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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

Oil basically powers the modern world. Everything from food production through material manufacturing to basic transport collapses without oil.

Food abundance, even if it's can be barely called that like corn syrup, is the most basic soma. No politician would even think risking it.

Meanwhile you could swap out Facebook for any other social network with barely any noticeable change in the economy and world. People can scroll through Twitter or Netflix instead. Big tech has very little leverage because they rely on network effects and censorship while being otherwise imminently replaceable.

That they're run by nerds doesn't help either.

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Oil powers tractors, but that can easily be electrically driven. Nitrogen Fertilizers, which is probably what you are referring to, are made using hydrogen, not oil. That hydrogen is usually produced using natural gas (again, usually not oil), but until the 1950s or so when steam reforming started to utter dominate, we tended to make it with hydropower electrolysis. There’s no fundamental reason you need oil for food abundance or transport. None whatsoever.

I think it's less that there are no viable alternatives and the very bleak consequences if food or power get screwed up. There's the saying "Nine meals between mankind and anarchy" that applies here. If you are messing with the food supply, you are playing with fire if things go sideways. People die, people starve, people riot.

So things have a strong incentive towards "if it aint broke don't fix it". You can argue a lot of it is in fact broken on some fundamental levels and the side effects of those two industries are massive but, at the moment, we have power and we have food (speaking for the US, not globally where that isn't the case).

The risk tolerance is very, very low. An unwillingness to accept any potential failure, regardless of impact, is frequently the single greatest problem for any change or reform.

The solution, then, is to build more supply. Energy austerity is never going to work. Clean energy abundance is the only possible way to a good future.

> easily

For for a couple of places yes. For the literal global economy it will take years to make the switch. I think renewable energy is great and we should definitely switch to it. But the sheer scale of the transition is enormous.

Right, and the only way to do it is to start. Action is the only thing that matters in the transition. But we should realize that it’s not at all hopeless. Post-WW2, our electricity production used to double about every decade or so, so we ARE capable of quickly scaling. We just have to BUILD.

I agree with you there, I don't agree with people that are against moving at all or even making it something important. I guess I just hear a lot of people act like the transition is trivial.

Also about the energy production doubling do you have a source?

Yeah, from the EIA, US electricity production increased by a factor of 5.56x from 1950 to 1973. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

That’s 2.5 doublings in 23 years, or a bit better than one doubling per decade. Growth was still high after that, but doubling slowed a bit (we were running into limitations of gas and especially oil availability… we kind of stopped using oil for electricity after the 70s). Point being we absolutely can scale, particularly if we’re scaling something that is not as inherently limited as oil is. Solar in particular can scale out massively (as could nuclear if we got our act together).

What do we use to make the electricity for the electric tractor? What raw materials do we need in order to make all of the solar panels that would provide electricity for the entire world?

By the way, I see the value in electric vehicles, but we need to recognize that the electricity has to come from somewhere and that all these new vehicles and batteries require raw materials that have to come from somewhere.

Yes, we do have plenty of raw materials to make electricity for the whole world. For instance, over the lifetime of a solar panel, the amount of silicon needed to generate 1kWh of electricity is approximately 1/1000th that of the amount of coal, plus the silicon isn't burned up (but can be recycled). https://www.freeingenergy.com/do-we-have-enough-materials-to...

So in fact, it requires a whole lot less raw materials (even when you include the other materials needed in a solar panel and all the processing required) to provide human civilization with solar electricity (even with storage) than with coal.

> Everything from food production through material manufacturing to basic transport collapses without oil.

Sure - but that's also true of computers.

Oh, I'm not saying tech companies should be equal to oil companies. But today's tech companies don't seem to have even 5% the power of oil companies.

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