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inactiveuser247 t1_ivnadhk wrote

Reply to comment by 685327592 in More people are employed in clean energy than in fossil fuels by kickresume

You would prefer it, but one of the features of disruptive technologies is that initially they won’t beat the existing tech in every metric. Over time they might, but that’s not the point.

Fossil fuels are pretty efficient now because we’ve had hundreds of years to perfect their extraction and build up their scale. If we were still reliant on people mining coal with picks and shovels and drilling for oil with tiny little drill rigs on land then that labour efficiency would tank.

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BillyShears2015 t1_ivonivy wrote

Relative to its competition (whale oil, burning logs, etc.) when it was still nascent, fossil fuels were still leaps and bounds more efficient in labor input vs. energy output, that’s why they became and remain dominant. Renewable’s competitive advantage going forward will be their distributed nature that increases system resiliency and reliability.

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