Sid Smith
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2019–2026
1:03:31 · 167K views · Apr 24, 2019
A Virginia Tech presentation by Sid Smith about collapse, fossil fuels and overshoot, arguing that industrial civilization faces a decline and how one might live with that. It was later expanded into a video series.
Recommended in collapse and energy threads as a sobering thermodynamic view of civilization, often with a warning that it is heavy.
10 comments from Hacker News
> Burn it all down and start over We won't be the ones doing that. > We're going to have to figure this sustainability thing out though It may be already late. I wish it wasn't so. I think we could have chance at repairing it ... if only we would do what's necessary. But we're not doing what's necessary, we never started even discussing it, and I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever do. We're talking only about climate change, but that's only one of the symptoms of the overshoot. Even people @ hacker news mostly don't have a clue. > we can't just ignore the problems We've been ignoring them for 50-70 years. The limits to growth / club of Rome was in 1972? So far ... we did nothing but ignored the problems. We may cross the 1.5C threshold in 5 years. Not in 2050 as previously expected, but in 5 years. And we're still pursuing economic growth. Have you noticed any evidence to the contrary lately? > it's going to be a big challenge, and things may get ugly I recommend few videos for you. I must warn you ... it may hamper your ability to enjoy parties. Collapse: The Only Realistic Scenario - Arthur Keller [LINK] How to Enjoy the End of the World - Dr. B. Sidney Smith this video Arithmetic, Population and Energy - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett [LINK] Why Societies Collapse And What it Means for Us - Joseph A. Tainter [LINK] Revealing the Naked Emperor – Paris, 2° & Carbon Budgets - Kevin Anderson [LINK]
> Computing saves millions of lives on a regular basis. Can't run modern agriculture or medicine or government without it. No, we couldn't have. Computing has killed us all. Good talk I watched the other day this video
> Civilizational doom isn't a foregone conclusion See lecture by B. Sidney Smith: this video . It explains the inevitablility of collapse.
Check out this sobering talk by Dr Sid Smith where he says the same thing wrt oils and fossil fuels. this video
> And of course, if you know that this scenario is possible, then you probably also start to understand why governments aren't as panicky about the whole situation as you seem to be. So not ecosystems restoration (habitats restoration, reforestation and afforestation, wetlands restoration, streams and rivers restoration, sustainable land management, conservation and protected areas, plant-based diets, ...), but attempts at geoengineering with aerosols like sulfur dioxide, or mirrors in space, or whitening the clouds. The potential problems are enormous. Solar radiation management is also an ungovernable technology. Even if we knew how to reflect the sun's rays, that means deciding on what is an international "best temperature". So what if cooling down the US means massive drought in China? What if China deploying this causes rainfall in India to drop? The Earth's climate is interconnected and block the sun's rays in one area affects another. It seems obvious to me that this technology could cause massive conflict (violent maybe) over what is the best way to use it. Anything to avoid doing the right thing. > We had the club of Rome with the same message in the 70s, and they were comically wrong There you're wrong again. [LINK] "We unravel the arguments that have raged for forty years in its aftermath and explore more recent findings which relate to the original hypothesis. There is unsettling evidence that society is still following the ‘standard run’ of the original study – i