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Comment by yyyk | Hacker News Reader

The article's conclusion may be distasteful to some, but is in line with historical precedent. The 1973 Yom Kippur war and following oil embargo led to fuel economy standards, CFL research was started, search for alternate fuel sources and extraction method such as fracking... Many parallels to today, except "green" sources barely existed at the time.

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The French 'Messmer Plan', a huge buildout of nuclear power, was a direct response to that 1973 oil crisis.

War progresses many industries and humanity as a whole. “War! What is it good for?” by Ian Morrison is a good read.

I don't have any reference but I expand it from any war to any crisis. Ask for a new server at work and you are ignored for years until the old server crashes and cannot be recovered. Suddenly they will be funding for new server and approvals done within the hour. It is sad humans too often need a crisis to realise what is important and focus on it. No crisis no focus everyone just pulling in different directions.

That makes a lot of sense though, to the point of being tautological. When something is a crisis, i.e. an urgent problem, you deal with it. If it's not urgent, it can wait.

The fact that it would very often be "cheaper" or more efficient to deal with any individual problem ahead of time somewhat loses it's appeal when you consider the huge amount of potential problems that are costly to even evaluate as to the benefits of dealing with them in advance.

> “War! What is it good for?” by Ian Morrison is a good read.

Few people know this, but that was actually the original title for "War and Peace". It was his mistress who insisted that he call it "War and Peace".

Unfortunately, conflict is an unsightly yet integral part of how humans progress. When the conflict becomes violent, the stakes become high enough to force us to do something drastic. I guess it's like that probably untrue idea of boiling a frog alive.

Is fracking better than well?

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