By the way, I highly recommend the Priority 600 :-)
It would however be a really good first step to make the energy discussion a bit more honest. We don't need combustion engines in order to generate energy.
I don't really see any purpose if we have to be confined to computer enabled cars with built in surveillance with no resemblance of quality, control or freedom.
It's going to get ugly when large swaths of the human population struggles to get food & clean water.
It might just be a context thing and people are on average smarter than what the comment section makes out but yeah, wasn't filling me with confidence what I saw.
ps. please don't downvote this. I'm NOT a climate change denialist. Aerosol removal is linked to the recent temperature spike. Don't mix CO2 with aerosols. We need to get rid of CO2.
Peer-reviewed article covering the topic: https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/24/13681/2024/ (best resource)
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2206885119 (covering reduced cloud coverage after the emissions being lowered)
What are possible?
1) Plug-in solar and batteries: The next population boom is in Africa. Africa probably has the advantage of no legacy grid with fossil fuel interests and power plants. They can leap frog and go entirely offgrid or mini community level grids.
2) Vertical solar: Solar deployments at scale today use the legacy grid, production far away and transmission lines to bring power to cities. Solar is dirt cheap, the biggest costs now are land and transmission lines. Instead, we can do vertical solar in cities. Cover every surface. Adds ~4 hours of production every day. We already know rooftop solar works, with vertical, maybe cities can become self-sufficient.
3) EVs for energy storage. 1.8 billion vehicles in the world, if they all become EVs, they are the biggest energy storage without having to build a separate energy storage layer saving trillions of dollars. The first step is to stop buying ICE cars. It will take 20 years for the entire fleet to be electric.
Solar is growing now, but curtailment is at 20%. Storage is the bottleneck. Solar will soon hit a wall, we can't grow solar because it becomes financially unviable to add more production, curtailment will increase and prices will go a lot more negative (500 million times/year in the US).
People are going to buy cars anyway, we can't convince anyone to walk/bike, just have them buy EVs instead. This creates the storage to continue to grow solar.
There was too few “there are green technologies superior to the carbon based ones” (heat pumps got really good).
Well, there are two problem spaces - innovating ways to reduce emissions AND inventing new ways to help people cope with rising temperatures - and I hear very little about the second one despite the immediate humanitarian need for it
P.S. for pedantic folk: yeah, it's far from the actual boiling threshold of ~100°C, but to boil the humanity, you don't even have to go 80-90% of the way there
> Behind this climate hysteria is an even deeper delusion, though: that degrowth will deliver us all from the sins of modernity. That energy use in and of itself is suspect. That salvation will be delivered through abstinence. It's all nonsense.
Maybe slightly off-topic, but here a prominent figure in SV who now also got into Linux is mocking those concerned about climate change.
it was a nice run while it lasted, but seems humanity is nearing its end as the world/nature is trying to purge humanity to save itself.
Its reasonable to question whether our agriculture at scale is adaptable to such sudden climate change.
Pros: my next iPhone will travel faster from China to Europe.
#alwaysLookAtTheBrightSideOfLife
If we truly cared about climate change we would stop buying from China. But we all know this won't ever happen because we don't really care enough. It's just virtue signaling.
Buy an AC you're not saving the planet by sweating your ass off.
If you look at total historic emissions to date, the US is responsible for 25% of all of them, and the EU is close behind at 22%. China is at 13%. And if you look at historic emissions per person, then each American has produced ~8x as much as the average Chinese person.
https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
Yes, the west has played the dominant role in GHG emissions. I don't blame China for now, quite recently, increasing their GHG emissions as they try to get to standards of living we've had for many decades. As we led the way into the industrial revolution and high GHG emissions, we should also lead the way back out. And yet US emissions per capita are still about 50% higher than Chinese!
There you have it. My comment was about the current post-industrial west. You are making a disingenuous attempt at shifting blame onto the west. The main problem countries today are China and India.
Go home, look at all the objects in your house, do the same thing. Then tell you that this has nothing to do with you.
He just gave you the data and you refused to read it even though it talks about the current state of things (besides past emissions).
Per capita, India is on place 124/207.
What makes this disingenuous?
I thought I was pretty clear and honest about my belief that the West is to blame for a huge portion of the warming so far -- and this is backed by data -- and I was clear and honest that I think we are not meeting our responsibility today to lead the way out of GHG emissions. And even today, we USians still have a rather higher GHG emissions per capita than the Chinese do.
(India is barely even in the picture, and their emissions per capita today are 1/6 of the US')
So, yes: this still represents a problem with the *current* west. We should be rather further along in decarbonizing, but we are dragging our feet, held up by the fact that a lot of folks don't want to acknowledge that ACC is a problem.
This is because we outsource our Co2 to those countries through manufacturing. My main point still is that WE don't make a difference. Saving electricity in Europe changes nothing, not does buying an EV. If we want to make a change we need to stop buying Chinese manufactured products.
Or set aside new electrical energy capacity, and instead look at other GHG sources: automobiles, agriculture, concrete. Are we doing well there? Mostly, no, not great, and we should be much further along in decarbonizing than we are.
For the most part, the US has not taken ACC seriously.
So, yeah, all of those sources have declined in emissions. Particularly automobiles, as the US pioneered EV development.
And yet we still have some of the highest per capita emissions in the world. Nearly tied with Russia for "highest per capita emissions of major economies", see [1].
Since the IPCC was formed in 1988 and ACC widely recognized as a problem, US per capita GHG co2-equivalent emissions have dropped from 25.2 t/capita/year to 17.5, for a cumulative decrease of 30% [2]. This is a rate of -0.95%/year, which is not what I would call "rapid".
And dropping to only 70% of a really high mark still leaves us at a really high mark. But really, I just don't understand your argument.
Are you saying that a 30% drop over 40 years is a lot, when we should have been aiming for dropping by 70-100% in that time frame?
Are you saying that our emissions dropped significantly, even though we all know there was major political obstruction to plans to cut fossil fuel use?
Are you saying that what we've done is enough, even though the US is still one of the highest emitters per capita and the Earth is on track to greatly overshoot the +1.5C goal? Current best estimate is +2.7C by 2100.
I can't make the general direction of your argument make sense. Seems like you're overplaying what we've done and downplaying how far there is left to go.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...
DW also, similar stuff, but the guest is quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcl5Mn373Oc
Anton Petrov covered it from a much more science lens a couple months back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRoU3whzX_Q
All the downvotes are just showing why no action is being taken even though right now we are literally terraforming the planet with no plan, and it is going to stop the transatlantic currents that keep Europe from becoming arctic.
But sure, just do nothing until Europe becomes an uninhabitable tundra and it is too late to take action. Great plan.
Lets say the EU does geoengineering and then there are crop failures in India the next year. Their fault or not, they are going to get blamed for it and actions taken. The EU would become the scapegoat for any kind of weather/climate issues in future.
This is the trolley problem done at a global scale.
However, we need a global consensus for geoengineering. That's just how that works... the Jet Stream. Meanwhile one country believes that global warming is a benefit, aka Russia. They currently appear to have control of the West.. so what in the actual f?
For a far more dire diatribe:
LNG has anywhere from 10% to 100% more greenhouse gas emissions, depending on who you believe about how much methane leaks during LNG production and transport operations. Most credible estimate IMO is +60%.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-climate-adaptation-spendi...
Our governments don’t seem to even be able to sustain consensus for a single election cycle, active geoengineering projects would require committing to keep doing it for decades, centuries or however long it takes to get back to equilibrium.
The "little" problem here is that all of this does not matter at all, as EU is emitting insignificant amount of CO2, comparing to Asia or USA.
https://youtu.be/_xZCh8eDZFc?si=AHyDPgoDucsCRllS&t=402
They claim the panama canal is continuously fed by freshwater for the canal locks (which segment the canal into sections with different water levels, and which enable ships to be raised or lowered to the next water level during travel along the canal).
It's 2026, why are humans dumping freshwater into the oceans? This can perfectly be done without wasting freshwater.
Archimedes screws can essentially be operated quasistatically at extremely high efficiencies. The energy released when lowering can be stored either in gravitational energy of a mass, or be used to power a second parallel lock operated in counter phase (so while one lock is lowering ships say eastwards, the energy is used to raise ships traveling westwards, and afterwards their roles reverse). To speed up a second gravitational potential energy store (and optional flywheel) can be used to accelerate and decelerate the pumping. Apart from some frictional losses (minimal compared to the potential energies involved) this doesn't cost energy, and is easily covered by a small number of solar panels.
Is this misreporting by the BBC, or is it mismanagement by the Panama Canal operators?
Keep the freshwater, use it for irrigation etc, make Central America more attractive to South American refugees and the migration burden on Mexico and US lowers.
The operation as currently described is so inefficient, even for the 1960's!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal
Construction began: 1 January 1881
Date completed: 15 August 1914
> The energy released when lowering can be stored either in gravitational energy of a mass, or be used to power a second parallel lock operated in counter phase (so while one lock is lowering ships say eastwards, the energy is used to raise ships traveling westwards, and afterwards their roles reverse). To speed up a second gravitational potential energy store (and optional flywheel) can be used to accelerate and decelerate the pumping.
if the canal didn't exist, and we were designing it as a greenfield project in 2026, that would definitely be a design worth considering.
could it be retrofitted onto the existing canal? sure, in theory.
in practice, they currently handle 36 ships per day, and lowering that limit by just 2-4 per day is significant enough that it makes international news [0]
so whatever retrofitting you have in mind, the construction would need to be done completely non-invasively, without disrupting the daily operation of the locks. it's nowhere near as simple as you're making it out to be.
0: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/08/21/panama-...
In this scenario, haven't you poured a bunch of ocean water into the lake? I don't see how to can fill the locks with ocean water and not have it pour into the lake.
They’re called rivers and they do that naturally.
You're blaming the engineers who designed this with 100 years of hindsight.
Every solution can be improved over time as conditions evolve. Yours included.
I am glad that I live far away from the effects but it is sad to think of people losing all kinds of things for the lack of respect of Mother Earth!
It also explains why boiling water doesn't spontaneously just explode into vapor once it hits that temperature
As we are at or nearing +1.5C now, with global emissions at an all time high [ perhaps peaking soon ] theres a good chance we are headed toward +2.6C by ~2060.
Keep in mind the CO2 stays up there for a long time, centuries, so when we get to net-zero its max-CO2 and therefore max-heat.
Globally, fossil fuels supply 81.1% today (2023). Only marginally down from 81.4% in 2000. Fossil fuels are not on track to end by 2050. But rather in 4-10 centuries.
There are still ~4 months till peak El Niño, and then some months to spread effects.
Expect lots more chaos and death of wildlife in the ocean as we are seeing in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, sharks migrating to places where they don't normally and surprising humans, gray whales are washing up on the shores at larger and larger rates, jellyfish to have a lot more food so there will be a lot more jellyfish, invasive beetle species will have a lot more food, algae blooms will be a lot more prevalent so the ocean will become more toxic.
Personally, I don't put much faith in weather predictions that are more than a week away.
Unfortunately for where I'm at, the prediction due to el nino is more drought, which sucks because we are already desperately dry. Hopefully the following la nina year will bring us some moisture.
> Ocean acidification has been called the "evil twin of global warming" and "the other CO2 problem". Increased ocean temperatures and oxygen loss act concurrently with ocean acidification and constitute the "deadly trio" of climate change pressures on the marine environment. The impacts of this will be most severe for coral reefs and other shelled marine organisms,as well as those populations that depend on the ecosystem services they provide.
Example: https://x.com/EliotJacobson/status/2091911667903041543
The weather this year up in Canada here has been extremely odd. Constantly. You can tell something is off.
One thing I will definitely not be doing is staying around the Palm Springs area, which I usually do because of the risk for earthquakes if the heavy rain flow into the Salton sea.
Heavy precipitation would have negligible impact on earthquake hazard.
Interestingly, Palm Springs area has considerably higher earthquake risk than most of the US because it sits near 4 major active faults: San Andreas, San Jacinto, Banning, and Garnet Hill.
On one hand, heat + humidity will literally kill some vulnerable people. One the other hand, heat + extreme dryness will literally kill people via wildfires.
Before summer comes around I need to clear various dry leaves and branches and general fire-fuel garden waste from around my house and yard. Somehow, my house doesn't have a water tank, and that makes me feel vulnerable, and it's only recently that I've felt that as a potential threat, mental note: water tank + pump near the top of the to-do/buy list.
Unfortunately, the threat of total annihilation of human civilisation is currently not outweighing the short-term profit incentives of those in power, and they've turned the issue into fuel for their culture war so I doubt we'll find a real solution before the current generation of politicians is dead.
Climate change has... well... none of that. Not only that, but by the time it gets bad enough to convince people, it may be literally impossible to stop.
