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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

A even more vital part is less consumption and all the consequences that come with it.

More clean energies and products won’t save us. The usage of earths resources is now roughly double of what the planet could sustain long term and it is still growing and I am afraid more cheap energy won’t help to solve this very systemic issue.

Todays teenagers are consuming more than teenagers ever before, mostly due to availability and online shops. Three decades ago you had to go to the next city and find something, nowadays you just order the thing and it is in your doorstep next day.

Adding cheap and clean energy into this mix is like taking painkillers when you have a open fracture so you can keep going. Might soothe your short term pains, but is ultimately a counter productive thing if applied just on its own.

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> The usage of earths resources is now roughly double of what the planet could sustain long term

Based on what data exactly? Mankind has only ever scratched the Earth's surface for resources, and still only on land. If you imagine the Earth is a perfect sphere, we have far from used much resources at all.

We have been using the resources we need. A bunch of rock and magma isn't really useful to us. It's things like soil which only exists on the surface, or oil, which has been getting harder and harder to extract.

The day we need more resources, you can be sure we will go and get them where they are. We have not have had the need to dig deep or explore the oceans so far (because other resources were readily available), but there is no telling we will never do so.

> or oil, which has been getting harder and harder to extract.

Harder to extract but still in much larger abundance than what was predicted by mostly everyone back in the 70-80s. I don't know if you were around then, but you may have heard of "peak oil". It never happened (as in, not yet, and that was already a long time ago).

I don't think the Earth is going to literally run out of anything, sure. We can always dig deeper, or prospect for more resources out in Siberia, or whatever. But there's something to be said for being concerned about being responsible with this golden age we find ourselves in, when resources are so extraordinarily cheap and abundant. It's not a given that it will be like this forever. Imagine lithium being as rare as gold, and think about whether something like the phenomenon of ubiquitous smartphones would even have been possible.

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