4 ms·
Are you referring to climate change (i.e. low oil prices reduce efforts to move to alternative energy) or revenues from oil?
by brandon272 12y ago
Are you referring to climate change (i.e. low oil prices reduce efforts to move to alternative energy) or revenues from oil?
- api 12y agoI'm referring to the eventual depletion of oil and other fossil fuels, which is the single greatest existential threat faced by humanity. It's far greater than worst case climate change scenarios. A good way to think about fossil fuel depletion: Imagine that there is a planet killer asteroid heading toward us. We've known about it since at least the 1950s, and there it is... heading slowly inexorably toward us. But for various reasons our math isn't perfect, so we don't know exactly when it's going to hit. It might be in the 2030s, or the 2050s, but almost certainly no later than 2100. When it does we all die. Nobody is talking about it, and very few are doing anything about it. Right now if we started to really run out of fossil fuels, everyone would starve to death. Our population is at least two orders of magnitude larger than what can be supported without that level of energy use. There would also probably be a global war, possibly thermonuclear, as every economy collapses at once and various warmongers and crackpots take over every country's leadership. There's an article about post-9/11 CIA torture on HN's front page right now... that was after an attack that just killed a few thousand people. Imagine the political lunacy that would ensue as the whole of modern civilization collapses in on itself, everyone's savings evaporates in a series of hyper-deflations, stock markets crash and then crash and then crash some more, etc. Every major nation would get a Hitler. Like I said... if you aren't afraid of this you haven't looked into it deeply or thought about it very much.