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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

Isn't environmentalists' argument that we should reduce our power consumption, rather than destroying the environment to keep providing so much power? That's not as crazy a position as you make it out to be is it?

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It's an absolutely crazy proposition because there are very few people who would choose to reduce their quality of life. It's far easier to switch to net-zero energy sources than it is to completely redefine society.

Some people think it's worth redefining society to protect the environment. I wouldn't agree with that absolutely either, but it's a logical and defensible position. It's not incoherent.

The problem is there position is completely irrational when you take the amount of damage down to standards of living to the negligible environmental damage done from PV panels. It's almost like the goal is to maximize human misery not minimize environmental damage.

Wholly impractical solutions are not defensible.

"The position is coherent" is a devastatingly low bar for the table stakes or redefining society that radically.

I also don't think it's particularly coherent. Reversing economic development in many places might actually push populations back into less sustainable modes of managing/interacting with their local environments.

Or dying.

It doesn't seem particularly coherent to me for a few reasons. To draw a hard line between human activity/habitat and nature seems artificial. A human settlement is not so different from a beaver dam of ant colony in many ways. The idea especially in the US that there is some pre-colonial unspoiled nature that we could preserve or return to seems historically ignorant. Native Americans were managing the land with fire in much of North America for at least 15k years and the whole place was a giant game park with archipelagos of agriculture and settlements. Early settlers remarked that upon arrival they could ride a horse through New England forests at a full gallop, which wouldn't be possible in a primeval/unmanaged forest. So redefining society away form managing nature would be a radical departure and it unclear what the end goal would even be. There is nothing to roll the clock back to really anywhere in the world, and even if you "re-wild" a lot of the continent it's not clear what you would get, it certainly wouldn't resemble the Americas of 1491 ecologically.

Mostly these folks seem like neo-malthusians who just hate people and civilization.

I'm all for increasing bio-diversity, pulling carbon out of the air, and cleaning up waste but I don't think any of that requires us to use drastically less energy. If anything we should aim to make energy so clean and cheap that those other things become cheap and easy.

> The idea especially in the US that there is some pre-colonial unspoiled nature that we could preserve or return to seems historically ignorant.

Who are you replying to here? Who's argued this?

The point I'm making is that there's a certain type of activist who believes these kinds o things, and they're arguing for things like reduction of per-capita energy use to reduce society's impact on the land based on the idea that there was ever really land here that wasn't actively managed by people. (At least since the glaciers receded) I'm making the case that these neo-malthusians want to protect an imagined environment of the past that didn't exist. There are certainly things we're doing that are environmentally negative form the perspective of biodiversity, CO2, local water tables, etc but I don't think fixing those things necessarily means using less energy, or having a lower standard of living.

A huge chunk of this thinking is ultimately the puritan moral code writ large. US-society in particular believes all good things must somehow involve suffering or sacrifice: so "fixing" environmental damage must involve making a sacrifice, and if it's not a constant one you "feel" then how can it be solution?

This also goes the other way: the sacrifice of the environment or air pollution or waterways of whatever is the obvious price that must be paid for luxury amenities.

I’m never really convinced of that the puritans were so profoundly influential on modern American habits. They were a relatively small group relative to the whole effort of colonization and almost everyone else thought they were crazy. Even their own children, as evidenced by the Half Way Compromise.

Notwithstanding I see that kind of “Puritanism” among European X-RAY activists. There’s something certainty very human about it, but I think people often reach for irrational, exuberant religiosity during confusing and difficult times.

Standards of living are highly connected to energy consumption. Reducing power consumption without also reducing living standards is difficult to do. Furthermore, power consumption is going to increase as transportation and industrial processes become electrified.

Electricity consumption is going to rise with electrification. Power consumption is going down. A heat pump is about three times as efficient as heating with oil. An electric engine is about twice as efficient as an ICE, and so on.

The overton window of HN is skewed so far into techno-optimism that you get downvoted into oblivion for mentioning reducing energy usage.

Edit: surprise, I'm also getting silent downvotes, as if I needed further proof.

People will advocate permanently destroying a habitat before they consider taking a bus instead of driving.

Yeah, humans have lived fine before fossil fuels so we can do it again, right? Just kill half of them. And let 90% of the remaining population work in the fields like slaves. Easy /s

Wildest strawman I’ve ever seen on this site. I’ve never even remotely seen anyone argue for what you’re mocking.

And it’s not even anything to do with fossil fuels - it’s about renewables.

While I agree that modern society requires significant energy inputs, there is a middle ground. For instance, if cities or the suburbs were more pedestrian friendly, walking, cycling, etc. would be a viable option meaning less use of fossil fuels by driving.

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