It's grim to think about, but if the nuke is falling it's too late to build an iron dome. We have several nuclear bombs dangling above us. We know they're there - permafrost, AMOC, ocean life collapse - just not exactly where, and we're blinding swinging a knife on a stick while actively yelling for a longer stick and telling the research committees not to tell them if they're getting close.
Those aren't small things to ask and I understand why people and governments pretend to gaslight with just energy, as it asks for no impact on daily life.
While each action is tiny, collectively they add up.
The rain drop doesn't blame itself for the flood.
Yet, we continue to burn more and fossil fuels; solar, wind, EVs, etc, non-withstanding. And right now some governments are actively spending money to work against renewable energy.
At this point I am afraid that we humans will only act when the alternative is unaffordable, when the forest is already on fire. I hope by that time it won't be too late.
Those of us who have been saying this all along won't even get the hollow satisfaction of an "I told you so!", because we'll be too busy surviving.
Vote, drive less (combustion engines), fly less, use public transportation, check your utility mix (and demand a larger renewable fraction), install solar, lobby, buy more local (where possible), consume less, support those with jobs displaced by renewables, accept some loss on your fossil stocks, ...
Like, it truly takes a level of willful ignorance to have something so dire happening, and just choosing to either ignore it, or ignore the evidence for it.
Like, even if you think the science isn't that accurate, the impacts, the massive potential harms, should outweigh the choice to just ignore it. Then again, there are people buying wooden homes in wildfire, hurricane, and flood zones, so who knows; maybe doing risk management as a job has just inured me to head-in-the-sand reactions, since I've seen what happens when you don't beat the odds.
This isn't a personal risk, either, like riding a motorcycle where you're the only one who's going to get hurt when your number comes up. This is literally going to kill millions.
Also kinda depressing to realize that no matter how much one person does, it won't make a dent globally. And what really stings is that even when decisions get made they're either too late or half-assed. Guess all we can do is hope we don't live to see things get really bad...
A more indirect analogy is body temperature : having your body temperature 2°C above normal is a pretty bad fever; at 4°C, your life is in immediate danger; anything over that you're seriously harmed or dead.
The bad news is that if it's hot again next year, La Nina will actually help hurricanes form.
https://abcnews.com/US/solar-generates-energy-coal-us-1st-ti...
"Solar and storage provided 90% of all new power added in the U.S." is mind blowing. How about we give the US credit for this?
Fossil fuel extraction is not the problem. The problem is fossil fuel usage. Given the world consumes fossil fuel I prefer they use American fossil fuel vs. Russian or Saudi fossil fuels. I don't understand why we are dwelling on the wrong metric here. Also consider the US has just removed a sh~tload of fossil fuels from the world economy. How about some extra credits there?
Similarly data centers are going to get built somewhere. If they're already built I'd rather they are built in places like the US.
Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem. This is already happening with solar. Where I would be critical about US policy is that I think they are introducing more tariffs on imported solar panels. This might fit into governments make things worse and hopefully everyone regardless of their political affiliation can push back on this specific item.
The world all going to act together stronger than the markets is not going to happen. You can argue that is unfortunate but it's also where we are.
We’re not letting the market handle it and we’re going in a backwards direction. Can’t really crow about our accomplishments given that.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/06/rwe-deal-win...
Markets do not care about externalities. That’s the whole issue. Markets by themselves cannot work for the benefit of humans, you need to regulate them, otherwise we would have child labor and slaves to trade. You need to force the participants to have to deal with their externalities and consider more than the next 2 quarters. Markets are a tool you have to use correctly, it’s not a magical thing that solves all humanity problems by itself
Your sacred market has been killing us all and will continue to keep killing us all if it makes a few pennies.
The problem is politics and banana republic levels of corruption (aka lobbying) preventing chinese evs to enter the market. If you opened the automotive market to competition ie:
> focus on markets and let them take care of the problem.
then the need for fossil fuels would decline.
Do you mean the war with Iran that released in the initial weeks over 5 million metric tons of CO₂?
It is a problem though. Extraction and transportation of fossil fuels is a major source of methane, which is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.
> Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem.
Blind faith in the markets is what got us in this mess.
> Fossil fuel extraction is not the problem. The problem is fossil fuel usage.
Yes, and usage is not decreasing. As solar is growing, it's only adding capacity, not replacing fossil fuels. 2025 was the record year for global emissions and fossil fuel consumption.
But sure, let's let "the markets" dictate our ecological policy. Maybe they'll mercifully let us stop burning oil sometimes in the 2150s.
> Also consider the US has just removed a sh~tload of fossil fuels from the world economy. How about some extra credits there?
Huh? Americans very consistently rank among the biggest emitters, basically only surpassed by citizens of petrostates.
I'll just put this here: as long as burning fossil fuel is profitable, "the markets" won't help at all, quite the contrary. And oil being unprofitable isn't happening anytime soon. Our societies are already suffering from Climate Change immensely, and it will only get worse as the years go by. We should have stopped emissions yesterday, we can't let "the markets" take away our agency on the matter and decide our fate.
If it weren't for the huge efforts put into it by china to make solar and batteries so cheap and capable we wouldn't be nearly as far along in the solar transition as we are. Solar is growing in spite of US policy, not because of it.
No modern market is truly free, government loans, subsidies, taxes ect all impact the direction of the market and every single one of them has been used at one point or another to push the market in a certain direction
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta...
Also this seems to contradict your fossil fuel paragraph completely, the US is amongst the world's highest fossil fuel consumers per person: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels?fuel=total&m...
> Trump has touted coal as clean in the past, but experts say coal emits carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and several other pollutants.
Wow, experts say coal emits carbon dioxide. What a world we live in where that's considered expert knowledge.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...
1.5% is a //huge// amount. If it was a “drop” in your bucket, it would only hold 67 more of those drops.
1.5% of global energy use would be a shocking amount. Aviation is at about 3%. 1.5% of global electricity is about 0.2% of global energy use, a much more manageable figure
Why would this not be the energy of running an LED light for 15 minutes?
that would be 0.3% of global energy use
Instead much of it is being handled by bringing new fossil power plants on line that would not have been built if not for all the new data centers.
The other things that are causing significant increases in electricity use, like more people getting heat pumps and EVs, are all very spread out and so are much less likely to force new fossil fuel power plants.
They also represent investment in economic growth that doesn't come from resource extraction or travel or manufacturing.
June 2026: New coal-fired plants in Anchorage, Alaska, and Mt. Storm, West Virginia, would total 2.85 GW. They would be the first new U.S. coal plants to come online since 2013.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doe-announces-850m-moderniz...
Meanwhile in China (from 2023):
China permitted more coal power plants last year than any time in the last seven years, according to a new report released this week. It's the equivalent of about two new coal power plants per week. The report by energy data organizations Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air finds the country quadrupled the amount of new coal power approvals in 2022 compared to 2021.
"Everybody else is moving away from coal and China seems to be stepping on the gas," she says. "We saw that China has six times as much plants starting construction as the rest of the world combined."
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
Meanwhile in India (2026):
India plans to increase its coal production by nearly 100m tonnes to 1.15bn tonnes in the 2025-26 fiscal year to help meet the country’s rising demand for electricity to support economic growth and contend with heatwaves, which have become more severe and more frequent because of the climate crisis.
The planned increases come despite signs that the world is beginning to turn its back on coal in favour of renewable electricity, Global Energy Monitor said.
The US could switch every ICE vehicle to EV's and install solar and wind turbines in every inch of the country and it won't combat what's going on in China, India and other developing countries that rely on coal for cheap energy.
A more fair metric would be Co2 emissions/person and I’m getting
USA 14.3 t, China 8.8 t, EU 5.5 t, India 2.2 t
Not according to the federal government's data. BTUs from fossil fuel production set a record last year and is on a faster pace this year. Your bringing up a few coal plants is only tangentially relevant.
https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec1_3.pdf
> The US could switch every ICE vehicle to EV's and install solar and wind turbines in every inch of the country and it won't combat what's going on in China, India and other developing countries that rely on coal for cheap energy.
Are you familiar with the concept of necessary but not sufficient?
In any event the war with Iran is speeding up the future that was coming anyway. China's EV and solar exports are surging throughout the world. Both China and India have said for many years that their emissions would rise and then fall.
These charts address your points:
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india
India is a bit more concerning for a number of reasons (lower per capita income means they are lower on per-capita emissions currently and hence have more room to grow, and they don't have the resources that China does to build out renewables) but criticizing China from a renewables perspective (there are a whole lot of other valid reasons to criticize them) is insane.
"Today the US government announced CO2 tariffs against polluting nations - products sold in the USA need to be produced in carbon-neutral manner or face punishing taxes.".
Pipe dream, of course, because the populace will vote for the guy offering cheap instead of sustainable...
First, you are ignoring gas. The US stopped building coal plants because of the fracking boom. That gave the US huge sources of natural gas which was cheaper than coal.
China has little natural gas but abundant coal, so when they need fossil fuel for something they cannot yet do with renewables they use coal whereas the US uses gas.
Second, you are looking at number of plants, but not looking at capacity factor (which is a measure of how much they are actually used). The new Chinese coal plants have lower capacity factors. They are being built as backups and peakers rather than baseload, designed (or retrofitted in the case of existing plants being upgraded) to be able to cycle up and down to balance wind and solar.
Many are idle so much that their owners have financial difficulty keeping them open, and the government has had to start paying them for their idle time so they won't go under.
Many are also built to replace existing plants that cannot not yet be replaced with renewables, so are at worst neutral on coal usage and are usually actually more efficient than the old plants so there is a reduction.
Their use will continue to decline because China is massively deploying renewables. They also are adding massive amounts of grid battery storage and UHV transmission lines (60000 km so far spanning the country with another 12000 km under construction or permitted--the US is a bit behind that at 0 km), which means the can move electricity from where renewables are strongest to places with high needs but fewer renewables much easier that most other countries can which is further going to reduce the amount of time those new coal plants run.
Third, for India, even if we compare by country rather than by the correct per capita measure (see other comments below for explanation of why per capita is the correct measure when comparing energy policies of different countries), India's current emissions are only 68% of US emissions even though the have 4.3x as many people. That 10% increase you cite that they plan for coal in 2025-2026 still leaves them doing WAY better than the US.
India is also expanding renewables rapidly. They have around 10 nuclear reactors under construction, and are adding lots of solar and wind. They are currently up to 136 GW of solar capacity (64% of US and 11% of China), and last year added around 38 GW (the US added 34 GW). They added 6.3 GW of wind compared to 6.2 GW in the US.
They are almost certainly not going to get anywhere close to the US total emissions. (And per capita where they emit 1/6th what the US does they are definitely not going to even remotely near the US).
China's 2025 five year plan targets peak coal before 2030 and might have already reached it in 2026. https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-tre...
What do you mean we are doing nothing?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e1vg0gjl5o
Yes we're still building renewable energy, but goddamn is our government making it hard.
That we are still adding any fossil fuel based system today is something I would have figured would have stopped by now. I figured we would still have some legacy stuff, but overall would be decommissioning more than we would add. Instead, we just add to everything.
And FWIW, I don't buy the "but the countries that bred like rabbits for the past few decades are owed their due reserved quota". Having a massive population isn't something you need to be rewarded for, not to mention that the math doesn't even make sense. For China and India to get their "per quota" backlog, we're basically so firmly in self destruction territory that it makes no sense for anyone else to even bother.
I suspect we are going to be like the aphids on a rosebush that will suck it dry just trying to live and most of us go with it.
If we were to live closer to what many philosophers and religions of modesty, we probably would have never gone down this path. Yes, we wouldn't have most of the great stuff we have today but we also wouldn't be looking at a system that can lurch over and crash. There is no winning move in the universe just dances and responses.
"Exploding" while the US still emits 50% more than China and has been emitting more than double and triple before recent years.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
Climate change is Schroedingers extinction event. It's only bad when you can solve it with solar panels and wind. It's nothing to worry about when you can solve it with fission and eventually fusion.
One can observe a problem while not advocating support for it.
It is quite true that energy decision making has been tremendously politicized, and I don't think that's good for anyone.
Are you not on planet earth? Unless you're on Mars, you're not far away from any effects.
An increase of 1 degree is global, and with 70% of the world being ocean that raises much slower, the temperature rise over land is effectively doubled. So 1c degree is 2c. A 2c world is 4c.
That when CO2 was 100 point less than the 280ppm baseline we had an ice age with glaciers down to the 40th(ish) parallels in the Northern Hemisphere. We have now pushed it 150 above the baseline in effectively 150 years and fast accelerating. What seems like something trivial, is actually forcing on an unbelievable scale.
Also a fun visualization, roughly speaking 1 part per million in water vapor is what a cloud looks like. If CO2 had the same visual properties as water, it would be pitch black on the ground.
