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Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

By my back of the envelope math, once we've fully transitioned away from fossil fuels as an energy source (distinct from, say, as a chemical feedstock), and fully remediated the externalities and damage they've done both in terms of atmospheric CO2, political violence, and direct environmental contamination, the entire industry is likely going to be net negative as a whole from the beginning of usage to now. That's kind of an amazing thing to think about, even if it is an order of magnitude off in one direction or another.

A similar example would be the asbestos mining and manufacturing industry, which has been essentially fully destroyed by legal settlements.

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The accounting only works if you assume the counterfactual is "same industrial civilization, minus fossil fuels." But there's a strong path-dependency argument that cheap hydrocarbons were the bootstrap not just for energy, but for the plastics, fertilizers, and chemical feedstocks that made modern manufacturing and agriculture possible in the first place. Renewables are downstream of that industrial base. You can't net out the externalities against a baseline that wouldn't exist without them.

Right I'm not saying that they were historically a bad idea, I'm saying that the future value of the industry is probably negative now that we're past the bootstrap to major alternatives in some areas. I don't see a way to get out of the energy trap of an early industrial revolution without concentrated combustion sources.

One does need carbohydrates for industrial bootstrap. Germans during WWII produced liquid fuel from coal. Modern version of this process becomes competitive with oil-base fuel around 80 USD/barrel.

Yes, this process is very energy intensive and generates like twice CO2 per energy used. But in a hypothetical world without oil and natural gas it may lead to earlier start with electric cars and renewables so the total amount of CO2 put into atmosphere would probably be the same. Plus, as coal is much more evenly distributed, there would be much less reasons for wars.

This only works up to a certain volume. The world economy requires about 38 billion barrels of oil per year. If you processed 100% of all grain, sugar crop, tuber and oilseed on Earth into liquid fuel, leaving zero for food, you'd get about 6 billion barrels of oil-equivalent in liquid fuels. Since it has to compete with food, the actual number would be much lower. It's not even close to being able to sustain our civilization.

There is absolutely enough coal to make liquid fuel for the current civilization. But if oil/gas would not exist, then electrical cars would be on the road much earlier as burning coal to produce electricity is much more efficient then converting it into liquid fuel to burn in a car engine. As electrical cars produces roughly the same amount of CO2 when using electricity from coal as ICE car running on gasoline, the climate impact would be roughly the same.

Then in a hypothetical scenario of 20th century without oil/natural gas nuclear energy would be much more widespread at this point and CO2 impact would be lower.

Just to be pedantic: I think you mean hydrocarbons (just carbon and hydrogen) rather than carbohydrates (carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen).

You could probably do it with carbohydrates (starches, sugars) or related molecules (wood, alcohol). But I'm pretty sure that hydrocarbons is what you intended there, and it's easier to dig that out of the ground.

It would've been impossible to bootstrap renewable energy without fossil fuels.

I'm strongly in favor of zero emissions. We also have to give fossil fuels their due for getting us here. I don't think the comparison to asbestos holds.

We've been milling wheat with wind power for more than a thousand years; run-of-river hydro-mechanical solutions have been used for milling, mining, and forging for just as long.

Electric wind and hydro solutions are hundreds of years old, at this point.

And of course, there's steam.

I think we'd have had a green revolution with wind and water. Petroleum wasn't necessary.

I imagine it would not have been so dramatic, though. Might have ultimately found our way to the same spot, but a few hundred years longer. It is hard to argue that the incredible energy density of fossil fuels (oil in particular) is not a big driver of our industrialization.

There's certainly a quality to it that has lent itself to the suburbanization of the USA. In the absence of viable electric battery technology, the suburbanization would have relied on street cars and pedestrians.

Which existed. And were ripped up around the time the automobile took over; which has all sorts of theories around it as to why...

I think without oil we'd have higher density cities, better public transit, and healthier populations.

> And of course, there's steam.

