I’m 38 years old, and I’ve worked in climate tech for the last 12 years. In my relatively short lifetime, and my relatively short career, I have seen the environment for political action, and funding for climate solutions, fluctuate maybe half a dozen times.
The physics, however, don’t change, and neither does the task in front of us.
I just spent ten months finding a job, the longest and most difficult job search of my career. It was hard because the macro environment is terrible, but also because I insisted on finding a role working on clean energy hardware.
At a time when basically all VC funding, and in many ways the entire productive capacity of the economy, is shifting to AI, it would have been smarter in some respects to just pivot to AI. I sat out the crypto bubble too, in which some of my peers made a lot of money by working on projects that were either useless, or straightforward scams.
We crossed the 1.5 degree threshold because the money can’t help itself. The slow, steady work of transitioning away from fossil fuels is never going to be as profitable, as quickly, as the various forms of gambling and addiction that have driven the tech industry for most of my lifetime.
But you, individually, can make the choice to keep your eye on the ball. You can commit to working on this problem until it’s done, no matter what. You can choose to find the others to organize and prepare, so that the ideas closest at hand when the next crisis comes are yours.
It’s the best solution I’ve come up with so far, and in spite of the challenges, it’s still working.
> You can commit to working on this problem until it’s done, no matter what.
My opinion is that the very first things people should do are:
1. Get a little bit informed. It doesn't require a PhD, it could be done instead of a fraction of the time they spend scrolling bullshit on their smartphone.
2. Accept the situation. Too many are in denial, with variants of "it's not that bad" or "it's because those in power are stupid, I would certainly fix the world" or "it's because of foreigners".
3. Vote accordingly.
It's too easy to say "we don't have any viable candidates" and "I don't understand why they haven't fixed the problem yet, they must be stupid (somehow implying that "in all likelihood I would have solved it by now")".
In relatively-functional democracies, the reason the people doesn't have viable candidates is because the people does not vote for competent people. Either because they vote for competent politicians (with modern politics being about getting elected, not exactly solving big problems) or because they proudly vote for extremists (which is of course even worse).
In a democracy, the people is the government. When the people says "the government is stupid", it reflects on the people. Maybe they're right: the government is stupid, because the people is stupid and elects stupid people, and that's why we're screwed.
I went from voting to electoral campaigns to the kind of activism that gets you arrested to working in climate as an engineer. I landed here because the first three were insufficient. I still support and encourage all of it, but the best you can get from voting is creating a better regulatory and funding environment for the necessary engineering and implementation work.
Glueing to streets can lead to terrorism charges, taking part of a demonstration even if it is not a legal one so far not.
(but among those activists there are certainly more radical elements, also actual eco terrorists, they recently showed solidarity to someone who was hiding close there, who made attacks on power plants and transmission lines)
The ones that made Hambach happen were the people that camped there in the woods literally for years in tree houses and they (some of them) also got arrested for it.
The arrests and prosecution I know of, are not because of living in a tree house there.
There was a lot of intentional ideological violence towards police. Part of the reason why I did not engage with them further, but I know people there.
I know that they tried to evict the people in the forest in 2018 and a bunch of people got arrested because they resisted the eviction.
Later on they walked it back and let them stay but still some people got arrested not because of violence but because they occupied the forest.
The prosecutions are not because they camped there, but what about those who were arrested and not prosecuted? just taken into jail, strip searched, then let go outside the police station after a night in jail when nobody can find where they are? Without any prosecution because the police cannot stick them anything? The violence against the police is mostly not ideological, it's caused by a deep anger about how people are treated, getting teargased for nothing, or prevented from moving.
Also now with social media, you can find a lot of example of what are called in France "Appariteurs" who often start the mayhem then leave through police lines without getting arrested.
"The violence against the police is mostly not ideological, it's caused by a deep anger about how people are treated,"
Yes yes, I heard that before. Let's just say I have been to many demonstrations and know the scene so sure, unprovoked police violence is a thing. But otherwise the pattern I witnessed quite often(and especially in the context of Hambach) is: some throwing stones or worse at police, police reacts with batons and teargas .. "wah wah, evil police!!"
When you have ACAB as a mantra and the core group consists of left wing extremists, what do you expect?
The openly showed solidarity with someone doing literal sabotage attacks on power plants and transmission lines. They are beyond reason and I claim the Hambach was temporarily saved not because, but despite those radicals. The mass demonstrations were what helped.
> I went from voting to electoral campaigns to the kind of activism that gets you arrested
You make it sound like you proved I was wrong... somehow? I never said "0% of the world is informed and votes accordingly". I said that the majority isn't and doesn't.
Sure, once you realise you personally aren't able to change that, you can move to the next thing that makes you feel good (in this case working on "green tech", if I understand correctly). Some people go live in a hut in the woods.
Doesn't change the fact that the people is the government, and can generally vote for change. But they don't, for many reasons, including "they actually spend very little time thinking about those things". I would argue that most people spend vastly more time saying that the government is stupid than actually getting informed on problems and what it would take to solve them.
35% of greenhouse gases are released by China and Russia. These are not democracies. They have killed their people to remain in power.
Another 8-9% is from India which while still classified as a flawed democracy is borderline.
And 11% is in the US which I guess we will find out if it is a flawed democracy or hybrid regime over the next few months. But at best it is paralyzed by polarization on the issue. And also due to lobbying/bribery from oil producing nations and states. The electoral system enforces two party rule which caused this problem in many nations, most of which are no longer classified as democracies.
These are also incidentally the nations best poised to solve the engineering issue of maintaining modern QOL while reducing emissions. The US has certainly contributed and China is working the issue very aggressively, largely out of a need for energy independence. But both of those contributions are fragile. The polarization is affecting it in the US and if China secured sources of energy that were cheaper but emitted, they would not hesitate.
> 35% of greenhouse gases are released by China and Russia
And we all import tons of stuff from China. Stop importing from China if you want to reduce their carbon footprint. Instead of paying them to build cheap stuff and then complaining because they build stuff for you.
Aren’t they essentially Leninist? Like if they weren’t burning coal to make Nikes and iPhones they’d be burning it for something else? So what’s the point of my choices here? I’m not even complaining, but from a problem-solving standpoint, seems kind of irrelevant.
As I said, they are aggressively contributing to the engineering side of emissions reductions. Probably the worlds most effective contributor in that regard. They are also the worlds largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Both are true. My final point is that those contributions are not altruistic, and their motivations could change if the entire oil production of Russia gets piped to them, they achieve naval dominance enough to secure malacca etc.
You have completely failed to take into account population.
Unless you can make a good case that some people have some kind of natural or divine right to a bigger share of whatever planetary CO2 budget we decide we have, shares have to be allocated per person rather than per country.
Any other systems leads to absurdity once you take into account that groupings of people can change.
Sure, per capita makes sense and that pushes some middle eastern countries to the top, with china and india way behind the us in emissions. But the post that started this was about voting to fix the climate. My whole point was that all the countries that are producing the majority of emissions aren't very democratic (us, india), or aren't at all (china russia), so voting is really quite irrelevant.
The number of plants is irrelevant. What is important is how much coal they use. That is going down because most of these new plants are built to just run at times when the renewables cannot handle the load.
Why coal when the peaks exceed what renewables can offer? The same reason the US builds natural gas plants (and is building more of those than anyone else in the world)--it is their fossil fuel that is the cheapest and has the most secure supply.
What point are you making, that China is doing it right, pay no attention to China? They produce the most emissions, and are not amenable to international plans to reduce emissions, making everybody else's efforts futile. Want to see the ourworldindata graph (again, probably)? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-share-of-co2-emiss...
Oh yeah well your country produces more emissions than Vatican City. Since absolute emissions are bad, no matter the size of the country, your country sucks too. Every country that isn't in last place for emissions sucks! Get your emissions down to Vatican City levels otherwise you're just as bad as everyone else /s
> are not amenable to international plans to reduce emissions
Please tell me more about this. They're actually flattening or reducing emissions. They signed the Paris agreement.
> Want to see the ourworldindata graph (again, probably)?
That graph tells me North America and Europe combined produce the nearly the same as China. That means if they go 0 carbon tomorrow, it's like taking out one China's worth of emissions. Is that futile?
North America and Europe have also emitted way more cumulatively than China. Historic emissions are the cause of problems today.
If you tell me "historic emissions" don't matter then I have to ask, where is the line? Do China's emissions yesterday also not matter? That's historic too, right?
What? The country that is in first place for emissions is causing most of the emissions.
> They're actually flattening or reducing emissions.
Reeeeally. Not reflected in the graph yet. Which of those is it anyway, flattening out, at a third of global emissions?
I've heard "historic emissions" before. You haven't reached for "per capita" yet. "Lump all the other countries together and blame it on them" is a new one. But what are you doing? Trying everything not to blame China, why?
> Do China's emissions yesterday also not matter? That's historic too, right?
That one doesn't even work, I could just agree that it's all about today's emissions.
You're trying everything to blame only China. Why?
> I've heard "historic emissions" before
And you think they don't matter? What do you think is warming the planet right now?
> You haven't reached for "per capita" yet.
Hey if per capita isn't important then get your country into last place. Until then it sucks just as hard as every other country not in last place. That's what you're saying, not me.
The reason I blame China is because their 32% is within the control of their authoritarian government, while the rest of the world has to wrangle awkward agreements between many countries, and political will in any individual country is sapped by awareness that only a small fraction of total emissions would be affected anyway, which wouldn't actually stop e.g. wildfires, so participation in a grand global plan is the only persuasive policy, but those grand global plans, such as they are, include agreement that China will carry on as usual.
Yes, I think who did what in the past is irrelevant to solving a problem now. What's that for, punishing sinners? Not the goal. We can decide that it's not morally China's fault (ha), but they'd still be the ones doing it, and it would still be hot (in the future, the only controllable part).
I can't comprehend this "last place" stuff. I think your idea - or ideology - is that the West is responsible (as in having agency) and blames China as a distraction. This flies in the face of the plain facts of where emissions come from and which entities have control over that, specifically the CCP and the CCP.
> The reason I blame China is because their 32% is within the control of their authoritarian government
And you believe this government will be able to order the population to stop burning fossil fuels, go back to living pre-industrial lives? Heck no.
That government was however able to order far-seeing investments in solar panel and battery manufacturing (done for national security, not climate, but who cares).
Even if China went 0 carbon, it wouldn't solve climate change because the other 69% of emissions would continue. Existing emissions will go on causing heating. Everyone has to make a change.
China for its part has done a ton of heavy lifting with its 31% of emissions. It manufactures abundant panels and batteries which make the transition cheap for everyone.
> Yes, I think who did what in the past is irrelevant to solving a problem now
You may think so, probably because you live in a rich country. But the people in developing countries asked to sacrifice in solving the problem do not.
If you move into a shared house with existing housemates, would you accept that you have to clean the already-disgusting bathroom prior to moving in because you have IBS and would use the bathroom more after moving in? You'd say "fuck no the people already living here messed it up".
That's what convincing developing countries to abandon fossil fuels at great personal cost is like. Make it cheap for them and they will do it. But if they see Westerners driving SUVs and flying everywhere, it's the same as your average Westerner's resentment of Elon Musk's private jet.
> they'd still be the ones doing it, and it would still be hot
Only 31% of it. Not even most of it. It would still be hot if they stopped.
> I can't comprehend this "last place" stuff.
It's the same as your "first place" stuff. If "most emissions" is terrible and everyone else is blameless, then "least emissions" is unalloyed good and everyone else is to blame.
> that the West is responsible (as in having agency) and blames China as a distraction
I think everyone is responsible and the West blames China as an excuse to do nothing (probably China does the same internally, I have no idea). Most emissions happen outside of China and are very much within the West's power to affect.
> asked to sacrifice in solving the problem do not.
So you mean that China wants the west to make some emission reductions, and then China will cut back on industry. I'm inclined to think they might be happy just with the first part and not bother with the second.
I think their 32% is instrumental to the rest of the world's political will, so I'm pretty much saying the reverse of what you're saying. This might indeed be a "you first" sort of situation, but there's no credible dialog about it anyway, Paris Shmaris.
No I mean all developing countries including China. For example, India's emissions are rapidly rising and people in the West love using that as a secondary pretext for their own inaction.
> So you mean that China wants the west to make some emission reductions, and then China will cut back on industry.
Now if you're intent on blaming solely China regardless of the facts, I really can't help you. You should examine your blindspots and biases before continuing the discussion.
> I'm inclined to think they might be happy just with the first part and not bother with the second.
I'm not. China is more exposed to climate change than most Western countries. And also PV and batteries are legitimately cheaper than burning coal. So they might just race ahead on sheer economics while we bicker.
> I think that 32% is instrumental to the rest of the world's political will,
I really don't think so. They'll just pick on India or some other poor country trying to haul themselves out of poverty. Because "political will" was never about what China or India do. It's about protecting the fossil fuel industry and its cheap energy.
A ton of carbon is a ton of carbon. It doesn't matter who reduces their emissions. Since we both agree on that logic, then the question is "who reduces emissions first?".
To me it's obvious: the richest countries first, because they have the most money to do it. This is where our views diverge.
In the west, people don't like various heatwaves and storms and fires, and they'd get behind a persuasive plan. What plan, though? They also like cheap energy. The reason why they vote for that is because they'll probably get it, while they won't get a cure for extreme weather. That's where international agreements, and the obstructiveness of the specific obstructive country in question, come into it. If your international agreement doesn't really do anything, the cheap energy has more persuasive power.
Why is "trying to haul themselves out of poverty" an excuse for causing climate change, by the way? That's a good trade-off, you imply? Being a poor underdog means you can have a dirty industrial revolution, because it's only fair that you should get a turn at burning a load of coal, is that the idea?
You say "China is more exposed": do they - anybody influential in China - actually express any concern about it? I don't know either.
> Why is "trying to haul themselves out of poverty" an excuse for causing climate change, by the way? That's a good trade-off, you imply?
It's a better reason than "I like hamburgers and steaks, big cars, and jet travel". Do you imply the West's choices are somehow nobler? Or is it ok because those "sins" as you call them are grandfathered in?
What are a poor country's choices? Stay poor, climate change happens anyway, and now they don't have any money to deal with it. Or get rich and have a chance of surviving.
> Being a poor underdog means you can have a dirty industrial revolution, because it's only fair that you should get a turn at burning a load of coal, is that the idea?
They would happily use free or heavily subsidized solar panels and batteries instead. Rich countries could easily fund this and tariff anyone who still burns fossil fuels. Why not do that instead of going "It's useless to do anything because China blah blah"?
> do they - anybody influential in China - actually express any concern about it?
They have targets to reduce carbon emissions, energy consumption per unit of GDP, particulate pollution, non-fossil fuel energy in total energy consumption, and increase forest cover in their current and previous 2 5-year plans. I didn't go back further than that.
its very interesting, because the US and India will suffer strongly from the effects of climate change.
Russia not so much, the melting of the perma frost might even enable agriculture in some regions previously impossible.
China will also suffer strongly, they know this so they are investing heavily also in resilience measures. anti desertification measures in the green wall, Water management, even geo engineering (which caused some tensions with india about raining off clouds before the water drifts away)
Well, you did qualify it with "in the" US but the US military is a bigger polluter than many nation states; number one source of carbon emissions in the world
Soooo yeah, Murica. As your vanity demands; all the attention is on you.
I and the rest of the world look forward to the US objectively failing to meet the moment.
That's why it was so important for the US to lead when it was the superpower that had the authority, respect and most influence over institutions of international cooperation. We're in the process of throwing all those accomplishments of the 20th century away. We used to be the good guys.
The less-bad guys maybe? Good guys are pretty hard to find in any honest history books. The moment is gone in any case. Emissions reductowould no longer be sufficient even of we had any confidence they would occur. Engineering solutions need to start focusing on climate engineering in parallel to clean energy. Both will definitely be needed to mitigate the losses to human quality of life.
"Doesn't change the fact that the people is the government"
That is not true in large parts of the world. Now even the most absolute monarchy has to listen to the people sometimes, but they absolutely can and do choose to do whatevery the small power circle on top wants, as long as the situation is somewhat under control for them.
I don’t know of any candidates (except a few outliers who have my support) who are pledging to reduce the footprint of the largest polluters. All anyone is willing to do is offer “feel-good” initiatives that make life harder for average people, building popular resistance to addressing climate issues, without actually taking the substantial, difficult steps that are needed. Meanwhile they work together on tightening the social control grid that is being rushed to completion before shit finally hits the fan.
> Maybe they're right: the government is stupid, because the people is stupid and elects stupid people, and that's why we're screwed.
Now you’re getting it. But they are stupid for a reason. The people are stupid because they are poorly educated and distracted by entertainment; they are poorly educated and distracted by entertainment because policy makers prefer passive consumers to active citizens; despite the long-term downsides, policy makers choose to create passive consumers because they are easier to control and unable to contest their power.
One of Reagan’s advisors warned that free higher ed was creating a dangerous “educated proletariat”, and he was right! The response to this danger was to end state funding of college tuition, to strip out funding for the humanities, and to gradually turn colleges into job prep centers rather than centers of higher learning. (This process started in earnest with Reagan, but you’ll notice that it was never rolled back.)
People did try to fight this, but we lost. And now here we are.
> I don’t know of any candidates (except a few outliers who have my support) who are pledging to reduce the footprint of the largest polluters
First, you apparently do know candidates like that, so...
Second, the reason we don't have candidates like that is because the candidates who get elected are the ones who do what they are doing now. Extremists get elected by being extreme, and they are because the people vote for them. If the people voted for consensual candidates trying to get the people together to find solutions, then we would have more of those. People in the US voted twice for Trump, no wonder all the other candidates are looking more and more like him. You get what you vote for.
> The people are stupid because they are poorly educated and distracted by entertainment; they are poorly educated and distracted by entertainment because policy makers prefer passive consumers to active citizens;
I don't know why people are stupid, but one thing I know for sure is that there are enough resources out there for them to inform themselves. And most people in Western democracies are educated, so they are capable of getting informed. They just... don't do it. Laziness maybe?
People being stupid doesn't lead to any specific outcome, it adds noise and randomness. To the extent that policies were the outcome of stupidity, those could equally well have been policies to reduce emissions.
If you throw LEGOs on the ground, they will form all sorts of random constructions, but it's very unlikely that they will end up building a model of the Empire State Building.
I would argue that in order to solve systemic problems, it's not enough to "randomly vote correctly once in a while". It needs to be carefully built.
I'm not surprised at all that "randomness" results in us not tackling the biggest problems our species has been confronted to.
> I don't know why people are stupid, but one thing I know for sure is that there are enough resources out there for them to inform themselves. And most people in Western democracies are educated, so they are capable of getting informed. They just... don't do it. Laziness maybe?
This, folks, is the power of neoliberalism distilled. Is there a problem? Why, it must be the fault of the many individuals who failed to take the appropriate action. Of course there is no consideration that many individuals together encompass a group who may be part of a larger system in which causality flows both ways.
Your comment here is not so different from accusations against “the blacks” (“why don’t they just stop committing crimes?”) or “the jews” or other groups. It is a simple reformulation of the classic “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. Obviously, if you fail to do so, it is a moral failure. Obviously.
The fact that this outlook infests so many minds is exactly why we have ended up here today.
If the trajectory continues, one day the people will pull themselves up by their collective bootstraps, and a real nightmare will begin, because such things are never clean.
So when people massively vote for extremists, it's fine, but when they massively get informed and decide to try to do something constructive, it's... "never clean"?
> Why, it must be the fault of the many individuals who failed to take the appropriate action
I am actually addressing the opposite: people tend to say "it's because of the few in the governments", as if they themselves would do better.
> Of course there is no consideration that many individuals together encompass a group who may be part of a larger system in which causality flows both ways.
I don't understand the "causality flowing both ways" part, but for the rest, that's EXACTLY my point. People are collectively part of a system, and they are collectively NOT solving the problem at all. And in relatively good approximation, they are blaming the people THEY elected.
Now being part of a system and not having the power to change it individually is one thing. Being part of a system getting worse, complaining all the time about it getting worse (to the point of going in the streets and burning cars/schools), but not being able to actually realise that it is more complicated than "it's not my fault, it's the elites"... Well I don't know how to call it, but it's tragic.
> So when people massively vote for extremists, it's fine, but when they massively get informed and decide to try to do something constructive, it's... "never clean"?
I was implying a revolution, which is almost always bloody and destructive, and almost never ends the way people want it to.
You completely missed the point on everything else. “Society” as a whole is both a bottom-up and a top-down construct. In more functional times, both sides influence and are influenced by each other. My contention is that the top is exerting enormous and extraordinary influence on the bottom to prevent any sort of reform, going so far as to sabotage their education, flood the media with propaganda, and actively implement divide-and-conquer strategies. Under these conditions, you can’t exactly blame the bottom for failing to find their footing.
You especially can’t blame them when most of the candidates who promise to “do something” are either co-opted or compromised from the start. The media says, vote for change! They just fail to mention that change is not on the menu of options. And woe to the few men of means who try to run for Congress to actually get something done; they don’t last long.
These conditions have only gone on for as long as they have because as Adam Smith said, “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” But there isn’t much wire left in the walls to strip out and sell. The pain has been unevenly distributed, with just enough people enjoying a decent standard of living to prevent any real mass movement. That won’t be true for much longer; we are running short of runway.
I think you hit the root causes dead centre there but there's an unfortunate consequence to your argument that you didn't call out.
The only way this changes is if there is real political/government leadership on the issue. That leadership can direct national resources. It can legislate. It can even tax - if necessarily to a very high degree - less useful ways of spending available resources in the private sector to deter waste.
We can't get that kind of leadership in many countries at the moment because too many people will just vote for whichever party they always have or whichever populist nutter has the most convincing sound bites. So before the political problem can be resolved there needs to be much more public education on the realities of the issue.
This is unfortunately a circular argument because the public information campaigns that are needed to fix the education problem are only going to be run by political/government leadership of the required calibre. If anything the populist lightweights will push the other way because dumbing down the voting population helps to sustain their own control and importance.
My hope is that before it's too late there will be enough politicians who are both capable of dealing with the real issues here and capable of taking on the populists convincingly enough to get elected to start moving the needle. Unfortunately I don't really see any other way this gets fixed instead of spiralling downwards.
> This is unfortunately a circular argument because the public information campaigns
I got educated in public schools. I was given all the tools needed to get informed and understand the problems well enough to... well at least not vote for extremists.
Saying "it's not the people's fault, it's the government that actively prevents them" is wrong in my experience. Even when the public education is good enough, extremism rises as soon as life becomes harder.
I don't think extremism and populism are the same thing FWIW - at least not as the terms are used here in the UK. (Obviously there is some overlap.)
A recurring problem with politics is that even a lot of decent and reasonably intelligent people still aren't interested enough to spend a lot of their time looking into political issues in detail. And that's understandable! Most adults have enough to worry about with jobs and families and their own hobbies and interests. The point of representative democracy as commonly used in Western nations is to have representatives who can devote their time to getting involved and understanding the issues on behalf of those they represent. But then how do voters know that the people they vote to represent them will take a good position on the issues that matter to them? A lot of it comes down to rhetoric and trust - and that's how folksy populist politicians manage to win votes and get elected even if better informed voters can see straight through the sales pitch.
The kind of public information campaigns I'm talking about here are the ones that try to raise awareness of the most important points about the most important political issues among the general population who can't or won't do enough research to find out for themselves. It's about getting the core message and basic facts to enough people who would then support doing sensible things as long as they have that essential information. But of course there can be a fine line between public information based on facts and logical reasoning from one party and mere political propaganda from another. The same tools of government and taxpayer funding can support either in exactly the same way - depending on who is already in power at the time.
“ When the people says "the government is stupid", it reflects on the people. Maybe they're right: the government is stupid, because the people is stupid and elects stupid people, and that's why we're screwed.”
Yep, George Carlin said this best when he was still alive. Bad Government is simply garbage in, garbage out, if the people are stupid, they will elect stupid people
This is just not true. There are many reasons so-called democratic elections fail to capture the will of the people. One of them is that many decisions are bundled into one, so lower priority decisions get sidelined by high priority ones.
The problem here isn't the people, it's a system that is built to have the appearance of being run by the people, while in reality the people will never be given reins to the system.
> The problem here isn't the people, it's a system that is built to have the appearance of being run by the people, while in reality the people will never be given reins to the system.
In Switzerland, the people can actually collect signatures and then vote to add articles to their Constitution. So they are very much in control. Check what they have voted in the last few years. When you ask the people, they actually don't give a shit about the climate problem. Then they say the problem is the government (not sure if they say that in Switzerland though).
This may be a contrarian view here, but a government that would force its citizens to reduce carbon footprint would be authoritarian by the views of most. China keeps backing the concept even though they are the greatest polluters and Putin got Schroeder in Germany to shut down nuclear. Authoritarian government without failure lead to wars. A war will come as a direct consequence of politicians selected because they can force people to do something “for their own good”.
You shouldn’t want political solutions to solve this - you want economic ones. I’ve been driving EVs almost exclusively for almost a decade and happy to see less smoke in the air, because and increasing number around are doing the same. Having solar during massive energy price spikes has been awesome. Tech that converts carbon from the air into bricks or some new type of fuel that generates revenue would quickly make factories want to capture it. Crops that grow in dry areas or tech to capture water and energy locally made affordable will increase local economies in countries that currently have so little that war is the only thing on the docket.
Forcing people to change what they eat or to pay reparations to countries that actually cause the pollution (much climate change action funnels money to China) or to lose jobs and factories will get you into war, because that’s precisely what authoritarians like Putin and China use to subjugate Europe.
Unfortunately a) economics and politics are inextricably tied and b) politicking will be required to allow economics to have a greater effect (ie by offsetting externalities through taxation).
The nuclear phase-out came into effect in 2002, under first Red-Green Schroeder government. (the "Act on the structured phase-out of the utilization of nuclear energy for the commercial generation of electricity")
Merkel government wanted to postpone the nuclear phase-out, but after Fukoshima, reverted to the original Red-Green nuclear phase-out.
They also blamed China for being the largest polluter. Which, while true on a pure numbers basis, doesn't really account for population/per capita and total renewables.
It also dismisses the fact China's pollution is everyone's pollution when they make most of the crap we buy.
Correct, and the reason I work in climate tech is Amory Lovins’ famous observation that people don’t care where their energy comes from, they care about “hot showers and cold beer”
Indeed and don't underestimate the influence you can have by participating in candidate selection (depending on your electoral system). For example in the UK the replacement candidate for a safe seat [i.e. almost guaranteed to be won by the party of the sitting representative] upon retirement of the incumbent may be decided by just a room full of people. Be in that room.
> the government is stupid, because the people is stupid and elects stupid people, and that's why we're screwed.
the government isn't stupid -- it's smartly serving the interests of the wealthy, who are primarily concerned with increased profits in the companies they hold shares in, not the wellbeing of Americans (much less those in other countries)
the US gov for the most part, has always been pro-owners (a small minority), not pro-workers (the vast majority of Americans) -- it's a structural feature, not a bug. and that's why it's so difficult to change unless things get so bad and the threat of social revolution is so great, that the gov is forced to make concessions -- this mostly only happened once, during the Great Depression
> In a democracy, the people is the government
sure, in theory. but in the US you'd have to start by overturning Citizens United so that the people -- not corporations -- are the ones driving elections
What is your reaction to credentialed physical scientists who accept that climate changes and that human greenhouse-gas emissions have an effect, but reject or dispute important parts of the mainstream assessment? They do have a Ph.D. and one of them has a Nobel Prize in Physics so it's difficult to ignore them. This is not to take a position but to point out that they can hardly be idiots; if you think they are, this needs to be made plain.
> They do have a Ph.D. and one of them has a Nobel Prize in Physics so it's difficult to ignore them.
Hard disagree here. Having a PhD only says you got hired for a PhD and spent years doing stuff. Doesn't make your opinion better than a scientific consensus. Having a Nobel Prize means that you won the lottery when you chose your field of research (if you were lucky enough to have a choice there). There is a famous "regression to the mean" with Nobel Prizes who then have a tendency to be confidently wrong for the rest of their life.
Not saying that PhDs and Nobel Prizes are worth nothing of course. What I'm saying is that science is about consensus. It's okay to believe that the consensus is wrong and to try to prove it, but until you manage to do it, you have to admit that the consensus is the best theory we have.
> This is not to take a position but to point out that they can hardly be idiots; if you think they are, this needs to be made plain.
I don't think they are. I think people tend to misunderstand how science works.
If the vast majority of scientists in a field agree on something, and few disagree, that's perfectly normal. Now when you take one scientist from the minority, realise that they are not stupid, and conclude from there that it would be rational to believe that the large consensus is wrong... then you are doing it wrong.
In other words, a scientist could say "you should believe the consensus about global warming, but my research is about trying to prove them wrong. Until them I have failed, given that the consensus is what it is, and therefore you should not base your survival on my ideas". Of course they won't, and in all fairness it shouldn't be their job to say that. We really just need people to understand how science works, and stop thinking that they can select the one study they like and say "it's true, I choose to believe this one".
> 1. Get a little bit informed. It doesn't require a PhD, it could be done instead of a fraction of the time they spend scrolling bullshit on their smartphone.
The problem is that as soon as you start digging into it, you're essentially walking in a guilt trip.
The kind of "eating an hamburger pollutes more than driving an SUV for 50 miles" guilt trip.
And you realize most of the focus should be on materialism, consumerism and how/what you eat, not just cleaner transport.
But who really wants to do so? I myself am aware that me eating a beef steak per week has a gigantic impact on environment and resources. That switching to pork > chicken > eggs in that same meal would be better.
But I just don't want to enter the guilt trip. So I do a bit, but not as much as I could.
A carbon tax should help there. Make it so me eating a steak is not incentivized. But then good luck with farmers, the easiest like and empathy grabbing category of workers on the planet.
You can't vegan hamburger your way to terminating those enterprises. You can tax, regulate and ban them though; and use the revenue to help society adjust.
Yeah. I raise my own cattle and the amount of beef we get from a single cow is more than enough to meet our beef needs for a year (at normal Western averages). They are a "closed loop" - they forage on plant material that would grow and rot anyway and actually condition the soil and make our pasture and forest healthier, and remove any need to buy fertiliser for our gardens or pasture.
Telling people that eating a burger is somehow having a huge environmental impact is nonsense, and it becomes rather obvious it's just promoted by people who want to promote veganism for philosophical reasons who have hijacked the environmental reasons.
It is also a complete no-go in China where veganism is viewed with suspicion because it is associated with religious fanaticism.
> You can't vegan hamburger your way to terminating those enterprises. You can tax, regulate and ban them though; and use the revenue to help society adjust.
You can't tax, regulate, or ban them when people still eat hamburgers. Who would vote in favor of that?
> Eating a hamburger or driving a car is not the problem at an individual level.
Strongly disagree. Oil is not getting produced because a handful of companies want to ruin the planet-- that happens because billions want those oil products, for personal mobility, cheap goods, cheap energy.
A lot of people simply don't care enough about the future consequences; they want to continue cheap consumption for as long as possible, and find justifications and excuses easily enough ("China emits so much more anyway", "I can't afford to pay more for gas", "why should I have to make any sacrifices that my parent generation did not have to make", etc.).
If you could disperse every last one of those companies into tiny 20-man operations, you would solve absolutely nothing. What would solve things is if a majority of people (in industrialized nations) would become willing to pay the cost for fast and extensive (green) electrification, to downregulate the size and frequency of personal transport, to pay a premium for green concrete and steel, to accept higher prices and worse availability in order to sanction any trading partner that is not similarly serious about emissions.
We can't get any of the above not because of evil corporations or politicians, but simply because most people just don't want to pay the price and make the sacrifice now for a better future.
Extremists, as in lumping trump together left wing folks who want a green new deal and to actually do something about the problem?
No socialist/lefty has been elected in the US despite their ideas being super popular. Don't act like voting for a centrist dem like Biden would do anything but ever so slightly slow the climate change scenario we're in. We absolutely need and FDR new deal scope of attack on this problem.
The revisionist history on Joe Biden is insane. I honestly can’t even explain it, other than the idea that there must be an extremely effective opposition campaign to smear him.
The dude engaged in more climate action than any previous president. The Inflation Reduction Act was a huge clean energy manufacturing bill. This is established fact that isn’t even really disputed from what I can tell.
Remember those EV subsidies that disappeared under Trump’s second term? Yeah, those did more to curb fossil fuel consumption than just about anything else the government could have done with direct action. Transportation accounts for 28% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The US is wildly car-dependent. The government should be practically forcing US auto buyers into EVs through EV incentives and gas taxes.
Americans are woefully uninformed about how their own government works. Even watching Schoolhouse Rock would teach you that presidents don't write or vote on bills.
I’m definitely not saying he was a modern Abraham Lincoln, please don’t extend my words beyond their reach.
Being a career politician doesn’t mean anything positive or negative without further context. All that means is that you are winning elections.
You can be a career politician because you are popular and effective, or you can be a career politician because your political machine has done a good job of keeping you in power — or both.
Bernie Sanders has been in congress about as long as Susan Collins and they are definitely not the same people in terms of the integrity of their ideology and congressional voting record.
In actual reality "Joe Biden was a career politician because he'd say..." does not in any way contradict "Joe Biden did x and engaged in more y..." Outcomes matter, regardless of motives. Do you see the difference?
The rest is changing the subject - derailing and inflammatory.
A little informed about what? That we are destroying the planet slowly? Yeah, we know.
What is your actual solution? That we tell people they can't have plastic straws? That we need to install solar and wind farms (which is already happening at mass scale in the West, by the way. That includes the US)?
What are you actually proposing? That we "vote"? Do you want to de-industrialize your corner of the world, like Europe is doing, while the rest of the world plows ahead unabated?
Until you're ready to go to war for this, it's unrealistic. And good luck trying to force any country to do anything you want without a well equipped war-machine. You think Russia, India or China care what Europe thinks about their climate policies?
So, yeah, go ahead and vote in your green parties.
There is no easy solution. If you think that installing solar and wind farm is "a solution", then... you misunderstand the size of the problem.
> What are you actually proposing?
Get informed, work your way towards accepting how bad it actually is, and then work your way towards accepting that life will get more complicated and that we have to work together to try to keep is a bearable as possible.
As long as people will be adversarial (like you are here, criticising green parties for no reason, I don't even vote for them) we'll be screwed. As long as people will go in the streets because "life is getting harder", we'll be screwed.
The only solution we have is to work together. And even if we do (we probably won't, but let's be optimistic), our life will get more complicated. That's why I say that the first step is to accept that. We won't solve the problem while being in denial.
I think it is fundamentally a demographic problem. We have a growing aging population in the worst-offending western countries, soon to be the majority voters (in some countries we are approaching 50% voters above age of 50). Wealth and fortune tend to come with age, so the same group sits on the assets needed to make a change (and are the worst offenders regarding CO2 production). At the same time, this group cares the least about the future livability of the planet, as the worst symptoms will only start to show when they have already passed away.
That is a fundamental problem that you will not solve by asking youger folks, who are actually affected and have all reason to agree and comply, to make a change.
I doubt that even younger folks in developed countries will be affected as drastically as "livability" perhaps implies.
I get the feeling that many are confused and fear the literal destruction of our planet by accelerating warming.
The reality is that the underlying physics fundamentally work in the opposite way, with warming slowing down rather than accelerating. I understand that for warming below 2C, the confidence is high that it is roughly a linear relation to additional CO2 emitted.
I'm optimistic about most things in life, perhaps it's a flaw of mine.
I do think we have decades, if not centuries, to develop solutions to climate change. Our planet will remain livable.
That said, I understand some ecological damage that may occur with global warming could be irreversible, and it makes sense to reduce emissions as soon as possible.
I think the whole framing of climate issues as "saving the planet" is misguided. Yes, the planet will remain livable pretty much no matter what. The threat of climate change isn't the literal destruction of the planet, or even the literal extinction of humanity. Rather it's such severe changes to the planet's biosphere that human civilization would be threatened.
Potential climate catastrophe scenarios where rapidly rising sea levels submerge many inhabited areas and various knock-on effects disrupt the food chain, even in those scenarios the planet is fine on geological timescales. What's not fine is human civilization, on human timescales. And I think this is what gets inadvertently hidden behind planet-saving rhetoric. If the worst case scenarios are "only" about billions of people dying due to resource scarcity and conflicts over said resources, this is something to be avoided.
I see a parallel with global nuclear war. Such a war would probably not end the species, there would be groups of survivors here and there. But human civilization as we know it would be over, with the global population being back to what it was in the hunter-gatherer era.
If sea levels rise significantly faster than over the last century, this seems likely to cause economic disruption, rather than threatening human civilization.
Even when we look at knock-on effects and food security, it seems very unlikely to threaten wealthy, developed countries with diversified food supply.
It is still going to disproportionately affect developing countries that are already struggling.
The biggest issue in the near to medium term is that tons of people in southeast asia will soon be living below sea level. This will require either an enormous infrastructure program or a massive refugee crisis.
I always cared. But I care more as I age. Why? Because I know (vaguely) the danger and I have ____KIDS____.
Older people usually have kids too. For anyone, ANYONE who accepts/knows the dangers we face to just shrug, knowing it's their own kids and grand kids that will suffer (wars, political upheaval, riots, deaths, migration) - no. I don't buy it.
Principally, it's the ignorance of the people to the things that matters most. Maybe they are partially sticking their heads in the sand a bit. But if it truly was properly reported on prime-time news and so on, they would know, and they would care.
> But if it truly was properly reported on prime-time news and so on, they would know, and they would care.
I don't know a single person that isn't aware of the issue, it's just a significant portion of them think it is outright fake or they just otherwise don't care because they see it as a lame thing to care about. How does one fix that side of things? It seems a major impediment to any progress.
In my experience, being a parent is unfortunately a poor predictor of caring and being ready to act on climate change or its effects.
The split seems mostly generational; my parents and other parents around their age seem to not really care (there are still dinner table debates about whether Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was a scam or not), but as my other-millennial friends are becoming parents, the vast majority of them do care, because this issue has been so front-of-mind for people my age. We're hyperaware of the fact that my country has more wildfires, milder winters, and hotter summers than it did when we all were growing up.
(There may be selection bias at play here; while I don't go out of my way to avoid them, I don't have many friends who deny the issue of climate change).
Many of us are also tracking the second- and third-order effects of these things; crop failures, droughts, and the migration and public services strain that come as a result of this; most frustrating is that the biggest voter blocs won't enact policy that's responsive to this, so when the inevitable (mass, climate-change-driven migration) grows over the coming decades, we'll be unprepared, and we'll either be overwhelmed by the movement of people, or complicit in one of the greatest humanitarian crises in history (and very possibly both).
I'm middle aged and have no kids so I probably fall into your category, in the sense that as long as it doesn't bite hard before I go it's in my top 5 political priorities but not at #1.
However my friends who have kids and grandkids care a great deal about climate change and generally do what they can politically (i.e. vote for Greens and so on) within the constraints of life (i.e. they're not out there throwing soup at paintings or whatever).
Maybe that's what it will take. I expect ecoterrorism to become a serious thing in the next decade or two. Who knew the Amish were right all along?
> However my friends who have kids and grandkids care a great deal about climate change and generally do what they can politically
As long as you got money, you can afford to "save on CO2" and buy a prius or whatnot. The thing is, we can't really avoid making things that are bad for the environment without making everything expensive. You can ban a product, like oil or fosil fuels, but you are banning the best solution - which is often also the cheapest. If it wasn't the best/cheapest, then why would you need to ban it, people would not be using it.
Climate politics eventually raises cost of living. If we could lower cost of living AND save the environment we would be already doing it.
So all the measures to save the climate will inevitable impact the lowest income households the most. Which is - and here we close the circle - the young, working population. The retired one have the wealth and assets, as established earlier.
You made my point. If those externalities are priced in, the producers will have to pay more, and ultimately all prices are passed on to the consumer -> rising cost of living.
When the Amish said that modern technology destroys the family they weren't envisioning a climate catastrophe being the thing that destroyed the family.
I recently travelled to the primary old-order region of my country, where I hadn't been in about a decade, and all the horses in the fields I remember have now been replaced by tractors. Let's be real: They don't fear climate change any more than the average Joe does, possibly less having less exposure to the science and messaging. All they have ever feared was families being broken apart by the kids leaving for the big city lights.
> That is a fundamental problem that you will not solve by asking youger folks, who are actually affected and have all reason to agree and comply, to make a change.
Younger folks tend to be more enthusiastic about "making a change" by direct action means, so you shouldn't count them out!
It is true that they don't have the resources in their natural state, but it is extraction and use of those resources that causes the problem. Letting the resources remain in their natural state is the solution!
Here's the thing: Resources aren't extracted just for fun. It is only done so to serve the consumer, and those consumers are disproportionately young-to-middle-age adults. Not using resources is the only way to combat this. That is fully within their control.
It's hysterical seeing the younger generations being asked to forego plastic straws while leaders in their parents and grandparents generations wage selfish wars. I'm sure saving on those straws will catch up to all those oil tankers that were burned in the last few months.
I'm not sure your age cut off is quite right, I'm 50 in a few months and my wife and our friends are all quite "pro climate" (just to easily sum it up), most people I know from the younger end of GenX are... the problem lies just a few years beyond that with the older GenX and up into the Boomers, which is where all the money is.
Yea it’s not an age thing as much as it’s a “I got mine and I’m gonna pull up the ladder and defend it” mentality. Yes, a stereotypical Boomer take, but not necessarily limited to or locked to the entire generation.
Democracies in general are suffering the fallout of losing its information economy.
From the death of local newspapers, the end of classifieds and the pressures on ad revenues, journalism had no real options but to shrink and consolidate.
The more content we create, the more the market focuses on creating content that could garner attention.
People are going to vote based on the information they have. If they are part of a captive market, then they are going to pick between the choices they are presented or decline to participate.
It’s some sort of irony, that as a society we developed ways to neutralize free speech and expression by flooding the zone with more content, not by controlling content.
I think partly it’s also that democracies aren’t great at longer term planning.
Like in my country there is a big election every 4 years and you have state elections in between. So any government needs to constantly appease the people to stay in power and do anything.
It’s basically impossible for them to make and more importantly realise any plans that go beyond that 4/5 year timeframe.
And to solve something like climate change we would need to think in decades or centuries.
We have tried autocracies over and over again, and they have the same failure state. Eventually you get to a leadership that is not capable of adapting to the situation and has no pressure to change, and all the ability to suppress life saving change.
They say they plan long term but look at what they do: build entire cities for nothing. A Supreme Leader who clings to power in advanced age, with no successor, setting the system up for a power struggle after his departure.
> and are the worst offenders regarding CO2 production
Unless you're doing those strange mental gymnastics of entities like oil companies are the emitters and not the consumers, that's not true. Old people who have gained large amounts of wealth have also lost large amounts of mobility and tend to not produce much co2 because they don't do much in life anymore, comparatively speaking. The data is clear that peak carbon emitters are in their 30s-40s, and they're still the ones most often seen crying about not being able to afford a home.
So 2/3 from those that are? It just means that those that are need to do more heavy lifting because there is at least a choice. Fair? No, but Earth doesn't care about what is fair and who does the most. It only cares about total output and so will the environment you live in.
> It just means that those that are need to do more heavy lifting because there is at least a choice.
That will not work because it means people just move high emitting activities to those countries.
For example the evisceration of the British steel industry means we import steel from China: dirtier energy mix, plus transport of a very heavy commodity.
You are right that they don't have a democracy because the people are unable to truly organize without the powers that be at the top putting an end to any movements, but the people in the remaining 2/3s of the world never bother to take time to organize either, so the democracy they do have is really only a belief, something theoretical, and they if they ever decided to exercise it in the future may find out that they weren't actually under democracy after all.
I applaud you for considering a change. However, you’re talking about making two career pivots at once, and I would suggest doing one at a time - i.e. either keep coding in clean energy, or do something other than coding, but not both. It’s hard to pivot.
If you want to be a senior SWE in clean energy, the Climatebase rec is good, or https://www.terra.do/, or subscribe to a newsletter like https://www.ctvc.co/tag/newsletter/ that announces when climate tech companies raise money (at the bottom of each newsletter), and apply to open roles at those companies when they start looking to spend their new money, usually ~1-3 months later.
Clean energy hardware meaning clean electricity generation, energy storage, or energy management and arbitrage hardware that reduces the need for fossil fuel-derived electricity.
It’s not always possible depending on where you are.
Actual real reasons like possibility of continuous dark cold windless weeks in the winter and then the more common/real one. Politics.
Also if someone wants to build nuclear why would you not let them? More production in general is better as long as the public money put into it is the same per kWh produced as wind/solar/whatever why would I care?
They suggest gas peaker plants to cover such climate scenarios (long cold windless winter weeks). Literally their solution for zero carbon is “build gas power plants”. And this isn’t just a coupe but several GW worth and also they only run during those week to two so price is in euros (not cents) per kWh.
Also their listed cost of nuclear power is a lot higher then actual real cost (TVO lists these publicly but every study still uses numbers that are much higher)
Edit: and again if someone wants to build (and pay for it) let them. Electricity production here (Finland) isn’t some single system where someone has control over all the investment but a free market where everyone is free to compete. If you think that you can compete with your solution (and can convince the investors/banks) why should we be saying no you can’t? In electricity production where there is actual cost for CO2 this actually works.
For the record I am against the government giving some guaranteed tariff price (or any other direct subsidy like that) to any production method. If new nuclear can’t be built without such subsidies then we should not build it.
I have been working in Climate Tech for a while but not as long as you.
Unfortunately my conclusion is that Climate Tech companies in general have been delusional thinking the mission is enough and there is no requirement to be a business.
The reason I am saying this is not to discourage from working in Climate Tech. The reason I say this is to please not go in with eyes closed which is all too common.
Climate Tech needs to grow and be sustainable both for the mission as well as a business. And for far too long I feel business smarts have been missing completely in this sector.
This ignores the big wheezing elephant in the room: climate action is fighting extremely entrenched and monied interests that are betting on dying before the bill for their action comes due and are ready to lie on almost unimaginable scale.
Saying it is simply a "branding failure" is about as accurate as saying "planning failure" is why around 80% of Ukrainians lost power in 2024.
This is not true, it's fossil fuel propaganda that has been very successful. The overwhelming majority of people are concerned about the climate but assume that they are in the minority. See https://ourworldindata.org/climate-change-support for example.
"Fight pollution" is the old approach, it doesn't work as well because greenhouse gases are generally invisible and cause no noticeable short-term impacts, and because in the US the industry has been successful in distorting the law such that greenhouse gases do not legally count as pollutants.
Climate change and renewables are broadly popular causes.
It might not seem like it if you live under a broken political system that can ignore what people want and so that doesn't translate into action.
When you point this out people say, "well it's not as important as cost of living or health or migrants from hot countries or getting out of wars in the middle east" despite it helping with all of those too.
The data says climate change is not broadly popular in the US. If it was, people (broadly speaking) would not have tripped over themselves buying bigger and higher vehicles and bigger houses in further flung suburbs. Not to mention the fierce political opposition to higher fossil fuel prices, which would be the easiest and most direct mechanism to combat carbon emissions.
> At a time when basically all VC funding, and in many ways the entire productive capacity of the economy, is shifting to AI,
Really enjoyed this snippet of your post. Not sure why, but being in the weeds with it, it had never really looked like this is an industrial revolution style retooling of how we work, with the pain and benefits that come along with it.
For me the root of the problem is politics rather than money. Or to be clear, the reasons for procrastinating are not economic. We have the technology to de-carbonize energy and in most cases it's cheaper and better than fossil-based energy production. On the consumption side, the move to electrification is also compelling and in most cases economical - EVs, induction cooking, heat pumps, etc.
But in terms of politics we have Trump paying companies to abandon half-built offshore wind farms and various European countries offering subsidies for fossil-fuel consumption 'to help with affordability' to shield consumers from their dependence on a volatile source of energy.
And that is ignoring the huge and persistent subsidies dished out by governments (estimated at about $800 billion globally - which ignores the externalities like pollution and global warming).
The sad truth is that shifting work to AI in a data center produces way less carbon than workers using even public transit to get to an office everyday.
A major problem, I think, is that humans insist on making everything a big package deal bound up with tribalism and ideology.
If you think climate change is a problem, you're more likely to be on the left of the political spectrum and hold a wide range of other views that have absolutely nothing to do with reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
(I'm not just picking on the left. Everyone does this with everything. It's human primate tribal behavior.)
The constant shifting winds are a result of political shifts and power struggles, often struggles over issues that are unrelated to climate change but are linked to it by this mechanism. It makes rational discourse and consistent action hard. The more bound up an issue is with politics the harder it is to even discuss reasonably.
Of course, people with a short term vested interest in not doing anything about this problem love it this way.
The problem is simple and the solution is to switch to power sources that emit far less CO2 or preferably none at all. This remains true regardless of our political, social, or cultural beliefs. Physics doesn't care.
Yes, it happens, but its cultural not an immutable human characteristic.
People make things that are a matter of opinion (politics, religion, whatever) a matter of identity.
This is worse in the US than in most places, but its become a lot worse in the UK, which I attribute to create American cultural influence, especially as it has come at the same time as specific American ideologies.
The problem is that most people do care about the environment but are hopelessly misinformed about what to do about it.
They think that personal acts of minor inconvenience like tolerating soggy paper straws saves the environment while fighting things that actually make a difference, like blocking transit to save a nest of bats; or blocking urban development to provide an extra 3 minutes a day of sunlight on a surface parking lot; or that somehow them flying across the USA to visit a national park and connect with nature or something is offset ecologically by token actions like reducing how many plastic grocery bags they use throughout the year. Most ordinarily people don’t understand the tradeoffs of their choices in the slightest.
