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There is a finite amount of fossil fuels in the earth, and yet the U.S. is still highly dependent on them. At some point, things will have to change.
Renewable energy technologies are getting more efficient each year, yet there seems to be little political will to make the transition. What are the current barriers stopping the U.S. from adopting green energy on a wide scale?
Your premises are wrong.
The US is seriously expanding its green energy, now even faster than expanding its fossil fuels use. The US has large explored resources of coal and oil. Hawaii plans to be off oil by 2045.
Why isn't it going faster? --Money.
Oil is cheap. Even in places like Hawaii where you have to ship oil thousands of miles and you have lots of sun, wind and waves it is still about even cost per watt.
at some point, things will have to change
But we are not at that point yet. As Churchill said
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.
We are perhaps the best placed to ignore changes, and the least inclined to look more than a couple elections into the future as a whole. Oil will get more expensive as we use up the easy to get stuff, green energy will get cheaper as we get more clever and build more production facilities; the money argument will eventually switch sides, and then we'll see how good the lobbyists really are.
This is actually a rather broad question, but I think it can be answered with some broad concepts.
What are the current barriers stopping the U.S. from adopting green energy on a wide scale?
Barrier 1: Geography
The US is a large landmass. It takes a lot of energy to move goods and people from point a to point b. The nations that have made the most progress towards weaning themselves off of fossil fuels have also been countries with small land area. If you look for articles such at this one that tend to be near the top of 'green energy' nations, they also are countries that are rather small.
Barrier 2: Entrenched Fossil Fuel Subsidies
Globally, the fossil fuel industries are heavily subsidized. Green energy is also subsidized, but there difference between the two is immense...globally, green energy subsidies are in the billions, while fossil fuel subsidies are in the trillions.
Barrier 3: Politics
Federal government over the past couple of decades in the US has been quite partisan. And different administrations and congresses have had different priorities when it comes to green energy.
For example, if you google Obama's green energy subsidies you will see that most of the articles are opinion pieces from the opposing party's pundits claiming it as a failure.
With a changing of the guard, Trump quickly started dismantling Obama era green energy policies.
Barrier 4: The US Never Embraced Nuclear Power
(Thanks to jamesqf's suggestion...) Many nations (such as France) have a long history of using Nuclear power as a major energy source. The US has a period where they began investing in nuclear but there has always been a segment that have protested against it. The Three Mile Island incident was the nail-in-the-coffin for advancing nuclear energy in the US (despite the fact that it could be argued that Three Mile Island was a perfect example of how safe it could be given how well the incident was contained).
- There is a finite amount of fossil fuels in the earth
- At some point, things will have to change.
- Renewable energy technologies are getting more efficient each year
These are all valid points
yet there seems to be little political will to make the transition.
That´s where you start to get things wrong.
The "transition" from fossil fuel isn't something that will be made... its a process that had already begun! And it's not a matter of "political will". Its a matter of economics*!
As fossil fuels have a finite quantity, the costs of using it tend to increase as we get to the point where it is no longer easily available. In the mean time, the costs of renewable energy tends to decrease due to the advances of technologies that make it more cost efficient.
The process of moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy will advance as the costs of using renewable energy starts to matches the costs of using fossil fuels...
What are the current barriers stopping the World from adopting green energy on a wide scale?
It's that the costs of using renewable energy are still far greater than the cost of using fossil fuel in the vast majority of applications...
By economics i mean the matter of allocating scarce resources to better suit people's needs
There is a finite amount of fossil fuels in the earth, and yet the U.S. is still highly dependent on them. At some point, things will have to change.
Sure. But changing things is expensive. If the only problem is that fossil fuels will eventually run out, then we are better off not changing until we need to do so. We save the costs of switching over until then, and the technology gets cheaper. As we use more and more, fossil fuel prices will go up, making other technologies cost competitive. Eventually it would be cheaper to switch.
If you want to argue that we shouldn't use fossil fuels because of greenhouse warming, that's one thing. But arguing that we shouldn't use them because they'll eventually run out is to misunderstand the problem. People were arguing that in the 1970s. Note that we haven't run out, more than forty years later. This is despite the fact that at the time, we had less than forty years of proved reserves remaining.
