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Comment by izzydata | Hacker News Reader

And then after millions of years and all of the biological matter turning into oil we will eventually use it all up within ~300-400 years. The era that humans will utilize this kind of gasoline combustion is such a tiny blip of the whole human history, but today it seems like civilization can't possibly exist without it.

I don't see how airplanes are even going to exist for mass transit and cargo 200 years from now or how we will ever escape Earths gravity again without building some kind of space elevator before we run out.

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Rockets (especially SpaceX ones) can fly without fossil fuels. Hydrocarbons can easily be synthesized with thermal depolymerization or wasteful processes like how we make ethanol from corn.

That's to say nothing of how all the oil fields we've tapped are the easy to get ones, and the deep sea holds a ton of oil.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/12/porsches-synthetic-gaso...

This is very interesting. Thank you.

Electric and hydrogen fueled airplanes are progressing. There are also futuristic ideas about powering the planes with ground or space based lasers powered by solar. Zeppelins still scale really well, and ships can use sails again. I believe a lot of this stuff would have already been resolved if we had stopped propping up the fossil fuel industry by funding wars to maintain supply and allowing the industry to externalize its costs.

We need a president to declare transitioning of fossil fuels to be a national emergency and also a matter of national defense, and set the military industrial complex to work actually building a sustainable supply chain for energy and materials.

Using such language is a guarantee that such an effort will not succeed.

Of course it's important and it's inevitable but calling it an "emergency" would by hyperbole and cause it to be taken less seriously.

> We need a president

The US is a little under 15% of the world economy, and a little over 15% of the worlds energy use. It’s going to take a lot more than just the actions of one President to solve climate change.

This is the opposite of how politics work. The median voter is near retirement age; their #1 issue is they hate change and their #2 issue is they hate gas prices going up. Anything which looks like either one of these will fail.

So instead of hyping up things you're going to do, you need to hype them down. Ideally, you'd just go around saying you're doing absolutely nothing. (Also, don't raise gas prices.)

It’s really up to China and, increasingly, India at this point. The Western countries are not emitting much anymore so the impact here is limited.

Reducing emissions means inventing new technology; once you've invented it, you can export it to those other countries emitting more than you are.

(This is not how most people sell it, but it's true.)

We can stop buying things from China and India then.

A World War 3 is definitely one way to cut emissions and save the Earth. It seems more likely than the world working together on a reasonable plan.

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