No. There is no honesty anywhere, that is my point.

> the need to displace fossil fuels really is very important.

Why? I don't necessarily disagree. But reality isn't a problem managed through a single variable. The things you list are not singularly caused by fossil fuels.

In fact, a very solid argument could be put forth about just how much uglier things might be without fossil fuels.

Here's the basic math someone would have to do before making the assertion that the elimination of fossil fuels --as a single causally-connected variable-- would make things better:

The simplest (well, not so simple) calculation is that, while we might eliminate fossil fuels we do not eliminate the need for the energy they provide. In other words, in rough terms, you still have to explain how we would generate, harness, create, transport and distribute a certain amount of energy per unit time (hour, day, week, month, year, whatever).

In fact, I think we can, in historical terms, state that energy requirements increase over time, they do not decrease.

The next element of the story is how we are going to replace the massive number of byproducts of fossil fuels that modern life pretty much depends on. We know that making complex hydrocarbons any other way is in a range between highly inefficient (which would increase the aforementioned energy requirement) and impossible.

My point --in stressing that reality is a rather complex multivariate problem-- is that, while it would be nice to think of a desirable reality without fossil fuels, in the real reality (just go with it) this is much more of an aspirational thing than an attainable objective.

The same is the case with electric vehicles. I have yet to see someone do the math on the total daily energy requirement of the installed fossil-fuel based vehicle fleet and explain how on earth (literally) we are going to generate that much energy without causing even more problems. Our current electrical grid is designed for current energy requirements (and power requirement, which is equally important). The current system, in any country I know of, doesn't magically have an extra 100% in power/energy generation capacity to support every vehicle going electric.

Reality: A multivariate problem. You push here and it pulls there. Not so simple.

> For instance, air pollution from fossil fuels kills tens of thousands of people every year.

Fair enough. Containerships, as a simple example, burn bunker fuel, one of the nastiest things you can burn. They are singularly responsible for more pollution along certain vectors than the entirety of the ground transportation industry. And yet we do nothing about it.

Why?

I can only guess. Part of it has got to be a case of "well, what we have works". The other issue --which I think is very real-- is that bunker fuel is, quite literally, the bottom of the barrel. It is what is left after you extract everything else from petroleum.

So, next Monday we stop using bunker fuel everywhere in the world. No problem. Right?

Wrong.

You see, all the other oil byproducts are still needed. Which means that the bottom of the barrel...the bunker fuel...would still be produced in absolutely massive quantities. Except now we are not using it, because we want to clean-up the planet.

Wait a minute. What do we do with it?

Well, we likely have to bury the stuff, dump it somewhere, make huge mountain-sized piles out of it. We would now use massive amounts of fuel (yes, everything is "massive") to run the machines that have to haul and manipulate this stuff. We also have to devote massive (sorry) resources, land and ecosystems to burying what we are not using. Where it goes from there I cannot even guess.

Once again, reality isn't a single variable problem. Bunker fuel == bad? Yes, no, maybe, hard to say. Because the alternative could be worse, far worse.

This is precisely what I don't see treated fairly these days. Imagine a politician taking the time and making the effort to fully analyze and understand the bunker fuel ecosystem and also taking the time to present this analysis to the voting public. Good luck. It is far easier to say "bunker fuel == bad", get votes, stay in office and move on. It's easy to show how horrible the stuff is (and it is!). It is impossible to show how much worse things could be if we don't fully understand what reality looks without it.

I'll overstay my welcome and give another example from real life.

A number of years ago a well-intentioned yet mathematically-challenged "science" teacher at my kid's school showed the kids this gut wrenching video animation that pretty much says humans are a pile of shit destroying the planet. The thing is a close as you can get to an ignorant politically-motivated pile of lies.

She was receptive to having a conversation. I asked if we could go through a simple exercise where we would try to understand what our small town would look like if we did not use the products of evil industrialized society. Petroleum is a favorite, of course.

I won't bore you with the details. Before we got done we had destroyed every forest in sight, had piles of human excrement the size of mountains, all possible fields where you could grow something in the region were dead, sources of water were polluted (human waste and other by products of inefficient source for everything) and more. At the extreme we were using horses to get around, etc. A town of a few tens of thousands of people relying on horses has a serious manure problem. We would burn trees for heat and cooking, etc.

As we extrapolated this from a town of tens of thousands to cities with millions and regions with tens to hundreds of millions of people, it became very obvious that modern life (or more accurately, modern population levels) would quickly become unsustainable if we demanded that humanity abandon how we got here and embrace everything "natural" an "sustainable". She was certainly surprised to understand the scale of the problem.

Once you start thinking at scale --planetary scale-- "natural" and "sustainable" quickly end-up with razed forests, depleted marine life, polluted water sources and a sky blackened with thick pollution.

Not to end on a depressing note. Yes, we are doing better, have been so for decades. We just have to be careful that we don't reduce reality to single variable problems, because that isn't reality, it's a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that.

Climate change is one of those. It is hard to find truth that is being discussed with honesty in the mainstream.