TBH, it is pretty surprising, considering that they should clearly be seeing the opportunity.

COO: "This is turning out to be hard"

CEO: "F*it, let the planet burn".

CFO: "I'm down with that, I'm retiring rich and have a good 10-20 years of cocaine and hookers before my house on the coast gets washed away"

You should too. It's not that hard.

I am doing it again, but in another city.

2. Your link is about co2 exhaled which is a tiny fraction of a person's overall co2 emissions.

3. According to https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/climate-solutions/carbo..., the average American's carbon footprint is about 16 tons of co2 per year multiplied by the average American's lifespan of 77 years equals 1,200 tons of co2. According to every source I could find, the overwhelming majority of trees in the United States weigh a single digit number of tons fully grown, and trees aren't pure-carbon either. Further, many trees don't reach maturity and of those that do many release their carbon via decay and combustion.

Except there are limits which the demand, for the most part, can't overcome.

> Im lumping in things like direct air capture, bioenergy carbon capture and storage,

All of these things are energy intensive, aren't they? So as energy becomes more expensive, so do they. Demand never gets quite so high that it's worth it to pay for this, because the price is always rising. There's another alternative in such situations... "just don't buy carbon offsets". The PR hit's cheaper after all.

We are actually running out. What comes next after shale?

The earth as well as the value of their own companies.

Go ask some people in developing countries if they think they should sacrifice economic growth for climate change. The answer is going to be overwhelmingly no. The developing world also has the majority of the world’s population, so the global consensus actually belongs to them, not us.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-023-03518-z

How much net real harm to humanity do you think global warming causes today? (If we ingnore psychological harm caused mostly by the scare tactics used to prevent it)

According to this article, total excess mortality from cold weather is still an order of magnitude higher than from hot weather:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...

As the world has been warming over the last decades, mortality from cold weather has been declining faster than the mortality from warm weather has increased.

This is from Europe, but prior studies have been conducted that produce the same results globally:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

> more like it's a non-issue now

So my claim is that global warming is also in reality a non-issue right now, even though it could in theory become a big issue in about 100-200 years, if we don't do anything.

I think the reason why Global Warming gets so much attention right now, is partly that we have few other serious issues to worry about right now, and partly because some groups have chosen to put it on the agenda.

Few people alive today actually remember WW2, and even the Cold War and the Nuclear Scare is becoming a distant memory.

So my prediction is NOT that the real threat of Global Warming will necesarily go away, but rather that something (like AGI) will appear that makes it seem insignificant by comparison.

The idea that we can only mitigate is insane. Yes we've already signed up for a lot of pain as a civilization, but as long we keep burning fossil fuels we are looking at an increasingly worse future.

It's not like a smoker who has gotten lung cancer, where the best we can do is try to ease the pain, and more smoking won't really matter.

The biggest first step in preventing the worse case is to be able to point to an established oil field and say "that will never be extracted, and will remain in the earth for at least a 1000 years."

Every ton of carbon we can keep in the ground that way, the better of our future, even if that future is already slated to be bad.

If you look at the Brent Crude (oil) price chart and zoom out so you can see the last 10 years it's definitely not showing any sign of a long-term downward trend.

https://www.google.com/search?q=brent+crude+oil+price

> Its not so much they are doing this for profits

Funding a massive climate change denial movement in the US for decades, consequently eating up our limited window of time to make the kinds of societal changes to avoid the worst consequences of climate change is very much an "oil company issue" that is done exclusively for profit.

The same way the best way to tackle crime is through better education for the people, getting the existing people out of poverty might be the single best thing we can do to have them realize the impact, reproduce less, and contribute to a solution. I also think this way ends up being pragmatic because it doesn't require "so we change everyone's minds" as step 1.

Like, with just the corporate headquarters of Shell, you've somehow created an excess in housing?

> maybe it wont be as necessary for people to hang on to fulltime work.

... To the point that they won't have to work for a living?!

It very likely could, and I'd happily pay for it. Like, my Mac Studio with an M2 Max in it probably took, all said, and absurd about of resources to create... But it only cost me $3k or something. Well, if it works as long as it should, it'll easily help me earn over half a million dollars. I'd rather pay far more for the computer and cover the expenses of the externalities of its production, but I don't have the choice.

Otherwise, a lot of the energy used in the production could be sustainably produced, but it's not incentivized enough in the countries (or any countries, I suppose) in order for that to occur.

Perhaps I could make improvements by switching to different computers. I know the framework offers opportunities to reuse the same chassis such you can use mostly-the-same hardware for a very long time, and that could be the right path forward. I love the philosophy.

