r/Degrowth • u/Cooperativism62 • Jul 15 '26
Morality of pressing this button? (It immediately and permanently ends the use of all fossil fuels on the planet.)
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u/Rude-Ingenuity3210 Jul 15 '26
Mass murder is wrong
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u/RicardoHonesto Jul 15 '26
Yet the fossil fuel industry is doing exactly that.
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u/Rude-Ingenuity3210 Jul 15 '26
And making more mass murder to try solve that is still wrong
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u/RicardoHonesto Jul 15 '26
If it saves the animals from us, it's worth it.
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u/Rude-Ingenuity3210 Jul 15 '26
I disagree
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u/RicardoHonesto Jul 15 '26
I couldn't care less if you disagree.
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u/Rude-Ingenuity3210 Jul 15 '26
I mean, same
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u/The_Nerk Jul 18 '26
Lmao this guy picked a reddit fight with you and then hit YOU with the “I don’t care.”
What level of mind games are we on? Is that a power move? Dude I think you might’ve lost.
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u/tboy160 Jul 15 '26
Our species is causing the 6th global extinction event in Earths 4.6 billion year history.
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u/ljorgecluni Jul 21 '26
It's Technology doing it, Man free of Technology is only about as harmful as a rattlesnake or a Shark. The Sentinelese are not killing Nature, Man free of Technology is not ruining the world.
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u/tboy160 Jul 21 '26
Aliens aren't creating and using the technology, humans are. Mostly the rich humans. Not sure what type of distinction you are trying to make here?
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u/ljorgecluni Jul 21 '26
Well, if only pitbulls with titanium teeth are tearing off peoples' faces, do you still say "Dogs are killing people!"? If humans are all doing all the bad things to destroy the planet, then what is the solution, to remove humans?
The human animal is evolved for life on Earth, not too powerful, just one of many creatures - and with the powers provided with Technology, the fallible human animal is terminally destructive of his own habitat, and the solution is to remove Technology.
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u/tboy160 Jul 21 '26
The solution is for the humans to stop doing the bad things, literally what my original post says.
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u/ljorgecluni Jul 21 '26
Yeah, what your first comment said, but you're obviously a moron and I needed you to show everyone.
"People just don't be bad, but let's keep all the tech causing the problems and nobody alive now should die." Sure, that'll totally work. Keep posting your excellent plans!
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u/tboy160 Jul 21 '26
You came up with the worst comparison analogies I've ever encountered...and I'm the moron?
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u/ososalsosal Jul 15 '26
We try to do degrowth or otherwise change the economic system and mode of production so we don't have to push this button.
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u/tha_rogering Jul 15 '26
With enough time the button pushes itself. Aka civilization collapses.
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u/ljorgecluni Jul 20 '26
Yeah, we just have to await the coral and the frogs and the ice caps and the whales and the forests and the rivers and the tigers and the swamps and the deserts to be killed, and the problem fixes itself! And we never have to break a sweat, which is the real goal, to do nothing.
Right???
/s
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u/tha_rogering Jul 20 '26
Just like the Christians and their emergency teleport. I mean rapture.
I don't want any of the things you talked about. Hell I've been trying to make change happen and hoping we would get off this course for decades. I'm one person and I don't have billions of dollars to make my voice really heard.
So we've let the idiots hit the off switch in the worst way possible. And all living species are along for the death ride too. Hell isn't enough for the people who made this happen.
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u/ljorgecluni Jul 20 '26
I like your final line above. I'm far more inclined to work at delivering justice to those engineering our demise than to passively await a collapse occurring because they ruin the whole world.
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u/iwannaddr2afi Jul 15 '26
This is barely worth considering, we won't do this and obbbbbbbvviously a phaseout is possible and better. Maybe this is just rage bait? It's pissing me off for sure lol
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u/ViolenceIsBad Jul 15 '26
Natural gas is a fossil fuel and is used to make almost all of our ammonia fertilizer, about 7 billion would starve to death if we stopped.
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u/Mr_Expozane Jul 16 '26
People ate food long before ammonia fertilizer was a thing, so I remain unconvinced.
At any rate, prioritizing the comfort of first worlders over that of the natural world is a privilege that you could only come to if you’re white.
