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Comment by kardianos | Hacker News Reader

I believe we have the capacity to live on Mars and even eventually the Moon. The Earth is still much more hospitable then either of those. We have proven oil reserves that will last 100 more years. So lets transition to electric and nuclear before then.

Also, be careful of Marxians and other Ideologues who would look for any excuse to tear society down so they can try their social experiments again. Be that class, identity, or climate. Solutions, yes. Tear everything down because it isn't perfect, no.

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Actually we only have proven reserves at the current rate of consumption for 47 years. USA has only reserves for 5 years. The bet is that oil companies keep finding new reserves, but that's not looking well. Rate of finding oil reserves is something like 8 billion barrels a year but we use 30+ billion. And if we keep burning that oil past 2040 at our current rate, the climate could lead to the extinction of all life including human life.

OK, great. But if we stick to oil for those 100 years, we'll continue killing planetary biodiversity, which will cause unknown knock-on effects that will make it hard to grow food the normal way, even if we're only looking at effects on humans. Is that really a good way to live?

Saying that the current situation is imperfect is like saying that jumping off a bridge puts you in a situation that isn't ideal. We need to pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and start investing in alternative energy sources - now, not in 10 or 20 or 50 years.

My gut feeling is that the science/tech side of this is mature and becoming more so all the time.

Our true cultural failure is articulating specific, accessible, and optimistic visions for what the future could actually look like. Our current teenagers and young adults came up in a time period where dystopian stories were prominent. Maybe we need to see a prominent success of an optimistic worldview.

People won’t fight for an idea they can’t imagine.

We need to start investing in alternative energy because coal and oil are a very efficient energy vault. That vault gave us an easy leg up through energy manipulation/controlled release at a scale that is easy for humans to use. Fusion, solar, fission, etc. are all jumpstarted through this stored vault. Without it it is difficult to get materials built to even jumpstart us through the current knowledge base/technology chain. We will have to revisit a lot of technology if we don't use the next 100 years to step to another century or even millennium technology/energy chain.

e.g It is difficult to burn enough trees to extract enough electricity to mine and refine resources needed to build solar panels or even build wire for transport.

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