[JuniperMesos]

I want humanity to have the power to radically reshape the uncaring physical world to suit the needs and desires of individual humans. This requires harnessing as much energy as possible (as well as having the technological capacity to direct that energy towards ends that benefit human beings).

Harnessing as much energy as possible entails making use of energy resources much in excess of what's available via fossil fuel exploration; we should be thinking on the scale of massive solar panel arrays in space beaming immense amounts of power to Earth, the sort of structures that are plausibly the beginning of a Dyson sphere. Also, with prodigious amounts energy available, lots of ways of directly controlling the amount of atmospheric CO2 become unlocked, that are currently prohibitively expensive, and this solves climate change as well as a host of other human problems.

But we're nowhere near that point yet, and humanity still does need fossil fuels to power the current economy, which is the same economy that is leading us towards that energy-abundant goal. I don't want to unnecessarily delay a future where we're harnessing all the power of the sun, by prematurely forestalling energy use using less desirable fossil fuels right now.