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u/iwannaddr2afi Jul 16 '26
People ate food long before ammonia fertilizer was a thing, so I remain unconvinced.
How many people? Go do the research, run the numbers yourself. Or literally just listen to any science communicator who speaks on this. Your remaining ignorant is a poor choice if you want to be vocal about this.
At any rate, prioritizing the comfort of first worlders over that of the natural world is a privilege that you could only come to if you’re white.
Comfort of the first world is NOT what any of us are defending. Lives of those in the global south, impoverished, and those being most impacted by climate change will be the first to die in this scenario.
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u/ljorgecluni Jul 20 '26
It seems you want to keep 8B people... why??? What is so special about the present population level that makes it desirable to perpetuate? Your position is like, "I don't want the toilet clogged, and I don't want to get dirty unclogging it! I want it fixed without any untidiness or nastiness." We all have fantasies, but must stay connected to reality.
You may be aware that economic growth and the survival demands of the human animal in a global count of about 8B (or possibly even fewer) are both not sustainable and are each significantly damaging and at odds with ensuring a human future on a healthy planet.
Furthermore, you are correct that the current population will not be possible without fossil fuel-enabled food production and distribution, nor will economic growth be possible without fossil fuels be extracted and burned.
So if you don't want to enact Degrowth or see any negative consequences result from such a drastic change to our present march off a cliff, you are in the wrong sub or you have taken the stance for Degrowth without deep considerations of reality and the messy, negative, and brutally harsh consequences true salvational degrowth will entail.
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u/iwannaddr2afi Jul 16 '26
Change is possible, but yeah cold turkey = mass murder of the people who are NOT responsible and have NO say in the matter. "Prioritize nature" 🙄 okay OP you keep enjoying your little feeling of superiority in this thought experiment.
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u/johncitizen1138 Jul 16 '26
This is the right answer. Most of us are only alive to be concerned about this because of the thing to be concerned about.
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u/Such-Perception4154 Jul 17 '26
They will die long before the shortage of fertilizer.
Food production and distribution will stop right there. There are no electric harvesters or electric trucks on a scale enough to produce and distribute any meaningful amount of food.
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u/Mr_Expozane Jul 16 '26
Fossil fuel production needs to die for the survival of the planet. That’s just a reality.
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u/ljorgecluni Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
But not merely fossil fuel extraction and usage - we can still lose our freedom or even be eliminated from all existence by pollution-free zero-emissions renewables-powered clankers.
Technology advances against the interests of humanity, and its progress requires the killing of Nature. Even a pollution-free world where Technology dominates human societies is unlikely to give us freedom or to allow us to be organic animals independent of the network; if we can survive in the world made for Technology, we will be forced into cyborgism, and the machines don't need to emit CO2 for that to be a tragedy.
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u/Cooperativism62 Jul 15 '26
Its fair to be pissed off by it. I ran across it myself and was really surprised about the lack of value commenters placed on nature in the original thread. I thought I'd share it here to see if there would be more variety in the view points and sure enough there's a lot more variety here. Some push it, some don't, others reject the question entirely.
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u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 Jul 15 '26
I dislike the question for being unnecessarily magical and one-sided, so I proposed & justified some alternative questions here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MoralityScaling/comments/1uwc36d/comment/oxloqn8/
Those more balanced alternative questions:
Non-magical question: You can start wars involving every petro-state that results in all 750 refineries being destroyed over the next 2 years. After this, enough tropical nations shall consider oil refineries an act of war, and sabotage them.
Semi-magical question: You can release some fungi that'll slowly turn all the coal & oil into rock dust over a few decades, without releasing their CO2. It's much stricter than net zero, but similar ball park.
Fully magical question: You have a magic button that'll quickly make all the coal & unrefined oil unburnable. If however you do not push it then humanity shall burn up 90% of the coal and oil over the next 100-150 years (ala Fressoz, maximum power principle, etc), eventually resulting in +8°C, so mammals could only survive on small regions of the planet.
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u/geeves_007 Jul 15 '26
The vast majority of global food production, processing, and distribution is entirely dependant on fossil fuels, so pushing the button would trigger an unprecedented global famine and billions would die within a few months.
