I agree that his technological arguments are basically wrong, so out goes the rest of what he’s saying.
Pennsylvania is a fossil fuel economy now, through fracking, and we are idiosyncratically beholden to it in our federal election. Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Ukraine, Venezuela, Mexico, Norway, Denmark, Sudan, the Middle East and Iran... these are all volatile fossil fuel and mineral extraction economies, they do not export much else to us besides a declining pool of cheap labor or in Denmark’s case, cheese.
Many countries aspire to be mineral economies, not the other way around, life is much simpler that way. That some places extract minerals from the earth, and others “extract minerals” by converting their control of the worldwide supply of attention into ads, and that the Earth extractors are in Pennsylvania and other parts of the world while the Attention extractors are in San Francisco and Los Angeles, is also a big part of the issue.
It is indeed more complicated than “who’s to blame, consumers or producers?” This forum is constantly full of people whose opinions boil down to, “I should get paid for my thing, and everyone’s else’s thing can go suck it.” It isn’t workable. This guy isn’t advancing a workable politic for global action against global warming.
And yet neither is solar power, despite obviously fixing the carbon problem. They do not make solar panels in Indonesia or Iran or Saudi Arabia or Mexico or Brazil or Sudan, that’s a billion people right there who depend on fossil fuel economics. What do you think their opinion is about solar panels? Making solar panels is hard, squeezing oil out of the ground is easy.
And if there’s anything history has taught us, people will fight violently to protect not their profitable means of making money, but their easy means of making money. That’s the problem dude.