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Comment by collegeburner | Hacker News Reader

a barrel of oil is equivalent to around twenty-five thousand man hours of work. sacrificing that would result in a colossal hit to quality of life. and ironically, the additional people needed to mitigate that might actually result in more ecological impact, to say nothing of broadening a global underclass of widget producers

we can and should use our limited hydrocarbons to bootstrap our way to higher-potential energy sources. but "using less" is a misguided assumption

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Quality of life is relative. I live on a piece of land on the scale of 50-100 acres and currently have a small herd of cows, a few pigs, and chickens. We don't have a tractor and have no intention of buying heavy equipment. Most people that notice this think we're crazy and need to get a tractor to make this work.

Sure some of our daily tasks would be easier, but we simply don't want to own or maintain a tractor and appreciate a hard day's work.

I can say first hand that my quality of life is greater by skipping the diesel-powered tool that most would consider a must, and I'm well aware that most in my position would consider having the tractor as a quality of life improvement. Neither view is wrong, they just require more context and a recognition that quality of life is relative.

We can use less cars and use more trains. Energy efficiency is also an addition in the crease of available energy source, since said energy sources can be deployed to more productive, less harmful processes.

Walking is also good, and it would probably do us good to personally increase humans' basal metabolism.

trains are exclusively fixed point-to-point. many cities are not constructed for walking and/or are 110 in the summer. respectfully, screw walking.

trains are exclusively fixed point-to-point. many cities are not constructed for walking and/or are 110 in the summer. respectfully, screw walking.

Changing society is hard isn't an excuse to continue the status quo, nor some edge case you envisioned is an excuse to not encourage walking, cycling, or public transit whenever possible.

no, i'm saying 1. transportation is only a certain amount of our infrastructure and the cars can be electrified, and 2. your paradigm assumes we hold the environment above people's quality of life. i do not.

That's only true if you hold the environment to be negatively correlated with quality of life.

It's not automatically true that having cars increase the quality of life.

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