Here is the dilemma: We want what we can’t have, so long as market forces reign.
Each country sees the energy debate mostly through the prism of its local energy security issues; Australia’s healthy economy is dependent on selling coal (with gas becoming important) and importing oil.
However, the global debate is fuelled by anxiety over the four big environmental risks in fossil based energy (dirty coal, risky deep sea drilling, oil producing tar sands, gas with fracking) and their impact on slowing the rate of growth of more costly renewables.
Below is a really good summary by Robert Rapier of the mix of energy sources, and the pressures of supply/demand.
Renewable Energy — Facts and Figures: The Energy Collective
….Given the explosive increase in renewable capacity, why would the world have used a slightly higher fraction of fossil power in 2011? Intuition might indicate that this fraction should be falling, but not only did the fraction from fossil fuels grow slightly, overall consumption of fossil fuels grew by nearly 3%. So renewables aren’t growing fast enough to displace fossil fuels; they are merely supplementing them.
The main reason for this is that developing countries are gravitating toward the cheapest and most reliable energy sources they can find, and those tend to be fossil fuels. This was demonstrated earlier in this series by showing the growth of coal consumption in developing regions.....
