I think a better way to think of this is to attack it from the other direction. What can't you live without? Or more broadly, what do you consider to really not be a luxury, but truly table stakes?
Here are some ideas:
- You say you're happy with "in the low 60s F in the winter", but what if you had no heat? I don't know where you live, but where I live this would be untenable. Because of abundant energy, I can live in a place that is in the 0s through 40s pretty often, without having any wood-burning heat source in my house, or spending a large amount of my time cutting and splitting wood. Not to mention how much deforestation it would require if we didn't have abundant oil (which is much better to refine from petroleum than whales, btw), gas, or electricity.
- You say you're happy without driving "frequently". But what about driving at all? The pre-gasoline solution to getting individual people to individual places was literally horses. Bicycles actually work pretty well now for this, but only because of all the roads that have now been built everywhere to support cars.
- Speaking of that, are roads and sidewalks a total luxury, or are they more important than that? Concrete is another critical component of our modern infrastructure that is downstream of sucking super old dead stuff out of the ground.
There is so much more of this sort of thing: grocery stores, modern medicine, illumination when the sun isn't up, it goes on and on. It is not hyperbole to say that human civilization at anything approaching the current scale and standard of living has been achieved on the back of abundant energy from fossil fuels.
It would not be impossible to roll this all way back, but it would be impossible to do so without devastating impacts to people currently living.
I strongly believe that rather than retreat, the far more promising path is to advance. As abundant as energy from fossil fuels has proved to be, they don't hold a candle to the energy that exists in nature: the sun sends us an astronomical amount of energy each day, the earth is mostly made out of rock that is hotter than industrial kilns, the bonds of particles within atoms themselves contain a huge amount of energy. The challenge is that these forms of energy are much harder to extract than lighting hydrocarbons on fire.
The trick is to make sure we use enough the abundant and easily accessible energy we have today as an investment in our collective project to lever up our ability to tap into the even more abundant but difficult to use energy that is laying all around us.
Here are some ideas:
- You say you're happy with "in the low 60s F in the winter", but what if you had no heat? I don't know where you live, but where I live this would be untenable. Because of abundant energy, I can live in a place that is in the 0s through 40s pretty often, without having any wood-burning heat source in my house, or spending a large amount of my time cutting and splitting wood. Not to mention how much deforestation it would require if we didn't have abundant oil (which is much better to refine from petroleum than whales, btw), gas, or electricity.
- You say you're happy without driving "frequently". But what about driving at all? The pre-gasoline solution to getting individual people to individual places was literally horses. Bicycles actually work pretty well now for this, but only because of all the roads that have now been built everywhere to support cars.
- Speaking of that, are roads and sidewalks a total luxury, or are they more important than that? Concrete is another critical component of our modern infrastructure that is downstream of sucking super old dead stuff out of the ground.
There is so much more of this sort of thing: grocery stores, modern medicine, illumination when the sun isn't up, it goes on and on. It is not hyperbole to say that human civilization at anything approaching the current scale and standard of living has been achieved on the back of abundant energy from fossil fuels.
It would not be impossible to roll this all way back, but it would be impossible to do so without devastating impacts to people currently living.
I strongly believe that rather than retreat, the far more promising path is to advance. As abundant as energy from fossil fuels has proved to be, they don't hold a candle to the energy that exists in nature: the sun sends us an astronomical amount of energy each day, the earth is mostly made out of rock that is hotter than industrial kilns, the bonds of particles within atoms themselves contain a huge amount of energy. The challenge is that these forms of energy are much harder to extract than lighting hydrocarbons on fire.
The trick is to make sure we use enough the abundant and easily accessible energy we have today as an investment in our collective project to lever up our ability to tap into the even more abundant but difficult to use energy that is laying all around us.