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Comment by Sytten | Hacker News Reader

I must say I do feel that way and it is a common "joke" within my circle (mid-twenties) that we will be lucky if we survive until our retirement. So I would not say 10 years timeframe, but more 40-50 years up to 100 years (so our potential children lifetime).

It will take a lot to change my mind on that, I believe we are truly f*ked and I don't believe humanity will get out of this one. It requires such drastic change in lifestyle that most are simply not ready to do unless facing imminent (in your face type) catastrophe. Most likely scenario in my mind is global disruption of food supply chain, wars for water access, lots of migrations and lots of death/suffering.

Planet is going to be fine, we don't need to "save it". Us? Not so much.

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> It requires such drastic change in lifestyle

Of course not.

This is a political problem, not a technological one.

We can pretty much see how a zero carbon energy future can be realized, if there is just the political will to allow it to happen.

Solar is already close to beating fossil fuels in pure cost terms, without subsidies. And we are a long, long way from maxing out the potential of harnessing solar energy.

And then there's nuclear to see us through until storage is good enough to supply all our needs from solar. Again it's political stupidity failing to see that the risks of nuclear power are minuscule compared to the threat of carbon.

Tesla is probably the most popular car manufacturer in the world. And the other major automobile manufacturers are pushing hard in developing new electric vehicles. Building out fast recharging stations is not a complicated technical problem. Except for reducing the charging time, but I'm confident that will improve as well. So again, migrating to electric vehicles is a political and cultural problem, not a technical one.

I really so no reason at all why lifestyle needs to degrade at all to get off of fossil fuels. We have a road map to solve every single one of the technology problems. We just need the dumb politicians (and voters) to get out of the way.

> Solar is already close to beating fossil fuels in pure cost terms, without subsidies.

Looking at the marginal cost to produce renewable energy today in a world doped with fossil fuel is meaningless. It's only cheap because we have ample cheap fossil fuel energy supply at our disposition to support production and logistics. Try to completely build, ship and install your solar panel and your wind turbines only using renewable energy and I bet you would see the cost increase by at least an order of magnitude.

But why are fossil fuels currently so cheap? They have a bunch of situational advantages over renewables that will either go away (such as subsidies and plentiful easy-to-access reserves) or evened out over time as infrastructure and adoption of renewables catches up

It's not a binary thing - the more that is done, the less the consequences.

Most people (even self declared environmentalists) still take commercial airplanes.

If even environmentalists can’t stop flying - literally the most important thing you can do as a individual to help the globe - we have no hope for others to take necessary reductions in quality of life.

It’s clear we either need to accept climate change, or engineer some other solution.

It's not just humans vs "planet". The big rock called Earth, yeah we probably aren't going to bother it much. But the destruction of biodiversity, all forms of life on earth, is an enormous ongoing tragedy that we absolutely have a responsibility to reverse with all our efforts.

I will bet the next 1000 years will look a lot like the last 1000.

We like to think we live in unusual or unique times… we don’t.

I would argue the opposite. The rate of change due to biological impact on Earth has been slowly speeding up ever since life developed.

Changes that used to take hundreds of millions of years now happen in decades. And there is no sign of slow down.

I am not arguing negatively or positively about the future, simply that the efficiency of innovation and scaling new changes are increasing, so the rate of change continues to increase.

This is the Holocene.

I think geo-engineering the planet is inevitable, completely aside from that as a climate issue. We already have many planet wide systems, and the number and scale of them are growing.

I can’t help but wonder if this same comment could be made in 1960 with a few dangers swapped out.

Most people can’t accept a lifestyle of never flying again.

I think we need to look at alternate solutions.

Sell me your retirement fund.

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