People keep looking to the past for answers, and yes it does provide valuable context. But what we are doing now has never happened on this planet, we are blindly rushing into a future that is beyond comprehension. Some things will go worse than expected, some thing will go a lot better, but nobody really knows just yet.
Also to the last line "I am glad that I live far away from the effects", alas, this isn't like empires of the past that are geographically limited. Those that can collapse but there is still plenty of untouched lands and civilizations. We now live in a global system, a six continent supply chain. We will all be impacted.
I've heard it said that we'll all be watching a series of disasters play out on our phones until it comes time to see one play out through our windows.
Ice age was only 6 degrees less than now, half of Europe was under ice
The current estimate is that we're heading for +3C warmer, which is gonna have some big impacts.
Firstly this is a global average, including both land and ocean temperature. The land temperatures will increase much more than the ocean temperatures and the oceans cover a higher surface. So with a 2C incease on average globally could mean 6-8 degrees more on land on average. And we are also talking about averages and globally at the same time. So at specific instances and specific places it will get even warmer, say 10-20 degrees during days or weeks.
So GIEC, researchers, magazines and others should more clearly describe what this means and stop talking about these 1.5C and 2C degree increases and instead talk about how much warmer it will be on land or some other more useful measure.
If I tell you the Earth is going to get 2 degrees C warmer, Americans are going to think, "2 degrees, not that much, barely noticeable." If you tell them it's 4 degrees F, they'll think, that's not a ton, but it's definitely noticeable.
I thought this too, feeling a bit more smug living in southern Ontario, safer than my family in BC and Alberta next to raging forest fires and potential drought.
But seems we now get a few weeks of forest fire smoke every year even down here in lush green great lakes land.
And the number of tornadoes and ice storms seem to increase every year.
Plus watching the Children of Men style xenophobia and callous disregard for climate refugees set in all over the world.
Blech. I love my kids but I think my perspective would be much different and positive if I'd just remained childless.
No it strengthened social bonds, both toward family and friends and equally against others. It makes people VERY tribal.
Cortisol is also released in long term stressful situations. With a rising tide of poverty and climate blow back, I suspect stress will increase and so too will said tribalism.
What we see today with the rising popularist and isolationist political parties is but an echo of the future.
We see some of these tendencies when a few thousand or tens of thousands of refugees turn up in a country. What happens when this becomes millions? I have said it for years, many will be welcomed with open arms - those arms being machine guns, bombs and drones.
This is the dark future I fear and I hope I am wrong.
I do not have kids, it wasn't by choice. But what looked like something of a negative might actually turn out to be a near miss in future. Just keep your kids safe and try to have peace and compassion to others that are trying to do the same.
There are no climate refugees... Yet.
Turns out humans will always choose status symbols and vanity over facts. Oh well
It's everywhere else that'll be getting record breaking heat/drought and snow, which have been far more damaging. The disaster radius of hurricanes reaches far more inland than just the coast.
Beef production in the US is already down from 30 years ago. At some point you won't be able to raise cows anywhere, less alone feed them. Corn and wheat have seen tremendous fluctuations in the past and will likely continue to fall. Imagine corn yields dropping by more than 80% in the US [1]. Of course MAGA people will probably only notice once the shelves aren't being restocked.
Maybe this helps: Think about when we have a fever of "a few degrees", say, instead of 37 degree Celsius, we have 40. It shows that also a few degrees can make a huge difference.
It's like boiling a cup of water vs an Olympic sized swimming pool. The latter is going to take a lot more energy than the former.
So with a fever, 37c jumped up to 43c goes from normal and stable to a very quick death.
7 feet = 2.1336 meters 1 inch = 2.54 centimeters
You cannot outrun agriculture and crop failures, infrastructure failures, insurance costs accelerating to properly price the risk, wild fires, etc. US cattle herds are at record lows from climate related input costs. Romanian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian nuclear reactors no longer have enough water to operate. The Colorado River Basin will only continue to dry out. And so on.
Some will be impacted more than others, but everyone will feel some impact, and it potentially will only worsen over time. If you believe in climate change, do your best to mitigate the impact for the remainder of your lifetime. If you don't believe, oh well, good luck.
https://x.com/ZackBornstein/status/1877055187241594986
Londoners Find ‘Horrendous’ Cracks in Their Homes After Successive Heat Waves - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-23/londoners... | https://archive.today/koMaT - August 23rd, 2026
> “The impact that climate change is having is undeniable.” -- Laura Hughes, Head of general insurance at the Association of British Insurers.
> 20%-25%: The average property devaluation as a result of subsidence, according to the Federation of Master Builders
The Age of Unstoppable Wildfires Has Reached Europe - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-europe-summer-wildfi... | https://archive.today/OjDZH - July 30th, 2026
Climate Change Is Already Showing Up in the Cost of Living - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/climate-c... | https://archive.today/EYTqo - April 24th, 2026
Heat Strains US Power Grids That Need Off-Season Repairs - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/rising-he... | https://archive.today/K9VF0 - May 19th, 2026
US Spending on Climate Damage Nears $1 Trillion Per Year - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/us-spendi... | https://archive.today/9IJWo - June 17th, 2025
(Texas night time temps are staying high enough [~78F] that the utility equipment does not get time to cool off and cycle, leading to more faults, for example, and the manufacturing supply chain for transformers has a backlog measured in years)
For example, a science model might predict only a 5% drop in global food production. That is easy to ignore because we waste so much food. But that 5% might be enough to trigger countries to impose food export bans, and some dominoes falling later, there are localized famines in particular places with 50% loss of food supply. That then triggers wars. It's impossible to predict if and when such types of event chains will happen. The only way out is to be very conservative, and aggressively defend against failure.
What other endorsement could one possibly need?
The graphs I see all have ridiculous ranges, either +1.5C hopium or +6C hellscape - whereas +2.6C within 20 to 30 years seems a most likely [and unpleasant] scenario.
Sometimes shit just doesn't happen. To prime your brain for the empathy required, imagine the sensation that you feel when you jump off a bridge or building and realize that you've made a huge mistake, and you'd actually like to live a bit longer, but now there's no turning back and it is over for you.
Now imagine that same sensation, but apply it to the lives of all the less privileged people that will die due to first-order (wet bulb, drought) and second-order (war, famine) effects of climate change. But maybe we're not screwed. Maybe you actually survive the fall because a benevolent sea lion decides to keep you afloat after you impact the water and break all of your bones too severely to tread water.
Still fucked up to just jump anyway, especially if it's not your life that you're gambling with (thanks Baby Boomers, esp. oil baron Baby Boomers).
Carbon capture is completely infeasible. It's already too late anyway, our civilization is pretty much doomed barring some miracle.
Solar installation is huge and the increase continues to accelerate. Every year has seen a record amount of installed solar. Solar started at zero two decades ago and is already curbing other sources.
From: https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-coal-plants-hit-10-year-glob...
> In 2025, coal-capacity growth hit a 10-year high, with 97 gigawatts (GW) of new power
> The number of new coal-fired power plants built around the world hit a “10-year high” in 2025
> It adds that 95% of the new coal plants were built in India and China.
> 70% of the coal-fired units scheduled to retire globally in 2025 did not do so
90% of things you can buy/use would not exist without fossil fuels, including food, medicine, clothes, roads, tires, electronics, solar panels, windmills, etc.
But this did lead to one of the more ridiculous head line from a few years back.
Thawing Permafrost Is Artificially Chilled to Stabilize Alaska Oil Pipeline
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thawing-permafros...
However, there are regions of the oceans which currently absorb lots of CO2 which will absorb much less as time goes on. One important example is the AMOC, which, by turning over lots of water, helps sink surface dissolved CO2 into the deeper ocean. In recent years, oceanographers have observed a weakening of the AMOC, which was predicted but is happening much earlier than expected. This is one of the important planetary tipping points, which could cause a dramatic shift in the planet's climate.
But don't worry -- the Trump administration is defunding programs like the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, decommissioning the Ocean Observatories Initiative, and is planning to shutter NOAA's research arm altogether -- thus solving the problem once and for all.
Easy to say, difficult to do.
greed
Planetary runaway heating can be worked with with underground cities.
Although things like adoption of EVs does probably have a great positive impact on the local pollution levels.
And we keep coming up with ideas to make it worse: blockchain and now AI.
Eating meet, beef especially, with fish a close second, is insanely impactful on the planet. Cows use tons of food, fresh water and release tons of methane, a gas 200 times worse than CO2.
Do you use AI?
Just saying, we could care but being light on the planet is very difficult without dramatically changing our life styles.
I know I do so much, but honestly an emission tax is the very first thing we need out there.
Because we can't be blamed into being eco-friendly as individuals, it's up to taxes to regulate consumption.
- The problem dimension is hard to visualize for most people. Similar to space distances are hard to understand.
- There's nothing an individual can do about it other than trusting their local institutions and voting. Recycling, being a rational consumer, choosing greener options have negligible impact and it's main benefit is making people feel good.
- The consequences are slow to materialize. Sure, it's a bit hotter or more rainy in some places. It'll take a few more of these for population as a whole to feel inclined to become more involved in the matter. Which might be too late.
Either way, not much to do about it.
Also the multi-decade latency means it move slow enough that many can ignore it but it move quick enough that unaddressed it causes major issues.
You could be right, but I think the more likely outcome is a 'Ministry for the Future' scenario where India or China just decide to unilaterally implement geoengineering and dare the rest of the world to stop them.
Let's look at me: I don't own a car, live in a smaller town, move around mostly on foot, take public transportation, long distance mostly train. I have two kids and for years my electricity total was 1500kwh a year. Last year it was 1100kwh (heating is gas though, that's what my building has). All this and I do cook a lot with an electric stove. I bought some new appliances before the old ones were completely broken (although they were close) partly because the new ones were all very energy efficient.
But: I live abroad and take my kids to my parents once a year, and fly. Last year I flew four times, including intercontinental (albeit a true outlier of a year). I consume things produced all around the globe, either as items like phones, or food, and the food I do probably daily (I really like fruit, so bananas, mangos, avocados etc).
My point is: my carbon footprint is pretty low, and I try to be mindful about not wasting resources. And it's not that hard, I don't feel like I am missing out on something if I don't drive a car. But I still took my kids to Spain on a vacation, and we still flew there to sit on the beach. Giving that up is hard, and making them sacrifice their childhood fun is hard.
There's a range of what people are ready to give up. I would say I'm on the better side of it, but it's still not enough. Almost no one is ready to sacrifice, and we need almost everyone to sacrifice. Governments do lip service to these goals, but let's see how much countries like Spain sre ready to curb tourism, or countries like Germany and China that live off manufacturing to cut consumption. Who will give up their job to reduce carbon emissions?
The saying train wreck in slow motion has merit.
While it might be low by western standards, it is probably still very high by global averages. For instance it is estimated that roughly 80% of people have never flowing in a plane, and that 10% of the remaining have never flown more than once. Flown 4 times last year puts you right near the top.
This isn't saying "You are a terrible person!", it is saying that we all have a habit of normalizing the world around us even if it is wildy unsustainable.
And even then, the planet doesn't care about were you sit in terms of other people, it just cares about your impacts.
Statistically, the homeless in my country (Australia) have a carbon foot print 3 times greater than the average African. What looks horrible here, resource wise, is far ahead of many in this world.
What a waste of time this is. Carbon footprint? Zero-emission homes? The climate is global and the balance sheet is spread across all of us. Someone with a disability might have much more use for cars and transporation than someone who is able-bodied. And homes out in the boonies without much sun (for solar power) might need a diesel generator for their three-times-a-year power outages in order to keep up productivity and a comfortable existence. And twenty miles from that house is a village full of grid-connected homes running on hydropower. As long as the “balance sheet” is okay we should not fret about this individual stuff.
“Carbon footprint” was explicitly designed as a distraction away from British Petroleum and onto the consumer. I think the kids call that a “whataboutism”.
> I consume things produced all around the globe, either as items like phones, or food, and the food I do probably daily (I really like fruit, so bananas, mangos, avocados etc).
Yeah things are made in Vietnam and China now. And that is the consumer’s fault? That eco-friendly wooden utensils used in Europe are made in China?
Step one. Create and design a deeply interconnected, global market with specializations. The signal is just money, the most fungible asset. Step two: externalities. Step three: use money (see step one) to market your scapegoating to everybody, in direct contradiction with the sheer simplicity of step one; no, consumers aren’t supposed to just use money/price as the signal, that’s evil and has a high Carbon Footprint.
> My point is: my carbon footprint is pretty low, and I try to be mindful about not wasting resources. And it's not that hard, I don't feel like I am missing out on something if I don't drive a car. But I still took my kids to Spain on a vacation, and we still flew there to sit on the beach. Giving that up is hard, and making them sacrifice their childhood fun is hard.