And on top of that culture wars and geopolitics is getting in the way of progress - we could be blanketing the world in solar panels and batteries and EVs on the cheap right now, but it’s dominated by enemy #1, China, so we won’t; not to mention that the right in the USA seems to think that renewables are for girly sissies. And the alternatives we have, like nuclear power, are being shut down across EU countries because people have no idea of just how self sabotaging that action is, given that the alternative is going to be fossil fuels coming from Russia and the Middle East. They’d rather die of heat stroke than use energy efficient air conditioning, so the powers of most people’s imagination are shockingly weak.
Popular opinion wants to blame everything on capitalism when the reasons for these problems don’t actually stem from there. Capitalism will be the way out if it’s given the chance, but it’s not popular to say that, so it won’t.
There is obviously a deep desire for personal penance and absolution that manifests itself in the environmental space. (see: paper straws, plastic bags, formerly compact fluorescent lightbulbs, low-flow toilets, etc.) I'm not sure I agree that this fundamentally is about people being misinformed; it seems possible that people would want this even if they were fully clear that these penances were trivial -- even in aggregate -- in the big picture.
I think that people do care about "the environment," but what they mean by "the environment" is much more "my personal connection with spaces that feel unspoiled" than "atmospheric CO2 levels."
Yeah, which is what makes me think that environmentalists are one of the biggest groups blocking the protection of the environment. Mostly concerned with whatever makes themselves feel absolved or at least have a pretty view from their window, while fighting tooth and nail against anything that can actually make a real difference for conservation. The actual saviors of the environment will be the capitalists who manufacture the green revolution at scale for profit, as it always has been for the last centuries of poverty reduction and social progress.
> But you, individually, can make the choice to keep your eye on the ball. You can commit to working on this problem until it’s done, no matter what. You can choose to find the others to organize and prepare, so that the ideas closest at hand when the next crisis comes are yours.
Why should the average person reduce his/her life quality in order to save the climate, when the average billionaire emits as much CO2 as one million people from the bottom 90% of the population combined? I do care about the climate, but it's clearly irrational to make sacrifices, when other people are unwilling to do that. Having a higher quality of life is more valuable to me than the tap on the shoulder I can give myself for playing my part in living responsibly.
> I do care about the climate, but it's clearly irrational to make sacrifices, when other people are unwilling to do that
We do irrational things daily in order to live harmoniously in groups. Heck, the entire field of behavioural economics was stood on its ear when they figured out that humans don’t behave rationally in all circumstances. Moral choices are individual. I limit my QOL in many “irrational” ways because it helps me
live with myself. Is it enough? Of course not. But we are too outnumbered by the greedy and the defeatists.
But if more an more people changed their attitude, stopped envying jet-setters and instead shamed them for their environmentally reckless attitude, maybe you would see a lot less plane travel, a lot less gas guzzlers, a lot less conspicuous consumption.
Shame works on the vast majority of people. We may lack inherent ethics, but we seldom like to swim against the stream.
> but it's clearly irrational to make sacrifices, when other people are unwilling to do that.
You realize that if everyone has that attitude then nothing will ever change, right? "You take the first step!" "No, you take the first step!"
> Why should the average person reduce his/her life quality in order to save the climate, when the average billionaire
I understand (and share) the sentiment, but there are not that many billionaires. Even if they all suddenly became vegans who never travel and live in a small house, that would not solve the problem. What the masses do is what has to change. How they travel, what they eat and buy and consume, their housing.
There are about 3500 billionaires in the world, meaning they emit as much CO2 in total as roughly 3.5 billlion people from the bottom 90%. They do play a huge part in this.
A quick google search indicates that the top 1% accouted for 16% of greenhouse gas emissions. https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-emit-much-... Yes that is a lot. But 1% includes many more thn just the billionaires and it also means that if the remaining 99% don't get their emissions in check, it doesn't matter much what the top 1% do, let alone the billionaires.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the billionaires should not do anything. If anybody is in a position to adjust their behavior, it's them. But acting as if as long as the billionaires don't change their behavior, nobody needs to, is the route straight to failure, though it is a very easy narrative for sure.
3.5 billion people does include the bottom 90%, yes. The 3.5bn number was referring to the fact that billionaires emit as much CO2 as a million people in the bottom 90%. That does include the footprint through their investments, however.
You take 3.5bn people of the bottom 90% in wealth and consider their CO2 emissions. The CO2 footprint of a single billionaire (incl the footprint caused by their investments) equals the footprint of one million people from that bottom 90%. There are 3500 billionaires, so their footprint is equivalent to that of 3.5bn people from the bottom 90%.
> But you, individually, can make the choice to keep your eye on the ball. You can commit to working on this problem until it’s done, no matter what. You can choose to find the others to organize and prepare, so that the ideas closest at hand when the next crisis comes are yours.
> It’s the best solution I’ve come up with so far, and in spite of the challenges, it’s still working.
This helped. It’s pretty much the only thing you can do.
The system is looking for growth, not for sustainability, which is someone else’s problem.
Not to mention, this is all going to assume resources in America and issues from an American perspective. Not to ding America, just that the conversation will cluster around the topics that matter to funders.
>We crossed the 1.5 degree threshold because the money can’t help itself.
Which is why I think we need carbon pricing / tax. If the politicians focused on that then the forces of capitalism and startups would be unleashed to bring down co2. Instead they ban plastic straws while the Chinese burn another million tons of coal.
It could maybe be brought in quite gradually in a decade or two ahead so people have time to install renewables, heat pumps and the like.
> Instead they ban plastic straws while the Chinese burn another million tons of coal.
I know it's easier to blame China than look at what we've done, but:
- The US generates more co2 per capita than China does.
- A lot of what China makes is products that we buy from them.
- The US has about twice as many CUMULATIVE co2 emissions than China does (remember, the co2 stays trapped in the atmosphere)
- The feds have gleefully killed as many clean energy initiatives as possible. Meanwhile, China leads the world on clean energy, has driven down renewable and EV batteries by 90% since 2010, is the world's largest renewable energy producer and investor, and is on track to generate half of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.
The reason that total atmospheric CO2 is increasing is because the rate that it's being added is a lot higher than the rate that it is reabsorbed by the various natural carbon sinks (including plants).
Only about 10% is reabsorbed quickly [1], the rest stays for hundreds or thousands of years. That may not be "trapped" in a pedantic sense, but it's pretty close.
It is an important distinction for many reasons. The general public have a pretty hazy idea of how it works. It also tends to lead to people to underestimate the impact of not destroying carbon sink ecosystems - it may not be the only reason so little is done about that, but it is definitely a reason.
Plastic straws are definitely a common form of beach trash, but they were never the "vast majority" of it. Not by item count, and certainly not by mass. They do rank in the top 10, but not at the top.
Ocean Conservancy has annual reports that include statistics from trash cleanup projects. The 2026 report[1] has a "global top items collected" list that covers 1986 to 2026; straws (& stirrers) are 5th at about 16 million items collected. Drinks bottles are number 3 at nearly 27 million. Cigarette butts are top (65 million)
Looking back at the report from the year 2000[2] as a comparison (this one lists numbers just for the year 2000 cleanup projects), straws are number 10 out of 12, cigarettes are still top, various other plastic items (not all of which are classified) are above straws.
Isn't the core issue that energy use and economic growth are deeply connected? If America uses a little less thanks to a carbon tax, it will just be cheaper for india and china, and their prosperity will grow more while americas begins to lag?
> Isn't the core issue that energy use and economic growth are deeply connected?
That's only true up to a point (see: efficiency, the length of logistics chains & so on). For the remainder, GHG footprint only holds for fossil-dependent economies.
Move to renewables & you're literally decoupling energy use from GHG emissions.
I mean that sounds nice, but when you have countries like China and India, they are going to be far more focused on lifting their population out of poverty over lowering emissions. From their perspective, we're living the planet destroying lives and the first world shouldn't have a say in the matter
>Instead they ban plastic straws while the Chinese burn another million tons of coal.
The chinese quite literally have greener energy than germany at the moment and are building the shit that you buy off of amazon. China is the only reason the current solar push is as successful as it is. Tame your sinophobia.
There's still complications e.g
if the "dirty" electricity is being used to power an EV or a heat pump then it's reducing GHG compared with directly fossil fueled alternatives.
Out of curiosity did you ever explore opportunities to work on this problem in China? It's something that some of us are going to have to bite the bullet and start considering I imagine as that country has become the center of innovation for so many fields. While obviously we traditionally have seen the reverse with huge numbers of Chinese coming to Western countries for graduate school and or for careers we should explore the opposite direction.
Paris accords were made on the assumption that each human emits the same. At least the stated goal is 16Gt-carbon-equivalent, and at an individual level 2t/yr.
The usual criticism is that it means every human emits the same, which is extremely tied to consumerism level, i.e. level of living, since in the climate universe, we have far enough access to consumerism and we're not limited by resources, but by emissions. And, like every policy claiming equalitarianism-for-all, it means it's no worth working if you'll have the same right to consumerism. Criminal, hard worker, bad country, good country, all equal humans.
The second criticism is how it's impossible to impose less consumerism to another country, let alone a megacountry, so this climate scheme has always been just about limiting the Western civilization, generally by people who go length to explain what Whites have done wrong in the world.
The Paris climate accord is a racist ideology that means that I should disappear. Typical from the 2012 era, but outdated in the 2020ies, and the more people claim that Whites should consume less, the more the world will burn in flames.
We are better off focusing on the top 10 countries and just forget about the rest. But we don't we do symbolic things that do not matter. Why?
Top CO₂ Emitters by Total Volume
• China: ~13.12 billion tons (9.13 tons per capita)
• United States: ~4.63 billion tons (13.59 tons per capita)
• India: ~3.15 billion tons (2.19 tons per capita)
• Russia: ~2.01 billion tons (14.06 tons per capita)
• Japan: ~972 million tons (7.79 tons per capita)
• Iran: ~829 million tons
• Indonesia: ~812 million tons
• Saudi Arabia: ~653 million tons
• South Korea: ~588 million tons
• Germany: ~580 million tons
No, all CO2 emission must stop so everybody is gotta put on work anyway.
Also, if what you had in mind with "focusing on" is some sort of military solution, you are listing the wrong thing; what you need is a list of top fossil fuel exporters which looks different from the "top emitters" list.
without hyperbole, literally tens of millions of people are working on decarbonizing these countries. the solar energy industry in just China alone is 4.2 million people
If you read what they are actually and put 2 and 2 together no they are not reducing co2 generation.
China continues to expand coal and fossil-fuel capacity—adding roughly 20 GW of coal power in early 2026 and seeing fossil emissions tick up 2% in Q1 2026—even as it leads the world in building massive amounts of solar, wind, and electric-vehicle infrastructure.
The stated goal is.
2030 Goals: China aims to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030, bring non-fossil fuels to 25% of total energy consumption, and peak coal and oil usage.
But that 25% is of a growing energy pool which means the co2 production will keep increasing and increasing as the total power generation grows.
If they double the power production but still keep 25% of it in carbon based they have doubled the co2 production.
It’s hard to find any really good site for these numbers because it is highly politicized. Looking at this, assuming it’s correct, paints a different picture:
“Over the past decade, the fastest growth has come from rapidly industrializing economies.”
It seems that countries have to evolve through this stage before things get better.
“Meanwhile, several advanced economies have moved in the opposite direction. Countries like the UK, Germany, and Japan have significantly reduced their carbon output, largely by phasing out coal and expanding renewable energy.”
Actually what has happened is that we exported our "cleanish" industry to areas that don't care so pollution shot up and co2 as well. The outsourcing fuelled a lot of the co2 production over the last couple of decades. We now have a dirtier and more polluting industrial base world wide than what we had 30 years ago.
I just read 'The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry', a selection of his essays and speeches. I'm quoting a relevant chunk of his 2011 speech 'The Future of Agriculture':
What must we do? First, we must not work or think on a heroic scale. In our age of global industrialism, heroes too lightly risk the lives of people, places, and things they do not see. We must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix. There is no justification, ever, for permanent ecological damage. If this imposes the verdict of guilt upon us all, so be it. Second, we must abandon the homeopathic delusion that the damages done by industrialization can be corrected by more industrialization. Third, we must quit solving our problems by ‘moving on.’ We must try to stay put, and to learn where we are geographically, historically, and ecologically. Fourth, we must learn, if we can, the sources and costs of our own economic lives. Fifth, we must give up the notion that we are too good to do our own work and clean up our own messes. It is not acceptable for this work to be done for us by wage slavery or by enslaving nature. Sixth, by way of correction, we must make local, locally adapted economies, based on local nature, local sunlight, local intelligence, and local work. Seventh, we must understand that these measures are radical. They go to the root of our problem. They cannot be performed for us by any expert, political leader, or corporation. This is an agenda that may be undertaken by ordinary citizens at any time, on their own initiative. In fact, it describes an effort already undertaken all over the world by many people. It defines also the expectation that citizens who by their gifts are exceptional will not shirk the most humble services.
> At a time when basically all VC funding, and in many ways the entire productive capacity of the economy, is shifting to AI, it would have been smarter in some respects to just pivot to AI. I sat out the crypto bubble too, in which some of my peers made a lot of money by working on projects that were either useless, or straightforward scams.
This is the problem with the "individual action" angle to fix structural problems. While it is commendable that you stood your ground and committed to your priors, structural problems are not fixed by good individual actions.
Capital demands that line goes up. Corporations are optimized to increase profits, all else be damned. Governments are beholden to GDP and Inflation goals, not to degrees Celsius.
A good example is meat consumption. Obviously it would be better for the environment if everyone went vegetarian, but doing so on an individual basis is foolish when governments give subsidies for raising cattle.
In other words, I would vote for banning meat consumption, but until it is tackled structurally, I am eating another ribeye.
> But you, individually,
Here lies the flaw of your argument. You, individually, can't do shit. You can work as much as you want in green tech while another GPU is fried while someone vibe-code their next slop copy of some open source software.
Because, as yourself said, money can't help itself. Self-destruction is inherent to the system. It's on the best interest of every individual to kill the world and keep raping its corpse while it makes another buck.
> i personally eat a mostly plant based diet and only eat sustainably wild caught fish a few times a week.
That's commendable, but also does not fix the structural incentives for raising cattle to sell meat.
It improves your individual health, which is good. Just don't fool yourself into thinking you're fixing thr former.
> the only solution is to make hella money (billions+) so we can control incentives.
How naive.
When you get there you will be beholden to the same incentives of any billionaire. You, too, will be raping the world at that point.
The system is not bad because billionaires are inherently bad people. A well-intentioned billionaire will be incentivized to be as destructive as their peers by the structure in place.
Maybe your optimism is what we need, but I don't see the logic of it.
You've seen how the "money can't help itself". Individual choices matter only to a certain extent, and I haven't seen any evidence that "enough individuals making the right choices" is sufficient to effect any measurable positive change.
The logical conclusion of the evidence I've seen so far is to change the system. Capitalism sucks when your goal is not to make as much money as possible. But changing the system seems too hard (and too much like a commie/revolutionary/extremist), so instead people just try to try harder. It sounds almost like a religion (cult) -- if you are not favored by $deity, you don't have enough faith, so try to believe harder and your wishes will be granted.
It's not to say I don't respect your decisions and commitments. Just that there's 8+ billion people in the world and individuals are just one out of 8+ billion, and "try harder" doesn't seem to work so well given these numbers and facts.
At least if one is attempting to change the economic system, it would be tackling one actual thing that's preventing your desired change from happening.
Most people I worked with in tech cared about things like climate change, but they were making good money and the problem felt so far removed and difficult. What could they do to make a difference? It's always easier to focus on the next sprint, the next title, etc.
I mostly blame greedy billionaires, citizens united, and cowardly politicians, but I have a hard time respecting people making six figures who aren't doing something to improve our broken country, even if it's volunteering at homeless services.
This is precisely why I'm what I guess one could describe as "Eco-Socialist".
The problem is the incentive structures inherent to Capitalism. Until we fix that, we are only putting on small band aids and alleviating our conscience at best.
Money/finance is the problem here, we've had the technology to make surplus exergy damn near free (in the ExROEI sense) since the 1960s but financial systems we had in place combined with political reticence and NIMBYISM/Nuclear fears have made the transition to the only energy source than can keep our modern civilization alive unattractive on the fiat ledger, and our civilizational malaise will continue to grow as our useful surplus exergy shrinks and shrinks with the available fossil fuels getting harder and harder (exergetically) to extract. Hydrocarbons were our consumable rope ladder to nuclear fission breeding cycles but we are almost out of remaining rungs to to make the climb IMO. Ban fiat currency, ban debt spending, ban the wallstreet casino and start the most ambitious project in human history to build out massive industrial parks around advanced cycle fission breeder reactors where we perform electrolysis, haber-bosch, direct carbon capture (atmospheric or from industrial exhaust) and manufacture synthetic hydrocarbons, while we directly electrify every single part of our civilization that is sensible to power that way (like homes, offices, stores and consumer transportation) with wind and solar.
So, the devil comes to Davos and says: "You can enjoy cheap energy, but some poor people in the global south will suffer and die" And after a long silence the US president says: "I feel like there is a catch there, but I just can't figure out what it is"
Except it's not cheaper. 70% of the world import fossil fuels. Many changes are happening because it is cheaper to not do that and use renewables instead. US Presidents are getting involved to stop cheaper energy getting built.
Offshore wind, which is more expensive than onshore wind, is cheaper than new coal in China. New solar and onshore wind competes with fuel costs for existing coal plants.
In a long run - maybe but in a short run high oil/gas/diesel prices push CPI up, as a reaction central banks are rising rates, bonds yields are rising even faster in anticipation of future rate hikes - this makes credit expensive and most green energy project depend on credit so investments into green energy going down too AFAIK. At least clean energy stock indexes are falling for the last few months because of high credit interest rates. So paradoxically Iran war is slowing energy transition.
Like Putin in Ukraine. But decoupling from Russian gas is still slow going and controversial in Europe, and the "moderate" right is more and more inclined to collaborate with Putin’s little fringe-right helper parties, likely partly because they’re massively bleeding votes and partly out of real sympathies for fringe policies that just used to be unmentionable in polite company.
It's controversial because it's not just about changing gas provider, but paying way more for gas as well.
Americans keep strong arming us into buying their LNG, but we also pay 5 times as much for it as we paid for Russian gas.
And Norway, Algeria, etc and all the other providers know very well that our biggest provider has been cut off, so they can all ask much more.
So it's very easy and convenient to say "why don't you do differently Europeans", but it has a terrible effect on our manufacturing and export bound economies.
The point is, obviously, that we should be decoupling from all gas. The past four years have made it very clear how risky it is to depend on foreign fossil fuels, economically and geopolitically.
I think the difference is that the renewable infrastructure requires new capital investment, whereas the fossil fuel infrastructure is already in place and amortized, even for importing countries (distribution networks, electricity generation plants, etc.) And so you've got to get someone to pay for the up-front costs which on the short term are greater than the long term costs.
I guess the fossil fuel infrastructure is actually more expensive? (Drilling, refining, shipping of the fuel: all not needed for wind and solar.) But this infrastructure has already been built and paid for, and now someone with a lot of money wants a return on their investment over the next 25 years. Which is not going to happen in a world where we prevent the worst climate change.
(Also, investment to decarbonize things like cement are not going to happen if fossils stay cheap.)
If global climate change is a problem, you can't just have some countries deindustrializing and reducing CO2 while others go full bore on scale manufacturing with any form of cheap energy including coal being used.
Plus ironically all of the batteries and solar panels for the West's climate mission will be made in China who didn't deindustrialize, has far lower energy prices, and less aggressive local rules around things like air pollution that let them be manufactured at all.
Meanwhile they are also rapidly going green by adopting this tech domestically since it's highly price competitive due to their manufacturing investments. They also invested heavily in Nuclear (which the government there openly welcomed).
> you can't just have some countries deindustrializing and reducing CO2 while others go full bore on scale manufacturing with any form of cheap energy including coal being used.
Well... that's what we did in the Industrial Revolution too. Only the countries were reversed.
Yes you can. China has barely emitted half the lifetimes emissions of the US because it didn't go through decades of inefficent and polluting technologies. The ozone hole wasn't caused by China.
Same thing applies to those up and coming countries: they immediately have more efficient technologies.
Be a tech maximalist- use tech and will power to pull ahead with green energy. Go hard on batteries and energy storage. I do not even care that I may sound delusional - the contrary doomer viewpoint is deluded in a far worse manner. The things we need either are or are not within our abilities- you will never know unless you try. Resigning with *it’s too hard* ensures we will know that we cannot.
I don't see why not. It's obviously not as good as getting all countries working together, but it's certainly not practical to wait until all countries are united before starting.
It lists 24 socio-ecological KPI across the planet since industrialisation beginning - as you can see:
There is not a single KPI where the curve shows even the slightest sign of recovery - and you can expect other graphs of adjacent KPI to show similar development.
In one sentence: There is no chance that humanity will ever come back to any pre-industry levels within the next 500 years. And by overusing our environment, our civilisation wont last 500 years. (sure, some hotspots will survive, but they wont have ASML Twin:Exe machines or cheap flight travel anymore etc.)
True!
Maybe its just a slowdown or the first clear signs of incoming collapse of these ressources?
Though, domestic land is already accelerating again over the last year, so it will be on par again with its previous high.
And this ensemble is only a collection of some KPI, there are additional ones I guess which will show similar upwards-trend.
The vast majority of countries in the world are aging. "Transistors per microprocessor" and "Phone subscriptions" are weird ones. As if the goal was to have sharp graphs...
Welcome to capitalism! Task #1: Figure out a couple of numbers. Task #2: Figure out if it's good when these numbers go up or bad. Task #3: Optimize everything against these numbers, never consider anything else but these numbers, they are your life now.
If AI works well, we'll reach the singularity and nobody in this world knows what the hell will happen.
We might merge consciousness and live in an ethereal medium, we might insert ourselves in a simulation and keep our physical bodies neatly healthy organized and packed where 20 Bln is not a problem at all, we might collectively (or AI do it for us) decide to reduce human pop to 1 Bln or less on Earth and terraform other planets.
Call me crazy, but if you described our world to someone some hundreds years ago, theyd think the same. Crazyness is a requirement for a correct prediction of the future. There are ALWAYS status quo changes based on revolutionary magic-like technologies that results in significant changes.
If you want to have at least a mild change of doing some sort of future prediction you can check predictions about our current time from people in the past and you'll see the mistakes they make, most people nowadays keep making. Using current technology and ways of thinking, as if they would stay the same just used in different ways, not thinking enough out of the box and allowing themselves to be more imaginative. Fix that, and you'll make wild predictions but also some of them which will be much closer to the truth than any status quo linear evolving incremental improving technology based prediction.
For instance there are more forests in much of Europe than we did before the industrial revolution, let alone the 1800s. e.g. more of France is covered in trees now than it was as far back as 1300. Of course that's a very narrow and specific "KPI", mostly just shows that humans already had a massive impact on the environment and ecosystems long before the industrial revolution.
I agree on the "we're on the wrong path" though I don't share your conclusion's gravity, but some of these indicators feel very weird to be included imho. Total FDI and transistor per processor makes very little point on the matter.
We are not trying to literally revert the planet to how it was 100 years ago, we are "just" trying to stop these trends as soon as possible so they don't continue for another 100 years. There are going to be consequences regardless, but they can always get worse.
Some of the planet is already much nicer than it was 100 years ago. At least in the European countries that industrialized the first or had high population density even before that.
Most growth is exponential (for a while, as a logistics curve (aka S-curve) does start exponentially), how about showing log(y(x)) instead of y(x).
But not always: if zero is not on the bar chart, e.g. log(y(x)) with [x] = Kelvin, such a plot will of course not work. So keep temperature as temperature increment over pre-industrial times or other baseline.
Also, does coastal nitrogen have three data points, or why the edge in the middle? Scatter charts plus trend are more the real thing than a curve if this is two linear relationships, with a second slope after a certain time, and keep y(x) plotting here, of course.
No, you use logarithms when you expect the data to follow an exponential curve, but there's no reason to believe that e.g. shrimp aquaculture should follow an exponential trend. Using a logarithm there would be rather misleading.
I see no problem with the graphic. It is going to be like this until we achieve energy abundance which we could have long ago if the idiotic climate activists didn't block nuclear everywhere.
You can keep the blue curves going up while bring down the green curves with sheer power of energy (and new technologies).
The solution to climate problems is not regressing to hunter gatherer age as the climate activists have wet dreams about. The solution is to produce more energy, improve technology, and clean up the pollution.
Humanity will do better. We'll go preindustrial levels within next 100 years. Ironically, china will probably lead the way.
Humanity will be around for a few more millennia at least.
How many humans, living what lifestyle, what eco-footprint, Star Trek style tech or back to cavemen after a nuclear winter, those are some of the questions.
Ignoring the overly pessimistic and self-defeating overall tone:
> There is no chance that humanity will ever come back to any pre-industry levels within the next 500 years
How could you possibly predict this? We have moments of time in history which are basically "before/after", and no one saw those points coming until they were in effect. Electricity, atoms, nuclear energy, walking on the moon, transistors, internet, LLMs and more are examples of these things, that were short of impossible, and had lots of people claiming "We'll never do that in a hundred years!", up until we already accomplished those things.
What I'd like to know, is what the point is? Why claim "our civilisation wont last 500 years" and similar, what do you wish to achieve with this? What conversation do you wish your comment to spawn, that people tell you you are wrong? Or right?
I would not say people have given up. The problem is that this search for saving the planet and humanity all together is hard to understand for the common folk, much in the same way other banners that have been imposed on people in the past 2 decades.
Common people want to go to work and know that they have a working transport system, that they can walk in between a few streets and feel safe, that they can have enough money for a mortgage and to feed themselves and their families.
None of these things are exactly addressed by putting solar panels, and wind farms all around, especially when the cost of fuel keep rising. When the security of the grid on a once thought-of super-power like UK is constantly put in question.
The common people doesnt care much about these topics and explanations because they don’t have time for it, because they do still need to get on with life. It’s generally youth and retirees the ones gluing themselves to the pavement, have you noticed? whats in common in these two groups is they can both still afford to be idealists.
Then you turn on the TV and see how much damage is being done to the environment in other regions, and so, why do I need to suck it up in my jumper all winter then? Why am I the one using paper straws that break before I finish my drink?
This whole thing was always a tough sale, but it’s gotten even harder in the current political climate.
I'm not entirely sure what definition of "common folk" we're using here but it's my experience that most people can understand climate change but that it's difficult to do anything while there are billions of dollars moving in favour of fossil fuels, unregulated shipping, the meat industry etc. Some of these comments are really surprising. There's a lot of criticism here for "environmentalists" and paper straws, but very little criticism for the groups that actively maintain the status quo.
> None of these things are exactly addressed by putting solar panels, and wind farms all around, especially when the cost of fuel keep rising.
Don't want to nitpick but this touches on a topic I think worth discussing. I feel that for many people, investments in green energy are a needless sacrifice we do for the sake of the environment (and a naive sacrifice at that since other countries can just keep on emitting their greenhouse gases anyway). It follows, since we invest in green this must have its costs elsewhere like in higher gas prices and obviously then people ask -- why should we keep doing this when we are hit with economic downturn?
But really green energy is all about the unaccounted for future costs. We can burn fossil fuels now but we are going to be in a whole lot of trouble when they become more expensive and dealing with their side effects (climate change) will become expensive as well. Green energy is a solution - you don't need to care about high fuel prices and what happens in Middle East if you can get all energy from the sun and wind.
Well the solution is just that green energy is already cost competitive with fossil fuels, so we just need to let the market do its thing and have people buy the cheap thing, which is increasingly green energy.
The argument is, why would the common folk care about the future? Why should they be the ones making the sacrifices if hardly ever they any benefit? None of this concerns the type of person that can easily just move on to green technology, of course not, I am not talking about your average HN user, I am talking about the people that has become ever more invisible, poor and disenfranchised.
For these people, what does the future has to offer anyway? Why do think people are not having babies anymore?
If you live day by day, and that is all you can afford, what kind of future you think people going to try and cultivate?
It’s also about energy security - why expose your energy markets to insane fluctuations in international fossil-fuel markets if you don’t have to? Surely the last few years have shown that energy independence is a critical social and defence policy now?
For many/most countries, investing in renewables is the best, cheapest and fastest way to move in that direction.
Your point about plastic straws reminded me of this interesting article Just Bury Your Trash [0]. There’s an argument to be made that recycling many types materials (except metal) is not worth it. Eg since recycled plastic is more expensive than virgin plastic, it might be better if the money we collectively spend on it could be redirected to something that’s more beneficial to the environment.
And while others have pointed out that plastic straw bans are not about climate change, I suspect many people think they are, lumping together “climate change”, “the environment”, and “pollution” into a monolithic thing. “I’m doing my part” with a plastic straw then as they eat beef, drive an SUV, and fly to vacation (disclaimer I do some of those things).
I was thinking about this a while back whilst I watched someone struggle with their shopping across the supermarket carpark without a plastic bag only to get in a Range Rover. I guess it's a form of moral self licensing[1].
I think the plastic straw ban was such a self-own that I find it hard to believe it wasn't astroturfed to undermine climate change (it wasn't). While I don't give a shit about straws myself (since I'm not an infant[0]) it was just such empty gesture politics that became a key culture war issue.
As you say it's not really about climate change as such, the problem is climate change becomes an omni-cause grouping pollution, waste management, biodiversity loss, etc. We end up being tarred with the same brush. A reasonable person should feel free to disavow the straw ban since it doesn't achieve its aims and is a distraction from real problems.
The campaign was started by a 9 year old[1] using an estimate that was roughly 2-3 times too high and fed by an unsourced claim[2] around the amount of plastic straws on beaches. As you say it becomes a cultural signifier of effort while achieving basically nothing. And this takes away so much energy around the broader issue of single-use plastics and ocean plastic pollution. Both of these are better served by advocating for domestic landfills rather than the current practice of dumping the plastic waste on 3rd countries.
[0]: yes some disabled people need to use straws as adults
Plastic recycling was about one thing: getting people to use more plastic.
Less than like 7% of plastics get recycled and basically all of that comes from industrial sources, not our homes.
The best thing you can do with plastic is use less of it and throw it in the trash. This tells you it is garbage and not going off to some magical facility to get recycled.
Also, keeping plastic in the environment by using it in building materials/fake grasses is a microplastics nightmare. We need to be removing plastic from the environment, not putting more out there.
Plastic is fine for recycling as long as the process is simple and cheap. Pressing plastic into panels using a sheet press, for use in construction, signage, or art/crafting, is actually fairly efficient versus trying to recreate “virgin” plastic through melting and mixing. It can also be done on a smaller scale. See https://www.onearmy.earth/news/sheetpress
But I agree that typical plastic recycling is inefficient.
Is China going woke and then broke on recycling? Or like renewables and EVs did they put engineers in charge and not Libertarians who irrationally hate all government programs?
It's not even that. If you take a look at videos of India etc you will see rivers full of plastic, plastic rubbish being burned, etc. It's just normal way of life for them.
But we are told that plastic straws are the issue, and switching to paper straws (that you need to use twice as many of when they inevitably dissolve) will solve the problems. Meanwhile, the H&M polyester dress that you wear 3 times before throwing it away takes as much energy as 2000x paper straws to manufacturer.
Chinas expansion of Coal power plants(1), India's behaviour with dirty rivers and pollution, Middle East burning rubber(2) so it is visible from space, etc, are all examples of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory on a global scale.
"the methane emissions alone from Turkmenistan’s two main fossil fuel fields caused more global heating in 2022 than the entire carbon emissions of the UK"
"The biggest event was a leak of 427 tonnes an hour in August, near Turkmenistan’s Caspian coast and a major pipeline. That single leak was equivalent to the rate of emissions from 67m cars, or the hourly national emissions of France."
Seems like a tough argument to make stick. The Chinese & Indians are clearly benefiting more from the economic growth than they are suffering from the downsides of pollution. They would not swap their current environmental problems for clean poverty.
It isn't a broken windows problem as much as drawing 2 billion people out of poverty is more urgent than most other concerns.
Exactly this. Living standards are closely correlated to energy use and no one is going to volunteer to live in poverty.
The environmental movement does itself no favours either by pursuing high social cost but low impact interventions like paper straws and ignoring (or outright vilifying) nuclear as a viable path forward.
Finally, there's a huge disconnect between the (supposed) low cost of renewables and what people experience on the ground. Countries like Germany are a good example of this. The constant refrain is that solar and wind are super cheap and are running more and more of the country, but those savings (if real) don't make it to the average rate payer. Something is clearly wrong here. Either the cost claims are incomplete and don't factor in something important or the auction mechanism used to set prices must be discarded. But the disparity between claiming massive cost benefits while having people pay more sours the public on the technology and destroys credibility.
> The environmental movement does itself no favours either by pursuing high social cost but low impact interventions like paper straws
How much energy has the environmental movement put into the paper straw topic compared to the attention it is continuously getting from those trying to ridicule the environmental movement?
None of my environment activist friends ever talks about plastic/paper straws. They tend to drink straight out of the glass/cup/bottle/can if anything. The only people bringing this up are those continuously pushing against change and those not realizing that it is just a big distraction topic to get people worked up.
It is quite exemplary how often the topic has been mentioned independently in just the discussions of this article.
Well, color me surprised, but you’re right: in contrast to china, Malaysia, and other SE Asia states, India’s plastic trash is mostly (97%) self-made, with the largest contributor being single use packaging for consumers.
What is this nonsense about straws? The reason plastic straws are banned is because they were one of the top 10 things littering European beaches. Indian plastic straws have fuck all to do with littering _our_ beaches.
And why then did plastic straws disapperaed in the US before slowly coming back? The story (in the US) I heard when I asked was usually "because we can and because it is good for the world".
That was a big self-own from a group that thought they have a carte blanche and can just ignore those pesky normies instead of explaining why the changes are good for them, too. And being smarter in picking battles. And minimizing inconveniences from unavoidable sharp edges.
> But we are told that plastic straws are the issue, and switching to paper straws (that you need to use twice as many of when they inevitably dissolve) will solve the problems.
Could we please stop with this strawman (sorry pun) topic of paper straws? Nobody claims that they solve the problems and they have just become this distracting meme that ridicules all efforts at environmental protection. Yes plastic straws are bad, no they are not among the top-10 problems humanity needs to address and yes the topic has been blown out of proportion just to make fun of things. If you care, do you not realize that every time you bring this up you are doing us all a disservice?
So, please, let's drop it and focus on actual issues of regulatory approaches to climate change instead.
Were paper straws ever about climate change? This feels like a red herring. Pollution has many aspects to it, and you can work on several problems simultaneously.
Plastic straws are simply emblematic of the environmental movement as a whole. "Political capital" is not infinite, folks will only tolerate so much disruption to their lives. Going after plastic straws instead of something more consequential was a mistake.
Even in America and among Republicans there's support for using less plastic straws and unless there's some extremely unexpected overlaps in opinion it basically means the only people who think it's a bad move also don't care about climate change and environmentalism seperate from the straw issue.
On the contrary in fact, I think a lot of people have decided to do something that will have a tremendously positive impact on the climate in the future: they've chosen not to have children. There will be downsides to that decision, but as far as climate goes it's by far the most impactful thing anyone can do.
It's hard to find a coherent perspective where that makes sense. Most parents have had kids when future conditions looked far worse than they do now. The situation actually looks rosy in 50 years given the promising moves the Chinese are making in nuclear and renewable technology.
It is more likely that children are inconvenient to the lifestyles people want to lead. That is more consistent with how bad people are at long-term planning.
This is the kind of take that causes more traditional (including right wing, but also people from non western countries) look at climate activists as crazy fanatics. You are technically right, but I think advocating for childlessness causes people to disregard the whole movement as insane.
I'm not really advocating for childlessness. I'm accepting of people who choose that life, but I don't have any skin in the game regarding whether or not anyone besides myself have kids. It's their choice.
The only judgement I make is people who have children and have no regard for the environment. I think those people are risking their children's long term welfare. That's a dick move. If you have kids you have a moral obligation to try to make sure the planet they live on in adulthood isn't fucked.
They could off themselves as well. That would help too. 4 billions of years of evolution end with me! What an absurd take. I'd understand one child, fewer than desired, etc.. but no children as a conscious effort to help the climate is something I don't buy that ever happened. Other reasons are at play for that. Nothing to do with the climate.
but no children as a conscious effort to help the climate is something I don't buy that ever happened
That's not what I said. People are choosing not to have children for lots of reasons. One of the benefits is that they end up having much less impact on the climate; that's not saying it's the reason they're doing it.
I don't think there's any expectation that humans will go extinct. We're here to stay. Suggesting this is about the extinction of the human race is a strawman.
The question is each of us needs to answer around having kids is firstly about whether or not you want to raise them in the world we live in, and secondly about whether you want (or care) that your children live in a world where the climate is broken, and having to deal with the resource issues, heat, wars over liveable land, etc. Heck, I'm sure plenty of people on HN are under 30 - there's every chance that they'll be around to see these problems first hand.
People who do want to have children are arguably very fortunate that there are lots of people who don't. The children who are born with have to deal with less contention for resources. That said though, they're still in for a pretty bad time by all accounts. Even if technology magically fixes everything, you still have to wonder if your kids will be in the part of society that can afford it.
But that is the root of the climate crisis. When it was just 150M Americans living a developed-world lifestyle, the climate was fine. As soon as you broaden that out to the 8B+ people living today, allowing all the folks in China/India/Africa to have the same lifestyle as the West, you have problems. In 1960 the average American emitted 16 metric tons of CO2; China emitted 0.5 metric tons and India 0.2. In 2020 US emissions actually decreased to 13.8, but China is at 9.2. Per capita emissions can decrease modestly but if you increase the number of capita by 50x, total CO2 emissions will increase accordingly.
Likewise, the climate crisis is far more likely to be solved by WW3 reducing the population down to ~1B than by individual per capita reductions.
Until recently I was strictly against having kids because of the world climate, both weather and political. But then my partner wanted them and I couldn't stand the notion of losing her, so I was able to compromise on my ideals.
CaaS? Sounds like a business plan. I don't propose anything, except the notion was a bit absurd. Takes mostly two to make a child, so even having (only) one is still a cull that goes well into that narrative. Make one, teach it to take care of nature, to prompt less and thus consume less energy, and to teach the same to others.
The only way to force common people to do something is to create scarcity.
If resources are scarce, people automatically start rationing. I lived in third world developing county for 30 years. There were many times when I had running water available for 1 hour a day and electricity available for 12 hours a day. So I did what I had to do and saved the climate.
In the West obviously you can't cut off water and electricity. So they impose taxes and such to create artificial scarcity. Like $1.5 gas tax is California forces people to go electric or take public transportation (not).
The problem is some "people" with more money, resources and influence game the system and do multiplicatively more damage. These are called corporations.
an important factor, I believe, is that a lot of "common people" are childless. about half of Western millennials are, and that was the last generation that didn't grow up in the clown world we live in now. zoomers and forth will be even more so.
I don't know why should a childless person give a damn about the future beyond their own lifespan. I think most of them don't, in their heart of hearts, and that's the only logical stance.
what percentage of their income does "almost every childless person" willingly sacrifice for some greater good?
how much do they care about the hardships of currently existing strangers, beyond sending thoughts and prayers on reddit?
just consider how preciously few Westerners had gone to die in Ukraine over the past 5 years, despite the deafening cacophony of virtue signaling on the Internet.
You're tying together some pretty far-flung strands of argument there.
Regarding children and selfishness: some of the most selfish people I know have kids. They're selfish in the sense that they only care about their family, even to the detriment of everyone else.
Because some people said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is bad, and that our political leaders should support Ukraine?
Might be time to turn off your devices and go touch some grass. It doesn't seem like you're in a good head space to be worrying about global politics right now.
but I'm talking about living without heating or cooling, subsisting on gruel, owning nothing und being happy, and all the other thing the young global leaders insist we must do to save the planet. and I don't think it's fair to ask that of people who have no reason to care what happens in 100 years.
Doubly frustrating when you consider that Americans would actually have needed to backslide on creature comforts for 1.5 to have ever been viable, at a time when people overwhelmingly want them.
This problem starts and ends with corporations and government regulations. It’s barely worth it to talk to people about it right now. Maybe in 10 years when things are a bit more on fire and people are more willing to listen.
>This problem starts and ends with corporations and government regulations.
That's what we have been relying on for the last forty years and we still have an issue.
Corporations respond to demand. If someone is willing to buy a barrel of oil to burn then you can be sure you will find someone else to pull it out of the ground for them.
No, for the last 40 years we’ve been trying paper straws, “reduce reuse recycle”, and keeping our thermostat low while corporations build such intense computing centers we can’t buy a damn personal PC anymore.
Of course companies respond to demand. That’s why we need governments with militaries to give them a second consideration to respond to.
Nope. Not even close. I will turn my thermostat up 3 degrees for every degree you lower yours. It still will make such an insignificant difference that I’m less than a rounding error.
This is on corporations. They use millions upon millions of gallons of water, they use entire cities-worth of electricity, and they break environmental regulations with wanton disregard.
This idea that personal responsibility is standing between us and a clean planet is also, by the way, a primary strategy of these criminals.
"Tofu has been crowned the prince of protein by a scientific scoring system that measured human health, sustainability and affordability.
...
To assess the environmental impact of each food, MacDonald compared the greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, land use and water use involved in producing 100g (3.5oz) of protein from each food.
Tofu was judged the best in this category, followed by chia seeds, quinoa, beans and sunflower seeds. Meanwhile, pork, beef and cheddar cheese came last."
If you don’t want to give up meat right away, at least consider stopping beef. One pound of beef is roughly equal to 8 pounds of pork, 10 pounds of chicken, and 20 pounds of tofu in CO₂ emissions.
There's a handful of reasons to keep even beef in the equation, albeit at way, way lower levels than we produce it now.
One is co-production of other materials -- wool is another desirable material.
Another is optimizing land use. Some land isn't suitable for row crop agriculture, but can sustain grazing. There's also land we're irrigating for row crop agriculture right now from aquifers we really shouldn't be; converting it back to grassland and grazing on it would let us recapture some of the lost calories.
Then there's un-optimizing the food chain. From a food-per-acre standpoint we should be primarily subsisting on soy and whichever of corn, potatoes or rice grows best in the local soy & climate. Even if we are going all in on minimizing land usage, however, we don't want to produce exactly as much food as we need, because crops fail and famines are bad. You can aim to overproduce a little year to year and maintain a surplus of storage to cover the bad years, but you can't just cover the average bad year. You need to cover the worst years possible happening several years in a row, you need to be covering once-in-millennia bad luck. So you need to overproduce enough that you don't expect some of it to ever be consumed by humans.
So you need something to do with the extra corn you produce, besides feed it to people, that you can rapidly cut back on in case if crop failures to return food back to the supply. One option is ethanol, and another is livestock -- feed your surplus grains to livestock, and then eat them instead. If you have crop failures, you cull the herds, which frees up their feed stocks for human consumption, as well as adding the extra meat calories to the supply. (And this even happens somewhat automatically with market forces -- farmers are always arbitraging grain prices against meat prices, and a spike in grain prices will lead them to sell off livestock as they become less profitable, which will in turn depress meat prices further.)
Be aware you're repeating some outdated takes on land use.
Invasive cattle grazing on "worthless" land is a trope that's not true. Especially in the US west, we have seen massive ecological destruction at the hooves of cattle. They are not bison. They do not graze the same. The plants they consume do not regrow the same. They introduce a ton of issues.
Jon Muir called cattle, and other livestock, "Hooved Locusts", because of how they destroy the land.
The latest research is that we should absolutely be removing cattle from these "worthless" lands. We are still discovering how these lands work and we are finding so many benefits we had no idea existed.
We gimped nature and now we call that gimped version "how it's supposed to be". We use culture and heritage, "the western way of life", to perpetuate the systemic destruction.
But this trope of "white people decide the land is worthless" has a long history of being used to exploit the land/people for short term gain. Cattle grazing is a form of land theft. Destroying the land/ecosystem so people can't use it they way they have was, and still is, a form of land theft.
Also, the US west is getting so dry that cattle can't find enough grass so we do what? We pull water to grow grass in the desert so we can feed those cattle that are on "worthless land". Thereby making the issue worse. But are cattle ranchers and alfalfa farmers gonna give up their water? Ha! That's an affront to the Cowboy Way Of Life! We need cheap beef and stetson hats cuz this is Murica!
The emissions for lamb/pork/beef are terrible, beef looks an order of magnitude worse than the rest. The top 10 or so are fairly similar in comparison. Chicken isn't bad comparatively, but tofu still looks a decent bit better.
It's a fun metric the author carefully crafted to justify his vegan/animal rights ideology. Personally, I value food that can provide the necessary micronutrients and macronutrients (including fat, which apparently the author thinks is inherently bad), so I'll continue eating meat and cheese.
There's no need to 'carefully craft a fun metric', if you're honest to yourself you'll notice that plant-based nutrition is the only sustainable way to feed billions of humans on this planet. But I'm curious, which micro- & macronutrients do you think are only available from meat and cheese?
> if you're honest to yourself you'll notice that plant-based nutrition is the only sustainable way to feed billions of humans on this planet
If you're honest to yourself, you'll notice that plant-based nutrition is not a sustainable way to feed billions of humans on this planet, because those billions of people would rather destroy the world than have some vegans enforce their morality on them while enjoying a lifestyle that consumes orders of magnitude more energy than some third world subsistence farmer's chickens.
I don't travel by plane, live in a urban center without a car, am vegan and buy everything used. Not all vegans are performative. But that's not the point.
Growing soy crop to feed the animals that are then fed to humans is simply unoptimized, you can just grow soy crop for humans to eat and get rid of magnitudes of pollution. That is a fact.
Vitamin B12 deficiency in vegans is a pretty obvious one.
But this is ignoring my point: if you go to the billions of people in the developing world and tell them they're going to have to switch their diets to soylent green because we, the first world, emitted too much CO2, they will rightfully tell you to fuck off.
> If you're honest to yourself, you'll notice that plant-based nutrition is not a sustainable way to feed billions of humans on this planet, because those billions of people would rather destroy the world than have some vegans enforce their morality on them
I’m not even vegan but why drag any morality into it? Plant-based food is less co2 intensive to produce. It’s not a controversial statement. Planet is heating up, also a fact. I get it that it feels bad but lashing out at vegans is not productive. Meat eaters (like me) should have the decency to at least shut up. Own your choices.
I used to be an idealist, and looking back at them now I realize it was a waste of time and energy.
I once had to work on a project where my employer signed a contract with a client to have *no bugs* in the delivered software. The massive burnout that resulted in trying to accomplish that ideal taught me to prioritize practicality over idealism.
Meat isn't a health food. Most Americans eat an unhealthy amount of meat. Especially red meat. You could probably eat half as much meat and not be in any danger of not getting enough macro nutrients.
The following come from beef, chicken, fish, eggs, and you don’t get from plants: Vitamin B12, EPA and DHA omega-3, Vitamin D3, Creatine, Taurine, Carnosine, retinol.
Plant provide, but less efficiently: iron, zinc, choline, calcium (some tofu provides, but depends on coagulant used), iodine.
On the flip side, plants provide fiber and numerous phytochemicals that meat, fish, and eggs lack.
Irrelevant amounts come from diet, adequate amounts come from sun exposure. Everyone should be supplementing this.
>Taurine, creatine, Carnosine
Irrelevant, synthesized by the human body.
>Retinol
Best consumed from carrots, sweet potatoes, etc. Only relevant animal source is organ meat (liver), which most people aren't consuming.
>B12
Even meat lovers get deficient on this, dietary intakes are usually inadequate. My mother and sister are rabid meat eaters and supplement it, everyone who has the means to should.
Omega-3 comes from seaweed and kelp, that's where the fish got it in the first place. You can get vegan Vitamin D3 capsules where the source is lichen. B12 is available in nutritional yeast (nooch) in very high amounts, it's also in many energy drinks. None of this is a serious issue.
You can just pop a pill once a day and not care about those.
Also your sister in law hasn't been well informed - it's a known fact that vegetarian diets have less iron in them, and women especially should take an iron supplement because of menstruation combined with the diet. But it's just one pill.
I don't know as I'm not a native speaker, probably not, but I ate meat for 22 years and that included good fine dishes as well. Yet I have been able to find good vegetarian recipes that bring me as much joy as the meat did, but in different ways of course.
I'm glad it works for you. I've rarely tasted a vegetarian dish I really liked except maybe chili made with granulated soy protein rather than minced meat.
My girlfriend was vegetarian for many years, and she put the effort to make tasty dishes (tofu, specifically, always had some marinade). Once she started eating meat again though (and we're talking only white meat like chicken, rabbit, duck, not pork/beef), she almost never eats a vegetarian dish.
There’s plenty of delicious vegetarian dishes. I’m not a fan of the ones that try to be meat dishes replaced with vegetables or anything processed to pretend to be meat.
Vegetables are delicious on their own. There’s thousands of years of cultures around the world making vegetables taste wonderful.
He, I never really got a satisfactory explanation as to why she started (I think it some objections to the meat industry), and or to why she changed her mind. It's certainly more convenient, since vegetarian options in traditional restaurants are basically nonexistent. But the trigger was a desire to sample the local cuisine when travelling. Started with fish, then birds, then, in Valencia, where it's traditional in paella, rabbit.
