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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

It’s not just consumers, it’s the entire fabric of modern society.

The machinery that makes everything in modern life work runs on fossil fuels, and up until recently there wasn’t another viable option. Even so, with limitations on batteries it’s debatable how viable our options are now. Moving massive payloads takes exponentially more energy than a moving a single driver. Society is built on moving things.

Every part of the building you are in now, every piece of food you eat got there via fossil fuels.

Like it or not we’re stuck with fossil fuels for the foreseeable future unless the entire fabric of society changes, and I’m not putting my money on that.

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We have modern nuclear technology that can replace all coal plants in a decade if we decide to do that.

But we wont.

The "but we won't" insights are spiteful and not that insightful. Here's another one: we could go back to pre-industrial lifestyles.

Not without a large depopulation event of some kind.

The natural nitrogen cycle can optimistically support 4B people. That means 3.5B people need to die for that to even become a workable solution. But but magic tech will save us all ! We have magic tech today, we don't use it.

> 3.5B need to die.

Well more actually, unless noone is born in that time, if you want to be glum about it.

I hadn't even heard about the nitrogen cycle. Thanks!

And oil company lobbyist fear-mongering is at least part of the reason we won’t make that switch.

I don't think they could be replaced that fast with nuclear. According to Bill Gates at a speech he gave @ ARPA-E, the limitation of mass nuclear right now is the number of heavy forges left in the world.

I think you could scale up a mixture of solar-PV, wind + some nuclear that fast however, because the manufacturing needs are not as bad.

No, not likely. Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald, the environmental and human rights organization. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent.

You aren't educating anyone on this forum with this perspective.

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