We all want solutions to the world's many crises but do we understand the underlying problems? Everything in nature, including human society, relies on energy for production, consumption, recycling, and sustainability. Therefore, to understand things, we must first examine how energy is turned into work and power. Steel, concrete, plastic,…
Those who think we should continue using fossil fuels despite the climate change and weather effects we’re already seeing do not understand the physics of how the world works.
Whenever someone starts with the high minded “no other species has ever done this” talk is just intellectually masturbating. We’re the first true mammal bipeds, the first species with complex language capabilities allowing us to compound generational knowledge, the first to live in air conditioned houses and eat breakfast cereal. We are fundamentally different in so many ways from other species that this line of argument means nothing. I understand that life’s order is allowed by thermodynamics because we pay for our existence by distributing energy and settibg off chemical reactions as we find them, but what’s the mechanism of our destruction should we stop drilling for and burning fossil fuels tomorrow? Are the squirrels going to take over the drilling and kill us all? Come on. If we don’t dig it up and burn it, it’s going to stay under the ground.
We are not going to abandon fossil fuels. However, fossil fuels are abandoning us. And those 8.1 billion and counting will be going away, too.
our energy requirements for being alive are much higher than a population that didn’t get itself on a hockey stick shaped population chart. we are in an intensification trap. we must continue to use fossil fuels to maintain the population and standard of living, unless we are willling to sacrifice the population and standard of living and/or renewables grow so much they take up the slack.
so any talk of leaving it in the ground needs to also include talk of how we are going to allocate the misery that comes from such.