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Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

It's easy (and popular) to be a pessimist but when I look at objective global data on decade+ time scales, the only rational conclusion is that things are generally getting better for more people in more places than ever before (data like global poverty, infant mortality, literacy, etc). That doesn't mean we don't still have a ways to go and it certainly doesn't mean that things aren't terrible for some people in some places at any given moment.

Addressing those things for those people in those places should certainly be a top priority but we shouldn't let that blind us to the broader reality that by most standardized, objective measures things are mostly getting better for more people more of the time.

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I am in the camp of we are in overshoot, have been for a very long time. In the same way that a someone can spend way above their income by using the credit card. Looks great now but that looming cloud of debt is coming. Societal wise we have done this via the monkey pore wish for "unlimited energy" in the form of fossil fuels. We got energy unlike anything else in history but at the cost of environmental blow back and setting the paradigm for our living standards.

Maybe we will rise to the challenge and go green on these, I'm not convinced yet but I am definitely not ruling it out.

When it comes to optimism, it boils down to two distinct modes. Necessity is the mother of invention. Less energy, stuff and stimulation will be good for most people in wealthy countries.

Fossil fuels will decline, we will make some cool new stuff that makes that decline easier, we will demand less stuff and use of energy. This doesn't sound so bad. Hopefully we will move into something akin to Solarpunk + cottage core. A declined future that is more fair. But the pessimist in me feels like that is but fantasy.

Why would energy usage need to decline when there's a giant ball of fusion in our sky we barely make use of, and when we've just begun exploring space in the past century?

Solar energy isn't free, it takes a lot of metals just to turn solar energy into electrical energy (including batteries for storage) and they don't last forever.

Here's a link to a talk from an associate professor doing an estimation of how much metals are needed to switch to renewable energy: https://youtu.be/MBVmnKuBocc?t=2406

Solar energy is the cheapest form of energy we have. Storage is a bit more expensive, but judging from the amount of metals the video proposes they want to go all-in on battery storage, whereas most experts I heard from propose to use hydrogen (or methane) as a storage medium, precisely because the amount of resources it needs are much smaller.

Hydrogen would also help with re-using all the ICE cars we have (and will continue to have) on the roads.

Definitely not a panacaea, and super-inefficient, but that's OK if we're just using it for storage/transportation.

super-inefficient?

as in it's only worth doing if you have nothing else to do with the energy (like when you have too much wind/sun etc)

That's just the concept of energy storage. And even if we lose a significant fraction it's often not an issue given how cheap solar is.

Sure, but it would be better if we had more efficient methods of doing it.

>whereas most experts I heard from propose to use hydrogen (or methane) as a storage medium

What experts? Power to gas has been really energy inefficient with little sign of improving from what I know. It can't really compete with pumped hydro even where pumped hydro makes less to no sense it seems.

Efficiency (almost) doesn't matter. Cost and scalability matters. Pumped hydro and batteries are wonderfully efficient, but they're a lot more difficult to scale than infrastructure for storing, transporting, and burning a gas.

Wow, that was a bucket of water in my face the likes of which I’ve never felt before! We are 100% completely screwed! We simply cannot maintain our standard of living into the future. The picture this professor paints is so incredibly bleak that it puts the war in Ukraine and a potential war in Taiwan into perspective.

Imagine if all the passengers on the Titanic had nuclear weapons. That’s the situation we’re in. And there are no lifeboats.

Except that all these problems are soluble.

We can adapt to climate change. We can create new (clean!) energy sources.

Solar is getting more efficient every year. There are new storage solutions appearing every year.

As TFA says, despair is not the answer. We can (and will) overcome all these problems.

Can you expand more on those new storage solutions?

here let me google that for you... https://www.forbes.com/sites/mitsubishiheavyindustries/2022/...

> We simply cannot maintain our standard of living into the future.

Don't make the mistake of confusing energy use with quality of life.

People like to make such alarmist statement around standard of living but we should instead ask ourselves what makes for quality of life.

A good example is planned obsolescence in technology: it greatly increases energy usage and pollution without making consumers happier (on the contrary they hate it)

Don't make the mistake of conflating carbon emissions with transportation. So much of our society is built on carbon and personal automobiles are only a part of it. Cement production, globalized shipping, fertilizers for growing food, natural gas for making steel and other heavy industry. No matter how you slice it, wind and solar can't replace any of that stuff.