As for the driving issue, that's very hard to overcome. I personally ride an electric bike just about all the time, but at the moment I'm on vacation in Whistler, BC, having driven through 2 full tanks of gas so far on my way from Victoria, to Squamish, now Whistler, and all the little stops in between. My Toyota Highlander produces more pollution than any other single thing in my life. My wife drives it for work and we both regret the purchase quite a bit. Yet, something electric would take a very long time to "break even" on the footprint before improving on our situation, even with how clean our electricity is here in BC. I need to do more research to understand how I could purchase my way out of this problem.

Because the free market is not willing to bear the risks - even when you ignore the whole "nuclear waste" and "meltdown" part. The construction costs are extremely high and basically guaranteed to wildly exceed initial estimates, while electricity price is highly volatile.

The only way companies are interested in building reactors is by having a guaranteed government subsidy. For example, Sizewell C in the UK has negotiated a guaranteed electricity price of £119 / MWh. The long-term electricity spot price in the UK for 2013-2021 is closer to £70, so taxpayers have to pay an additional £49 / MWh in subsidies. Good luck selling that to the nuclear-skeptic taxpayers.

Because of environmentalists like Green Peace, Sierra Club etc.

The high price of oil is a huge drag on economy, with every spike causing inflation and reducing economic growth.

The USA has already developed technology needed, and renewables are now the cheapest energy source. The countries that scale them up quickly will enjoy smooth economic growth and cheaper energy than ever in history, and the countries that keep using oil will stagnate.

Everyone still has to make their living, and they have to do it inside the elites construction of the market.

The tragedy arises in aggregate. When every industry contributes negligible amounts at the same time the aggregate contribution is no longer negligible. Rational individual action leads to total destruction.

Yeah we are all guilty. Even when we contribute negligible amounts.

Computing infrastructure is one thing, but then there's also the enormous waste footprint of electronics in general. So many billions of people are now cycling through devices, and our recycling story is disturbingly poor. My job is quite close to this problem, whether it directly supports it or not. My livelihood more or less depends on humanity using connected devices, so this problem works in my favour (so to speak).

At what point do we blame ourselves to increasing fossil fuel usage, even in the what, past 5 years?

And yes, you can build pretty tall structures out of CLT, but there's still smaller than what you can build with steel and concrete. The tallest one built that I know of is 25 stories. But at least 6 or so of those floors are all concrete+steel, and it still uses concrete+steel emergency stairwells.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/inside-fs/delivering-mission/apply/w...

But what is the foundation made from? What do you think the elevator shafts are made from? Its not like its 100% wood. I would like to see more CLT construction, and modern building codes are allowing taller and larger stick construction as well, but arguing that steel and concrete aren't necessary is ignoring all the rest of the things supporting that structure along with all the other things that still need steel and concrete. How did all the building materials arrive at the site? What harvested the wood? What were the machines making the CLT made out of? What are the fireproof stairwells usually made out of? Steel and concrete.

We'll probably see more and more construction which looks like this, where some CLT offsets some concrete and steel, but chances are the whole building isn't entirely wood:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/styles/fs_wysiwy...

Using modern materials and building codes can let us reduce our usage of things like steel and concrete for more buildings, but its not going to fully eliminate their usage in our world.

In fact who is actually causing emissions? They sell products and it's the end users who burn the product.

Every gallon of oil you use is equivalent to a democratic vote for oil ... we all can choose to vote in the other direction right now... but we don't.

Ostrom didn't debunk the tragedy of the commons. She merely suggests a framework that would avoid it, which has never been tested at the scale of 7 billion people trying to solve global warming.

For some reason, whenI lie to the insurance company, its fraud and I am a criminal.

But when a company lies to me about my environmentally friendly product, it's just business.

> Indeed, making the much bigger model, the GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters, emitted over 550 tons of CO2e while consuming 1,287 MW hours of electricity, per computer scientist Kate Saenko. It’s the same amount of emissions as a single person taking 550 roundtrip flights between New York and San Francisco.

Specifically, I struggle with the interpretation where this is presented as significant amount. To me, training GPT-3 at the cost of about a SINGLE New York-San Francisco return flight is practically negligible. I wonder whether for example at a conference like NeurIPS the carbon cost of all the experiments is exceeded by the carbon cost of participant travel to the conference. My guess is that probably yes.

[1] https://carboncredits.com/how-big-is-the-co2-footprint-of-ai...

The oil supply chain is logistically demanding. Once oil is pumped out of the ground it's got to go somewhere, and once it's there it has to move or be burned, because storing oil gets expensive. What oil producers care about is predictability of demand, price is important but it's secondary to that. If the whole world knows that there's plenty of oil it's much harder to set the price where you want it. If the world thinks oil is a rare and precious commodity the price is natural.

