Because money obviously, but not the way you seem to think.

For the last 150 years, there's been loads of the stuff more or less lying around. It doesn't require much effort to bring to a usable state, and a cup full can move you, your wife and kids, your dog, and your car to the top of that hill in the distance.

Until very, very recently that's been a pretty unbeatable deal.

Now we're just building out the infrastructure and developing the maintenance skills. We're in the midst of a transition.

Cheap , fairly-easy, portable, storable source of energy, and the current supply chains are very high capacity. Lots of well understood methods and machines to use it. An oil tanker on sea or land moves a hell of a lot of energy to wherever people want it.

Population keeps growing. No way are all of those people going to leave that stuff in the ground, if "we" don't take the cheap stuff, "they" will. So it becomes like a race to find and extract it all.

Even if you don't want it personally, someone in your economy or military will be better off for it. Some people will go looking for it - and someone'll get rich if they find it.

It has a higher energy density than most other substances. I think it's like double lithium ion batteries.

Because it's cheap and easy to produce. Biofuels compete with food and forests. Not sure how much waste products can cover. Either way the biodiesel is about twice the price of the regular stuff here and has a lower tax rate than regular diesel (~43% tax rate)

It has a very high energy density. First Google result approx 10x that of batteries in EVs.

All the infrastructure is already built. EVs are becoming better and better options but the grid needs to be upgraded and the generation capacity increased.

Fun fact: Shell patented tons of alternatives to fossil fuel and then shelved them.

Sauce: worked there.

two big reasons:

• we don't have replacement energy sources at scale (this is of course party caused by inflated demand eg. data centers, always-on electronics)

• energy production is heavily subsidized in that so-called external costs are paid by the public instead of the companies

Until we can both reduce demand and increase supply, while also making corporations pay the cost of the pollution they produce, we're stuck with this shit.

Because we don't need to generate the energy, therefore it's got a cost advantage, even though the true cost of it is that it contributes massively to climate problems.

That is: batteries must be charged, the plants to make biofuels must absorb solar energy for at least half a year to have energy present, the solar panels to power the grid must sit and soak up that energy, generators must be physically turned for hydro.

the only things that have pre-existing energy that we just "tap for free" are oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear.

the best track for us to go on is to go for 3rd or 4th gen nuclear, and sodium ion batteries, imo. Solar is a close second. Hydro would be up there, but it's too disruptive ecologically.

The mix of actual reasonable answers and "everyone here despises capitalism, so I'll just blame it on conspiracies involving the rich" answers is quite interesting.

The simplest answer is that almost everyone is motivated by what they can get out of a thing, and petroleum is cheaper than the alternatives. The infrastructure is already in place, and the downsides (including climate change) are paid for by everyone, not just the producers and biggest consumers.

I believe two reasons: first, political will. Fossil fuel companies are large and entrenched, and have lots of experience lobbying governments. They block things like carbon taxes.

Second, a strange sort of game theory where each player (each country) thinks "My individual contributions to greenhouse gasses are just a small part of the total. They won't cause global catastrophe. Just an incremental increase in the existing catastrophe. The incremental harm won't fall directly on me; it will be divided among many countries. If continuing to use fossil fuels provides some small economic advantage, it outweighs the portion of the harms that will land on me. As for the harms I experience from other countries' carbon emissions, there's nothing I can do to prevent them."

Downvoted for ageism.

Money.

Switching to something new usually inherently costs money. (Capital expense) If you are scraping by, you can't afford another $500-$1000 a month car payment for a new car.

The option to convert an older already paid for internal combustion vehicle basically requires another $10k minimum, not including any regulatory stuff and that would be parts cost alone, no labor. Add to that regulatory/local registration issues with the diy route and you basically bake continued demand for fossil fuels into the system.

You can mitigate some of that by doing public transportation but you have to have a functional system AND an public that wants to use it.

This basically means that a large portion of the population who won't/can't buy new EVs. Is stuck using gas vehicles until you get lower cost used EVs. The problem there is that they are expensive to repair and NOT diy friendly. Add to that battery deg and lower reliability (in general see used teslas) and people are scared to buy used EVs.

Its a pricing problem that we have not gotten around yet. The subsidies helped but weren't enough to get more people in. Couple that with a bad economic situation where people are holding onto their older stuff for longer and you basically get only progress on the higher income side while lower income brackets have to still use their gas vehicles which means the producers keep producing and supplying to a captive market.

We can't replace it fully.

We can replace it with cars. We can replace it with trains as well, but electrified track is more expensive than just plopping a diesel engine there and filling her up. Track for that is just steel+concrete and rocks and stuff.

We can not replace it with air planes, helicopters, rockets. At all. We could reduce air travel and stuff like fighter jets.

We can also not replace it for cargo ships. And that's pretty bad news. Luckily ships are crazy efficient, so the actual CO2 and other pollution per ton and kilometer is very very low. If you get a delivery, that delivery comes in a fossil fuel truck to your doorstep, that truck will emit more CO2 than the ship will, going either from china to Rotterdam or the US westcoast. And also global transportation is probably more than necessary.

Anyway, the big problem we can solve are cars and planes.

There are also a bunch of chemical and industrial processes that need coal. Fertilizer and steel are two big ones.

I tried to parse what you wrote, but I honestly can't make any sense of it.

the people from the regions most affected as “lesser people”

Pretty sure this part is missing a verb and an object.

Because it is somewhat competitive economically in certain use cases and a ton of existing infrastructure was already built to use various fossil fuels.

The switch to non-fossil fuels was going to take at least a generation in most developed countries since you need to build out electricity generation and storage.