Wind and solar might not, but that isn't to say that there arent replacements

This isn't the first time someone has predicted an end to economic growth soon because of peak raw resources having been attained. We can go all the way back to the numerous failed predictions of Elrich's Population Bomb book. The idea that we're close to the pinnacle of what technology and science can achieve is ridiculous given the immense cosmic time scales and resources available. We're nowhere near the limit of what's possible.

Or we just stop pretending that nuclear is bad and build the plants to keep an industrial base going past 2050.

Hell at this point whoever does will just conquer whoever doesn't. Just like the industrial revolution let whoever burn coal take over the rest. I'm hoping to be in a country that isn't conquered, but the west seems to have entered a death spiral of self delusion.

Well in theory, yes. In practice, the Russians have captured a large nuclear reactor and may use it as a dirty bomb if things don't go their way. Can't turn a solar panel or windmill into a weapon like that. You could turn a hydroelectric dam in a weapon though, I believe that's the plot of a few films. And solar heat collectors are impractical death rays.

> In practice, the Russians have captured a large nuclear reactor and may use it as a dirty bomb if things don't go their way

This is still theory unless they actually use it for that.

Also, Russia's own Kursk 2 isn't very far from the captured one. They could turn that into a dirty bomb too. Recency bias on a threat shouldn't overwhelm normal analysis.

No, it shouldn't overwhelm it, but it should inform it. There is no proliferation risk associated with wind, solar, geothermal, etc.

Where I live is at risk of declining political stability in the near future. I don't worry about living next to a nuclear power plant because I'm worried about maintenance or operational safety or whatever, I worry about what happens when a thousand men with machetes and an apocalyptic ideology show up. And perhaps you look at the news in your country and wonder if you also may be heading towards declining political stability.

> No, it shouldn't overwhelm it, but it should inform it. There is no proliferation risk associated with wind, solar, geothermal, etc.

Note my example was also nuclear. I don't know what you're countering with this.

Yes, thank god Russia doesn't have the worlds largest nuclear stock pile of weapons to threaten the world with and has to steal others countries nuclear power plants to threaten them with a dirty bomb. On their border. Less than 100km away from the nearest Russian city.

It does make sense because they will claim that the Ukrainians did it, which they’ve already started to lay the groundwork for.

Also, nuclear plants can be a target for plenty of states or groups that don’t have nuclear weapons like terrorists.

There comes a point where you should turn off the television and turn on your brain.

I don’t even know what this means. Are you saying that we should expect propaganda to not work despite it working since the beginning of recorded history? If so, that is really dumb.

I'm saying you should consume less pro-Ukranian propaganda and think a bit more.

Thanks for making my point for me.

On your first point: And this would be believed by whom? Just as everyone credible firmly takes seriously Russia's claims that it attacked Ukraine to rid the smaller country of a Nazi threat to Russian sovereignty? Give me a break.

As for your second claim: So can hydro plants, causing enormous destruction. So? Secure the vulnerable asset, create defensive and preventative strategies. You don't go through life not building genuinely useful things because somewhere, somehow, somebody might aim to do them harm. The logic is absurd if taken to any other level. For example, I should never buy or build a house because some group of landless lunatics might coalesce and try to take it from me one day. Better to not have my own useful home in the first place then? Absurd.

Things did get better globally, even if marginally for most, but at what price. If I take out a loan to live it up for a year, but then have no way of paying it back, because I haven't invested the money into anything substantial did things really got better for me? With the Industrial Revolution, and later the Green Revolution we began accumulating a debt. All the gains we made were borrowed against the future. This is not progress, this is ignorance.

"If I take out a loan to live it up for a year, but then have no way of paying it back, because I haven't invested the money into anything substantial did things really got better for me?"

Yes. Because those you spent it with must have, or you wouldn't have been able to buy anything with it. Therefore you caused things to happen that wouldn't otherwise have happened.

Debt is one of human's greatest inventions. It's what allows us to ensure that the underlying currency - human labour time - isn't wasted because there is no call to use it today.

Instead we have a currency - "here's a pig, owe me one" that causes a surplus to arise. Some people won't be able to fulfil that promise in which case it will, in advanced societies, be cancelled. That's what bankruptcy is for. The assets you used to secure the loan are then transferred to others. However the use of labour time in others to create the capacity to generate a surplus remains somewhere down the induced transaction chain.

Debt is the magic by which money is created on demand. That causes information to be transmitted down the supply chain that causes the capacity to make more to arise.

Which is why those societies that use debt are more advanced than those that chose to outlaw its use. They ended up with fewer days wasted in aggregate and more capacity to produce.

Most people fulfil their promises since it is inherent in human society to do right by others. And quite a lot of people like holding the assets that represent the debt as a status symbol of how well they have done - whether they can actually really call in those promises or not.

