What is this crap? EVs are all over the place and so is renewable energy. Emmissions are falling. We haven’t opened a new coal plant in a generation.

Ok, and how environmentally friendly is it to dig up the minerals to make the batteries, ship them to the plants in massive container ships, process them through polluting means, put them into cars that were also built from resources ripped from the earth using machines billowing CO2, and then shipped across the globe in container ships that pollute more than all cars combined on Earth?

And ok, we haven’t opened a coal plant in a generation, maybe in the US. China is still building them, as are a good chunk of the world. In fact, the IEA estimates to China’s use of coal will be up about 6% total from 2023, while India’s is an increase of 10% of coal use. They estimate global coal use will be down next year, 2025, the first time since 2016, and it’s estimated to drop 0.3%.

Ok? It’s bad and we’re working to fix it. That’s very different than “we’re all doomed and should stop doing anything”.

Do you understand how biodiversity works? You can’t just run a population down to a handful of that species, and then they’ll make a comeback as if nothing ever happened. There is not enough genetic diversity for a healthy and sustainable population to grow and repair itself from that. 69% of all life on earth has been wiped out, bud, we’re not fixing that.

https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement

Lmfao, “a legally binding international agreement,” yeah, ok. That’s why a single President unilaterally removed us from the agreement, right? Because it’s legally binding? And that’s why all of these countries are taking it seriously and making huge efforts to reduce global emissions, right? They’ve only had since adopting them in 2015/2016 to start making progress, almost a decade, and… Omg… Omg you’re right!!! We’re doing it!!!

Just kidding, from September 2024:

None of the larger, industrialized countries or the European Union as a whole are currently on track to meet the 2° Celsius goal. African nations Nigeria, Ethiopia, Morocco and Kenya as well as Costa Rica and Nepal are named by the Climate Action Tracker to be on track to meet the 1.5° Celsius goal using a fair share approach, while Norway is predicted to meet the 2° Celsius goal. The website analyzed the climate policies of 35 countries and the EU.

Wow, so the countries that are supposed to be leading the charge aren’t even on track to stop 2°C temperature rise, nevermind the 1.5°C we’re supposed to be aiming for.

But we’ve got more electric cars, and we’re still consuming and ordering things from across the globe, so it’ll probably all work out if we just believe hard enough.

Edit: Switching to electric cars doesn’t prevent the pollution of microplastics from tires, btw, another massive part of climate change everyone seems to just be covering their eyes and pretending they can’t see. We found microplastics in the clouds, ffs, nevermind in our own blood and bodies.

Nor do electric cars stop the glaciers that have already retreated way further than they should from retreating further. Where’s all that methane gas, y’know, the more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, remind me, where is all that methane that was trapped in the ice going? Oh, right, it’s feeding into the climate cycle, making things rapidly worse while we twiddle our thumbs and tell ourselves science will fix this for us, nothing else needs to be done.

Yes greenpeace, the Exxon funded anti-green terrorist organization, spread massive amounts of propaganda written by oil companies, including anti nuclear propaganda.

To your second point, nickel-iron batteries by the 1950s had developed to a point where they could compete with ice vehicles (not that they couldn’t earlier as well) and would have made great electric cars and trucks given they were already the primary power source for trains (just in diesel electric form). EVs as we know them today would have been ubiquitous had Edison not been terrible with technology and science.

With that the primary use for petroleum oil would have been eliminated, and we’d need large amounts of cheap electricity by the 1950s, resulting in nuclear being the cheapest option per kWh.

You might ask why bring up green peace if I’m going a half century earlier to start this alternative history timeline… Because there was a revival of interest in EVs and alternatives to oil in the 1960s and 1970s when greenpeace was active. We could have made the switch then to EVs and nuclear plants to power them. 1970s cars were so inefficient that even the nearly century old at the time nickel iron batteries would have still been able to compete with ice engines.

But if we don’t have nuclear to power them, they’re not the environmentally friendly option in a time before efficient solar and wind power, so oils execs just needed to attack nuclear plants and hey, there just happens to be a group of confused hippies arguing against nuclear arms… If you could tie nuclear power to nuclear weapons and get the peace hippies convinced nuclear power leads to nuclear weapons proliferation and also convince them nuclear disasters are somehow worse than oil disasters (which even at the time was not true, it just felt that way due to biased, sponsored, media coverage) then you can convince the core audience of EVs that it’s not worth investing in that tech or nuclear.

To your point in developing nations, yes they can. Foreign owned and operated nuclear plants are incredibly popular at this time, Germany’s nuclear plants in Brazil being an example of nuclear being deployed to a particularly unstable developing country with minimal issues.

Minimizing uses for oil helps carve a path to eliminate it and other carbon based energy sources. Even if nuclear cannot eliminate all use in its own, it’s a cornerstone technology that enables others to land the killing blow.