How do you make steam without burning something? If you say nuclear fission then you're proposing that humans would somehow have invented electric mining vehicles and mined enough ore to invent fusion without burning a single hydrocarbon molecule?

I suppose in an alternate reality where we simply had no fossil fuels this may have been the tech tree. It would have taken centuries longer though.

Coal was certainly a problem; we have the word "smog" for a reason. But we were already on our way to electrified transport, via street cars and similar, when the automobile surged to popularity.

And where does all that electricity come from? Until the 40s or so, hydroelectric plants and wind turbines could provide hardly any power output compared to coal plants, later supplemented by gas plants; even the electric streetcars relied on fossil fuels further down the line. Renewable energy development would've had to scale an order of magnitude further than in reality to be a basis for industry and transportation, alongside advances in electricity distribution and storage to pull it from where it's generated.

The solution, in the absence of oil, would be to simply build more hydro and wind. Neither are particularly difficult technologies. Where they would have lagged in efficiency they make up for in simplicity.

Distributing electricity isn't easy, but it also isn't particularly insurmountable. We had to solve it even with oil as a source of electrical generation.

Your scenario seems baselessly optimistic. If it were just as simple to run society off of those, we would've been doing it to some extent already: it's not like Big Coal or Big Oil was blocking everyone else from having ideas about how to generate power (see: the initial spread of gas power, followed by the spread of nuclear power), and surely many people would've had the incentive to produce power without dealing with coal miners or oilmen. It's that it would've been dramatically more expensive without all the design iterations they have since gone through.

And if you greatly restrict supply at a given price point, without changing the underlying demand, you'll end up with much higher prices and lower total volume, so we wouldn't enjoyed all the compounding benefits from access to energy.

There are places that do. Here in Canada there are at least two provinces that subsist almost entirely off of hydro, and have for the better part of a century. Both export huge amounts of electricity to the USA.

And we have active political conflict between big oil and everyone else, where there seems to be an insatiable demand for socializing the externalities of oil and gas while receiving public funding to make oil production competitive and market viable. In that manner, it places itself in front of efforts to use literally anything else.

If oil and gas had never received a single dollar of public funding, including by way of public funding for externalities that support or recover from oil and gas, then it never would have been market viable as an energy source in places where it doesn't seep out of the soil. Roads would not have been paved, power plants would not have been built, suburbs would only exist for the very wealthy.

Respectfully, from reading all your other comments all over this thread, I don't think you understand everything that modern technology stands on top of. You're handwaving away enormously difficult, complicated things and processes with "just use hydro". It doesn't work like that.

Your heart is in the right place and I sympathize with you about car-oriented development in North America. But I think you have a massive blind spot.

Fossil fuels were good and necessary for the modern world. Their owners have perpetrated heinous lies to keep us tied to them for far longer than was good or necessary.

We might argue whether they were good (I disagree) but I cannot agree that they were ever _necessary_ as an energy source. Viable alternatives exist and have existed for the entire duration of their use as a form of energy; and the story of oil-as-energy is the story of human suffering in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; without oil there would not be wars over oil, there would be healthier populations, and (likely) climate change would be less of a concern.

It wasn't necessary for it to happen eventually, but if eventually is several generations further down the line because it would have been painfully slow that's an important factor to consider.

Slower industrial and economic development would include huge human costs in terms of slower medical, social, economic and possibly also political development. It might have some beneficial effects as well though. I don't think it's an easy calculation to make.

We had rapid social progress _despite_ suburbanization. It never came to pass that we could assume that every household had a car, there was always a statistically significant urban populations that preferred transit, and delivery of public services is less efficient with lower density populations.

I happen to believe that we would be a healthier, happier society if suburbanization had never occurred. If we walked more, and had better access to the services we need, then we'd be healthier and happier. And it would be cheaper to deliver services.