We are continually finding more fossil fuels. The world actually has more proven reserves than it had forty years ago. Will that stop eventually? Certainly. But we may all be dead by then. The nuclear power plants that were built in the 1970s are already at end of life and should be replaced or at least refurbished.
The United States has plenty of coal. And with sufficiently high prices, it has plenty of petroleum and natural gas.
When people talk about this, they tend to talk as if we would suddenly run out of fossil fuels. We won't. We'll have steadily diminishing returns. It will cost more and more to extract the fossil fuels.
What are the current barriers stopping the U.S. from adopting green energy on a wide scale?
People don't want to make the changes to do so.
Expensive as they are, fossil fuels are still the cheapest form of energy. That changed a bit at the end of the George W. Bush administration, as petroleum got more expensive. But with the decline in prices since, options that worked with $4 a gallon gas aren't competitive with $2.40 a gallon gas.
There are also some problems related to managing the grid. The grid isn't really ready to handle green alternatives, as most of them are variable. Only hydroelectric is baseline power. Only biofuels are on demand. Solar and wind are as supplied. We get them when the sun shines or the wind blows. They may actually increase use of petroleum and natural gas, as those are relatively cheap on demand sources. And as supplied sources require on demand sources to fill in for them.
This makes power more expensive. Since as supplied sources require on demand sources that can completely replace them, getting rid of the as supplied sources makes the system cheaper. Because without them, we can just use the on demand sources. Beyond that, some of the on demand sources could be replaced with cheaper baseline power (coal or nuclear) if they didn't have to take the as supplied energy.
Power companies are reluctant to increase their prices (even assuming regulators will let them). People are more likely to buy on price than greenness. For example, Green Mountain Energy provides 175,000 KW of generation capacity, but that's only .5% of US capacity.
Note that some will argue that fossil fuels are more heavily subsidized than green sources. This is disputed and I don't want to rehash that argument here. Even if we accept that as true, people still aren't willing to pay the extra without subsidies. And politicians enable them. Some politicians want to reduce the federal gasoline tax, even though its fixed value per gallon means that as prices increase, revenues fall. Thus important road and bridge maintenance stagnates without sufficient revenue to support the costs.
Although a lot of people are implicating fossil fuel subsidies as one of the main reasons for their low price, those subsidies (mostly oil) are there for a reason. Renewable energy is great for a lot of things, but right now there is NO renewable solution for bulk transportation. Transportation of people and goods is really, really important for a nation's economy to function, so countries have to put resources towards securing enough oil to keep all their transportation systems functioning.
Electric trains may be a solution someday, but biofuels certainly won't be, nor should they be. We'd have to farm most of the planet's land for fuel instead of food, and that certainly wouldn't end well. I remember reading once how many acres of farmland would be needed to fuel a single 747 transatlantic flight, and it was shocking. Imagine habitat loss for wildlife, poor people starving because of high food prices, the list goes on.
Green Energy may be getting more efficient, but it is nowhere near as efficient as petroleum. It is less expensive and easier to obtain fossil fuels than it is anything else termed "green energy".
If you pick the measure of efficiency as being the amount of energy that can be produced in a square meter, you have 2.5 watts for wind, 5 watts for solar (best conditions) and 100 watts for gasoline.
You can see this by imagining a generator that you can buy at a hardware store which can produce 1000W and is only as big as your knee. Now think how many solar panels will it take to produce 1000W, when each 2 by 5 panel produces 150 watts.
You can make a similar case regarding the amount of money that it would cost to produce that wattage. For example, a solar panel may be $400 for 150 watts, and a 1000W generator for $500.
Politically speaking, green energy requires some comfort sacrifices. For example, in Germany one must make do with no air conditioner and as little water use as possible for the "green ideal". You would have to convince a lot of people to lower their standard of living to commit to that ideal.
