I believe that is an accurate analysis. As to whether or not the fossil fuel industry has already passed a tipping point is I think still up in the air. That should not be confused with passed peak oil - I believe the only explanation for the exploitation of tar sands is the high price of crude dictated by dwindling reserves. I do believe the tipping point is and must be near, and when it is realized we will see changes take place quite rapidly all across the social strata. Consider the tobacco industry. Before their tipping point was realized they were able to quash a 60 Minutes report on the industry and here. The following is from: Tobacco Timeline: The Twentieth Century 1950 - 1999--The Battle is Joined
- 1992: LITIGATION: Supreme Court rules that the 1965 warning label law does not shield tobacco companies from suits accusing them of deceiving the public about the health effects of smoking.
- 1994-03-24: Wall St. Journal publishes, "Smoke & Mirrors: EPA Wages War on Cigarettes," by Jacob Sullum. The article takes issue with the EPA's 1993 report on secondhand smoke, quoting industry-paid scientists--Alvan Feinstein, James Enstrom and Gary Huber. - 1994-05-31: World No-Tobacco Day. Slogan: The media and tobacco: Getting the health message across - 1995-07-12: AMA excoriates tobacco industry over "secret" B&W papers. AMA devotes entire July 19, 1995 issue of JAMA to a study of the papers, finds The evidence is unequivocal -- the US public has been duped by the tobacco industry. No right-thinking individual can ignore the evidence. We should all be outraged, and we should force the removal of this scourge from our nation . . . - 1995-08-31: LITIGATION: $1.9 million awarded plaintiff Milton Horowitz in Kent Micronite filter case; only the 2nd time an award has been given in a liability case against a tobacco company. However, the suit concerned asbestos, not tobacco - 1996-07-19: LITIGATION: Massachusetts becomes the 10th state to sue tobacco companies.. - 1996-08-09: LITIGATION: FL: Brown & Williamson is ordered to pay the Grady Carters $750,000 in only the second financial judgement ever in a strictly-tobacco-oriented liability lawsuit. The eventual payment of $1.1 million on March 8, 2001, will be the first time an individual collects payment from the tobacco industry for a tobacco-related illness. Carter Atty: Norwood S. Wilner I think this tends to show that the tide of public opinion turned long before the influence of the tobacco industry on the political establishment began to seriously diminish. And it is only in the last few weeks that political figures have attempted to get big stores to stop carrying cigarettes. Point being: the fossil fuel industry is a long long way away from actually seeing their political allies turn away, much less witness a decline in revenue, both clear barometers of the health of the industry overall. I think it’s important to always start with a reminder of the underlying context. As I argued in my book The Great Disruption, dramatic economic change is not a choice we get to make it, but an inevitable result of physical science. This is because business as usual, with results like ever increasing resource constraint or a global temperature increase of 4 degrees or more, would trigger economic and social collapse. So the only realistic outcomes are such a collapse or an economic transformation that prevents it, with timing the only big unknown.
Interesting chronology of the tobacco industry there, but I don't think you can equate fossil fuels to tobacco. I'm playing a bit of devil's advocate here, and oversimplifying... Tobacco is a certain type of vice. Vice has always been, and always will be in demand. Certainly, tobacco usage was curbed via science and a change in public opinion, but big tobacco still limps by to this day. So this is less about public opinion, because most people don't actually care about how their energy consumption needs are met. This is more about economic forcing. If it's cheaper to not use fossil fuel, game over. Fossil fuel's political allies will turn away the moment that their pockets get lighter, which is of course driven by profit (or the lack thereof). The fossil fuel industry will not continue to limp on, it will rather abruptly die.
Sure, of course. The question is what will it take to make alternatives to fossil fuels cheaper? Take the automobile - to fuel that using something other than fossil fuels requires not only improvements in battery technology - which at this point may be maturing more quickly now than even two years ago - it also requires significant upgrades in the electrical grid itself. See:
As I understand it, upgrading the the electrical grid will cost money and take time. Until that happens I will be surprised to see electrical vehicles take up a significant share of the auto market, and until they do I think we have to assume the fossil fuel industry is in charge. Scientific American: Will Electric Cars Wreck the Grid?
Unless you were thinking of fueling the automobile by some other means? Clean Technica: Southern California Edison Offers Insight Into Impact Of Electric Vehicles On Grid
The power drain argument against electric cars is very weak, solutions have already been determined.
All that's needed is to have the cars pull their power at times of lower load, which is during the night. They also could use the car batteries to reduce the peak load (around 5-6pm I think?), which would help the electric industry, as the peak load the lines have to be designed for won't be as high. No links, as it's something I saw ~5 years ago on television.
Is it weak? Is the electrical infrastructure and its carrying capacity uniform nationwide relative to current demand? I don't know what the numbers are, but it seems reasonable to presume that on a hot summer night in southern California demand might not fall to far from capacity now. And given that our entire economy, rightly or wrongly, is predicated on a premise of growth one tends to expect electrical demand to follow an upward trajectory even in an absence of electric vehicles - assuming: the economy itself is healthy and no alternative form of energy has displaced electricity's share of the energy market. that in turn suggests that anywhere where the electrical grid is operating during any part of the year at peak capacity, an increase in demand represents a problem in demand of a solution. I don't dispute that those solutions do exist, simply whether or not they are already in place. The premise of the article above was that fossil fuels had reached a tipping point, and the author makes a strong case regarding coal - but there remain significant sources of carbon from fossil fuels that in my view have yet to see a down turn in demand of any meaningful significance.