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Comment by userabchn | Hacker News Reader

You single out only fossil fuels, but there are so many other ways in which we are damaging the environment that we also need to worry about - PFAS everywhere, noise and light pollution, pesticides and many other chemicals in rivers, expanses of monocultures, etc. It concerns me that there is so much fixation on one form of harm, which I fear may result in less attention to the many others that we are inflicting.

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I would argue that literally every single issue you mentioned is a consequence of fossil fuels

I'm pretty sure we still plan to have lights in our renewable energy utopia.

We don't need them as indiscriminately and wastefully as we currently have them.

When solar is providing us electricity at 2 cents / KWH, we will use them even more indiscriminately.

and in this far-from-reality-now story, im sure many things will be different.

Well, for lighting the battery costs are more relevant.

But nowadays you don't even need to wire electricity to the place you want to floodlight, so yes, we will only use them more.

We dont need a lot things. Lack of "need" has never stopped humans. Switching to renewable energy certainly won't change that.

Your ability to read their post as well as your ability to reply to it is thanks to fossil fuels.

The food you eat is thanks to fossil fuels.

Your entire lifestyle, from heating your home to taking your medicine: thanks to fossil fuels.

If you don't like it, take your clothes off and go live in a cave.

Even if I wanted to do that I couldn't because everybody else's indiscriminate use of fossil fuels is destroying the environment I would need to sustain me. Literally the point of the article you've responded to.

pesticides in rivers because of fossil fuels?

There are lots of speculative culprits and maybe it's a combination, but we won't get anywhere unless we find out which ones are responsible for fouling habitability by desirable insects and selectively addressing those pollutants.

If it's, for example, fertilizers... it would not be likely we pull back on farming output with resulting starvation in other countries that depend on affordable agricultural products in a global market (yes, we rich countries can afford a 2x or 3x cost of food, but not people in poor countries from which in a global economy we'd be sucking up their agricultural production and outbidding the locals.

biodiversity loss is surely a huge one. "even in undisturbed forests" is the headline, but these undisturbed forests are lesser in size every year. Ireland's forestry cover has dropped from about 80% in the 1600s to 1% in the 1900s. It's back up to 11% now and that seems great on paper, but its all monoculture forestry for logging, with zero wildlife. meanwhile, hedgerows and wild land is shrinking all the time - the place where wildlife actually lives

Here's one that I don't think people are even considering.

I've seen insects flying repeatedly into brightly colored non flower objects. They get stuck doing it.

So even something as simple as a small piece of colored fabric can throw bees off and there's no such thing as a forest so untouched that there isn't some human left object in it.

Brightly colored objects are more common than ever too.

Ammonia from dairy operations doesn't help.

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