> Summary: It's written with a clear tinge of irony, but essentially it is saying we're playing Russian Roulette with a nearly loaded gun with the only place we know in this Solar System that is capable of maintaining Life, and a beautiful biodiverese one at that.

Thanks - and feel free to ignore if this is getting too tedious, but I feel like I may not be asking my question correctly, as the answer seems to be the same thing.

I'm starting from an inability to hear the key difference between Musk's framing of climate change and the traditional framing of climate change that is presented. To me what Musk said sounds no different that what I normally hear. Now since a number of people are saying that Musk's framing resonated with them while the traditional one didn't, I'm looking to understand how it differs from the traditional one.

And I appreciate your replies, but I keep seeing a summary of what Musk said (which is accurate and is also how I read it), but nothing on how people hear the traditional framing of climate change. To me the traditional framing is something like: "We only have one planet, let's stop destroying it before it's too late." To my ears those are essentially the same thing. Clearly I'm missing the difference, and I'm looking to hear how someone hears the traditional framing. And then specifically what about the traditional framing is missing.

I'm looking for a compare and contrast between A and B. And I do appreciate your replies, but unless I'm missing something, they seem like two summaries of A and no discussion of B. And not how B is different from A. Which is what I'm trying to parse out.

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Regarding crypto I do understand your thinking that it has potential to be beneficial. And clearly it's something you've spent a lot of time thinking about. The two concerns I have are this:

Crypto does have a high demand and growing demand for energy. That is mainly renewables. But to me,

The second part, is that the novel part of the ecosystem to me are programmatic contracts primarily. A distributed database second. 95% of the benefits of crypto for larger society boil down to programmatic contracts once you strip out the hype (and any speculation / get rich quick aspects). [To be very clear bitcoin price appreciation in itself is not a net benefit for society. But it is something that entices people to purchase and spread crypto which has properties that are a net benefit for society.]

If someone started from a goal of wanting smart contracts and possibly a distributed db they could come up with something significantly more energy efficient than crypto coin.

But back to the first part which is my primary concern and I ask you as someone who does care about this. I'm assuming the reason you want to swap to renewables is because it will produce a lot of solar and provide us with a renewable energy surplus. Clearly this would be a benefit to humanity. The question I ask you, is that Bitcoin (for example) and many others all scale with difficulty. Meaning the more energy available, the more power people will use for mining.

We will never have an energy surplus for the remaining future because any additional energy we add will now immediately be used for crypto to increase its difficulty. Solar could be an order of magnitude cheaper tomorrow, and as a result, people will just by 10x as much as they buy today. We won't get almost any surplus value from that hypothetical 10x surplus/improvement. Crypto will be an energy sink for society from now going forward. Do you see anything to contradict that? Because to me that is one of the largest flaws with the approach to crypto.