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stinkbeetleyesterday at 11:26 PM0 repliesview on HN

> nothing can replace petroleum right now.

You don't need to be some kind of super genius to understand this, if you have not been sucked in to the populist left wing propaganda about petroleum. We can't even replace petroleum for energy right now, let alone all its other uses.

It's not just oil we'll have issues with either, lots of minerals could easily see shortages and rapidly increasing costs to extract over this century.

> We are doomed.

More propaganda. We don't need infinite economic growth, infinite population growth, or even continued quality of life growth. Nothing bad even happens when you have degrowth, it's all crazy propaganda that people repeat we need to keep boosting up population numbers.

A few generations ago nobody on earth ever saw a motor car for the entire history of humanity. Or electricity. Antibiotics. Synthetic fertilizers. Any kind of plastic.

Things will change, people will adapt, conflict and famine, etc. Much the same as the rest of human history. The people of the future might no lot be able to expect to be clothed, fed, housed, and entertained in exchange for sitting around an air-conditioned office eating a birthday cake before putting in their solid 2.5 hours of work for the day drawing up the next draft of policies around who can use which bathroom before scrolling tiktok for the rest of the work day. But I wouldn't call that "doomed".