Comment by dcrazy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dcrazy | Hacker News Reader

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Asserting fossil fuels are crap betrays you as an ideologue, rather than someone who is solution-oriented.

Fossil fuels have amazing energy density, fantastic refueling characteristics, and a highly developed production and delivery infrastructure. Electricity only has the last one, and even then you have to take marks off for lack of widespread DC in most places on Earth where you can fill a Jerry can with 93 octane.

I know that I can only afford to drive an EV because of a stack of dependencies that work out Just So for myself. I would love for the world to move en masse away from fossil fuels and hydrocarbons in general, but that’s not gonna happen by telling the people who deploy these systems in the real world that the energy source their entire systems are built around is inferior and unnecessary.

> Asserting fossil fuels are crap

is a coarse short hand for saying they have negative externalities which are horrendous and that only really become unquestionable as the boiling frog dies.

This is not an ideological stance, more a thermodynamic one-

( my background includes a decade and more in exploration geophysics for resource mapping and extraction at multiple large country / continental scale measuring and modelling gravity, tides, magnetics, radiometrics, atmospheric temperature and density (not so much actual gas mix, although yes, isotopes) )

> Fossil fuels have amazing energy density, fantastic refueling characteristics,

which cannot be denied. They also increase the insulation factor of the atmosphere in a slow steady fashion that traps energy that would be radiated to space were it not for human fossil fuel usage .

> and a highly developed production and delivery infrastructure.

So do drug cartels.

We are in that time when it's humanities best interest to reduce fossil fuel usage as much as possible, as fast as possible, and look to means of extracting some of the excess CO2 from the atmosphere that has been added by humans.

“In reality fossil fuel is crap and we don’t need it”

The second half of that sentence is what makes it clearly an ideological assertion.

> rather than someone who is solution-oriented

Or maybe they are solutions oriented around the problem that the world is going to boil, instead of solution oriented around the problem of producing consumer goods at enormous volumes and shipping them across the ocean?

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