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We do not. We simply moved your outsized impact to places you do not see.

Hmm... no, not really, even considering rare earth mineral mining, the total elimination of fossil fuel combustion would dramatically reduce human environmental harm.
There is zero way with current technology and economic development that we could support even half of the current worlds population without fossil fuels.
We certainly could not continue providing the current world with latest gen iphones, you are right.

Feeding and housing them though? Absolutely doable. It would require a significant change in our societies, but we know enough things about the universe to accomplish this.

If you're saying, politically, this is impossible, sure, you're probably right.

Ho man, the level of delusion here. Have you ever visited India? China? This isn’t a ‘latest gen iPhone’ (which, btw, is well out of reach of your typical Indian already).

This is a ‘the entire world economy is based on fossil fuels, and attempting to redo the entire worlds economy to use non-fossil fuels is not currently doable’. Even the best case emergency scenarios would have to use even more fossil fuels to try.

Germany and California have tried elements of it, but even despite massive investment they are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels for almost all the baseline parts of their economies (transportation, heating, industrial uses, etc).

If we all went on a wartime footing and devoted our entire economies to completely retooling the worlds economies, maybe - but realistically, it’s clear that people would rather blow each other up (which will also solve this problem a bit !) than do that.

And a big reason why is a lot of people are likely to starve to death or be pushed into poverty to attempt it.

You carefully ommitted China who is working (and will succeed as they always do unlike Germany and California…) on post-fossil world way before fossils become scarse
Yes I agree with you that it would be politically probably impossible, since it would, as you imply, require dismantling capitalism.

But, it's not like we need fossil fuels to farm, and there's already enough housing for all the humans. If we engaged in expropriation, it's certainly physically possible.

Yeah we could. Just not to the extremely wasteful American standards of living. Even America can only support them because it controls the whole world's money printer.

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