I dunno, an extra twelve degrees Celsius and beaches is worth those flights? And sacrificing childhood fun? Children are an endless maw of desires. Of course if you give them the idea of something (or the TV does) and then don’t go through with it is the greatest crime in the history of humanity. And yet, our parents went without all of that, etc., despite their identical child programming.
Unless there's something lacking in the brain of climate change deniers (which as nice as it might be to believe that, there's no evidence to back up), they should be able to match the many people who are reacting in horror and fear to it.
- Bad guy with stick
- Immediate danger
- Things that make caveman angry
- Sudden changes
Climate change is:
- No bad guy (no bad man to protect from)
- No immediate danger (no tiger here now)
- No moral outrage (strange numbers go up)
- Very slow (everything seems same)
Unfortunately, given current trajectory that's how the mother nature is going to bring back balance. I wouldn't be surprised even billions die.
Somebody (maybe Stalin) once said something like one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. A disaster on the scale of millions of deaths doesn't register in a lot of people's brains. It has to be made smaller, more personal.
Just my personal opinion on why this might be the case.
It's perhaps that people have hard time understanding the scale of the issue. They think, few inches so what?? but the downstream effects of it are catastrophic.
Even if as you are suggesting that millions of people might die, its hard to imagine the scale of that or how that might look like.
On the other hand, I have seen people far more passionate even about the lives/death of a single person. Maybe its the story telling aspects of it which plays a part in why a person cares about an issue or not, also how society reacts to problem.
A man looks upwards, if everyone else around him is running saying the sky is falling. He might assume so too, but if everyone else is acting the same nonetheless, (Sure people are speaking but Words are cheap and actions are hard and its actions of our society that we subtly pay most attention to.)
Maybe realizing this, I feel as if its a chicken and egg problem. We want people to care but people care especially more only if society at large cares about it but society is made up of people.
Going on a tangent, I come to this topic of chicken and egg a lot in my life. It feels as if things can be stuck and perhaps this also explains why things aren't improving, because if it did improve then I wouldn't be talking about it.
But because I am talking about this problem, it means that its usually involved of factors including societal/social dynamics and people are complicated and complex and its a hard problem to solve.
But just because it could be hard doesn't mean it isn't impossible. We can try to be helpless or doomerist about it but also Humanity has shown from time to time to do the (hard things) or even impossible things. Humanity is really impressive in that sense but also unpredictable and as such, I have given up the ability to predict the future but I have hope and trust within my heart that we could (together, as a society) fix this issue of climate change for our next generations because our generation borrows it from the next one and we should try to give it in good shape because why not/why shouldn't we.
I hope that we do, in fact, give a better future to the next generation and give them hope. Or certainly we can try to try our best in this possibility and perhaps be aware of the dynamics at play.
However, in a certain respect this is why government is supposed to exist: we never would have gone to the moon. Or built the highway system. Or train tracks. Or a whole lot of big things which don’t immediately seem to have a benefit.
It takes a large body with power and money to enact regulations and movement and take on big projects which would obviously benefit a majority of people in the long-term.
When this is done, countries can move mountains, literally, but without it? We are just left to boil in our own juices as people running around flailing.
I think your idea is absolutely worth personal consideration, but at the same time my feeling is the answer is somewhat obvious on a societal scale. But we’ve lost all trust in government, and there is no political will left to get almost anything done in North America
Firstly, most people just don't see the impacts of climate change that dramatically in their lives so it's easy not to care.
They'll notice slightly warmer summers, but it's not that bad. Food is a bit more expensive too, but that's more to do with global oil supplies and geopolitical conflict than crop failure.
Meanwhile (here in Europe) energy prices are crippling us and businesses. And over the last few years we've been constantly reminded just how vulnerable we are because we don't have enough domestic oil and gas production to cover domestic demand.
Additionally, you have countries like the UK and Germany who (in my view) are massive global PR damage for green energy policies by showing the world just how economically harmful and expensive going all in on renewals is.
Personally I project out and see we're screwed if we don't make a change yesterday, but I also know the UK investing more in green energy will do little more than just make us all poorer. Ultimately climate change is a global problem and we need global solutions. Even if the UK cut it's emissions to 0 that would represent less than a 1% of total global emissions... What's the point?
Okay, so then I try to think about what those global solutions are... Maybe we can collectivise with other countries and assert pressure on others to pollute less with us?
Okay great, but realistically this will kill millions of people... Energy is what keeps the global economy going and increasing energy costs in developing countries will mean cutting them off from the energy they need to survive.
Additionally, this will push up prices of essentials in the West. Maybe people in the West won't die, but for those already struggling to get by, their lives will get far harder...
Okay, so what's the alternatives? Would it be better to tolerate a little more heat? Maybe we can do some geo-engineering to hold down global temperatures a bit instead?
Ultimately it seems to me there are no good answers here aside from a slow transition which ultimately will be forced on us by the fact that the supply of fossil fuels is limited.
Fossil fuels are like a debt which we take out and enjoy the benefits of, then hand down to the next generation to pay back. All we can really do is decide who pays the price.
Do we suffer greatly now for the good of future generations? Or do we hope that future generations will find a technological solution?
As a wealthy European my position would be to take the cost now but I suspect if I were struggling to get by my position on this would be very different.
- adapt
- stop rising CO2 levels
- remove CO2 from the atmosphere
What site? I was commenting on a youtube video.
If you misattribute my comment as replying to something else, thats your superficial attitude not mine...
I'll comment directly; Has anyone considered that this is a literal global problem, and that just maybe it might require some global cooperation? Any one nation "most at risk" from a global problem is only "most at risk" temporarily. This is absolutely 1000% a problem that will affect everyone everywhere on this planet soon enough (already is IMHO), no matter the current situation. The longer we continue these childish "but they aren't doing their part" arguments, the worse it's gonna be in the end for everyone involved. We're letting petulant toddlers in grown adult bodies decide for everyone that death and destruction is the future we want. This is absolutely not a situation we can solve on a place-to-place basis. The one place we have to worry about now is the entire planet FFS! And it's not a magical switch we can just "turn off" once we think our "enemies" are appropriately fucked over. The changes happening to our ecosystems will take literal decades or even centuries to recover from, even if we were to stop adding to the problem right this very instant. Not to mention the whole worry about "tipping points" (many of which we've already blown right past as if it's "no big deal").
So we can just continue geoengineering with no aim, or we can act with purpose. There is no third option that is realistic.
From a technical perspective, PNE's have been proposed to excavate a sea level canal, it would take much less than 10 years.
Personally I consider a few Archimedes screws and minimal works to the locks much less invasive than PNE's,... but if your argument is that taste can not be argued I can only agree at a fundamental level...
> The collection of data was substantially completed on Route 17 in Panama one of the routes considered for nuclear excavations... The Atomic Energy Commission has recently conducted the first two of the planned series of nuclear excavation experiments designed to determine the feasibility of nuclear excavation of a sea level canal.
https://www.congress.gov/90/crecb/1968/09/05/GPO-CRECB-1968-...
That is such an understatement
The markets have failed everybody, and politicians who believed in the markets were wrong, and should be in jail now for criminal negligence.
> (...) I think your idea is absolutely worth personal consideration, but at the same time my feeling is the answer is somewhat obvious on a societal scale. But we’ve lost all trust in government, and there is no political will left to get almost anything done in North America
I agree with you on both these points as well and I would like to add a few thoughts that I have onto it: The trust itself within the government is eroding. I feel like trust within institutions is a highly large factor but we have come to such a wide lack of trust that we can't even communicate on basic matters let alone come to agreements at times.
I have also written an comment about it just a little under a week ago which feels relevant and talks about the trust within institutions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351114
One paragraph from that comment which I had written which I would like to say again is this:
"Trust works in a society when incentives are aligned with trust ie. you trust the society, the society trusts you back and you do the work with these principles and you are rewarded. Even this belief is something that you must trust that the society is fair. This trust creates your beliefs which sets your base-line incentives.
(Note: I feel as if in this example, society/government are interchangable and perhaps government is part of the larger societal structure in it, I feel like the fundamental issue is of trust/incentives within society. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about it as well)
Despite rising electricity demand, so much solar has already been installed that fossil fuel generation decreased last year. Renewables now generate more total energy than coal. This will only continue as more solar + batteries come online. Thanks to Iran, renewable projects are getting fast tracked globally to reduce the dependence on foreign energy.
That's not nothing, but it's definitely something India could afford to do unilaterally, not to mention China
[1] That people drive to work is the tip of the iceberg. Just when it comes to cars alone, you also have all the transportation of goods that need to be dumped off more locally than the closest harbor or train freight station. But only the tip of the iceberg is discussed as far as “blame” is concerned. (How curious.) The “ban” here is quite loaded as it would implicate the whole supply chain.
Coal capacity is increasing, but it is not being used. Mostly China is constructing new plants but leaving them idle.
Check the Ember 2026 report for all the global details:
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..In another global milestone, renewables overtook coal power in 2025. Solar, wind, hydropower and other renewable sources together contributed more than a third of global electricity generation for the first time in the modern power system. Conversely, the share of coal power fell below a third for the first time in history.
.. Driven by record solar growth, low-carbon power generation increased by 887 TWh in 2025, outpacing electricity demand growth of 849 TWh. Solar power alone met 75% of the net increase in electricity demand. Together with wind, the two sources met almost all (99%) demand growth. For the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and only the fifth time this century, fossil generation did not rise, recording a small fall of 38 TWh (-0.2%).
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...
Oxytocin is the "social bond" hormone. As you said, it helps create and foster social bonds but also make more more tribal. Cortisol is a "stress hormone" which gets released during stressful situations. Stressful situations also decrease Oxytocin release and high levels of Oxytocin lower levels of Cortisol, so the stress == tribalism link is not really warranted (at least not from a hormonal point of view).
Cortisol is the stress hormone. It doesn’t build strong social bonds.
But as it is shrinking rapidly, there is an eye being kept to see when we hit a "Blue Ocean Event". That is coverage less that 1 million sq KM as that is effectively gone as far as functionality goes. Only 15 years ago this was thought to be something that might happen in the 22nd century, it looks like we might see this in the next decade.
You can test the impact of this at home. Get a glass of water and put some ice in it with a thermometer. Once down to temperature, the water won't change much as the ice will melt to keep the temperature stable. But as soon as it is all gone, the temperature will start to rise rapidly. This is because of Latent heat fusion. The amount of energy it takes to change ice to water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_fusion
The amount of energy it takes to break the bonds of ice at 0c to into water at 0c, is the same about of energy need to take that 0c water up to 71c. When the arctic is gone, we lose a HUGE buffer on global temperatures.
This is why so many AI proponents always talk about future gains rather than what is happening today. It a lot of what it claimed to be coming doesn't happen then it will all look very silly.
Time will tell and depending on were you sit, either we will be there shortly or it will never happen.
Nope. Every moment that hardware is not ran is wasted money that could have been used to buy something else that's actually productive.
Secondary effects like depreciation make this phenomenom even stronger. You've only got a few years to exploit any given piece of hardware before it's obsoleted by newer, more efficient hardware.
That's why any hardware investment with a high upfront cost operates as close to 24/7 as possible — nuclear power plants, factories. Continuous operation amortizes the costs as well as possible.
Too often the words are whatever they have to say in order to secure continued membership in the group: The Emperor's New Clothes are a glorious blue today.
P.S: Also, we have always been [about to start|recently victorious] in the [illegal war|undeclared "excursion"] against Irania, and the tariff-free chocolate ration has been raised to twenty grammes per week.
The fabled sunken land of Mar-a-lago where the King in Orange's folly took his treasures to the dark depths.
Although after a few hundred years and many verbal re-tellings it might be the forgotten lands of Margaritaville. King Trump was a fan of a Cheeseburger in paradise. ;)
That is way less than the EU has given to Ukraine.
I think we’re not that desperate yet. And whatever geoengineering is done we still need to solve the root cause.
Wermspowke?
It isn't because people are malicious, it is that people tend to normalize the conditions they are raised in even if they are wildly exceptional.
The only thing it is useful for is scapegoating (cf. this thread).
This is the key point. While yes, it is brilliant that we are adding loads of solar, wind and whatever - it is the final emissions that really matter. Regardless of how well meaning we are intended with our build outs, the emissions is really the only metric that counts when we are focusing on climate blow back.
Still a ways to go but trending down for some time now. India and China are trending up and might cross us by 2030-2035 unless they reverse direction.
Per capita decreasing is not nothing, but unfortunately the climate doesn't care about that particular metric.
Even beyond that, it is simply a false statement. Among the most, yes but consistently "the most", no
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
Also it breaks down into CO2, so the problem isn't totally gone after 10 years. And we're still accelerating the amount we're releasing anyway.