Ecological and resource extractive debt is not magic, they have limits and externalities that most financial systems don't fully account for in their balance sheets.

This is something I have to remind people of all the time - usually I just get blank stares.

Forget the dollars and cents tokens on wealth, they can and are manipulated but intentionally and unintentionally. How much energy and resources that gets us do we have? That is the real currency we have to work with.

All the debt in the world means nothing if we cannot produce the goods with the token we produced assuming the resources would be there.

> How much energy and resources that gets us do we have?

Millions of years worth..... Like really of course you get blank stares it's not an issue that exists.

While there is a vast amount of resources below us, the CO2 above us that's causing us so much trouble would form a layer of just 3.8mm (0.15 inch) of dry ice if it was all deposited on Earth's surface as a solid.

Millions of years of what? We have maybe a few hundred years of helium if we’re generous with our assumptions and we’re literally squirting that into balloons and letting it float away into the atmosphere and off into space. It’s literally an unrecoverable loss.

This is just one of the many resource limits we’re facing as a species, and this is how we address it today.

Since you brought helium into discussion, why do we fill party balloons with helium?

Just how great is the risc of filling them with hidrogen? I know it's flamable and leaks through many materials. But in the context of party balloons just how great is that risc? The quantity is very small. And no ones life depends on it. And in the case of fire, that quantity would burn almost instantly. I doubt it would even have the time to ignite anything other than another flamable gas.

Has anyone actually seriously worked out how much party balloons contribute to the loss of helium from the atmosphere? And isn't helium an expected waste product from fusion reactors? Not saying it's not an issue but I'm not convinced it's worth getting too upset over just yet.

https://www.helium-one.com/helium-market/

Apparently 8%. But all of these industries waste it unnecessarily, due to our failing to price in or consider the future scarcity.

Helium as a waste product of fusion reactors is such a pipe dream, and will produce such tiny volumes should that ever happen, that it is not a remotely realistic solution to the problem.

That's all "lifting balloons" - I'd think the majority of which would be for weather balloons etc.? You're probably right about He from fusion reactors but if we have 100s of years to solve it who knows.

Who knows is exactly the problem. Hand waving this away for future generations to deal with is exactly the problem. If we can’t imagine how we’ll solve it, we should probably strive not to create the mess.

But we do know that plenty of other current human activities, primarily around extracting stuff from deep underground and pumping it into the atmosphere, are going to cause huge issues for even just our kid's generation, with no realistic technology likely to be developed quickly enough to solve it(*). If we hypothetically needed to use up the earth's remaining helium to fix that I'd support doing so. Running out of helium isn't expected to introduce a risk of making the planet largely uninhabitable, as far as I'm aware.

(*) I'm more or less convinced that such a miracle technology is the only hope we have of avoiding catastrophic change. I'm baffled why there's not massively more funding into researching potential geoengineering solutions, given the stakes. Even fossil fuel companies would benefit!

I’m really not sure what point you’re making. Where has anyone proposed a climate solution by using all of the world’s helium?

What we do use helium for today are things like MRI machines that are medically invaluable, and we do so wastefully potentially denying future generations this technology.

Even if we eventually find alternatives, it may be inferior or we may otherwise deny them technological advantages of similar importance that would be more accessible through access to helium.

The problem is that today Helium is cheap enough we’re happy to boil an MRI machine’s worth off into space for a child’s birthday party.

Climate change is simply another face of the same coin of indifference to the costs we confer on others.

Maybe someone will invent Helium fission power! I did say "hypothetical". I don't think we disagree, I just consider other ecological challenges far more serious than running out of Helium.

Apparently there's plenty on the moon...

Out of curiosity I put the numbers into Wolfram Alpha, and it suggests that even if 100% of our current power (all power not just electricity) needs came from fusing deuterium and tritium into helium, those reactors would make only about 5.3% of our current helium consumption.

What do you have in mind as a "millions of years" power source?

At current rates, fossil fuels will last a few centuries, nuclear a few millennia.

Although geothermal would last for geological timescales, the estimated maximum output only covers current electricity use (~2 TW, well short of the ~17 TW total power use, and ideally we'd increase the minimum power use per person to get closer to European or American levels rather than keeping our current distribution).

The kinetic rotational energy of the earth would last us 400 million years.

Sun will last a few billion, but then we're no longer talking about extractive technologies.

If I have a debt of £50 and you have the corresponding £50 asset that you like to look at, then you don't need any material amount of energy to get to that state of happiness.