Ah, I definitely understand her choice. Imo the biggest downside to being a plant eater is that I lose the joy of testing most local cuisines, and it's a hassle to get good protein in smaller towns. Always have protein powder with me when traveling so that I can guarantee protein intake even if I just eat fries all day. It's the worst aspect now that I think of it.
I can only hope that local cuisines develop plant-friendly choices alongside them so that this isn't an issue in the future.
Supermarket tofu is around 3 kg of CO₂e per kg. If you fatten pigs in your backyard and butcher them on site you can get pork down to around 4 or 5. I do realize McDonald's isn't doing it that way though.
>It's the whole reason that tofu isn't more popular
I wouldn't be so sure to claim that it is more popular. Tofu is big in asian countries.
Pork is more popular not because it's somehow superior. It's popular in the west because that was historically available so that's what people there know how to "grow" and cook.
Bringing jobs and purpose closer to home as opposed to outsourcing labour abroad and donating a cut to international middlemen.
Also brings people 'closer' to the animals and makes it more likely that meat regains its ritualistic role in society, as opposed to being a consumer product. This should reduce consumption, boost appreciation, bring communities that little bit closer, etc.
My point was that pork can compete with tofu under the right conditions.
Heck, unless you're riding your bike to buy groceries, you will spend more than the extra 1-2 extra kg in gas getting to the supermarket (3-4 miles per kg CO₂e)
I'm surprised that chicken breast is that low in (water) pollution, beating even lentils. Seems like the big takeaway here is really how awful beef is in comparison to basically anything else lol
I know people that do like 4 transatlantic trips per year and eat meat for every single dish.
Convincing them to reduce their impact would have waaaay more effect than lecturing someone that already travels by bike/train and eats vegetarian diet.
The world population grows by 200,000 extra people, every day. Keep in mind any adaptations have to compensate for this growth in population, continually, for at least the next couple of decades.
Energy consumption per person also has a lot of room to grow. For every barrel of oil eschewed by a relatively rich person in the developed world, there are probably 3 or 4 ready to pickup the slack and increase their quality of life in the rest of the much poorer world.
This is like assuming people in africa need telephone lines strewn to every home in order to have telecommunications. The developing world doesn't need oil. It needs solar panels and ever cheaper batteries.
The growth of energy use is mostly in countries that are industrializing/developing. Places like India/Indonesia/Vietnam/... are where most energy will be added and they'll all add coal.
None of this requires fossil fuels and small rural villages in poor countries are never going to get electricity if they have to wait for large power plants and long distance transmission lines to be built. It makes far more sense for a village to have a solar farm, a battery bank and a small local grid.
I assume current technology requires significant fossil fuels to be used to manufacture and transport the type of batteries that can replace the heavy lifting that fossil fuels do.
We have electric cars and whatnot, but they're still far more expensive than fossil fuel cars with less bang for the buck in terms of power and portability. I doubt we will see cost effective construction vehicles, ships, planes, etc. powered via batteries anytime soon, at least not on a timescale that makes a material difference.
The BYD Seagull costs $10,150. If there wasn't tarrifs on China EVs would be significantly cheaper. The cost of batteries has been decreasing exponentially just like the cost of solar. Electric tractor trailers are already on the road. Your pessimism about electric heavy machinery is misplaced.
From my perspective it's like you're looking at the market for telephones in 2004 and remarking that most phones are landlines and most portable phones are flip phones and therefore you don't see a future for smartphones.
Solar and wind are cheaper than any other form of electricity in history. (Often even when paired with a storage facility) The fact that it doesn't always shine or blow when needed is driving massive investment into storage technology. The world is changing rapidly. You're not paying attention.
> We could all try and do a bit with our daily choices:
Another thing to do would be to not vote more and more for extremists. "It's not working right now, it cannot be worse so I will vote for the most extreme person that says I am doing everything right and foreigners are the problem" is easy, but counter-productive and wrong.
I still don't know what to answer to someone who says "anyway the government is completely incompetent" while being incompetent themselves at the very first opportunity they have to contribute: voting.
Not saying that it is going well right now (it's not). But saying "because it's not going well means that it cannot be worse and therefore I can vote for whoever" is... just idiotic.
This goes for competence, and also for morals: it seems in many countries we now vote in politicians that are massively and overtly corrupt with the reasoning that it won't get worse because previous politicians were somewhat corrupt and tried to hide it).
Everyone's voting for the corruption that they think will help them. It is easy to say corruption is a problem, and everyone sees all the other sides corruption. However, they refused to look at other site is involved in corruption too.
Once in a while an extreme case will get in the news and someone will correct their own size but that is where generally you'll see people defending their own corruption.
Let's be honest. People aren't eating tofu because it's fundamentally not that nice. There's plenty of ways you can improve it, but it just doesn't taste good without effort like most meats do.
Realistically the only thing we'd be able to convince people to do is to eat less beef, but you're never going to be able to convince the population to switch over to tofu
I think it's just a matter of adapting, I was a meat eater for 22 years of my life and nowadays can't stand the taste of meat. Tofu tastes awesome when done well.
Buuuut people are different, and I could be an outlier. I just think there's more propaganda to it than people realize, especially currently with fitness influencers boosting meat consumption.
I think it's largely what you are used to. I make an effort to prepare tofu for my kids. I find it "ok" generally, but my kids? They _love_ tofu. It's their favourite food.
This is a very western centric view, tofu is entirely unrelated to meat, and billions of people love tofu. Nobody needs to switch, it's just its own thing. It's like saying beef is tastier than kidney beans. Ok? Theyre not related at all.
Have you tried eating meat or chicken without preparation? It's pretty disgusting. My mother used to leave chicken marinating in lemon overnight just so it would be edible. With tofu I can just throw some ginger and paprika on it, put it in the air fryer and it tastes awesome.
It's difficult for humans to comprehend the scale of what it would take to stop the planet from heating up. There are 100+ years of extraction of massive quantities of sequestered carbon from the Earth's crust and burning it now baked into the system, with an approximate 15-year lag on observed atmospheric and ocean temperature increases i.e. the temperatures we are currently seeing are those caused by emissions up to around 2011. Since then, carbon emissions have increased, not decreased, so we have a minimum of 15 more years of temperature rises to come.
As a though experiment, ask people if it would be possible for humans to prevent the tides coming in and out each day. Mostly you will be laughed at. Yet the same people usually think that preventing the Earth from heating up, which is a problem on a similar scale, can be achieved with a bit of recycling, eating less meat and cycling to work.
This single graph [1] is enough to demonstrate that 'solving' climate change is beyond the scale of human capabilities.
I don't follow you. You say that the heating up is caused by "100+ years of extraction of massive quantities of sequestered carbon from the Earth's crust and burning it now baked into the system" but at the same time you say humans, who did the extraction and burning for 100+ years, cannot stop doing it? I mean, reverting the temperature to pre-industrial level it's not going to happen soon in any case, but at least stopping increasing it constantly IT IS a human-achievable goal, by definition.
> Yet the same people usually think that preventing the Earth from heating up, which is a problem on a similar scale, can be achieved with a bit of recycling, eating less meat and cycling to work.
No this is propaganda that fossil fuel companies have successfully imposed on us, that it's the consumers' fault when a large part of the pollution comes from the industrial side. But consumers have leverage in regards to industries - if they stop buying meat, the polluting meat industry would decrease and help solve this problem.
Also what do you suggest? It seems that you are implying that because we can't stop it now, we don't need to focus on the problem and can let it grow even higher?
It’s really not, lots of people have been doing this work for a long time, if you want to understand what it’s going to take you can start here: https://drawdown.org/
The oceans warmed up by half a degree celsius in only 5 years. Everybody talks about air temperature, but the amount of energy that gets stored in the oceans is simply unimaginable. Until now, the oceans have been a great heat buffer, but I fear that this might come to an end.
This. I have, lying around unpublished, a few science fiction novels that I wrote where I assumed we actually did everything realistically needed to stop climate change. Like, not the deal "we make some solar panels but keep all the industries," but the real thing: "we take down the industries, we promote degrowth, we embrace and promote a proper demographic collapse, we shame meat eaters, we put youth into environmental enforcement militias, and we change global culture to embrace all of that."
It's a world that has nothing to do with this one. Of course deceiving ourselves with plastic straws is easier.
I agree in principal, but what is it with the plastic straws thing?
That was never about climate change that I am aware of. It was about pollution, same with plastic bags.
Plastic is a curse on the environment, especially the single use plastic that goes directly in the bin and into landfill or the oceans. Eventually it ends up in the food chain as microplatics.
Do we not want to reduce plastic pollution now? OK, maybe straws are fraction of the plastic pollution created, but surely every little bit helps?
People moan because it is a regular minor incovience to their life. If society can't get over something so trivial we are fucked.
People moan because it’s empty corporate misdirection that misplaces and deflects blame from the actual problem. More than half the plastic in the sea is industrial fishing refuse but sure, the straw in your smoothie is the problem.
Well, it does. Which is the problem. We essentially have three choices: one , we walk the knife edge which is our current-day thinking, where we hope that we somehow enable some magical thing--in the future, always in the future--that solves climate change without making life even a little worse for anybody. Two, we do nothing and adapt to climate change however it comes. Three: we do something unpleasant. Four is "go and make colonies in space" but for most folk that's the same as three.
I mean, the most likely outcome is that we vaporize 80% of humanity in a nuclear war that lasts a few minutes, and then global temperatures end up cooler for a decade thanks to nuclear winter. I guess that falls under "we do something unpleasant", but it's unpleasant in the sense of being life-ending for a majority of humanity and then civilization-destroying for the remainder.
I hope the evil genius that came up with the idea of making young republican-voting libertarians so angry about plastic straws got a bonus.
Judging by these threads he's pretty much singlehandedly destroyed any attempt to move humanity to cheaper, cleaner, safer, inexhaustible energy supplies.
I don't think it was a republican the one who "destroyed... inexhaustible energy supplies". It was well-meaning environmentalists in Europe who didn't bother with math nor science when they demanded to take down nuclear power and to buy gas from Russia. They were raised in the "end of history" culture of the nineties that was a little too cheerful, but busy shifting manufacture to Asia, and it favored more humanities in schools in this part of the world, in itself not a bad thing, but to the detriment of exact and logical thinking. Maybe all of it made our thinking an easy prey of the people selling the oil and the gas.
Republican or German butterflies (as in "butterfly effect") should not be blamed when they start a big scale avalanche on loose snow.
Yes good point, the evil genius who convinced republican-voting libertarians to irrationally love nuclear power and so nurse an unquenchable grudge against environmentalists and renewables should get a runners up medal in terms of how much damage he's done to the planet.
We have much more than 15 more years of temperature rises to come. It's not like we reached net zero in 2026 or have a plausible plan to reach that anytime soon. Net zero is probably another few decades away.
The point is that even if we did get to net zero today heating would continue to rise for another 15 years. That's what the lag is. Whenever we get there, add 15 years.
True, but not much of an issue I think. I'd assume we reach net zero very gradually and fifteen years before net zero will be pretty close to zero already. But oh well, first we need a clear downward trend of global emission.
The climate change advocates have lost all their credibility by lobbying against nuclear. Because of their religious fanaticism Germany closed their nuclear plants and is compensating for it by burning coal. If this wasn't so tragic it would be hell of a comedy.
There is strong opposition to nuclear energy in Germany, which I disagree with, but I don't think "climate change advocates" (whatever the heck they are) have anything to do with it.
Centralized motivated groups have more political power than their "percentage" would suggest, that's why we have kosher/gluten/halal labels everywhere.
Merkel needed to ally. It was either the Greens, the communists, or the AfD. Of course the Greens came with closing the power plants.
During that fantastic decision making, Schroder and Merkel moved Germany onto Russia gas. (Of those 2, Schroder now holds management positions in Russian Gazprom, and Russian-German NordStream, the company that owns the pipeline). Brilliant decision making all around.
Their other decisions were to count on America for defense, refusing any investment into defense or defense tech (despite America objecting), and to use China as an export market.
Each of those decisions now, as it turns out, costs every German citizen 3000-6000 euros per year, on a large average, and EU citizens about 5000 euros per year.
Brilliant politician. One would almost think that, since a broken clock is right twice daily, these people weren't at all "wrong" (and certainly Schroder wasn't)
This is such a common story across different conservation domains that I no longer trust the green movement. I think many of them are motivated by a sense of moral superiority rather than by actual concern for the environment.
> In 1997, the National Wildlife Institute, in co-operation with the University of Turin, produced an action plan to eradicate the American grey squirrel from Italy, as this introduced species replaces the native red squirrel through competitive exclusion and damages trees through de-barking. The first step, a trial eradication of a small population of grey squirrels at Racconigi (Turin) to evaluate the efficiency of the removal techniques, started in May 1997. Preliminary results showed that eradication was feasible, but the project was opposed by radical animal rights groups which took the National Wildlife Institute to court in June 1997. This legal action caused a suspension of the project and led to a lengthy judicial enquiry that ended in July 2000 with the acquittal of the Institute. Nevertheless, the 3-year suspension of all actions led to a significant expansion of the grey squirrel's range and thus eradication is no longer considered practical.
You are absolutely right. They think they can bend everyone on their feet because their morals are so "superior". Almost every single of their actions result in more long term harm to the environment.
Have you actually followed the money on those "climate change advocates"?
While I don’t doubt there are some that believe nuclear is a no-go. Most of the ones opposing nuclear are in fact backed by some O&G lobbyists. At least, this is the case in USA.
Well point is that Germany's CO2 emissions could be the same as in France had they not stopped building nuclear plants in the 80s and 90s. Obviously the psychosis amongst environmentalists who were hellbent on maximizing CO2 emissions (in addition to Germans electing a Russian agent to lead their country in 1998) was just one of the factors.
Nuclear appears to be a distraction, today in 2026, it was not so in 2002 when Germany started to phase-out nuclear energy.
Global warming was not much interesting for public until about 2006 - 2007 and when public started to be interested in global warming, the public was promised that renewables would the solve the problem. They did not solve the problem, worldwide annual CO2 increased from 30,9 Gt (2007) to 37.8 Gt (2025).
Storage still has some way to go until comparing the raw price per MWh ceases to be a partially apples to oranges comparison. You can't really have a stable grid in most of Europe with only solar + wing + storage. Unless you are willing to close down most of the factories during winter amongst other things.
Add a bit of firming and you can. Or just accept a tiny bit of fossil fuels. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
We still need to decarbonize agriculture, chemicals, aviation, shipping, heavy industry, construction and so on. Most of which use either chemical energy carriers, or fossil feedstock.
Siphoning off a tiny bit off that for grid firming duty is trivial. Or do sustainable biofuels from food waste and so on.
Which is also what the system studies lands on. Finding that adding new nuclear makes it far more expensive.
This comment shows how much disinformed you are on that question.
The temporary transition to coal was studied long time ago and identified as the best solution even though it would increase CO2 for a small time. But in compensation it would allow to transition faster to green energy thanks to savings done on nuclear, hence overall reducing faster CO2 emission.
> The temporary transition to coal was studied long time ago and identified
When and by whom? The "phase-out" in 2002 was enacted by a government led by a person who later turned out to be a paid Russian agent. How did that work out? Germany did almost nothing for 10-15 while it increased it's dependency on fossil fuel imports from Russia...
There was no need to temporarily transition to coal except this:
1. The raw power of nuclear would make renewables not that attractive; so deployment will be slow.
2. Removing nuclear from scene will create demand for renewables.
The 1.5 step that climate activists ignored (because why not? Humans are cancers. Industrialization is a mistake) is the crashing of economy. Germany is will paying for that mistake and will never recover.
It certainly was in the 80s and early 2000s if negative externalities like CO2 emissions were factored in (of course nobody cared about that back then)
This kind of reasoning is exactly the reason why we're screwed. "I am smarter, it's because of them". "Look how good I am at criticising people without any nuance".
> The climate change advocates have lost all their credibility
If you think there is a need for "climate change advocates" at this point, you're a moron. Climate change is a scientific fact, it doesn't need advocates. It would be like criticising "gravity advocates".
> by lobbying against nuclear
Again that's a completely stupid take. A subset of the people you criticise lobbied against nuclear. And by the way nuclear energy does not magically solve all problems.
> If this wasn't so tragic it would be hell of a comedy.
What's tragic to me is that everybody is very keen on telling how everybody else is stupid, usually taking big stupid shortcuts showing that they are actually not better.
Sure, nuclear is a good tool that we should leverage. But the reality is that the situation is such that we need to change a bit of everything everywhere, and the first step to do that is to realise it, accept it and vote for it. What do people instead? Say "it's because of those other people, I am better, and I will now vote for an extremist because my lack of common sense tells me it cannot be worse".
> Sure, nuclear is a good tool that we should leverage. But the reality is that the situation is such that we need to change a bit of everything everywhere, and the first step to do that is to realise it, accept it and vote for it. What do people instead? Say "it's because of those other people, I am better, and I will now vote for an extremist because my lack of common sense tells me it cannot be worse".
It might be worth voting for an extremist if that extremist being in a position of power keeps people out of power who would otherwise work against nuclear power plants; even if the extremist himself doesn't care about nuclear power one way or the other.
My point is that people who vote for extremes "because it cannot be worse" couldn't be more wrong. Of course it can be worse. Instead of complaining and voting to say "I'm pissed because I think someone else should make my life easier" like a kid, people should start thinking about what's needed.
Right now, people seem to feel like "they" (anyone but themselves apparently) should prevent our life conditions from getting worse. Maybe it's time to realise that our life will get more difficult, and we as adults need to accept it and start planning for that. Not voting for the guy who says it's all the fault of foreigners and that nuclear energy will magically save us.
History shows that very smart people and even groups of very smart people can do remarkably stupid things, pointing out their obvious errors is not a statement of intellectual superiority.
> pointing out their obvious errors is not a statement of intellectual superiority.
First, I don't care about looking smart, and even less about looking "intellectually superior".
Second, if it was obvious it would be even more tragic. But the fact is that it's not obvious at all: the solution to our big problems (energy, biodiversity loss, global warming) are complicated. Whoever says "vote for me, I have the solution" is either a liar or a moron.
Another issue is they’ve lost their credibility going all in on geopolitics (Palestine) and being anti development which makes it impossible to create green energy and denser energy efficient cities
Unfortunately, even if we exceed and then bring temperature back to 1.5 degree over preindustrial, the damage has already been done. Many ecosystems and species will be lost, and many of the feedbacks (for example arctic sea ice) have hysteresis in them which will not get us to the same state even though nominally our temperature will be lower again. And because of hysteresis, larger reduction in CO2 might be required to get us back to 1.5 degrees.
That's why all this CO2 capture and drawdown using some kind of unspecified, new technology, is such a distraction. Ideally we shouldn't release the carbon in the first place.
That's not what I am saying at all, I am just pointing out that venturing to 2 degrees (or more) and back to 1.5 degrees incurs the cost. Maybe it's well-known at this point, and I am just stating the obvious; but it's not my general impression.
I am not sure what you are saying then, with this:
> Unfortunately, even if we exceed and then bring temperature back to 1.5 degree over preindustrial, the damage has already been done.
We won't be able to get back to 1.5, and in fact the way it's going we're still accelerating our emissions, so it will get a lot worse.
Now, if we could get back to 1.5, it would most definitely be better than not getting back to it. So "the damage has already been done" is wrong.
If we managed to keep it at 2 instead of higher, it would most definitely be better than not keeping it at 2. So "the damage has already been done" is wrong.
If we managed to keep it at 3 instead of higher, ... you get my point.
What's happening is that we've already caused damage that will hurt, and we are now actively working towards causing more damage that will hurt more. The faster we get our shit together, the less it will hurt. There is no "it's too late, it's done". There is "it will be painful" and "it will be more painful" and "it will be a lot more painful" all the way down.
Nope. "damage" will be done. "The damage" implies "all of it", and that is wrong. Going back to 1.5 actually means less damage than not going back. So "the damage" is not "completely" done.
"Going back to 1.5 actually means less damage than not going back."
That's a different claim, but also no. Let's imagine we go 1.5 -> 2 -> 1.5 in a few decades (and keep in mind capture is more difficult, so the 2nd transition will take longer), compared to just 1.5 -> 2. In the return case, we stress all the ecosystems twice by change, rather than once. So it's not at all clear it's less damaging.
CO2 capture is obvious greenwashing, just like electric personal cars. They're here to save industries, not the planet, I don't think anyone half serious believes anything other than that
Yes on CO2 capture, but electric personal cars are substantially lower emissions than internal combustion cars. Anyone saying something different is pushing fossil propaganda - that is just not a fact-based argument.
Yes, getting everyone onto electrified public transport + scooters is better - but EVs do provide meaningful emissions reduction.
Maybe, but cement manufacturing by itself is responsible for a staggering 8% of global co2 emissions. And we really don't have a viable option for replacing cement, and probably won't for a long time. Capturing and removing that co2 has a meaningful impact. Even if CCS were limited to just that one industry.
There are absolutely viable ways to reduce concrete emissions by about 30% - but it is staggeringly difficult to get the construction industry (including architects, structural engineers, standards bodies etc.) to change practices.
It always puzzles me when people think fusion is just infinite free energy. You're not just gonna have one fusion plant producing a billion zetawatts of electricity. Each fusion plant will likely produce roughly the same as a large nuclear plant. So we would need to build hundreds/thousands of them, it would take many decades to build them. Fusion reactors are extremely complicated machines.
And even if we did this, we would also need tens of thousands of carbon capture facilities, and the infrastructure to actually store the CO2 somewhere.
Carbon capture (from air) is just completely infeasible. It's not even remotely realistic. There is absolutely no way it will ever make a significant difference.
It’s pretty easy to see how electric personal cars make a difference even if the initial vehicle manufacturing process is indeed dirtier, and plenty of serious people consider them a part of the solution. CO2 capture also isn’t greenwashing, it’s just handwaving away problems with the idea that tech will somehow save us, which is also true for like… every single solution to this problem we’ve considered.
Both perpetuate the idea that we can just continue business as usual and that we'll find a magic solution later.
2 to 3 tonnes of metal and batteries to transport 75kg of meat and sit uselessly 98% of the time is not the optimal way to transport people, no matter how you look at it
Nobody has ever, at any point been talking about “optimal”, so that’s irrelevant. Optimal is completely abandoning science and returning to nature. There is no better outcome for nature. That’s the optimal outcome.
Putting a bunch of meat in tubes is not optimal. Putting a bunch of meat on very large, multi-passenger vehicles is not optimal. Putting 9 billion bike and walking pathways for meat is not optimal. Cities made of concrete are not optimal.
Who cares about optimal? Actually serious people are discussing living in harmony.
If nobody is allowed to own a car, then nobody is happy. If the only way to own a car is to own an electric one, then many people are happy. This is not optimal. Nothing we’re doing or aiming for is, in any sense of the word.
"the damage has already been done" is dangerous wording, because it implies that we won't cause more damage. However, we will cause way more damage than has already been done!
It was still worth it on the metrics most people care about: life expectancy, child mortality, poverty, food security. Cutting off cheap fossil energy decades earlier would have been far worse for humanity than the slight warming we're getting now.
To be fair switching to nuclear was an option in the 70s-90s. Obviously it would have a been a bit more expensive but it would have slowed down climate change by 10-20 years.
On average, maybe yes. But in the rich world we also used a huge chunk of fossil fuel for relatively small marginal gains in quality of life (adding a fifth weekend shopping trip per year, buying a superyacht), and sometimes worsening life expectancy (driving too much, eating too much beef).
Why should I believe your assessment that a huge chunk of fossil fuel use by the rich world went to "relatively small marginal gains in quality of life"? I think they went to massive quality of life gains for huge numbers of people, and that suddenly removing fossil fuels as an energy source would be catastrophically bad for huge numbers of people, and not obviously worse than the effects of global warming over a comparable timeframe.
I never suggested we should suddenly remove fossil fuels as an energy source, that is a huge exaggeration. We wouldn't have needed to do anything suddenly 40-50 years ago when we started to understand that there was a problem, and we won't suddenly remove fossil fuels in the upcoming few years either.
But that is also a false choice: Not all CO2 emissions in the past 40 years were net beneficial. I firmly believe humanity would have done better with fewer (not zero, fewer) flights, less (not zero) beef, and fewer (not zero) fossil fuel car journeys. All while continuing to raise people from poverty and providing real improvements, of course.
We could have just built nuclear power plants. Invested into the technology, built breeder reactors and all that. We wouldn't have had to sacrifice anything, except of course for the astronomical profits of oil and gas companies.
And sure this wouldn't have solved the entire problem, electricity generation only accounts for like 40-50% of CO2 emissions or so? But it would have made a huge difference, and allowed us to focus entirely on the other half of the problem.
And it's not "slight warming". 20,000 years ago the global average temperature was about 3 degrees celsius lower than the reference point. That was the last ice age. Today we are 1.5 degrees above the reference point, 4,5 above the ice age. In a few decades we'll be at 3 degrees above reference, 6 degrees above ice age.
The transition from ice age (-3) to the temperate climate that allowed humanity to thrive, took place over about 12,000 years. The transition from reference to +3 is taking place over about a century. And we won't stop at +3, it'll keep going. Already at 1.5 it's having huge profound effects.
This is literally the end of the world as we know it. It's already well on its way. We are already seeing widespread crop failures, water scarcity, blistering heat waves, extreme weather etc. It will get much worse, this is just the beginning.
CO2 emissions trading is greenwash. CO2 capture not necessarily so. It could be a useful tool, so long as it's not used as an excuse to launder other emissions.
Carbon offsets are greenwash. Emissions trading mostly works, because it's just about the government setting a quota and then letting people figure out who gets to use it.
CO2 emissions trade for about 50$/t. CO2 capture costs 500$/t. So, both are useless - it costs 10 times more to get the carbon out, why are we selling them so cheap, it costs 10 times more to get the carbon out compared to not emitting it, it will never be economical.
Of course, direct air capture of CO2 is extremely energy intense. You can only do it if you've built excessive renewable energy overproduction. And I mean unimaginable excessive.
We've emitted more than a trillion tons of CO2 since 1990. If we want to put just that back into the ground (pump it into old oil wells), the final storage will be several thousand cubic kilometers of high pressure CO2. Just the direct air capture will cost more than an Exawatt hour of renewable electricity (currently, humanity produces around 30 PWh of electricity per year from all sources).
You can use some tricks. Turning all agricultural waste, forestry waste and organic garbage into bio char (instead of letting it decompose on the fields or in compost facilities, which emits CO2) captures a few billion tons per year, but that's far more labor intense and requires a lot of automation work.
DAC isn't useful for short term, but could be useful as a very long term cleanup project.
Assuming world wide solar panel production continues to rapidly grow, wait until it reaches a point where we could set aside a number of solar panels for DAC each year equal to the current annual production of solar panels. Let's call this an arseload of solar panels.
Each year use those panels to build a solar farm in a subtropical desert dedicated solely to powering a DAC facility using current commercial DAC technology.
When we've expanded solar panel production enough raise the set aside to two arseloads a year. Keep increasing it when we can.
By the time we have 180 arseloads worth of panels (at current panel efficiency) powering DAC (at current DAC efficiency), we'd be removing each year about 10% more CO2 than we currently emit per year. We'd be using about 1/15th of the area of the 5 largest subtropical deserts.
If we ever got to 1600 arseloads we'd be removing CO2 fast enough to take the atmosphere from 450 ppm CO2 to 280 ppm in 6 years.
All that carbon removed, if stored as graphite and spread out evenly under 1600 aresloads of solar panels would form a layer about 1 cm deep.
Note that I'm not hypothesizing any breakthroughs in solar power or in DAC. The only thing speculative here is that it is possible to build hundreds of arseloads of solar panels over the next several hundred years. I have no idea if there is some consumable needed that is sufficiently limited to make this impossible.
Yes, but in an indirect way. Direct carbon capture (DAC) is so energy intensive that it's only viable in places with 100% clean electricity, like Iceland. It's a non-starter in most countries.
However, places that have 100% clean electricity are often isolated. You need to ship in all equipment, which is made elsewhere, and fly in all personnel. This quickly adds up:
Capturing carbon from the source, like a coal power plant, is much easier. But the capture rate is only 50% on average, so a coal power plant with carbon capture is still horrible while also ridiculously expensive, so it doesn't really make sense.
> That's why all this CO2 capture and drawdown using some kind of unspecified, new technology, is such a distraction. Ideally we shouldn't release the carbon in the first place.
But imagine your oil and gas...
One way to keep your expertise be valuable is to offer the solution to the externalities you produce. By proposing to store that externality using your drilling/rig assets. It's a win win, for the company, a loss loss for everyone else.
> That's why all this CO2 capture and drawdown using some kind of unspecified, new technology, is such a distraction. Ideally we shouldn't release the carbon in the first place.
This is in my amateur opinion, an absolutely bonkers and crazy stance. I can't understand why any pro-green person would affirm this.
There are two facts, (again, imo) one - all our emission reducing efforts would maybe slow their acceleration or in other way to frame it, maybe we collectively would cut tens percents of annual emissions. We, humanity, will a always emit a lot of CO2 from the sources we can't reduce without going full stone age. Fact two - there is a lot of CO2 and other GH gas in the atmosphere now and even more would be there tomorrow. We MUST remove it somehow. Like, there are literally two components - either we remove the insulator (CO2&Co) or we remove the energy (sun rays). We can't do either of course, yet.
The more greenwashing and muddying happens, with overfocus on cutting emissions while deliberately skipping RnD on the CO2 capture or sun shield tech, the more humans will be fucked in future.
Or to provide a different analogy. We are in a completely closed system here, an oven. Turning the regulator from III to II helps of course, but the meat will eventually cook either way, unless either the power is disconnected or the insulating door is opened.
Fully agreed. We're not gonna get out of this without something a bit crazy, and CO2 capture at least has an actionable theory: "what if power was 10x cheaper". That's imaginable at least, much more so than "what if we committed a few genocides" as was proposed elsewhere in this thread.
The bonkers crazy stance is yours. Carbon capture cannot work. We would need to build at the very least tens of thousands of carbon capture plants, way more than we currently have power plants.
So to me, the bonkers crazy stance is "let's just continue destroying the world, and hope magic future tech will save it". Especially when the tech you're talking about it just completely obviously entirely infeasible. Add to that the fact that we are destroying the world now. The ship is currently sinking. A solution in 50 years is a solution 100 years too late.
The actual solution that we do have is nuclear power. We could have replaced all fossil fueled power production decades ago if we wanted to. That would have reduced our emissions by nearly 50% and we would have been able to put all our efforts into solving the remaining half of the problem.
As it stands right now I fully expect the world to end quite soon. Maybe within my lifetime. Unless I die early I'll definitely see +3C in like 20 years or so, and probably +4 and +5 as well if not even more than that. I'm not having children because I don't want to put someone into this world just to suffer through the end of it. I have absolutely no faith in our ability to solve climate change. I believe we could have, if the world wasn't full of corrupt rich people and stupid people voting for them. But it is what it is. We've doomed ourselves and we're watching the end unfold before our eyes while everyones like that meme with the dog in the burning house saying "this is fine".
First - I'm well aware about CO2 capture being a fantasy and not viable today. The "tiny" problem is that it is still one of the 3 possible faint solutions to overheating and we WILL need at least one of them operational in the next 50-200 years. If we won't start the RnD today, then it would still be a fantasy in a century or two, when we won't have any time left to play around.
Second - where exactly did you get a notion that CO2 capture = "let's just continue destroying the world"? Of course every other tech should be mobilized and improved too in parallel.
Third - nuclear generation at scale is as fantastical as DACs. Please read about actual issues with real life construction of plants and about actual emissions attributed to each plant cumulatively, without greenwashing like selectively ignoring whole parts of supply chain and maintenance and decommission. I love nuclear energy btw, despite literally suffered through the worst accident in their history (I'm from Kyiv) along with my whole family. We do should construct more of them and SMRs can't come quick enough.
Fourth - there is a collective delusion that moving 100% to renewable energy would cut emissions by 50% or any other similar fantasy number. In reality the whole world energy generation is only 1/4 to 1/3 of all world emissions, and course the so called "net zero" or "carbon neutral" catchphrases are greenwashing, it is impossible. A 100% world renewable generation would only cut part of that part of global emissions. So let's say renewables reduce energy emissions by 50% or maybe even 75%. So then the non-generation emissions would decrease by only 15-20% (for example Xnew = Xold * (1 - 0.25 * 0.75) = 0.8125 * Xold or 18% decrease in other words). This is what is often ignored in a green advertisements.
> The "tiny" problem is that it is still one of the 3 possible faint solutions to overheating and we WILL need at least one of them operational in the next 50-200 years
We need them now. We currently don't have any time left to play around. In 50 years the global average temperature will be somewhere in the 3-5C range, which is apocalyptic. We'll be too busy fighting wars over water and arable land etc, to do anything meaningful about global warming.
My view is that capturing CO2 is hopeless, what we need to do instead is simply not emit the CO2 in the first place. But we aren't doing that, we're just building new coal/gas plants every year instead like a bunch of idiots. Because that's what we are. Bunch of morons who are dooming ourselves.
Whatever money is earned burning a ton of coal/gas, it will cost multiple times that amount to sequester the resulting CO2.
> where exactly did you get a notion that CO2 capture = "let's just continue destroying the world"?
I view it as an excuse to continue burning fossil fuels. It's not actually a solution to the problem at all, but it's presented as a solution when the reality is that it simply will never make a dent in the actual problem. There is no money in CO2 sequestration. We have a huge amount of investment in fossil fuel extraction and power generation etc because it makes money. CO2 is worthless, the only way anyone could possibly make money capturing CO2 and pumping it into the ground is if states paid them to do it. So a much simpler solution would be to pay them to generate clean power instead. "But where would the money come from" I don't know, where will the money for CO2 sequestration come from? We can't afford to pay a little extra for clean energy but somehow magically future us will be able to pay way way way way more for CO2 sequestration? It's not going to happen.
> Third - nuclear generation at scale is as fantastical as DACs. Please read about actual issues with real life construction of plants and about actual emissions attributed to each plant cumulatively, without greenwashing like selectively ignoring whole parts of supply chain and maintenance and decommission.
Google AI:
Nuclear power plants produce zero direct carbon dioxide emissions during operation. Across their full lifecycle—including uranium mining, enrichment, plant construction, and decommissioning—nuclear energy averages about 12 to 50 grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt-hour (g CO2e/kWh), making it one of the lowest-carbon electricity sources available.
Solar PV: ~85 g CO2e/kWh
Wind: ~26 g CO2e/kWh
Hydroelectric: ~26 g CO2e/kWh
Natural Gas: ~499 g CO2e/kWh
Coal / Lignite: ~888 to 1,054 g CO2e/kWh
There are over 400 operational nuclear power plants in the world, the technology clearly works. Yes Chernobyl was terrible, it was caused by the dysfunctional Soviet Union political environment, it's not a fault of the technology itself. The state withheld information about a critical flaw in the reactor design. Coal kills more people in a week, than nuclear has through its entire history.
> So let's say renewables reduce energy emissions by 50% or maybe even 75%.
As you can see from the numbers I shared above, renewables cut emissions by over 95% compared to coal, 90% compared to gas.
I'm not saying we could be entirely carbon-neutral. I'm saying emissions from electricity generation specifically, which according to Google represents over 40% of CO2 emissions, could be almost entirely eliminated. Instead of 40% it could be less than 5%. From there we could work on other things such as shipping, farming etc. Maybe we'd just stop farming cows. I love beef but I'd be okay with that. Aviation could go as far as I'm concerned. I love vacationing but I'd rather have a planet that's going to continue being habitable. I could still go pretty far using trains, electric buses, my own electric car etc. Shipping could be electrified - nuclear submarines and warships already exists, that could be an option.
And yes, I know all these solutions don't eliminate 100% of emissions. But they eliminate a large amount of them. EVs, over their lifespan, cause 60-70% less emissions than a comparable fossil fueled car. Yeah it's not 100% but it's a whole lot better than 0%.
All the "solutions" to global warming are entirely fictional. Yet we keep barreling headfirst into it, because the world is full of idiots who aren't taking the problem seriously. Any rational person who really understands what's at stake would happily sacrifice some comforts, but most people aren't rational, they don't trust science because they don't understand it, and the rich control the propaganda machines that fill their feeble minds with bullshit instead.
I think its more they don't have to reduce their pollution output. They can just pump it all out as much as possible, to make as much profit as possible, and "hope" a magical reversal tech arrives at some point in the future.
It's basically no regulation, to only focus on profit.
It's the fossil fuel industry who is pushing for carbon capture (because they know it isn't viable). The fossil fuel industry is just running the tobacco company playbook.
"Under current policies, only six G20 members
(China, India, Indonesia, Russian Federation,
South Africa and Türkiye) are assessed as likely to
achieve their unconditional 2030 targets, while the
assessment of the European Union is inconclusive.
Overall, this suggests limited progress in narrowing
implementation gaps across the G20."
"All G20 members except Argentina, Saudi Arabia
and the United States of America have new NDCs
with mitigation targets for 2035."
It is very important to add that not all targets were created equal in the agreement, that was a major part of the negotiation. Not saying anything else, just that a simple reading of that statement might make you come to an underlying conclusion that isn't correct.
Correct. For instance, still today China burns more coal than every other country combined. They are starting from a place that is so bad that even small improvements will look like huge gains.
Also, I read a few years back an explainer about China internal issues in the scope of energy generation. We westerners think that China is monolithic monarchy of sorts and everything "happens in China" is representative of the country average. Well, apparently it's not. According to that analyst, every province is semi-autonomous and reluctant to cede power to the central govt. or neighbors. So all the new fancy solar installations are logically in the low population western provinces, and connected to the grid there. And in the east there are still a lot of local coal generation. And eastern provinces are simultaneously way more populated, way richer and have way bigger modern crisis threats (housing, inflation, unemployment, job and study application saturation and over competitiveness etc.). So now the provincial govt. is facing a threat of losing both local power generation, profits from running a coal plant business, and the most important yet another job loss prospect from shutting down plants and all the related infrastructure - shipping, storage, management, distribution etc. Bear all costs and get zero gains.
So I suspect that there will be two mostly independent trends in China (and other industrial places like that) - solar installation will grow, but coal use won't be meaningfully cut without huge HUGE help from central and foreign powers at once.
It's not just a matter of population density, the sichuan basin and most the east coast is just doesn't get much sun/wind. If not for these 'resource provinces' they would've just gone full on coal.
China’s coal use has shifted from decades of rapid expansion to a historic decline. Coal’s share of electricity generation dropped below 50% for the first time in 2026 (reaching 49.7% in the first six months), down from over 75% in the early 2010s and a peak share of around 81% in 2007, driven by massive wind and solar growth.
It has still grown in absolute terms although even that seems to have flattened off in the last couple of years.
There was no coal for generation consumption decline in China, yet. You look at the relative units (percentages), but instead check absolute units. The consumption steadily grew up until 2023 and now it is flat for two years, but it is not yet declining. So all the existing coal generation is running as it were, it's just the new plants maybe aren't constructed. But we are far away from the "deliberately early decommissioning" stage.
The propaganda spilled since the 1970s by large cooperations and politicians had two effects. People understand the problem is huge, and worse, they feel they cannot do anything about this issue themselves.
What we tend to forget is that large changes in society tend to start with us. Try eating less meat, eat healthy food, reduce car and plane usage when possible, buy less stuff (especially online), these are things anyone can do (rich or poor). When you start, family members and friends might follow.
From there, more people will try to change their consumption, and when enough people do that, politicians that are willing to tackle these issues will be elected. And when politicians are elected at some point your government will take the right step. From there we go to countries and eventually a large part of the world will do what must be done to survive.
You want a better world? Start by improving your own life and health.
Well, but the companies exist because people buy their products, right? If I buy pork from a farm, CO2 was technically produced by that farm, but it's on me.
Ultimately those 50-cent companies are making things that we buy. Even if they're selling to another business, that other business is selling to you. The chain might be long and hard to figure out, but it all comes down to you.
I guess I can see that. And I can't help but make the most ethical choices I can. And I know for a fact that it has inspired other people in my community.
This is feel-good bullshit. The thing that will actually make people stop burning so much fossil fuels is if gas costed $50 a gallon and everyone who drives a car for any reason is thinking about this number before they use their car. Which is absolutely the sort of state of affairs that large numbers of people - and not just in the rich world - would legitimately riot about.
Fortunately we don't need $50 gas because these days we have $1 gas in the form of electric cars. Of course the price of electric varies very much from place to place. For some people electric cars are not competitive with gas but for other people electric is a lot cheaper and has been for a long time and now electric cars are practical.
The other thing you can do is start demanding better transit. Most people live in a city dense enough that transit could replace nearly all their transportation needs. Sure, we would still have to have trucks to get freight around, but that's a small minority of the energy used.
On my last vacation I came across a similar message on reddit[0] and it totally spooked me.
I have been telling my wife I want to move as my area (at some point) will be flooded. I live in the Netherlands and when the icecaps have melted (WHEN not IF) I live in the wrong part.
Could someone explain this to me because it nags at me in these discussions. Nuclear - what happened in the West, and why isn't it discussed both to solve high energy costs and climate change. Take three countries.
Germany. Germany seems extremely dependent on natural gas which has connected it to Russia in ways that clearly cause political problems and geopolitical issues.
United States seems to be able to afford it but also dismantled its nuclear power plants. In New York State they got rid of a plant that fed NYC and provided jobs, Indian Point, and energy costs have gone up from what I understand.
France has nuclear but behaves culturally like everyone else, with high energy costs and curious behaviors like keeping AC away from people culturally and legally.
I'm all for progressive change, but what do you tell non-climate scientists? If I live in a northern climate in a wooded area, I can't get solar on my house. I can have an electric vehicle and try to keep usage low in the house, but honestly the rest feels like events completely beyond my control, making conversations like these pretty abstract. Okay, we're screwed in a few decades. What exactly do you want me to do? Vote for Greens who attack nuclear and AC like in Europe?
At today's pace of demand, known conventional deposits of uranium will last a little over a century. Nuclear power provides about 9% of the world's electricity. Trying to replace fossil fuel demand with nuclear is both economically and materially not possible.
A century is a pretty amazing amount of time considering the alternative, no?
It just feels like climate change activism is about telling us we're all going to suffer anyway, so turn off your AC and start to pay more in building costs and taxes. Don't we want practical solutions?
People are still talking about 1.5C at 2100 as if it's not some high fantasy? :) Wake up, it was greenwashing all this time. The question is rather are we lucky to have 3C by the end of the century, or the hot models are correct and we'll get 4-5C. That's the question. 1.5C... Phah! Fun joke :)
Human greed will lead to human extinction. It is a foregone conclusion, too many would rather die owning the latest iphone or latests trends than care about the global whole. You see it all around us, between the Congo, Sudan, Palestine, Ukraine and so much more... we just don't give a shit.
In summary, we are the architects of our own demise. (this is not pessimism, but realism)
To be honest, no company wants to lower their income. This is institutionalised (i.e. the stock holders will throw you out if you decide to lower the income)
That's why they are selling us new cars instead of converting the old ones to electric or semi- electric drive. The amount of CO2 emitted on the new car creation and shipping is tremendous. The same with phones, washing machines etc. And now AI. It should be done on optimising (the software, the reliability), not creating new and throwing out the old ones
Extinction means zero humans left, which is highly unlikely as we are a very resilient species. A global collapse is more likely sometime in the future, but even then some countries and communities might just keep going on.
Utter nonsense. This is not realism. This is your weird negative way of looking at the world.
A lot of European countries are now generating most of their electricity from renewables, and it's being built out rapidly. We can now produce grid-scale storage at lower and cheaper prices. In places like Texas, this is happening at a breakneck speed.
Also developing countries are adopting solar panels and batteries at a surprisingly fast pace, since they just buy them for cheap from China rather than waiting for a dysfunctional government to build out a proper grid to rural villages.
the thing with the climate goal is just an arbitrary number to the person on the street.
for us that come from poor countries - it fuels degrowth. you want us to shut down coal plants & yet you don't want us to trade with china.
even in rich countries such as Germany - cost of energy has been a factor in slowing down growth because bureaucrats said so. while private planes keep flying, good keep getting shipped from overseas.
china has enabled cheap solar - which in turn has enabled cheap access to electricity. china has enabled cheap electric vehicles. for a bunch of people in 'poor' or 3rd world countries - in the next few years their first cars will be chinese EVs not Japanese 2nd hands or other 2nd hands from western countries.
You can't tell people to sacrifice, when people above them are getting away with robbery. You can't sell society on a negative vision for the future and any metric that becomes a target ceases to be a good metric.
We need a positive vision and I don't see anything more positive than automation and the insane unlocks that it can provide. We have the potential to eliminate commuting, turn manufacturing on its head and turn ourselves from this mindless corporate rat race into something genuinely better for everyone.
The bottom line is all environmental initiatives must be human-first benefits for anyone to take them seriously. Solar for example can make your energy independent and cheaper, that should be the focus on selling it - the emissions are just a bonus. Automated cars mean a 2 car household can live with 1 car (or less), and it will come and pick them up, and they can be drunk or fall asleep in it, and they're still comfortable, thats a win before even considering the vastly improved traffic efficiency and throughput on the same roads and reclaiming of carparks as grass.
I eat vegetarian. I own a Fairphone. I take the night train instead of a flight when possible.
To me, the most workable solution to global warming I have heard of is: building a giant Cannon on the moon and have it shoot moon dust in-between the sun and the earth. This won't stop ocean acidification but at least things will cool down. And we have a cannon on the moon which is cool.
Renewables and nuclear in China and other countries have really made a dent in emissions. I never expected to see it during my lifetime, very positive. Also electrification is making a lot of fossil fuel less relevant every year. It will take time though since there is so much friction. What works in one country can take decades to diffuse into the neighboring one.
One difficulty you will encounter when looking into the effects of climate change is that you can't generally attribute individual events to it (or very rarely at least). Its effects are only really visible in more general (abstract) statistical measures (Just like me losing a coin flip doesn't mean the coin is weighted, but when i lose 8 out of 10 flips i will start getting suspicious)
That logic seems a bit weak, because it is saying we're already living in a world where the worst-case is happening, and we're just talking about the odds of any individual experiencing it are going up a little.
Compare it to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-person-vs-... where there is strong evidence that using more energy directly leads to more prosperity. We've got much better chances to do well if we stick to using the cheapest available energy. Then people can just build over the top of any disasters that strike.
> because it is saying we're already living in a world where the worst-case is happening, and we're just talking about the odds of any individual experiencing it are going up a little.
I'm not sure I'm following? A raise in temperature doesnt in itself cause any particular wildfire, drought or tsunami (just like the weight in a coin won't), but these events get more and more likely (just like losing the coin flip as the coin gets more and more unfair). This doesn't assume anything about the actual probability or trajectory we're on, if i measure my coinflips and they turn out to be 50/50 the argument is just as valid
> strong evidence
I think that pointing to 1 singular graph as "strong evidence" is a bit shallow. there are plenty of reasons to think that there are many confounding variables here.
In Belgium alone 665 people died in June's extreme heatwave that would otherwise still be alive. This is not even just old people. Other European countries have similar numbers.
Europe's inland waterways have extremely low water levels because of climate change related drought. Mainly the Rhine, which is a very important transport route. Ships can't load as much, meaning goods can be delivered at a slower pace. This causes enormous economic damage.
Not only droughts are a problem, but floods as well. In the past few years we've already seen large scale floods necessitating people to flee their homes
Global average temperature has risen about a degree over the last century. That's a truly terrifying amount of energy. Habitats are shifting, forests are burning away in places where their current composition has become unsustainable, regions are becoming arid, permafrost is becoming less permanent.
Technically most of everything else is weather, not climate, do you want a list of bad weather events?
People will name heat waves, but look up stats on how many die of cold vs. heat.
For the argument to work it must be that climate change causes more extremes on both sides. It's difficult to look at the evidence through an objective lens, but whenever I've looked it seems like warming the earth by a few degrees is most likely to save lives overall. There are of course other unknowns and it it's a very risky experiment to run.
Billions of dollars have been spent undermining science and electing corrupt fascists because people with control of fossil fuel wealth didn't want to deal with reality and laws and democracy.
That may well kill more people than climate change. Hard to tell as both have the potential to spiral out into a variety of intertwining tragedies.
If the human part of climate change wasn’t true and the fossil fuel industry’s wasn’t the culprit it would’ve been proven by now. It is very unlikely that the fossil fuel industry that is so rich and powerful wouldn’t have proven it by now.
There are none. The planet is greener, even the Sahara is shrinking. The Great Coral Reef has just had its best 5 years ever. On average, crops produce more due to higher CO2 levels.
Pacific islands failed to sink. Hurricanes failed to become more frequent. Fewer people died due to cold temperatures (which kill far more people than hot temperatures).
The planet is greener, I guess that you are pointing to; Nature Climate Change, 2016, Zhu et. al. where the authors of the study have warned that erroneous conclusions would be taken from the study.
I can't tell if this is sarcastic, or you're just lying?
> The planet is greener, even the Sahara is shrinking
The UK was baked brown in the heat and it was so bad it was visible by satellite, we had uncharacteristic wildfires all summer. Google has literally no idea what you're talking about by claiming the Sahara is shrinking, the best I can find is "maybe the expansion is slowing?"
> The Great Coral Reef has just had its best 5 years ever.
Apparently it had its most devastating coral bleaching event just 2 years ago, so I'm not sure this is true?
> On average, crops produce more due to higher CO2 levels.
