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by hueving 3991 days ago
That last statement is unfounded. With the current price of fossil fuels, there is no evidence that renewables pay back after 20 years.
2 comments

The current price of fossil fuels is not sustainable, and has wildly fluctuated over the last decade. It's not really a metric that can be used for long term planning, except to say that fossil fuels are finite (in the "human scale" of time. Everything is finite if you want to get pedantic.), and therefore the cost will eventually go up if we keep relying on them.

The varying monetary cost of fossil fuels also causes huge destabilization of the world economy (See 1973 OPEC crisis etc). It would make the global economy much more stable if we could eliminate such an unpredictable variable.

Also, mathematically, something that is "renewable" will, given time, obviously provide a better ROI than something that isn't. The figure of 20 years may not be accurate, but fossil fuels will never pay back. Once used, they're practically gone for good.

>Also, mathematically, something that is "renewable" will, given time, obviously provide a better ROI than something that isn't.

Only on a global scale, but people don't act globally. The ROI for the actual entity buying the windmills will be worse if natural gas prices are almost nothing.

By that logic, the fact that heating with wood is cheap means that converting to oil or gas was not a good thing at the time.

Oil might stay cheap, or it might not, depending on supply. That should have little impact on a shift to sustainable energy.