I have to remind people all the time of a simple truth - there isn't a one to one relationship between money and stuff.

And money isn't real. It's largely an illusion. At best a social relation.

If I mortgage the singular life supporting planet we are aware of and don't pay back the debt...

Then whoever gave you the debt will be bankrupt, and whoever you paid the debt to will be rich.

Money doesn't stop at its first use. And debt is nothing more than allowing you to spend the real thing without selling it first.

I'm not sure I follow your argument. I agree that debt is important for society to function however taking on debt that you don't invest into yourself is literally ruinous and not in a hypothetical way - tons of people's lives have been destroyed by getting into too much debt that they weren't able to pay back.

> Yes. Because those you spent it with must have, or you wouldn't have been able to buy anything with it

This just means that the people that you paid have better lives but you haven't explained how things are better are better for yourself unless you have some way of paying that debt back.

You must have a way of paying the debt back, or you wouldn't have been able to obtain the resource you did on a promise.

The people doing the deal with you accepted your promise to repay. They don't do that for the fun of it.

Debt is just a way of spending things without selling them first. You can either borrow against your car to spend it, or you can sell the car to spend it.

Either way if you consume rather than buying another car, then you end up with no car.

The financial crash would like to have a word with you.

Many people gave 'resources' to people who couldn't afford the debt, because with many layers of obfuscation, and perverse incentives for mortgage providers, they made it look like many more people could afford it than actually could.

Further...payday loans...loan sharks...people get money for things they can't afford, and can't realistically pay back, all the time.

And bankruptcy sorts all that out. That's why we have it as the reset mechanism.

Capitalism without the threat of bankruptcy is like Catholicism without the threat of hellfire.

It sounds like you are saying, "Don't worry, if we can't manage to pay back the loans we have taken against the planet's nonrenewable or slowly-renewing resources, we can just declare bankruptcy and start over", which is not as reassuring as you seem to imagine.

Bankruptcy works on a small scale, as an act of grace, because the bankrupt party can bootstrap themselves back into productivity using the functional economy around them.

When too many people go bankrupt at once, the economy crashes.

When the whole planet runs out of ecological credit, and we all go bankrupt at once, where are we going to find another civilization to bootstrap from?

All the easy energy is gone, forever. There will never be another coal- or oil-driven industrial revolution on planet Earth. If we reach bankruptcy on the scale of a planetary ecosystem, it will most likely be permanent, as far as Homo sapiens is concerned.

Whether bankruptcy is necessary to capitalism is irrelevant to your point

> You must have a way of paying the debt back, or you wouldn't have been able to obtain the resource you did on a promise.

I am stating that some people _don't_ have a way of paying the debt back, and yet they have been loaned to, incurring debt, and thus ruined (as the parent you were originally replying to suggests)

> You must have a way of paying the debt back, or you wouldn't have been able to obtain the resource you did on a promise

This simply isn't true. On small scales, people lose their businesses and families declare bankruptcy. That's why I said this isn't a hypothetical. And on a large scale it causes financial collapses if many people go bankrupt at once.

It simply is true. But under capitalism plans don't always work out. That's how it is supposed to work. Things are tried and some fail. That way is progress and productivity.

We have system autostabilisers that rebalance the ship when the private sector has a blow up.

Bankruptcy is the reset mechanism. It's a mechanism that actually works, unlike the debtors' prisons we had previously.

The economy gets better for more people in more places than ever before. Environmental destruction is also progressing faster than ever before. Many crucial ecosystems are on the brink of collapse (e.g. the rainforests) and we show no signs of intending to protect them.

Media doesn't report good things that happen in the environment. From 2013-2019, they hammered constantly on how the Great Barrier Reef was dying. But, not a peep when they found that it is healthiest its ever been in recent history: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/parts-australia...

No wonder the trust in media has fallen to the lowest. Reuters/AP are informative as a root source, but I have stopped trusting environmentalist doom-and-gloom stories from MSM.

Environment is going to get far worse though. Germany is busy burning the shittiest form of coal as its primary fuel (35%): Lignite coal with 1/5th water content. It is the worse than burning literally anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany

Again, thanks to the utterly idiotic emotionally-driven environmentalists that are going to make the planet worse ironically. We need to stop giving them fodder and look to the tech/engineering community for solutions.

Regarding the Great Barrier Reef, it's not as simple as you're saying: https://theconversation.com/record-coral-cover-doesnt-necess...

Maybe, why is this source trustworthy, I have no idea. There are probably many examples of improvement in the environment that goes unreported.