I mean, yeah if you are into the average crop? People tend to like stuff like corn and coffee which are threatened by raised heat levels. With current heat levels we're projected to lose upwards of 1/5th the corn harvest by 2030.
> Pacific islands failed to sink.
I mean some of them did, like a decade ago, just none of the ones you care about.
> Hurricanes failed to become more frequent
Same frequency but wind force increases by water temperature, so a cat 1 hurricane like Rafael ends up a cat 3 hurricane due to climate change. I am seeing a pattern with your selective presentation of the facts.
> Fewer people died due to cold temperatures
Is that not because a large share of the world's old were taken out by COVID within the last 6 years? That is the group most likely to die to cold.
This is a genuinely interesting question - if humanity had the technological capacity to set the global temperature at any value, what value should that be? Is there any reason to think that the temperature in place from the beginning of the Holocene to the beginning of widespread fossil fuel usage by humans is the best one?
I agree! Intuitively i would think that most ecosystems evolved to adapt to their environment and, unless this environment is characterized by large swings in temperature and other conditions, will suffer in conditions different from the ones they evolved to thrive in. That means that any change in conditions needs to be slow enough for these ecosystems to gradually adjust by whatever means they have access to.
Skynet won't have to bother launching a nuclear war. It will just sit and munch digital popcorn, waiting for humanity to fix the humanity 'problem'. A tiny speck of time in the fullness of things.
Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine. :)
I remember 10 years ago when there greentech was a thing and "carbon neutral" (by carbon credit shams or not) was a goal. I was a bit proud then. That has passed.
Now it's just about heating data centers as much as possible. Apparently climate is a solved problem. The tech CEO's children and grandchildren are safe again, and we can go back to focus on profits. /s
Tired of the complete inability of the human race to take in the Pale Blue Dot [1], and what it means. No one is coming to rescue your grandchildren. And it would be much easier for us to do something today, than them in 50 years. Actions compound over time: perhaps those actions should then be long-term positive.
Don't need AGI, we know how to fix it (nuclear), and have chosen not to, because nobody gave a fuck about the climate, it was never about global warming.
Nuclear doomerism is what has lead us to this silly "status quo" and the subject of the article/thread.
There is more than one kind of nuclear, and the fuel situation has known reserves that aren't being used because of lack of demand. Fuel costs in reactors are only a very small part of their operational costs so new mines are not the priority. We also have viable seawater extraction technologies that are waiting for appropriate demand. Past that, there are also breeder and waste-burning reactors long held-up as a vital and fuel-conserving part of a complete nuclear eco-system.
Bluntly: the nuclear build-out France achieved in the 70s, scaled globally, would solve the climate problem and position us for synthetic fuel production at a civilizational scale. Modern technologies & robotics have us on track for facilities producing low greenhouse energy for more than a century. Global shipping, transport fuels, and energy-intensive industry require high-energy inputs. WWS are wonderful, but very awkward in those domains.
If you would start to re-rollout nuclear, Uranium will be consumed within 10-20 years by all participants. In most countries, nuclear supplied usually a small but stable fragment of the overall energysupply.
U-235 is the least useful fuel medium for long term energy generation, the us along has about 57 million TWh of breedable u-238 just sitting around in cooling pools and storage facilities
> The emissions gap is now a leadership gap. And the world is running out of time and excuses to close it.
The leadership of some countries, including the former "leader of the free world", fixed that by declaring global warming to be a hoax, so they don't need any excuses anymore and can just continue catering to their fossil fuel donors.
As much as I agree climate change is an important topic, I hate the rhetoric of "irreversible changes". Of course they're irreversible! Change is the only constant.
https://nowcity.org/ - Now City is an experiment in long-term urban planning based on the course we’ve set for ourselves, including complete loss of ice and roughly 4°C of warming with the associated shift in the human climate niche. This map accounts for the new hazards and new opportunities, and attempts to anticipate how populations might migrate and settle.
The other problem is the prisoners dilemma: if the west stops having children and not-the-west does not stop then within a short time we will have replaced the west with an equivalent population breeding much faster for cultural or religious reasons.
There is also a world of social disruption, which could lead to environmentally disastrous wars, that come from those kinds of demographic inversions. The combination of worsening climate issues with those destabilizations might lead to acute depopulation at the global level, but not likely of a climate-friendly variety.
Destroying the world to improve some portion of the climate experienced by some portion of some population at some unspecified later date a century or more in the future versus, say, geoengineering and attacking the present-day cost structures of nuclear energy strikes me generally as a Bad Plan.
having less children if you live in a developed economy just means outsourcing your children to a developing economy.
If there are 1 million less children born in the US, it's very likely there will be 1 million more immigrants to take their place, and the places those immigrants come from will have higher birth rates to replace them
No skin in the game and less influence on the next generation having the skills and values needed to make the world better instead of carrying on the path it's on. Of course most people having kids aren't thinking of that aspect.
It's definitely a difficult task to ask people to make concrete sacrifices now for a made-up metric for an abstract goal in the future that doesn't affect them.
The problem is that people today do not have skin in the game for what happens generations down the line. No real consequences, little desire for actual change.
Nah, that is actually logical and helpful for ecology. Just in a roundabout way. EU is for now a spearhead in all things pro-green so to say, at least on paper. By protecting local economies via tariffs (foreign EVs, foreign uranium fuel rods etc.), EU will continue being a power block and continue influencing other countries to be more green too.
What is bad, is a the lack of a coherent and realistic green programs and climate forecasts in EU as a whole. There are no incentive programs to switch to expensive one time EV purchases and charger installations (I tried to research what what would it cost to install a personal charger in my freshly constructed 2024 apartment building parking in a big city, the AI app called me a fool, well almost(1)). There are no coherent plans to expand charging networks at a state or union levels.
There solar panels, V2G, B2G, multizone electricity meters, dynamic tariffs, incentives, all are either non-existent or very spotty and organized at local levels.
There are no union wide help to transition from coal, oil, gas to relatively greener energy.
No re-foresation incentives and little to no marine protection.
No preparation for a real 3C temperature hike by the year 2100, instead the fantasy 1.5C or 2C numbers are reiterated and the populace is lulled into thinking all will be well for their kids.
I can continue the list, but the picture is of incompetence and apathy really. A few token and inconsequential efforts are done, just enough for re-elections, and that's it.
1: "This is the classic "pioneer dilemma" discussed on Polish forums. If you pay the 3,000 PLN because you are the first, and next year Neighbor B and Neighbor C get EVs, it is deeply unfair for you to keep subsidizing the overall risk profile. To protect yourself, you must not sign a contract that binds you to a flat fee indefinitely." (c) generated by AI
Are you being sarcastic? Your first paragraph is very much Effective Altruism but for European cultural superiority. "European culture is the best, so, by protecting that culture's economic base, it's actually better for the rest of the world because we can export our Lovely Eco Friendly Culture more, the more we power it with coal and oil and gas."
I despise the EA sex cult, but the the irony in that comparison is indeed visible. Good catch, I guess, I'll think about it. :)
So yes, I do currently think that the reality of life is that certain whole societies are in the given moment (now) more progressive than others. Or do you believe that some BRICS pseudo-union would collectively push for more green tech than EU is doing now (even though EU foreign policy actions are mostly impotent)?
Sure, maybe China will eventually take a lead in green tech policies, or maybe it even already did, though I'm not convinced so far. As soon as that happens visibly,I would gladly change my opinion and would advocate that now EU should follow more progressive lead (as long as Xi don't start WW3 for some "dvizhukha" like other demented autocrats did).
PS: and don't attribute to me stuff I didn't say, like this "we can export our Lovely Eco Friendly Culture more, the more we power it with coal and oil and gas."(c)
Obviously protective measures for any country are done to make sure an economy doesn't become completely dependent on another's with strongly opposing values.
Europe's car manufacturers need to get their shit together, but not being able to buy any car whatsoever the moment China gets their own Donald Trump is worse than cars being slightly worse and a bit more expensive for a while.
Hilarious compared to what exactly lmao? The US? China? Russia? TYhE GlObAl SoUtH? OPEC?
The world is a giant school playground where the bullies in charge are competing for #1 position on the goober eating contest while the school is burning
I both agree and disagree. The EU isn't worse than others. For example, it's basically the only place that's willing to replace coal with imported gas, which is a major economical sacrifice.
On the other hand, with the money the EU spends on climate measures, the results leave a lot to be desired. The EU has prioritized things like hydrogen, biofuels and carbon capture, which all have very little to show for.
If Europe had spent all that money on EVs and heat pumps, emissions would have decreased drastically while prices woundn't even go up. But that's not possible if you want to preserve old jobs. Then you have to do those stupid things that aren't viable, like e-fuels for cars.
I'm also not sure if replacing coal with gas did actually decrease emissions on the whole. The gas lobby is a large reason why electrification has stalled in Europe, while China's coal lobby helped electric trucks to reach 50% share last month.
It’s kind of hard to clean the pool when everyone around is constantly taking a shit in it, and then people like you point and laugh at the person cleaning the pool, take their tools away, disrupt the cleaning, disregard any ideas, then complain they are inefficient.
This might shock you because it happens outside your social bubble, but there is an insane amount of people (double-digit percentages for sure) that is simply unwilling to make even the smallest sacrifice in order to mitigate climate change, and they vote accordingly.
That does not make climate change any less of an emergency, but it limits politically feasible countermeasures a lot.
"While running for president in 2024, Donald Trump told oil and gas executives that he would pursue their policy priorities if the industry raised $1 billion for his campaign—and after returning to office last year, the Republican did just that, enriching those invested in fossil fuels, including himself, at the expense of the public and planet."
1.5 hasn't been viable for over a decade and was already baked in when it became popular. Now people are moving the goalposts to 2.0 and guess what the situation is.
These feel-good "we can still fix it" articles are very common and are never correct. Our trajectory is set. Read Hansen. He's been shouting about this since the 80s when he testified in front of Congress.
The agreement was made in 2017, it was probably never viable as there was no solidarity globally to reaching that target, the biggest emitters just didn't see the need to lower emissions.
I remember, around 2016, a european climate scientist saying that he had to fill up more forms and prove every experiment in the most strict way. The justification was that their conclusions could have economical repercussions. The results of their experiments were always a few years late because of that.
Welcome to the "absence of economical repercussions" world.
Yes, a simple carbon tax could have been phased in over time. We already had nuclear and trains and insulation etc. and we now know from our present (their future) that solar, wind, heat pumps, EVs are cost effective.
Turns out the whole problem was politics, not science or technology or economics.
The goals were chosen so countries and industries could stave off the climate doomerism on the long term.
Countries like Saudi Arabia, but also India, are currently trying to delay the next report to make it miss the 2028 deadline to lessen efforts for combatting climate change where it doesn't align with their industries.
Risks will always be underreported while targets will be optimisic, because that's safest for countries dealing in and reliant on fossil fuels.
This is the same question I've asked myself. One country sacrifices its entire energy production in favor of green alternatives, while the rest of the world doesn't. It doesn't even move the needle. It's just a pitiful way to fail.
Renewables will be that fast in roll-out and much cheaper and then other countries will follow the path.
(which is funny, since China installed more solar in 2024/2025 than US+EU combined - so for them its working, in the beginning they were adptors, now they became shapers; same for africa: now a real option to get cheap energy, the only region where solar is more expensive than it should be, is actually EU + US)
I've seen the consequences of the shift to renewables here in Spain: entire ecosystems destroyed, drought everywhere, wildlife displaced, and native plant species disappearing because of wind turbines and solar farms.
I'm in favor of renewables, but at the individual level (your own home). Meanwhile, the Spanish government has made several moves to ban personal electric vehicles like EUCs and electric scooters, which only pushes people back toward gas-powered vehicles.
Solar/wind farms are great when you have the land suitable for those. My favourite example is replacing the U.S. farms growing corn that is used to produce ethanol (which is then added to the gas) with solar farms. This would produce more energy while not disrupting any ecosystems (at least not more than the existing farms).
So either Spain has no land like that, or the Spanish government has fucked something up. Judging by the rest of your post, I‘m leaning towards the latter :-)
Renewables did all that? Are you stupid? If you actually cared about habitat loss there is a big list of things that take up more space than renewables. This is so idiotic it has to be rage bait
That's not libertarian dogma by any libertarian, I know. It is right-wing, but libertarians it will remind you that politics is far too complex to try and move to one axis.
Just a reminder that the worse climate change gets, the larger the difference is that a single 0.1 degrees makes. 1.0->1.1 degree difference in global warming is barely noticeable, but 2.9->3.0 makes a huge difference.
So, paradoxically, the worse the situation gets, the larger our incentive should become to avoid yet another increase in global warming.
I will take a moment to remind everyone that the people who don’t care about our future argue in bad faith (because their voters are genuinely stupid):
> Cruz, R-Texas, said in a tweet late Wednesday that by returning America to the multinational climate accord, Biden has indicated that he is more interested "in the views of the citizens of Paris than in the jobs of the citizens of Pittsburgh."
Did he misunderstand? This is from an AI summary from Google, but I recall his education being roughly this well before AI was in my search results:
> Cruz attended Princeton University, graduating with a B.A. in public policy (cum laude) in 1992. He then attended Harvard Law School, earning his Juris Doctor (magna cum laude) in 1995, where he served as a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review.
He’s not stupid. Many of them are not stupid (Marjorie Taylor Greene genuinely is). They cynically manipulate the stupids to the detriment of us all. Must be cool to think heaven is about to make it not matter (rapture), meanwhile the whole population of the world is effed due to lying liars holding us back and stupid voters who probably can’t read at an eighth grade level.
We live in clown world. Elections are decided by Meta and Twitter algorithms, both biased by their operators. Information doesn't get to people and lies abound. If you want to imagine the future of the world, picture indigenous children killed after being sucked into a gold mining machine:
Historical fact: the developed world is developed mostly via industrial revolution, a.k.a. they find out how to turn coal into wealth first
Current situation: the developed world emits much more than the developing side per capita. Even France, a country powered by nuclear, emits twice as much as India per capita
Yeah, good luck convincing the developing countries to limit their emission. "Bro please stay poor" and "you have too much population" aren't very nice things to say.
The developed world didn't have solar panels. They barely had batteries. There's a reason the developing world isn't trying to build the most optimal steam engines they can come up with.
The developing world will miss out on nuclear power because there will always be at least on major military force that will claim everyone they don't like is building weapons of mass destruction. Still, they can take solar over coal and oil, especially now that things like the EV industry are rapidly making electrical solutions for problems historically solved with fossil fuels.
The developing world is in many cases the past couple years leapfrogging fossil fuel infrastructure and going straight to solar electrification, thanks to China's cheap solar panels and improvements in energy storage battery systems.
Its time to admit that government will not be able to solve this in a reasonable amount of time. Can we please fund private charities that are actually doing something about this and could make a huge difference if they were funded better?
Demand that your government create a charity funding program where you as the tax payer get to decide where your tax money goes and choose a charity that aligns with your values and goals to tackle this once and for all.
>“Every additional fraction of a degree and additional year of warming above 1.5°C raises the risk of irreversible changes including in ice sheets, permafrost carbon, ocean circulation and coral systems, along with devastating human impacts,” the report states.
The mention to coral systems, from an ignorant perspective, seems weirdly specific to me. Kinda like "civilization will collapse and the price of sweaters will go up".
Does their disappearance have indirect consequences I'm not aware of?
Sometimes called rainforests of the sea, shallow coral reefs form some of Earth's most diverse ecosystems. They occupy less than 0.1% of the world's ocean area, about half the area of France. Yet, they provide a home for at least 25% of all marine species ...
Aside from being home to a lot of seafood they also play a not fully understood part in the breeding of a good number of other seafood in ways not yet fully understood.
ie. Lose the reefs .. and then we find out how our supply of seafood is impacted.
That's what I was missing yeah. I always took the bleaching of corals in media as a visible 'canary in the mine' situation, never knew they were so central to marine life.
Coral is the first to go. It's the metaphorical canary in the coal mine. We will probably survive without coral (we might lose a lot of fish but humanity will persist).
Coral bleaching is also accelerated by ocean acidification. Acidification due to CO2 being absorbed into the ocean affects all marine life, but importantly, also plankton. Phytoplankton produces most of the oxygen on earth, and we kind of need that to live. It's not exactly "coral reefs are dead = oxygen depleted", but you don't get many visual representations of oceanic climate change that could threaten all mammals on earth.
Not sure what consequences you are aware of but the key point with corals is loss of biodiversity. It's (I believe) the tipping point that goes at the lowest temperature rise.
> Coral reefs are some of the most diverse and valuable ecosystems on Earth. Home to over 4,000 species of fish, corals, and other marine life, coral reefs cover only 1% of the world’s oceans, but provide habitat for at least 25% of the world’s marine life, with many reef species still to be discovered.
> Coral reefs have an estimated global value of £6 trillion each year, due in part to their contribution to fishing and tourism industries and the coastal protection they provide.
"New goal: not exceed 2°C, then bring the temperature back down to 1.5°C"
It kind of feels people have given up. I'm working on a startup that aims to replaces aviation (the most difficult emissions to avoid) with night trains in Europe (currently economically uncompetitive). It's an obvious impact story, but impact appears to be "out".
Nice concept. I caught European Sleeper last week, my first time on a night train. It was ok but I'd like something better if I was using it regularly.
It's a tough time to do something about climate change. Short-termism is very attractive right now.
I agree. I was looking at a night train from Milan to Lecce. It costed waaay more than flights+ the extra night in the hotel. Crazy if you think about it
IIRC night trains are kinda making a comeback - they are quite convenient that you can travel over night & wake up in your destination. Otherwise you would spend a day traveling & would need 1-2 days of accommodation on top of that.
Beds as opposed to seats mean fewer passengers per train carriage, so the fixed cost of operating the train is shared among fewer tickets.
You can make one trip per day with a night-train, whereas a seated train runs 16-20hrs per day. So again, fixed cost of the train existing is shared between far fewer ticket sales.
Then you need to store the train during the day, and you need to securely park the train when it arrives at its destination at night (a normal train yard isn't secure enough if you have a hotel full of people, and a train station usually needs all of its platforms).
The capacity really is the main issue, in terms of cost.
The second is lack of privacy, in terms of attractiveness. 6-people-per-cabin couchette cars have sufficient capacity, but the market isn't quite there anymore.
We basically want to get as many cabins as possible in railcar (to reduce cost), but they're are comfortable and private (to increase attractiveness). With these levers, you can change the operating margin from -15%..-10% to around 10%.
Hundreds of kilometres of good quality electric railway infra is expensive to maintain. And by good quality I mean capable of relatively decent speeds like say 120-160 km/h. With airports you need to maintain lot less.
The last couple of nightjets in the order from Siemens were converted back to day trains (rail jets), presumably because the trainsets are not economical enough (too few beds).
I'm against night trains. Much better to have high speed travel during the day and then at night close down the tracks completely and do your track maintenance so the tracks are good for the next day. You can get by with skipping maintenance here and there, but that quickly will come back to haunt you and make your trains even worse.
Take a great day train, get some plays and then take a hotel room for the night. That's the most sustainable way to travel.
Increased carbon emissions is a result of prosperity and progress.
I've always thought it's a little hypocritical that the first movers were 'allowed' to cut down all their trees, burn coal like no tomorrow, and yolo industry. However, when other cultures try and industrialise, it's a big nono.
We need to face the reality that our lifestyles come with a carbon cost which will impact the planet, and plan for something realistic. Setting moving, impossible goalposts is a pipedream, and a sign that someone has sat in a classroom too long.
The planet will change, it always has. Instead of endlessly whinging and spreading doom, we need to be realistic about who we are as a species and plan accordingly. We also need to build resilience into our systems so we can weather any future storms.
Also, a serious global carbon tax is the cleanest solution internationally; taxing extraction at source in line with the resulting costs of negative externalities and mitigation strategies. Could set up a nice fund for offering prizes to companies who hit certain milestones in green tech. A little bit like global competitions in Civ5.
We will continue extracting absolutely everything we can from Earth, at whatever the cost ... with the hope that technology will one day save us from our weakness.
And, yes, technologyy may "save us", but there are many different definitions of what that will look that ... some may be horrendous for the majority, but none of them will inconvenience those making the most significant decisions.
2 degree global warming means 5-6 degree more in new york (as the average mean temperature is meassured also above oceans/mountaints etc.) - and you can now ask yourself if you still want to live in NY when its 5-6 degree warmer than today?
> The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable
Good. Now, let's drop that goal and go on.
At least in Europe, higher priority should be saving human lives by providing air conditioning and a climate-friendly environment instead of putting more money into climate money washing machines.
I know i’ll be downvoted, but at this point whatever.
I largely stopped caring about these announcements and also about this initiatives.
The reason is that we see these pushes but at the same time we see no real initiative, with all the burden left on individuals with little to no power to make meaningful changes.
Some examples:
1. Travel: I’m constantly told that travel by airplane is bad and should be avoided and to prefer travel by train. Yet my last trip (milan <-> munich) was 1h for ~75€ each way via airplane BUT 8h and ~200€ each way via train. And this before even pulling in the “rich people private planes” talking point.
2. I still see essentially zero push towards widespread nuclear energy for proper electrification
3. Cars keep getting fucking larger and larger. It’s crazy to see how many SUVs i see everyday burning gas with just one person on board. Electric cars don’t really solve this issue because electricity generation is not yer 100% clean.
4. I still don’t see a general push towards unified public transportation. I don’t even want it to be completely free but FUCK i don’t want to deal with three different providers if i ever dare to get out of my city while staying within the region. God forbid i decide to go to another region somewhere outside a main city.
5. I still don’t see a general push towards work from home. I live in a city large enough to have public transportation but I know very well this is the exception and not the rule. Most people burn gas and emit co2 to unwillingly go to the office to do the same things they’d do from home while also bringing their company laptop from home. This is beyond moronic.
And don’t star blaming capitalism or whatever: i don’t see any meaningful push in the right direction from either side of the political tribune.
So whatever, shit is fucked up and stuff, we’re getting extinct, such is life i guess.
> Electric cars don’t really solve this issue because electricity generation is not yer 100% clean.
Electric cars reduce emissions even if electricity is 100% generated from gas (a gas power station has higher efficiency than ICE, burning gas emits less CO2 per watt than burning petrol). Also fraction of non-carbon sources in electricity generation is rising almost around the world, not as fast as one may want but rising. Large cars is mostly an American problem, most of the world even if wants large cars cannot afford them anyway.
Stop caring because not seeing initiatives is like inverting responsibilities.
Initiatives will come if people care.
Never in history the solution to major crisis came from politicians or alike.
Even if your contributions is small, it doesn't prevent you to do them. By which extent is a personal choice, but personally I chose to be consistent with myself and my values, and I don't care about the choices of others.
Regarding airplane, I much prefer an 8h+5min trip in train than a 1h+2h trip in plane because comfort is way better and you are not dealt with like cattle. Of course I wish the price advantage would be different than nowadays.
Electric cars are not yet the perfect solution, but they are already way better than fuel cars. As for the rest, my government says its the way to go, then I go.
Note that in GIEC report, nuclear (fission or fusion) was not identified as a major solution to climate change (only contribute 10% of the whole). The main contributors were green energies.
>Note that in GIEC report, nuclear (fission or fusion) was not identified as a major solution to climate change (only contribute 10% of the whole). The main contributors were green energies.
Probably because they were making assumptions based on LWRs and using LCOE to asses the costs, instead of something sensible like EROEI
To be fair: setting it as a temperature range was very
stupid from the get go. Also, to not consider the economic
impact, was also stupid, and the CO2-tax is also beyond
idiotic since it creates a fake-economy where people buy
the right to pollute. That runs counter to the idea of
green energy.
I think one should abandon the Paris Agreement and label
it as the failure as it was. However had that does not
mean that green energy should be abandoned. There need to
be more incentives towards green energy (see how Putin uses
gas as means to amplify his genocidal activity against
Ukrainians). Meaning, companies that verifiably transition
towards more renewable, need to get positive incentives to
go towards that and maintain it at all times. The CO2 tax
should also be eliminated without compensation. And there
also has to be more realism - it makes no sense to cut down
an economy, producing more unemployment in the process. It
has to be a cohesive unit.
Climate catastrophe will be the reason there's no food on the table.
This is already happening to crops like cocoa and coffee, and crops like maize and wheat are next.
If we're too stupid as a species to understand this, we can just let Darwin clean this up and give the planet another chance with different species in a few million years or so.
My point is that people want their short term economic needs met (food, shelter, quality of life).
You wont find broad support for policies that save an abstract future 40y away if you cause huge economic hardship on current people.
You can see how quickly support for addressing climate change erroded in the last few once more pressing short term needs of people were not met anymore. Academics and the upper middle class can keep theorizing about how to save the future because they can afford it while the less fortunate will turn to policies that dont hurt their short term prospects.
Bottom line is that ignoring the economic impact is foolish. No lasting political support
Humans are probably the only Earthlings that have any chance of achieving interplanetary civilization and persisting long term. If this civilization collapses and our energy technologies are lost then any future attempts at civilization will be facing a steeper slope to get those technologies back without the cheap and abundant fossil fuels we burned up. Many of those fuels may never return to this planet because life has evolved considerably so things like the Carboniferous may not happen again.
> Humans are probably the only Earthlings that have any chance of achieving interplanetary civilization and persisting long term.
Stop watching sci fi my dude, there is 0% chance we leave the solar system and probably even earth.
It's not a video game, there is no speed run, there is nothing out there for us, what's the hurry with burning and destroying our home planet ? Do you think we'll have it better on Mars lmao?
I'm not sure why you're responding as if my comment is some sort of hopium. I'm saying that if we don't stop ourselves from making Earth uninhabitable to us in the very near future, that this is the peak of technological civilization on Earth for all time. Whether human descendants or another sapient species comes out of the climate turmoil and tries to advance again, they're gonna hit a wall.
All our ambitions and dreams for the future hinge on reversing the damage we've done.
> Climate is going to be least important of your problems if you cant put food on the table.
??? We're already having record low crop yields CAUSED by climate change right now my dude. You won't have food on your plate BECAUSE of climate change
Not sure which economic impact you mean when the ultimate economic impact of climate catastrophe will be the complete destruction of the global economy.
This is not hyperbole. If nothing changes that's a completely realistic outcome within 50 - 100 years.
We could always make more war in the Middle East (and Europe) and then 1,5°C would be totally viable. /s
Seriously now: Attempts to cut fossil fuel supply are worthless unless done en masse and in big scale - any single country doing it will just spur investment in another country. Since the world will not come to a truly binding agreement, the only thing that can be truly regulated is demand which can be regulated locally without necessarily increasing demand elsewhere.
The big new ticket is data centers, which strongly tend to use fossils due to SLAs and regulations. This can be fixed by new regulations, but only if people act now before the new approvals and builds are done.
Well cutting is happening right now and very large scale. USA is kinda laggard here but eg new electric car sales is up 70% in Europe or new Solar installations are up 50% in Africa.
Your examples are examples of cuts on the demand side. They satisfy current transport/electricity demand with a means that costs much less carbon, so fossil demand goes down.
(By contrast, a supply cut is 'not developing new fossil resource cuz someone else will buy it and burn it', which is obviously a dead end).
Yes lets do it by continuing to outsource the pollution to China and deindustrialize Europe.
Cut the nuclear, add the imported solarpanels and experience the joy of 10x electricity prices.
Blame the consumer for not turning the kettle off during peak hours and make sure you give tax breaks to Google and BiGData to open a couple more datacenters that use more power than a average city.
Oh, ban combustion engines, fuck up every batteryfactory by thinking its enough to buy the Make-Your-Own-Battery-Kit on Aliexpress.
Europe's strategy has indeed been stupid, but not for the reasons you write.
Some parts of the energy transition are profitable, like EVs and heat pumps. This is where Europe dropped the ball.
Other parts are unprofitable, like hydrogen. This is what Europe has prioritized, without anything to show for it.
Then there are the ugly parts, like most carbon capture or importing virgin palm oil mislabelled as used cooking oil. Those things don't even decrease emissions. Again, Europe has focused too much on this.
If Europe would simply have banned combustion engines and gas boilers, emissions would have decreased drastically while prices would also decrease. Alas, Europe prioritized bad stuff instead.
Well, certainly not simple. It is actually workable and making a difference now because there's an alternative that works and is cheaper. the only thing we need to do is get people to start using it.
We probably shouldn't talk about an outright ban. There are a couple of places where we may need to say, in your niche, those don't work, so we'll let you continue using it. We'll worry about those later. Let's stop the vast majority of cases first. Then we start worrying about the niches.
People buying a new car can afford an EV. They should have to justify getting a gas engine. Part of this is they need to demand chargers (and more people buying EVs will result in chargers) in useful places to charge their car.
The above covers about 98% of all car sales: you can make an EV and if everybody else is also buying EVs that creates enough demand for things like chargers that they will automatically go in to fill the demand.
> If Europe would simply have banned combustion engines and gas boilers, emissions would have decreased drastically while prices would also decrease. Alas, Europe prioritized bad stuff instead.
I will remove the gas boiler when you give me £15,000 to put solar panels on my roof with a storage battery and to remove all the gas stuff out my house. I don't have a large house either (2 Bedroom).
We are burning the only planet we have in a contest to be king of the ashes.
Who gives a fuck whether the US or China win the AI race if they both burn tons of hydrocarbon to get there? Either way, the race itself will fuck the planet up worse than either victor would.
Same about all the dumb wars of conquest, Ukraine, Iran. Who gives a fuck over those lines on a map if the map itself is on fire? All the burning of oil depots, all the explosives used are all an assault on humanity itself, not just on whatever state construct.
I have a growing suspicion that this is the Great Filter. Dumb, self-important squabbles that destroy the material basis for a species' survival in an attempt to gain control instead of cooperation.
> I have a growing suspicion that this is the Great Filter.
Ackshually... It can be our filter, but it cannot be the Great Filter.
The Great Filter has to apply universally, to every plausible society. If even a few are cooperative hiveminds, or empires ruled by an iron fist, or... whatever else you can imagine that doesn't squabble internally... then the Filter does not apply to them, which means that their absence is still weird.
The Filter has three plausible answers, IMO: (1) Some variant of the planetarium or zoo hypothesis; (2) every advanced society, universally, decides to transcend into data centers powered by rotating black holes and stable for trillions of years, or something similarly weird; potentially also New Physics, like waste heat to mass conversion; (3) the filter is in our past and abiogenesis is a lot rarer than assumed.
Maybe we'll manage to launch some datacenters, then at least there'll be a backup of the database of how much each person's net worth is, floating above the dead planet...
And if we have several of them in space, they'll use blockchain, of course.
I honestly hoped the end would be the White Walkers just coming and killing everyone because they were too distracted and petty to mount a united defense. It would've made for a much stronger metaphor and fit in much better with the dark vibe and unexpected killing off of audience favorites that made the show a success in the first place.
I feel like the Disneyfied ending we got instead really ruined the show for me.
Its the only corner where one can try to talk some sense into some of the people directly involved in this process.
The self-professed unideological technical minds that pride themselves on first-principle thinking.
The walking contradictions that fail to recognize that it is in fact their ideology that is pushing us to this outcome, based on said first principles (thermodynamics ffs!) they do not actually take into account.
Is there anyone who actually cares about any of this?
Look at flightradar. Look at Marinetracker. Look how many cars are used every day and the billions of barrels of oil we're consuming.
We are not going to consume less oil, unless there's some manufactured event that stops us (like COVID), or we physically run out.
People are addicted to moving about, making things, entire economies rely on it.
And nobody here would sacrifice opportunity for a future that may not even happen. Even if you're the most conscious consumer, the world's going to heat up anyway. You not driving a gas car, or not eating meat, won't make any difference because somebody else will be there to consume what you leave behind.
And I plan to use as much oil as possible, take as many planes and cruises as I can, eat as much meat, because I frankly care less and I'm not going to miss out if I have the choice. I know I am not alone in this thinking and many, many others also no longer care, not that they ever did.
But you're more than welcome to leave the resources to others who will gladly use them.
I think the difficult part may be to explain to your children why you didn't care about their future. I'm guessing you're child-free, or do you home school?
There was a book on the overshoot nonsense a few years ago (literally called Overshoot) that talks about the make believe story of carbon capture and how during the negotiations for CAP in the 2000s and 2010s those were included as otherwise the US would have agreed to no plan at all. And even if something like removing carbon at scale through forestry, burning, and co2 capture was ever so viable who would pay for that. That only works with emissions trading (which every other month gets watered down because muh energy bills, muh aviation cost, etc) or some “energy costs nothing” mythological tech. We are fucked and while there are many who care the vast majority of people oscillates between too dumb, too selfish, and too manipulated to ever be willing to give up today’s comforts for a happier tomorrow.
I’m 38 years old, and I’ve worked in climate tech for the last 12 years. In my relatively short lifetime, and my relatively short career, I have seen the environment for political action, and funding for climate solutions, fluctuate maybe half a dozen times.
The physics, however, don’t change, and neither does the task in front of us.
I just spent ten months finding a job, the longest and most difficult job search of my career. It was hard because the macro environment is terrible, but also because I insisted on finding a role working on clean energy hardware.
At a time when basically all VC funding, and in many ways the entire productive capacity of the economy, is shifting to AI, it would have been smarter in some respects to just pivot to AI. I sat out the crypto bubble too, in which some of my peers made a lot of money by working on projects that were either useless, or straightforward scams.
We crossed the 1.5 degree threshold because the money can’t help itself. The slow, steady work of transitioning away from fossil fuels is never going to be as profitable, as quickly, as the various forms of gambling and addiction that have driven the tech industry for most of my lifetime.
But you, individually, can make the choice to keep your eye on the ball. You can commit to working on this problem until it’s done, no matter what. You can choose to find the others to organize and prepare, so that the ideas closest at hand when the next crisis comes are yours.
It’s the best solution I’ve come up with so far, and in spite of the challenges, it’s still working.
> You can commit to working on this problem until it’s done, no matter what.
My opinion is that the very first things people should do are:
1. Get a little bit informed. It doesn't require a PhD, it could be done instead of a fraction of the time they spend scrolling bullshit on their smartphone.
2. Accept the situation. Too many are in denial, with variants of "it's not that bad" or "it's because those in power are stupid, I would certainly fix the world" or "it's because of foreigners".
3. Vote accordingly.
It's too easy to say "we don't have any viable candidates" and "I don't understand why they haven't fixed the problem yet, they must be stupid (somehow implying that "in all likelihood I would have solved it by now")".
In relatively-functional democracies, the reason the people doesn't have viable candidates is because the people does not vote for competent people. Either because they vote for competent politicians (with modern politics being about getting elected, not exactly solving big problems) or because they proudly vote for extremists (which is of course even worse).
In a democracy, the people is the government. When the people says "the government is stupid", it reflects on the people. Maybe they're right: the government is stupid, because the people is stupid and elects stupid people, and that's why we're screwed.
I went from voting to electoral campaigns to the kind of activism that gets you arrested to working in climate as an engineer. I landed here because the first three were insufficient. I still support and encourage all of it, but the best you can get from voting is creating a better regulatory and funding environment for the necessary engineering and implementation work.
this is the correct kind of activism: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-five-yea... (HN Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49844657 )
"to the kind of activism that gets you arrested "
Glueing to the streets and alike?
I never found that to be helpful. Preventing chopping down forests to open new coal strip mining on the other hand .. I would be with you.
The latter gets you arrested even harder
Depends how you do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_Forest
Glueing to streets can lead to terrorism charges, taking part of a demonstration even if it is not a legal one so far not.
(but among those activists there are certainly more radical elements, also actual eco terrorists, they recently showed solidarity to someone who was hiding close there, who made attacks on power plants and transmission lines)
What do you mean? A lot of people got arrested in the course of the Hambach protests
Not the ones demonstrating, but those who threw stones at police and did sabotage.
Again not sure what you’re referring to.
The ones that made Hambach happen were the people that camped there in the woods literally for years in tree houses and they (some of them) also got arrested for it.
The arrests and prosecution I know of, are not because of living in a tree house there.
There was a lot of intentional ideological violence towards police. Part of the reason why I did not engage with them further, but I know people there.
They still camp there btw
I know that they tried to evict the people in the forest in 2018 and a bunch of people got arrested because they resisted the eviction. Later on they walked it back and let them stay but still some people got arrested not because of violence but because they occupied the forest.
The prosecutions are not because they camped there, but what about those who were arrested and not prosecuted? just taken into jail, strip searched, then let go outside the police station after a night in jail when nobody can find where they are? Without any prosecution because the police cannot stick them anything? The violence against the police is mostly not ideological, it's caused by a deep anger about how people are treated, getting teargased for nothing, or prevented from moving.
Also now with social media, you can find a lot of example of what are called in France "Appariteurs" who often start the mayhem then leave through police lines without getting arrested.
"The violence against the police is mostly not ideological, it's caused by a deep anger about how people are treated,"
Yes yes, I heard that before. Let's just say I have been to many demonstrations and know the scene so sure, unprovoked police violence is a thing. But otherwise the pattern I witnessed quite often(and especially in the context of Hambach) is: some throwing stones or worse at police, police reacts with batons and teargas .. "wah wah, evil police!!"
When you have ACAB as a mantra and the core group consists of left wing extremists, what do you expect?
The openly showed solidarity with someone doing literal sabotage attacks on power plants and transmission lines. They are beyond reason and I claim the Hambach was temporarily saved not because, but despite those radicals. The mass demonstrations were what helped.
> I went from voting to electoral campaigns to the kind of activism that gets you arrested
You make it sound like you proved I was wrong... somehow? I never said "0% of the world is informed and votes accordingly". I said that the majority isn't and doesn't.
Sure, once you realise you personally aren't able to change that, you can move to the next thing that makes you feel good (in this case working on "green tech", if I understand correctly). Some people go live in a hut in the woods.
Doesn't change the fact that the people is the government, and can generally vote for change. But they don't, for many reasons, including "they actually spend very little time thinking about those things". I would argue that most people spend vastly more time saying that the government is stupid than actually getting informed on problems and what it would take to solve them.
35% of greenhouse gases are released by China and Russia. These are not democracies. They have killed their people to remain in power.
Another 8-9% is from India which while still classified as a flawed democracy is borderline.
And 11% is in the US which I guess we will find out if it is a flawed democracy or hybrid regime over the next few months. But at best it is paralyzed by polarization on the issue. And also due to lobbying/bribery from oil producing nations and states. The electoral system enforces two party rule which caused this problem in many nations, most of which are no longer classified as democracies.
These are also incidentally the nations best poised to solve the engineering issue of maintaining modern QOL while reducing emissions. The US has certainly contributed and China is working the issue very aggressively, largely out of a need for energy independence. But both of those contributions are fragile. The polarization is affecting it in the US and if China secured sources of energy that were cheaper but emitted, they would not hesitate.
> 35% of greenhouse gases are released by China and Russia
And we all import tons of stuff from China. Stop importing from China if you want to reduce their carbon footprint. Instead of paying them to build cheap stuff and then complaining because they build stuff for you.
Aren’t they essentially Leninist? Like if they weren’t burning coal to make Nikes and iPhones they’d be burning it for something else? So what’s the point of my choices here? I’m not even complaining, but from a problem-solving standpoint, seems kind of irrelevant.
Yet China has successfully pivoted to EVs, is building more nuclear than anywhere else, and is also helping the rest of the planet move to EVs.
As I said, they are aggressively contributing to the engineering side of emissions reductions. Probably the worlds most effective contributor in that regard. They are also the worlds largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Both are true. My final point is that those contributions are not altruistic, and their motivations could change if the entire oil production of Russia gets piped to them, they achieve naval dominance enough to secure malacca etc.
You have completely failed to take into account population.
Unless you can make a good case that some people have some kind of natural or divine right to a bigger share of whatever planetary CO2 budget we decide we have, shares have to be allocated per person rather than per country.
Any other systems leads to absurdity once you take into account that groupings of people can change.
Sure, per capita makes sense and that pushes some middle eastern countries to the top, with china and india way behind the us in emissions. But the post that started this was about voting to fix the climate. My whole point was that all the countries that are producing the majority of emissions aren't very democratic (us, india), or aren't at all (china russia), so voting is really quite irrelevant.
Both can be true statements.
They are also building more coal plants than anyone else.
The number of plants is irrelevant. What is important is how much coal they use. That is going down because most of these new plants are built to just run at times when the renewables cannot handle the load.
Why coal when the peaks exceed what renewables can offer? The same reason the US builds natural gas plants (and is building more of those than anyone else in the world)--it is their fossil fuel that is the cheapest and has the most secure supply.
They are also building more renewables than anyone else. And unlike the new coal plants, they actually use the renewables.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292
What point are you making, that China is doing it right, pay no attention to China? They produce the most emissions, and are not amenable to international plans to reduce emissions, making everybody else's efforts futile. Want to see the ourworldindata graph (again, probably)? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-share-of-co2-emiss...
> They produce the most emissions
Oh yeah well your country produces more emissions than Vatican City. Since absolute emissions are bad, no matter the size of the country, your country sucks too. Every country that isn't in last place for emissions sucks! Get your emissions down to Vatican City levels otherwise you're just as bad as everyone else /s
> are not amenable to international plans to reduce emissions
Please tell me more about this. They're actually flattening or reducing emissions. They signed the Paris agreement.
> Want to see the ourworldindata graph (again, probably)?
That graph tells me North America and Europe combined produce the nearly the same as China. That means if they go 0 carbon tomorrow, it's like taking out one China's worth of emissions. Is that futile?
North America and Europe have also emitted way more cumulatively than China. Historic emissions are the cause of problems today.
Here's another ourworldindata graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions
If you tell me "historic emissions" don't matter then I have to ask, where is the line? Do China's emissions yesterday also not matter? That's historic too, right?
What? The country that is in first place for emissions is causing most of the emissions.
> They're actually flattening or reducing emissions.
Reeeeally. Not reflected in the graph yet. Which of those is it anyway, flattening out, at a third of global emissions?
I've heard "historic emissions" before. You haven't reached for "per capita" yet. "Lump all the other countries together and blame it on them" is a new one. But what are you doing? Trying everything not to blame China, why?
> Do China's emissions yesterday also not matter? That's historic too, right?
That one doesn't even work, I could just agree that it's all about today's emissions.
> The country that is in first place for emissions is causing most of the emissions.
I'm not aware of a dictionary which defines "most" as 31%.
> Not reflected in the graph yet
Actually it is. The graph you yourself shared. And it only goes up to 2024. The following year had actual reductions.
https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/
> Trying everything not to blame China, why?
You're trying everything to blame only China. Why?
> I've heard "historic emissions" before
And you think they don't matter? What do you think is warming the planet right now?
> You haven't reached for "per capita" yet.
Hey if per capita isn't important then get your country into last place. Until then it sucks just as hard as every other country not in last place. That's what you're saying, not me.
The reason I blame China is because their 32% is within the control of their authoritarian government, while the rest of the world has to wrangle awkward agreements between many countries, and political will in any individual country is sapped by awareness that only a small fraction of total emissions would be affected anyway, which wouldn't actually stop e.g. wildfires, so participation in a grand global plan is the only persuasive policy, but those grand global plans, such as they are, include agreement that China will carry on as usual.
Yes, I think who did what in the past is irrelevant to solving a problem now. What's that for, punishing sinners? Not the goal. We can decide that it's not morally China's fault (ha), but they'd still be the ones doing it, and it would still be hot (in the future, the only controllable part).
I can't comprehend this "last place" stuff. I think your idea - or ideology - is that the West is responsible (as in having agency) and blames China as a distraction. This flies in the face of the plain facts of where emissions come from and which entities have control over that, specifically the CCP and the CCP.
> The reason I blame China is because their 32% is within the control of their authoritarian government
And you believe this government will be able to order the population to stop burning fossil fuels, go back to living pre-industrial lives? Heck no.
That government was however able to order far-seeing investments in solar panel and battery manufacturing (done for national security, not climate, but who cares).
Even if China went 0 carbon, it wouldn't solve climate change because the other 69% of emissions would continue. Existing emissions will go on causing heating. Everyone has to make a change.
China for its part has done a ton of heavy lifting with its 31% of emissions. It manufactures abundant panels and batteries which make the transition cheap for everyone.
> Yes, I think who did what in the past is irrelevant to solving a problem now
You may think so, probably because you live in a rich country. But the people in developing countries asked to sacrifice in solving the problem do not.
If you move into a shared house with existing housemates, would you accept that you have to clean the already-disgusting bathroom prior to moving in because you have IBS and would use the bathroom more after moving in? You'd say "fuck no the people already living here messed it up".
That's what convincing developing countries to abandon fossil fuels at great personal cost is like. Make it cheap for them and they will do it. But if they see Westerners driving SUVs and flying everywhere, it's the same as your average Westerner's resentment of Elon Musk's private jet.
> they'd still be the ones doing it, and it would still be hot
Only 31% of it. Not even most of it. It would still be hot if they stopped.
> I can't comprehend this "last place" stuff.
It's the same as your "first place" stuff. If "most emissions" is terrible and everyone else is blameless, then "least emissions" is unalloyed good and everyone else is to blame.
> that the West is responsible (as in having agency) and blames China as a distraction
I think everyone is responsible and the West blames China as an excuse to do nothing (probably China does the same internally, I have no idea). Most emissions happen outside of China and are very much within the West's power to affect.
> the people in developing countries
China, you mean, not changing the subject?
> asked to sacrifice in solving the problem do not.
So you mean that China wants the west to make some emission reductions, and then China will cut back on industry. I'm inclined to think they might be happy just with the first part and not bother with the second.
I think their 32% is instrumental to the rest of the world's political will, so I'm pretty much saying the reverse of what you're saying. This might indeed be a "you first" sort of situation, but there's no credible dialog about it anyway, Paris Shmaris.
> China, you mean, not changing the subject?
No I mean all developing countries including China. For example, India's emissions are rapidly rising and people in the West love using that as a secondary pretext for their own inaction.
> So you mean that China wants the west to make some emission reductions, and then China will cut back on industry.
China already has reduced fossil fuel use in electricity generation and industry. I gave you two sources earlier. Here's a third: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-energy-transi...
Now if you're intent on blaming solely China regardless of the facts, I really can't help you. You should examine your blindspots and biases before continuing the discussion.
> I'm inclined to think they might be happy just with the first part and not bother with the second.
I'm not. China is more exposed to climate change than most Western countries. And also PV and batteries are legitimately cheaper than burning coal. So they might just race ahead on sheer economics while we bicker.
> I think that 32% is instrumental to the rest of the world's political will,
I really don't think so. They'll just pick on India or some other poor country trying to haul themselves out of poverty. Because "political will" was never about what China or India do. It's about protecting the fossil fuel industry and its cheap energy.
A ton of carbon is a ton of carbon. It doesn't matter who reduces their emissions. Since we both agree on that logic, then the question is "who reduces emissions first?".
To me it's obvious: the richest countries first, because they have the most money to do it. This is where our views diverge.
In the west, people don't like various heatwaves and storms and fires, and they'd get behind a persuasive plan. What plan, though? They also like cheap energy. The reason why they vote for that is because they'll probably get it, while they won't get a cure for extreme weather. That's where international agreements, and the obstructiveness of the specific obstructive country in question, come into it. If your international agreement doesn't really do anything, the cheap energy has more persuasive power.
Why is "trying to haul themselves out of poverty" an excuse for causing climate change, by the way? That's a good trade-off, you imply? Being a poor underdog means you can have a dirty industrial revolution, because it's only fair that you should get a turn at burning a load of coal, is that the idea?
You say "China is more exposed": do they - anybody influential in China - actually express any concern about it? I don't know either.
> Why is "trying to haul themselves out of poverty" an excuse for causing climate change, by the way? That's a good trade-off, you imply?
It's a better reason than "I like hamburgers and steaks, big cars, and jet travel". Do you imply the West's choices are somehow nobler? Or is it ok because those "sins" as you call them are grandfathered in?
What are a poor country's choices? Stay poor, climate change happens anyway, and now they don't have any money to deal with it. Or get rich and have a chance of surviving.
> Being a poor underdog means you can have a dirty industrial revolution, because it's only fair that you should get a turn at burning a load of coal, is that the idea?
They would happily use free or heavily subsidized solar panels and batteries instead. Rich countries could easily fund this and tariff anyone who still burns fossil fuels. Why not do that instead of going "It's useless to do anything because China blah blah"?
> do they - anybody influential in China - actually express any concern about it?
They have targets to reduce carbon emissions, energy consumption per unit of GDP, particulate pollution, non-fossil fuel energy in total energy consumption, and increase forest cover in their current and previous 2 5-year plans. I didn't go back further than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_Five-Year_Plan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Five-Year_Plan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_Five-Year_Plan
In many ways, EVs and renewables esp. turbine generators are byproducts of coal. Look into how the vast majority of rare-earths are mined.
China is not stable.
its very interesting, because the US and India will suffer strongly from the effects of climate change.
Russia not so much, the melting of the perma frost might even enable agriculture in some regions previously impossible.
China will also suffer strongly, they know this so they are investing heavily also in resilience measures. anti desertification measures in the green wall, Water management, even geo engineering (which caused some tensions with india about raining off clouds before the water drifts away)
> Russia not so much
Source? Climate change causes a lot more issues than just "it's a few degrees warmer", are you aware?
Like... extreme weather events and biodiversity loss, for a start.
> And 11% is in the US
Well, you did qualify it with "in the" US but the US military is a bigger polluter than many nation states; number one source of carbon emissions in the world
Soooo yeah, Murica. As your vanity demands; all the attention is on you.
