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That is a result, not an action. There's a book that came out recently - "Not the End of the World" by Hannah Ritchie - that starts by digging into a two-prong

That is a result, not an action. There's a book that came out recently - "Not the End of the World" by Hannah Ritchie - that starts by digging into a two-pronged definition of the concept of "sustainability", where the first prong is about meeting the needs of current generations, and the second prong (which is the one we usually focus on when thinking about sustainability) is about maintaining an environment in which future generations can meet their needs as well. The problem with most of what we're doing today is that it fails the second prong: future generations won't be able to meet their needs if the earth is too hot to support human civilization. But the problem with your proposed solution is that it fails the first prong. If you were dictator of the world and waved your wand such that nobody ever dug up another fossil fuel, starting from this moment, the result would be upheaval, privation, and death on a massive scale. Human civilization is, at this moment, dependent on digging up those fossil fuels and lighting them on fire. So what the (great many) people who are working on this problem are doing is trying to navigate a path that threads a needle between these two bad outcomes, transitioning away from the dig-stuff-up-and-burn-it model to one that still works about as well - or ideally, even better! - for people currently living, without sacrificing the lives of people who will live in the future. And yeah, pretty much everyone involved thinks that does mean we'll dig up very little of those fossils, on the other side of this transition. But that is more like an effect than a cause. Hope that helps!

tasty_freeze 3y ago
I think that is an uncharitable reading of the person you are replying to. I don't think they want to wave a magic wand and stop all oil/coal tomorrow. But investing time/money/policy to move away from fossil fuels is something we could have been doing since at least the Kyoto Protocol and yet we are doing next to nothing, and in fact are still subsidizing oil companies.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  > I don't think they want to wave a magic wand and stop all oil/coal tomorrow. Tomorrow is far too late. We should have started reducing our dependencies on oil since the 1970s.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Respectfully, I don't think it is an uncharitable reading at all. It is a response to a literal reading of the question "we just need to stop mining and drilling fossil fuels, how is this not obvious?". It is an obvious idea - and it's totally fine to put out obvious ideas! - but that's also why there are so many well known and top of mind reasons that it is not the solution to our predicament. To me, this is like a new student of algebra who thinks, "division is defined for all values of the denominator except zero, an obvious solution to that special case is that it should be defined for zero as well". It's an interesting idea for a student to have, but the reasons it doesn't work are very well known.
meristohm 3y ago
To what degree are we human animals in a population boom? Of course we want to maintain and even grow, but there are costs to that. To address the first prong, would it work to change our culture? Continuing to justify the massive amount of energy we convert, largely because we want to and not because we need to, feels like a problem with solutions that don't necessarily involve war.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I mean, what's your timescale for this "population boom"? Population growth hasn't been speeding up for a very long time (indeed, the opposite). Clearly we use more energy than we need, but I think lots of people hugely overestimate how much room there is to cut that without many many people dying. A very large amount of humanity's energy usage goes toward the food and other infrastructure of civilization that keeps people alive. Improving energy efficiency is certainly one component of decarbonization. But to my knowledge, nobody suggests it is enough on its own, or even a particularly large portion of the mix of solutions.
perrygeo 3y ago
Thank you for the balanced take. Stopping oil cold turkey would be a disaster for our civilization. Some think of oil merely as fuel for our cars and trucks, maybe for heating homes and businesses. Stopping all that would be relatively easy! But we've built our entire agricultural system, our entire infrastructure, our entire medical system on non-fuel applications of oil - plastics, fertilizer, synthetics, tar, steel and so many other industrial materials that require fossilized carbon, with no viable substitutes in sight. We need oil now, to build technology that will eventually replace oil! EV, electrified cities, solar panels, wind farms, nuclear and hydro power, food hubs, 15 minute city infrastructure, public transport... all require fossil fuels to bootstrap them. I think the most helpful framing is to look out ~100 years. In 2124, will humanity be using fossil fuels? No, highly unlikely. Oil is done: either through depletion, or EROI descent, or explicit measures to cap CO2 pollution, or a combination. We will see a world without oil soon, one way or the other. The question is how gracefully can we make this transition without causing massive human suffering? Part of that graceful transition involves the responsible use of our remaining fossil hydrocarbons. "Just stop oil" gives us zero chance of pulling off a smooth transition and plunges us straight into economic collapse with no regard for human well-being. "Drill-baby-drill" raises the risk of catastrophic climate crises with no regard for human well-being. Neither is a good mental framework if you care about helping humanity deal with this predicament.

tasty_freeze 3y ago

I think that is an uncharitable reading of the person you are replying to. I don't think they want to wave a magic wand and stop all oil/coal tomorrow. But investing time/money/policy to move away from fossil fuels is something we could have been doing since at least the Kyoto Protocol and yet we are doing next to nothing, and in fact are still subsidizing oil companies.

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
> I don't think they want to wave a magic wand and stop all oil/coal tomorrow. Tomorrow is far too late. We should have started reducing our dependencies on oil since the 1970s.
sanderjd 3y ago
Respectfully, I don't think it is an uncharitable reading at all. It is a response to a literal reading of the question "we just need to stop mining and drilling fossil fuels, how is this not obvious?". It is an obvious idea - and it's totally fine to put out obvious ideas! - but that's also why there are so many well known and top of mind reasons that it is not the solution to our predicament. To me, this is like a new student of algebra who thinks, "division is defined for all values of the denominator except zero, an obvious solution to that special case is that it should be defined for zero as well". It's an interesting idea for a student to have, but the reasons it doesn't work are very well known.

meristohm 3y ago

To what degree are we human animals in a population boom? Of course we want to maintain and even grow, but there are costs to that. To address the first prong, would it work to change our culture? Continuing to justify the massive amount of energy we convert, largely because we want to and not because we need to, feels like a problem with solutions that don't necessarily involve war.

sanderjd 3y ago
I mean, what's your timescale for this "population boom"? Population growth hasn't been speeding up for a very long time (indeed, the opposite). Clearly we use more energy than we need, but I think lots of people hugely overestimate how much room there is to cut that without many many people dying. A very large amount of humanity's energy usage goes toward the food and other infrastructure of civilization that keeps people alive. Improving energy efficiency is certainly one component of decarbonization. But to my knowledge, nobody suggests it is enough on its own, or even a particularly large portion of the mix of solutions.

perrygeo 3y ago

Thank you for the balanced take. Stopping oil cold turkey would be a disaster for our civilization. Some think of oil merely as fuel for our cars and trucks, maybe for heating homes and businesses. Stopping all that would be relatively easy! But we've built our entire agricultural system, our entire infrastructure, our entire medical system on non-fuel applications of oil - plastics, fertilizer, synthetics, tar, steel and so many other industrial materials that require fossilized carbon, with no viable substitutes in sight. We need oil now, to build technology that will eventually replace oil! EV, electrified cities, solar panels, wind farms, nuclear and hydro power, food hubs, 15 minute city infrastructure, public transport... all require fossil fuels to bootstrap them. I think the most helpful framing is to look out ~100 years. In 2124, will humanity be using fossil fuels? No, highly unlikely. Oil is done: either through depletion, or EROI descent, or explicit measures to cap CO2 pollution, or a combination. We will see a world without oil soon, one way or the other. The question is how gracefully can we make this transition without causing massive human suffering? Part of that graceful transition involves the responsible use of our remaining fossil hydrocarbons. "Just stop oil" gives us zero chance of pulling off a smooth transition and plunges us straight into economic collapse with no regard for human well-being. "Drill-baby-drill" raises the risk of catastrophic climate crises with no regard for human well-being. Neither is a good mental framework if you care about helping humanity deal with this predicament.