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Comment by nvahalik | Hacker News Reader

If I may, a wonderful book called “The Alchemy of Air” by Thomas Hager is a very enlightening book on this very same issue during the late 1800s.

EDIT: I was mobile earlier but wanted to throw a bit of a teaser in here. This book (along with Hager's "The Demon Under the Microscope) are excellent reads and I high recommend them.

Essentially, there were many "doomsday scenarios" wherein the context of the late 1800s was that vast supplies of natural fertilizer were used up and people were very worried about food supplies. Long story short, the "fixing" of nitrogen from the air not only alleviated the short term issues but also had a huge influence in wars and who was in power in the early 20th Century.

Consequently, this books ends with some pretty questions surrounding the impact of what all of this extraneous nitrogen might do long term—the impacts of which are already seen in rivers and streams... but the ocean and other areas as well.

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> Essentially, there were many "doomsday scenarios" wherein the context of the late 1800s was that vast supplies of natural fertilizer were used up and people were very worried about food supplies.

Assuming scientists will come up with a new technology is a bad survival strategy. At this rate, we expect our children to find a way around climate change, ocean acidification and soil erosion. Mankind is one fat dude who'd rather dream about diet pills than stop eating.

I don't think we really expect our children to do that. It's just there aren't any good options right now. The world is so dependent on hydrocarbons and large scale agriculture that there is no viable alternative.

Not viable? Just depends on who you ask or what your definition of viable is. We need to rip that bandage off now and reduce our standard of living by however much it takes to get into a sustainable symbiosis with our planet.

Fossil fuel companies: bankrupt

Cheap Chinese goods: gone

Meat in every meal: nope

Cheap processed foods: gone

It would be a huge lifestyle change for everyone on the planet. Difficult, but certainly viable.

Fossil fuel companies being bankrupt is not viable. Fossil fuels allow the modern world to function. How are you going to get food distributed across the country without fossil fuels? How are you going to make sure critical infrastructure continues to run?

Edit: I'm not saying fossil fuel dependency is a good thing, but it's a fact of life, and any realistic proposal for moving away from fossil fuels needs to start with accurately understanding just how important they are.

None of those problems are difficult to solve if we actually care. If we want to move off fossil fuels, we could do so in a couple decades.

Also, maybe the fact that we have to distribute food across the country is part of the problem. If food prices in areas that can't grow food nearby go up 100x then people will move.

Hmmmm, I mostly agree. Except I think our definitions of difficult are different. People are complaining about how hard it is to move out of the Bay Area, which they can't afford to live in. Imagine how much more difficult it would be to move millions of people so they can live closer to food sources. Those people also need jobs so they can afford food, and it's hard or impossible to move industries that are capital intensive or depend on natural resources.

It's pretty obvious that eventually we'll have to deal with these problems, but I don't see how society will start the process voluntarily. It's too disruptive and there is no financial incentive to do so. (And even if one country decides to, then they lose out relative to every country that decides not to, so it really has to be an everyone or no one thing).

There's no financial incentive to fix things? It's almost like we need some kind of revolution to upend the existing system and replace it with one that addresses people's needs directly rather than blindly maximizing financial gains. I feel like I read something about this once...

> How are you going to get food distributed across the country without fossil fuels

You would distribute less and source more locally. No more bananas or mangoes. That was the idea behind the "reduce our standard of living" phrase.

Okay, but what would that look like? How do you go from where we are now to there without massive disruption. How do you start feeding NYC locally?

It's way harder to de-industrialize than to industrialize. A lot of our cities are only viable because of the dividend from fossil fuels.

Obviously, the first step would be to repeal the second amendment. Since that train ain't leaving the station, the threatened tyranny, while lovely to dream about, isn't so likely.

I missed the context of your context switch. It reads as if you are saying that 'we' need to repeal the second so that 'we' can be loaded up and forcibly moved by our societal masters (with little resistance)

Is that correct?

I could have been writing ironically... if so it would have been to highlight the silliness of grandparent's "when I am king everyone will do the right thing also that will have no side effects I'm neglecting to consider right now" scenario. Really, someone ought to do that for all such scenarios.

> Really, someone ought to do that for all such scenarios.

Agreed. I had a lawyer-gf at one point in my past, and she executed some variant of this on me every time a vacuous proposal left my mouth. Any proposal at all, really.

But, I did not understand the intent behind what you were writing. Can you restate this for those of us slower members of your audience?

Well, this whole thread is a glob of implausible proposals justified by implausible assumptions. "We'll eat no more meat or bananas!" "Because we won't burn any more oil!" "Because oil will be illegal!" "Because sustainability!"

This is all just silly. Credit to 'workthrowaway27 for responding in reasoned fashion, but that hasn't dissuaded any of the silly folk in their silliness. They suggest catastrophic changes to the lives of everyone on earth, and the reasons they offer are transparently based on personal psychological idiosyncrasies rather than on a practical understanding of reality. All of this tyrannical bullshit won't happen, not only because it shouldn't happen, but also because it can't possibly happen. One does admit it to be a lovely dream, because one understands that lots of people dream of denying the agency of other humans. This is an impulse to indulge in daydreams, not in the political sphere.

Everything here is hypothetical responding to anecdote. And vice-versa. I have enough life experience to build a rich (and often sorrow-ful) anecdote, but that's all it is.

Thank you.

I'm not saying fossil fuel dependency is a good thing, but it's a fact of life

It's easy to believe they are utterly indispensable. They are just so convenient, and we love to convince ourselves convenience is really necessity. But would the world truly collapse into the dark ages if fossil fuels petered out in the next decade, and we no longer had that option?

How are you going to transport food? You ignore that food was shipped around a long time before fossil fuels. More of a pain, of course, but we did it all the same.

Yes, but society was structured under different assumptions then. I live in a city in the desert. There wouldn't be cities in the desert (with modern living standards) if we didn't have fossil fuels to get food, building supplies, electrical wiring, etc. out here.

Yes, society can function without fossil fuels, but probably not with the same number of people, and certainly not with the same standard of living.

And not in coastal California. ..

Sure, we could go back oxen and agriculture without fertilizer or pesticides. How many billion people are you willing to see starve to make that happen?

As many as it takes to have a sustainable culture.

If we wait until there is no topsoil left, even more billions will die, and it won't be in a controlled and purposeful way like it would be if we do it now. Hell, maybe even no one has to die from starvation. Maybe just limiting births would do the trick. Or any other number of ideas that don't involve mass murder or mass starvation or going back to 200 year old farming methods.

And this is why nobody takes socialist seriously. For the sake of idealism, kill half the planet.

For idealism?

So it's idealist to want a sustainable society that doesn't destroy the planet a short couple hundred years after discovering fossil fuels and industrial food production? How is that idealist? Idealism is thinking that the current situation is somehow salvageable without extreme overhauls.

And plus, no one is saying to go back to oxen and carts. That is fairly ridiculous so my response was equally ridiculous.

>As many as it takes to have a sustainable culture.

People were advocating for much the same thing in the '70s when Erlich's The Population Bomb came out, and thank God we ignored them. And yet a single hectare of land produces multiples of what it produced then, allowing enough food for everyone (though it doesn't always get to the people who need it, admittedly).

If I had to bet I'd say in 100 years we'll be producing even more food per person, so I consider any plan that would have people starving forced to limit reproduction to be off the table.

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