Comment by nocoiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nocoiner | Hacker News Reader

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I think most people should really sit down and give some thought to why these oil companies are so big and profitable. Is it because the executives get off on extracting for the sake of extracting, damn the earth and the flora and the fauna? Maybe. (Probably not.)

It probably has something more to do with the fact that individuals like driving their cars and taking planes to vacation destinations and appreciate the utility and versatility of plastic.

I’m not trying to absolve oil companies or say that it is the individuals who are at fault, but the oil companies produce a tremendously useful product. And individual consumers buy great volumes of that product because, well, it’s tremendously useful and makes possible their western standard of living.

So forgive me for thinking that this stunt is cutesy and fundamentally unserious. The oil companies wouldn’t be nearly as big as they are if they cast majority of humanity wasn’t very, very interested in what they’re selling.

Plenty of blame to go around here.

Countries worldwide are addicted to fossil fuels because you need to burn fuel if you want to achieve almost anything. As Jean-Marc Jancovici puts it, the oil consumption of a country is its GDP. There’s a lot of energy in an oil drop. It’s not easy to move a country without burning fossil fuels. You commute to work by car or bus? You probably burn fossil fuels. Your food is grown using tractors which plant seeds which were delivered using trucks.

You might replace those with energy but what about heavy machinery? We should just stop burning fossil fuels at all.

The solution to the climate apocalypse depends on overcoming capitalism. Give food and shelter to all the unemployed due to the GDP collapse.

We should have never reached such a level of addiction to a substance which destroys our environment. We have known it since the 19th century yet here we are, witnessing the apocalypse that the Cassandræ have forecasted.

There are more sustainable economic systems like the one in North Korea, etc. but look which economic and political systems get destroyed when the revenue rate of the Fossil fuels corporations is at stake.

We are bound for a termination shock or whatever it’s called because that’s in the interest of the big capital of the Fossil Fuels and its military branch

I absolutely refuse to accept that long term human existence is only viable at North Korean levels of economic development. I wouldn’t care to live in that world, and I won’t speak for my children, but I doubt that they would find that particularly appealing.

We’re not going to stop burning hydrocarbons anytime soon - see above: they’re just too darn useful - but we’re making great progress in relegating them to their highest and best use. Oil fired power plants? Virtually extinct. Coal fired power plants? In terminal decline. Generating power from “waste” natural gas, instead of flaring it? Much progress there.

Let’s keep building out renewables, work on the power storage problem, and (ideally) learn how to build nukes safely and efficiently again.

Then with a moonshot or two like fusion or room temp superconductors, I think we have a better than even chance of coming out of this century with the climate crisis under control. We can all make more responsible choices, but I don’t currently see a need to sacrifice human welfare to get there.

The gulf between the western world and North Korea is _vast_.

As an example, the USA has roughly double the fossil fuel consumption per capita as Germany and triple that of France, yet the standard of living in the USA is not significantly higher (and the median may in fact be lower, depending on your standards).

Fossil fuel usage is higher in Russia than any western European country, yet the Russian standard of living is lower.

There's a lot of low hanging fruit we can go after in the short term, we could potentially halve our fossil fuel usage in ten years and if we actually put the effort in do it while maintaining a high standard of living.

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