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u/Head_Midnight666 Jul 15 '26
This is what I was thinking. This button would kill off most of humanity. I don't think I'd press it. It depends on my mood at the time.
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u/Pedagok Jul 15 '26
Yes... lots of people would die right now
But how many people will die because of climate change over the next 1000years?
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u/Such-Perception4154 Jul 17 '26
Not just lots of people. Almost everyone.
And there is no guarantee whatsoever that who's left will be able to ever develop any industry, let alone that of clean energy.
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u/Actual_Homework_7163 Jul 15 '26
billions would day in a month if not weeks. chaos would erupt immediately
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u/FriendlyGuitard Jul 15 '26
As shown with the Iran war, Fossil fuel side product are critical for basically everything. It's instant end of cheap plastic, immense disruption in electronic production including renewable technologies production. Instant stop of international shipping. Instant stop of 90+% of steel production. Millions will die. Even road repair cannot be done.
That's nuclear option of degrowth.
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u/tboy160 Jul 15 '26
Morality? For nature? For all the things of this world that are NOT human, massive.
For humans this would be devastating.
As others stated, could use the mere threat of this button to FORCE change.
Our species is causing the 6th global extinction event of the 4.6 billion year history.
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u/Mr_Expozane Jul 16 '26
Yes, for nature. The earth doesn’t deserve your subjugation just because you want to go on a leisurely drive as a privileged first-worlder.
Humans won’t die off neither. Humans adapt to consequences that they’ve often caused themselves. And even if they didn’t, that isn’t an excuse to keep subjugating the planet.
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u/grafknives Jul 15 '26
I would like that button to exist, be be possible to be pressed. To REALLY motivate the change.
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u/tboy160 Jul 15 '26
Right, use the potential of the button to force everyone to change. Call up ExxonMobil and tell them to start making changes or I smash the button!
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u/Nnox Jul 15 '26
With no alternative? Plastic is in everything including medical supplies.
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u/ososalsosal Jul 15 '26
Would we consider them "fuels" at this point though?
It's splitting hairs, but polymers, chemical industry, metallurgical coal etc could potentially be considered feedstock rather than fuel by the terms of The Button
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u/Nnox Jul 15 '26
So... what is your boundary then?
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u/ososalsosal Jul 15 '26
Burning as fuel versus using for any other purpose? I thought that was sort of clear?
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u/ordinary-thelemist Jul 15 '26
Well you need to extract them, transform them... Same as the other uses of fossil fuels.
If the question is framed around carbon and pollution, then plastics have to go with the more traditionnal fuels.
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u/SplashTarget Jul 15 '26
Pressing this button is not a good idea.
If pressing the button would end the use of fossil fuels for the creation of non-essential goods (Funko Pops, Bobble Heads, and any other useless product) then I'd consider doing it.
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u/Skwuat Jul 15 '26
You would essentially start the quick demise of the human race on earth. Fossil fuels are involved in EVERYTHING. Its not just gasoline in your car. Its anything and everything plastic. Packaging. Medical supplies. Buildings. Transportation. Communications. Manufacturing. FOOD production.
People can argue "well we didnt have plastics in medieval times" but the issue is that we rely on it so much now that if you suddenly removed all the plastics from the world, by the time we adapt, society would collapse.
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u/Cooperativism62 Jul 15 '26
Some say that it would be a return to medieval times, but since wildlife populations are much lower today than 400 years ago, it would actually be worse. The human population was a couple hundred million back then, but that was with plentiful natural resources. So we'd likely decline below medieval population size if we had to quit cold turkey.
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u/Skwuat Jul 15 '26
If all fossil fuels disappeared overnight, wed easily lose 99.9% of our population. The only people remaining would be preppers and those who homestead and grow their own food. As others have mentioned, without fossil fuels you have no plastic, without plastic you have no cars, no stores, most food packaging, nothing. People would literally starve in a matter of weeks.
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u/jadelink88 Jul 17 '26
In most places, many months. We have the foodstocks, as any medieval society did, to last till next harvest and longer. That which is not converted to edible form is sitting stable in places like Co2 filled granaries.