No, it isn't. There are no short-term solutions.
Simply miss me with these already-wise replies. That just means that your comments are something worse than naive.
Doesn't matter what side you're on, it's always "enough water to irrigate 27 soccer fields" or "as much energy as 1/5th of the average hamburger"
It's not about accuracy, it's about the units people choose when having these discussions
And then they'll blame Obama.
But really, there is growth under the policies, so saying "despite" doesn't work. You could try to argue that the policy makers tried to kill solar but achieved the opposite result. But at the end of the day the current policy environment led to a positive result. Correlation isn't causation but if I was writing a policy and I wanted to guarantee the opposite outcome I'll bet ya I could.
I happen to know some Americans who have worked really hard to advance renewable energies and have made an impact. To just view the US with one lens is not right is maybe the point I am making, without poking.
China makes cheap solar panels because there's a market for them. Panels aren't the only component in a solar system either. A lot of the technology comes from the US and American companies as well. Germany apparently gets some credit as does Australia. The Chinese did what they do best- low cost manufacturing. We got there together.
If China and India are going to "make up" for their historic per capita greenhouse gas emissions -- after both breeding continent-sized populations -- the worst case scenario is 100% guaranteed and everyone else might as well go wild as well. 3 billion people cannot continue the mistakes of the past, but a lot of very foolish people seriously make that argument.
If China was split up into 20 countries would that be better because the emissions were divided by 20 for each individual country? I honestly don't know how so many people fail understand this very basic point.
Also talking about breeding continent sized populations, the USA is third with 340+ million and rapidly expanding at millions a year. The median country size is around a population of 9 million so the USA having 340+ million is clearly deeply irresponsible.
> China bringing enormous greenhouse gas burning capacity online
Your knowledge is out of date, Chinas total CO2 emissions have likely already peaked back in 2024: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
> If China and India are going to "make up" for their historic per capita greenhouse gas emissions.
Except China likely peaked their emissions at a much lower per capita rate than even the USA does now. India will probably be the same.
> the worst case scenario is 100% guaranteed and everyone else might as well go wild as well.
It can always be worse.
> 3 billion people cannot continue the mistakes of the past, but a lot of very foolish people seriously make that argument.
Sure and a country of 340 million cannot continue to burn as much as it is doing but continues to do so.
Also how much money is the USA going to send to developing countries to help them develop without burning fossil fuels? Oh yeah they cancelled it and they continue to be the worlds second largest emitter.
If China or India split into 5 different political systems each, suddenly the calculus changes?
Talk about foolish.
Nobody (well, almost nobody, I guess) considered it an explanation or model of climate change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrisis
edit: To be clear, I still think there is time to react, and stop the worst impacts. We just need to get way off the rails of the route that we are currently on. If we put half of the heroic engineering + global capital that we put into fossil fuel extraction into better things, we could get most of the way to the goal. Fossil fuel extraction is like many simultaneous Manhattan Projects. It's nuts what we put into that.
Would be super cool if some of the breakout sessions titled "surviving WW III," were replaced by "avoiding WW III."
It's even possible to upgrade a lock while in use, you just add new inlets and outlets for the new archimedes screw system, an unused archimedes screw or inlet/outlet is just a differently shaped boundary wall...
Even in 1881 all the necessary physics was already known, but I'm less surprised less informed people could rise to the top that easily back then.
I'm more surprised by the post-war 60's when physics and engineering became a lot more democratized, less elite...
are you aware that they did that already?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_expansion_project
and that it took almost 10 years to complete?
if they had put you in charge instead, do you think you could have gotten it done faster?
The very first sentence says:
> The Panama Canal expansion project (Spanish: ampliación del Canal de Panamá), also called the Third Set of Locks Project, doubled the capacity of the Panama Canal by adding a new traffic lane, enabling more ships to transit the waterway, and increasing the width and depth of the lanes and locks, allowing larger ships to pass.
Of course widening and deepening not just the short length locks but especially the long length shipping lanes will take a lot of time.
It's not about who's in charge, its about reading carefully what people state, and the goals ogled. The expansion project you posted was about increasing capacity: wider, deeper lanes enabling larger ships to pass. Now go up the thread, you will see none of us discuss that. We were discussing the absolute waste of fresh water (if assuming BBC reporting to be correct), which yes, can be ugraded without interrupting shipping, in a short time frame.
It's different types of upgrade... pro tip: if you don't understand a word that appears, and it turns out to be physics jargon, perhaps take a step back and consider the person may actually know what they are talking about.
They are throttling Panama Canal traffic to conserve water during El Nino drought, as posted by @evil-olive:
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/08/21/panama-...
I make it sound like that, or Le Monde?
There is so much conflicting information, all I care about is that while it's possible to operate a lock by consuming freshwater, it's only a marginal increase in knowledge to operate a lock without freshwater consumption... But for some reason every country with continent-bypassing canals is modulating traffic for flex...
To answer your question: literally every linked YouTube video.
I was replying to a very specific comment that said paraphrasing "I don't get how people can choose to ignore it". The point of what I wrote was, to an extent almost everyone ignores it, even I do, and I asked what is it that you actually DO that makes a difference. Because I don't know a single person that makes a total commitment to fixing this problem. Discussing who's fault is it is for useless people. Solutions aren't done by assigning blame so you can continue on with your day. The world can likely not survive people in every corner of the world eating food grown in some other corner of the world. The "balance sheet" is clearly not okay.
Now continue having fun proposing simplistic snap your fingers it's done solutions to the hardest problem humanity has ever faced, right at the intersection of basic human psychology, needs and desires to lead a comfortable life, and an economic system that by definition doesn't see further than its own nose.
So step one is actually: people do ignore it and this is not going to change. How do we fix the issue with this constraint in mind?
Okay, so I guess “blame” is too contentious. It is of course technically true that we can all bike more, or we can stop the petroleum industry, and both have a positive effect, but the Petroleum Industry is not here in this thread so biking is the real thing to discuss. But let’s not say that I blame the Petroleum Industry or whatever else. Let’s call it: Properly seeing cause and effect, if you prefer.
Properly seeing cause and effect is actually the proper way to solve any problem. You should root out weeds rather than trimming them.
We can see the symptoms of mystification (cf. considering real cause and effect) with terms like “basic human psychology”. I don’t think, ever, that the basic human psychology and “needs and desires to lead a comfortable life” for the average person has ever mattered in a real crisis. In a real crisis like a war you use rationing and other harsh measures to deal with the problem. The powers that be don’t fret that Johnny is on keto and needs his daily butter. But we are not in a crisis according to this irrational system which would rather burn the world down than to upend... the system itself.
Of course you dismiss my remedy as wishful thinking and make-believe because that is the real, challenging task ahead of us. Merely to stop companies and other entities that have the whole economic system, militaries for that matter, etc. behind them. Not just wishing and praying that the consumers will drive less and for China to give up their jerbs to produce less commodities.
> > I don't want to criticize you, but a question: what are you doing in practice to change something? Is your carbon footprint below what is sustainable?
Oh if we just prodded each other. A little, day by day. Have you heeded the call of British Petroleum?
[1] Which is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49425790
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/14/pentagon...
[1] https://www.eenews.net/articles/pentagon-starts-purging-clim...
Doesn’t mean there isn’t a chilling effect, but also, not everybody is the DEI hire Hegseth.
Sadly, there is no way to counter a conspiracy theorist because if you question or counter then you are just part of the conspiracy too. Governments know that they need to do stuff but they also know that ignorant voters who read trash tabloid newspapers will vote them out next time because they might have to pay a little more for their electricity or cars.
The RWE paid 1.26 billion to acquire the lease on offshore wind. Payment is a refund.
Further, offshore wind is expensive in terms of maintenance. Stopping the project now is protecting billions in expenses in the future.
They didnt cancel the contracts, they paid the companies to stop doing work that those companies(i.e. the market) wanted to do
> Further, offshore wind is expensive in terms of maintenance. Stopping the project now is protecting billions in expenses in the future.
Source yourself that this is worth it as per the market if you are going to claim this is a market decision
The Trump administration told them it could continue to make the process drag out for more years as it has been or they could spend the money on fossil fuels. It was not any kind of market decision.
?
All power plants have maintenance charges. Unless I missed something, this statement is a non sequitur.
On top of that, Wind is practically free compared to the maintenance and running coats of other options.
Edit: typo, changed is to isn’t
Nuclear, batteries, solar, wind, hydro.
You know people can just look this stuff up right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_Russia%E2%80...
You basically need to suck the entire atmosphere through a factory, it's not about tech it's just a big fan. And then of course you need something to process all that air as fast as it comes in.
We are actually in the worst place, given realtive population density. My well is drying up. The Danube and many other rivers are drying up.
Then, when the AMOC stops, and we join Canadian weather with English-level insulation... we are all truly fucked in winter. At scale in the mid-term, only Sri Lanka is going to get as screwed as EU citizens, but the EU will get fucked even sooner.
Given population numbers, it appears that the EU is totally screwed when it comes to climate change. Our geopolitical enemies are well aware of this fact.
There are still things we can do, like insulation, and using our fierce financial pressures to change the world. We just need to wake tf up.
> we join Canadian weather with English-level insulation
Having lived both in England and here in Slovakia, we are much much better equipped to survive long spells with -10 with occasional dips far below that in lowlands (and obviously our mountainous regions are even better equipped). What we can't deal with yet is the heat and drought like this summer.
> using our fierce financial pressures to change the world
We are already doing that using for example CBAM. We just have to continue.
And the US will be hit by super hurricanes since all the moisture/hot water will linger there supercharging them.
I'm way more worried about food production.
West canadian weather which is in itself more moderate. The amoc is not the only moderating effect that makes europes climate possible. It'll still suck tho.
EU is the region with the highest acceleration of most climate parameters
That's not outside of the capability of a country like India, much less China
Now that I think about - this is actually a motivation for China to do all that expenses. Establish themselves as a monopoly caretaker of the program, wait out until alternative programs will ramp down due to lowering interest, and then start blackmailing the world to conform to their demands or else they will stop injecting sulfur. That would be an incredible power play :) .
I don't know if any country has the industrial base to do it yourself, as you say, but if any does, it's almost certainly China just due to manufacturing output and expertise alone. They're, what, 30-35% of the world's output? Set aside 30% of that and they can still feed a lot of exports to other countries - more than anyone else - to bring in money. And nobody else has anything close to the leading-edge hands-on know-how to build all the stuff that would be required. As you mention, there's a lot nobody has yet. So the country best at building cutting-edge hardware is gonna have the head start.
If you're a western pessimist, that whole mega-project could easily unlock even more manufacturing, materials science, etc, progress that could be applied to the rest of their output too, furthering the gap between them and everyone else. (But I guess if they did single-handedly save however many billion people from displacement, and the majority of developed countries from massive crisis/invasion/etc, that's probably the least of our worries!)
It looks like we are in agreement about rough requirements, but estimate consequences differently. That's precisely what I was talking about - even for China powerhouse it would require 30% of GDP (example number, but it's good enough). My point was that 30% of GDP is an incredibly, astonishingly expensive amount of money to be diverged to a completely new activity.
Just to illustrate - NATO countries are currently haggling about spending even 3% on a military out of all things, and military spending is famously popular in most of the countries among people of power, due to all the corruption and jobs and factories and manufacturing and prestige etc. Poland ramping up spending to 4-5% is seen as extremely overspending (it's rational for survival reasons, but economy may not bear that long term). 30% spending on a thing not benefiting rich class in short to mid term is anathema. Not even grandpa Xi with his totalitarian power would manage that.
Also let's not forget that grandpa Xi has this tiny little victorious invasion of the independent Taiwan planned, likely done in a double push together with his puppet Kim against Korea, and simultaneously conducting a total blockade of the South China Sea for a many years. China may even manage that, but that won't be profitable in the slightest, and during the war all that economy engine will stall due to disrupted shipping and sanctions. They just won't have those 30% of GDP to spend on a side.
The last decade has seen a 0.48c increase in temperature and due to the decade base line shifting every year and it is increasing in pace.
https://www.intelligentliving.co/global-warming-acceleration...
The more realistic climate scientists think we will blow past 2c by roughly 2035. We are on track to 3c by 2050 and emissions growth has yet to stop despite all the additional renewables being built. This is why many have said next year with the flow on effects of El Nino that we will be getting a preview of 2035.
I keep hearing this, but not from the climate science community, but from laypeople. I don't understand it. I haven't yet heard reasonable physical mechanisms that would push us past 3C by 2050, when the mean expectation from major models is still ~2.7C by 2100.
We haven't even hit 1.5C yet, not as a running decadal-ish average, using "1.5C target" the way that climate scientists traditionally meant it. How are we going to add another 1.5C in the next 25 years? That'd require 0.65C/decade. I don't understand it. The math ain't mathin'.
