Cities have far more potential for efficient energy generation and use than houses.

Let's take one poor country: Brazil. 80% of electricity is from renewable resources.

You cannot buy pure gasoline at the pump, it's all mixed with renewable ethanol and the percentage goes up by law every year. Since the vast majority of cars run on pure ethanal which you can get at all fueling stations, some people choose to never buy fossil fuels for their car.

All diesel is mixed with renewable biodiesel by law, and that percentage goes up every year.

So if a poor country with the largest city in the Southern hemisphere can make such rapid progress, you're really out of excuses. The technology and prices are there. The question is electing the right people who will encourage it to happen.

Some will mention that Brazil is lucky to have a lot of hydro which is true. So go look at their huge investment in solar and wind which isn't luck. And then you need to explain the progress in transportation moving away from fossil fuels. There's a lot to learn from a poor developing country with huge cities.

Those massive investments are made in the hope for return, not the current elected people’s green goodwill. Brazil has lots of land and water which makes ethanol (financially) profitable and many mines that are better driven for national solar panel production than going to international market.

> Those massive investments are made in the hope for return, not the current elected people’s green goodwill

Could you please share the evidence you have of the motivations of the elected people? Anyone can make guesses and it would be easy enough for me to come up with a list of reasons that your guesses are wrong. I'd prefer a more evidence based approach. Lacking evidence, guesses like this can be ignored.

I'm also not sure why the motivations are even important if the end result is renewable energy, and especially energy that is more carbon neutral than burning fossil fuels.

> Let's take one poor country: Brazil. 80% of electricity is from renewable resources.

I dont think thats true at all: https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/brazil

Which chart are you looking at? I don't see a chart for electricity sources on that page. When I go to the page for electricity mix (https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix) and choose Brazil in the chart, I get a total of 77.46% of electricity coming from renewables (not including nuclear) for 2021. If we include nuclear, it's 80%.

It's usually higher than 80% without including nuclear, but 2021 had significantly lower hydro due to drought. Fortunately the huge investment in wind and solar kept that number close enough to 80%. Had that investment not happened, the numbers for 2021 would be much lower.

There were multiple decades in Brazil where 80% of electricity came from hydro alone.

I was specifically addressing "You won't get people to agree to make their life worse for the sake of the environment, no matter how much activists keep trying to push that"

That could as well be a city apartment, except for the rooftop solar being enough for the whole building.

> so everyone lives in a house in an American suburb

How about we get started on those and see how we go? You can also put solar panels on the roofs of appartment blocks and the distributed cost and maintenance gets even mroe compelling even if you dont generate 100% of the usage.