Hacker News Books

I very strongly recommend reading the underlying article itself. I've submitted that numerous times to HN, unfortunately PDFs seem not to have much uptake, in part because many readers arrive via mobile devices.

https://www-legacy.dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_C...

I'd stumbled across this through my own research, trying to find literature with a detailed description of fossil-fuel formation. I've since found it referenced by numerous other works --- yes, one of my forms of entertainment is looking for familiar citations amongst footnotes. Smil's Energy and Civilization being one work citing Dukes.

It's not just the material conversion that's staggering, there's the time of accumulation. For petroleum, humans burn in one year a quantity which took five million years to accumulate.

There is a very prevalent group of people on HN who don't deny that global warming is happening, but strongly deny that it is a serious problem.

This group deeply believes that technology will solve their problems, no matter how large. All that is required is believing in this strongly enough. There is a nearly rabid belief that everything will be fine because "technology" will find a way.

What these people fail to recognize is that technology is a function of energy. This comes across pretty clearly in Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization. Technology has felt magical in the last 250 years because we have had a tremendous amount of energy.

There is a very common myth, one I used to believe myself, that magically in the age of reason man woke up and started creating amazing things. I think everyone in tech has been at least someone seduced by this vision. The cover of SICP has a wizard on it!

What more accurately happened is that we started extracting fossil fuels, and that let to us being able to to magical things, including finding more fossil fuels faster. Even the earliest hunter gathers were able to harness fire and benefit from it. The first agrarian societies learned how to use the sun to build truly solar powered economies. We live in the age of fossil fuels, and as much as we wish it to be true, we are not able to build renewables on a scale and timeline to even begin to replace the magic of fossil fuels. In fact we continue to globally use more of every fossil fuel every year. Renewables are only able to supplement our insatiable hunger for energy.

So technology can't magically save us from our energy problems because energy is the magic that makes technology happen. But for many here such statements border on heresy.

> US consumption CO2 numbers account for US purchase of solar panels.

That's what I said, but they don't account for the manufacture of raw materials produced and sold in China to aid in the manufacture of these panels, nor of the associated infrastructure causes. They therefore underestimate the export co2.

> Is of what was in terms of energy. Will it be that way in the future? Only if we let corruption and entrenched fossil fuel interests prevent cheaper options from being deployed.

Energy is effectively the same as economic activity. You are correct that if we could magically replace all of the fossil fuel usage with renewables we would be at zero emissions. But again, all sources of energy production have been rising.

> Dollars are not CO2 emissions. CO2 is emissions. Our economic systems are constructed by law and convention, and technology is completely changeable.

Again you are correct that dollars are not CO2 emissions, but dollars are a good proxy for energy (read Smil's Energy and Civilization if you need a reference for that), and currently the vast majority of our energy needs are met with CO2 emitting fuel sources.

> The only solution is compete transition of the economy in all sectors. Massive change. I say get on board or get out of the way.

Do you really not see the contradiction regarding the problem at hand and your solution? A complete transition of the economy is a incredibly destructive, insanely energy intensive process. Unless energy was already mostly renewable such a solution will only lead to the problem being worse.

I guess I'll get out of the way since this conversation has only further convinced me of how bleak our situation is.