Comment by pluralmonad
2 days ago
Never heard this take before. Care to elaborate? It seems like crop failure and disease are the typical causes of food shortages, if not outright human logistical failures. Sounds like saying pouring gasoline on a tiny fire is the only reason we aren't cold (ignoring that more firewood would be the solution). An unsustainable solution is not in-fact a good solution. So if your assertion is correct, then we should all prepare for our thatched huts in which we will starve.
Not the person you're replying to, but I think I can explain it this way:
The quality of life of a human being is directly related to the amount of free energy (i.e. thermodynamic free energy, not free as in no cost) they have access to. Life must be able to generate more energy than it needs, even tiny bacteria. As humans developed, we found more ways to access and utilize free energy.
There is a phrase: Energy return on investment (or EROI). You can map the development of humanity pretty cleanly to an increasing EROI over the entire course of our history.
Fossil Carbon allowed us to explode our EROI and gave us access to never before seen amounts of free energy. Unless we find ways to maintain that EROI, our quality of life will necessarily diminish.
Obviously we need to cut our use of fossil carbon. And if we don't, we're simply going to run out, and then we'll be stuck anyway. But we also don't have anything with a comparable EROI to replace it with.
This is the root problem we're facing. If we had working fusion, it would be a whole lot easier to decarbonize.
> Green Revolution techniques also heavily rely on agricultural machinery and chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and defoliants; which, as of 2014, are derived from crude oil, making agriculture increasingly reliant on crude oil extraction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
Those are derived from crude oil only because for a long time that has been the cheapest way to make them, not because oil were necessary in any way.
And it was the cheapest way only because most prices are fake, because they do not correspond to the cost of closed cycles of the materials used to make a product.
All those things require mostly energy, air, water and a few abundant minerals and metals to be made. Technologies to make them in this way have already existed for almost a century (e.g. making synthetic hydrocarbons, to replace oil), but they are still very inefficient. However, the inefficiency is mostly due to the fact that negligible amounts of money have been allocated for the development of such technologies (because as long as the use of fossil oil is permitted, there is no way for synthetic hydrocarbons to be cheaper), in comparison with the frivolous amounts of money that are wasted on various fads, like AI datacenters.
I think their point is more along the lines of the energy availability of Fossel Fuels allows for the Mass Farming and Construction that we do, not so much that we can pour it on a fire in place of wood.
40–50% of the nitrogen in our bodies come from fossil fuels via synthetic fertilizers.
You clearly haven't given a lot of thought to questions like "where does all this cheap food/housing/heating come from?"
The fact that fossil fuels -- since their mass adoption in the late 19th century -- are the single largest cause of improved living conditions is standard economic history.
> An unsustainable solution is not in-fact a good solution.
It was a perfectly good solution. It replaced wood fires which are clearly worse. Coal was great until natural gas became available. As solar/wind/nuclear become abundant, they are conintuing to displace fossil fuels.
This all seems very confused. I would say you clearly have not thought this through, but that would be fairly rude given the tiny scope of this comment thread. If your definition of better (or perfectly good) is: makes me more comfortable in the short term then I can understand that perspective.
So your opinion is that humanity should not have burned fossil fuels, we should have kept burning wood, until solar/wind/nuclear were invented? Seems obviously wrong.
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