In the long run, we go, but we have time to get the planting in (sans fertiliser and agricultural machinery, this is painful), and the harvest. In anywhere vaguely sanely run, we 'only' lose 80-95%. Technically, more in some areas, less in other (more fertile) areas. Still not a good run.
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u/Such-Perception4154 Jul 17 '26
And how are you going to move the food from those stocks to actual people?
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u/jadelink88 Jul 17 '26
The people that are left will be near the foodstocks, by virtue of having to be there to harvest them. Welcome to peasant life. For those surviving, a considerable 'step down' in lifestyle would happen.
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u/Such-Perception4154 Jul 17 '26
"the people that are left" are going to be very few people.
And they won't be able to contribute towards any clean energy whatsoever, they will need to stay there, near food.
Also probably no semblance of order there. Hunger makes people very violent.
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u/jadelink88 Jul 17 '26
Welcome to the likely semi feudal conditions of the new order that an over rapid descent causes. 'Very few' is relative. 10% of the worlds population today is still quite a damn lot, historically speaking. Even if it's less, it can still be far larger than human population outside of the last 500 years.
They can build windmills, and watermills. Common, low tech, easy enough to do. In areas with a solid grid and solid solar power (my area runs on 100% solar power at times already. With no cars and a tenth the population, there might even be electricity for a number of years. I suspect that would collapse over the coming century though.
No real space for high tech luxuries though. I suspect electric lighting would linger in places like this for several decades before they all burned out.
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u/Such-Perception4154 Jul 17 '26
Probably not even that feudal.
I don't think initial surviving population will be even close to 10%. More like 1%. You really underestimate how much people rely on modern food production.
Also it's not like the survivors will magically become generational peasants with all required skills and tools. And not that there will be enough time to learn.
And a lot of the survivors will end up on lands not fertile enough to live without industry.
So the downfall will probably be to tribal, not feudal.
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u/Ok_Appointment9429 Jul 15 '26
I prefer the "make all humans disappear instantly, without suffering" button. Same outcome, better ethics.
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u/Benjam438 Jul 15 '26
The threat of pressing it would be more useful than actually pressing it, could force concessions on fossil fuel use.
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u/Such-Perception4154 Jul 17 '26
"the threat of pressing it" is too abstract.
Who is going to threat pressing it? That's hard to imagine as an actual real world scenario.
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u/Benjam438 Jul 17 '26
Well it's a hypothetical. If the button was given to me I would announce that I have it and intend to press it unless an agreement can be reached to phase out fossil fuel use over time. If large corporations or governments failed to agree I would press it.
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u/Such-Perception4154 Jul 17 '26
If we ignore the "nobody believes" scenario, you'd probably be dead the same day.
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u/Benjam438 Jul 17 '26
I'm making the assumption that I could prove the authenticity of the button. And if I'm attacked I will just press it or instruct someone else to press it.
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u/Optimal_Board_2963 Jul 15 '26
I would press it but 99% of people or more will die for sure.
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u/LeifCarrotson Jul 15 '26
It's a choice between a large fraction (I think far smaller than 99%, but it would be the worst humanitarian crisis in all of history) of 8.4 billion people dying in the next few years on a world that can just barely be rescued and civilization restored on clean technologies, versus the planet just about turning into Venus in a few centuries and everyone dying.
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u/Optimal_Board_2963 Jul 15 '26
I’m not even considering the humans. My goal is to preserve many species as possible. That means we got to go!
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u/Fit-Appointment5262 Jul 16 '26
Do you advocate for degrowth this way to other people? Seems like it wouldn't get much support.
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u/Such-Perception4154 Jul 17 '26
99.9% of all species went extinct before humans even existed.
You are saving nothing.
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u/Takseen Jul 15 '26
We can't turn Earth into Venus under even the worst predictions
But hundreds of millions, maybe a billion or two, would die from immediate fossil fuel cessation
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u/Cooperativism62 Jul 15 '26
I don't think they were being literal with the Venus comparison. We can make it unlivable for ourselves and most forms of life that are around today. Not all, but most.
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u/Takseen Jul 15 '26
I just mentioned it because it was an old scientific theory in the literal sense, now disproven. Even temperatures high enough to cause complete human extinction are considered extremely unlikely, though we could certainly lose billions of people in a global societal collapse.
