What are some reasons we use fossil fuels?

Indeed. The first fossil fuel discovered (coal) made the Industrial Revolution possible, by leveraging the power of human muscles, draft animals and water mills by a factor of (very roughly) 100.

The discovery and exploitation of the next generation of fossil fuels, petroleum and natural gas, muliplied that 100 by (again very roughly) another 100, bringing the Industrial Era to its peak. Some of the things we take for granted that would never have happened without petroleum:

• Only about 6% of the population (in the developed nations) are employed in the food production and distribution industry, versus more than 99% just a couple of centuries ago. This made entire new fields of endeavor possible.
• Our jobs now only require roughly 40 hours of our life per week, instead of the 70-100 hours of the pre-industrial farmer. Even farmers today, with their engine-driven tools, work a standard week and have lots of time for education, vacations, entertainment, hobbies, and unfocused relaxation.
• The industrial economy produces a surplus no one could have dreamed of. By the 1890s, the U.S. economy toggled from scarcity-driven to surplus-driven. For the first time in human history, the average person could afford everything he needed for a modest, comfortable life, and had surplus income to spend on fun, luxury, travel, education, entertainment, starting his own business... or just more beer.

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki shaped the entire human race's attitudes about nuclear fission and fusion. Chernobyl and TMI didn't help at all, and in case we were about to forget them, we now have Fukushima. Add the not unreasonable academic concerns about storing waste that will be lethally dangerous for a longer time than the entire existence of civilization, and it's easy to understand why most humans would like to find an alternative to nuclear power plants.

Solar collectors in extremely high orbit are the safest option I've ever read about. They can be as large as necessary and beam their energy down in focused microwaves. There's only one little problem: Building and launching them will be the largest project, with the longest duration, that humans have ever attempted, making the pyramids and the transcontinental railroads look like Tinkertoys and Erector Sets. It will require the cooperation of all nations over several generations, surviving all political upheavals.

Yeah, we'll get right on it!

Nobody's talking about installing a nuclear-powered electric generator in an automobile any more than we have steam-powered electric generators installed in today's electric cars. Economy of scale dictates that you build a few gigantic generators, transmit the electricity over wires, and pump it into batteries in the cars while they're parked: exactly what we do now with our coal-fired steam-powered electric powerplants to get the juice into the few electric cars on the road.

The inefficiency of converting the energy multiple times is much less than the inefficiency of building and installing a fossil-fuel-burning steam turbine or a nuclear-reactor-powered steam turbine in everybody's Toyota.

 

There is no really good, obvious sarcasm emoticon; that would probably be self-contradictory. Mrs. Fraggle says that's the only one I need because I never understand sarcasm and when I try to do it it never works.

You pointed out that nuclear generators provide only a fraction of the world's power, although other members noted that it's not a small fraction. I suggested that the reason for this is that people are uncomfortable with the concept. Note all the antipathy to both existing and new nuclear plants since Fukushima.

This is one of those situations that our species handles very poorly. Everybody will wait until the energy crisis is dire, from the standpoint of both cost and availability, before they finally start approving the construction of new nuclear plants out of desperation.

Obviously it will take a while before they come online so things will get worse before they get better. Furthermore, many of those plants will be built in countries whose governments are just a teeny-weeny bit dysfunctional. Imagine, for example, the South Koreans paying North Korea to build the plant in their country and sell them the energy!

So corners will be cut during the construction, and graft and sheer incompetence will be rampant. This planet will end up with a few nuclear plants that make Chernobyl look like a textbook model of perfect engineering.

 

The burning of fossil fuels is an ecological nightmare. No matter how well we clean up the process (the Japanese have come rather close to zero nasty emissions), it still, by the very nature of fundamental chemistry, releases carbon dioxide. This can't help but accelerate the current warming trend, which may well reach a peak higher than has ever been reached in the warming-cooling cycles of the past. If this happens it could break the cycle and it's anybody's guess what the planet will be like a few thousand years later.

But using nuclear fusion to generate electricity, using only the technology we have today but managing it more skillfully, will not have any short-term environmental impact. It will greatly lower carbon dioxide emissions and reduce or eliminate our contribution to global warming. The impact is long-term, as we continue to bury nuclear waste in places where there could be an earthquake sometime in the next twenty thousand years. It's also possible (although I personally believe the possiblity to be too small to take seriously) that civilization will collapse, literacy will be lost, and nobody will remember what's in those dumps with the funny signs all around them.

This is why I advocate high-orbit solar energy collectors, beaming down the energy as microwaves, which are harmless enough that cattle can be grazed over the receiver fields even if you wouldn't want your children to play there.

Recycle what? I don't understand your question. The waste products of both external combustion engines (the coal- and oil-burning turbines in electrical power plants) and internal combustion engines (the gasoline, propane and diesel motors in vehicles) don't have much salvageable energy left in them. Since our engines continue to be more and more efficient, most of the waste produced by these engines is carbon dioxide, which is at the very bottom of the chemical energy chain, with literallly zero salvage value.

 

100 years ago our primary source of energy was coal. In much of the world wood was still being burned for energy.

If that statement isn't correct I'm only off by ten years at the most. But I'd be very surprised since steam engines were still the dominant providers of motive power and they all worked just perfectly with coal. Railroad locomotives could even burn wood, although I suspect it was probably too bulky for steamship engines.

 

No, they did not want these things to happen, but they took a calculated risk.

As you say, there is always a non-zero probability that something will go wrong. You can spend more money on more controls to reduce that probability to an even lower value. But as the probability becomes lower and lower, the next level of control becomes more complex and the incremental cost of implementing it becomes greater and greater.

There is a point in every project where you say, "Okay, we have to stop implementing more controls now because it will be too expensive. If there is a failure we'll have to deal with the cost and the publicity. But we've done the math and we thing the probability of that happening is so low that we can ignore it. Incidentally, by ignoring it we will save a lot of money."

This is how these things happen. To the executives of BP, the Gulf spill was a regrettable accident. They made a bet and they lost it, but life goes on and in any case the loss to them is purely financial. Their homes are okay.

To the people who live around the gulf, the spill was not a regrettable accident, it was a catastrophe.

The BP executives, in essence, played Russian roulette with those people's homes, jobs, and communities. Not their own.