficult sources will also run out. If we put all our energy and resources into continued fossil fuel extraction, we will have lost an opportunity to have invested in renewable energy.
Solar and wind are now cheaper in many places than some fossil fuels and within the next two years, three, four, five years at the most. What the exponential curve does isn't going to go away. It is totally over for fossil fuels and nuclear. Nuclear's actually gone out.
As Governor of Colorado, I will continue to transition our state away from fossil fuels to more clean, renewable sources of energy.
Yet now the industrialized world is moving away from fossil fuels and moving towards renewable sources of energy. And because we have not invested so much into education, we don't have the technology and sometimes we don't even have the capital to buy this technology.
We must transition away from the dirtiest fossil fuels toward renewable sources of energy for the sake of our economy and our planet.
The Hillary Clinton foreign policy has cost America thousands of lives and trillions and trillions of dollars, and unleashed ISIS across the world.
Remember that the problem is bigger than the car you drive or the types of lightbulbs in city hall. We need a fundamental shift away from dirty fossil fuels that spew carbon pollution. To make that happen, we need to put pressure on our leaders to take the bold actions necessary to move us off dirty sources of energy.
We're going to get off fossil fuels, no question. We may not do it quickly enough to avoid some pain, and I'm quite worried about that. But by the 22nd century, there's no way we'll be on fossil fuels.
Clinton understands that climate change is real, is caused by human activity and is one of the great environmental crises facing our planet. She knows that we must transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and move aggressively to energy efficiency and sustainable energy.
Every candidate running for president has got to answer the following very simple question: At a time when we need to address the planetary crisis of climate change, and transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainability, should we continue to give $135 billion in tax breaks and subsidies over the next decade to fossil fuel companies?
World leaders need to realize that the cost of transforming the global energy system is far less than coping with the consequences of burning the planet's remaining fossil fuels.
It will be nearly impossible to slow warming appreciably without condemning much of the world to poverty unless energy sources that emit little or no carbon dioxide become competitive with conventional fossil fuels.
Obviously, nu-que-lar power is, uh, a renewable source of energy, and the less demand there is for non-renewable sources of energy, like fossil fuels, the better it off it is for the American people.