5 ms·

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 ful

• readthenotes1 8mo ago
  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).
  • ch4s3 8mo ago
    Not to mention synthetic fertilizer basically ending famine outside of war zones.
• righthand 8mo ago
  Can’t wait to get all that spilled blood back!
  • adventured 8mo ago
    Water, lithium, high-purity sand, various other high-value metals. There isn't going to be a shortage of blood being spilled for resources.
    • mekdoonggi 8mo ago
      Solar, wind, and batteries are already potentially trillion dollar markets. Is there an active, bloody conflict occurring due to any of those?
      • alephnerd 8mo ago
        > 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-congos-war-zone-minerals-even-after-pact-sources-say-2026-03-02/ https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/us-struggling-de-risk-c... [1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-explores-rare-earth-deal-with-myanmar-rebels-after-chinese-curbs-2025-09-10/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-explores-rare-eart... [2] - https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/commentary/blog/lithium-the-link-between-the-ukraine-war-and-the-clean-energy-transition/ https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/commentary/blog/lithium-the... [3] - https://dayan.org/content/central-african-republic-between-france-and-russia https://dayan.org/content/central-african-republic-between-f... [4] - https://energycapitalpower.com/exclusive-central-african-republic-bets-on-untapped-mining-wealth/ https://energycapitalpower.com/exclusive-central-african-rep... [5] - https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/36610/ https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/36610/ [6] - https://www.ibanet.org/Rule-of-law-Milei-election-win-raises-questions-over-US-interference https://www.ibanet.org/Rule-of-law-Milei-election-win-raises... [7] - https://www.ft.com/content/401a9e84-3034-4375-bf39-56b92500c7aa https://www.ft.com/content/401a9e84-3034-4375-bf39-56b92500c...
• moralestapia 8mo ago
  That's one hell of a big envelope!
• pinkpomelo 8mo ago
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• triceratops 8mo ago
  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.
  • dleslie 8mo ago
    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.
    • rootusrootus 8mo ago
      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.
      • dleslie 8mo ago
        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.
    • triceratops 8mo ago
      > 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.
• zdw 8mo ago
  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."
• crazygringo 8mo ago
  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.
  • triceratops 8mo ago
    > You don't need fossil fuels for massive warfare Yeah you do. Compare the casualties and destruction in 19th century and 20th century wars.
    • runarb 8mo ago
      > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll
      • fpoling 8mo ago
        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.
      • triceratops 8mo ago
• quantified 8mo ago
  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.
  • jaggederest 8mo ago
    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.
  • mekdoonggi 8mo ago
    > What kind of military transport airplanes or bombers will be electric? Looked into how wars are being fought these days? Drones.
  • rootusrootus 8mo ago
    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.
  • Suckseh 8mo ago
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• genericone 8mo ago
  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.
  • jaggederest 8mo ago
    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.
  • fpoling 8mo ago
    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.
    • mordymoop 8mo ago
      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.
      • 8mo ago
• glitchc 8mo ago
  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-peeling-away-from-the-sticky-situation-glue-puts-us-in/ https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/sustainability/sealed-fate-pe...
  • FarmerPotato 8mo ago
    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.
  • FarmerPotato 8mo ago
    Aaand this news about glue from used cooking oil, which can replace EVA glue: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a69681178/cooking-oil-glue/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a6968117...
• arjie 8mo ago
  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.
  • jaggederest 8mo ago
    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.
• deleted 8mo ago
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• Fwirt 8mo ago
  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.
• jmyeet 8mo ago
  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?
  • jaggederest 8mo ago
    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?
• deleted 8mo ago
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