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Electric transportation is not just cars to get to work. If 8 billion people all rode bicycles 100% of the time, you still need oil to grow and transport the fo

Electric transportation is not just cars to get to work. If 8 billion people all rode bicycles 100% of the time, you still need oil to grow and transport the food. Without any oil, most of them would still perish. Oil gets more expensive over time without new technology. You're trying to downscale the problem, but you do not eliminate it that way. Our population numbers are oil-supported no matter how we live. The moral imperative is to make them something more renewable-supported, before it is a crisis. Just because the crisis is many decades out does not make it less moral. We still need new technology, or else.

Fricken 9y ago
Getting people off meat would eliminate the lion's share of the problems with our industrial agricultural system. Again, it's not a technology problem, we could stop eating meat this afternoon if everyone was onboard, instead of waiting for some fantastic new technology to come around. I'm not against new technology, but deferring responsibility to breakthroughs that may or may not arrive in time strikes me as another form of bikeshedding. I've been hearing about the electric vehicle revolution for a quarter century, it has yet to arrive in any meaningful capacity. Throughout our history our biggest problems have been problems related to scarcity, so we're hardwired to think in those terms. Even though our problems are now problems of abundance, the default is to think that to solve this we need more of something. More technology! Build more factories, more steel, more lithium, more cobalt, we need a whole new industrial ecosystem to replace the one we've got! We're really good at managing scarcity. We're clueless about managing abundance. Of course, nobody likes the idea of less, it violates all our best instincts. Humans are highly adaptable, but we rarely adapt willingly if it's perceived to be a step down. That's the moral problem of our age, in my opinion.
- jackmott 9y ago
  until we then add even more people to the earth and arrive at the same problem. all these kinds of solutions need to be coupled with population management solutions.
- babyrainbow 9y ago
  Can't agree more with this [1]. I think human beings, as a whole, is like a lazy teenager who would rather stretch from his chair to get the remote control from the floor, risking a fall or sprain, than actually get up and pick it... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14622156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14622156

Fricken 9y ago

Getting people off meat would eliminate the lion's share of the problems with our industrial agricultural system. Again, it's not a technology problem, we could stop eating meat this afternoon if everyone was onboard, instead of waiting for some fantastic new technology to come around. I'm not against new technology, but deferring responsibility to breakthroughs that may or may not arrive in time strikes me as another form of bikeshedding. I've been hearing about the electric vehicle revolution for a quarter century, it has yet to arrive in any meaningful capacity. Throughout our history our biggest problems have been problems related to scarcity, so we're hardwired to think in those terms. Even though our problems are now problems of abundance, the default is to think that to solve this we need more of something. More technology! Build more factories, more steel, more lithium, more cobalt, we need a whole new industrial ecosystem to replace the one we've got! We're really good at managing scarcity. We're clueless about managing abundance. Of course, nobody likes the idea of less, it violates all our best instincts. Humans are highly adaptable, but we rarely adapt willingly if it's perceived to be a step down. That's the moral problem of our age, in my opinion.

jackmott 9y ago
until we then add even more people to the earth and arrive at the same problem. all these kinds of solutions need to be coupled with population management solutions.
babyrainbow 9y ago
Can't agree more with this [1]. I think human beings, as a whole, is like a lazy teenager who would rather stretch from his chair to get the remote control from the floor, risking a fall or sprain, than actually get up and pick it... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14622156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14622156