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Comment by WastingMyTime89 | Hacker News Reader

What got us there is burning fossil fuel not "innovation", even if you put scare quotes around it.

I know it's hipe to pile up on the modern world but I quite enjoy hunger being a solvable issue despite the population rising to unheard of before numbers, having eridacated or significantly reduced the impact of most of the nastiest diseases and education and well being steadily rising throughout the world. I don't understand how so many people got convinced that the solution is wallowing in sorrow and selfpity and advocating for a return to the dark age.

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> What got us there is burning fossil fuel not "innovation"

Burning fossil fuel IS _the_ thing that brought us here. There is no innovation without fossil fuel, there is no growth without fossil fuel: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-correlation-between-...

Plastic, transportation, medicine, food, &c. every single thing that allowed us to live like we do today is 100% fossil fuel based. Fossil fuel were a miracle, finding alternative will be extremely long and hard, if not completely impossible

> I don't understand how so many people got convinced that the solution is wallowing in sorrow and selfpity and advocating for a return to the dark age.

Nobody is advocating for that, it's not a solution, it's the reality we'll be facing soon, even if you don't want to. The choice is to be realistic and prepare for what's coming VS continuing business as usual

> I quite enjoy hunger being a solvable issue despite the population rising

Are you sure about that ? That as many people suffering of hunger _right now_ that there were inhabitants in the whole fucking world in 1800

> having eridacated or significantly reduced the impact of most of the nastiest diseases

All fun an games until bacteria started becoming antibiotic resistant: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4378521/

The very thing that allowed us to live like we do now is coming to bite our asses

Innovation and burning fossil fuel are not synonymous. Obviously having plenty of available energy is what allowed us to reach this point but we are long past the time when we couldn’t do anything without burning coal or using oil.

We have clean energy sources. Alternative are already there for the most polluting usage: nuclear power, wind and solar, electric propulsion. You are stuck thirty years in the past and arguing for us to go further back.

> Are you sure about that?

Of course I’m sure about that. Production has been above demand for decades. The issue is instability and logistic. We have the technical means to feed everyone and hunger affects an infinitely smaller proportion of the world than 200 years ago (population was multiplied by 8 since 1800).

> The choice is to be realistic and prepare for what's coming VS continuing business as usual

No one is advocating for continuing business as usual. Some are advocating strongly for curbing everyone freedom and accepting making everyone life worse to conform to their moral standards. Others want to actually tackle the problem like we have done for every other one: by working on finding and developing appropriate solutions which clearly do exist.

> All fun an games until bacteria started becoming antibiotic resistant

It’s still fun and game. The issue is broad antibiotic use in farming and poor economic return for companies working on antibiotic and despite that we still have effective cure.

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