I used to trust climate science. That trust is being eroded for me. Just the other day, someone reported that kids are gaining weight due to climate change. The reason? They can’t go out and play when it’s 2 deg C hotter. Come on.

I despise climate catastrophization by the media.

Media reporting on climate change is often dramatically wrong, whether it takes the slant of “everything is terrible” or “things are actually great”.

Go read how the IPCC reports are authored, you’ll hopefully develop some faith about the accuracy of what is in them. Then go read the summaries for policy makers to get an idea of what they say. You’ll see that most of what both sides are saying is in there is not what is in there.

I'm active in my community advocating for greater transit and modeshare and our transit advocacy network is much better at trumpeting good news than the MSM and many Twitter doomers for a simple reason: nobody will give us more funding until we tell them how $X was spent on initiative Y which led to great outcome Z. It's our job to tell everyone how this little bike lane in this neighborhood decreased car trips and increased safety. The MSM faces no existential risk when it trumpets bad news all day, but we have to convince our neighbors that the money they're spending or the traffic blockage they're facing as new infrastructure is built is worthwhile.

As far as I know the barrier reef is already dead because we emitted enough GHG to force sufficiently high water temperatures that the reef can't survive. It's only a matter of a couple of decades before the temperatures catch up with our emissions.

Wouldn’t environmentalists be opposed to coal as well? Or is it simply that they favor it over nuclear power? I’m not particularly well acquainted with German green parties’ policies.

They are. But when they’ve cornered themselves into freezing this winter, lignite coal it is.

Homes are not heated with nuclear power or lignite, they are heated with gas.

Gas is at risk of cut off this winter. Electric heating will be the primary source if that happens.

> In late June, after Russia reduced supplies by 60%, Berlin triggered the second stage of its national gas emergency plan — one step away from gas rationing.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2022/07/18/a...

Electrical heating is impossible. There is neither sufficient generation, nor sufficient grid capacity, so matter how many of the nuclear plants we had we keep running. Even in a mostly-nuclear grid like France's you just don't have the spare capacity lying around to replace fossil fuels for heating in a year.

Heating homes with conventional electric heatpumps is a pipe dream but underground heat pumps which are getting more common can be really efficient no?

Not sure I follow, even if coal were used for heating in Germany. Would the country be in a better environmental situation overall without the activists? I don’t doubt there’s some level of energy hypocrisy currently going on in Europe, but I don’t see how environmentalists have exacerbated the current crisis. Are you referring to their opposition to nuclear energy?

Yea because if it weren't for these people, Germany would have invested in Nuclear or secure better natural gas than from Russia (Algeria?). Nord Stream 1 was hastily negotiated with the devil. Devil then invaded Crimea to secure the oil fields. Then 8 years later, they did it again with Nord Stream 2! The devil used it as a leverage to take big chunks of Ukraine. Trump warned them (as much as I loathe the guy, he was right, unsophisticatedly but eerily accurate): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O24rulfjA8U

Environmentalists also invested in Solar energy in Germany. It has to be the dumbest idea ever, solar power in Germany is like 10% as efficient as Western USA. It is one of the worst places in Europe to stick solar panels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany

In general, Environmentalists do not understand the difference between gardening and farming. It's the Greta crowd that's going to lead this world towards mass starvation of humans. They have no solutions, only blind clueless activism.

> The devil used it as a leverage to take big chunks of Ukraine

Tried, but then they got back-up in the form of European and US weapon shipments that are trouncing the Russian's poorly trained forces and equipment - or, that's what the diverse media in my neck of the wood is saying. Russia doesn't seem to be winning or gaining though.

Trump is siding with the Russians and rejected military / financial aid to the Ukraine because they refused to find dirt on Biden or whatever it was about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Ukraine_scandal

Decade+ time scales don’t mean a whole lot. It’s far too short a time.

it's only gotten better if you look at food access, but food access != happiness; depression is rampant because we are being forced to live against our nature. I assure you, I hate being alive in the current world, even if my stomach is full.

Moreover even that is most likely only temporary, we are living inside a consumerist bubble that will soon burst (growing social unrest, ravaging pollution, probably a major war) leaving a horrible mess behind (we don't know how to endure physical discomfort anymore).

Not entirely true, e.g. deaths from natural disasters have been on a steady decline over many decades despite such disasters becoming more common and more destructive. In general our ability to continue improving human life expectancy has seemingly defied the odds - even in 2022 despite covid and everything else, average life expectancy is expected to improve on 2021 in most countries (including the good ol' U S of A). It does feel a bit like quantity over quality though.

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