Comment by chamomeal

I feel like our whacky world is only made possible by fossil fuels. Like why is it profitable to

- build these vapes and sell them for a few dollars? - tear down an entire house, rebuild a new one from scratch, and sell it? - ship things all the way across the entire freakin ocean instead of manufacturing them locally? - mine cryptocurrency?

To me the answer is always fossil fuels. We stumbled on an energy source so dense (at first, seemingly) infinite that it just wildly increased the amount of energy we can use. For most of human history our greatest constraint was energy, then that constraint was just blown the fuck off.

I feel like our whole society is riding a high of cheap energy. We attribute so much progress to things like science and democracy and great thinkers and revolutionaries. But how much of it was really just fossil fuels and nitrogen fixing??