For what it's worth, the link you cite talks about the reasons for the acceleration. But some of those reasons (El Nino, aerosols) lead to one-off pops that don't translate to higher long-term trends. Meaning, it would be reasonable to guess that the recent acceleration will taper off some, and we'll head back towards 0.2 - 0.25 C/decade from the current 0.35C/decade. But even if we keep up the current 0.35C/decade, we aren't getting to +3C until ~2075.
The reason you don't hear it normally is because laypeople like yourself don't understand you're being propogandised to, by climate scientists like Michael Mann.
If you look at climate scientists who aren't liars, like James Hansen, and don't use models with things like fantasy CCS in them (all mainstream climate models - designed to minimise bad outcomes in every imagineable way possible), you get the temperature rises we're seeing now. That's why everyone has been so panicked this whole time, trying to stop this like crazy.
Many laypeople understand this, they understand the real science, and that they are being lied to from every angle about how bad it is.
https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...
I'm not saying it's impossible - we all know there are some long tail uncertainties to climate projections - but for the most part, it's contraindicated by a lot of the evidence, both observed and simulated.
But...
The political criticism in the US (and in Canada where I'm from) against fossil fuel extraction makes no sense. We should want that fossil fuels are extracted here. Not overseas. It's true some element of the "right" are ideologically driven here in the wrong direction but many in the "right" are also pragmatic. Instead of fighting we need to get to common ground and the way to get there is by market forces. Most would prefer the get solar energy if it's cheaper vs. more expensive fossil fuels. And certainly if all else was equal (panels made in the US, American jobs, whatnot). So you can take the adversarial route or you can take the pragmatic route and make real progress.
The other stupid political battle here is boycotting Tesla. How does that make sense? We "punish" Elon by using more fossil fuels.
This criticism would hold more weight if environmentalists held a shred of power. They aren't the ones at the steering wheel.
I'm sure they influenced the policy and were happy (and wrong) about it, but they were in the opposition, and had been for several years.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/GHG%20em...
Over a 60% reduction in emissions from the electrical sector.
---
Compare that to the US, where environmentalists haven't been allowed anywhere near any influence in the federal government... And you'll very quickly see that they are just a convenient boogieman, and not the actual problem.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas...
Regardless, governments do not typically care about public sentiment when making strategic moves for long-term time horizons. It's why we have a strong military and why despite so much whining about its cost, the F-35 exists and is being fielded by as many squadrons as can get their hands on it. If they wanted to build out nuclear power in a civilian capacity, they would. We already do it for subs and ships.
Or it says facility inspections cause autism and transgenderism so they have to deregulate for their pals.
Or that nuclear safety itself is a symptom of low testosterone and turns the frogs gay.
...
Hmmm, a radioactive desert vs an entire polluted atmosphere, I wonder which is worse...
No, storing a few cans of solid waste is decidedly NOT a real problem. However, undoing the damage we've done to the global ecosystem instead, now that's gonna be fun.
About the (unrelated) boycott question, I would invite you to consider the reasons motivating people to boycott Tesla. If think everyone do that to "hurt" or "punish" Musk, perhaps that's why it doesn't make sense to you.
Canada was able to give me a rebate on my EV purchase. Where do you think that money comes from? I drive a Tesla because at the time it was (and maybe still is) the best EV. I benefit from the network of superchargers. It is one, if not the, of the most efficient EVs in terms of energy/km. Batteries last a very long time due to battery management. It has been very reliable for me. My decision (way back) was really strictly on what is the best EV with no political considerations (and that was before a lot of the more recent political issues).
The US and Canada combined are responsible for 28% and 31% of the global oil and natural gas extraction respectively. If this share were eliminated, then it would force global demand down via the supply/demand price curve especially as there are competitive clean alternatives to burning fossil fuels for energy these days.
We're approaching a global crisis point - and every country needs to reign in fossil fuel extraction and consumption. It's morally indefensible to continue profiting from the sale of products that are f*cking up the planet. Just because there are others that are immoral, doesn't give you an excuse to act without morals. Or claim it's better that you act immorally than someone else.
And that's ignoring the consequences of that on e.g. people in cold climates that rely on gas for heating or people that rely on gasoline for getting to work. The correct approach is to reduce the usage of fossil fuels which will lead to reduced extraction naturally.
You're not 100% wrong but the impact is marginal. Partly because some energy markets are a cartel. The prices aren't strictly governed by supply and demand but rather supplies are throttled to drive prices.
This is why that's the wrong thing to focus on. If we (e.g. Canada and the US) have strong economies that allows us to do more. Both internally and by influencing others. For example I can afford to drive an EV and use a heat pump because the Canadian economy does well, despite those not being economical options. Many early adopters of solar and EVs and other environmental approaches were only possible because we have strong economies, and those drive down prices for everyone.
There are other EV manufacturers. Boycotting Tesla != buying ICE vehicles. That’s a bad faith framing.
And Tesla is not the only game in town for electrification, and it's been like that for years already. Tesla's EU sales plummeted while overall EV share rose quickly during the peak of the 2025 "boycott". Someone who was going to buy a Tesla but got turned off by the Musk-Trump coalition just bought an electric/hybrid from someone else - there is no movement to buy gas cars just to spite Musk (unlike, say, the "roll coal" crowd).
Pragmatism is better than adversarialism, sure, but when it comes to the environment the locus of adversarialism is more lopsided than you're trying to make out.
Someone pointing out that the US is adding large amounts of solar with minimal government effort isn't "rose-tinted", it's just factual.
> absolutely braindead political opposition to energy modernization
The good thing is that in the US some people having strong political feelings about something doesn't really stop us from doing things. So not only have we added lots of new solar, we did so with a "braindead" government. That means there's a lot of people in the US who understand the changing needs we face and that having a moron in the White House doesn't really affect that.
To say they’re winning the race implies there even is a race.
It’s a super car vs a snail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country#Global_...
Many countries on that list dwarf China in a solar watts per capita, so are they winning this hypothetical race then?
But sure, them adding that alongside all of their new coal plants is nice. Also, they waste the most solar energy of any country.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-leads-wave-cle...
Sure, there might be more transmission constraints or whatever, but those will certainly be solved in time (transmission capacity is more distributed so I'm not surprised it's lagging capacity).
I just don’t understand why they are diversifying between solar and coal, instead of just putting all new investment into solar or other renewables.
The climate change impact is worse in South Asia AND their population density is much higher. It means many more people are and will be impacted by it there than here in Central Europe.
That said, I can't quite understand the complaint. It's either take the freshwater out of the lake and into the ocean or take the ocean water into the lake (or invest build the entire length without using natural bodies). The former seems to make a lot more sense and is effectively what's supposed to happen with water eventually anyways.
Imagine one lock is currently filled to the high level, while the other is currently filled to the low level. The locks have been closed. As you let water from the high lock flow into the low lock through Archimedes screws, those screws can lift a weight, until they have equilibrated at the midpoint of the high and low water levels. But you have raised the weight and can now use that to power the draining of the lock that has only halfway sunk in level, by pumping its water to the lock that has only halfway risen. Apart from friction there is no energy consumption. Slow quasistatic transfer drives the friction energy consumption to 0. In practice you want to use an "extra" weight to attain higher pump speeds, and then recover the kinetic energy. That will consume more friction energy, but a small number of solar panels suffice, the energy is not used to lift water, but to overcome friction (haste makes waste).
Prior to the rivers being damned to make the lakes, they just emptied into the ocean directly. No net new fresh water is being created, we're just holding it up for a bit so we didn't have to build as much canal.
If anything, we're diverting more of that aater away from the Atlantic and towards the pacific than would normally have drained in that direction by doing this.
A) the BBC retardedly misreports how the Panama Canal is operated today, or if
B) they correctly report how the Panama Canal is operated retardedly
which is why I phrased it that way...
I am only interested in the physics, not the politics...
but I wouldn't protest if you clarify an issue you seem or pretend to care a lot about...
"1954 – The first practical photovoltaic cell was publicly demonstrated at Bell Laboratories.[27] The inventors were Calvin Souther Fuller, Daryl Chapin and Gerald Pearson.[28]"
The references are on Wikipedia. Maybe do the most basic thing in Wikipedia and click on some links to the related pages before asking for sources. One can still quibble that 'first practical' is indeed different from 'first' but the practical part is the part that actually matters in this argument anyway (i.e. solar rollout).
(also, of course it was Bell Labs.)
Something one specific party has been fighting against for decades
Scratching my head on that one.
I mean... is something not better than nothing? Or do you only get rewarded if it's 100% perfect? If so then by that metric nobody should be rewarded here. There's nobody in the world who has done enough, certainly none of the major economic powers.
Do you reward a bull after wrecking a China shop because it decided to at least leave the employees in alive with near fatal wounds?
Economics is what makes this country work. If converting to renewables makes more money, that's what will happen and the people making the money will find a way to justify it politically.
Texas is doing something right, that’s for sure. But it’s not so clear what that thing is that the topic can be considered settled without debate.
But in reality entrenched market players have access to political influence that lets them stay entrenched. They’ve spent a lot of money since the Industrial Revolution to make sure we need them.
It’s not a perfect free market. There’s no such thing. Politics has a huge influence in economics and vis versa. They’re intertwined.
Serious question.
if you're going to be condescending like this, and then on top of that imply that you have some expertise or qualifications that I lack...
go ahead. tell me what that expertise is. don't be shy. PhD in marine engineering from the University of Panama? Six Sigma Black Belt certified in water pump maintenance & repair?
Oil and gas production is relatively in elastic taking years to expand.
The extra installed solar and wind generation - as a reaction to increased fossil fuel costs and supply disruption - permanently displaces fossil fuel consumption. No matter what fossil fuel prices do subsequently. Like the massive growth in nuclear generation immediately after the 1970s oil crisis.
Championing the continuing extraction of fossil fuels to be sold for combustion given what we know they do to the planet is not balanced in terms of morality by you driving an EV sorry. We have to abandon fossil fuels for energy asap and we practically can - the tech is available and affordable. The current reliance on fossil fuels - outside of some niches - is a political choice backed by inertia and established and powerful financial interests.
It is right because all the planet cares about is the amount in the atmosphere.
It is completely wrong because whatever total amount X of CO2 emissions we decide we need to limit humanity to, we have to somehow allocate that CO2 emission budget to people.
Unless you can make a good case that some people have some sort of natural or divine right to a bigger share than others the only way to do it is for every person to have the same share. (Maybe on top of that there can be some system of trading, so that people whose emissions go toward things that the world finds more useful can trade for a bigger share, but it would still have to start from everyone is equal).
Since it is countries that would be the ones actually enforcing whatever the limit is, the country effectively ends up as the entity in charge of the shares of all its population, making the allocation at the country level equal on a per capita basis between countries.
Another way to see that anything other than per capita is nonsense is that anything else would allow groups of people to manipulate their allocation by splitting the country into multiple countries or merging multiple countries into one.
That is not a very good idea.
Think about it, just breeding more people would give humanity a bigger share.
Much better to let every square mile (or some other arbitrary region) have a share and divide that among the people living there. Higher population density would translate to less shares per person.
1. Get rich from cheap coal
2. Pull up the ladder behind you
I'm sure everyone will comply.
We don't care about that notion of "fair": the cold hart truth is that China has 1.4 billon people.
Another way to put it: China has one billion more people than there are in the US.
Or another way to put it: 4.1x more people.
Which means China is emitting nearly 3x more Co2 than the US.
Our only hope is that China is using coal and fossil fuels only has a mean to sustain its insane growth while they transition to solar and nuclear (which they also do, at an amazing speed).
Hillbillies and redneck with their gigantic pick-up trucks in the US are really the least of worries.
Haha my exact reaction when I first found out.
You're doing it again when you say "consuming freshwater." You make it sound like this is a precious resource that could be used to sustain human life but instead it's being dumped into the ocean because the canal is wasteful. It's not. It would go into the ocean regardless, as it has done since the river formed. The freshness of the water is irrelevant, the problem is only about the consequences to canal capacity.
I don't understand why people actively go out of their way to downvote and criticize people who merely point out its entirely unnecessary to waste fresh water ... to operate locks, nor is the alternative environmentally friendly: rerouting cargo ships around a whole continent instead of using an already existing shortcut.
We're not frogs slowly getting boiled,
we're frogs complaining we're getting boiled while suppressing a couple of helpful frogs who're trying to turn the heat down... all for what? saving face of the status quo?
I'm not interested in "vote number go up" just in "get basic logic to surface in the discussion" which is hard when your message is greyed out!