I think that may be insufficiently factoring in energy costs. If energy costs a n order of magnitude or two more for an extended period, you just get a whole lot less economy generally, and therefore a whole lot less of everything an economy can provide.

Walking more sounds great, but I'm not sure it compensates for what could be an order of magnitude less health care generally.

Health care is more efficiently delivered to higher density populations. Low density populations increase the time to access health care, which increases the risk of delivering emergency care but it also encumbers access to primary care with the associated access time. Suburban areas are a great deal more expensive in terms of health care delivery.

Consider that in the absence of suburbanization there is decreased demand for energy. Higher density housing is cheaper to service overall, but also provides greater efficiency in accessing services. The reduced efficiency of suburban residences _requires_ the existence of high density forms of readily accessible and consumable energy; it simply isn't viable to build an American suburb without cheap energy, because it is a hideously inefficient model.

But other models _do_ exist, and _are_ successful. The suburb can die and society will be better off for it.

Absolutely true, my point is more about extraction per se now that alternatives for some uses exist, and definitely the bootstrap problem is real and fossil fuels were the only way to get past it.

What I'm saying is more of an "externalities may exceed the value for any future time" than "we should go back in time and ban them from the beginning". I also suspect that as chemical feedstock and niche uses they'll effectively never be replaced, just probably be synthetic instead of extracted.

Thermal solar can be built 200 years ago. Although coal is very useful for production of steel, it is not essential as wood can be used instead.

> Although coal is very useful for production of steel, it is not essential as wood can be used instead.

Wasn't the production of charcoal in Europe during the middle ages the cause of rather massive deforestation?

I don't know about Europe, but mining deforested most of Nevada's pinyon-juniper woodlands to produce charcoal during the 1800s.

> Thermal solar can be built 200 years ago

That's good for heating water, but I'm not aware of it generating a significant amount of electricity even today.

Soviet Union built one in Crimea. It worked. And nothing special was used that could not be built 200 years ago. But it was rather inefficient and in presence of cheap coal there were no point to continue with it after the collapse of Soviet Union.

That's a heck of a "back of the envelope".

You're going to have to give us your calculations there.

Because a gigantic amount of life improvement is also attributable to using fossil fuels for energy. So how exactly are you weighing up the two sides? Not to mention, it's hard to see how we ever would have been able to create the modern forms of renewable energy in the first place without fossil fuels as an intermediate technological phase.

And it's not even clear how you'd attribute political violence to fossil fuels. You don't need fossil fuels for massive warfare. And if you remove one primary resource from the equation, then another resource now becomes primary, and people will be fighting over that. In the days of the Roman Empire, grain was the strategic resource.

> You don't need fossil fuels for massive warfare

Yeah you do. Compare the casualties and destruction in 19th century and 20th century wars.

> Yeah you do. Compare the casualties and destruction in 19th century and 20th century wars.

Looking at Wikipedia's list of wars by death toll[0], it seems that people were capable of massive casualties and destruction without fossil fuels, too. Like the Taiping Rebellion in 1850–1864, with a death toll of 20–70 million. The Mongol invasions in 1206–1368, with a death range of 20–60 million, and the Three Kingdoms period in 184–280, with a death range of 34 million.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

Casualties from Mongol invasion are very likely much less than what was given in Wikipedia. There are good arguments that in fact probability of being killed has not changed throughout the history. It just in modern times wars are less frequent but are more devastating.

> Taiping Rebellion

"With no reliable census at the time, estimates of the death toll of the Taiping Rebellion are speculative. Most of the deaths were attributed to plague and famine".

That just means there was a large population around that could die from the effects of the war.

> The Mongol invasions in 1206–1368 [168 years]... and the Three Kingdoms period in 184–280 [96 years]

If WW2 [6 years] had gone on as long as the Mongol invasions the death toll would've topped 1 billion.

> it's hard to see how we ever would have been able to create the modern forms of renewable energy in the first place without fossil fuels as an intermediate technological phase.

