Comment by throwaway55421 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway55421 | Hacker News Reader

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But we do need more energy.

Energy can fix essentially any problem we have. Need to desalinate water? Energy. Need to heat your Arctic home? Energy.

Being able to use energy in crazy and inefficient ways is a feature, not a bug. Everything you ever do outside of subsistence level agriculture is proof of that.

The ideal state of being would be one in which we have limitless fusion power or similar and we basically just do whatever we wish. If we get that and alchemy we win the Universe.

The problem is in not pricing in externalities. If I have a fusion reactor in my garden then I can use as much of it as I want and it has no negative effect on you.

If we tax carbon heavily then Bitcoin and friends will actually get us to that future more quickly.

That politicians are fucking around with stuff like low emission zones and labels on meat or whatever rather than just taxing carbon is almost genocidal at this point. It's hilariously off the mark.

> we do need more energy

Sounds like ideology to me. I, for one, need many thing from basic food to nice music, but energy on its own in not in that list.

I wonder what people picture when they say "energy" but probably not that thing that is equivalent to movement and that is always a constant by definition (at least here and now), and that increase entropy when we manipulate it (entropy being that thing every life forms is designed to fight).

Anyway, carbon in the atmosphere may be a bigger problem than a fusion reactor in your garden, yet I'm a bit concerned by how much faster "we" could destroy our environment by producing more useless stuff if it became cheaper to do so.

> I, for one, need many thing from basic food to nice music, but energy on its own in not in that list.

Energy is a dependency of both of the things you listed - and an abundance of energy makes those things more accessible to more people, yourself and myself included.

It's also a dependency of everything detrimental. My point was: it's not central in itself, but is framed to appear so because of ideology.

> The ideal state of being would be one in which we have limitless fusion power or similar and we basically just do whatever we wish. If we get that and alchemy we win the Universe.

No, using energy inevitably changes the state of world we live in (that is actually the point). Use crazy amounts of energy in a distributed and unregulated manner, and the world will be nowhere like the one we evolved in, and we will die.

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