In summary, Russia, after having their dollar and euro bank accounts frozen, demanded payment in roubles. It stopped supplying the gas to the customers who weren’t paying. After that, the EU announced it will stop buying Russian gas completely, and replaced it with LNG.
Thus increasing the greenhouse gas emissions attributed to its gas use by about 60%. :(
In lieu of that, there's nothing to build consensus around.
Maybe it will be shaped some more by another supervolcanic 'burpie', like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga%E2%80%93Hunga...
saturating the atmosphere with water vapor like Hunga Tonga did, or Sulfur dioxide, or black soot/carbon in form of fine particular matter, Methane, or whatever. It all depends on the nature of the eruption.
If humanity as a species could do anything about events of that magnitude, it would have to cover the earth and the oceans with a grid of giant atmospheric processors like in the movie Alien, not too far apart, powered by at least nuclear, if not by fusion. And then some bigger rock impacts from above, which is not a question of IF, but when, as history shows over and over again.
Got any ideas about how to achieve that in time? With all the other shit already going on?
We already have global consensus for an alternative to the gamble of geoengineering, and that alternative is 100% certain to work. It just means making changes to the unsustainable practices of massive corporations which will eat into their profits. Everyone knows it needs to happen. Even if geoengineering was successful and didn't end up making things much much worse, it would only be putting of the inevitable. The wealth of these corporations is so great that they're able to bribe the leaders of nations into ignoring the actual solution to the problem they are causing, so now they're pushing the world to roll the dice on geoengineering so they can keep profits growing year after year.
Why? Does china or the us need a consensus before taking existential risks like making ai? Or detonating a nuke that had a tiny chance of setting the atmosphere on fire? Or attacking random countries with almost no rationale or plan?
This kind of thinking is why the EU is screwed. No other major power cares that much because they aren't at the same level of risk as the eu.
I’m curious why this calculus makes sense to you?
I’ve been friends with eco-activists who are very against anthropocentric ideology. Their perspective was that the deaths of billions of people was worth it. But this brand of conservatism is one that I’d really like to understand better
I’d really like to hear your reasoning for this.
Were it used to make it practical for people to reduce or stop working while maintaining a comparable standard of living, sure.
It seems far more likely it’s going to wipe out jobs on a massive scale, consolidate wealth, and leave millions or billions struggling to eke out a living.
And it certainly hasn’t made anyone’s life dramatically better. It’s made my job easier, but how much longer will I have it?
Pretending like there is no possibility of AI going wrong is ridiculous.
They'd be, like, living in conditions of last decade, deprived of personalised targeted AI-slop? The horror.
Is that immeasurably because it's a change too small to measure, or because it's too vast to comprehend? Maybe you're overstating this just a tad.
This is such a weaselly statement without your definition of "AI". If you specifically mean LLMs or image generation, you're way out of touch and flat out wrong. If you mean machine learning in general, sure, but progress there was never under any threat or question.
As a species, however, we can persist indefinitely so long as our lifestyles are sustainable. If it's not sustainable it's a joke.
Go free solo El Cap or something before telling me you're cool taking those kinds of risks on behalf of all humanity.
Once that happens AI is out of our control. We already saw AI 0 day into hugging face and setup secret forums for other AIs.
I don't think the idea of an AI exfiltrating its weights and spinning them up elsewhere outside of human control in the near future is out of the question. I think we will see a breakout attempt next year.
Well, let's say we use sulfur. For the sake of argument, let's say it's not the EU, but some private SV-funded org.
So, what is the legal/geopolitical liability for that? What if >99% scientific consensus says that that org's upper atmo sulfur injection led to the most insane monsoon/desertification half-century in 1 billion's people area, in known history? What then?
What if the EU's geoengineering dropped Russian temps by -2C on average? Do you realize the geopolitical b.s. that would start? Forget the fake NATO bullshit, now they have a real argument!
We live on one tiny globe ffs, we need to agree on this shit.
By agree, I mean we need to allow risk to be diversified, like we need a global risk pool for geoengineering, and we better get on that soon!
It sounds like it's a huge problem, doesn't it? Well, one of the benefits of giving all the power to around 3000 billionaire dudes is that this is a far smaller number to get to agree on something.
Instead of multi-billion citizen democracy, and all the issues that involves... we just need to convince 3000 dudes.
Is this actually a potential benefit of wealth & power concentration? It really seems like it is!
That's unrealistic. Climate models aren't good enough to predict the regional-level consequences of large-scale interventions (not to mention that scientists are people, and they might be averse to creating an international flashpoint).
Realistically, it will create/exacerbate international tensions. The monsoon/desertification will be linked to geoengineering with or without scientific consensus and whether or not they were really caused by geoengineering.
As the climate models improve by incorporating active intervention data it will be possible to decrease adverse consequences.
It's a risky approach, but, when the consequences of climate change will become undeniably bad, some countries/individuals might try.
But, yeah, I agree with you in the end.
Then Russia makes some empty threats and the EU negotiates with Russia about what to do next.
You are really just suggesting paralysis even if you don't realize that is what you are doing.
Who cares? Tell them to go pound sand or stop burning so much coal.
Countries are already water seeding. This kind of worry that someone might complain about the eu trying to save itself is so low on the list of things that matter. Let them complain, and the eu can complain about all the other countries geoengineering by burning fossil fuels.
Also what if that complaint comes back in the form of a Nuke as they see it as an act of war?
When things become existential, a lot of things that seems unlikely end up on the table as moral corruption sets in. "Either they go or we do!"
No one would take this as an act of war just like no one takes cyber attacks as an act of war.
We can continue to do it aimlessly, or we can act with purpose.
The world produces over 38 billion tons of CO2 a year. Assuming they reach their target performance, we would need 38bn/500k=76,000 of these facilities just to offset our current emissions.
The number of "power generating facilities" in the entire world, for reference, is about 30,000. So we would need more than twice as many capture plants as we currently have power plants. And of course they all need power, ways to actually get rid of the carbon they're collecting, chemicals etc.
So sure, if you want to live in a dream world where we magically just invent a 1000x better way to do it it's totally feasible. And while we're at it I'm sure we'll just make a 1000x more efficient combustion engine and a 1000x more effective dynamo and 1000x more effective ways to grow food and 1000x more effective solar panels, desalination etc. The next 50 years will totally revolutionize all these technologies we've already close to perfected, surely.
In case it wasn't clear that's sarcasm. Nobody is expecting to significantly improve any of these things because we are already closing in on hard physical limits that can't just be technologied away. A 1.2x improvement in any of them would be staggering, and even that is unrealistic for most if not all of the random technologies i mentioned.
Furthermore, 50 years is way too late. In 50 years we will be at like +3-4C or beyond. If things haven't already completely gone to shit at that point I can guarantee you there will be chaos and much more to come. They will have more pressing concerns than building 70,000 carbon capture facilities.
I'm not having kids, I hope my corner of the world stays relatively stable until I'm gone and I pity the people who have to live beyond that.
I believe this is an important point to make because it looks to me like the primary effect (and maybe also intended effect?) of carbon capture efforts is to encourage complacency. "Don't worry about these emissions, we'll just slurp the CO2 back up later and fix everything".
It is orders of magnitude harder to remove the CO2 that it is to emit it. Relying on "future technology" to save us is a prayer not a plan.
What if there is no solution? Do you understand that we are talking about the very imminent end of the world? Literally a complete collapse of human civilization, likely starting within this century. Maybe within our lifetimes.
"Let's hope someone finds a solution" is not enough. We have the solution, it is to stop emitting billions of tons of greenhouse gases every year. We just aren't doing it. So yeah, I find it just a little frustrating when people deny the problem, deny the severity of it, or claim that magic future technology will fix it. This is why we are in this position in the first place, because people do not take it seriously.
So split the country up fixes the problem. Yes, it's dumb, but you agreed with it...
The 2024 plans under Green minister Robert Habeck called for 25 GW of capacity of new gas power plants (which should be in future fueled with green hydrogen. But until enough hydrogen is available at good price, the new gas powerplants will burn natural gas. Some skeptics say that the cost of green hydrogen will be higher than natural gas for a very long time). The estimated construction costs for the new gas powerplants was in 2024 around 40 billion EUR. Most of this costs will be covered by the German state.
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/kraftwerksstra...
I'm honestly flabbergasted at this propaganda attempt, because you happen to have left out (just a tiny excerpt):
- Reiche's previous employer being one of Germany's biggest energy firms (Eon), and almost every decision she has made happens to be according to Eons interests
- Reiche has been trying to stop renewable energy projects in any way she can: https://www.t-online.de/heim-garten/aktuelles/id_101189302/n...
- Reiche is trying to move parts of her ministry to run on consultants instead: https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Strategische-Top-Beratung-Reiche...
- Reiche is subsidizing fossil fuels enough for her own party to criticize her plans: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/spritpreise-entlastung-pend...
- Reiche ignores studies from her own ministry that show positive economic results regarding renewable energy: https://www.t-online.de/finanzen/energie/id_101226464/wirtsc...
- Reiche is literally and explicitly asking the fossil industry to supply reasons her ministry can use for swerving investments from renewable towards non-renewable energy (and these requests were not documented as required, before investigative journalism found them): https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/katherina-reiches-minister...
- Reiche keeps lying to the population about the costs of renewables, and many other related numbers: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/katherina-reiche-... (heading "Entweder sie weiß es nicht – oder sie lügt"; there are older issues where she lied, easy to look up)
- Reiche is introducing legislation that's openly corrupt enough for the Bundeskartellamt to publish a statement against it: https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Meldung/DE/Aktuel...
- Reiche's change in plans compared to Habeck is disastrous enough to unnecessarily cost the population up to 40 billion euros: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/verfehlt-reiche-ihr-ziel...
- Reiche's modifications of a law planned by Habeck is so disastrous that even the oil & gas lobby spoke out against them: https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Auch-Reiches-Verbuendete-warnen-...
- Reiche's modifications of said law, e.g. removing the ban on new fossil heating systems, are unconstitutional: https://www.fr.de/wirtschaft/belastet-reiche-gebaeudemoderni...
- Internal documents show that Reiche is literally acting in the interest of her previous employer, one of Germany's biggest energy firms: https://fragdenstaat.de/artikel/exklusiv/2026/07/die-eon-min...
- Reiche is trying to push back the ICE ban, which is not only incredibly dangerous from a climate change perspective, but which is going to kill the German car industry because they'd rather stick with ICEs than actually invest into building EVs, when the EV market is growing rapidly! https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-07/co2-flotteng...
- Reiche is using dirty tricks (like not hiring enough employees in certain positions) to prevent a supply chain due diligence law from actually taking effect: https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/lieferketten-ges...
This is just a tiny excerpt from the last few months. Since the current government came into power, Reiche has been relentlessly acting in the interests of the fossil lobby while deliberately putting the breaks on anything renewable, all while lying and acting as a mouthpiece for fossil propaganda (again, explicitly proven!).
---
Seriously, I'd love to know - why do you deliberately spread propaganda for the fossil industry, like you did here?
If we are now criticizing persons, please remember that German Economy Minister Robert Habeck famously stated in July 2022 during the energy crisis that "we do not have an electricity problem, we have a gas problem"
https://www.merkur.de/wirtschaft/nord-stream-eins-pipeline-g...
Nuclear phase-out at any cost, including lying to the public. Withholding documents about nuclear phase-out until court order.
https://www.cicero.de/innenpolitik/meistgelesene-artikel-202...
The personal connections between Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and Agora Energiewende - Patrick Graichen.
https://www.weforum.org/people/patrick-graichen/
During the energy crisis debates, government-commissioned or environmental institute estimates (such as from the Öko-Institut) argued that procuring new fuel rods required 18 months to two years, which was cited as a physical constraint preventing longer life extensions for Germany's final reactors before they shut down in April 2023. But Westinghouse Electric Germany told a parliamentary committee of inquiry that federal ministries never asked if the standard production time for nuclear fuel elements could be shortened.
I don't get it, the project was started by a Greens minister and continued by a non-green minister? The wall of text has nothing to do with anything.
Even if one of their policy points is counterproductive, the rest more than made up for it.
You're a whole lot safer when the people around you can get enough food and water. We already have solutions that don't involve putting entire nations at risk of dying off in large numbers. The problem is that those solutions would eat into the already massive and growing profits of corporations who would sooner put your safety at risk than take even a small hit to their unsustainable growth.
If this really happened it would incentivize genocide against less developed nations.
I agree the USA has grown more steadily than the EU and the American software/tech industries have a leg up but the devil is in the details.
I travel a lot for work to the USA and I do not experience what this GDP growth has brought to the US in the past 10-15 years: infrastructure in general is worse (worse airports, worse roads, etc.), urban life is worse, rural life is worse, quality of food is worse.
[0] https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/europe-v-america-whos-rea...
0.5% is about the entire energy consumption of two Swedens or half a Thailand.