I and the rest of the world look forward to the US objectively failing to meet the moment.
The US Military: Bigger Polluter Than Most Countries
If the US Defense Department were a country, it would have ranked 59th worldwide in emissions in 2024
https://thebulletin.org/2026/08/mission-impossible-quantifyi...
I recommend any doubters to watch Abby Martin's documentary Earth Greatest Enemy.
That's why it was so important for the US to lead when it was the superpower that had the authority, respect and most influence over institutions of international cooperation. We're in the process of throwing all those accomplishments of the 20th century away. We used to be the good guys.
The less-bad guys maybe? Good guys are pretty hard to find in any honest history books. The moment is gone in any case. Emissions reductowould no longer be sufficient even of we had any confidence they would occur. Engineering solutions need to start focusing on climate engineering in parallel to clean energy. Both will definitely be needed to mitigate the losses to human quality of life.
"Doesn't change the fact that the people is the government"
That is not true in large parts of the world. Now even the most absolute monarchy has to listen to the people sometimes, but they absolutely can and do choose to do whatevery the small power circle on top wants, as long as the situation is somewhat under control for them.
> Doesn't change the fact that the people is the government
That completely ignores realities of society, power and influence, even in democratic societies.
I don’t know of any candidates (except a few outliers who have my support) who are pledging to reduce the footprint of the largest polluters. All anyone is willing to do is offer “feel-good” initiatives that make life harder for average people, building popular resistance to addressing climate issues, without actually taking the substantial, difficult steps that are needed. Meanwhile they work together on tightening the social control grid that is being rushed to completion before shit finally hits the fan.
> Maybe they're right: the government is stupid, because the people is stupid and elects stupid people, and that's why we're screwed.
Now you’re getting it. But they are stupid for a reason. The people are stupid because they are poorly educated and distracted by entertainment; they are poorly educated and distracted by entertainment because policy makers prefer passive consumers to active citizens; despite the long-term downsides, policy makers choose to create passive consumers because they are easier to control and unable to contest their power.
One of Reagan’s advisors warned that free higher ed was creating a dangerous “educated proletariat”, and he was right! The response to this danger was to end state funding of college tuition, to strip out funding for the humanities, and to gradually turn colleges into job prep centers rather than centers of higher learning. (This process started in earnest with Reagan, but you’ll notice that it was never rolled back.)
People did try to fight this, but we lost. And now here we are.
> I don’t know of any candidates (except a few outliers who have my support) who are pledging to reduce the footprint of the largest polluters
First, you apparently do know candidates like that, so...
Second, the reason we don't have candidates like that is because the candidates who get elected are the ones who do what they are doing now. Extremists get elected by being extreme, and they are because the people vote for them. If the people voted for consensual candidates trying to get the people together to find solutions, then we would have more of those. People in the US voted twice for Trump, no wonder all the other candidates are looking more and more like him. You get what you vote for.
> The people are stupid because they are poorly educated and distracted by entertainment; they are poorly educated and distracted by entertainment because policy makers prefer passive consumers to active citizens;
I don't know why people are stupid, but one thing I know for sure is that there are enough resources out there for them to inform themselves. And most people in Western democracies are educated, so they are capable of getting informed. They just... don't do it. Laziness maybe?
People being stupid doesn't lead to any specific outcome, it adds noise and randomness. To the extent that policies were the outcome of stupidity, those could equally well have been policies to reduce emissions.
If you throw LEGOs on the ground, they will form all sorts of random constructions, but it's very unlikely that they will end up building a model of the Empire State Building.
I would argue that in order to solve systemic problems, it's not enough to "randomly vote correctly once in a while". It needs to be carefully built.
I'm not surprised at all that "randomness" results in us not tackling the biggest problems our species has been confronted to.
> I don't know why people are stupid, but one thing I know for sure is that there are enough resources out there for them to inform themselves. And most people in Western democracies are educated, so they are capable of getting informed. They just... don't do it. Laziness maybe?
This, folks, is the power of neoliberalism distilled. Is there a problem? Why, it must be the fault of the many individuals who failed to take the appropriate action. Of course there is no consideration that many individuals together encompass a group who may be part of a larger system in which causality flows both ways.
Your comment here is not so different from accusations against “the blacks” (“why don’t they just stop committing crimes?”) or “the jews” or other groups. It is a simple reformulation of the classic “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. Obviously, if you fail to do so, it is a moral failure. Obviously.
The fact that this outlook infests so many minds is exactly why we have ended up here today.
If the trajectory continues, one day the people will pull themselves up by their collective bootstraps, and a real nightmare will begin, because such things are never clean.
So when people massively vote for extremists, it's fine, but when they massively get informed and decide to try to do something constructive, it's... "never clean"?
> Why, it must be the fault of the many individuals who failed to take the appropriate action
I am actually addressing the opposite: people tend to say "it's because of the few in the governments", as if they themselves would do better.
> Of course there is no consideration that many individuals together encompass a group who may be part of a larger system in which causality flows both ways.
I don't understand the "causality flowing both ways" part, but for the rest, that's EXACTLY my point. People are collectively part of a system, and they are collectively NOT solving the problem at all. And in relatively good approximation, they are blaming the people THEY elected.
Now being part of a system and not having the power to change it individually is one thing. Being part of a system getting worse, complaining all the time about it getting worse (to the point of going in the streets and burning cars/schools), but not being able to actually realise that it is more complicated than "it's not my fault, it's the elites"... Well I don't know how to call it, but it's tragic.
> So when people massively vote for extremists, it's fine, but when they massively get informed and decide to try to do something constructive, it's... "never clean"?
I was implying a revolution, which is almost always bloody and destructive, and almost never ends the way people want it to.
You completely missed the point on everything else. “Society” as a whole is both a bottom-up and a top-down construct. In more functional times, both sides influence and are influenced by each other. My contention is that the top is exerting enormous and extraordinary influence on the bottom to prevent any sort of reform, going so far as to sabotage their education, flood the media with propaganda, and actively implement divide-and-conquer strategies. Under these conditions, you can’t exactly blame the bottom for failing to find their footing.
You especially can’t blame them when most of the candidates who promise to “do something” are either co-opted or compromised from the start. The media says, vote for change! They just fail to mention that change is not on the menu of options. And woe to the few men of means who try to run for Congress to actually get something done; they don’t last long.
These conditions have only gone on for as long as they have because as Adam Smith said, “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” But there isn’t much wire left in the walls to strip out and sell. The pain has been unevenly distributed, with just enough people enjoying a decent standard of living to prevent any real mass movement. That won’t be true for much longer; we are running short of runway.
I think you hit the root causes dead centre there but there's an unfortunate consequence to your argument that you didn't call out.
The only way this changes is if there is real political/government leadership on the issue. That leadership can direct national resources. It can legislate. It can even tax - if necessarily to a very high degree - less useful ways of spending available resources in the private sector to deter waste.
We can't get that kind of leadership in many countries at the moment because too many people will just vote for whichever party they always have or whichever populist nutter has the most convincing sound bites. So before the political problem can be resolved there needs to be much more public education on the realities of the issue.
This is unfortunately a circular argument because the public information campaigns that are needed to fix the education problem are only going to be run by political/government leadership of the required calibre. If anything the populist lightweights will push the other way because dumbing down the voting population helps to sustain their own control and importance.
My hope is that before it's too late there will be enough politicians who are both capable of dealing with the real issues here and capable of taking on the populists convincingly enough to get elected to start moving the needle. Unfortunately I don't really see any other way this gets fixed instead of spiralling downwards.
> This is unfortunately a circular argument because the public information campaigns
I got educated in public schools. I was given all the tools needed to get informed and understand the problems well enough to... well at least not vote for extremists.
Saying "it's not the people's fault, it's the government that actively prevents them" is wrong in my experience. Even when the public education is good enough, extremism rises as soon as life becomes harder.
I don't think extremism and populism are the same thing FWIW - at least not as the terms are used here in the UK. (Obviously there is some overlap.)
A recurring problem with politics is that even a lot of decent and reasonably intelligent people still aren't interested enough to spend a lot of their time looking into political issues in detail. And that's understandable! Most adults have enough to worry about with jobs and families and their own hobbies and interests. The point of representative democracy as commonly used in Western nations is to have representatives who can devote their time to getting involved and understanding the issues on behalf of those they represent. But then how do voters know that the people they vote to represent them will take a good position on the issues that matter to them? A lot of it comes down to rhetoric and trust - and that's how folksy populist politicians manage to win votes and get elected even if better informed voters can see straight through the sales pitch.
The kind of public information campaigns I'm talking about here are the ones that try to raise awareness of the most important points about the most important political issues among the general population who can't or won't do enough research to find out for themselves. It's about getting the core message and basic facts to enough people who would then support doing sensible things as long as they have that essential information. But of course there can be a fine line between public information based on facts and logical reasoning from one party and mere political propaganda from another. The same tools of government and taxpayer funding can support either in exactly the same way - depending on who is already in power at the time.
“ When the people says "the government is stupid", it reflects on the people. Maybe they're right: the government is stupid, because the people is stupid and elects stupid people, and that's why we're screwed.”
Yep, George Carlin said this best when he was still alive. Bad Government is simply garbage in, garbage out, if the people are stupid, they will elect stupid people
> In a democracy, the people is the government.
This is just not true. There are many reasons so-called democratic elections fail to capture the will of the people. One of them is that many decisions are bundled into one, so lower priority decisions get sidelined by high priority ones.
The problem here isn't the people, it's a system that is built to have the appearance of being run by the people, while in reality the people will never be given reins to the system.
> The problem here isn't the people, it's a system that is built to have the appearance of being run by the people, while in reality the people will never be given reins to the system.
In Switzerland, the people can actually collect signatures and then vote to add articles to their Constitution. So they are very much in control. Check what they have voted in the last few years. When you ask the people, they actually don't give a shit about the climate problem. Then they say the problem is the government (not sure if they say that in Switzerland though).
This may be a contrarian view here, but a government that would force its citizens to reduce carbon footprint would be authoritarian by the views of most. China keeps backing the concept even though they are the greatest polluters and Putin got Schroeder in Germany to shut down nuclear. Authoritarian government without failure lead to wars. A war will come as a direct consequence of politicians selected because they can force people to do something “for their own good”.
You shouldn’t want political solutions to solve this - you want economic ones. I’ve been driving EVs almost exclusively for almost a decade and happy to see less smoke in the air, because and increasing number around are doing the same. Having solar during massive energy price spikes has been awesome. Tech that converts carbon from the air into bricks or some new type of fuel that generates revenue would quickly make factories want to capture it. Crops that grow in dry areas or tech to capture water and energy locally made affordable will increase local economies in countries that currently have so little that war is the only thing on the docket.
Forcing people to change what they eat or to pay reparations to countries that actually cause the pollution (much climate change action funnels money to China) or to lose jobs and factories will get you into war, because that’s precisely what authoritarians like Putin and China use to subjugate Europe.
Unfortunately a) economics and politics are inextricably tied and b) politicking will be required to allow economics to have a greater effect (ie by offsetting externalities through taxation).
"Putin got Schroeder in Germany to shut down nuclear."
Merkel did after Fukoshima and with broad public support.
The nuclear phase-out came into effect in 2002, under first Red-Green Schroeder government. (the "Act on the structured phase-out of the utilization of nuclear energy for the commercial generation of electricity")
Merkel government wanted to postpone the nuclear phase-out, but after Fukoshima, reverted to the original Red-Green nuclear phase-out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa...
"Authoritarian government without failure lead to wars."
Huh? Who has China invaded this year? And the USA?
Run your statements though an evidence filter first.
They also blamed China for being the largest polluter. Which, while true on a pure numbers basis, doesn't really account for population/per capita and total renewables.
It also dismisses the fact China's pollution is everyone's pollution when they make most of the crap we buy.
Yes, current polling basically indicates that the US electorate's overwhelming preference is "cheap gas".
Correct, and the reason I work in climate tech is Amory Lovins’ famous observation that people don’t care where their energy comes from, they care about “hot showers and cold beer”
Who is claiming that climate change is caused by foreigners?
Indeed and don't underestimate the influence you can have by participating in candidate selection (depending on your electoral system). For example in the UK the replacement candidate for a safe seat [i.e. almost guaranteed to be won by the party of the sitting representative] upon retirement of the incumbent may be decided by just a room full of people. Be in that room.
> the government is stupid, because the people is stupid and elects stupid people, and that's why we're screwed.
the government isn't stupid -- it's smartly serving the interests of the wealthy, who are primarily concerned with increased profits in the companies they hold shares in, not the wellbeing of Americans (much less those in other countries)
the US gov for the most part, has always been pro-owners (a small minority), not pro-workers (the vast majority of Americans) -- it's a structural feature, not a bug. and that's why it's so difficult to change unless things get so bad and the threat of social revolution is so great, that the gov is forced to make concessions -- this mostly only happened once, during the Great Depression
> In a democracy, the people is the government
sure, in theory. but in the US you'd have to start by overturning Citizens United so that the people -- not corporations -- are the ones driving elections
What is your reaction to credentialed physical scientists who accept that climate changes and that human greenhouse-gas emissions have an effect, but reject or dispute important parts of the mainstream assessment? They do have a Ph.D. and one of them has a Nobel Prize in Physics so it's difficult to ignore them. This is not to take a position but to point out that they can hardly be idiots; if you think they are, this needs to be made plain.
> They do have a Ph.D. and one of them has a Nobel Prize in Physics so it's difficult to ignore them.
Hard disagree here. Having a PhD only says you got hired for a PhD and spent years doing stuff. Doesn't make your opinion better than a scientific consensus. Having a Nobel Prize means that you won the lottery when you chose your field of research (if you were lucky enough to have a choice there). There is a famous "regression to the mean" with Nobel Prizes who then have a tendency to be confidently wrong for the rest of their life.
Not saying that PhDs and Nobel Prizes are worth nothing of course. What I'm saying is that science is about consensus. It's okay to believe that the consensus is wrong and to try to prove it, but until you manage to do it, you have to admit that the consensus is the best theory we have.
> This is not to take a position but to point out that they can hardly be idiots; if you think they are, this needs to be made plain.
I don't think they are. I think people tend to misunderstand how science works.
If the vast majority of scientists in a field agree on something, and few disagree, that's perfectly normal. Now when you take one scientist from the minority, realise that they are not stupid, and conclude from there that it would be rational to believe that the large consensus is wrong... then you are doing it wrong.
In other words, a scientist could say "you should believe the consensus about global warming, but my research is about trying to prove them wrong. Until them I have failed, given that the consensus is what it is, and therefore you should not base your survival on my ideas". Of course they won't, and in all fairness it shouldn't be their job to say that. We really just need people to understand how science works, and stop thinking that they can select the one study they like and say "it's true, I choose to believe this one".
> 1. Get a little bit informed. It doesn't require a PhD, it could be done instead of a fraction of the time they spend scrolling bullshit on their smartphone.
The problem is that as soon as you start digging into it, you're essentially walking in a guilt trip.
The kind of "eating an hamburger pollutes more than driving an SUV for 50 miles" guilt trip.
And you realize most of the focus should be on materialism, consumerism and how/what you eat, not just cleaner transport.
But who really wants to do so? I myself am aware that me eating a beef steak per week has a gigantic impact on environment and resources. That switching to pork > chicken > eggs in that same meal would be better.
But I just don't want to enter the guilt trip. So I do a bit, but not as much as I could.
A carbon tax should help there. Make it so me eating a steak is not incentivized. But then good luck with farmers, the easiest like and empathy grabbing category of workers on the planet.
Oh good lord do I hate this "your carbon footprint" rhetoric.
Eating a hamburger or driving a car is not the problem at an individual level.
These companies are: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/revealed... Going to bet not much has changed since 2019.
You can't vegan hamburger your way to terminating those enterprises. You can tax, regulate and ban them though; and use the revenue to help society adjust.
Yeah. I raise my own cattle and the amount of beef we get from a single cow is more than enough to meet our beef needs for a year (at normal Western averages). They are a "closed loop" - they forage on plant material that would grow and rot anyway and actually condition the soil and make our pasture and forest healthier, and remove any need to buy fertiliser for our gardens or pasture.
Telling people that eating a burger is somehow having a huge environmental impact is nonsense, and it becomes rather obvious it's just promoted by people who want to promote veganism for philosophical reasons who have hijacked the environmental reasons.
It is also a complete no-go in China where veganism is viewed with suspicion because it is associated with religious fanaticism.
> You can't vegan hamburger your way to terminating those enterprises. You can tax, regulate and ban them though; and use the revenue to help society adjust.
You can't tax, regulate, or ban them when people still eat hamburgers. Who would vote in favor of that?
But if enough people eat vegan hamburgers...
We have living proof that laws against meat get passed when voters eat less meat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_slaughter_in_India#Legi...
In this case the motivation is religion, not environment. The outcome is the same though.
> Eating a hamburger or driving a car is not the problem at an individual level.
Strongly disagree. Oil is not getting produced because a handful of companies want to ruin the planet-- that happens because billions want those oil products, for personal mobility, cheap goods, cheap energy.
A lot of people simply don't care enough about the future consequences; they want to continue cheap consumption for as long as possible, and find justifications and excuses easily enough ("China emits so much more anyway", "I can't afford to pay more for gas", "why should I have to make any sacrifices that my parent generation did not have to make", etc.).
If you could disperse every last one of those companies into tiny 20-man operations, you would solve absolutely nothing. What would solve things is if a majority of people (in industrialized nations) would become willing to pay the cost for fast and extensive (green) electrification, to downregulate the size and frequency of personal transport, to pay a premium for green concrete and steel, to accept higher prices and worse availability in order to sanction any trading partner that is not similarly serious about emissions.
We can't get any of the above not because of evil corporations or politicians, but simply because most people just don't want to pay the price and make the sacrifice now for a better future.
Extremists, as in lumping trump together left wing folks who want a green new deal and to actually do something about the problem?
No socialist/lefty has been elected in the US despite their ideas being super popular. Don't act like voting for a centrist dem like Biden would do anything but ever so slightly slow the climate change scenario we're in. We absolutely need and FDR new deal scope of attack on this problem.
The revisionist history on Joe Biden is insane. I honestly can’t even explain it, other than the idea that there must be an extremely effective opposition campaign to smear him.
The dude engaged in more climate action than any previous president. The Inflation Reduction Act was a huge clean energy manufacturing bill. This is established fact that isn’t even really disputed from what I can tell.
Remember those EV subsidies that disappeared under Trump’s second term? Yeah, those did more to curb fossil fuel consumption than just about anything else the government could have done with direct action. Transportation accounts for 28% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The US is wildly car-dependent. The government should be practically forcing US auto buyers into EVs through EV incentives and gas taxes.
Americans are woefully uninformed about how their own government works. Even watching Schoolhouse Rock would teach you that presidents don't write or vote on bills.
>there must be an extremely effective opposition campaign to smear him.
In your world, Joe Biden was the modern day Abraham Lincoln, and the Russian propaganda firms are working overtime on HackerNews "smearing him".
In reality, Joe Biden was a career politician because he'd say whatever needed to be said to be elected at the time.
I’m definitely not saying he was a modern Abraham Lincoln, please don’t extend my words beyond their reach.
Being a career politician doesn’t mean anything positive or negative without further context. All that means is that you are winning elections.
You can be a career politician because you are popular and effective, or you can be a career politician because your political machine has done a good job of keeping you in power — or both.
Bernie Sanders has been in congress about as long as Susan Collins and they are definitely not the same people in terms of the integrity of their ideology and congressional voting record.
In actual reality "Joe Biden was a career politician because he'd say..." does not in any way contradict "Joe Biden did x and engaged in more y..." Outcomes matter, regardless of motives. Do you see the difference?
The rest is changing the subject - derailing and inflammatory.
>1. Get a little bit informed
These viewpoints are exhausting.
A little informed about what? That we are destroying the planet slowly? Yeah, we know.
What is your actual solution? That we tell people they can't have plastic straws? That we need to install solar and wind farms (which is already happening at mass scale in the West, by the way. That includes the US)?
What are you actually proposing? That we "vote"? Do you want to de-industrialize your corner of the world, like Europe is doing, while the rest of the world plows ahead unabated?
Until you're ready to go to war for this, it's unrealistic. And good luck trying to force any country to do anything you want without a well equipped war-machine. You think Russia, India or China care what Europe thinks about their climate policies?
So, yeah, go ahead and vote in your green parties.
> What is your actual solution?
There is no easy solution. If you think that installing solar and wind farm is "a solution", then... you misunderstand the size of the problem.
> What are you actually proposing?
Get informed, work your way towards accepting how bad it actually is, and then work your way towards accepting that life will get more complicated and that we have to work together to try to keep is a bearable as possible.
As long as people will be adversarial (like you are here, criticising green parties for no reason, I don't even vote for them) we'll be screwed. As long as people will go in the streets because "life is getting harder", we'll be screwed.
The only solution we have is to work together. And even if we do (we probably won't, but let's be optimistic), our life will get more complicated. That's why I say that the first step is to accept that. We won't solve the problem while being in denial.
I think it is fundamentally a demographic problem. We have a growing aging population in the worst-offending western countries, soon to be the majority voters (in some countries we are approaching 50% voters above age of 50). Wealth and fortune tend to come with age, so the same group sits on the assets needed to make a change (and are the worst offenders regarding CO2 production). At the same time, this group cares the least about the future livability of the planet, as the worst symptoms will only start to show when they have already passed away.
That is a fundamental problem that you will not solve by asking youger folks, who are actually affected and have all reason to agree and comply, to make a change.
I doubt that even younger folks in developed countries will be affected as drastically as "livability" perhaps implies.
I get the feeling that many are confused and fear the literal destruction of our planet by accelerating warming.
The reality is that the underlying physics fundamentally work in the opposite way, with warming slowing down rather than accelerating. I understand that for warming below 2C, the confidence is high that it is roughly a linear relation to additional CO2 emitted.
I'm optimistic about most things in life, perhaps it's a flaw of mine.
I do think we have decades, if not centuries, to develop solutions to climate change. Our planet will remain livable.
That said, I understand some ecological damage that may occur with global warming could be irreversible, and it makes sense to reduce emissions as soon as possible.
I think the whole framing of climate issues as "saving the planet" is misguided. Yes, the planet will remain livable pretty much no matter what. The threat of climate change isn't the literal destruction of the planet, or even the literal extinction of humanity. Rather it's such severe changes to the planet's biosphere that human civilization would be threatened.
Potential climate catastrophe scenarios where rapidly rising sea levels submerge many inhabited areas and various knock-on effects disrupt the food chain, even in those scenarios the planet is fine on geological timescales. What's not fine is human civilization, on human timescales. And I think this is what gets inadvertently hidden behind planet-saving rhetoric. If the worst case scenarios are "only" about billions of people dying due to resource scarcity and conflicts over said resources, this is something to be avoided.
I see a parallel with global nuclear war. Such a war would probably not end the species, there would be groups of survivors here and there. But human civilization as we know it would be over, with the global population being back to what it was in the hunter-gatherer era.
Isn't even that dramatically overstated?
If sea levels rise significantly faster than over the last century, this seems likely to cause economic disruption, rather than threatening human civilization.
Even when we look at knock-on effects and food security, it seems very unlikely to threaten wealthy, developed countries with diversified food supply.
It is still going to disproportionately affect developing countries that are already struggling.
> I doubt that even younger folks in developed countries will be affected as drastically as "livability" perhaps implies.
From what I have seen its more linked to affluence of countries than anything else.
The biggest issue in the near to medium term is that tons of people in southeast asia will soon be living below sea level. This will require either an enormous infrastructure program or a massive refugee crisis.
I just don't fully agree anymore.
I always cared. But I care more as I age. Why? Because I know (vaguely) the danger and I have ____KIDS____.
Older people usually have kids too. For anyone, ANYONE who accepts/knows the dangers we face to just shrug, knowing it's their own kids and grand kids that will suffer (wars, political upheaval, riots, deaths, migration) - no. I don't buy it.
Principally, it's the ignorance of the people to the things that matters most. Maybe they are partially sticking their heads in the sand a bit. But if it truly was properly reported on prime-time news and so on, they would know, and they would care.
> But if it truly was properly reported on prime-time news and so on, they would know, and they would care.
I don't know a single person that isn't aware of the issue, it's just a significant portion of them think it is outright fake or they just otherwise don't care because they see it as a lame thing to care about. How does one fix that side of things? It seems a major impediment to any progress.
In my experience, being a parent is unfortunately a poor predictor of caring and being ready to act on climate change or its effects.
The split seems mostly generational; my parents and other parents around their age seem to not really care (there are still dinner table debates about whether Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was a scam or not), but as my other-millennial friends are becoming parents, the vast majority of them do care, because this issue has been so front-of-mind for people my age. We're hyperaware of the fact that my country has more wildfires, milder winters, and hotter summers than it did when we all were growing up.
(There may be selection bias at play here; while I don't go out of my way to avoid them, I don't have many friends who deny the issue of climate change).
Many of us are also tracking the second- and third-order effects of these things; crop failures, droughts, and the migration and public services strain that come as a result of this; most frustrating is that the biggest voter blocs won't enact policy that's responsive to this, so when the inevitable (mass, climate-change-driven migration) grows over the coming decades, we'll be unprepared, and we'll either be overwhelmed by the movement of people, or complicit in one of the greatest humanitarian crises in history (and very possibly both).
> Older people usually have kids too
They are NOT, and the trend is pointing downwards. That is the demographic shift, which many call demographic catastrofe.
90% of people are stupid and people who think this deep like you are basically <1%
so better to just live in SF or certain areas of the midwest
where climate change won’t affect me
It will affect you via second order effects
not as long you are rich (relative to the rest of the world)
I'm middle aged and have no kids so I probably fall into your category, in the sense that as long as it doesn't bite hard before I go it's in my top 5 political priorities but not at #1.
However my friends who have kids and grandkids care a great deal about climate change and generally do what they can politically (i.e. vote for Greens and so on) within the constraints of life (i.e. they're not out there throwing soup at paintings or whatever).
Maybe that's what it will take. I expect ecoterrorism to become a serious thing in the next decade or two. Who knew the Amish were right all along?
> However my friends who have kids and grandkids care a great deal about climate change and generally do what they can politically
As long as you got money, you can afford to "save on CO2" and buy a prius or whatnot. The thing is, we can't really avoid making things that are bad for the environment without making everything expensive. You can ban a product, like oil or fosil fuels, but you are banning the best solution - which is often also the cheapest. If it wasn't the best/cheapest, then why would you need to ban it, people would not be using it.
Climate politics eventually raises cost of living. If we could lower cost of living AND save the environment we would be already doing it.
So all the measures to save the climate will inevitable impact the lowest income households the most. Which is - and here we close the circle - the young, working population. The retired one have the wealth and assets, as established earlier.
Often the cheapest solution is only cheapest because its producers aren't paying for externalities.
You made my point. If those externalities are priced in, the producers will have to pay more, and ultimately all prices are passed on to the consumer -> rising cost of living.
> Who knew the Amish were right all along?
When the Amish said that modern technology destroys the family they weren't envisioning a climate catastrophe being the thing that destroyed the family.
I recently travelled to the primary old-order region of my country, where I hadn't been in about a decade, and all the horses in the fields I remember have now been replaced by tractors. Let's be real: They don't fear climate change any more than the average Joe does, possibly less having less exposure to the science and messaging. All they have ever feared was families being broken apart by the kids leaving for the big city lights.
> That is a fundamental problem that you will not solve by asking youger folks, who are actually affected and have all reason to agree and comply, to make a change.
Younger folks tend to be more enthusiastic about "making a change" by direct action means, so you shouldn't count them out!
Individual action isn’t enough and they don’t have the resources.
Which is literally OPs point.
It was a joke based on the historical fact that students frequently trigger violent uprisings...
It is true that they don't have the resources in their natural state, but it is extraction and use of those resources that causes the problem. Letting the resources remain in their natural state is the solution!
Here's the thing: Resources aren't extracted just for fun. It is only done so to serve the consumer, and those consumers are disproportionately young-to-middle-age adults. Not using resources is the only way to combat this. That is fully within their control.
> approaching 50% voters above age of 50).
IIRC,this is already true for some?
It's hysterical seeing the younger generations being asked to forego plastic straws while leaders in their parents and grandparents generations wage selfish wars. I'm sure saving on those straws will catch up to all those oil tankers that were burned in the last few months.
I'm not sure your age cut off is quite right, I'm 50 in a few months and my wife and our friends are all quite "pro climate" (just to easily sum it up), most people I know from the younger end of GenX are... the problem lies just a few years beyond that with the older GenX and up into the Boomers, which is where all the money is.
Yea it’s not an age thing as much as it’s a “I got mine and I’m gonna pull up the ladder and defend it” mentality. Yes, a stereotypical Boomer take, but not necessarily limited to or locked to the entire generation.
Democracies in general are suffering the fallout of losing its information economy.
From the death of local newspapers, the end of classifieds and the pressures on ad revenues, journalism had no real options but to shrink and consolidate.
The more content we create, the more the market focuses on creating content that could garner attention.
People are going to vote based on the information they have. If they are part of a captive market, then they are going to pick between the choices they are presented or decline to participate.
It’s some sort of irony, that as a society we developed ways to neutralize free speech and expression by flooding the zone with more content, not by controlling content.
I think partly it’s also that democracies aren’t great at longer term planning.
Like in my country there is a big election every 4 years and you have state elections in between. So any government needs to constantly appease the people to stay in power and do anything. It’s basically impossible for them to make and more importantly realise any plans that go beyond that 4/5 year timeframe.
And to solve something like climate change we would need to think in decades or centuries.
This is a tradeoff.
We have tried autocracies over and over again, and they have the same failure state. Eventually you get to a leadership that is not capable of adapting to the situation and has no pressure to change, and all the ability to suppress life saving change.
I guess that’s why I see a lot more future in China. No need these short term goals. They can have goals spanning decades.
They can have long term plans but they suffer from the consequences of authoritarian government.
Not the same problems as democracy but I would argue that authoritarianism is even worse.
They say they plan long term but look at what they do: build entire cities for nothing. A Supreme Leader who clings to power in advanced age, with no successor, setting the system up for a power struggle after his departure.
> and are the worst offenders regarding CO2 production
Unless you're doing those strange mental gymnastics of entities like oil companies are the emitters and not the consumers, that's not true. Old people who have gained large amounts of wealth have also lost large amounts of mobility and tend to not produce much co2 because they don't do much in life anymore, comparatively speaking. The data is clear that peak carbon emitters are in their 30s-40s, and they're still the ones most often seen crying about not being able to afford a home.
Do the voters matter?
A third of CO₂ emissions come from a country that is not a democracy.
So 2/3 from those that are? It just means that those that are need to do more heavy lifting because there is at least a choice. Fair? No, but Earth doesn't care about what is fair and who does the most. It only cares about total output and so will the environment you live in.
> It just means that those that are need to do more heavy lifting because there is at least a choice.
That will not work because it means people just move high emitting activities to those countries.
For example the evisceration of the British steel industry means we import steel from China: dirtier energy mix, plus transport of a very heavy commodity.
My math is a bit rusty, but I'm pretty sure 1/3 is less than 1/2.
It is. How is that relevant?
If you want to compare democracies to non-democracies then you have to add all the other non-democracies too which would give you more than half.
The people of China vote.
You are right that they don't have a democracy because the people are unable to truly organize without the powers that be at the top putting an end to any movements, but the people in the remaining 2/3s of the world never bother to take time to organize either, so the democracy they do have is really only a belief, something theoretical, and they if they ever decided to exercise it in the future may find out that they weren't actually under democracy after all.
Any tips for a senior SWE who would love to move away from coding and into the clean energy space?
I applaud you for considering a change. However, you’re talking about making two career pivots at once, and I would suggest doing one at a time - i.e. either keep coding in clean energy, or do something other than coding, but not both. It’s hard to pivot.
If you want to be a senior SWE in clean energy, the Climatebase rec is good, or https://www.terra.do/, or subscribe to a newsletter like https://www.ctvc.co/tag/newsletter/ that announces when climate tech companies raise money (at the bottom of each newsletter), and apply to open roles at those companies when they start looking to spend their new money, usually ~1-3 months later.
https://climatebase.org
There are loads of uses for improved software in clean energy. You don't necessarily need to move away.
Why not keep coding in the clean energy space? https://github.com/pogopaule/awesome-sustainability-jobs
If in the US, never vote for GOP canadites plus vote for progressive democrats.
But we all know the top 1% will make sure the US will never change so everyone needs to make sure they vote.
> clean energy hardware
This sounds interesting. Tell us more?
Clean energy hardware meaning clean electricity generation, energy storage, or energy management and arbitrage hardware that reduces the need for fossil fuel-derived electricity.
So solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries?
I would add flexible demand response sw/hw and long duration energy storage
And nuclear if you all care about is the carbon footprint.
Not really given how ruinously expensive it is? Isn’t the most decarbonization per dollar the fastest what matters?
It’s not always possible depending on where you are.
Actual real reasons like possibility of continuous dark cold windless weeks in the winter and then the more common/real one. Politics.
Also if someone wants to build nuclear why would you not let them? More production in general is better as long as the public money put into it is the same per kWh produced as wind/solar/whatever why would I care?
System studies find that renewable energy systems are cheaper than involving new nuclear from Australia to Denmark and Finland.
Denmark, 2026: system-level LCOE including storage, flexibility and system integration; renewables substantially cheaper than nuclear.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
Finland, 2025: nuclear scenarios 71–84% higher system cost; unrestricted least-cost optimization builds zero new nuclear.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
Australia, CSIRO + AEMO GenCost 2025–26: whole-system modelling including transmission, storage and firming; renewables + storage remain the lowest-cost net-zero pathway.
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...
What are these grid operators and researchers missing that you know?
They suggest gas peaker plants to cover such climate scenarios (long cold windless winter weeks). Literally their solution for zero carbon is “build gas power plants”. And this isn’t just a coupe but several GW worth and also they only run during those week to two so price is in euros (not cents) per kWh.
Also their listed cost of nuclear power is a lot higher then actual real cost (TVO lists these publicly but every study still uses numbers that are much higher)
Edit: and again if someone wants to build (and pay for it) let them. Electricity production here (Finland) isn’t some single system where someone has control over all the investment but a free market where everyone is free to compete. If you think that you can compete with your solution (and can convince the investors/banks) why should we be saying no you can’t? In electricity production where there is actual cost for CO2 this actually works.
For the record I am against the government giving some guaranteed tariff price (or any other direct subsidy like that) to any production method. If new nuclear can’t be built without such subsidies then we should not build it.
I have been working in Climate Tech for a while but not as long as you.
Unfortunately my conclusion is that Climate Tech companies in general have been delusional thinking the mission is enough and there is no requirement to be a business.
The reason I am saying this is not to discourage from working in Climate Tech. The reason I say this is to please not go in with eyes closed which is all too common.
Climate Tech needs to grow and be sustainable both for the mission as well as a business. And for far too long I feel business smarts have been missing completely in this sector.
I agree with this advice.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are several “climate tech” companies that abandoned the mission as soon as they raise a Series B
Normal people don't care about climate, and 1.5C is meaningless to them.
Pollution in the air they breathe, the water they drink and the soil their food comes from? That's something normal people care about and understand.
Climate change is a branding and communications failure. Fight pollution (bad thing) not "climate" or "change".
Why doesn't anyone understand this and rebrand?
This ignores the big wheezing elephant in the room: climate action is fighting extremely entrenched and monied interests that are betting on dying before the bill for their action comes due and are ready to lie on almost unimaginable scale.
Saying it is simply a "branding failure" is about as accurate as saying "planning failure" is why around 80% of Ukrainians lost power in 2024.
> Normal people don't care about climate
This is not true, it's fossil fuel propaganda that has been very successful. The overwhelming majority of people are concerned about the climate but assume that they are in the minority. See https://ourworldindata.org/climate-change-support for example.
"Fight pollution" is the old approach, it doesn't work as well because greenhouse gases are generally invisible and cause no noticeable short-term impacts, and because in the US the industry has been successful in distorting the law such that greenhouse gases do not legally count as pollutants.
Climate change and renewables are broadly popular causes.
It might not seem like it if you live under a broken political system that can ignore what people want and so that doesn't translate into action.
When you point this out people say, "well it's not as important as cost of living or health or migrants from hot countries or getting out of wars in the middle east" despite it helping with all of those too.
The data says climate change is not broadly popular in the US. If it was, people (broadly speaking) would not have tripped over themselves buying bigger and higher vehicles and bigger houses in further flung suburbs. Not to mention the fierce political opposition to higher fossil fuel prices, which would be the easiest and most direct mechanism to combat carbon emissions.
> At a time when basically all VC funding, and in many ways the entire productive capacity of the economy, is shifting to AI,
Really enjoyed this snippet of your post. Not sure why, but being in the weeds with it, it had never really looked like this is an industrial revolution style retooling of how we work, with the pain and benefits that come along with it.
Shameless plug https://github.com/pogopaule/awesome-sustainability-jobs
For me the root of the problem is politics rather than money. Or to be clear, the reasons for procrastinating are not economic. We have the technology to de-carbonize energy and in most cases it's cheaper and better than fossil-based energy production. On the consumption side, the move to electrification is also compelling and in most cases economical - EVs, induction cooking, heat pumps, etc.
But in terms of politics we have Trump paying companies to abandon half-built offshore wind farms and various European countries offering subsidies for fossil-fuel consumption 'to help with affordability' to shield consumers from their dependence on a volatile source of energy.
And that is ignoring the huge and persistent subsidies dished out by governments (estimated at about $800 billion globally - which ignores the externalities like pollution and global warming).
The sad truth is that shifting work to AI in a data center produces way less carbon than workers using even public transit to get to an office everyday.
I've been increasingly more interested in agriphotovoltaics. What is your opinion on utilising this system for agriculture
A major problem, I think, is that humans insist on making everything a big package deal bound up with tribalism and ideology.
If you think climate change is a problem, you're more likely to be on the left of the political spectrum and hold a wide range of other views that have absolutely nothing to do with reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
(I'm not just picking on the left. Everyone does this with everything. It's human primate tribal behavior.)
The constant shifting winds are a result of political shifts and power struggles, often struggles over issues that are unrelated to climate change but are linked to it by this mechanism. It makes rational discourse and consistent action hard. The more bound up an issue is with politics the harder it is to even discuss reasonably.
Of course, people with a short term vested interest in not doing anything about this problem love it this way.
The problem is simple and the solution is to switch to power sources that emit far less CO2 or preferably none at all. This remains true regardless of our political, social, or cultural beliefs. Physics doesn't care.
Yes, it happens, but its cultural not an immutable human characteristic.
People make things that are a matter of opinion (politics, religion, whatever) a matter of identity.
This is worse in the US than in most places, but its become a lot worse in the UK, which I attribute to create American cultural influence, especially as it has come at the same time as specific American ideologies.
The problem is that most people do care about the environment but are hopelessly misinformed about what to do about it.
They think that personal acts of minor inconvenience like tolerating soggy paper straws saves the environment while fighting things that actually make a difference, like blocking transit to save a nest of bats; or blocking urban development to provide an extra 3 minutes a day of sunlight on a surface parking lot; or that somehow them flying across the USA to visit a national park and connect with nature or something is offset ecologically by token actions like reducing how many plastic grocery bags they use throughout the year. Most ordinarily people don’t understand the tradeoffs of their choices in the slightest.
And on top of that culture wars and geopolitics is getting in the way of progress - we could be blanketing the world in solar panels and batteries and EVs on the cheap right now, but it’s dominated by enemy #1, China, so we won’t; not to mention that the right in the USA seems to think that renewables are for girly sissies. And the alternatives we have, like nuclear power, are being shut down across EU countries because people have no idea of just how self sabotaging that action is, given that the alternative is going to be fossil fuels coming from Russia and the Middle East. They’d rather die of heat stroke than use energy efficient air conditioning, so the powers of most people’s imagination are shockingly weak.
Popular opinion wants to blame everything on capitalism when the reasons for these problems don’t actually stem from there. Capitalism will be the way out if it’s given the chance, but it’s not popular to say that, so it won’t.
There is obviously a deep desire for personal penance and absolution that manifests itself in the environmental space. (see: paper straws, plastic bags, formerly compact fluorescent lightbulbs, low-flow toilets, etc.) I'm not sure I agree that this fundamentally is about people being misinformed; it seems possible that people would want this even if they were fully clear that these penances were trivial -- even in aggregate -- in the big picture.
I think that people do care about "the environment," but what they mean by "the environment" is much more "my personal connection with spaces that feel unspoiled" than "atmospheric CO2 levels."
Yeah, which is what makes me think that environmentalists are one of the biggest groups blocking the protection of the environment. Mostly concerned with whatever makes themselves feel absolved or at least have a pretty view from their window, while fighting tooth and nail against anything that can actually make a real difference for conservation. The actual saviors of the environment will be the capitalists who manufacture the green revolution at scale for profit, as it always has been for the last centuries of poverty reduction and social progress.
> But you, individually, can make the choice to keep your eye on the ball. You can commit to working on this problem until it’s done, no matter what. You can choose to find the others to organize and prepare, so that the ideas closest at hand when the next crisis comes are yours.
Why should the average person reduce his/her life quality in order to save the climate, when the average billionaire emits as much CO2 as one million people from the bottom 90% of the population combined? I do care about the climate, but it's clearly irrational to make sacrifices, when other people are unwilling to do that. Having a higher quality of life is more valuable to me than the tap on the shoulder I can give myself for playing my part in living responsibly.
> I do care about the climate, but it's clearly irrational to make sacrifices, when other people are unwilling to do that
We do irrational things daily in order to live harmoniously in groups. Heck, the entire field of behavioural economics was stood on its ear when they figured out that humans don’t behave rationally in all circumstances. Moral choices are individual. I limit my QOL in many “irrational” ways because it helps me live with myself. Is it enough? Of course not. But we are too outnumbered by the greedy and the defeatists.
> Why should the average person reduce his/her life quality in order to save the climate
Read what you quoted again. That's not what it says.
> Having a higher quality of life is more valuable to me than the tap on the shoulder I can give myself
It'll only be higher until things reach a tipping point. That point is only getting closer and very possibly within your lifetime.
That's an easy option.
But if more an more people changed their attitude, stopped envying jet-setters and instead shamed them for their environmentally reckless attitude, maybe you would see a lot less plane travel, a lot less gas guzzlers, a lot less conspicuous consumption.
Shame works on the vast majority of people. We may lack inherent ethics, but we seldom like to swim against the stream.
How do you arrive at that figure?
> but it's clearly irrational to make sacrifices, when other people are unwilling to do that.
You realize that if everyone has that attitude then nothing will ever change, right? "You take the first step!" "No, you take the first step!"
> Why should the average person reduce his/her life quality in order to save the climate, when the average billionaire
I understand (and share) the sentiment, but there are not that many billionaires. Even if they all suddenly became vegans who never travel and live in a small house, that would not solve the problem. What the masses do is what has to change. How they travel, what they eat and buy and consume, their housing.
There are about 3500 billionaires in the world, meaning they emit as much CO2 in total as roughly 3.5 billlion people from the bottom 90%. They do play a huge part in this.
3.5 billion people are the bottom 90%?
A quick google search indicates that the top 1% accouted for 16% of greenhouse gas emissions. https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-emit-much-... Yes that is a lot. But 1% includes many more thn just the billionaires and it also means that if the remaining 99% don't get their emissions in check, it doesn't matter much what the top 1% do, let alone the billionaires.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the billionaires should not do anything. If anybody is in a position to adjust their behavior, it's them. But acting as if as long as the billionaires don't change their behavior, nobody needs to, is the route straight to failure, though it is a very easy narrative for sure.
3.5 billion people does include the bottom 90%, yes. The 3.5bn number was referring to the fact that billionaires emit as much CO2 as a million people in the bottom 90%. That does include the footprint through their investments, however.
I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time following your math. Could you please enlighten me?
8.3bn people on earth. 90% if that is ... more than 3.5bn? Something like 7.4bn? How can "the bottom 90%" be included in those 3.5bn?
And I also don't follow where the "a million people in the bottom 90%" are suddenly coming from. Which million out if those 7.4bn people?
I'm really at a loss w.r.t. your arguments.
You take 3.5bn people of the bottom 90% in wealth and consider their CO2 emissions. The CO2 footprint of a single billionaire (incl the footprint caused by their investments) equals the footprint of one million people from that bottom 90%. There are 3500 billionaires, so their footprint is equivalent to that of 3.5bn people from the bottom 90%.
> But you, individually, can make the choice to keep your eye on the ball. You can commit to working on this problem until it’s done, no matter what. You can choose to find the others to organize and prepare, so that the ideas closest at hand when the next crisis comes are yours. > It’s the best solution I’ve come up with so far, and in spite of the challenges, it’s still working.
This helped. It’s pretty much the only thing you can do.
The system is looking for growth, not for sustainability, which is someone else’s problem.
Not to mention, this is all going to assume resources in America and issues from an American perspective. Not to ding America, just that the conversation will cluster around the topics that matter to funders.
I did find others to organize. We meet few times per year, train bushcraft and surviving in post apocalyptic world.
Looking at our politicians and bilionairs - this seem to be the only sensible choice we have.
>We crossed the 1.5 degree threshold because the money can’t help itself.
Which is why I think we need carbon pricing / tax. If the politicians focused on that then the forces of capitalism and startups would be unleashed to bring down co2. Instead they ban plastic straws while the Chinese burn another million tons of coal.
It could maybe be brought in quite gradually in a decade or two ahead so people have time to install renewables, heat pumps and the like.
> Instead they ban plastic straws while the Chinese burn another million tons of coal.
I know it's easier to blame China than look at what we've done, but:
- The US generates more co2 per capita than China does.
- A lot of what China makes is products that we buy from them.
- The US has about twice as many CUMULATIVE co2 emissions than China does (remember, the co2 stays trapped in the atmosphere)
- The feds have gleefully killed as many clean energy initiatives as possible. Meanwhile, China leads the world on clean energy, has driven down renewable and EV batteries by 90% since 2010, is the world's largest renewable energy producer and investor, and is on track to generate half of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.
> has driven down >the cost of< renewable and EV batteries by 90% since 2010
I'm not one for pedantic corrections but I feel like this one's important
> remember, the co2 stays trapped in the atmosphere)
You have heard of photosynthesis?
The reason that total atmospheric CO2 is increasing is because the rate that it's being added is a lot higher than the rate that it is reabsorbed by the various natural carbon sinks (including plants).
Only about 10% is reabsorbed quickly [1], the rest stays for hundreds or thousands of years. That may not be "trapped" in a pedantic sense, but it's pretty close.
[1] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-do-we-know-how-long-carb...
It is an important distinction for many reasons. The general public have a pretty hazy idea of how it works. It also tends to lead to people to underestimate the impact of not destroying carbon sink ecosystems - it may not be the only reason so little is done about that, but it is definitely a reason.
plastic straws have been banned for a different reason than fighting climate change: they were the vast majority of trash showing up on shorelines.
I am with you with wanting carbon taxes, but it's not like there's a single issue that can ever be tackled at a time.
Plastic straws are definitely a common form of beach trash, but they were never the "vast majority" of it. Not by item count, and certainly not by mass. They do rank in the top 10, but not at the top.
Ocean Conservancy has annual reports that include statistics from trash cleanup projects. The 2026 report[1] has a "global top items collected" list that covers 1986 to 2026; straws (& stirrers) are 5th at about 16 million items collected. Drinks bottles are number 3 at nearly 27 million. Cigarette butts are top (65 million)
Looking back at the report from the year 2000[2] as a comparison (this one lists numbers just for the year 2000 cleanup projects), straws are number 10 out of 12, cigarettes are still top, various other plastic items (not all of which are classified) are above straws.
[1] https://oceanconservancy.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/2026... [2] https://oceanconservancy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/2000...
Isn't the core issue that energy use and economic growth are deeply connected? If America uses a little less thanks to a carbon tax, it will just be cheaper for india and china, and their prosperity will grow more while americas begins to lag?
> Isn't the core issue that energy use and economic growth are deeply connected?
That's only true up to a point (see: efficiency, the length of logistics chains & so on). For the remainder, GHG footprint only holds for fossil-dependent economies.
Move to renewables & you're literally decoupling energy use from GHG emissions.
They are connected but you'd try to make it global, and switch towards greener energy like solar so growth continues,
I mean that sounds nice, but when you have countries like China and India, they are going to be far more focused on lifting their population out of poverty over lowering emissions. From their perspective, we're living the planet destroying lives and the first world shouldn't have a say in the matter
I think the pollution from the USA are way beyond what's necessary for their GDP
> Which is why I think we need carbon pricing / tax.
That only works if its global. Otherwise people just shift activities to somewher with a lower tax.
>Instead they ban plastic straws while the Chinese burn another million tons of coal.
The chinese quite literally have greener energy than germany at the moment and are building the shit that you buy off of amazon. China is the only reason the current solar push is as successful as it is. Tame your sinophobia.
Germany has cleaner electricity than China (and the USA) you can directly compare by calculating CO2 per kWh:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...
There's still complications e.g if the "dirty" electricity is being used to power an EV or a heat pump then it's reducing GHG compared with directly fossil fueled alternatives.
According to this, Germany gets 84% of its energy from fossil fuels, and China 87%: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?source=fossil_...
The trend is interesting too: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?tab=line&count...
> nd are building the shit that you buy off of amazon.
So not buying Chinese made stuff on Amazon would help.
