Some are very pessimistic that only 20 per cent of our future energy by 2050 will be generated from fossil fuels.
With a strategy such as I present below, 'only' three things are really needed:
Ha!
1. There needs to be the political will to sort out what is arguably the greatest pollution crisis that has ever faced human-kind.
2. The appropriate total costs of using fossil fuels needs to be actually charged. This is already more the case in Europe than North America. Fossil fuel firms will try a last time profit grab by raising prices on sale of fossil fuels to those unwilling to give up, so a severe profits / income tax approach is needed to severely lower the after tax net revenues from sale of fossil fuels. This needs to be done worldwide through legislative action by all governments at every level. Rather than subsidising non fossil fuels, it is better to tax heavily the manufacture of fossil fuels for use and their actual use in the home.
In effect, some sources such as Alberta gas and shale oil, fracking etc. go out of business because they will be paying the right costs for their contribution to pollution. There will be no false profit incentive for fossil fuel development because the pollution costs will be factored in by governments. This puts the capitalist innovation profit incentive where it should be to develop non fossil non polluting fuel sources as the main vehicle for profit. The market itself will never do this. It has to be done by stronger POLITICAL action. The present pollution barter system is arguably a failure because it puts the profit incentives in the wrong places.
3. Every household should have the opportunity to place excess and stored energy on the national grid. By not taxing the profits from such non-fossil sales, there is an incentive to expand capacity at every level. The result will possibly be what we always have seen in agriculture when the household unit can make profit. We will see massive excess supply, but in this case not of the usual farm products but of energy products. Eventually this will drive out all but the most efficient large scale producers as the increasingly bigger firms seek profit from scaling upward.
