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Comment by snek_case | Hacker News Reader

Slightly worrying notion but, if Russia believes that global warming benefits them, they might keep on extracting and burning fossil fuels long after everyone else has transitioned to renewables.

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Well the USA knows global warming does not benefit them, yet they continue extracting and consuming fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow. I'd first focus on that transition to renewables at home before worrying about what Russian energy consumption looks like in this post-renewable-transition utopia :)

My understanding is that global warming is only mildly negative to US as a whole long term. Coastal cities/region are obviously toast but they are only small % of landmass. Country will adjust just fine.

I'm not sure that's the case. Don't most of the population live on those coastal regions? And isn't there an ongoing drought problem that'll only get worse over time? These don't sound mild at all.

Unlikely. Fossil fuel extraction is expensive. It makes sense economically only because theres a lot of demand for it globally and companies can net huge profits. Without that kind of global demand, fossil fuel extraction will be limited to keeping the existing facilities open until they dry up.

For a preview of the future of oil, we just need to look at what happened to coal.

> For a preview of the future of oil, we just need to look at what happened to coal.

So people turning nuclear power off and burning lots of coal and gas to compensate?

Hopefully not. Global coal consumption has steadily increased over time. If oil follows the same pattern, we're all dead.

https://yearbook.enerdata.net/coal-lignite/coal-world-consum...

Coal is a lot more plentiful than oil, and much less concentrated.

Is there a cheap way to create fertilizers without hydrocarbons? Otherwise there will be demand for them as long as they are available. In other words, it's very likely that we will use all available fossil fuels.

> Is there a cheap way to create fertilizers without hydrocarbons?

There is cow poo if you don't count circulating carbon.

I think there is recent experiment about that... My understanding is that it didn't go too well in Sri Lanka...

There are only so many cows.

The Haber-Bosch process needs Hydrogen. Currently we get that from Methane, but you can also use electrolysis to produce it.

So, it's like we, the good guys, can decide to extract and burn fossil fuels as long as we want, but once we say enough is enough, everybody else must also stop doing what we have been doing for ages.

Indeed it might but its need for it is finite and renewables as more resources are sunk into improving them may eventually make doing so increasingly economically disadvantageous. As more of the world moves on it becomes easier to encourage different behavior as well as Russia ceases to have anything else anyone needs.

For most of this time we didn't know it was bad though.

They are a large country but a smallish population that is actually shrinking. Their domestic needs for fuel are pretty modest. It's their exports drying up that will drag them into the future. Considering recent events, that might be sooner rather than later.

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