[toomuchtodo]

Demand is hard. You’re at the whim of irrational human consumers (and all that that entails). Supply is easy. You’re at the whim of violently rational economic actors with control of assets.

Assume a distressed fossil asset is for sale, and you want to acquire it to retire it permanently. You’re engaged with someone who isn’t emotional; it’s just business. You negotiate on the value of the asset(s), and once an agreement is reached, transfer of ownership occurs and it’s a done deal. It’s not like consumers when you’re at the whim of their identity and self in some cases, trying to sell them on clean power or mobility.

Bonus points if you can use leverage (policy, relationships, whatever) to drive down the value of the distressed asset before acquiring it for forced retirement. That’s just being capital efficient.

[jjranalli]

I could be wrong, but I doubt the approach you described alone could reduce emissions at the scale required.

What I'm trying to say is that (I think) the root of the problem are the economic incentives for fossil fuel companies. It's easier for them to compromise with governments (who can't strong-arm them) and pay fines (which in turn gets charged to their customers). I don't think this problem has ever been solved.

But what if for some reason consumers, at a large scale, stopped paying for energy produced with fossil fuels? Wouldn't they be forced to adapt?

Consumers may be emotional, but can also be swayed with the right incentives (governments typically play this part). I assume this to be extremely hard of course, but theoretically I feel like it would be the only way to align all parties in the same direction.

[toomuchtodo]

There doesn’t appear to be any meaningful political or government will to implement a carbon tax or shift policy rapidly to deprecate fossil fuel use in a timely manner. Those, of course, would be the ideal path forward, but radical solutions will likely need to come from outside of government based on how we’ve gotten to here.