Out of curiosity did you ever explore opportunities to work on this problem in China? It's something that some of us are going to have to bite the bullet and start considering I imagine as that country has become the center of innovation for so many fields. While obviously we traditionally have seen the reverse with huge numbers of Chinese coming to Western countries for graduate school and or for careers we should explore the opposite direction.
Paris accords were made on the assumption that each human emits the same. At least the stated goal is 16Gt-carbon-equivalent, and at an individual level 2t/yr.
The usual criticism is that it means every human emits the same, which is extremely tied to consumerism level, i.e. level of living, since in the climate universe, we have far enough access to consumerism and we're not limited by resources, but by emissions. And, like every policy claiming equalitarianism-for-all, it means it's no worth working if you'll have the same right to consumerism. Criminal, hard worker, bad country, good country, all equal humans.
The second criticism is how it's impossible to impose less consumerism to another country, let alone a megacountry, so this climate scheme has always been just about limiting the Western civilization, generally by people who go length to explain what Whites have done wrong in the world.
The Paris climate accord is a racist ideology that means that I should disappear. Typical from the 2012 era, but outdated in the 2020ies, and the more people claim that Whites should consume less, the more the world will burn in flames.
That's a lot of words to say white people deserve to emit more co2 because they're white.
I don’t know. I have honestly given up on humanity. We are so fucking greedy, status-driven, and prone to violence.
We are no longer merit, science driven.
> We are so fucking greedy, status-driven, and prone to violence.
I have good news for you, so is all life. And even our closest relatives, the great apes.
We have succeeded overall despite (because?) of these traits.
> I have honestly given up on humanity
No you haven’t
We are better off focusing on the top 10 countries and just forget about the rest. But we don't we do symbolic things that do not matter. Why?
Top CO₂ Emitters by Total Volume • China: ~13.12 billion tons (9.13 tons per capita) • United States: ~4.63 billion tons (13.59 tons per capita) • India: ~3.15 billion tons (2.19 tons per capita) • Russia: ~2.01 billion tons (14.06 tons per capita) • Japan: ~972 million tons (7.79 tons per capita) • Iran: ~829 million tons • Indonesia: ~812 million tons • Saudi Arabia: ~653 million tons • South Korea: ~588 million tons • Germany: ~580 million tons
No, all CO2 emission must stop so everybody is gotta put on work anyway.
Also, if what you had in mind with "focusing on" is some sort of military solution, you are listing the wrong thing; what you need is a list of top fossil fuel exporters which looks different from the "top emitters" list.
without hyperbole, literally tens of millions of people are working on decarbonizing these countries. the solar energy industry in just China alone is 4.2 million people
If you read what they are actually and put 2 and 2 together no they are not reducing co2 generation.
China continues to expand coal and fossil-fuel capacity—adding roughly 20 GW of coal power in early 2026 and seeing fossil emissions tick up 2% in Q1 2026—even as it leads the world in building massive amounts of solar, wind, and electric-vehicle infrastructure.
The stated goal is.
2030 Goals: China aims to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030, bring non-fossil fuels to 25% of total energy consumption, and peak coal and oil usage.
But that 25% is of a growing energy pool which means the co2 production will keep increasing and increasing as the total power generation grows.
If they double the power production but still keep 25% of it in carbon based they have doubled the co2 production.
It’s hard to find any really good site for these numbers because it is highly politicized. Looking at this, assuming it’s correct, paints a different picture:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-where-emissions-are-...
“Over the past decade, the fastest growth has come from rapidly industrializing economies.”
It seems that countries have to evolve through this stage before things get better.
“Meanwhile, several advanced economies have moved in the opposite direction. Countries like the UK, Germany, and Japan have significantly reduced their carbon output, largely by phasing out coal and expanding renewable energy.”
Actually what has happened is that we exported our "cleanish" industry to areas that don't care so pollution shot up and co2 as well. The outsourcing fuelled a lot of the co2 production over the last couple of decades. We now have a dirtier and more polluting industrial base world wide than what we had 30 years ago.
I just read 'The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry', a selection of his essays and speeches. I'm quoting a relevant chunk of his 2011 speech 'The Future of Agriculture':
What must we do? First, we must not work or think on a heroic scale. In our age of global industrialism, heroes too lightly risk the lives of people, places, and things they do not see. We must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix. There is no justification, ever, for permanent ecological damage. If this imposes the verdict of guilt upon us all, so be it. Second, we must abandon the homeopathic delusion that the damages done by industrialization can be corrected by more industrialization. Third, we must quit solving our problems by ‘moving on.’ We must try to stay put, and to learn where we are geographically, historically, and ecologically. Fourth, we must learn, if we can, the sources and costs of our own economic lives. Fifth, we must give up the notion that we are too good to do our own work and clean up our own messes. It is not acceptable for this work to be done for us by wage slavery or by enslaving nature. Sixth, by way of correction, we must make local, locally adapted economies, based on local nature, local sunlight, local intelligence, and local work. Seventh, we must understand that these measures are radical. They go to the root of our problem. They cannot be performed for us by any expert, political leader, or corporation. This is an agenda that may be undertaken by ordinary citizens at any time, on their own initiative. In fact, it describes an effort already undertaken all over the world by many people. It defines also the expectation that citizens who by their gifts are exceptional will not shirk the most humble services.
line must go up forever, otherwise you are a communist or a luddite it seems.
> At a time when basically all VC funding, and in many ways the entire productive capacity of the economy, is shifting to AI, it would have been smarter in some respects to just pivot to AI. I sat out the crypto bubble too, in which some of my peers made a lot of money by working on projects that were either useless, or straightforward scams.
This is the problem with the "individual action" angle to fix structural problems. While it is commendable that you stood your ground and committed to your priors, structural problems are not fixed by good individual actions.
Capital demands that line goes up. Corporations are optimized to increase profits, all else be damned. Governments are beholden to GDP and Inflation goals, not to degrees Celsius.
A good example is meat consumption. Obviously it would be better for the environment if everyone went vegetarian, but doing so on an individual basis is foolish when governments give subsidies for raising cattle.
In other words, I would vote for banning meat consumption, but until it is tackled structurally, I am eating another ribeye.
> But you, individually,
Here lies the flaw of your argument. You, individually, can't do shit. You can work as much as you want in green tech while another GPU is fried while someone vibe-code their next slop copy of some open source software.
Because, as yourself said, money can't help itself. Self-destruction is inherent to the system. It's on the best interest of every individual to kill the world and keep raping its corpse while it makes another buck.
speaking of meat it isn’t really the subsidies imo.
it’s a political thing. most people are dumb and politics is made for the lowest common denominators.
you’re called slurs if you reject factory farmed meat.
i personally eat a mostly plant based diet and only eat sustainably wild caught fish a few times a week.
meat is like 5x more expensive than tofu. beans and lentils are cheap. i get about 130g of protein a day and my health results are in the 99pct.
we live in a world surrounded by absolute dumb fucks.
the only solution is to make hella money (billions+) so we can control incentives.
> i personally eat a mostly plant based diet and only eat sustainably wild caught fish a few times a week.
That's commendable, but also does not fix the structural incentives for raising cattle to sell meat.
It improves your individual health, which is good. Just don't fool yourself into thinking you're fixing thr former.
> the only solution is to make hella money (billions+) so we can control incentives.
How naive.
When you get there you will be beholden to the same incentives of any billionaire. You, too, will be raping the world at that point.
The system is not bad because billionaires are inherently bad people. A well-intentioned billionaire will be incentivized to be as destructive as their peers by the structure in place.
i’m just saying moneyed interests drive incentives.
the vast vast majority of people who can affect change come from money and influence.
the broke ones are the outliers.
voting and stuff is cool but end of the day it is an exclusive club.
Maybe your optimism is what we need, but I don't see the logic of it.
You've seen how the "money can't help itself". Individual choices matter only to a certain extent, and I haven't seen any evidence that "enough individuals making the right choices" is sufficient to effect any measurable positive change.
The logical conclusion of the evidence I've seen so far is to change the system. Capitalism sucks when your goal is not to make as much money as possible. But changing the system seems too hard (and too much like a commie/revolutionary/extremist), so instead people just try to try harder. It sounds almost like a religion (cult) -- if you are not favored by $deity, you don't have enough faith, so try to believe harder and your wishes will be granted.
It's not to say I don't respect your decisions and commitments. Just that there's 8+ billion people in the world and individuals are just one out of 8+ billion, and "try harder" doesn't seem to work so well given these numbers and facts.
What is your approach to changing the global economic system that doesn't involve trying harder? That sounds very hard.
At least if one is attempting to change the economic system, it would be tackling one actual thing that's preventing your desired change from happening.
Maybe it will fail. There's no guarantee.
Most people I worked with in tech cared about things like climate change, but they were making good money and the problem felt so far removed and difficult. What could they do to make a difference? It's always easier to focus on the next sprint, the next title, etc.
I mostly blame greedy billionaires, citizens united, and cowardly politicians, but I have a hard time respecting people making six figures who aren't doing something to improve our broken country, even if it's volunteering at homeless services.
But.. how does volunteering at homeless services help with climate change?
I'm not saying volunteering isn't helping to create a better world, but there seems to be a disconnect in the logic.
This is precisely why I'm what I guess one could describe as "Eco-Socialist".
The problem is the incentive structures inherent to Capitalism. Until we fix that, we are only putting on small band aids and alleviating our conscience at best.
Money/finance is the problem here, we've had the technology to make surplus exergy damn near free (in the ExROEI sense) since the 1960s but financial systems we had in place combined with political reticence and NIMBYISM/Nuclear fears have made the transition to the only energy source than can keep our modern civilization alive unattractive on the fiat ledger, and our civilizational malaise will continue to grow as our useful surplus exergy shrinks and shrinks with the available fossil fuels getting harder and harder (exergetically) to extract. Hydrocarbons were our consumable rope ladder to nuclear fission breeding cycles but we are almost out of remaining rungs to to make the climb IMO. Ban fiat currency, ban debt spending, ban the wallstreet casino and start the most ambitious project in human history to build out massive industrial parks around advanced cycle fission breeder reactors where we perform electrolysis, haber-bosch, direct carbon capture (atmospheric or from industrial exhaust) and manufacture synthetic hydrocarbons, while we directly electrify every single part of our civilization that is sensible to power that way (like homes, offices, stores and consumer transportation) with wind and solar.
So, the devil comes to Davos and says: "You can enjoy cheap energy, but some poor people in the global south will suffer and die" And after a long silence the US president says: "I feel like there is a catch there, but I just can't figure out what it is"
Why is it the US President?
US emissions are down 9-10% and China emissions are up by 23-25%.[1]
China represents ~32% of global emissions.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
Being the main blocker for coordinated global rampdown of oil use production (and China being the renewables enabler).
US is down from no.1 per capita to no.1 per capita. Nice
And then you have Indonesian fires releasing more than the US does in a year..
Except it's not cheaper. 70% of the world import fossil fuels. Many changes are happening because it is cheaper to not do that and use renewables instead. US Presidents are getting involved to stop cheaper energy getting built.
Offshore wind, which is more expensive than onshore wind, is cheaper than new coal in China. New solar and onshore wind competes with fuel costs for existing coal plants.
If anything, Trump fucking around in Iran is helping the switch more than anything, such irony.
In a long run - maybe but in a short run high oil/gas/diesel prices push CPI up, as a reaction central banks are rising rates, bonds yields are rising even faster in anticipation of future rate hikes - this makes credit expensive and most green energy project depend on credit so investments into green energy going down too AFAIK. At least clean energy stock indexes are falling for the last few months because of high credit interest rates. So paradoxically Iran war is slowing energy transition.
Like Putin in Ukraine. But decoupling from Russian gas is still slow going and controversial in Europe, and the "moderate" right is more and more inclined to collaborate with Putin’s little fringe-right helper parties, likely partly because they’re massively bleeding votes and partly out of real sympathies for fringe policies that just used to be unmentionable in polite company.
It's controversial because it's not just about changing gas provider, but paying way more for gas as well.
Americans keep strong arming us into buying their LNG, but we also pay 5 times as much for it as we paid for Russian gas.
And Norway, Algeria, etc and all the other providers know very well that our biggest provider has been cut off, so they can all ask much more.
So it's very easy and convenient to say "why don't you do differently Europeans", but it has a terrible effect on our manufacturing and export bound economies.
The point is, obviously, that we should be decoupling from all gas. The past four years have made it very clear how risky it is to depend on foreign fossil fuels, economically and geopolitically.
He might be shown to be one of the greatest climate change activists in human history.
Except emissions are up under Trump. The US is puking new emissions right now.
I was just joking, and also largely meant for other countries to move away from fossil fuels.
The key difference is that it is easier to control and extract profits for a narrow set of people from fossil fuel.
I think the difference is that the renewable infrastructure requires new capital investment, whereas the fossil fuel infrastructure is already in place and amortized, even for importing countries (distribution networks, electricity generation plants, etc.) And so you've got to get someone to pay for the up-front costs which on the short term are greater than the long term costs.
I guess the fossil fuel infrastructure is actually more expensive? (Drilling, refining, shipping of the fuel: all not needed for wind and solar.) But this infrastructure has already been built and paid for, and now someone with a lot of money wants a return on their investment over the next 25 years. Which is not going to happen in a world where we prevent the worst climate change.
(Also, investment to decarbonize things like cement are not going to happen if fossils stay cheap.)
If global climate change is a problem, you can't just have some countries deindustrializing and reducing CO2 while others go full bore on scale manufacturing with any form of cheap energy including coal being used.
Plus ironically all of the batteries and solar panels for the West's climate mission will be made in China who didn't deindustrialize, has far lower energy prices, and less aggressive local rules around things like air pollution that let them be manufactured at all.
Meanwhile they are also rapidly going green by adopting this tech domestically since it's highly price competitive due to their manufacturing investments. They also invested heavily in Nuclear (which the government there openly welcomed).
> you can't just have some countries deindustrializing and reducing CO2 while others go full bore on scale manufacturing with any form of cheap energy including coal being used.
Well... that's what we did in the Industrial Revolution too. Only the countries were reversed.
Agreed! If we can’t try and save the Earth perfectly, we shouldn’t try at all.
Yes you can. China has barely emitted half the lifetimes emissions of the US because it didn't go through decades of inefficent and polluting technologies. The ozone hole wasn't caused by China.
Same thing applies to those up and coming countries: they immediately have more efficient technologies.
Be a tech maximalist- use tech and will power to pull ahead with green energy. Go hard on batteries and energy storage. I do not even care that I may sound delusional - the contrary doomer viewpoint is deluded in a far worse manner. The things we need either are or are not within our abilities- you will never know unless you try. Resigning with *it’s too hard* ensures we will know that we cannot.
I don't see why not. It's obviously not as good as getting all countries working together, but it's certainly not practical to wait until all countries are united before starting.
Stop making things, its so dirty.
Buy all the things from me, don't worry about my dirty powered factories.
Well the rich western nations need to sacrifice.
Luckily that works well with democracy...
Government: "We need to sacrifice"
Populists: "No one will take/tax our gas-guzzling trucks and our beef! Make this country great again!"
Voters: "Fuck off government, put the populists in power instead!"
"Things are expensive! Vote for short term price decreases at the expense of the next generation!"
I highly recommend this graphic to everyone:
https://globaia.org/_astro/GA_1750-2024_DARK2.CKx3duw8_ZQd9m...
It lists 24 socio-ecological KPI across the planet since industrialisation beginning - as you can see:
There is not a single KPI where the curve shows even the slightest sign of recovery - and you can expect other graphs of adjacent KPI to show similar development.
In one sentence: There is no chance that humanity will ever come back to any pre-industry levels within the next 500 years. And by overusing our environment, our civilisation wont last 500 years. (sure, some hotspots will survive, but they wont have ASML Twin:Exe machines or cheap flight travel anymore etc.)
> There is not a single KPI where the curve shows even the slightest sign of recovery
ozone, marine fish capture, tropical forest loss, and domesticated land are shown as below peak, aren't they?
True! Maybe its just a slowdown or the first clear signs of incoming collapse of these ressources? Though, domestic land is already accelerating again over the last year, so it will be on par again with its previous high.
And this ensemble is only a collection of some KPI, there are additional ones I guess which will show similar upwards-trend.
The vast majority of countries in the world are aging. "Transistors per microprocessor" and "Phone subscriptions" are weird ones. As if the goal was to have sharp graphs...
> As if the goal was to have sharp graphs
Welcome to capitalism! Task #1: Figure out a couple of numbers. Task #2: Figure out if it's good when these numbers go up or bad. Task #3: Optimize everything against these numbers, never consider anything else but these numbers, they are your life now.
The world population graph is misleading. Looking at it one could be lead to believe that in 2100 there will be 13bln people.
In reality by 2100 the world's population will be around 10.2bln and declining from 10.3bln in 2084 or so.
And that also assumes the UN won't revise its projections once again, as every time they did, they had to lower their estimates.
There is too much uncertainty in predictions like this.
E.g. if we are lucky, and AI works well for biology, we may be able to extend lifespan significantly and end up with 20bln people instead.
If AI works well, we'll reach the singularity and nobody in this world knows what the hell will happen.
We might merge consciousness and live in an ethereal medium, we might insert ourselves in a simulation and keep our physical bodies neatly healthy organized and packed where 20 Bln is not a problem at all, we might collectively (or AI do it for us) decide to reduce human pop to 1 Bln or less on Earth and terraform other planets.
Call me crazy, but if you described our world to someone some hundreds years ago, theyd think the same. Crazyness is a requirement for a correct prediction of the future. There are ALWAYS status quo changes based on revolutionary magic-like technologies that results in significant changes.
If you want to have at least a mild change of doing some sort of future prediction you can check predictions about our current time from people in the past and you'll see the mistakes they make, most people nowadays keep making. Using current technology and ways of thinking, as if they would stay the same just used in different ways, not thinking enough out of the box and allowing themselves to be more imaginative. Fix that, and you'll make wild predictions but also some of them which will be much closer to the truth than any status quo linear evolving incremental improving technology based prediction.
I think they are about to revise their projections again, the population is continuing to decline much faster than estimated.
That is my feeling as well.
I expect a major revision after India's census concludes next year.
We really don't know how many people there are in the world - some countries (mainly in Africa) hadn't had a census in years.
> pre-industry levels within the next 500 years
For instance there are more forests in much of Europe than we did before the industrial revolution, let alone the 1800s. e.g. more of France is covered in trees now than it was as far back as 1300. Of course that's a very narrow and specific "KPI", mostly just shows that humans already had a massive impact on the environment and ecosystems long before the industrial revolution.
I agree on the "we're on the wrong path" though I don't share your conclusion's gravity, but some of these indicators feel very weird to be included imho. Total FDI and transistor per processor makes very little point on the matter.
We are not trying to literally revert the planet to how it was 100 years ago, we are "just" trying to stop these trends as soon as possible so they don't continue for another 100 years. There are going to be consequences regardless, but they can always get worse.
Some of the planet is already much nicer than it was 100 years ago. At least in the European countries that industrialized the first or had high population density even before that.
Most growth is exponential (for a while, as a logistics curve (aka S-curve) does start exponentially), how about showing log(y(x)) instead of y(x).
But not always: if zero is not on the bar chart, e.g. log(y(x)) with [x] = Kelvin, such a plot will of course not work. So keep temperature as temperature increment over pre-industrial times or other baseline.
Also, does coastal nitrogen have three data points, or why the edge in the middle? Scatter charts plus trend are more the real thing than a curve if this is two linear relationships, with a second slope after a certain time, and keep y(x) plotting here, of course.
No, you use logarithms when you expect the data to follow an exponential curve, but there's no reason to believe that e.g. shrimp aquaculture should follow an exponential trend. Using a logarithm there would be rather misleading.
>There is not a single KPI where the curve shows even the slightest sign of recovery
Ozone, I believe.
I see no problem with the graphic. It is going to be like this until we achieve energy abundance which we could have long ago if the idiotic climate activists didn't block nuclear everywhere.
You can keep the blue curves going up while bring down the green curves with sheer power of energy (and new technologies).
The solution to climate problems is not regressing to hunter gatherer age as the climate activists have wet dreams about. The solution is to produce more energy, improve technology, and clean up the pollution.
Humanity will do better. We'll go preindustrial levels within next 100 years. Ironically, china will probably lead the way.
I've heard this argument for the last ~40 years.
"Technology will take care of this" and then crickets.
The solution is to curb our excess, which nobody wants to do. We are all living like kings and queens.
You can adjust the way you calculate every year so you can show improvements. Like we do with inflation
Optimistic to think humanity will survive 500 years on this planet.
Humanity will be around for a few more millennia at least.
How many humans, living what lifestyle, what eco-footprint, Star Trek style tech or back to cavemen after a nuclear winter, those are some of the questions.
As for other species... fewer of them for sure.
Ignoring the overly pessimistic and self-defeating overall tone:
> There is no chance that humanity will ever come back to any pre-industry levels within the next 500 years
How could you possibly predict this? We have moments of time in history which are basically "before/after", and no one saw those points coming until they were in effect. Electricity, atoms, nuclear energy, walking on the moon, transistors, internet, LLMs and more are examples of these things, that were short of impossible, and had lots of people claiming "We'll never do that in a hundred years!", up until we already accomplished those things.
What I'd like to know, is what the point is? Why claim "our civilisation wont last 500 years" and similar, what do you wish to achieve with this? What conversation do you wish your comment to spawn, that people tell you you are wrong? Or right?
I would not say people have given up. The problem is that this search for saving the planet and humanity all together is hard to understand for the common folk, much in the same way other banners that have been imposed on people in the past 2 decades.
Common people want to go to work and know that they have a working transport system, that they can walk in between a few streets and feel safe, that they can have enough money for a mortgage and to feed themselves and their families.
None of these things are exactly addressed by putting solar panels, and wind farms all around, especially when the cost of fuel keep rising. When the security of the grid on a once thought-of super-power like UK is constantly put in question.
The common people doesnt care much about these topics and explanations because they don’t have time for it, because they do still need to get on with life. It’s generally youth and retirees the ones gluing themselves to the pavement, have you noticed? whats in common in these two groups is they can both still afford to be idealists.
Then you turn on the TV and see how much damage is being done to the environment in other regions, and so, why do I need to suck it up in my jumper all winter then? Why am I the one using paper straws that break before I finish my drink?
This whole thing was always a tough sale, but it’s gotten even harder in the current political climate.
> hard to understand for the common folk
I'm not entirely sure what definition of "common folk" we're using here but it's my experience that most people can understand climate change but that it's difficult to do anything while there are billions of dollars moving in favour of fossil fuels, unregulated shipping, the meat industry etc. Some of these comments are really surprising. There's a lot of criticism here for "environmentalists" and paper straws, but very little criticism for the groups that actively maintain the status quo.
> None of these things are exactly addressed by putting solar panels, and wind farms all around, especially when the cost of fuel keep rising.
Don't want to nitpick but this touches on a topic I think worth discussing. I feel that for many people, investments in green energy are a needless sacrifice we do for the sake of the environment (and a naive sacrifice at that since other countries can just keep on emitting their greenhouse gases anyway). It follows, since we invest in green this must have its costs elsewhere like in higher gas prices and obviously then people ask -- why should we keep doing this when we are hit with economic downturn?
But really green energy is all about the unaccounted for future costs. We can burn fossil fuels now but we are going to be in a whole lot of trouble when they become more expensive and dealing with their side effects (climate change) will become expensive as well. Green energy is a solution - you don't need to care about high fuel prices and what happens in Middle East if you can get all energy from the sun and wind.
Well the solution is just that green energy is already cost competitive with fossil fuels, so we just need to let the market do its thing and have people buy the cheap thing, which is increasingly green energy.
Yes, totally correct in all points, but people just don't care about the future. I fear it's easy as that.
They aren't having any children, so it's hard to care about 100 years from now.
In my experience the folks having kids care less about the environment than others.
The argument is, why would the common folk care about the future? Why should they be the ones making the sacrifices if hardly ever they any benefit? None of this concerns the type of person that can easily just move on to green technology, of course not, I am not talking about your average HN user, I am talking about the people that has become ever more invisible, poor and disenfranchised.
For these people, what does the future has to offer anyway? Why do think people are not having babies anymore?
If you live day by day, and that is all you can afford, what kind of future you think people going to try and cultivate?
It’s also about energy security - why expose your energy markets to insane fluctuations in international fossil-fuel markets if you don’t have to? Surely the last few years have shown that energy independence is a critical social and defence policy now?
For many/most countries, investing in renewables is the best, cheapest and fastest way to move in that direction.
Your point about plastic straws reminded me of this interesting article Just Bury Your Trash [0]. There’s an argument to be made that recycling many types materials (except metal) is not worth it. Eg since recycled plastic is more expensive than virgin plastic, it might be better if the money we collectively spend on it could be redirected to something that’s more beneficial to the environment.
And while others have pointed out that plastic straw bans are not about climate change, I suspect many people think they are, lumping together “climate change”, “the environment”, and “pollution” into a monolithic thing. “I’m doing my part” with a plastic straw then as they eat beef, drive an SUV, and fly to vacation (disclaimer I do some of those things).
[0] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/just-bury-your-trash
I was thinking about this a while back whilst I watched someone struggle with their shopping across the supermarket carpark without a plastic bag only to get in a Range Rover. I guess it's a form of moral self licensing[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing
I think the plastic straw ban was such a self-own that I find it hard to believe it wasn't astroturfed to undermine climate change (it wasn't). While I don't give a shit about straws myself (since I'm not an infant[0]) it was just such empty gesture politics that became a key culture war issue.
As you say it's not really about climate change as such, the problem is climate change becomes an omni-cause grouping pollution, waste management, biodiversity loss, etc. We end up being tarred with the same brush. A reasonable person should feel free to disavow the straw ban since it doesn't achieve its aims and is a distraction from real problems.
The campaign was started by a 9 year old[1] using an estimate that was roughly 2-3 times too high and fed by an unsourced claim[2] around the amount of plastic straws on beaches. As you say it becomes a cultural signifier of effort while achieving basically nothing. And this takes away so much energy around the broader issue of single-use plastics and ocean plastic pollution. Both of these are better served by advocating for domestic landfills rather than the current practice of dumping the plastic waste on 3rd countries.
[0]: yes some disabled people need to use straws as adults
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/22/631254978/one-childs-outsized...
[2]: https://apnews.com/article/c1b6f8666138441d9af6054d8c096086
Plastic recycling was about one thing: getting people to use more plastic.
Less than like 7% of plastics get recycled and basically all of that comes from industrial sources, not our homes.
The best thing you can do with plastic is use less of it and throw it in the trash. This tells you it is garbage and not going off to some magical facility to get recycled.
Also, keeping plastic in the environment by using it in building materials/fake grasses is a microplastics nightmare. We need to be removing plastic from the environment, not putting more out there.
Plastic is fine for recycling as long as the process is simple and cheap. Pressing plastic into panels using a sheet press, for use in construction, signage, or art/crafting, is actually fairly efficient versus trying to recreate “virgin” plastic through melting and mixing. It can also be done on a smaller scale. See https://www.onearmy.earth/news/sheetpress
But I agree that typical plastic recycling is inefficient.
Counterpoint: China
Is China going woke and then broke on recycling? Or like renewables and EVs did they put engineers in charge and not Libertarians who irrationally hate all government programs?
https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/articles/chinas-cir...
There is no amount of paper straws that will offset anything the rich deciders do. It's a ploy for time for no reason whatsoever.
It's not even that. If you take a look at videos of India etc you will see rivers full of plastic, plastic rubbish being burned, etc. It's just normal way of life for them.
But we are told that plastic straws are the issue, and switching to paper straws (that you need to use twice as many of when they inevitably dissolve) will solve the problems. Meanwhile, the H&M polyester dress that you wear 3 times before throwing it away takes as much energy as 2000x paper straws to manufacturer.
Chinas expansion of Coal power plants(1), India's behaviour with dirty rivers and pollution, Middle East burning rubber(2) so it is visible from space, etc, are all examples of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory on a global scale.
1. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-coal-power-ri...
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJPxWu0qqiQ
And it gets worse. Like LOOK AT THIS
"the methane emissions alone from Turkmenistan’s two main fossil fuel fields caused more global heating in 2022 than the entire carbon emissions of the UK"
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/31/turkmeni...
"The biggest event was a leak of 427 tonnes an hour in August, near Turkmenistan’s Caspian coast and a major pipeline. That single leak was equivalent to the rate of emissions from 67m cars, or the hourly national emissions of France."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/06/revealed...
Seems like a tough argument to make stick. The Chinese & Indians are clearly benefiting more from the economic growth than they are suffering from the downsides of pollution. They would not swap their current environmental problems for clean poverty.
It isn't a broken windows problem as much as drawing 2 billion people out of poverty is more urgent than most other concerns.
Exactly this. Living standards are closely correlated to energy use and no one is going to volunteer to live in poverty.
The environmental movement does itself no favours either by pursuing high social cost but low impact interventions like paper straws and ignoring (or outright vilifying) nuclear as a viable path forward.
Finally, there's a huge disconnect between the (supposed) low cost of renewables and what people experience on the ground. Countries like Germany are a good example of this. The constant refrain is that solar and wind are super cheap and are running more and more of the country, but those savings (if real) don't make it to the average rate payer. Something is clearly wrong here. Either the cost claims are incomplete and don't factor in something important or the auction mechanism used to set prices must be discarded. But the disparity between claiming massive cost benefits while having people pay more sours the public on the technology and destroys credibility.
> The environmental movement does itself no favours either by pursuing high social cost but low impact interventions like paper straws
How much energy has the environmental movement put into the paper straw topic compared to the attention it is continuously getting from those trying to ridicule the environmental movement?
None of my environment activist friends ever talks about plastic/paper straws. They tend to drink straight out of the glass/cup/bottle/can if anything. The only people bringing this up are those continuously pushing against change and those not realizing that it is just a big distraction topic to get people worked up.
It is quite exemplary how often the topic has been mentioned independently in just the discussions of this article.
Please stop falling for this.
If you see a neighbour with an untidy lawn does it make you want to give up keeping your lawn clean?
You do understand that they are suffering because of choices made for them, by the west? Its our plastic that flows through their rivers.
It's not, it's their plastic, and their choices.
Well, color me surprised, but you’re right: in contrast to china, Malaysia, and other SE Asia states, India’s plastic trash is mostly (97%) self-made, with the largest contributor being single use packaging for consumers.
Another thing that might surprise you is 75% of the waste in the great pacific garbage patch is lost or discarded fishing gear.
If the neighbor is on the other side of the globe, hardly makes a difference to most people.
My actual neighbor, gets a talk then a call to the local enforcement agency if it doesn't improve.
>My actual neighbor, gets a talk then a call to the local enforcement agency if it doesn't improve.
Is there a local enforcement agency for... tidy lawns where you live?
Enforcement of tidy lawns is genuinely a thing in very many places in the US.
I suppose homeowner associations are useful for something.
But according to his post it makes a difference? "Why should I care because they are polluting on the other side of the planet?"
It's unfortunate we can't call a local agency to fix their attitude, but at least we can do our part. What it's worth if you don't even try?
> It's just normal way of life for them.
Sanitation service is expensive. It's an under valued historical victory in rich countries.
What is this nonsense about straws? The reason plastic straws are banned is because they were one of the top 10 things littering European beaches. Indian plastic straws have fuck all to do with littering _our_ beaches.
And why then did plastic straws disapperaed in the US before slowly coming back? The story (in the US) I heard when I asked was usually "because we can and because it is good for the world".
That was a big self-own from a group that thought they have a carte blanche and can just ignore those pesky normies instead of explaining why the changes are good for them, too. And being smarter in picking battles. And minimizing inconveniences from unavoidable sharp edges.
similarly for plastic bags.
Why did Alberta ban plastic straws then? There are approximately zero beaches here.
Alberta didn’t, Canada banned them because of similar evidence linking plastic straws to beach litter.
> But we are told that plastic straws are the issue, and switching to paper straws (that you need to use twice as many of when they inevitably dissolve) will solve the problems.
Could we please stop with this strawman (sorry pun) topic of paper straws? Nobody claims that they solve the problems and they have just become this distracting meme that ridicules all efforts at environmental protection. Yes plastic straws are bad, no they are not among the top-10 problems humanity needs to address and yes the topic has been blown out of proportion just to make fun of things. If you care, do you not realize that every time you bring this up you are doing us all a disservice?
So, please, let's drop it and focus on actual issues of regulatory approaches to climate change instead.
Were paper straws ever about climate change? This feels like a red herring. Pollution has many aspects to it, and you can work on several problems simultaneously.
No, they are about cleaning up European beaches. Anyone using plastic straws as an argument against combating climate change is acting in bad faith.
Plastic straws are simply emblematic of the environmental movement as a whole. "Political capital" is not infinite, folks will only tolerate so much disruption to their lives. Going after plastic straws instead of something more consequential was a mistake.
This isn't supported by polling.
Even in America and among Republicans there's support for using less plastic straws and unless there's some extremely unexpected overlaps in opinion it basically means the only people who think it's a bad move also don't care about climate change and environmentalism seperate from the straw issue.
I never hear environmentalists talking about plastic straws, only people with an anti-environmentalist agenda.
I would not say people have give up.
On the contrary in fact, I think a lot of people have decided to do something that will have a tremendously positive impact on the climate in the future: they've chosen not to have children. There will be downsides to that decision, but as far as climate goes it's by far the most impactful thing anyone can do.
It's hard to find a coherent perspective where that makes sense. Most parents have had kids when future conditions looked far worse than they do now. The situation actually looks rosy in 50 years given the promising moves the Chinese are making in nuclear and renewable technology.
It is more likely that children are inconvenient to the lifestyles people want to lead. That is more consistent with how bad people are at long-term planning.
Late-stage individualism.
This is the kind of take that causes more traditional (including right wing, but also people from non western countries) look at climate activists as crazy fanatics. You are technically right, but I think advocating for childlessness causes people to disregard the whole movement as insane.
I'm not really advocating for childlessness. I'm accepting of people who choose that life, but I don't have any skin in the game regarding whether or not anyone besides myself have kids. It's their choice.
The only judgement I make is people who have children and have no regard for the environment. I think those people are risking their children's long term welfare. That's a dick move. If you have kids you have a moral obligation to try to make sure the planet they live on in adulthood isn't fucked.
They could off themselves as well. That would help too. 4 billions of years of evolution end with me! What an absurd take. I'd understand one child, fewer than desired, etc.. but no children as a conscious effort to help the climate is something I don't buy that ever happened. Other reasons are at play for that. Nothing to do with the climate.
but no children as a conscious effort to help the climate is something I don't buy that ever happened
That's not what I said. People are choosing not to have children for lots of reasons. One of the benefits is that they end up having much less impact on the climate; that's not saying it's the reason they're doing it.
What’s the point of climate if there is no humans?
If humans were not here there won’t be a concept of climate to even care about.
We only do it for ourselves. Not for the plants or animals.
I don't think there's any expectation that humans will go extinct. We're here to stay. Suggesting this is about the extinction of the human race is a strawman.
The question is each of us needs to answer around having kids is firstly about whether or not you want to raise them in the world we live in, and secondly about whether you want (or care) that your children live in a world where the climate is broken, and having to deal with the resource issues, heat, wars over liveable land, etc. Heck, I'm sure plenty of people on HN are under 30 - there's every chance that they'll be around to see these problems first hand.
People who do want to have children are arguably very fortunate that there are lots of people who don't. The children who are born with have to deal with less contention for resources. That said though, they're still in for a pretty bad time by all accounts. Even if technology magically fixes everything, you still have to wonder if your kids will be in the part of society that can afford it.
But that is the root of the climate crisis. When it was just 150M Americans living a developed-world lifestyle, the climate was fine. As soon as you broaden that out to the 8B+ people living today, allowing all the folks in China/India/Africa to have the same lifestyle as the West, you have problems. In 1960 the average American emitted 16 metric tons of CO2; China emitted 0.5 metric tons and India 0.2. In 2020 US emissions actually decreased to 13.8, but China is at 9.2. Per capita emissions can decrease modestly but if you increase the number of capita by 50x, total CO2 emissions will increase accordingly.
Likewise, the climate crisis is far more likely to be solved by WW3 reducing the population down to ~1B than by individual per capita reductions.
One of the things we all have to be mindful of, including you, is binary thinking. Very few are calling for there to be "no humans" and you know it.
Until recently I was strictly against having kids because of the world climate, both weather and political. But then my partner wanted them and I couldn't stand the notion of losing her, so I was able to compromise on my ideals.
But yeah without her, definitely.
What are you proposing exactly, global distribution of cyanide capsules?
CaaS? Sounds like a business plan. I don't propose anything, except the notion was a bit absurd. Takes mostly two to make a child, so even having (only) one is still a cull that goes well into that narrative. Make one, teach it to take care of nature, to prompt less and thus consume less energy, and to teach the same to others.
Rising cost of fuel must be a very good reason to invest in renewable sources, like solar and wind.
The red herring, paper straws, why mention that? It is just some shit that is created to keep ”common people” distracted from the real problem.
The only way to force common people to do something is to create scarcity.
If resources are scarce, people automatically start rationing. I lived in third world developing county for 30 years. There were many times when I had running water available for 1 hour a day and electricity available for 12 hours a day. So I did what I had to do and saved the climate.
In the West obviously you can't cut off water and electricity. So they impose taxes and such to create artificial scarcity. Like $1.5 gas tax is California forces people to go electric or take public transportation (not).
The problem is some "people" with more money, resources and influence game the system and do multiplicatively more damage. These are called corporations.
Did you have many "corporations" in the third world country that you're from? No?
Yes there are. Some of the clothes you wear might be from there.
an important factor, I believe, is that a lot of "common people" are childless. about half of Western millennials are, and that was the last generation that didn't grow up in the clown world we live in now. zoomers and forth will be even more so.
I don't know why should a childless person give a damn about the future beyond their own lifespan. I think most of them don't, in their heart of hearts, and that's the only logical stance.
It’s an equally valid (i.e., not valid) observation that most of the people with children obviously don’t give a damn, or we wouldn’t be here.
>I don't know why should a childless person give a damn about the future beyond their own lifespan.
Pretty wild thing to say. I assure you that almost every childless person cares about someone or something, and would like to protect it.
what percentage of their income does "almost every childless person" willingly sacrifice for some greater good?
how much do they care about the hardships of currently existing strangers, beyond sending thoughts and prayers on reddit?
just consider how preciously few Westerners had gone to die in Ukraine over the past 5 years, despite the deafening cacophony of virtue signaling on the Internet.
You're tying together some pretty far-flung strands of argument there.
Regarding children and selfishness: some of the most selfish people I know have kids. They're selfish in the sense that they only care about their family, even to the detriment of everyone else.
"Deafening cacophony"?
Because some people said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is bad, and that our political leaders should support Ukraine?
Might be time to turn off your devices and go touch some grass. It doesn't seem like you're in a good head space to be worrying about global politics right now.
the point I was making was that the sentiment expressed on the internet does not represent willingness to actually do something.
Neither does the existence of a family. You're making reaching correlations and then blaming a scapegoat when your argument falls through.
Bro go outside and meet people. You're saying keyboard warrior stuff.
Also, what "most people" think is largely irrelevant when it comes to policy.
Do you not do any good deeds unless they directly benefit you?
sure. small things.
but I'm talking about living without heating or cooling, subsisting on gruel, owning nothing und being happy, and all the other thing the young global leaders insist we must do to save the planet. and I don't think it's fair to ask that of people who have no reason to care what happens in 100 years.
Doubly frustrating when you consider that Americans would actually have needed to backslide on creature comforts for 1.5 to have ever been viable, at a time when people overwhelmingly want them.
This problem starts and ends with corporations and government regulations. It’s barely worth it to talk to people about it right now. Maybe in 10 years when things are a bit more on fire and people are more willing to listen.
The problem is: when things will be on fire, it will be much more difficult or impossible to get them back to an acceptable level.
>This problem starts and ends with corporations and government regulations.
That's what we have been relying on for the last forty years and we still have an issue.
Corporations respond to demand. If someone is willing to buy a barrel of oil to burn then you can be sure you will find someone else to pull it out of the ground for them.
No, for the last 40 years we’ve been trying paper straws, “reduce reuse recycle”, and keeping our thermostat low while corporations build such intense computing centers we can’t buy a damn personal PC anymore.
Of course companies respond to demand. That’s why we need governments with militaries to give them a second consideration to respond to.
We could all stand to drive less and wear sweaters inside during the winter.
Nope. Not even close. I will turn my thermostat up 3 degrees for every degree you lower yours. It still will make such an insignificant difference that I’m less than a rounding error.
This is on corporations. They use millions upon millions of gallons of water, they use entire cities-worth of electricity, and they break environmental regulations with wanton disregard.
This idea that personal responsibility is standing between us and a clean planet is also, by the way, a primary strategy of these criminals.
We could all try and do a bit with our daily choices:
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/best-source-protein-tofu
Key figure missing in this article is "by how much"?
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221214-what-is-the-lowe...
Compared to chicken breast it's about 2.87x less impactful, but the real offender is beef, which has 25x the footprint of tofu.
Overall we really just need to get rid of beef. On an annual basis the carbon footprint of the respective protein sources is:
-tofu - less than 500kg
-chicken - less than 1250kg
-beef - over 10 tonnes
Mix one part peas with two parts chicken and you're around a tonne - a reasonable amount without having to even touch tofu.
> we really just need to get rid of beef
you don't even have to get rid of it, even consuming less beef has significant impacts.
Just consuming the amount that your doctor considered healthy would be a massive reduction for many people.
If you don’t want to give up meat right away, at least consider stopping beef. One pound of beef is roughly equal to 8 pounds of pork, 10 pounds of chicken, and 20 pounds of tofu in CO₂ emissions.
Does it account for diary, eggs, leather?
There's a handful of reasons to keep even beef in the equation, albeit at way, way lower levels than we produce it now.
One is co-production of other materials -- wool is another desirable material.
Another is optimizing land use. Some land isn't suitable for row crop agriculture, but can sustain grazing. There's also land we're irrigating for row crop agriculture right now from aquifers we really shouldn't be; converting it back to grassland and grazing on it would let us recapture some of the lost calories.
Then there's un-optimizing the food chain. From a food-per-acre standpoint we should be primarily subsisting on soy and whichever of corn, potatoes or rice grows best in the local soy & climate. Even if we are going all in on minimizing land usage, however, we don't want to produce exactly as much food as we need, because crops fail and famines are bad. You can aim to overproduce a little year to year and maintain a surplus of storage to cover the bad years, but you can't just cover the average bad year. You need to cover the worst years possible happening several years in a row, you need to be covering once-in-millennia bad luck. So you need to overproduce enough that you don't expect some of it to ever be consumed by humans.
So you need something to do with the extra corn you produce, besides feed it to people, that you can rapidly cut back on in case if crop failures to return food back to the supply. One option is ethanol, and another is livestock -- feed your surplus grains to livestock, and then eat them instead. If you have crop failures, you cull the herds, which frees up their feed stocks for human consumption, as well as adding the extra meat calories to the supply. (And this even happens somewhat automatically with market forces -- farmers are always arbitraging grain prices against meat prices, and a spike in grain prices will lead them to sell off livestock as they become less profitable, which will in turn depress meat prices further.)
Be aware you're repeating some outdated takes on land use.
Invasive cattle grazing on "worthless" land is a trope that's not true. Especially in the US west, we have seen massive ecological destruction at the hooves of cattle. They are not bison. They do not graze the same. The plants they consume do not regrow the same. They introduce a ton of issues.
Jon Muir called cattle, and other livestock, "Hooved Locusts", because of how they destroy the land.
The latest research is that we should absolutely be removing cattle from these "worthless" lands. We are still discovering how these lands work and we are finding so many benefits we had no idea existed.
We gimped nature and now we call that gimped version "how it's supposed to be". We use culture and heritage, "the western way of life", to perpetuate the systemic destruction.
But this trope of "white people decide the land is worthless" has a long history of being used to exploit the land/people for short term gain. Cattle grazing is a form of land theft. Destroying the land/ecosystem so people can't use it they way they have was, and still is, a form of land theft.
Also, the US west is getting so dry that cattle can't find enough grass so we do what? We pull water to grow grass in the desert so we can feed those cattle that are on "worthless land". Thereby making the issue worse. But are cattle ranchers and alfalfa farmers gonna give up their water? Ha! That's an affront to the Cowboy Way Of Life! We need cheap beef and stetson hats cuz this is Murica!
- Beef (1 lb): 0.45 kg (454 g)
- Pork (8 lbs): 3.63 kg (3,629 g)
- Chicken (10 lbs): 4.54 kg (4,536 g)
- Tofu (20 lbs): 9.07 kg (9,072 g)
Ok Ok. Lemme convert that.
One kilo of beef is roughly equal to 8 kilos of pork, 10 kilos of chicken, and 20 kilos of tofu in CO₂ emissions.
Though I agree with you that using metric system is better, here's what's important is the ratio, so the unit is not really relevant.
Nobody is eating a pound of beef anyway, or at least I hope not. And certainly nobody is eating a kilogram of beef!
Well a family could easily get through 4kg of meat a week
Over what time interval?
Anything reasonable. Not in a single meal, not really in a day, and doesn't fit a week either I think.
I wonder how much of that is because of the impact of methane farts alone.
Maybe we ought to try out what the Australians did and collect cow farts in bags.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1ic99ql/...
And then there's Brazil cutting down the Amazon forest to make beef cattle ranches. Have these been taken into account?
There it is. Give up meat, eat grass. Next you'll say people should not use AC, live in caves etc.
I'm gonna cook some beef for dinner tonight :)
It's unfortunate it's a ranking... there could be huge or tiny gaps between the entries.
The original source https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-system... links betterproteininstitute.com which then links https://www.betterproteininstitute.com/_files/ugd/7be592_a59...
The emissions for lamb/pork/beef are terrible, beef looks an order of magnitude worse than the rest. The top 10 or so are fairly similar in comparison. Chicken isn't bad comparatively, but tofu still looks a decent bit better.
It's a fun metric the author carefully crafted to justify his vegan/animal rights ideology. Personally, I value food that can provide the necessary micronutrients and macronutrients (including fat, which apparently the author thinks is inherently bad), so I'll continue eating meat and cheese.
There's no need to 'carefully craft a fun metric', if you're honest to yourself you'll notice that plant-based nutrition is the only sustainable way to feed billions of humans on this planet. But I'm curious, which micro- & macronutrients do you think are only available from meat and cheese?
> if you're honest to yourself you'll notice that plant-based nutrition is the only sustainable way to feed billions of humans on this planet
If you're honest to yourself, you'll notice that plant-based nutrition is not a sustainable way to feed billions of humans on this planet, because those billions of people would rather destroy the world than have some vegans enforce their morality on them while enjoying a lifestyle that consumes orders of magnitude more energy than some third world subsistence farmer's chickens.
I don't travel by plane, live in a urban center without a car, am vegan and buy everything used. Not all vegans are performative. But that's not the point.
Growing soy crop to feed the animals that are then fed to humans is simply unoptimized, you can just grow soy crop for humans to eat and get rid of magnitudes of pollution. That is a fact.
Soy crop is shit for humans. You can eat that crap if you want; don't push that mental illness onto others. Humans are designed to eat meat.
Do you have any studies to back your claims?
Vitamin B12 deficiency in vegans is a pretty obvious one.
But this is ignoring my point: if you go to the billions of people in the developing world and tell them they're going to have to switch their diets to soylent green because we, the first world, emitted too much CO2, they will rightfully tell you to fuck off.
> If you're honest to yourself, you'll notice that plant-based nutrition is not a sustainable way to feed billions of humans on this planet, because those billions of people would rather destroy the world than have some vegans enforce their morality on them
I’m not even vegan but why drag any morality into it? Plant-based food is less co2 intensive to produce. It’s not a controversial statement. Planet is heating up, also a fact. I get it that it feels bad but lashing out at vegans is not productive. Meat eaters (like me) should have the decency to at least shut up. Own your choices.
Maybe beside the point, but um, yeah, nobody's going to sign up for a global ban on meat. It would cause civil wars.
I used to be an idealist, and looking back at them now I realize it was a waste of time and energy.
I once had to work on a project where my employer signed a contract with a client to have *no bugs* in the delivered software. The massive burnout that resulted in trying to accomplish that ideal taught me to prioritize practicality over idealism.
Meat isn't a health food. Most Americans eat an unhealthy amount of meat. Especially red meat. You could probably eat half as much meat and not be in any danger of not getting enough macro nutrients.
Which macronutrients and micronutrients are those?
The following come from beef, chicken, fish, eggs, and you don’t get from plants: Vitamin B12, EPA and DHA omega-3, Vitamin D3, Creatine, Taurine, Carnosine, retinol.
Plant provide, but less efficiently: iron, zinc, choline, calcium (some tofu provides, but depends on coagulant used), iodine.
On the flip side, plants provide fiber and numerous phytochemicals that meat, fish, and eggs lack.
>Vitamin D3
Irrelevant amounts come from diet, adequate amounts come from sun exposure. Everyone should be supplementing this.
>Taurine, creatine, Carnosine
Irrelevant, synthesized by the human body.
>Retinol
Best consumed from carrots, sweet potatoes, etc. Only relevant animal source is organ meat (liver), which most people aren't consuming.
>B12
Even meat lovers get deficient on this, dietary intakes are usually inadequate. My mother and sister are rabid meat eaters and supplement it, everyone who has the means to should.
Omega-3 comes from seaweed and kelp, that's where the fish got it in the first place. You can get vegan Vitamin D3 capsules where the source is lichen. B12 is available in nutritional yeast (nooch) in very high amounts, it's also in many energy drinks. None of this is a serious issue.
