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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

I also expect Trump to roll back many of those policies and create new, worse ones like opening up more federal land for drilling and mining.

That said, you must have a lot more faith in the current policies than I do. The sole focus on limiting carbon in the atmosphere has been woefully misguided in my opinion. We need to focus on reducing our total impact on the planet, not just trying to mitigate it a bit while we continue to consume more resources and use use more energy every year.

If human impact on the planet is going to kill us all with Trump in office, it was going to happen either way.

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> opening up more federal land for drilling and mining

I'm honestly not sure how much a difference Trump will make in this. The US greatly increased oil and gas production under Biden.

It seems that policies that supported an energy transition were generally working. If those get rolled back, hopefully things are in a good enough place that more sustainable energy continues dominating.

I'm still not actually clear how an energy transition will even work unless its paired with a huge reduction in how much total energy we actually use.

Moving from fossil fuels to renewables or even nuclear is all well and good, but it takes a huge amount of natural resources to pull off. Nuclear may be easier, renewables require a lot more resources than we currently have.

> unless its paired with a huge reduction in how much total energy we actually use.

This is very unrealistic IMO. That will never happen. It flies against the whole idea of civilization and the development of human history.

Energy consumption will rise on larger timescales. Best you can do is to tame the growth by efficiency and using more renewable, greener energy generation.

If you want to keep bees on your apartment roof that is fine, but we are not all going back to being subsistence farmers at this point.

Defeatist? Perhaps, but I don't think so.

While I do agree that its unrealistic to this people collectively will learn what it means to have "enough", I don't see another realistic solution.

We're not only increasing total energy consumption every year, we're increasing energy consumption per capita. It may be one thing if the argument is that energy use will rise or fall inline with population, but that's not the case.

This is the main crux of why climate change debates have always felt hollow to me. We can argue about plastic straws, diesel engine emissions, or what an acceptable level of parts per million in the atmosphere is but those are all surface level problems. Assuming the science linking human impact to climate issues is accurate, we're screwed no matter what we do on those issues if we continue to demand more power from whatever today's preferred energy source is.

I fully agree that all these things don't _solve_ anything and it never will, it just delays the inevitable a little bit.

But it is not completely out of the question we could solve abundant nonpolluting energy. Failure there is not inevitable.

> people collectively will learn what it means to have "enough"

Maybe I am too cynical, but I think the problem with this is that means, in practice:

"OK, everyone. Let's stop accelerated technological progress, and the level of civilization we have today, that's where we're going to stay at from now on, with maybe some smaller bugfixes rolling out once every 50 years or so.

The quality of life you have today? That's it.

Oh, and all you guys still in poverty [there are still billions of people who use very little energy], you're also going to have to stay there. Sorry."

That will in turn cause civil unrest and even more unhappy people than we have today, which means increased totalitarianism, oppression and violence to quash that to keep societies "stable". For all the ills of consumerism and aspirationism, it _is_ serving as an opium to keep people distracted from the harsh realities of the world.

We'd go back to the Middle Ages, in terms of the rate of improvement of the quality of life. I don't think many people are OK with that.

> But it is not completely out of the question we could solve abundant nonpolluting energy. Failure there is not inevitable.

I am pretty cynical and skeptical, so that may be tainting my view here for sure. This idea of abundant, nonpolluting energy feels like a perpetual motion machine to me. Energy systems require control to be useful, from storage to transmission to heat dissipation. Energy systems are inherently lossy and though we could one day find a cleaner or even truly clean energy source, that energy still has to be stored, transmitted, and used.

> OK, everyone. Let's stop accelerated technological progress, and the level of civilization we have today, that's where we're going to stay at from now on, with maybe some smaller bugfixes rolling out once every 50 years or so.

The opposite side of the coin is interesting to consider as well. We will always think things could be better, and maybe we even can make them better. We need to know what "enough" is though, and that would mean that we could get to a point where we have consumed enough resources and we should slow down or stop. "Progress" as a goal always sounds great on the surface, but it has to be directional (we need to know what we're progressing towards) and it must be bounded when goals are reached.

This is really where my cynicism steps in though. I just haven't seen many examples of people who can actually find "enough" and stop there. We tend to get used to what we have now and imagine ways things could get better. If energy were better used today, for example, I strongly believe that everyone could have the basics of food, water, shelter, and community covered and we wouldn't be stuck hating our jobs and always stressed out. We just collectively don't seem to want that.

> The US greatly increased oil and gas production under Biden.

And critically, I think, the Harris campaign failed to highlight facts like that, and emphasize how she will be different. Instead she completely bungled the messaging and went for "I'll do nothing different from what Biden did except add a Republican in my cabinet".

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/06/politics/harris-campaign-...

> “What, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” co-host of ABC’s “The View” Sunny Hostin asked Harris, looking to give her a set for her to spike over the net. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said.

Talk about a monumental failure.

Her campaign, and the democratic party more broadly, made a lot of mistakes. Her failing to distinguish herself from Biden was one of them, but I don't actually think it was the worst. They believed that Biden was going to win and waited way too late to swap in a replacement, it kind of makes sense that they wouldn't try to differentiate if they honestly believed Biden was a good candidate with a viable platform.

That's fair, they definitely waited too late. I guess I also wonder, what if they just left Biden as is. They believed he was going to win, heck he got 80M+ popular votes when he ran. Why risk swap him out. But then, I think, once they did swap him, she could have boosted her position by emphasizing how she will do things better. But perhaps she was also honest and didn't want to lie and she didn't really plan on changing anything.

The only conclusion I could make from the DNC dropping Biden so late was that he was so clearly slipping that they couldn't hide it, or ignore it, anymore. I have to assume that if they kept him on the ticket we would have seen a few months of campaigning that could look an awful lot like elder abuse.

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