There are massive costs of not doing those things – and, as far as I can tell, those costs are greater. Coal is expensive and irradiates the atmosphere. Oil drilling causes spills, fracking causes earthquakes, and oil dependency has been a major driver of war for the past century.
> Coal is expensive and irradiates the atmosphere. Oil drilling causes spills, fracking causes earthquakes, and oil dependency has been a major driver of war for the past century.
Fracking lowers emissions. As far as I've been able to tell, earthquakes aren't a major problem with it.
This is where the activists end up showing their true colors, and why many people have grown to distrust them over time. On the one hand, they claim Global Warming is going to bring us to the brink of human extinction unless we act rapidly. On the other, they're trying to stop things that will lower emissions if it doesn't follow their preferred course of action.
How? Burning fuel from fracking emits CO₂ into the atmosphere, just like any other fossil fuel. On top of that unburned methane is often released into the atmosphere, which is much more potent than CO₂ is a greenhouse gas.
> On the one hand, they claim Global Warming is going to bring us to the brink of human extinction unless we act rapidly.
Extinction is exaggerated (I'm not even sure who exactly claims that?), but we are indeed making our environment tougher and tougher to live in. There are already places that have become too hot to live in for parts of the year, to name just one thing.
And I'm not sure how fracking lowers emissions? It results in large quantities of methane being emitted: methane is a very potent greenhouse gas (which eventually decays to carbon dioxide, also a greenhouse gas albeit a less potent one). Seems like fracking increases emissions, to me – not that I'm an expert.
Jevons Paradox tells us that embracing fracking to reduce coal emissions isn't enough, because any gains in lowering emissions will be offset by people burning more oil. There's a lot of underserved demand for energy, so gradual increases in efficiency (or, in this case, per-watt emissions) do not actually reduce total consumption.
Unless your plan to reduce emissions by embracing fracking comes with laws to restrict consumption - like, the kind of laws you'd have the villain in an Ayn Rand novel pass - then all you will do is increase emissions.
Of course, deliberately enforcing energy poverty is a bad idea and most[0] environmentalists aren't in favor of it. The reason why activists push renewables so hard is because the externalities on those are way better. i.e. pollution will not 'catch up' on solar and wind nearly as quickly, if at all, because solar panels don't emit anything when you're harvesting energy with them.
Also, solar is really, really cheap. It's pretty hard to argue against an energy source that gives you energy too cheap to meter, even if it's only during the day.
[0] i.e. the ones that aren't outright enviro-fascists. Though, if you were an enviro-fascist, your best bet would be to just do nothing and embrace fossil fuel accelerationism.
