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Let me rephrase: For much of history, civilizations and other groups of people took conquered peoples as slaves to support the conquerors' lifestyles. The slav

Let me rephrase: For much of history, civilizations and other groups of people took conquered peoples as slaves to support the conquerors' lifestyles. The slaves served as the cheap energy that today has been supplanted by fossil fuels. Our Western lifestyle is predicated upon these fossil fuels in much the same way that prior societies' lifestyles were based upon slavery. Slavery has undesirable characteristics that we (being dependent on it no longer) are free to scorn the evils of. Fossil fuels also have undesirable characteristics: they're polluting the atmosphere, polluting the water, and releasing boatloads of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Sea levels are rising, coral are dying, and storms are projected to continue increasing in magnitude. Perhaps you've heard the economics saying, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." You and I are so utterly dependent on this source of energy that our brains can't fully comprehend the consequences of choosing the alternative. And there's absolutely nothing we can do to convince anyone else to stop using fossil fuels. If you're anything like me (and other normal humans), you ignore the costs associated with your actions and continue to use fossil fuels for transport, for food, and for electricity to power your electronic gadgets. To change your lifestyle would require severe unpleasantness. *edit for clarity

pdonis 13y ago
Ok, this makes things a lot clearer. > You and I are so utterly dependent on this source of energy that our brains can't fully comprehend the consequences of choosing the alternative. Depends on the alternative. If the alternative is a much lower standard of living, you're right, there's no way you're going to convince a significant number of people to choose that alternative. (You and I are both providing evidence of that just by having this discussion in this forum.) OTOH, if the alternative is using non-fossil-fuel sources of energy to maintain our standard of living, I'm all for that. I think the chief obstacle in the way of that is people's unwillingness to accept that any source of energy will have some undesirable characteristics. "There's no such thing as a free lunch" applies to any way of achieving a standard of living beyond bare subsistence. So the goal can't be to find an energy source that has no undesirable characteristics; the best we can do is to find sources that have less net undesirability, so to speak, than fossil fuels--just as fossil fuels have less net undesirability (by a very large margin, IMO) than slavery. There are at least two such sources that I can think of that have the potential of supporting a first world standard of living: nuclear, and solar done right.
- mitochondrion 13y ago
  I totally agree with what you've said, although I personally think that in terms of long-term misery that fossil fuels have the potential to be just as damaging as slavery.
  - pdonis 13y ago
    > I personally think that in terms of long-term misery that fossil fuels have the potential to be just as damaging as slavery. To me that says that you are either drastically overestimating the potential misery due to fossil fuels or drastically underestimating the actual misery that was caused by slavery.
    - anonbanker 13y ago
      perhaps you could cite some sources that would calibrate those of us that agree with the GP's mindset.
      - pdonis 13y ago
        What sort of data would you like to see? I'm having a hard time even getting the potential harm from fossil fuels to within a few orders of magnitude of the actual harm caused by slavery. Perhaps you could start by answering this question: do you think I am drastically underestimating the potential harm from fossil fuels, or drastically overestimating the actual harm that was done by slavery? That will help me to "calibrate" where you are coming from. (And if it's the first of the two, as I suspect, can you give some specifics about why?)

pdonis 13y ago

Ok, this makes things a lot clearer. > You and I are so utterly dependent on this source of energy that our brains can't fully comprehend the consequences of choosing the alternative. Depends on the alternative. If the alternative is a much lower standard of living, you're right, there's no way you're going to convince a significant number of people to choose that alternative. (You and I are both providing evidence of that just by having this discussion in this forum.) OTOH, if the alternative is using non-fossil-fuel sources of energy to maintain our standard of living, I'm all for that. I think the chief obstacle in the way of that is people's unwillingness to accept that any source of energy will have some undesirable characteristics. "There's no such thing as a free lunch" applies to any way of achieving a standard of living beyond bare subsistence. So the goal can't be to find an energy source that has no undesirable characteristics; the best we can do is to find sources that have less net undesirability, so to speak, than fossil fuels--just as fossil fuels have less net undesirability (by a very large margin, IMO) than slavery. There are at least two such sources that I can think of that have the potential of supporting a first world standard of living: nuclear, and solar done right.

mitochondrion 13y ago
I totally agree with what you've said, although I personally think that in terms of long-term misery that fossil fuels have the potential to be just as damaging as slavery.
- pdonis 13y ago
  > I personally think that in terms of long-term misery that fossil fuels have the potential to be just as damaging as slavery. To me that says that you are either drastically overestimating the potential misery due to fossil fuels or drastically underestimating the actual misery that was caused by slavery.
  - anonbanker 13y ago
    perhaps you could cite some sources that would calibrate those of us that agree with the GP's mindset.
    - pdonis 13y ago
      What sort of data would you like to see? I'm having a hard time even getting the potential harm from fossil fuels to within a few orders of magnitude of the actual harm caused by slavery. Perhaps you could start by answering this question: do you think I am drastically underestimating the potential harm from fossil fuels, or drastically overestimating the actual harm that was done by slavery? That will help me to "calibrate" where you are coming from. (And if it's the first of the two, as I suspect, can you give some specifics about why?)