Then again, we missed the window to stop long ago. So why bother anyways, right?

Ultimately, it's a very poor excuse to state that because we can't stop immediately, that we might as well continue digging as much oil as possible out of the ground for burning.

But this has always been the problem with stopping climate change.

We are choosing between lesser, but certain immediate pain vs larger but less certain future pain.

In the 1880s we could have easily stopped climate changed, but been forced to slow growth. The pain would have been minimal for those living, but the probability of extreme catastrophe seemed remote so nothing was done.

As we move forward the probability of extreme catastrophe becomes more certain, but so too does the immediately pain.

None of these things are necessarily true. In fact from the government stability perspective we've been in an unparalleled period of peace and stability that looks incredibly shaky into the near future.

Any climate commitments go completely out the window when conflict breaks out between nations.

The argument wasn't that they're unconstitutional, it's that they weren't authorized by Congress. To have the law you have to actually pass the law.

> crops fail due to the climate becoming unpredictable and wars over clean water become ubiquitous

Currently, we're facing what can become the worst famine in decades because of a single war that was NOT caused by global warming or access to water. Just simple nationalism.

The food supply 50-300 years from now is really hard to predict. If the birth rate stays at current levels, and also reach such levels in the few countries where the birth rate is still high today (mostly Africa), there will be a lot fewer mouths to feed in 2100 than today.

And if the birth rate goes back up, and exponential population growth resumes, no amount of food production will ensure that we never run out.

Right now (or rather, before 2022), the amount of food produced per capita globally, is probably higher than at any time before since the dawn of time.

Thanks in very large parts to fossil fuels used for farm machinery and in fertilizers.

I don't think it's public opinion so much as it is necessity to maintain current standards of living for the next few decades. Renewable energy is still a relatively small fraction of overall energy use, and net global oil consumption has been steadily increasing the past few years (likely to surpass pre-covid levels this year). Our society is still very much addicted to hydrocarbons.

And they are right. There are viable alternatives to gasoline cars now and people still buy gas powered vehicles. Most of Teslas success I think has not been so much due to the hunger for an electric vehicle but because of Tesla's cool factor, performance and design. The rest of the major vehicle manufacturers have essentially failed on the electric vehicle front.

My first thought as well.

Yes, Congress can pass a new law. That doesn't make the supreme court's decision absolutely fucking rank idiocy based entirely in political goals covered in the thinnest veneer of jurisprudence.

Yes, Gorsuch thinks that Congress can't delegate at all and basically all execute agencies should be destroyed. We know. He'll ride out climate change in a mansion.

> China, India, Indonesia, Turkey and Zimbabwe were the only countries that both added new coal plants and announced new projects. China accounted for 92% of all new coal project announcements.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/coal-burning-capacity-cli...

And if per capita consumption can go down in the 2010's when we had negligible amounts of wind, solar, EV's and heat pumps, what'll it do in the 2020's when we have non-negligible amounts of wind, solar, EV's and heat pumps?

There was no question about the constitutional authority of Congress in the other case. They were interpreting the Clean Air act and concluded it didn't enable the EPA to do this.

> Yes. The Supreme Court is a political body, like any other.

They generally try to avoid political issues and punt them to the elected branches.

> Notably, West Virginia v EPA took on a regulation that had already been reversed by the Trump administration.

'The case was not rendered moot when the Biden administration took over in 2020, as the EPA under the Biden administration stated their inclination to include "outside the fence line" controls, making the case still relevant to the authority the EPA had in interpreting their Congressional charter.' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_v._EPA)

> And yet, the Clean Air Act exists. Congress could edit it or repeal it if they wanted.

You keep saying "the Clean Air Act exists" but the question is what it authorizes the EPA to do.

They could pretty easily impose costs on fossil fuel generators that make them uncompetitive and thereby cause a switch to other generation methods, but that would raise energy costs for consumers in the meantime, which would be unpopular. So they wanted to do something else, but the something else wasn't a thing the law authorized the EPA to do, so if you want that you need to change the law.

https://insideevs.com/news/675163/norway-plugin-car-sales-ju...

The USA was at 14% last year and could hit 18% this year.

https://insideevs.com/news/675163/norway-plugin-car-sales-ju...

Are you talking about China? I think they're considered a second-world country, as they were somewhat aligned with the USSR.

Keep in mind that most countries are trying to electrify most parts of the economy, so we not only need to decarbonize the current electrical supply, but possibly 2-3 times that, if we are to replace NG for heating, steel and chemical industries, fertilizers and so on.

Keep in mind that even if the technology for producing windmills and batteries go down a lot, we still need a lot of new mining capacity to even have enough raw materials to produce those items. That alone could take 10-15 years to build out.