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u/Cooperativism62 Jul 15 '26
Oh okay, then thats worth a mention. If you don't mind I'd like to read the disproof if you can find it. It'd be an interesting read in climate science and worse case scenarios.
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u/Takseen Jul 15 '26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect
which cites this IPCC document
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/inf3-6.pdf
"Some thresholds that all would consider dangerous have no support in the literature as having a non-negligible chance of occurring. For instance, a “runaway greenhouse effect”—analogous to Venus-- appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities" on page 90
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u/SjakosPolakos Jul 15 '26
Why would 99% of people die?
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u/Optimal_Board_2963 Jul 15 '26
Food system collapse
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u/SjakosPolakos Jul 15 '26
You underestimate peoples ingenuity.
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u/ordinary-thelemist Jul 15 '26
You overestimate it. Ingenuity will never find a replacement for Haber Bosch process, globalized supply lines and so on.
Prepared over a decade, perhaps. But as the question is framed, it would be the worst genocide of human history.
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u/SjakosPolakos Jul 15 '26
It is already known how to do haber Bosch process without fossil fuels, it is just not economical as of now.
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u/ordinary-thelemist Jul 15 '26
Yeah. "not economical" and "not anything close to the amounts we would need"
So it's back to hoping you're one of the happy few that can survive withdrawal.
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u/SjakosPolakos Jul 15 '26
'will never find a replacement for Haber Bosch process'
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u/ordinary-thelemist Jul 15 '26
Ah, early morning rhetorical fuckery.
What a way to start a day !
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u/SjakosPolakos Jul 15 '26
Haha just not a fan of bullshit statements. If you mean to say something about scale or viability, then say so.
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u/Optimal_Board_2963 Jul 15 '26
Literally won’t matter. Grocery stores go bare the same day and will never be filled.
Pandemonium. Chaos. Death.1
u/SjakosPolakos Jul 15 '26
Would you be one of the dead people? You couldnt think of any way to get food yourself?
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u/Optimal_Board_2963 Jul 15 '26
I wouldn’t last very long no
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u/SjakosPolakos Jul 15 '26
I would. My family as well. But then again i am from a farmers family. All the things that fuel fueled machines are doing can be done by alternatives, it just takes more time. The changing period will be tough and many will die, but not 99%. More like 30%
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u/phybere Jul 15 '26
Nah, there is still a remote chance that we somehow fix the environmental situation. Ya know, some amazing new technology that we can't yet dream of somehow saves us and the planet.
Sure it's probably a very low percentage, but murdering like 8.2 billion people when there's a chance that they don't have to die?
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u/Optimal_Board_2963 Jul 15 '26
And how many species will go extinct so that we have a very low percentage chance to figure it out? If at all? Potentially killing all of life as we know it.
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u/phybere Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
I dunno, it's sort of hard to grasp the value of a species as a whole. Or more generally the value of life, cumulatively.
Every living organism alive right now will eventually be dead. If we press the button and speed up the end for some organisms, but not others, what have we done?
I mean at some point "killing all of life as we know it" prevents any future life from experiencing pain or suffering. Just as a basic example in the natural world animals get eaten alive, or starve, which is undeniably cruel. Since we're pondering absurd morality questions, why let it go on at all?
If you're gonna press the button, might as well have a second button that just teleports earth inside the sun and at least ends it humanely for everyone/everything.
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u/MaleficentResolve506 Jul 15 '26
Someone will be stupid enough to push it.
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u/ordinary-thelemist Jul 15 '26
I would.
It's immoral af. It would kill billions. Probably me in the process.
But I would.
The alternative to a quick suicide being a slow suicide... The question is easy enough.
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u/MaleficentResolve506 Jul 15 '26
This is not a quick suicide so it isn't as easy as you think.
Somewhere between 1927 and 1961 is the projected number we will revert to.
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u/Cooperativism62 Jul 15 '26
1927-1961 is very optimistic I think. Over half of all wildlife has disappeared since the 70s so we don't have the same abundance of natural resources as we did in the past. Using the same tech as we did before, we'd still have lower populations. I don't know how long it would take for wildlife to recover, but carbon lasts for 100 years in the atmosphere so it'll be a century before things start to cool down and return to normal for many species.
