The last 100 years have seen unprecedented growth in technology and science. We’ve been given Einstein’s General Theory, put man on the moon, split atoms, seen the rise of commercial aviation and we now live our lives seamlessly integrated with all sorts of computers and software code.

It seems as if we truly live our lives out of a work of science fiction. Yet, despite the vast wealth of knowledge we have gained in the last century, we still continue to fuel our lifestyles and our automobiles by burning the decomposed remains of dinosaurs and organisms that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. Think about that.

People wonder what happens to you when you die; so far it seems the answer is that you’re buried, you decompose, and then your remains are excavated and put inside a machine that burns them to generate electricity.

Imagine if you had to put gasoline in your laptop, or that your iPhone was coal powered; what a funny piece of technology that would be. Yet, we live in a world where news about oil spills and coal mine accidents are still all-too-common; the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the West Virginia coal mine accident, a smaller oil spill occurred this weekend in Salt Lake City, and those are just accidents in the United States.

This year, in April, China had four coal mine accidents in just one week, injuring hundreds and killing dozens. Doesn’t this seem a bit arcane in a world where we have the technology to harness enough solar energy to power the entire world in less than 1% of the total land area of the globe?

One of the most tragic aspects of this topic is that it has been brutally politicized. Instead of being an issue of logic and sustainability of the planet, it has been painted red and blue and become an issue of politics.

I was skeptical of even writing this piece because I didn’t want to come off as a “crazy left-wing environmentalist” (no offense to crazy left-wing environmentalists, I really do love you). But even that characterization is absurd. Since when do you have to belong to a certain political ideology to care about the earth? We embrace technology in almost every other aspect of our lives, so why not here?

Though the adoption of renewable energy technologies is certainly the future of mankind, how fast we get there remains to be seen. The biggest headwind slowing this process is the relationship between governments and oil companies.

By “relationship”, I don’t mean the typical coziness between regulators and the regulated, or the amount of money spent by oil companies lobbying or donated to political campaigns (though you can be sure those figures are high). When I use the term “relationship” I mean that for the vast majority of the world, the government is the oil company.

Oil companies are big, right? Huge, even. Exxon, Conoco Phillips and Chevron are privately-owned companies everybody’s heard of, and combined comprise a market cap of over $500 billion.

But the oil crisis of the early 1970s really accelerated the growth of a trend in government-owned oil companies.

Today, national oil companies — those sponsored or owned by government — account for more than half of global oil production and own or control almost 90 percent of all global oil reserves.

Exxon, Conoco Phillips and Chevron, combined, control about 20 billion barrels of oil reserves; however, Saudi Arabian Oil Co., Petroleos de Venezuela and National Iranian Oil Co. combined control 500 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.

Granted, it makes some sense that governments would own and/or control oil companies; when your only source of power is black fossil gunk, it’s wise from a political and national security standpoint to be able to control production of that substance.

The only governments not on the national oil company bandwagon are primarily western governments such as those in North American and European nations. But the inability to secure and control the production of your power supply is a competitive disadvantage to consumers of that country and can be dangerous to national security.

It’s important to understand that the process of weaning a world off of fossil fuels will be terribly slow and complicated. The entire infrastructure currently in place is created to work with these fossil fuels, and we will be going from solely fossil fuels to a whole portfolio of energy sources such as solar, nuclear, and wind.

But complication is no excuse for inaction, and with the a majority of the world’s governments also doubling as giant oil companies, it will be up to the free-market-loving western nations to pioneer the way forward in this science-fiction life that we live and make the move toward renewable energies.