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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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