That wasn't the point. It's clear that fossil fuels are a phase, one that can't last forever because they're finite. At some point they'll run out. But long before that can happens, we're more likely to transition away. Perhaps not completely, but to the point that they're something like whale oil.

Mills using water as a source of energy are known for thousands of years. If oil, natural gas or even coal would not exist, that and wind energy would be used on much bigger scale. Then a solar power station using thermal solar could be built like 200 years ago. And nuclear energy would be eventually discovered.

Thank you for stating my thesis better than I could, exactly right. I think they were (and to some degree, especially as a feedstock, are) essential to escape from the energy poverty of e.g. the late 1700s. I just think we could have transitioned away at the turn of the previous century, or the turn of this century, and saved ourselves a lot of pain. The fact that they are still widely used as nominally primary energy (actually stored secondary energy) is a little disappointing.

> I just think we could have transitioned away at the turn of the previous century... and saved ourselves a lot of pain.

I mean, that's a hugely provocative statement that needs to be backed up with some level of analysis.

You need to look at all of the industries and products that would have become impossible, and what the ramifications of that are.

Even today, you're basically proposing that entire industries, such as long-distance air travel, effectively disappear. And that sea shipping effectively regresses to sailing ships? I can't even imagine how one could begin to perform an even remotely plausible analysis, given how much each industry relies on other industries, and how difficult it would be to estimate how other technological advances would have developed instead.

I think this falls in line with the sentiment from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy":

"And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."

The way fossil fuels have been exploited has been categorically evil, and from that perspective I think the "industry" is going to be seen as a net negative. The negative externalities are in line with the waste generated by the development of nuclear weapons (think Hanford) on an even grander scale. But it would have been impossible for us to reach a point where it was possible to produce solar cells, hydro, and wind energy without the incredible energy density of petroleum fuels. The fuel for the industrial revolution that gave us our modern livelihoods. Petroleum-derived fertilizers are what enable the global population that we have today, so in a very real sense you and I would not exist without the development of fossil fuels on a grand scale. Whether or not that is a benefit or a deficit to mankind will probably be left to the historians.

Lest anyone think I condone the irreparable damage done to the planet by the industrialization enabled by reckless exploitation of petroleum, I think the whole thing is shameful, and I feel a bit of shame every time I have to drive my gasoline-powered car to the store. But I think there was a responsible way to harvest and benefit from that natural resource and like most natural resources, human greed found a way to make the worst of it.

I daresay it will be tricky to make any back of the envelope calculations without the use of fossil fuel products, given that both the envelope and the writing tool heavily rely on them.

The pen, pencil and paper are somewhat obvious. Less obvious is that we also need them to make glue at an industrial scale [1].

[1] https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/sustainability/sealed-fate-pe...

Your comment wins the day, as far as I'm concerned.

Here's to more back-of-the-envelope calculations (and less hand-waving).

I learned a lot about glue here.

Aaand this news about glue from used cooking oil, which can replace EVA glue: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a6968117...

Insert here the New Yorker cartoon about the shabby business executive around a campfire with a bunch of kids crowing "Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."

That sounds like it's smuggling in some assumptions that do not hold. Modern industrialization has led to human flourishing on an unprecedented scale. Pre-industrial civilizations are not getting to this point without high-energy-density materials and bootstrapping to photovoltaics, wind, and nuclear seem highly unlikely. Even solar concentrators seem unlikely to help considering fossil fuels provide portable energy storage that was unmatched in utility until recently.

I think there's probably a lot of rosy math in this counterfactual. Perhaps one can argue that post the nuclear age, we could have made some choices that environmentalists would oppose that would nonetheless have been better for the environment, but "from the beginning of use"? I think that I'd like to see.

EDIT: It would be a fun universe to play with, though. Do we use solar concentrators to provide the power to make grain ethanol? We'd have to master food production first without Haber-Bosch though. That sounds like a real challenge.

