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Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I actually disagree with anything you're saying here.

I'm not really arguing exactly whatever is in the Limits to Growth book (I've heard of it but haven't read it), but I do think we are overutilizing resources faster than they can recover, and we can't just create a "make some new fossil fuels" or "make the sand that we need" tech at the scale that we would need to replace them.

Like fossil fuels for example, take millions of years for the planet to produce naturally, but we've burned through a good chunk of what is cheap to extract and process in about a hundred years.

I might be including two things that are a bit different from each other, but they all contribute to our ability to thrive as a species, especially at our (average) level of comfort and consumption currently.

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We are literally getting more energy from the sun than we could know what to do with it at this moment. The problem is that we oriented our society around the use of certain technology and resources are destructive to the planet's ecological and biological systems.

It's possible that certain overuse of certain technology is actually causing us discomfort.

Cars are energy intensive mode of transportation and manufacture. We could all walk more and be subjected to less pollution and experience a greater quality of life.

> Cars are energy intensive mode of transportation and manufacture. We could all walk more and be subjected to less pollution and experience a greater quality of life.

Yeah I agree. I already try to use my car (a hybrid, tried to get electric but there were none in the area at the time) as little as I can.

Working from home the past six years has cut down how much I drive to like 20% of what I used to. Unfortunately I do live in a suburb in the US, so I don't have much choice but to drive to places unless I just want to be stuck in my house forever. Only place I could probably feasibly walk to near me is a 7-11 or a Papa Johns, and that would still take 25 minutes each way.

The depletion of fossil fuels is not the problem. In fact, the opposite is true: we need to leave a very large proportion of present-day fossil fuel reserves in the ground if we're to avert catastrophic increases in global radiative forcing, and leading fossil fuel states don't particularly want to do that. Renewables, and potentially nuclear, can deliver all the energy we need if we are intelligent about it. Some things will be more expensive in the medium-term (producing extreme high heat, flying), but that's far from a doomsday scenario. Other things (average electricity prices, road and rail transport) will be cheaper.

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