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Comment by stavros_ | Hacker News Reader

Back breaking labour, very long working hours, poor health care and for the most part, endentured servitude to those who own the land/mills/factories you toil away in?

All of these things are more true now than they were in the average subsistence based society. Amazon warehouse workers have a worse deal than serfs, and a much much worse deal than hunter gatherers.

Oh and this

we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels

Isn't just wrong, it's laughable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment

If you want a really long read - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31850765-energy-and-civi...

The tl;dr is that renewables cannot provide equivalent levels of surplus energy to fossil fuels, cannot offer the same reliability as fossil fuels, cannot perform the same functions as fossil fuels (e.g. shipping). Not now, not ever. Not possible.

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Your own link puts the EROI of renewables in the same range as conventional oil (wind slightly better, PV slightly worse), and way better than shale or sand oil.

And of course you can make liquid fuels by cracking water and then doing chemistry to add carbon (which can be from atmospheric CO2). This is what Musk has planned for Mars, the process is from 1897: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

Further chemistry can turn that into long chain hydrocarbons, from what I remember of school.

>All of these things are more true now than they were in the average subsistence based society

I don't think that's accurate at all. For one, we no longer have prevalence of childhood leukemia that we used to have. You could run down a long list of similar examples related to health.

For another, we have robust labor standards in most of the world which we didn't didn't used to have. Warehouse workers do indeed have appalling work conditions measured by modern standards, and we should be incensed by those. But I think any serious consideration of what, say, dust bowl Texas was like prior to rural electrification, or what an experience of hunter-gatherer life would be like for a person who actually wanted to go out and try it, I think it would be nuts to say such conditions are preferable.

As others have mentioned, your own link to EROI doesn't appear to make the point that you think it does.

>Isn't just wrong, it's laughable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment

Conventional oil reserves are declining so this article merely proves that renewables are superior.

Society is great...

...if you’re a well compensated tech worker having gourmet lunch delivered by benefit-less contractors paid slave wages.

“Amazon warehouse workers have a worse deal than serfs“

Could you back this claim up? I don’t find it at all plausible.

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