Democrats (at least those in non-oil producing districts) have been calling for an end to the oil economy since the Santa Barbara disaster of 1969 and the 1973 Oil Embargo. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House and Ronald Reagan made their removal a priority. Clinton and Obama invested in clean energy. Bush invented a war to make sure the US increased its dependency on foreign oil. Trump rolled back more than 100 Obama Era clean energy initiatives and actively supported new pipelines in the Middle East, Europe, and North America.
There has obviously been a partisan divide. I don't know the details of those 100 clean energy initiatives that were rolled back. It looks like some rollbacks were good for practical reasons (leaving Paris agreement, arbitrary fuel economy regulations) and some were bad (airborne mercury regulations weakened).
You pose this in a negative light that Republicans are constantly undoing progress towards green energy, which is true, but you neglect that Democrats try to weaken our current strengths in oil, natural gas, and coal which all provide fairly efficient and cheap energy. (And Democrats tend to oppose nuclear power for some reason- the cleanest efficient power source). Also, while I'd prefer new pipelines to be made here, having pipelines abroad would reduce our reliance on OPEC/Russia and put it more towards allies at the very least, as well as having the benefit of cheaper fuel across the globe.
Meanwhile Germany has very expensive power due to their large quick shift to "green energy". I don't want that here. It seems that in the meantime, we should support fossil fuels and make them as clean as possible (working on carbon recapture tech, for example) while we also support research into making green energy actually viable, as some only work when the weather behaves a certain way and massive amounts of batteries would be needed. Whereas with, say, coal, if you need more or less energy, you just burn more or less coal to meet the need.
? Biden halted the XL pipeline with a stroke of a pen. Biden actively opposed Nord Stream since he was a Senator in 1997 and as a VP on behalf of Ukraine but US has little influence in that deal. Not sure how you could fault any Democrats before faulting most Republicans on pipeline construction.
I apologize, I mistyped. I meant to say that stopping construction of the XL pipeline increased our dependence on Russian oil.
Blame do nothing ever Republicans and the oil companies that finance their campaigns. 85% of oil money donations went to Trump in the last campaign. Oil has been a top 5 industry GOP campaign donor since the 1960s. GOP policies have always favored big oil as a result.
Let's do this. The price of gas was always going to increase forever until nobody can afford it anymore. Might as well push up the timeline and make the transition now. Reserve our oil for defense, which is going to take a much longer time to transition to effective renewables, and for plastics- we are going to need a lot of plastic in the future.
I'm really not opposed to that, it just seems that you would like to do it on a much shorter timeline and with more top-down pressure to push the current huge fossil fuels industries out. I think that the way you propose it would make it incredibly expensive to heat houses and keep the lights on. The price of gas would eventually increase until nobody could afford it, but that would not have happened for many decades.
I think that we could realistically switch to almost entirely green energy in 20 years without all of the growing pains.