(Please note that I single out Germany because according to the Wikipedia article on German water use it is the country which uses the second lowest amount of water, and because on a tourist trip there of five European countries, I was told the reason that there is no air conditioner is because of the high energy efficiency green ideal of the country. Furthermore, a recent episode of House Hunters in Germany added some information about the high-efficiency water heaters used in Germany that take up a large amount of space in homes and therefore, are an incentive to not use hot water as much. However, not living there, I may be wrong.)
The information for watts per area comes from uswitch.com, a website that makes the case of why fossil fuels are still more economical than green alternatives.
For the same reason chip cards still show incipient adoption in the U.S., even while they're considered a much better technological solution to magnetic strip cards:
Social, economic and industrial inertia.
Let's take Brazil for example. Right after the 1973 oil crisis the number of vehicles manufactured in Brazil was one order of magnitude smaller (~750k units) than the US (7M+), despite having half the population (Brazil 108.4 million / U.S. 216 million). A strategic decision was made at the time by the government to switch to ethanol production in order to fuel the Brazilian fleet. Quoting Wikipedia,
The Brazilian car manufacturing industry developed flexible-fuel vehicles that can run on any proportion of gasoline (E20-E25 blend) and hydrous ethanol (E100).[...] The success of "flex" vehicles, together with the mandatory E25 blend throughout the country, allowed ethanol fuel consumption in the country to achieve a 50% market share of the gasoline-powered fleet in February 2008.
The two most important points here - the Brazilian car industry wasn't even close to reach market saturation back then, and manufacturer lobby wasn't nearly as strong as it is today; as a result, the government had enough political power to set this course. Meanwhile, the U.S. car industry was already a very successful aspect of the U.S. economy, with lots of lobbying power to spare.
The same inertia can be correlated to chip card use. U.S. have a huge technological base focused on magnetic strip, so efforts to switch to a more secure technological solution fight an uphill battle. A comparatively incipient presence in Brazil allowed credit companies to successfully implement EMV to the extent that magnetic strip-based cards are virtually nonexistent.
Part of the reason the US, and Europe, for that matter, still rely on fossil fuel is the expense of changing over. A new renewable plant costs far more than a fossil fuel plant whose cost was amortized years ago. And renewable plants aren't zero operating costs... they require substantial maintenance. With governments already running deficits, where will that money come from?
Part of the reason is that neither the US or European economy could function on renewables alone, with current technology. The most promising renewables: solar and wind, don't deliver power when it is needed. Wind farms shut down during storms or when the wind dies down, and solar quits when the sun goes down.
What is missing is a cost effective way to store large amounts of electric power, so that it can be generated in optimal renewable conditions, yet be available when it is needed to run a nation's economy. That solution is in progress. Nations could help by cutting funding on climate research, and boosting funding for the solution to climate change, which we already know: use less fossil fuel. Duh just doesn't say it.
As for alternate fuel autos, a lone US company has done far more than any country in that regard.
Until the first part of this decade, the available all electric vehicles were fairly pitiful (g-wiz), accepting the idea that one had to suffer to be green.
Enter Elon Musk and the Tesla Model S - the first all electric car that people actually want to own, and not just because it's electric... it's a terrific (albeit pricey) car. And the price is about the same as, say, a BMW 5 series, which the Model S competes with.
So the powerful auto lobby and the powerful oil lobby couldn't stop one person who nearly went broke getting Tesla off the ground.
Since Tesla rose to fame, some auto makers have gone back to the drawing board and have begun to come up with viable, practical, decent electric cars. This wasn't a conspiracy, it was more dull auto executives and entrenched thinking. Nothing like losing sales to get them moving.
The upcoming Tesla model 3, at USD$35k with a 200 mile range, is definitely a positive step, as is the half million pre orders for it... with a $1k deposit. The interest is there. When someone can develop an all electric car, with a 500 mile range, priced at under $25k, people will buy it. Not to be green, but because it's a better deal. In the US, if 1/4 of the cars on the road were all electric, we could shut off foreign oil purchases completely, from the ME and elsewhere.
In the end, that is what it will take to get us off of fossil fuel. The replacement not only has to be green, it has to be less expensive than fossil fuel, or enough short sighted people will go to the polls and vote in legislators to restore their lower power bills.
