JoshuaZ comments on Mini advent calendar of Xrisks: nuclear war - Less Wrong
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So Nick Bostrom, who seems to be one of the major thinkers about existential risk seems to think that this justifies being discussed in the context of existential risk http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html . In 5.1 of that link he writes:
Moving on, you wrote:
So I agree we need to be careful about keeping focused on existential risk as proximate causes. I had a slightly annoying discussion with someone earlier today who was arguing that "religious fanaticism" should constitute an existential risk. But in some contexts, the line certainly is blurry. If for example, a nuclear war wiped out all but 10 humans, and then they died from lack of food, I suspect you'd say that the existential risk that got them was nuclear war, not famine. In this context, the question has to be asked if something doesn't completely wipe out humanity but leaves humanity in a situation where it is limping along to the point where things that wouldn't normally be existential risk could easily wipe humanity out should that be classified as existential risk? Even if one doesn't want to call that "existential risk", it seems clear that they share the most relevant features of existential risk (e.g. relevant to understanding the Great Filter, likely understudied and underfunded, will still result in a tremendous loss of human value, will prevent us from traveling out among the stars, will make us feel really stupid if we fail to prevent and it happens, etc.).
This and the rest of that paragraph seem to indicate that you didn't read my earlier paragraph that closely. Nothing in my comment said that we were running out of fossil fuels, or even that we were running out of fuels with >1 EROEI. There's a lot of fossil fuels left. The issue in this context is that the remaining fossil fuels take technology to efficiently harness, and while we generally have that technology, a society trying to come back from drastic collapse may not have the technology. That's a very different worry than any claim about us running out of fossil fuels in the near or even indefinite future.