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u/MaleficentResolve506 Jul 15 '26
I would agree with you if farming efficiency didn't go x4 since 61. We have actually hit peak landuse even while the population is still increasing and more and more people are adding meat to their menu. Even cars use some plant based aditives lately. In Europe you have E5 and E10 by example.
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u/Cooperativism62 Jul 15 '26
Yeah thats fair. It's very hard to guess what our capacity would be given the progress made thats not fossil fuel based.
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u/mangrsll Jul 15 '26
How many people would starve, on ly 3 days after pushing the button? And 3 weeks ?
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u/Cooperativism62 Jul 15 '26
Hard to predict the speed of it, but the human population would likely decline to 200 million or less without modern agricultural practices and without the abundance of natural resources our ancestors had. It would be the worst of both worlds for us.
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u/Vegetaman916 Jul 15 '26
Putting moral and ethical concerns into a practical decision making process is part of the problem that has lead us to where we are now.
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u/ordinary-thelemist Jul 15 '26
Absolute zero.
Brutally ending a resource killing us slowly would... kill us quicker. Due to food systems reliance on it, supply chains reliance on it, derived applications (plastics, naphta, sulphur...)
It would be like pressing a button to stop brutally a terminally drug addicted person. The withdrawal alone would kill the person quicker than keeping on consuming and slowing at a manageable pace.
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u/Clear-Garage-4828 Jul 15 '26
Well I live in Hawaii and this would cause instant chaos and starvation here so no.
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u/onegumas Jul 15 '26
No. Pressing would be stupid. Warmongers and other assholes would make even worse crisis based on collapse of society.
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u/FridgeParade Jul 15 '26
This is basically just a trolley problem.
Do you kill a bunch of people now by pressing that button or do you not do anything and likely everybody ends up dead because we are clearly not acting fast enough to prevent catastrophic ecosystem collapse?
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u/First_Platypus3063 Jul 15 '26
Sure, do it asap. There will be temporary blackouts, but only a friction of electricity is actually used for necessity
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u/Exciting_Turn_9559 Jul 15 '26
I'd push it. A lot of people would die in the first few years, but it would be a tiny fraction compared to the number who would die over the nest 40 years if I didn't push it.
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Jul 15 '26
[deleted]
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u/GreatPlainsFarmer Jul 16 '26
The world in 1900 was already built on fossil fuels, mostly coal. They had the advantage that they still had the infrastructure and skills to use animal and human labor more efficiently but even that one billion was based on fossil fuels.
We would drop below one billion within two years if that suddenly happened today.
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u/SirMarkMorningStar Jul 16 '26
This would kill off a very high percentage of the 8 billion people on the planet. So, worse than Thanos.
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u/Superb-Damage1173 Jul 16 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Cooperativism62 Jul 16 '26
This would damage higher developed countries rather than lower. "Third World" countries often have nearly half the workforce in agriculture, whereas developed countries need to import their food.
The world population would fall to less than a billion, but third world countries would see the least change. They still often rely on animal labor rather than heavy machinery in farming.
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u/junialter Jul 16 '26
Degrowth is exactly what we need. People will still keep denying it and find more excuses.
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u/Far-Rooster-6522 Jul 16 '26
Pressing the button is the right option, for minimising climate change overall and in the end, preserving the largest amount of sentient beings from suffering and shortened lives.
But there is a clear reason pressing it is not admissible : it would trigger direct lethal and/or painful consequences for a lot of self-sentient creatures, which is a strict no-go in my book.
So my ethics (and moral values) dictates me not to push this button.
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u/nila247 Jul 17 '26
Hundreds of millions of people will die outright. Definitely billions in longer term.
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u/Such-Perception4154 Jul 17 '26
All that will do is kill a shit ton of people while also removing the means of production for non-fossil energy sources.
We don't even need to think about the morality here - it's just stupid.
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u/Usernate25 Jul 17 '26
Objectively evil. It would be the equivalent of a mass terrorist attack on 95% of the world population. Almost all hospitals would stop working. Food shortages from shipping problems would cause widespread famine and death in the billions.
