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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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