My statement is just forward looking - I don't see a way to get out of the energy trap from 1700 to perhaps 1900 besides fossil fuels, practically speaking, the regret I have is that we've continued past the point where alternatives are comparable or even superior.

I am curious how your back of the envelope calculations valued the reduction in transportation speed and cost afforded by fossil fuels over sails, paddles, and draft animals for the last 150 years or so.

Likewise, curious about the cost and value that air conditioning and refrigeration have provided. I'm not sure how you do a back of the envelope calculation to address opening up the southern United States-- something that wouldn't have been likely without the low cost of electricity given by coal (outside the TVA region).

Not to mention synthetic fertilizer basically ending famine outside of war zones.

It is unlikely that we will ever fully migrate away, unless the infrastructure to produce the fuels collapses. What kind of military transport airplanes or bombers will be electric? There will be many uses for fuel, just not perhaps in urban centers of the majority of people.

Right, I'm not saying we'll stop using e.g. JP8, I just think it will be synthetic over the long run. Similarly for chemical feedstocks - hydrocarbons are very useful materials that aren't going to disappear any time soon. I just think the "drilling them out of the ground" part is going to end.

> What kind of military transport airplanes or bombers will be electric?

Looked into how wars are being fought these days? Drones.

I hope we can switch to biofuels, though. The value of liquid fuels is undeniable, but we can make them without digging up more oil.

I have no idea how you possibly came up with this.

For a start, there are a ton of non-energy uses of fossil fuels (eg fertilizer, plastics, roads). There are certain vehicles with huge impediments to switching away (eg planes, ships).

And beyond all that there are a ton of other sources of greenhouse gases, notably construction, specifically concrete.

We’ve taken a ton of sequestered carbon from the ground. To get net zero we’d have to sequester at least this much and the real way we have is growing plants. There are only so many plants you can grow.

So how do you get to get net zero?

My hyperbolic suggestion was to build four pyramids of carbon cubes. They'd have to be about 5km wide and similarly tall, and would be by far the largest structures ever built by humanity. You'd need supplemental oxygen to spend any substantial time on the peak.

Assuming we had too-cheap-to-meter fusion or a dyson swarm or something like that, of course.

Call it total cost of say, $50 trillion, no big deal, right?

That's one hell of a big envelope!

Can’t wait to get all that spilled blood back!

Water, lithium, high-purity sand, various other high-value metals. There isn't going to be a shortage of blood being spilled for resources.

Solar, wind, and batteries are already potentially trillion dollar markets. Is there an active, bloody conflict occurring due to any of those?

> Is there an active, bloody conflict occurring due to any of those

The Congolese Civil War and the ongoing M23/Rwanda-led War [0], as well as the Myanmar Civil War [1]. Even the Russian Invasion of Ukraine has a critical minerals component [2] as does the ongoing Central African Republic Civil War [3][4] and the Oromo insurgency within the Ethiopian Civil War [5].

This does not mean that we shouldn't invest in building renewable and battery capacity (we in fact need to further enhance capacity), but we need to recognize that hard power trumps soft power in a multipolar world.

Renewable power doesn't imply pacifism. It is powered by critical minerals that all regional powers are rushing to control either with ballots [6], bribes [7], or bullets.

Renewable power will be covered in blood, but less blood than will be caused by anthropogenic climate change. If we need to make deals with devils, so be it. Such is life.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/us-struggling-de-risk-c...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-explores-rare-eart...

[2] - https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/commentary/blog/lithium-the...

[3] - https://dayan.org/content/central-african-republic-between-f...

[4] - https://energycapitalpower.com/exclusive-central-african-rep...

[5] - https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/36610/

[6] - https://www.ibanet.org/Rule-of-law-Milei-election-win-raises...

[7] - https://www.ft.com/content/401a9e84-3034-4375-bf39-56b92500c...

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