Calcium, iron, zinc, et al. To avoid deficiencies on a plant-based diet, you have to carefully manage your diet around them.
Anecdotally, my sister in law has been vegetarian for over a decade and just recently been diagnosed with anemia.
You can just pop a pill once a day and not care about those.
Also your sister in law hasn't been well informed - it's a known fact that vegetarian diets have less iron in them, and women especially should take an iron supplement because of menstruation combined with the diet. But it's just one pill.
Perfect choice! Just try to keep beef at minimum, if you can, because it is the most damaging one for the enviroment.
Tofu lose soundly in human preference category (well for some people) which they neglected to take in account.
Have you ever tasted good tofu recipes?
Have you ever enjoyed a reverse seared marbled ribeye?
I don't know as I'm not a native speaker, probably not, but I ate meat for 22 years and that included good fine dishes as well. Yet I have been able to find good vegetarian recipes that bring me as much joy as the meat did, but in different ways of course.
I'm glad it works for you. I've rarely tasted a vegetarian dish I really liked except maybe chili made with granulated soy protein rather than minced meat.
My girlfriend was vegetarian for many years, and she put the effort to make tasty dishes (tofu, specifically, always had some marinade). Once she started eating meat again though (and we're talking only white meat like chicken, rabbit, duck, not pork/beef), she almost never eats a vegetarian dish.
There’s plenty of delicious vegetarian dishes. I’m not a fan of the ones that try to be meat dishes replaced with vegetables or anything processed to pretend to be meat.
Vegetables are delicious on their own. There’s thousands of years of cultures around the world making vegetables taste wonderful.
Yeah we people are so different. Why she started eating meat again, was it part convenience so you could share the same foods?
He, I never really got a satisfactory explanation as to why she started (I think it some objections to the meat industry), and or to why she changed her mind. It's certainly more convenient, since vegetarian options in traditional restaurants are basically nonexistent. But the trigger was a desire to sample the local cuisine when travelling. Started with fish, then birds, then, in Valencia, where it's traditional in paella, rabbit.
Ah, I definitely understand her choice. Imo the biggest downside to being a plant eater is that I lose the joy of testing most local cuisines, and it's a hassle to get good protein in smaller towns. Always have protein powder with me when traveling so that I can guarantee protein intake even if I just eat fries all day. It's the worst aspect now that I think of it.
I can only hope that local cuisines develop plant-friendly choices alongside them so that this isn't an issue in the future.
strange, meat on its own is pretty bland.
Never had a steak as good as a mapo tofu to be honest.
now I'm hungry
Source? Or did you just came up with that category based on your own personal experience?
It depends on how you do it.
Supermarket tofu is around 3 kg of CO₂e per kg. If you fatten pigs in your backyard and butcher them on site you can get pork down to around 4 or 5. I do realize McDonald's isn't doing it that way though.
What's the point of this? You would need to take care of the pigs and have all the infra for that (fixed costs), and tofu still wins?
Because pork tastes better than tofu. It's the whole reason that tofu isn't more popular
>It's the whole reason that tofu isn't more popular
I wouldn't be so sure to claim that it is more popular. Tofu is big in asian countries.
Pork is more popular not because it's somehow superior. It's popular in the west because that was historically available so that's what people there know how to "grow" and cook.
... you realize Asia consumes 3-4x more pork than tofu, right?
The argument's comparative, though.
Most tofu eating countries absolutely loooooooooove pork. China's pork consumption puts the rest of the world in fun-fact tier.
Think Indonesia is the outlier given that pork is haram.
Bringing jobs and purpose closer to home as opposed to outsourcing labour abroad and donating a cut to international middlemen.
Also brings people 'closer' to the animals and makes it more likely that meat regains its ritualistic role in society, as opposed to being a consumer product. This should reduce consumption, boost appreciation, bring communities that little bit closer, etc.
>What's the point of this?
an internet's worth of bacon jokes imply the answer.
For one thing, many people can't afford to feed their family tofu at supermarket prices.
Also, infra? Poor people just call it their yard.
Not many poor people have a yard
My point was that pork can compete with tofu under the right conditions.
Heck, unless you're riding your bike to buy groceries, you will spend more than the extra 1-2 extra kg in gas getting to the supermarket (3-4 miles per kg CO₂e)
In rural areas I’d guess having access to at least a little land is more common. Not that it necessarily makes the original idea practical.
I'm surprised that chicken breast is that low in (water) pollution, beating even lentils. Seems like the big takeaway here is really how awful beef is in comparison to basically anything else lol
> We could all try and do a bit with our daily choices:
Or our annual choices - a transatlantic flight is 1000kg vs a steak which looks to be more like 20kg (depending on your source).
A hundred axes we can spin on
Anything could help.
I know people that do like 4 transatlantic trips per year and eat meat for every single dish.
Convincing them to reduce their impact would have waaaay more effect than lecturing someone that already travels by bike/train and eats vegetarian diet.
So an annual return trip is two steaks per week.
I'll start the day Elon and Taylor Swift stop flying private planes. I promise.
The world population grows by 200,000 extra people, every day. Keep in mind any adaptations have to compensate for this growth in population, continually, for at least the next couple of decades.
I didn’t think it was growing that fast but it is: https://www.hurtyourbrain.com/p/how-many-people-are-added-to...
Energy consumption per person also has a lot of room to grow. For every barrel of oil eschewed by a relatively rich person in the developed world, there are probably 3 or 4 ready to pickup the slack and increase their quality of life in the rest of the much poorer world.
This is like assuming people in africa need telephone lines strewn to every home in order to have telecommunications. The developing world doesn't need oil. It needs solar panels and ever cheaper batteries.
The growth of energy use is mostly in countries that are industrializing/developing. Places like India/Indonesia/Vietnam/... are where most energy will be added and they'll all add coal.
That would be dumb of them to add one of the most expensive forms of energy
Energy sources aren't perfect substitutes
I didn't know that. Maybe someone could invent a device to convert PV electrons into coal electrons.
No, it’s like assuming people in Africa want developed country luxuries like detached single family homes, individual cars, and flights.
And while telephone wires might not be needed, much more energy intensive infrastructure like water and sewer pipes and power lines are needed.
None of this requires fossil fuels and small rural villages in poor countries are never going to get electricity if they have to wait for large power plants and long distance transmission lines to be built. It makes far more sense for a village to have a solar farm, a battery bank and a small local grid.
I assume current technology requires significant fossil fuels to be used to manufacture and transport the type of batteries that can replace the heavy lifting that fossil fuels do.
We have electric cars and whatnot, but they're still far more expensive than fossil fuel cars with less bang for the buck in terms of power and portability. I doubt we will see cost effective construction vehicles, ships, planes, etc. powered via batteries anytime soon, at least not on a timescale that makes a material difference.
https://www.iea.org/world/energy-mix
22.9% natural gas + 30% oil + 27.6% coal = 80.5% of the world's energy coming from fossil fuels today.
Fossil fuels are still a very powerful, cost effective, and versatile battery compared to electric batteries.
The BYD Seagull costs $10,150. If there wasn't tarrifs on China EVs would be significantly cheaper. The cost of batteries has been decreasing exponentially just like the cost of solar. Electric tractor trailers are already on the road. Your pessimism about electric heavy machinery is misplaced.
From my perspective it's like you're looking at the market for telephones in 2004 and remarking that most phones are landlines and most portable phones are flip phones and therefore you don't see a future for smartphones.
Solar and wind are cheaper than any other form of electricity in history. (Often even when paired with a storage facility) The fact that it doesn't always shine or blow when needed is driving massive investment into storage technology. The world is changing rapidly. You're not paying attention.
you can have a look at all the underlying impact assessments for food here: https://brightway.eaternity.ch/
> We could all try and do a bit with our daily choices:
Another thing to do would be to not vote more and more for extremists. "It's not working right now, it cannot be worse so I will vote for the most extreme person that says I am doing everything right and foreigners are the problem" is easy, but counter-productive and wrong.
I still don't know what to answer to someone who says "anyway the government is completely incompetent" while being incompetent themselves at the very first opportunity they have to contribute: voting.
Not saying that it is going well right now (it's not). But saying "because it's not going well means that it cannot be worse and therefore I can vote for whoever" is... just idiotic.
This goes for competence, and also for morals: it seems in many countries we now vote in politicians that are massively and overtly corrupt with the reasoning that it won't get worse because previous politicians were somewhat corrupt and tried to hide it).
Everyone's voting for the corruption that they think will help them. It is easy to say corruption is a problem, and everyone sees all the other sides corruption. However, they refused to look at other site is involved in corruption too.
Once in a while an extreme case will get in the news and someone will correct their own size but that is where generally you'll see people defending their own corruption.
Unfortunately the party that claims government can't solve problems can point to the failures they create when they get power to prove their thesis.
Let's be honest. People aren't eating tofu because it's fundamentally not that nice. There's plenty of ways you can improve it, but it just doesn't taste good without effort like most meats do.
Realistically the only thing we'd be able to convince people to do is to eat less beef, but you're never going to be able to convince the population to switch over to tofu
I think it's just a matter of adapting, I was a meat eater for 22 years of my life and nowadays can't stand the taste of meat. Tofu tastes awesome when done well.
Buuuut people are different, and I could be an outlier. I just think there's more propaganda to it than people realize, especially currently with fitness influencers boosting meat consumption.
I think it's largely what you are used to. I make an effort to prepare tofu for my kids. I find it "ok" generally, but my kids? They _love_ tofu. It's their favourite food.
This is a very western centric view, tofu is entirely unrelated to meat, and billions of people love tofu. Nobody needs to switch, it's just its own thing. It's like saying beef is tastier than kidney beans. Ok? Theyre not related at all.
Have you tried eating meat or chicken without preparation? It's pretty disgusting. My mother used to leave chicken marinating in lemon overnight just so it would be edible. With tofu I can just throw some ginger and paprika on it, put it in the air fryer and it tastes awesome.
I hadn't thought of this, just tried in an convection oven and I think I found a new recipe (still needs perfecting). Thanks!
It's difficult for humans to comprehend the scale of what it would take to stop the planet from heating up. There are 100+ years of extraction of massive quantities of sequestered carbon from the Earth's crust and burning it now baked into the system, with an approximate 15-year lag on observed atmospheric and ocean temperature increases i.e. the temperatures we are currently seeing are those caused by emissions up to around 2011. Since then, carbon emissions have increased, not decreased, so we have a minimum of 15 more years of temperature rises to come.
As a though experiment, ask people if it would be possible for humans to prevent the tides coming in and out each day. Mostly you will be laughed at. Yet the same people usually think that preventing the Earth from heating up, which is a problem on a similar scale, can be achieved with a bit of recycling, eating less meat and cycling to work.
This single graph [1] is enough to demonstrate that 'solving' climate change is beyond the scale of human capabilities.
[1] https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2
I don't follow you. You say that the heating up is caused by "100+ years of extraction of massive quantities of sequestered carbon from the Earth's crust and burning it now baked into the system" but at the same time you say humans, who did the extraction and burning for 100+ years, cannot stop doing it? I mean, reverting the temperature to pre-industrial level it's not going to happen soon in any case, but at least stopping increasing it constantly IT IS a human-achievable goal, by definition.
> Yet the same people usually think that preventing the Earth from heating up, which is a problem on a similar scale, can be achieved with a bit of recycling, eating less meat and cycling to work.
No this is propaganda that fossil fuel companies have successfully imposed on us, that it's the consumers' fault when a large part of the pollution comes from the industrial side. But consumers have leverage in regards to industries - if they stop buying meat, the polluting meat industry would decrease and help solve this problem.
Also what do you suggest? It seems that you are implying that because we can't stop it now, we don't need to focus on the problem and can let it grow even higher?
It’s really not, lots of people have been doing this work for a long time, if you want to understand what it’s going to take you can start here: https://drawdown.org/
The oceans warmed up by half a degree celsius in only 5 years. Everybody talks about air temperature, but the amount of energy that gets stored in the oceans is simply unimaginable. Until now, the oceans have been a great heat buffer, but I fear that this might come to an end.
This. I have, lying around unpublished, a few science fiction novels that I wrote where I assumed we actually did everything realistically needed to stop climate change. Like, not the deal "we make some solar panels but keep all the industries," but the real thing: "we take down the industries, we promote degrowth, we embrace and promote a proper demographic collapse, we shame meat eaters, we put youth into environmental enforcement militias, and we change global culture to embrace all of that."
It's a world that has nothing to do with this one. Of course deceiving ourselves with plastic straws is easier.
I agree in principal, but what is it with the plastic straws thing?
That was never about climate change that I am aware of. It was about pollution, same with plastic bags.
Plastic is a curse on the environment, especially the single use plastic that goes directly in the bin and into landfill or the oceans. Eventually it ends up in the food chain as microplatics.
Do we not want to reduce plastic pollution now? OK, maybe straws are fraction of the plastic pollution created, but surely every little bit helps?
People moan because it is a regular minor incovience to their life. If society can't get over something so trivial we are fucked.
People moan because it’s empty corporate misdirection that misplaces and deflects blame from the actual problem. More than half the plastic in the sea is industrial fishing refuse but sure, the straw in your smoothie is the problem.
The solution you suggest is necessary sounds absolutely horrible and very anti human.
Well, it does. Which is the problem. We essentially have three choices: one , we walk the knife edge which is our current-day thinking, where we hope that we somehow enable some magical thing--in the future, always in the future--that solves climate change without making life even a little worse for anybody. Two, we do nothing and adapt to climate change however it comes. Three: we do something unpleasant. Four is "go and make colonies in space" but for most folk that's the same as three.
I mean, the most likely outcome is that we vaporize 80% of humanity in a nuclear war that lasts a few minutes, and then global temperatures end up cooler for a decade thanks to nuclear winter. I guess that falls under "we do something unpleasant", but it's unpleasant in the sense of being life-ending for a majority of humanity and then civilization-destroying for the remainder.
Is it more human to barrel forward filled with greed into extinction? I guess so, sadly
With the way the world is nowadays, maybe a fascist hellhole really is more human to the average idiot.
I hope the evil genius that came up with the idea of making young republican-voting libertarians so angry about plastic straws got a bonus.
Judging by these threads he's pretty much singlehandedly destroyed any attempt to move humanity to cheaper, cleaner, safer, inexhaustible energy supplies.
I don't think it was a republican the one who "destroyed... inexhaustible energy supplies". It was well-meaning environmentalists in Europe who didn't bother with math nor science when they demanded to take down nuclear power and to buy gas from Russia. They were raised in the "end of history" culture of the nineties that was a little too cheerful, but busy shifting manufacture to Asia, and it favored more humanities in schools in this part of the world, in itself not a bad thing, but to the detriment of exact and logical thinking. Maybe all of it made our thinking an easy prey of the people selling the oil and the gas.
Republican or German butterflies (as in "butterfly effect") should not be blamed when they start a big scale avalanche on loose snow.
Yes good point, the evil genius who convinced republican-voting libertarians to irrationally love nuclear power and so nurse an unquenchable grudge against environmentalists and renewables should get a runners up medal in terms of how much damage he's done to the planet.
We have much more than 15 more years of temperature rises to come. It's not like we reached net zero in 2026 or have a plausible plan to reach that anytime soon. Net zero is probably another few decades away.
The point is that even if we did get to net zero today heating would continue to rise for another 15 years. That's what the lag is. Whenever we get there, add 15 years.
True, but not much of an issue I think. I'd assume we reach net zero very gradually and fifteen years before net zero will be pretty close to zero already. But oh well, first we need a clear downward trend of global emission.
The climate change advocates have lost all their credibility by lobbying against nuclear. Because of their religious fanaticism Germany closed their nuclear plants and is compensating for it by burning coal. If this wasn't so tragic it would be hell of a comedy.
There is strong opposition to nuclear energy in Germany, which I disagree with, but I don't think "climate change advocates" (whatever the heck they are) have anything to do with it.
> Because of their religious fanaticism Germany closed their nuclear plants
Must have missed when Merkel left the CDU and joined the Greens...
Centralized motivated groups have more political power than their "percentage" would suggest, that's why we have kosher/gluten/halal labels everywhere.
By 2011 hardly mattered anyway. Nuclear was doomed when Western countries stopped developing and building new plants in the 80s and 90s.
Merkel needed to ally. It was either the Greens, the communists, or the AfD. Of course the Greens came with closing the power plants.
During that fantastic decision making, Schroder and Merkel moved Germany onto Russia gas. (Of those 2, Schroder now holds management positions in Russian Gazprom, and Russian-German NordStream, the company that owns the pipeline). Brilliant decision making all around.
Their other decisions were to count on America for defense, refusing any investment into defense or defense tech (despite America objecting), and to use China as an export market.
Each of those decisions now, as it turns out, costs every German citizen 3000-6000 euros per year, on a large average, and EU citizens about 5000 euros per year.
Brilliant politician. One would almost think that, since a broken clock is right twice daily, these people weren't at all "wrong" (and certainly Schroder wasn't)
100%, we had a solution to the biggest source of emissions decades ago. The greens across Europe have done more damage to the environment than good.
This is such a common story across different conservation domains that I no longer trust the green movement. I think many of them are motivated by a sense of moral superiority rather than by actual concern for the environment.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...
> In 1997, the National Wildlife Institute, in co-operation with the University of Turin, produced an action plan to eradicate the American grey squirrel from Italy, as this introduced species replaces the native red squirrel through competitive exclusion and damages trees through de-barking. The first step, a trial eradication of a small population of grey squirrels at Racconigi (Turin) to evaluate the efficiency of the removal techniques, started in May 1997. Preliminary results showed that eradication was feasible, but the project was opposed by radical animal rights groups which took the National Wildlife Institute to court in June 1997. This legal action caused a suspension of the project and led to a lengthy judicial enquiry that ended in July 2000 with the acquittal of the Institute. Nevertheless, the 3-year suspension of all actions led to a significant expansion of the grey squirrel's range and thus eradication is no longer considered practical.
You are absolutely right. They think they can bend everyone on their feet because their morals are so "superior". Almost every single of their actions result in more long term harm to the environment.
Have you actually followed the money on those "climate change advocates"?
While I don’t doubt there are some that believe nuclear is a no-go. Most of the ones opposing nuclear are in fact backed by some O&G lobbyists. At least, this is the case in USA.
Given that Germany's coal burning levels are the lowest in over 70 years please do explain how Germany replaced nuclear with coal.
I just can't comprehend why some people get so upset by Germany.
Well point is that Germany's CO2 emissions could be the same as in France had they not stopped building nuclear plants in the 80s and 90s. Obviously the psychosis amongst environmentalists who were hellbent on maximizing CO2 emissions (in addition to Germans electing a Russian agent to lead their country in 1998) was just one of the factors.
Germany has the same CO2 per capita today as France at the height of their nuclear generation, which was back in 2005.
Germany also reduced theirs more than France since that point. And grown per capita GDP faster from a higher start.
Nuclear appears to be a distraction, it's not even visible on a graph of Germany's GHG emissions.
Nuclear appears to be a distraction, today in 2026, it was not so in 2002 when Germany started to phase-out nuclear energy.
Global warming was not much interesting for public until about 2006 - 2007 and when public started to be interested in global warming, the public was promised that renewables would the solve the problem. They did not solve the problem, worldwide annual CO2 increased from 30,9 Gt (2007) to 37.8 Gt (2025).
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/co2-em...
Local decreases in some countries don't make a difference because, global warming is function of the total amount CO2.
Which is crying over spilled milk. We live in 2026.
Today renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history, and is reshaping the global energy system.
Storage still has some way to go until comparing the raw price per MWh ceases to be a partially apples to oranges comparison. You can't really have a stable grid in most of Europe with only solar + wing + storage. Unless you are willing to close down most of the factories during winter amongst other things.
Add a bit of firming and you can. Or just accept a tiny bit of fossil fuels. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
We still need to decarbonize agriculture, chemicals, aviation, shipping, heavy industry, construction and so on. Most of which use either chemical energy carriers, or fossil feedstock.
Siphoning off a tiny bit off that for grid firming duty is trivial. Or do sustainable biofuels from food waste and so on.
Which is also what the system studies lands on. Finding that adding new nuclear makes it far more expensive.
This comment shows how much disinformed you are on that question.
The temporary transition to coal was studied long time ago and identified as the best solution even though it would increase CO2 for a small time. But in compensation it would allow to transition faster to green energy thanks to savings done on nuclear, hence overall reducing faster CO2 emission.
> The temporary transition to coal was studied long time ago and identified
When and by whom? The "phase-out" in 2002 was enacted by a government led by a person who later turned out to be a paid Russian agent. How did that work out? Germany did almost nothing for 10-15 while it increased it's dependency on fossil fuel imports from Russia...
why would you have such a phase? why turn off nuclear before you have your renewables in place?
There was no need to temporarily transition to coal except this: 1. The raw power of nuclear would make renewables not that attractive; so deployment will be slow. 2. Removing nuclear from scene will create demand for renewables.
The 1.5 step that climate activists ignored (because why not? Humans are cancers. Industrialization is a mistake) is the crashing of economy. Germany is will paying for that mistake and will never recover.
What about the savings, I thought nuclear was the cheapest form of energy
It certainly was in the 80s and early 2000s if negative externalities like CO2 emissions were factored in (of course nobody cared about that back then)
This kind of reasoning is exactly the reason why we're screwed. "I am smarter, it's because of them". "Look how good I am at criticising people without any nuance".
> The climate change advocates have lost all their credibility
If you think there is a need for "climate change advocates" at this point, you're a moron. Climate change is a scientific fact, it doesn't need advocates. It would be like criticising "gravity advocates".
> by lobbying against nuclear
Again that's a completely stupid take. A subset of the people you criticise lobbied against nuclear. And by the way nuclear energy does not magically solve all problems.
> If this wasn't so tragic it would be hell of a comedy.
What's tragic to me is that everybody is very keen on telling how everybody else is stupid, usually taking big stupid shortcuts showing that they are actually not better.
Sure, nuclear is a good tool that we should leverage. But the reality is that the situation is such that we need to change a bit of everything everywhere, and the first step to do that is to realise it, accept it and vote for it. What do people instead? Say "it's because of those other people, I am better, and I will now vote for an extremist because my lack of common sense tells me it cannot be worse".
> Sure, nuclear is a good tool that we should leverage. But the reality is that the situation is such that we need to change a bit of everything everywhere, and the first step to do that is to realise it, accept it and vote for it. What do people instead? Say "it's because of those other people, I am better, and I will now vote for an extremist because my lack of common sense tells me it cannot be worse".
It might be worth voting for an extremist if that extremist being in a position of power keeps people out of power who would otherwise work against nuclear power plants; even if the extremist himself doesn't care about nuclear power one way or the other.
> It might be worth voting for an extremist if
By using "if's" like that, I can fly.
My point is that people who vote for extremes "because it cannot be worse" couldn't be more wrong. Of course it can be worse. Instead of complaining and voting to say "I'm pissed because I think someone else should make my life easier" like a kid, people should start thinking about what's needed.
Right now, people seem to feel like "they" (anyone but themselves apparently) should prevent our life conditions from getting worse. Maybe it's time to realise that our life will get more difficult, and we as adults need to accept it and start planning for that. Not voting for the guy who says it's all the fault of foreigners and that nuclear energy will magically save us.
History shows that very smart people and even groups of very smart people can do remarkably stupid things, pointing out their obvious errors is not a statement of intellectual superiority.
> pointing out their obvious errors is not a statement of intellectual superiority.
First, I don't care about looking smart, and even less about looking "intellectually superior".
Second, if it was obvious it would be even more tragic. But the fact is that it's not obvious at all: the solution to our big problems (energy, biodiversity loss, global warming) are complicated. Whoever says "vote for me, I have the solution" is either a liar or a moron.
> What's tragic to me is that everybody is very keen on telling how everybody else is stupid
And yet your comment repeatedly tells this person how stupid they are, even going as far as calling them a moron. Take a step back.
Another issue is they’ve lost their credibility going all in on geopolitics (Palestine) and being anti development which makes it impossible to create green energy and denser energy efficient cities
Unfortunately, even if we exceed and then bring temperature back to 1.5 degree over preindustrial, the damage has already been done. Many ecosystems and species will be lost, and many of the feedbacks (for example arctic sea ice) have hysteresis in them which will not get us to the same state even though nominally our temperature will be lower again. And because of hysteresis, larger reduction in CO2 might be required to get us back to 1.5 degrees.
That's why all this CO2 capture and drawdown using some kind of unspecified, new technology, is such a distraction. Ideally we shouldn't release the carbon in the first place.
> the damage has already been done
"I lost a finger, the damage has already been done. No need saving my arm, you can go ahead and cut it".
Unless you meant "Damage has already been done, there is a lot we won't get back. And that's exactly why we should now fight to preserve what we can"?
That's not what I am saying at all, I am just pointing out that venturing to 2 degrees (or more) and back to 1.5 degrees incurs the cost. Maybe it's well-known at this point, and I am just stating the obvious; but it's not my general impression.
I am not sure what you are saying then, with this:
> Unfortunately, even if we exceed and then bring temperature back to 1.5 degree over preindustrial, the damage has already been done.
We won't be able to get back to 1.5, and in fact the way it's going we're still accelerating our emissions, so it will get a lot worse.
Now, if we could get back to 1.5, it would most definitely be better than not getting back to it. So "the damage has already been done" is wrong.
If we managed to keep it at 2 instead of higher, it would most definitely be better than not keeping it at 2. So "the damage has already been done" is wrong.
If we managed to keep it at 3 instead of higher, ... you get my point.
What's happening is that we've already caused damage that will hurt, and we are now actively working towards causing more damage that will hurt more. The faster we get our shit together, the less it will hurt. There is no "it's too late, it's done". There is "it will be painful" and "it will be more painful" and "it will be a lot more painful" all the way down.
It was suggested by TFA:
"The urgent task is to ensure that global warming remains below the 2°C threshold, with the aim of returning to 1.5°C by the end of the century."
I disagree it's impossible but I agree it is difficult, and (as I said) the damage will be done.
> and (as I said) the damage will be done.
Nope. "damage" will be done. "The damage" implies "all of it", and that is wrong. Going back to 1.5 actually means less damage than not going back. So "the damage" is not "completely" done.
"Going back to 1.5 actually means less damage than not going back."
That's a different claim, but also no. Let's imagine we go 1.5 -> 2 -> 1.5 in a few decades (and keep in mind capture is more difficult, so the 2nd transition will take longer), compared to just 1.5 -> 2. In the return case, we stress all the ecosystems twice by change, rather than once. So it's not at all clear it's less damaging.
CO2 capture is obvious greenwashing, just like electric personal cars. They're here to save industries, not the planet, I don't think anyone half serious believes anything other than that
Yes on CO2 capture, but electric personal cars are substantially lower emissions than internal combustion cars. Anyone saying something different is pushing fossil propaganda - that is just not a fact-based argument.
Yes, getting everyone onto electrified public transport + scooters is better - but EVs do provide meaningful emissions reduction.
Maybe, but cement manufacturing by itself is responsible for a staggering 8% of global co2 emissions. And we really don't have a viable option for replacing cement, and probably won't for a long time. Capturing and removing that co2 has a meaningful impact. Even if CCS were limited to just that one industry.
There are absolutely viable ways to reduce concrete emissions by about 30% - but it is staggeringly difficult to get the construction industry (including architects, structural engineers, standards bodies etc.) to change practices.
You could apply it to existing power plants for example. I could see a use there.
But don't use it as a justification for a new coal plant saying it's zero carbon now....
with fusion you would have enough energy to do it?
It always puzzles me when people think fusion is just infinite free energy. You're not just gonna have one fusion plant producing a billion zetawatts of electricity. Each fusion plant will likely produce roughly the same as a large nuclear plant. So we would need to build hundreds/thousands of them, it would take many decades to build them. Fusion reactors are extremely complicated machines.
And even if we did this, we would also need tens of thousands of carbon capture facilities, and the infrastructure to actually store the CO2 somewhere.
Carbon capture (from air) is just completely infeasible. It's not even remotely realistic. There is absolutely no way it will ever make a significant difference.
We have biggest fussion reactor available to us on the sky everyday relatively for free. But that won't stop our greed and overpopulation.
It’s pretty easy to see how electric personal cars make a difference even if the initial vehicle manufacturing process is indeed dirtier, and plenty of serious people consider them a part of the solution. CO2 capture also isn’t greenwashing, it’s just handwaving away problems with the idea that tech will somehow save us, which is also true for like… every single solution to this problem we’ve considered.
Both perpetuate the idea that we can just continue business as usual and that we'll find a magic solution later.
2 to 3 tonnes of metal and batteries to transport 75kg of meat and sit uselessly 98% of the time is not the optimal way to transport people, no matter how you look at it
Nobody has ever, at any point been talking about “optimal”, so that’s irrelevant. Optimal is completely abandoning science and returning to nature. There is no better outcome for nature. That’s the optimal outcome.
Putting a bunch of meat in tubes is not optimal. Putting a bunch of meat on very large, multi-passenger vehicles is not optimal. Putting 9 billion bike and walking pathways for meat is not optimal. Cities made of concrete are not optimal.
Who cares about optimal? Actually serious people are discussing living in harmony.
If nobody is allowed to own a car, then nobody is happy. If the only way to own a car is to own an electric one, then many people are happy. This is not optimal. Nothing we’re doing or aiming for is, in any sense of the word.
"the damage has already been done" is dangerous wording, because it implies that we won't cause more damage. However, we will cause way more damage than has already been done!
It was still worth it on the metrics most people care about: life expectancy, child mortality, poverty, food security. Cutting off cheap fossil energy decades earlier would have been far worse for humanity than the slight warming we're getting now.
To be fair switching to nuclear was an option in the 70s-90s. Obviously it would have a been a bit more expensive but it would have slowed down climate change by 10-20 years.
On average, maybe yes. But in the rich world we also used a huge chunk of fossil fuel for relatively small marginal gains in quality of life (adding a fifth weekend shopping trip per year, buying a superyacht), and sometimes worsening life expectancy (driving too much, eating too much beef).
Why should I believe your assessment that a huge chunk of fossil fuel use by the rich world went to "relatively small marginal gains in quality of life"? I think they went to massive quality of life gains for huge numbers of people, and that suddenly removing fossil fuels as an energy source would be catastrophically bad for huge numbers of people, and not obviously worse than the effects of global warming over a comparable timeframe.
I never suggested we should suddenly remove fossil fuels as an energy source, that is a huge exaggeration. We wouldn't have needed to do anything suddenly 40-50 years ago when we started to understand that there was a problem, and we won't suddenly remove fossil fuels in the upcoming few years either.
But that is also a false choice: Not all CO2 emissions in the past 40 years were net beneficial. I firmly believe humanity would have done better with fewer (not zero, fewer) flights, less (not zero) beef, and fewer (not zero) fossil fuel car journeys. All while continuing to raise people from poverty and providing real improvements, of course.
We could have just built nuclear power plants. Invested into the technology, built breeder reactors and all that. We wouldn't have had to sacrifice anything, except of course for the astronomical profits of oil and gas companies.
And sure this wouldn't have solved the entire problem, electricity generation only accounts for like 40-50% of CO2 emissions or so? But it would have made a huge difference, and allowed us to focus entirely on the other half of the problem.
And it's not "slight warming". 20,000 years ago the global average temperature was about 3 degrees celsius lower than the reference point. That was the last ice age. Today we are 1.5 degrees above the reference point, 4,5 above the ice age. In a few decades we'll be at 3 degrees above reference, 6 degrees above ice age.
The transition from ice age (-3) to the temperate climate that allowed humanity to thrive, took place over about 12,000 years. The transition from reference to +3 is taking place over about a century. And we won't stop at +3, it'll keep going. Already at 1.5 it's having huge profound effects.
Look at this chart, this should help you understand the severity of the situation. https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...
This is literally the end of the world as we know it. It's already well on its way. We are already seeing widespread crop failures, water scarcity, blistering heat waves, extreme weather etc. It will get much worse, this is just the beginning.
CO2 emissions trading is greenwash. CO2 capture not necessarily so. It could be a useful tool, so long as it's not used as an excuse to launder other emissions.
Carbon offsets are greenwash. Emissions trading mostly works, because it's just about the government setting a quota and then letting people figure out who gets to use it.
CO2 emissions trade for about 50$/t. CO2 capture costs 500$/t. So, both are useless - it costs 10 times more to get the carbon out, why are we selling them so cheap, it costs 10 times more to get the carbon out compared to not emitting it, it will never be economical.
A while ago (years ago?) I read something about how carbon capture is so energy intensive that it doesn’t really help much. Is that still true?
I guess if you powered it with green energy, that’d be a net positive?
Of course, direct air capture of CO2 is extremely energy intense. You can only do it if you've built excessive renewable energy overproduction. And I mean unimaginable excessive.
We've emitted more than a trillion tons of CO2 since 1990. If we want to put just that back into the ground (pump it into old oil wells), the final storage will be several thousand cubic kilometers of high pressure CO2. Just the direct air capture will cost more than an Exawatt hour of renewable electricity (currently, humanity produces around 30 PWh of electricity per year from all sources).
You can use some tricks. Turning all agricultural waste, forestry waste and organic garbage into bio char (instead of letting it decompose on the fields or in compost facilities, which emits CO2) captures a few billion tons per year, but that's far more labor intense and requires a lot of automation work.
You store it as graphite.
DAC isn't useful for short term, but could be useful as a very long term cleanup project.
Assuming world wide solar panel production continues to rapidly grow, wait until it reaches a point where we could set aside a number of solar panels for DAC each year equal to the current annual production of solar panels. Let's call this an arseload of solar panels.
Each year use those panels to build a solar farm in a subtropical desert dedicated solely to powering a DAC facility using current commercial DAC technology.
When we've expanded solar panel production enough raise the set aside to two arseloads a year. Keep increasing it when we can.
By the time we have 180 arseloads worth of panels (at current panel efficiency) powering DAC (at current DAC efficiency), we'd be removing each year about 10% more CO2 than we currently emit per year. We'd be using about 1/15th of the area of the 5 largest subtropical deserts.
If we ever got to 1600 arseloads we'd be removing CO2 fast enough to take the atmosphere from 450 ppm CO2 to 280 ppm in 6 years.
All that carbon removed, if stored as graphite and spread out evenly under 1600 aresloads of solar panels would form a layer about 1 cm deep.
Note that I'm not hypothesizing any breakthroughs in solar power or in DAC. The only thing speculative here is that it is possible to build hundreds of arseloads of solar panels over the next several hundred years. I have no idea if there is some consumable needed that is sufficiently limited to make this impossible.
As long as you have well suited oil/gas wells to put compressed CO2 into, you'd much rather do that.
DAC of a ton of CO2 costs around ~2 MWh. Compressing it into a well costs ~0.5 MWh, but low temperature reduction to solid graphite costs ~10 MWh.
Solid storage in soil is much more interesting in bio char applications, because the char is full of nutrients and a good water absorber.
Yes, but in an indirect way. Direct carbon capture (DAC) is so energy intensive that it's only viable in places with 100% clean electricity, like Iceland. It's a non-starter in most countries.
However, places that have 100% clean electricity are often isolated. You need to ship in all equipment, which is made elsewhere, and fly in all personnel. This quickly adds up:
https://heimildin.is/grein/24581/climeworks-capture-fails-to...
Capturing carbon from the source, like a coal power plant, is much easier. But the capture rate is only 50% on average, so a coal power plant with carbon capture is still horrible while also ridiculously expensive, so it doesn't really make sense.
> That's why all this CO2 capture and drawdown using some kind of unspecified, new technology, is such a distraction. Ideally we shouldn't release the carbon in the first place.
But imagine your oil and gas...
One way to keep your expertise be valuable is to offer the solution to the externalities you produce. By proposing to store that externality using your drilling/rig assets. It's a win win, for the company, a loss loss for everyone else.
> That's why all this CO2 capture and drawdown using some kind of unspecified, new technology, is such a distraction. Ideally we shouldn't release the carbon in the first place.
This is in my amateur opinion, an absolutely bonkers and crazy stance. I can't understand why any pro-green person would affirm this.
There are two facts, (again, imo) one - all our emission reducing efforts would maybe slow their acceleration or in other way to frame it, maybe we collectively would cut tens percents of annual emissions. We, humanity, will a always emit a lot of CO2 from the sources we can't reduce without going full stone age. Fact two - there is a lot of CO2 and other GH gas in the atmosphere now and even more would be there tomorrow. We MUST remove it somehow. Like, there are literally two components - either we remove the insulator (CO2&Co) or we remove the energy (sun rays). We can't do either of course, yet.
The more greenwashing and muddying happens, with overfocus on cutting emissions while deliberately skipping RnD on the CO2 capture or sun shield tech, the more humans will be fucked in future.
Or to provide a different analogy. We are in a completely closed system here, an oven. Turning the regulator from III to II helps of course, but the meat will eventually cook either way, unless either the power is disconnected or the insulating door is opened.
Fully agreed. We're not gonna get out of this without something a bit crazy, and CO2 capture at least has an actionable theory: "what if power was 10x cheaper". That's imaginable at least, much more so than "what if we committed a few genocides" as was proposed elsewhere in this thread.
The bonkers crazy stance is yours. Carbon capture cannot work. We would need to build at the very least tens of thousands of carbon capture plants, way more than we currently have power plants.
So to me, the bonkers crazy stance is "let's just continue destroying the world, and hope magic future tech will save it". Especially when the tech you're talking about it just completely obviously entirely infeasible. Add to that the fact that we are destroying the world now. The ship is currently sinking. A solution in 50 years is a solution 100 years too late.
The actual solution that we do have is nuclear power. We could have replaced all fossil fueled power production decades ago if we wanted to. That would have reduced our emissions by nearly 50% and we would have been able to put all our efforts into solving the remaining half of the problem.
As it stands right now I fully expect the world to end quite soon. Maybe within my lifetime. Unless I die early I'll definitely see +3C in like 20 years or so, and probably +4 and +5 as well if not even more than that. I'm not having children because I don't want to put someone into this world just to suffer through the end of it. I have absolutely no faith in our ability to solve climate change. I believe we could have, if the world wasn't full of corrupt rich people and stupid people voting for them. But it is what it is. We've doomed ourselves and we're watching the end unfold before our eyes while everyones like that meme with the dog in the burning house saying "this is fine".
First - I'm well aware about CO2 capture being a fantasy and not viable today. The "tiny" problem is that it is still one of the 3 possible faint solutions to overheating and we WILL need at least one of them operational in the next 50-200 years. If we won't start the RnD today, then it would still be a fantasy in a century or two, when we won't have any time left to play around.
Second - where exactly did you get a notion that CO2 capture = "let's just continue destroying the world"? Of course every other tech should be mobilized and improved too in parallel.
Third - nuclear generation at scale is as fantastical as DACs. Please read about actual issues with real life construction of plants and about actual emissions attributed to each plant cumulatively, without greenwashing like selectively ignoring whole parts of supply chain and maintenance and decommission. I love nuclear energy btw, despite literally suffered through the worst accident in their history (I'm from Kyiv) along with my whole family. We do should construct more of them and SMRs can't come quick enough.
Fourth - there is a collective delusion that moving 100% to renewable energy would cut emissions by 50% or any other similar fantasy number. In reality the whole world energy generation is only 1/4 to 1/3 of all world emissions, and course the so called "net zero" or "carbon neutral" catchphrases are greenwashing, it is impossible. A 100% world renewable generation would only cut part of that part of global emissions. So let's say renewables reduce energy emissions by 50% or maybe even 75%. So then the non-generation emissions would decrease by only 15-20% (for example Xnew = Xold * (1 - 0.25 * 0.75) = 0.8125 * Xold or 18% decrease in other words). This is what is often ignored in a green advertisements.
> The "tiny" problem is that it is still one of the 3 possible faint solutions to overheating and we WILL need at least one of them operational in the next 50-200 years
We need them now. We currently don't have any time left to play around. In 50 years the global average temperature will be somewhere in the 3-5C range, which is apocalyptic. We'll be too busy fighting wars over water and arable land etc, to do anything meaningful about global warming. My view is that capturing CO2 is hopeless, what we need to do instead is simply not emit the CO2 in the first place. But we aren't doing that, we're just building new coal/gas plants every year instead like a bunch of idiots. Because that's what we are. Bunch of morons who are dooming ourselves. Whatever money is earned burning a ton of coal/gas, it will cost multiple times that amount to sequester the resulting CO2.
> where exactly did you get a notion that CO2 capture = "let's just continue destroying the world"?
I view it as an excuse to continue burning fossil fuels. It's not actually a solution to the problem at all, but it's presented as a solution when the reality is that it simply will never make a dent in the actual problem. There is no money in CO2 sequestration. We have a huge amount of investment in fossil fuel extraction and power generation etc because it makes money. CO2 is worthless, the only way anyone could possibly make money capturing CO2 and pumping it into the ground is if states paid them to do it. So a much simpler solution would be to pay them to generate clean power instead. "But where would the money come from" I don't know, where will the money for CO2 sequestration come from? We can't afford to pay a little extra for clean energy but somehow magically future us will be able to pay way way way way more for CO2 sequestration? It's not going to happen.
> Third - nuclear generation at scale is as fantastical as DACs. Please read about actual issues with real life construction of plants and about actual emissions attributed to each plant cumulatively, without greenwashing like selectively ignoring whole parts of supply chain and maintenance and decommission.
Google AI: Nuclear power plants produce zero direct carbon dioxide emissions during operation. Across their full lifecycle—including uranium mining, enrichment, plant construction, and decommissioning—nuclear energy averages about 12 to 50 grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt-hour (g CO2e/kWh), making it one of the lowest-carbon electricity sources available.
Solar PV: ~85 g CO2e/kWh Wind: ~26 g CO2e/kWh Hydroelectric: ~26 g CO2e/kWh Natural Gas: ~499 g CO2e/kWh Coal / Lignite: ~888 to 1,054 g CO2e/kWh
There are over 400 operational nuclear power plants in the world, the technology clearly works. Yes Chernobyl was terrible, it was caused by the dysfunctional Soviet Union political environment, it's not a fault of the technology itself. The state withheld information about a critical flaw in the reactor design. Coal kills more people in a week, than nuclear has through its entire history.
> So let's say renewables reduce energy emissions by 50% or maybe even 75%.
As you can see from the numbers I shared above, renewables cut emissions by over 95% compared to coal, 90% compared to gas.
I'm not saying we could be entirely carbon-neutral. I'm saying emissions from electricity generation specifically, which according to Google represents over 40% of CO2 emissions, could be almost entirely eliminated. Instead of 40% it could be less than 5%. From there we could work on other things such as shipping, farming etc. Maybe we'd just stop farming cows. I love beef but I'd be okay with that. Aviation could go as far as I'm concerned. I love vacationing but I'd rather have a planet that's going to continue being habitable. I could still go pretty far using trains, electric buses, my own electric car etc. Shipping could be electrified - nuclear submarines and warships already exists, that could be an option. And yes, I know all these solutions don't eliminate 100% of emissions. But they eliminate a large amount of them. EVs, over their lifespan, cause 60-70% less emissions than a comparable fossil fueled car. Yeah it's not 100% but it's a whole lot better than 0%.
All the "solutions" to global warming are entirely fictional. Yet we keep barreling headfirst into it, because the world is full of idiots who aren't taking the problem seriously. Any rational person who really understands what's at stake would happily sacrifice some comforts, but most people aren't rational, they don't trust science because they don't understand it, and the rich control the propaganda machines that fill their feeble minds with bullshit instead.
I agree with the second paragraph. It seems as if some among the industry see a simple cash grab here.
I think its more they don't have to reduce their pollution output. They can just pump it all out as much as possible, to make as much profit as possible, and "hope" a magical reversal tech arrives at some point in the future.
It's basically no regulation, to only focus on profit.
It's the fossil fuel industry who is pushing for carbon capture (because they know it isn't viable). The fossil fuel industry is just running the tobacco company playbook.
From the report:
"Under current policies, only six G20 members (China, India, Indonesia, Russian Federation, South Africa and Türkiye) are assessed as likely to achieve their unconditional 2030 targets, while the assessment of the European Union is inconclusive. Overall, this suggests limited progress in narrowing implementation gaps across the G20."
"All G20 members except Argentina, Saudi Arabia and the United States of America have new NDCs with mitigation targets for 2035."
It is very important to add that not all targets were created equal in the agreement, that was a major part of the negotiation. Not saying anything else, just that a simple reading of that statement might make you come to an underlying conclusion that isn't correct.
Correct. For instance, still today China burns more coal than every other country combined. They are starting from a place that is so bad that even small improvements will look like huge gains.
Also, I read a few years back an explainer about China internal issues in the scope of energy generation. We westerners think that China is monolithic monarchy of sorts and everything "happens in China" is representative of the country average. Well, apparently it's not. According to that analyst, every province is semi-autonomous and reluctant to cede power to the central govt. or neighbors. So all the new fancy solar installations are logically in the low population western provinces, and connected to the grid there. And in the east there are still a lot of local coal generation. And eastern provinces are simultaneously way more populated, way richer and have way bigger modern crisis threats (housing, inflation, unemployment, job and study application saturation and over competitiveness etc.). So now the provincial govt. is facing a threat of losing both local power generation, profits from running a coal plant business, and the most important yet another job loss prospect from shutting down plants and all the related infrastructure - shipping, storage, management, distribution etc. Bear all costs and get zero gains.
So I suspect that there will be two mostly independent trends in China (and other industrial places like that) - solar installation will grow, but coal use won't be meaningfully cut without huge HUGE help from central and foreign powers at once.
It's not just a matter of population density, the sichuan basin and most the east coast is just doesn't get much sun/wind. If not for these 'resource provinces' they would've just gone full on coal.
That too, yes
China’s coal use has shifted from decades of rapid expansion to a historic decline. Coal’s share of electricity generation dropped below 50% for the first time in 2026 (reaching 49.7% in the first six months), down from over 75% in the early 2010s and a peak share of around 81% in 2007, driven by massive wind and solar growth.
It has still grown in absolute terms although even that seems to have flattened off in the last couple of years.
There was no coal for generation consumption decline in China, yet. You look at the relative units (percentages), but instead check absolute units. The consumption steadily grew up until 2023 and now it is flat for two years, but it is not yet declining. So all the existing coal generation is running as it were, it's just the new plants maybe aren't constructed. But we are far away from the "deliberately early decommissioning" stage.
Did you not read my last sentence?
Oh, sorry, I got carried away and missed that part, my mistake.
The propaganda spilled since the 1970s by large cooperations and politicians had two effects. People understand the problem is huge, and worse, they feel they cannot do anything about this issue themselves.
What we tend to forget is that large changes in society tend to start with us. Try eating less meat, eat healthy food, reduce car and plane usage when possible, buy less stuff (especially online), these are things anyone can do (rich or poor). When you start, family members and friends might follow.
From there, more people will try to change their consumption, and when enough people do that, politicians that are willing to tackle these issues will be elected. And when politicians are elected at some point your government will take the right step. From there we go to countries and eventually a large part of the world will do what must be done to survive.
You want a better world? Start by improving your own life and health.
>You want a better world? Start by improving your own life and health.
Not trying to have a gotcha win here, but I don't agree with the sentiment that it falls on the individual. Here's why
"From 2016 to 2022, 80% of global carbon dioxide emissions were produced by just 57 companies"
https://climatecontroljournal.com/compared-to-individuals-ho...
Well, but the companies exist because people buy their products, right? If I buy pork from a farm, CO2 was technically produced by that farm, but it's on me.
Ultimately those 50-cent companies are making things that we buy. Even if they're selling to another business, that other business is selling to you. The chain might be long and hard to figure out, but it all comes down to you.
I guess I can see that. And I can't help but make the most ethical choices I can. And I know for a fact that it has inspired other people in my community.
Is there any precedent for the majority of humanity to do something for the common good without being physically coerced to do it?
This is feel-good bullshit. The thing that will actually make people stop burning so much fossil fuels is if gas costed $50 a gallon and everyone who drives a car for any reason is thinking about this number before they use their car. Which is absolutely the sort of state of affairs that large numbers of people - and not just in the rich world - would legitimately riot about.
Fortunately we don't need $50 gas because these days we have $1 gas in the form of electric cars. Of course the price of electric varies very much from place to place. For some people electric cars are not competitive with gas but for other people electric is a lot cheaper and has been for a long time and now electric cars are practical.
The other thing you can do is start demanding better transit. Most people live in a city dense enough that transit could replace nearly all their transportation needs. Sure, we would still have to have trucks to get freight around, but that's a small minority of the energy used.
On my last vacation I came across a similar message on reddit[0] and it totally spooked me. I have been telling my wife I want to move as my area (at some point) will be flooded. I live in the Netherlands and when the icecaps have melted (WHEN not IF) I live in the wrong part.
[0] https://reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/1vejkf4/i_am_a_...
Could someone explain this to me because it nags at me in these discussions. Nuclear - what happened in the West, and why isn't it discussed both to solve high energy costs and climate change. Take three countries.
Germany. Germany seems extremely dependent on natural gas which has connected it to Russia in ways that clearly cause political problems and geopolitical issues.
United States seems to be able to afford it but also dismantled its nuclear power plants. In New York State they got rid of a plant that fed NYC and provided jobs, Indian Point, and energy costs have gone up from what I understand.
France has nuclear but behaves culturally like everyone else, with high energy costs and curious behaviors like keeping AC away from people culturally and legally.
