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Comment by jotm | Hacker News Reader

Temperatures have been rising even further north. I'm near the 47th parallel and there was practically no winter this year. Used to have -20 degC with lots of snow, but alas. Last year's highs were above 40 degC for weeks - unimaginable 20 years ago, and rare 10 years ago.

Everyone's getting air conditioners now. For some unexplainable reasons, people still use dark colored roofs - it's time that everyone painted them white or silver, because those A/Cs will just make everything worse in the long term.

Most people seem to think it's a temporary thing. They'll believe it until it becomes the new normal I guess.

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Well it is a temporary thing, the rate of change is still increasing. We'll reach the new normal a number of decades after we stop burning fossil fuel.

> after we stop burning fossil fuel

You mean, when we run out of fossil fuel?

That's just not going to happen by any measure. Deposits might become more and more expensive to tap into, but we're not just going to run out. We need to stop using them, not hope that we'll just stop once they are out - they simply won't be.

That is what everyone means when they say "run out of oil". Read it as "run out of oil worth extracting". We're obviously not going to spend 2 TJ of energy to extract oil that contains 1 TJ of energy.

This assumes we use the oil purely due to its energy content. Which is true in some sense or the other, but unless you can replace all uses of oil derivatives with either synthetic sources (that don't cost significantly more energy to create than the oil extraction would) or something different altogether (e.g. in the "producing electricity" use case).

And even then, who knows whether dumping spare electricity into oil wells instead of e.g. batteries or pumped storage hydroelectricity might remain profitable.

My point is, it's not necessarily that obvious, and we better not wait for people to stop running out of ideas to make a profit on fossil fuels.

There are people willing to extract despite negative energy efficiency, especially in underdeveloped parts of the world. Societal development requires a particular amount of energy expenditure per capita to progress.

Well that's one way, we'll see.

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