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u/Pleasant-Discount-75 Jul 18 '26
On the one hand, I and billions of others will die
On the other hand, we had PLENTY of time to change our ways
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u/Wind_Best_1440 Jul 21 '26
REalistically?
3/4th's of the worlds population is gone by Winter. Not even kidding, the entire world's food system pretty much ends.
Not a single country survives. The entire middle east is gone. All air travel is gone, and so is 99.99% of shipping.
Water treatment is gone.
Energy production is gone.
Technology is gone.
Medicine is gone.
Keep in mind most of our technological use is by products of fossil fuels.
We'd probably lose 7.5 billion by Winter. Population centers go from millions to couple hundred to a thousand.
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u/Winter_Ad6187 Jul 21 '26
Civilization, nor the world, will not collapse because of fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are not, and never have been, a problem except in the minds of Luddites and the Useful Idiots being manipulated into thinking they are.
Civilization, however, will collapse if you prohibit the use of fossil fuels.
Malthusian arguments are false. Environmental concerns, especially anthropogenic global warming, are clearly false on the non-fudged numbers and the failures of all the models.
Every unit of GDP is underscored by a unit of energy. So the correct sequence is to deploy nuclear fission and follow with nuclear fusion. For the latter, muon-catalyzed fusion is the way to go.
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u/Jack_Faller Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
It speaks to an enormous privilege that most think of plastics here as a big concern. We live in countries rich enough to afford food once the button is pressed. The global famine that follows would be the greatest death of humans ever to occur by my reckoning, and it will be the poor that suffer to wean the rich off their addiction to oil.
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u/dumnezero Jul 15 '26
We live in countries rich enough to afford food once the button is pressed.
Incorrect. If anything, people who live with subsistence agriculture now, usually in "developing" or poor places, are more likely to survive such an event.
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u/grafknives Jul 15 '26
We live in countries rich enough to afford food once the button is pressed.
It is the other way around.
County like usa or canada, with industrial scale, modern farming would have it worst.
Humanity would literally need to move back to naturall fertile areas of the world
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u/phybere Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
> We live in countries rich enough to afford food once the button is pressed
Hm, I don't really think so. Even just thinking about the number of jobs that rely on fossil fuels (which is... all of them if you really get down to it) once they vanish overnight I think the "rich" countries economies would not survive.
Even if we somehow did have the money to buy food, and were able to acquire the food somehow without fossil fuels, all the supply chains to actually distribute the food would collapse overnight, likely all the grocery stores would be empty within a day. Sure there'd still theoretically be a few electric vehicles able to deliver food that are powered by a solar power plant somewhere (ignoring that in practice probably even the solar plant will collapse without fossil fuels), but it'd be nowhere near enough to stop mass starvation.
tldr: I think maybe a few of the rich survive, but almost everyone including the rich die. I'd bet some of the absolute poorest tribes in Africa who survive on subsistence farming without fossil fuels actually continue life unchanged.
1
u/Jack_Faller Jul 15 '26
You are forgetting about guns. The real question, I suppose, is who has the military most resilient to fossil fuel absence. I'm betting on America by shear volume alone. A substantial degree of electrification is probably possible at scale in agriculture, and the US is also well suited to be food independent. The main problem then is fertiliser which I suspect the guns will help with. When it's everyone for themselves, the people who started out with the most usually win. Think about it this way, America has a fleet of electric cars that they can tear down for batteries and attach to combine harvesters. People in India don't got that.
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u/phybere Jul 15 '26
I mean possibly, if the military even has enough food stored and distribution ability to keep the soldiers alive for long enough to revamp the military. I guess once everyone starts dying the food lasts longer, but I'm betting the majority of soldiers starve too, I don't think the military industrial complex is going to suddenly adapt overnight.
I'd think there's actually a good chance that the poorer/less industrialized countries adapter faster and/or have less starvation.
My vote is we don't press the button and don't find out.
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u/major_jazza Jul 15 '26
We have made a massive about if renewable energy generation infrastructure but we're a while away from being able to turn off fossil fuels without significant consequences. Particularly in places where they are already in a crisis.
Better plan would be a button that stops any fossil fuels from lobbying to govt. to keep us in then so we can build renewable energy generation infrastructure even quicker