I'm all for progressive change, but what do you tell non-climate scientists? If I live in a northern climate in a wooded area, I can't get solar on my house. I can have an electric vehicle and try to keep usage low in the house, but honestly the rest feels like events completely beyond my control, making conversations like these pretty abstract. Okay, we're screwed in a few decades. What exactly do you want me to do? Vote for Greens who attack nuclear and AC like in Europe?
At today's pace of demand, known conventional deposits of uranium will last a little over a century. Nuclear power provides about 9% of the world's electricity. Trying to replace fossil fuel demand with nuclear is both economically and materially not possible.
A century is a pretty amazing amount of time considering the alternative, no?
It just feels like climate change activism is about telling us we're all going to suffer anyway, so turn off your AC and start to pay more in building costs and taxes. Don't we want practical solutions?
You know we can breed centuries of fuel if we used u-238 to pu-239 cycles right?
People are still talking about 1.5C at 2100 as if it's not some high fantasy? :) Wake up, it was greenwashing all this time. The question is rather are we lucky to have 3C by the end of the century, or the hot models are correct and we'll get 4-5C. That's the question. 1.5C... Phah! Fun joke :)
Human greed will lead to human extinction. It is a foregone conclusion, too many would rather die owning the latest iphone or latests trends than care about the global whole. You see it all around us, between the Congo, Sudan, Palestine, Ukraine and so much more... we just don't give a shit.
In summary, we are the architects of our own demise. (this is not pessimism, but realism)
To be honest, no company wants to lower their income. This is institutionalised (i.e. the stock holders will throw you out if you decide to lower the income)
That's why they are selling us new cars instead of converting the old ones to electric or semi- electric drive. The amount of CO2 emitted on the new car creation and shipping is tremendous. The same with phones, washing machines etc. And now AI. It should be done on optimising (the software, the reliability), not creating new and throwing out the old ones
Extinction means zero humans left, which is highly unlikely as we are a very resilient species. A global collapse is more likely sometime in the future, but even then some countries and communities might just keep going on.
Utter nonsense. This is not realism. This is your weird negative way of looking at the world.
A lot of European countries are now generating most of their electricity from renewables, and it's being built out rapidly. We can now produce grid-scale storage at lower and cheaper prices. In places like Texas, this is happening at a breakneck speed.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?source=to...
Also developing countries are adopting solar panels and batteries at a surprisingly fast pace, since they just buy them for cheap from China rather than waiting for a dysfunctional government to build out a proper grid to rural villages.
Eventually of course this must be true, but eventually is a very long time and thus not susceptible of reasonable analysis.
I think a realist would likely imagine a long period of suffering and confusion rather than extinction (which is actually a sort of psychic panacea).
the thing with the climate goal is just an arbitrary number to the person on the street.
for us that come from poor countries - it fuels degrowth. you want us to shut down coal plants & yet you don't want us to trade with china.
even in rich countries such as Germany - cost of energy has been a factor in slowing down growth because bureaucrats said so. while private planes keep flying, good keep getting shipped from overseas.
china has enabled cheap solar - which in turn has enabled cheap access to electricity. china has enabled cheap electric vehicles. for a bunch of people in 'poor' or 3rd world countries - in the next few years their first cars will be chinese EVs not Japanese 2nd hands or other 2nd hands from western countries.
You can't tell people to sacrifice, when people above them are getting away with robbery. You can't sell society on a negative vision for the future and any metric that becomes a target ceases to be a good metric.
We need a positive vision and I don't see anything more positive than automation and the insane unlocks that it can provide. We have the potential to eliminate commuting, turn manufacturing on its head and turn ourselves from this mindless corporate rat race into something genuinely better for everyone.
The bottom line is all environmental initiatives must be human-first benefits for anyone to take them seriously. Solar for example can make your energy independent and cheaper, that should be the focus on selling it - the emissions are just a bonus. Automated cars mean a 2 car household can live with 1 car (or less), and it will come and pick them up, and they can be drunk or fall asleep in it, and they're still comfortable, thats a win before even considering the vastly improved traffic efficiency and throughput on the same roads and reclaiming of carparks as grass.
I eat vegetarian. I own a Fairphone. I take the night train instead of a flight when possible.
To me, the most workable solution to global warming I have heard of is: building a giant Cannon on the moon and have it shoot moon dust in-between the sun and the earth. This won't stop ocean acidification but at least things will cool down. And we have a cannon on the moon which is cool.
For those who want the Emissions Gap Report the article is based on, here's the Executive Summary: https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/api/core/bitstreams/80aaab0e-2a...
And full report: https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/api/core/bitstreams/8819b586-8d...
I recommend putting the full report in your favorite LLM and asking questions as a start!
Renewables and nuclear in China and other countries have really made a dent in emissions. I never expected to see it during my lifetime, very positive. Also electrification is making a lot of fossil fuel less relevant every year. It will take time though since there is so much friction. What works in one country can take decades to diffuse into the neighboring one.
Can anyone provide a list of bad things that have happened because of climate change, genuinely curious and I want to learn from the experts here!
This is a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change
One difficulty you will encounter when looking into the effects of climate change is that you can't generally attribute individual events to it (or very rarely at least). Its effects are only really visible in more general (abstract) statistical measures (Just like me losing a coin flip doesn't mean the coin is weighted, but when i lose 8 out of 10 flips i will start getting suspicious)
That logic seems a bit weak, because it is saying we're already living in a world where the worst-case is happening, and we're just talking about the odds of any individual experiencing it are going up a little.
Compare it to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-person-vs-... where there is strong evidence that using more energy directly leads to more prosperity. We've got much better chances to do well if we stick to using the cheapest available energy. Then people can just build over the top of any disasters that strike.
> because it is saying we're already living in a world where the worst-case is happening, and we're just talking about the odds of any individual experiencing it are going up a little.
I'm not sure I'm following? A raise in temperature doesnt in itself cause any particular wildfire, drought or tsunami (just like the weight in a coin won't), but these events get more and more likely (just like losing the coin flip as the coin gets more and more unfair). This doesn't assume anything about the actual probability or trajectory we're on, if i measure my coinflips and they turn out to be 50/50 the argument is just as valid
> strong evidence
I think that pointing to 1 singular graph as "strong evidence" is a bit shallow. there are plenty of reasons to think that there are many confounding variables here.
To name just a few:
In Belgium alone 665 people died in June's extreme heatwave that would otherwise still be alive. This is not even just old people. Other European countries have similar numbers.
Europe's inland waterways have extremely low water levels because of climate change related drought. Mainly the Rhine, which is a very important transport route. Ships can't load as much, meaning goods can be delivered at a slower pace. This causes enormous economic damage.
Not only droughts are a problem, but floods as well. In the past few years we've already seen large scale floods necessitating people to flee their homes
Global average temperature has risen about a degree over the last century. That's a truly terrifying amount of energy. Habitats are shifting, forests are burning away in places where their current composition has become unsustainable, regions are becoming arid, permafrost is becoming less permanent.
Technically most of everything else is weather, not climate, do you want a list of bad weather events?
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/82686/climate...
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/19/unpreced...
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1...
For example.
People will name heat waves, but look up stats on how many die of cold vs. heat.
For the argument to work it must be that climate change causes more extremes on both sides. It's difficult to look at the evidence through an objective lens, but whenever I've looked it seems like warming the earth by a few degrees is most likely to save lives overall. There are of course other unknowns and it it's a very risky experiment to run.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change
Can't tell if genuine or ragebait...
Billions of dollars have been spent undermining science and electing corrupt fascists because people with control of fossil fuel wealth didn't want to deal with reality and laws and democracy.
That may well kill more people than climate change. Hard to tell as both have the potential to spiral out into a variety of intertwining tragedies.
If the human part of climate change wasn’t true and the fossil fuel industry’s wasn’t the culprit it would’ve been proven by now. It is very unlikely that the fossil fuel industry that is so rich and powerful wouldn’t have proven it by now.
There are none. The planet is greener, even the Sahara is shrinking. The Great Coral Reef has just had its best 5 years ever. On average, crops produce more due to higher CO2 levels.
Pacific islands failed to sink. Hurricanes failed to become more frequent. Fewer people died due to cold temperatures (which kill far more people than hot temperatures).
The planet is greener, I guess that you are pointing to; Nature Climate Change, 2016, Zhu et. al. where the authors of the study have warned that erroneous conclusions would be taken from the study.
I can't tell if this is sarcastic, or you're just lying?
> The planet is greener, even the Sahara is shrinking
The UK was baked brown in the heat and it was so bad it was visible by satellite, we had uncharacteristic wildfires all summer. Google has literally no idea what you're talking about by claiming the Sahara is shrinking, the best I can find is "maybe the expansion is slowing?"
> The Great Coral Reef has just had its best 5 years ever.
Apparently it had its most devastating coral bleaching event just 2 years ago, so I'm not sure this is true?
> On average, crops produce more due to higher CO2 levels.
I mean, yeah if you are into the average crop? People tend to like stuff like corn and coffee which are threatened by raised heat levels. With current heat levels we're projected to lose upwards of 1/5th the corn harvest by 2030.
> Pacific islands failed to sink.
I mean some of them did, like a decade ago, just none of the ones you care about.
> Hurricanes failed to become more frequent
Same frequency but wind force increases by water temperature, so a cat 1 hurricane like Rafael ends up a cat 3 hurricane due to climate change. I am seeing a pattern with your selective presentation of the facts.
> Fewer people died due to cold temperatures
Is that not because a large share of the world's old were taken out by COVID within the last 6 years? That is the group most likely to die to cold.
> Apparently it had its most devastating coral bleaching event just 2 years ago
And it's largely recovered [1]
> With current heat levels we're projected to lose upwards of 1/5th the corn harvest by 2030.
Who is projecting that? Globally we're producing 8% more corn YoY [2]. Do you expect all of the sudden in the next 5 years for 20% of that to vanish?
> I mean some of them did, like a decade ago
Which ones specifically? The Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands all still exist, and some have experienced growth [3]
> That is the group most likely to die to cold.
I think you're arguing against yourself here. Fewer people died from extreme cold because of climate change and higher average temperatures.
[1] https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co... [2] https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/production/0440000 [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02954-1
Clearly you need to send an urgent correction to the Australian Government Agency: https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co.... This is their download link for the report for 2026 published August 26. https://www.aims.gov.au/sites/default/files/2026-08/AIMS_LTM...
That report for 2025-2026 is evidence for the claim that the coral reefs have had their best 5 years ever?
So how high should we drive temperature in your opinion? Sounds like you do think it's rising, just that the effects are largely positive
This is a genuinely interesting question - if humanity had the technological capacity to set the global temperature at any value, what value should that be? Is there any reason to think that the temperature in place from the beginning of the Holocene to the beginning of widespread fossil fuel usage by humans is the best one?
> This is a genuinely interesting question
I agree! Intuitively i would think that most ecosystems evolved to adapt to their environment and, unless this environment is characterized by large swings in temperature and other conditions, will suffer in conditions different from the ones they evolved to thrive in. That means that any change in conditions needs to be slow enough for these ecosystems to gradually adjust by whatever means they have access to.
Utter nonsense.
See also:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/27/what-caused-th...
Yep, no consequences. Europeans didn't have heat waves this summer and they certainly didn't think of buying aircons this year.
When AGI is here we just have to ask how to fix it :)
42 yeah. But we already know what to do, why would AGI suddenly make us do that:D
Skynet won't have to bother launching a nuclear war. It will just sit and munch digital popcorn, waiting for humanity to fix the humanity 'problem'. A tiny speck of time in the fullness of things.
We might not like how it fixes it.
Darken the sky.
Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine. :)
I remember 10 years ago when there greentech was a thing and "carbon neutral" (by carbon credit shams or not) was a goal. I was a bit proud then. That has passed.
Now it's just about heating data centers as much as possible. Apparently climate is a solved problem. The tech CEO's children and grandchildren are safe again, and we can go back to focus on profits. /s
Tired of the complete inability of the human race to take in the Pale Blue Dot [1], and what it means. No one is coming to rescue your grandchildren. And it would be much easier for us to do something today, than them in 50 years. Actions compound over time: perhaps those actions should then be long-term positive.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot
Don't need AGI, we know how to fix it (nuclear), and have chosen not to, because nobody gave a fuck about the climate, it was never about global warming.
Nuclear is not an option, esp most countries with nuclear do import their uranium primarily from one country...
Nuclear doomerism is what has lead us to this silly "status quo" and the subject of the article/thread.
There is more than one kind of nuclear, and the fuel situation has known reserves that aren't being used because of lack of demand. Fuel costs in reactors are only a very small part of their operational costs so new mines are not the priority. We also have viable seawater extraction technologies that are waiting for appropriate demand. Past that, there are also breeder and waste-burning reactors long held-up as a vital and fuel-conserving part of a complete nuclear eco-system.
Bluntly: the nuclear build-out France achieved in the 70s, scaled globally, would solve the climate problem and position us for synthetic fuel production at a civilizational scale. Modern technologies & robotics have us on track for facilities producing low greenhouse energy for more than a century. Global shipping, transport fuels, and energy-intensive industry require high-energy inputs. WWS are wonderful, but very awkward in those domains.
If you would start to re-rollout nuclear, Uranium will be consumed within 10-20 years by all participants. In most countries, nuclear supplied usually a small but stable fragment of the overall energysupply.
U-235 is the least useful fuel medium for long term energy generation, the us along has about 57 million TWh of breedable u-238 just sitting around in cooling pools and storage facilities
Nuclear is 100% an option. Not exploring for uranium is also a choice.
Mass solar + wind + hydro and geothermal, with nuclear as a grid stabilizer for when solar and wind aren't working and the batteries are empty.
> The emissions gap is now a leadership gap. And the world is running out of time and excuses to close it.
The leadership of some countries, including the former "leader of the free world", fixed that by declaring global warming to be a hoax, so they don't need any excuses anymore and can just continue catering to their fossil fuel donors.
As much as I agree climate change is an important topic, I hate the rhetoric of "irreversible changes". Of course they're irreversible! Change is the only constant.
https://nowcity.org/ - Now City is an experiment in long-term urban planning based on the course we’ve set for ourselves, including complete loss of ice and roughly 4°C of warming with the associated shift in the human climate niche. This map accounts for the new hazards and new opportunities, and attempts to anticipate how populations might migrate and settle.
The number #1 best thing we in the west can do to mitigate climate change is having fewer to no children.
Source:https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541
The problem is that having no children means having no skin in the game. Which defeats the whole purpose.
The other problem is the prisoners dilemma: if the west stops having children and not-the-west does not stop then within a short time we will have replaced the west with an equivalent population breeding much faster for cultural or religious reasons.
There is also a world of social disruption, which could lead to environmentally disastrous wars, that come from those kinds of demographic inversions. The combination of worsening climate issues with those destabilizations might lead to acute depopulation at the global level, but not likely of a climate-friendly variety.
Destroying the world to improve some portion of the climate experienced by some portion of some population at some unspecified later date a century or more in the future versus, say, geoengineering and attacking the present-day cost structures of nuclear energy strikes me generally as a Bad Plan.
having less children if you live in a developed economy just means outsourcing your children to a developing economy.
If there are 1 million less children born in the US, it's very likely there will be 1 million more immigrants to take their place, and the places those immigrants come from will have higher birth rates to replace them
No skin in the game and less influence on the next generation having the skills and values needed to make the world better instead of carrying on the path it's on. Of course most people having kids aren't thinking of that aspect.
As long as we don't fill the gap with more immigration from poorer countries.
They're a step ahead of you, and invited millions from the east.
It's impossible to move the green train when fossil fuels are so cheap. Let the gasoline become 6 euros per liter and come again.
It's definitely a difficult task to ask people to make concrete sacrifices now for a made-up metric for an abstract goal in the future that doesn't affect them.
"Après moi, le déluge"
The problem is that people today do not have skin in the game for what happens generations down the line. No real consequences, little desire for actual change.
You didn't think that 77 year old Joe Biden sincerely cared about his climate plan for the year 2050? /s
I'm sure temperature ceiling will just work like debt ceiling.
Difference being nobody ever died as a direct consequence of the national debt.
debt is imaginary, temperature is not
It's hilarious that the EU is busy putting tariffs on electric vehicles and blocking nuclear power... but they still call it an "emergency".
Nah, that is actually logical and helpful for ecology. Just in a roundabout way. EU is for now a spearhead in all things pro-green so to say, at least on paper. By protecting local economies via tariffs (foreign EVs, foreign uranium fuel rods etc.), EU will continue being a power block and continue influencing other countries to be more green too.
What is bad, is a the lack of a coherent and realistic green programs and climate forecasts in EU as a whole. There are no incentive programs to switch to expensive one time EV purchases and charger installations (I tried to research what what would it cost to install a personal charger in my freshly constructed 2024 apartment building parking in a big city, the AI app called me a fool, well almost(1)). There are no coherent plans to expand charging networks at a state or union levels.
There solar panels, V2G, B2G, multizone electricity meters, dynamic tariffs, incentives, all are either non-existent or very spotty and organized at local levels.
There are no union wide help to transition from coal, oil, gas to relatively greener energy.
No re-foresation incentives and little to no marine protection.
No preparation for a real 3C temperature hike by the year 2100, instead the fantasy 1.5C or 2C numbers are reiterated and the populace is lulled into thinking all will be well for their kids.
I can continue the list, but the picture is of incompetence and apathy really. A few token and inconsequential efforts are done, just enough for re-elections, and that's it.
1: "This is the classic "pioneer dilemma" discussed on Polish forums. If you pay the 3,000 PLN because you are the first, and next year Neighbor B and Neighbor C get EVs, it is deeply unfair for you to keep subsidizing the overall risk profile. To protect yourself, you must not sign a contract that binds you to a flat fee indefinitely." (c) generated by AI
Are you being sarcastic? Your first paragraph is very much Effective Altruism but for European cultural superiority. "European culture is the best, so, by protecting that culture's economic base, it's actually better for the rest of the world because we can export our Lovely Eco Friendly Culture more, the more we power it with coal and oil and gas."
I despise the EA sex cult, but the the irony in that comparison is indeed visible. Good catch, I guess, I'll think about it. :)
So yes, I do currently think that the reality of life is that certain whole societies are in the given moment (now) more progressive than others. Or do you believe that some BRICS pseudo-union would collectively push for more green tech than EU is doing now (even though EU foreign policy actions are mostly impotent)?
Sure, maybe China will eventually take a lead in green tech policies, or maybe it even already did, though I'm not convinced so far. As soon as that happens visibly,I would gladly change my opinion and would advocate that now EU should follow more progressive lead (as long as Xi don't start WW3 for some "dvizhukha" like other demented autocrats did).
PS: and don't attribute to me stuff I didn't say, like this "we can export our Lovely Eco Friendly Culture more, the more we power it with coal and oil and gas."(c)
The tariffs are on Chinese EVs only - that's right, EVs built in place that burns more coal each year than every other country combined.
We both know that China's coal production is not the reason the tariffs are in place
Obviously protective measures for any country are done to make sure an economy doesn't become completely dependent on another's with strongly opposing values.
Europe's car manufacturers need to get their shit together, but not being able to buy any car whatsoever the moment China gets their own Donald Trump is worse than cars being slightly worse and a bit more expensive for a while.
How is the EU blocking nuclear power? Also the tariffs are on Chinese EVs, not those built in the EU.
This is the energy commissioner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_J%C3%B8rgensen
But if it is a real emergency, surely we would just want any EVs we can get, to encourage building out the infrastructure for them.
You haven't really answered my question. Germany shut down its last nuclear power plant in 2023, this guy you linked got appointed in December 2024.
You want to destroy the automotive industry in Europe so we can increase dependance on Chinese EVs?
> It's hilarious that the EU is busy
Hilarious compared to what exactly lmao? The US? China? Russia? TYhE GlObAl SoUtH? OPEC?
The world is a giant school playground where the bullies in charge are competing for #1 position on the goober eating contest while the school is burning
I both agree and disagree. The EU isn't worse than others. For example, it's basically the only place that's willing to replace coal with imported gas, which is a major economical sacrifice.
On the other hand, with the money the EU spends on climate measures, the results leave a lot to be desired. The EU has prioritized things like hydrogen, biofuels and carbon capture, which all have very little to show for.
If Europe had spent all that money on EVs and heat pumps, emissions would have decreased drastically while prices woundn't even go up. But that's not possible if you want to preserve old jobs. Then you have to do those stupid things that aren't viable, like e-fuels for cars.
I'm also not sure if replacing coal with gas did actually decrease emissions on the whole. The gas lobby is a large reason why electrification has stalled in Europe, while China's coal lobby helped electric trucks to reach 50% share last month.
It’s kind of hard to clean the pool when everyone around is constantly taking a shit in it, and then people like you point and laugh at the person cleaning the pool, take their tools away, disrupt the cleaning, disregard any ideas, then complain they are inefficient.
This might shock you because it happens outside your social bubble, but there is an insane amount of people (double-digit percentages for sure) that is simply unwilling to make even the smallest sacrifice in order to mitigate climate change, and they vote accordingly.
That does not make climate change any less of an emergency, but it limits politically feasible countermeasures a lot.
"While running for president in 2024, Donald Trump told oil and gas executives that he would pursue their policy priorities if the industry raised $1 billion for his campaign—and after returning to office last year, the Republican did just that, enriching those invested in fossil fuels, including himself, at the expense of the public and planet."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-oil-executives-1-bil...
1.5 hasn't been viable for over a decade and was already baked in when it became popular. Now people are moving the goalposts to 2.0 and guess what the situation is.
These feel-good "we can still fix it" articles are very common and are never correct. Our trajectory is set. Read Hansen. He's been shouting about this since the 80s when he testified in front of Congress.
I would build some thousands of datacenters and ask AI how can we solve this problem, I'm sure this will fix the problem.
The agreement was made in 2017, it was probably never viable as there was no solidarity globally to reaching that target, the biggest emitters just didn't see the need to lower emissions.
I remember way back when exceeding 1.5 was in the past, not the future.
When did it become a future event again?
I have to say, if you looked at the graphs of the last reports, 1.5C was never going to happen.
How is everyone preparing to the climate doomsday? How many years do we have?
Humans are given heaven on earth, only to turn it into hell itself
I try to imagine the mind of an executive or millionaire who willingly destroys the environment for profit, and I just can't do it.
It was born dead.
Regards, A meteorologist
Wanting to control the temperature is the worst kind of thing we want.
why? We know that we influence it, but the direction is unfavourable. why its bad to want to control it in the right direction?
The question is... Was it ever viable?
I remember, around 2016, a european climate scientist saying that he had to fill up more forms and prove every experiment in the most strict way. The justification was that their conclusions could have economical repercussions. The results of their experiments were always a few years late because of that.
Welcome to the "absence of economical repercussions" world.
Yes, a simple carbon tax could have been phased in over time. We already had nuclear and trains and insulation etc. and we now know from our present (their future) that solar, wind, heat pumps, EVs are cost effective.
Turns out the whole problem was politics, not science or technology or economics.
The goals were chosen so countries and industries could stave off the climate doomerism on the long term.
Countries like Saudi Arabia, but also India, are currently trying to delay the next report to make it miss the 2028 deadline to lessen efforts for combatting climate change where it doesn't align with their industries.
Risks will always be underreported while targets will be optimisic, because that's safest for countries dealing in and reliant on fossil fuels.
This is the same question I've asked myself. One country sacrifices its entire energy production in favor of green alternatives, while the rest of the world doesn't. It doesn't even move the needle. It's just a pitiful way to fail.
The paradigm was:
Renewables will be that fast in roll-out and much cheaper and then other countries will follow the path.
(which is funny, since China installed more solar in 2024/2025 than US+EU combined - so for them its working, in the beginning they were adptors, now they became shapers; same for africa: now a real option to get cheap energy, the only region where solar is more expensive than it should be, is actually EU + US)
I've seen the consequences of the shift to renewables here in Spain: entire ecosystems destroyed, drought everywhere, wildlife displaced, and native plant species disappearing because of wind turbines and solar farms.
I'm in favor of renewables, but at the individual level (your own home). Meanwhile, the Spanish government has made several moves to ban personal electric vehicles like EUCs and electric scooters, which only pushes people back toward gas-powered vehicles.
Everything is being done wrong.
Solar/wind farms are great when you have the land suitable for those. My favourite example is replacing the U.S. farms growing corn that is used to produce ethanol (which is then added to the gas) with solar farms. This would produce more energy while not disrupting any ecosystems (at least not more than the existing farms).
So either Spain has no land like that, or the Spanish government has fucked something up. Judging by the rest of your post, I‘m leaning towards the latter :-)
Renewables did all that? Are you stupid? If you actually cared about habitat loss there is a big list of things that take up more space than renewables. This is so idiotic it has to be rage bait
do you know of any politician in charge who is doing anything/whatever-at-least-one-thing right?
As libertarian, of course not.
Is it official libertarian dogma that solar panels and wind turbines cause droughts?
Seems like an incredibly convenient, yet insane, thing to believe if you want to deflect blame from fossil fuel driven climate change.
It's not the solution the problem, it's who execute it.
It has to be bait. No one could be that stupid.
That's not libertarian dogma by any libertarian, I know. It is right-wing, but libertarians it will remind you that politics is far too complex to try and move to one axis.
I agree, countries that do not adhere to CO2 targets should be heavily sanctioned. They are killing us, after all.
Just a reminder that the worse climate change gets, the larger the difference is that a single 0.1 degrees makes. 1.0->1.1 degree difference in global warming is barely noticeable, but 2.9->3.0 makes a huge difference.
So, paradoxically, the worse the situation gets, the larger our incentive should become to avoid yet another increase in global warming.
Where there's no will, there's no way.
I will take a moment to remind everyone that the people who don’t care about our future argue in bad faith (because their voters are genuinely stupid):
> Cruz, R-Texas, said in a tweet late Wednesday that by returning America to the multinational climate accord, Biden has indicated that he is more interested "in the views of the citizens of Paris than in the jobs of the citizens of Pittsburgh."
Did he misunderstand? This is from an AI summary from Google, but I recall his education being roughly this well before AI was in my search results:
> Cruz attended Princeton University, graduating with a B.A. in public policy (cum laude) in 1992. He then attended Harvard Law School, earning his Juris Doctor (magna cum laude) in 1995, where he served as a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review.
He’s not stupid. Many of them are not stupid (Marjorie Taylor Greene genuinely is). They cynically manipulate the stupids to the detriment of us all. Must be cool to think heaven is about to make it not matter (rapture), meanwhile the whole population of the world is effed due to lying liars holding us back and stupid voters who probably can’t read at an eighth grade level.
We live in clown world. Elections are decided by Meta and Twitter algorithms, both biased by their operators. Information doesn't get to people and lies abound. If you want to imagine the future of the world, picture indigenous children killed after being sucked into a gold mining machine:
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/two-yanomami-boys-dro...
Furthermore, imagine that the politician that incentivized and enabled such gold mining will be re-elected, forever.
Historical fact: the developed world is developed mostly via industrial revolution, a.k.a. they find out how to turn coal into wealth first
Current situation: the developed world emits much more than the developing side per capita. Even France, a country powered by nuclear, emits twice as much as India per capita
Yeah, good luck convincing the developing countries to limit their emission. "Bro please stay poor" and "you have too much population" aren't very nice things to say.
The developed world didn't have solar panels. They barely had batteries. There's a reason the developing world isn't trying to build the most optimal steam engines they can come up with.
The developing world will miss out on nuclear power because there will always be at least on major military force that will claim everyone they don't like is building weapons of mass destruction. Still, they can take solar over coal and oil, especially now that things like the EV industry are rapidly making electrical solutions for problems historically solved with fossil fuels.
The developing world is in many cases the past couple years leapfrogging fossil fuel infrastructure and going straight to solar electrification, thanks to China's cheap solar panels and improvements in energy storage battery systems.
Its time to admit that government will not be able to solve this in a reasonable amount of time. Can we please fund private charities that are actually doing something about this and could make a huge difference if they were funded better?
Demand that your government create a charity funding program where you as the tax payer get to decide where your tax money goes and choose a charity that aligns with your values and goals to tackle this once and for all.
>“Every additional fraction of a degree and additional year of warming above 1.5°C raises the risk of irreversible changes including in ice sheets, permafrost carbon, ocean circulation and coral systems, along with devastating human impacts,” the report states.
The mention to coral systems, from an ignorant perspective, seems weirdly specific to me. Kinda like "civilization will collapse and the price of sweaters will go up".
Does their disappearance have indirect consequences I'm not aware of?
Aside from being home to a lot of seafood they also play a not fully understood part in the breeding of a good number of other seafood in ways not yet fully understood.
ie. Lose the reefs .. and then we find out how our supply of seafood is impacted.
That's what I was missing yeah. I always took the bleaching of corals in media as a visible 'canary in the mine' situation, never knew they were so central to marine life.
Coral is the first to go. It's the metaphorical canary in the coal mine. We will probably survive without coral (we might lose a lot of fish but humanity will persist).
Coral bleaching is also accelerated by ocean acidification. Acidification due to CO2 being absorbed into the ocean affects all marine life, but importantly, also plankton. Phytoplankton produces most of the oxygen on earth, and we kind of need that to live. It's not exactly "coral reefs are dead = oxygen depleted", but you don't get many visual representations of oceanic climate change that could threaten all mammals on earth.
Not sure what consequences you are aware of but the key point with corals is loss of biodiversity. It's (I believe) the tipping point that goes at the lowest temperature rise.
> Coral reefs are some of the most diverse and valuable ecosystems on Earth. Home to over 4,000 species of fish, corals, and other marine life, coral reefs cover only 1% of the world’s oceans, but provide habitat for at least 25% of the world’s marine life, with many reef species still to be discovered.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_corals/cora...
> Coral reefs have an estimated global value of £6 trillion each year, due in part to their contribution to fishing and tourism industries and the coastal protection they provide.
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/quick-questions/why-are-coral...
It’s the marine equivalent of “forests die worldwide.” You might not know why you need them, but you’ll probably miss them when they’re gone
People really like coral reefs. "Civilization will collapse and this baby kitty will die."
Baby kitty and 1bn people competing for your dinner.
A quick Google suggests 25% of marine life and 1bn people.
replace "corals" with "temperate forests" to realize the scale of affected animal populations/species
corals are along the coasts all around the tropics and they are food chain, from plants to herbivores to predators
Coral systems are a major part of aquatic life, so you'd lose a ton fish, a major food source.
You'd also lose erosion protection on coasts, plant systems like Mangroves (e.g. CO2 sinks).
Additionally, the biodiversity in coral systems has been a rich source of biochemicals, think Alzheimer treatments, cancer and arthritis research.
If anyone cared about the Paris Agreement nuclear adoption would have been significantly more rapid, but the fact is, it was never about climate.
"New goal: not exceed 2°C, then bring the temperature back down to 1.5°C"
It kind of feels people have given up. I'm working on a startup that aims to replaces aviation (the most difficult emissions to avoid) with night trains in Europe (currently economically uncompetitive). It's an obvious impact story, but impact appears to be "out".
Nice concept. I caught European Sleeper last week, my first time on a night train. It was ok but I'd like something better if I was using it regularly.
It's a tough time to do something about climate change. Short-termism is very attractive right now.
Well, European sleeper is an operator -- their ability to improve the technology/interior is limited, it's a huge task just to keep running.
We are not an operator, so we will work with operators, basically adding our railcars to their trains.
The problem is the people you would need to convince. You'd be selling to people who largely won't care and don't want to be inconvenienced.
I agree. I was looking at a night train from Milan to Lecce. It costed waaay more than flights+ the extra night in the hotel. Crazy if you think about it
IIRC night trains are kinda making a comeback - they are quite convenient that you can travel over night & wake up in your destination. Otherwise you would spend a day traveling & would need 1-2 days of accommodation on top of that.
Yeah, why _are_ night trains uncompetitive? Is it just so simple as "air travel doesn't have externalities priced in"?
Beds as opposed to seats mean fewer passengers per train carriage, so the fixed cost of operating the train is shared among fewer tickets.
You can make one trip per day with a night-train, whereas a seated train runs 16-20hrs per day. So again, fixed cost of the train existing is shared between far fewer ticket sales.
Then you need to store the train during the day, and you need to securely park the train when it arrives at its destination at night (a normal train yard isn't secure enough if you have a hotel full of people, and a train station usually needs all of its platforms).
The capacity really is the main issue, in terms of cost.
The second is lack of privacy, in terms of attractiveness. 6-people-per-cabin couchette cars have sufficient capacity, but the market isn't quite there anymore.
We basically want to get as many cabins as possible in railcar (to reduce cost), but they're are comfortable and private (to increase attractiveness). With these levers, you can change the operating margin from -15%..-10% to around 10%.
Hundreds of kilometres of good quality electric railway infra is expensive to maintain. And by good quality I mean capable of relatively decent speeds like say 120-160 km/h. With airports you need to maintain lot less.
I think last time I looked it was that jet fuel is exempt from taxes in the EU? but trains aren't so flights are artificially cheap
Jet fuel is barely taxed and most touristic places subsidies the tickets to bring in the consumer cash cows.
Yes but the discussion is about places in Europe that a night train can reach, are these price-subsidizing tourist places among them?
I don't think there is much of an overlap between the train mafia and the airline mafia, you'd have to ask them.
You can start by asking that guy: https://www.politico.eu/article/ryanair-lashes-out-at-air-fr...
Exactly. Outcompeting this is hard when you basically don't pay taxes for fuel.
Pretty much yeah.
> night trains in Europe
That company from austria seems quite successfull, IIRC?
The last couple of nightjets in the order from Siemens were converted back to day trains (rail jets), presumably because the trainsets are not economical enough (too few beds).
I'm against night trains. Much better to have high speed travel during the day and then at night close down the tracks completely and do your track maintenance so the tracks are good for the next day. You can get by with skipping maintenance here and there, but that quickly will come back to haunt you and make your trains even worse.
Take a great day train, get some plays and then take a hotel room for the night. That's the most sustainable way to travel.
You mean more datacenters wasn't a move in the right direction?
Didn't we already exceed it last year?
Increased carbon emissions is a result of prosperity and progress.
I've always thought it's a little hypocritical that the first movers were 'allowed' to cut down all their trees, burn coal like no tomorrow, and yolo industry. However, when other cultures try and industrialise, it's a big nono.
We need to face the reality that our lifestyles come with a carbon cost which will impact the planet, and plan for something realistic. Setting moving, impossible goalposts is a pipedream, and a sign that someone has sat in a classroom too long.
The planet will change, it always has. Instead of endlessly whinging and spreading doom, we need to be realistic about who we are as a species and plan accordingly. We also need to build resilience into our systems so we can weather any future storms.
Also, a serious global carbon tax is the cleanest solution internationally; taxing extraction at source in line with the resulting costs of negative externalities and mitigation strategies. Could set up a nice fund for offering prizes to companies who hit certain milestones in green tech. A little bit like global competitions in Civ5.
We will continue extracting absolutely everything we can from Earth, at whatever the cost ... with the hope that technology will one day save us from our weakness.
And, yes, technologyy may "save us", but there are many different definitions of what that will look that ... some may be horrendous for the majority, but none of them will inconvenience those making the most significant decisions.
2 degree global warming means 5-6 degree more in new york (as the average mean temperature is meassured also above oceans/mountaints etc.) - and you can now ask yourself if you still want to live in NY when its 5-6 degree warmer than today?
I think the point is that - tragically and infuriatingly - it seems we'll answer that question when it happens.
Personally, I think it's time for some metaphorical guillotines to change our current directon.
Since Covid no one seems to care that much any more.
Even the Greens party in Australia is more interested in social issues than environment.
Is there really anything but two Trump administrations go blame this on? In really curious.
For something as unpredictable as the climate, setting goals is not viable.
> The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable
Good. Now, let's drop that goal and go on.
At least in Europe, higher priority should be saving human lives by providing air conditioning and a climate-friendly environment instead of putting more money into climate money washing machines.
Wait, is using gas powered data centers to produce AI slop bad for the climate?
We're now in 'stage 4':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYHwgQLvjqs
Humanity is near its end. And all we have to show for it is AI slop.
Thank the billionaires for always protecting your bottomline. I truly hope your plans to exit Earth via deep space exploration fail.
I know i’ll be downvoted, but at this point whatever.
I largely stopped caring about these announcements and also about this initiatives.
The reason is that we see these pushes but at the same time we see no real initiative, with all the burden left on individuals with little to no power to make meaningful changes.
Some examples:
1. Travel: I’m constantly told that travel by airplane is bad and should be avoided and to prefer travel by train. Yet my last trip (milan <-> munich) was 1h for ~75€ each way via airplane BUT 8h and ~200€ each way via train. And this before even pulling in the “rich people private planes” talking point.
2. I still see essentially zero push towards widespread nuclear energy for proper electrification
3. Cars keep getting fucking larger and larger. It’s crazy to see how many SUVs i see everyday burning gas with just one person on board. Electric cars don’t really solve this issue because electricity generation is not yer 100% clean.
4. I still don’t see a general push towards unified public transportation. I don’t even want it to be completely free but FUCK i don’t want to deal with three different providers if i ever dare to get out of my city while staying within the region. God forbid i decide to go to another region somewhere outside a main city.
5. I still don’t see a general push towards work from home. I live in a city large enough to have public transportation but I know very well this is the exception and not the rule. Most people burn gas and emit co2 to unwillingly go to the office to do the same things they’d do from home while also bringing their company laptop from home. This is beyond moronic.
And don’t star blaming capitalism or whatever: i don’t see any meaningful push in the right direction from either side of the political tribune.
So whatever, shit is fucked up and stuff, we’re getting extinct, such is life i guess.
> Electric cars don’t really solve this issue because electricity generation is not yer 100% clean.
Electric cars reduce emissions even if electricity is 100% generated from gas (a gas power station has higher efficiency than ICE, burning gas emits less CO2 per watt than burning petrol). Also fraction of non-carbon sources in electricity generation is rising almost around the world, not as fast as one may want but rising. Large cars is mostly an American problem, most of the world even if wants large cars cannot afford them anyway.
Stop caring because not seeing initiatives is like inverting responsibilities.
Initiatives will come if people care.
Never in history the solution to major crisis came from politicians or alike.
Even if your contributions is small, it doesn't prevent you to do them. By which extent is a personal choice, but personally I chose to be consistent with myself and my values, and I don't care about the choices of others.
Regarding airplane, I much prefer an 8h+5min trip in train than a 1h+2h trip in plane because comfort is way better and you are not dealt with like cattle. Of course I wish the price advantage would be different than nowadays.
Electric cars are not yet the perfect solution, but they are already way better than fuel cars. As for the rest, my government says its the way to go, then I go.
Note that in GIEC report, nuclear (fission or fusion) was not identified as a major solution to climate change (only contribute 10% of the whole). The main contributors were green energies.
>Note that in GIEC report, nuclear (fission or fusion) was not identified as a major solution to climate change (only contribute 10% of the whole). The main contributors were green energies.
Probably because they were making assumptions based on LWRs and using LCOE to asses the costs, instead of something sensible like EROEI
> Initiatives will come if people care.
yeah sure keep caring if you want. keep living in denial about the fact that people cared already, and shit still hit the fan.
you do you, i guess.
> As for the rest, my government says its the way to go, then I go.
lol
To be fair: setting it as a temperature range was very stupid from the get go. Also, to not consider the economic impact, was also stupid, and the CO2-tax is also beyond idiotic since it creates a fake-economy where people buy the right to pollute. That runs counter to the idea of green energy.
I think one should abandon the Paris Agreement and label it as the failure as it was. However had that does not mean that green energy should be abandoned. There need to be more incentives towards green energy (see how Putin uses gas as means to amplify his genocidal activity against Ukrainians). Meaning, companies that verifiably transition towards more renewable, need to get positive incentives to go towards that and maintain it at all times. The CO2 tax should also be eliminated without compensation. And there also has to be more realism - it makes no sense to cut down an economy, producing more unemployment in the process. It has to be a cohesive unit.
> Also, to not consider the economic impact
It's going to be the least of your problem
Its the other way around. Climate is going to be least important of your problems if you cant put food on the table.
Climate catastrophe will be the reason there's no food on the table.
This is already happening to crops like cocoa and coffee, and crops like maize and wheat are next.
If we're too stupid as a species to understand this, we can just let Darwin clean this up and give the planet another chance with different species in a few million years or so.
My point is that people want their short term economic needs met (food, shelter, quality of life).
You wont find broad support for policies that save an abstract future 40y away if you cause huge economic hardship on current people.
You can see how quickly support for addressing climate change erroded in the last few once more pressing short term needs of people were not met anymore. Academics and the upper middle class can keep theorizing about how to save the future because they can afford it while the less fortunate will turn to policies that dont hurt their short term prospects.
Bottom line is that ignoring the economic impact is foolish. No lasting political support
Humans are probably the only Earthlings that have any chance of achieving interplanetary civilization and persisting long term. If this civilization collapses and our energy technologies are lost then any future attempts at civilization will be facing a steeper slope to get those technologies back without the cheap and abundant fossil fuels we burned up. Many of those fuels may never return to this planet because life has evolved considerably so things like the Carboniferous may not happen again.
> Humans are probably the only Earthlings that have any chance of achieving interplanetary civilization and persisting long term.
Stop watching sci fi my dude, there is 0% chance we leave the solar system and probably even earth.
It's not a video game, there is no speed run, there is nothing out there for us, what's the hurry with burning and destroying our home planet ? Do you think we'll have it better on Mars lmao?
I'm not sure why you're responding as if my comment is some sort of hopium. I'm saying that if we don't stop ourselves from making Earth uninhabitable to us in the very near future, that this is the peak of technological civilization on Earth for all time. Whether human descendants or another sapient species comes out of the climate turmoil and tries to advance again, they're gonna hit a wall.
All our ambitions and dreams for the future hinge on reversing the damage we've done.
> Climate is going to be least important of your problems if you cant put food on the table.
??? We're already having record low crop yields CAUSED by climate change right now my dude. You won't have food on your plate BECAUSE of climate change
We dont have record low global crop yield. Are you confusing single countries with global output?
Not sure which economic impact you mean when the ultimate economic impact of climate catastrophe will be the complete destruction of the global economy.
This is not hyperbole. If nothing changes that's a completely realistic outcome within 50 - 100 years.
> complete destruction of the global economy. This is not hyperbole. If nothing changes that's a completely realistic outcome within 50 - 100 years
Saying the global economy will be completely destroyed within 100 years does indeed sound hyperbolic, uninformed, alarmist, FWIW.
Abandon the Paris agreement and then what? International politics won't allow for anything better to be put in its place for the foreseeable future.
We could always make more war in the Middle East (and Europe) and then 1,5°C would be totally viable. /s
Seriously now: Attempts to cut fossil fuel supply are worthless unless done en masse and in big scale - any single country doing it will just spur investment in another country. Since the world will not come to a truly binding agreement, the only thing that can be truly regulated is demand which can be regulated locally without necessarily increasing demand elsewhere.
The big new ticket is data centers, which strongly tend to use fossils due to SLAs and regulations. This can be fixed by new regulations, but only if people act now before the new approvals and builds are done.
Well cutting is happening right now and very large scale. USA is kinda laggard here but eg new electric car sales is up 70% in Europe or new Solar installations are up 50% in Africa.
Your examples are examples of cuts on the demand side. They satisfy current transport/electricity demand with a means that costs much less carbon, so fossil demand goes down.
(By contrast, a supply cut is 'not developing new fossil resource cuz someone else will buy it and burn it', which is obviously a dead end).
Yes lets do it by continuing to outsource the pollution to China and deindustrialize Europe.
Cut the nuclear, add the imported solarpanels and experience the joy of 10x electricity prices.
Blame the consumer for not turning the kettle off during peak hours and make sure you give tax breaks to Google and BiGData to open a couple more datacenters that use more power than a average city.
Oh, ban combustion engines, fuck up every batteryfactory by thinking its enough to buy the Make-Your-Own-Battery-Kit on Aliexpress.
Wow such strategy.
Europe's strategy has indeed been stupid, but not for the reasons you write.
Some parts of the energy transition are profitable, like EVs and heat pumps. This is where Europe dropped the ball.
Other parts are unprofitable, like hydrogen. This is what Europe has prioritized, without anything to show for it.
Then there are the ugly parts, like most carbon capture or importing virgin palm oil mislabelled as used cooking oil. Those things don't even decrease emissions. Again, Europe has focused too much on this.
If Europe would simply have banned combustion engines and gas boilers, emissions would have decreased drastically while prices would also decrease. Alas, Europe prioritized bad stuff instead.
"simply ban combustion engines and gas boilers" - there's nothing simple about this
Well, certainly not simple. It is actually workable and making a difference now because there's an alternative that works and is cheaper. the only thing we need to do is get people to start using it.
We probably shouldn't talk about an outright ban. There are a couple of places where we may need to say, in your niche, those don't work, so we'll let you continue using it. We'll worry about those later. Let's stop the vast majority of cases first. Then we start worrying about the niches.
What are you on about with niches? Most people can't afford a brand new EV car and have nowhere to charge it.
People buying a new car can afford an EV. They should have to justify getting a gas engine. Part of this is they need to demand chargers (and more people buying EVs will result in chargers) in useful places to charge their car.
The above covers about 98% of all car sales: you can make an EV and if everybody else is also buying EVs that creates enough demand for things like chargers that they will automatically go in to fill the demand.
> If Europe would simply have banned combustion engines and gas boilers, emissions would have decreased drastically while prices would also decrease. Alas, Europe prioritized bad stuff instead.
I will remove the gas boiler when you give me £15,000 to put solar panels on my roof with a storage battery and to remove all the gas stuff out my house. I don't have a large house either (2 Bedroom).
We are burning the only planet we have in a contest to be king of the ashes.
Who gives a fuck whether the US or China win the AI race if they both burn tons of hydrocarbon to get there? Either way, the race itself will fuck the planet up worse than either victor would.
Same about all the dumb wars of conquest, Ukraine, Iran. Who gives a fuck over those lines on a map if the map itself is on fire? All the burning of oil depots, all the explosives used are all an assault on humanity itself, not just on whatever state construct.
I have a growing suspicion that this is the Great Filter. Dumb, self-important squabbles that destroy the material basis for a species' survival in an attempt to gain control instead of cooperation.
> I have a growing suspicion that this is the Great Filter.
Ackshually... It can be our filter, but it cannot be the Great Filter.
The Great Filter has to apply universally, to every plausible society. If even a few are cooperative hiveminds, or empires ruled by an iron fist, or... whatever else you can imagine that doesn't squabble internally... then the Filter does not apply to them, which means that their absence is still weird.
The Filter has three plausible answers, IMO: (1) Some variant of the planetarium or zoo hypothesis; (2) every advanced society, universally, decides to transcend into data centers powered by rotating black holes and stable for trillions of years, or something similarly weird; potentially also New Physics, like waste heat to mass conversion; (3) the filter is in our past and abiogenesis is a lot rarer than assumed.
Maybe we'll manage to launch some datacenters, then at least there'll be a backup of the database of how much each person's net worth is, floating above the dead planet...
And if we have several of them in space, they'll use blockchain, of course.
Let us put the Servers with the Blockchain into Space, so we can be sure the net worth status is stored really really save? :-D
Never saw Game of Thrones? Which maybe should have ended with everyone dying?
I honestly hoped the end would be the White Walkers just coming and killing everyone because they were too distracted and petty to mount a united defense. It would've made for a much stronger metaphor and fit in much better with the dark vibe and unexpected killing off of audience favorites that made the show a success in the first place.
I feel like the Disneyfied ending we got instead really ruined the show for me.
You're right but you're on the wrong corner of the internet for such take
Its the only corner where one can try to talk some sense into some of the people directly involved in this process.
The self-professed unideological technical minds that pride themselves on first-principle thinking.
The walking contradictions that fail to recognize that it is in fact their ideology that is pushing us to this outcome, based on said first principles (thermodynamics ffs!) they do not actually take into account.
Sense isn't common.
Even in this forum you won't find consensus on what to do, it's all complaining and grandstanding.
I don't have a solution, but what I do know is that any idea here that doesn't involve human psychology and motivation will never suceed.
Is there anyone who actually cares about any of this?
Look at flightradar. Look at Marinetracker. Look how many cars are used every day and the billions of barrels of oil we're consuming.
We are not going to consume less oil, unless there's some manufactured event that stops us (like COVID), or we physically run out.
People are addicted to moving about, making things, entire economies rely on it.
And nobody here would sacrifice opportunity for a future that may not even happen. Even if you're the most conscious consumer, the world's going to heat up anyway. You not driving a gas car, or not eating meat, won't make any difference because somebody else will be there to consume what you leave behind.
And I plan to use as much oil as possible, take as many planes and cruises as I can, eat as much meat, because I frankly care less and I'm not going to miss out if I have the choice. I know I am not alone in this thinking and many, many others also no longer care, not that they ever did.
But you're more than welcome to leave the resources to others who will gladly use them.
I think the difficult part may be to explain to your children why you didn't care about their future. I'm guessing you're child-free, or do you home school?
“Instead, let’s spend trillions in building chat bots to get people out of their jobs”
There was a book on the overshoot nonsense a few years ago (literally called Overshoot) that talks about the make believe story of carbon capture and how during the negotiations for CAP in the 2000s and 2010s those were included as otherwise the US would have agreed to no plan at all. And even if something like removing carbon at scale through forestry, burning, and co2 capture was ever so viable who would pay for that. That only works with emissions trading (which every other month gets watered down because muh energy bills, muh aviation cost, etc) or some “energy costs nothing” mythological tech. We are fucked and while there are many who care the vast majority of people oscillates between too dumb, too selfish, and too manipulated to ever be willing to give up today’s comforts for a happier tomorrow.