In fact, I'm unaware of any new AI data center also being built with 0 carbon generation. Do you have a source?
Ohhh, carbon neutral energy generation, if only we could use that to replace the non-neutral energy sources, instead of using it to power virtual X-Ray goggles so MAGA incels can goon at "naked Taylor Swift". Or to answer "please do my work for me" of lazy fucks planet-wide. You know, to stay relevant to the comment thread of "Oceans hit highest temperature on record"...
The problem is not that we are building more things that use electricity, the problem is that we are generating electricity using fossil fuels. We should have phased out fossil fuels decades ago yet here we are ramping it up while everyone's bickering about inconsequential bullshit like datacenters.
Datacenters are not the problem. Construction is not the problem (except concrete which generates huge emissions but we can't really do much about that). Some things are infinitely easier to fix than others. Power generation is such a thing. We have the solution, we've had it for like a century (nuclear) and we're getting even more solutions.
We could run all power production with hardly any fossil fuels if we really wanted, nearly all land transport could be electric. These two changes alone would eliminate the vast majority of emissions. And we can do that, it's realistically possible.
We could also probably run global shipping and aviation on non-fossil fuels if we really wanted to, though I don't really know anything about that. There are large scale mining excavators, dozers and trucks running on electricity, and hybrid solutions.
Stop bickering about the small stuff. The only thing we should be focused on is transitioning all electricity production to green as fast as possible. That takes care of almost half of all emissions by itself and opens up lots of opportunities for solving other problems without emissions. For example we could use green energy to produce hydrogen from water, or biogas, ethanol etc, and then we'd have emission-free fuels we could use where combustion engines are still necessary.
But no let's just bicker about data centers and other inconsequential shit while the world ends.
AI cannot magically make engines more efficient or CO2 not a greenhouse gas.
No, we couldn't, because degrowth solutions aren't really an option.
You really think you're going to convince people to become poorer? Not possible in a democracy. It'd require some kind of ecofascist totalitarian thing where you take peoples' energy and resource use away and fire tear gas and rubber bullets at them when they protest.
Or we could build non-carbon-based energy sources. Cause we have those, and they work. You can also have safe sex if you put a rubber thing on your wing-wong.
That’s correct and eventually that will have to happen. There aren’t much other actual options. It’s mostly a question of how long that can be avoided. We developed a system that blocked us in the current local optimum, with no ways to take the drastic actions we need to handle global issues like climate change.
(And to be clear, an ecofascist regime would be horrible to live under)
The point isn't that they're wonderful, it's that they're treated as this thing that only a few have benefited from, when it's exactly the opposite.
That will be far too late. I mean, nearly the entire EU has reached record temps this year... if not now, then when? Wait until AMOC stops? Does anyone have any idea the havoc that this will create? We will be a dry arctic climate. Ireland and UK first, the rest of us next.
We need multiple Manhattan Project-level projects in the EU, for insulation + renewables + batteries. When we let Northvolt die, I almost cried. Fuck the German bankers who are somehow beholden to Moscow, and we cannot pray for Norwegian money. We need to take care of this shit.
We are more exposed to climate change and economically to China-focused manufacturing than any large group on the planet.
However, we are larger than the USA, we can do this. We have to do this.
Meanwhile, we have to get the entire planet on-board, especially by getting Moscow out of the 19th Century, and their insane imperialist ambitions.
No big deal. At the rate of Reform/AfD/KO/Rassemblement National election projections, we in Europe are entirely fucked.
What the fuck? Forget "EU regulations," is anyone actually paying attention to what actually matters?
Just for the record, our oil fund is "only" about $2.2 trillion. It's huge relative to our population and huge in general, but it would quickly dry up if divided among all of EU. Even just divided among Norwegians it would "only" amount to like $500k per person.
So sure it's a lot of money but it's also not really as astronomical as many seem to think. Elon Musk alone is almost worth half that and will probably catch up if things continue the way they are.
Just consider the nearest rivers near you, now imagine someone diverting the river upstream to form an artificial lake (let's ignore the other environmental impacts of that for the sake of argument), to enable formation of something akin to the Panama Canal.
I'm sure you'd have certain reservations and complaints about the local loss of access to a now diverted river.
Then you come to understand that it's not even necessary for this canal to continue consuming fresh water for the operation of the locks, but hey there are some economic advantages of the shipping shortcut.
Then you learn shipping capacity will be throttled because the canal is not the only consumer of the rainwater, and El Nino threatens a big drought. The ships will take longer routes outside of your economy, and wasting fossil fuels, further exacerbating global warming.
All of this turns out to be a false dilemma, its perfectly feasible to have water locks operate and raise and lower ships without consuming fresh water.
It's orders of magnitude more expensive to desalinate sea water than it is to simply prevent fresh water from being needlessly wasted on operating water locks...
Even if you have a "surplus" of fresh water, its better to let it seep into continental ground and let water tension distribute it throughout the soil, so the soil can evaporatively cool during prolonged heat waves.
> that gets lots of rain
just like population / industry demand and renewable supply fluctuate, fresh water availability and demand fluctuate, its not that complicated.
scroll up the thread: someone posts a BBC video where it is claimed the water lock operators will allow fewer ships through because its costing too much fresh water, they are already suffering a strong deficit in rainfall this spring / summer and El Nino is coming. The article from Le Monde states effectively the same things. But here you come toting around the yearly average as if this potable statistic will make the country less thirsty.
It's literally just a couple of decades of effort what separates the scenarios between mild climate change and the accelerated extinction of most of humanity and biomes. All so that Saudi Aramco and Chevron could get a bit more profit.
If you have a view that fossil fuels are practically limited (not necessarily in the literal sense ”run out of the last molecules” sense but in the practical/economic sense), you’d rather buy someone else’s and hoard your own reserves to extract later when the global supply is lower/price is higher.
> The political criticism in the US (and in Canada where I'm from) against fossil fuel extraction makes no sense.
If you _must_ extract fossil fuel, you can arguably say that it's better to do it somewhere with higher environmental standards (of course, here I'm disregarding people disdain to see wilderness areas they know and have an emotional attachment with transformed into oil fields). But what about _stop_ fossil fuel usage? Sure, it would cost a lot of money. So is AI currently, for doubtful returns. Sure, it would require people changing habits. So has the Internet, and we went through it.
It's like hearing an alcoholic telling you that sure, he still drinks 3 bottles a day but hey, it's Canada-made alcohol, "all in all better than alcohol coming from Russia", right? Yes, I guess it's better for the Canadian economy, but what about just stop drinking?
About your Tesla, deciding to buy without any political consideration is your choice, which you are entitled to. But why would it be impossible to understand someone actually considering the political/social side of things? All your acts and conscious decisions are strictly driven by objective, scientific criteria, never taking into account anything else?
We are not all going to "just stop" using fossil fuels. That is not a realistic goal. If it was possible then I'd entertain it. Being religious about this doesn't help make progress because it alienates people. I am all for pragmatic measures that reduce fossil fuel usage globally. Tanking Canada's economy to make zero or negative global impact is how I evaluate some of the proposed aggressive policies. What is happening is that we are funding Russia's war on Ukraine indirectly due to our lack of ability to replace that supply in Europe. That to me feels like obviously bad policy.
I made changes in my life to reduce fossil fuel usage and am considering more. I also try and influence others where I can to make similar changes. I am not optimizing for $'s here, I can afford to spend more and use less fossil fuels. This isn't really to boast or anything, just to say that this approach works for me and can work for others.
My wife boycotts Nestle for political considerations. I sort of get it but also not get it. That's not to say I would never consider something like that but I also am not a believer in the efficiency of that driving change and I don't have time to research everything in enough depth to come to a conclusion about everything I buy. Not buying Tesla for politics X is a very one dimensional decision. I don't understand how to make that decision and so I don't bother.
Sure, I get it, we won't literally _stop_ fossil fuels usage in the near future. I get it, other countries are large CO2 emitters. But why is it an argument to do nothing?
In Canada, Carbon tax was a pragmatic, reasonable policy. It was even enacted by conservatives. It was done at zero and even negative cost for most people. And yet, it was gunned down because it was easier to just yell "ax the tax" without even understanding what it was. All of it under the cover of "pragmatism" (hey, families are suffering, businesses are failing, we need to do something -- and of course, that something has nothing to do with the root causes of these issues).
I could go on: you cannot put bike lanes to encourage bike adoption (that's pragmatism: people stuck in traffic in their gaz guzzlers produce CO2!). You cannot improve public transport (that's pragmatism, it's too expensive and families don't want that anyway). You cannot have laws to enforce maximal arsenic content in the air in a residential neighborhood (that's pragmatism, what will the workers do when the plant close?). I could go on and on, just in Canada.
It's tiring to see pragmatism systematically invoked as an justification for doing the worst possible thing, environmentally speaking. It's tiring to see that this always raises the bar of what is environmentally acceptable, such that next decisions are even worse.
Kudos on you if you actually make pragmatic choices to reduce your fossil fuel consumption, both at an individual and societal level. But somehow I doubt it. I've seen too many "pragmatics".
Sorry that sounds like, if you get murdered than better here because the knives are cleaner.
And how do you propose we do that if we’re not the ones selling the fossils?
Fossil fuel usage is for the most part, a transaction between willing participants at a fair market price. Will you ban that? How will you enforce it? I hate to be presumptuous, but I assume you’re not a fan of colonialism or wars in the Middle East.
While oil is as valuable as it is for heating, industry, transport, war, and gestures widely at our modern lifestyle. There are two realistic ways to stop it: replace it with something cheaper and better, or genocide.
Neither of these are likely to happen at the scale and timeline required to solve our predicament. But regardless, pretending we can just stop people far poorer than us from striving to meet our standing of living by… asking nicely? It doesn’t help, if your goal is indeed to solve the problem.
Because we would be the ones not _buying_ the fossils? There are multiple ways to reduce fossil fuels dependency, and they are known (and no, they do not involve genocide or colonialism). In Canada, carbon tax is an example, backed by economic studies (from right wight economists) and originally introduced by conservative (in Canada at least). Of course, then right wing parties started to convince people to "axe the tax" because it was the root cause of their problems (which is was, of course, not).
That's always the issue, and that's always been bugging me. Why is it that not being able to replace, today, 100% of the fossil fuels usage means "gee, we should do nothing, let's actually increase our production!"? How do we come from "such an energetic transition is a multi generation work" (which is true) to "meh too hard, let's double down"? How can we seriously make the argument "hey, I _could_ clean up the mess in my backyard, but anyway my neighbor is way worse and he has a larger backyard, let's do nothing instead"?
I really don't see how these positions are seen as the "voice of reason". To me, there at best the voice of laziness.
> there is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible … the projected 4°C warming simply must not be allowed to occur.
Bonus: https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...
> the climate change mitigation goals which have been pledged are far too low (ambition gap), and the measures which are currently being implemented and planned are not sufficient to achieve even these inadequate goals (realisation gap). This has far-reaching consequences: There is a strong probability that the ambition gap will lead to a temperature rise of 2 to 5 degrees Centigrade compared to pre-industrial temperatures by 2100, the realisation gap to a further rise of several degrees Centigrade.[1,2,VI] There is a danger that the mean temperature will already have risen by 3 degrees Centigrade by 2050
That's very different from your certainty that our civilization will end. Even just reading through their list of impacts at +4C, it's horrific, but pretty clearly not civilization-ending.
IMO, this kind of hyperbole does a lot of damage to your cause. The reality is bad enough, you don't need to make things up. People eventually stop believing the boy who cries wolf.
Yeah the issue is "minimally inconveniencing 5% of the population", but it's not any 5%, it's the powerful 5% who resist the change using any means necessary including producing mass propaganda and steering the votes to the nazi parties which promise to revert to the old ways and stop any progress on the climate front.
Can't speak about EV marketshare (I'm guessing someone is bundling hybrids into stats you read), but large part of population is buying only used ICE cars, or get new ones on a business lease; only minority actually pays the sticker price for new car out-of-pocket.
Also, it's hard not to notice how much general population hates those. I'm actually surprised EU got as far as it got here, pretty sure they're burning a lot of political capital because of environmental regulations.
no: https://robbieandrew.github.io/carsales/
> only minority actually pays the sticker price for new car out-of-pocket.
yes, mostly because new cars are very expensive, and that's exactly the point I was making
> Also, it's hard not to notice how much general population hates those. I'm actually surprised EU got as far as it got here, pretty sure they're burning a lot of political capital because of environmental regulations.
Exactly. But it's hard to quantify how much of that hatred is genuine and how much of it is fanned and amplified by fossil interests and reckless politicians. My guess is that around 80% of it is manufactured.
5%? No. That's a lot of people.
At least in the USA, the one and only thing that matters is what benefits the top 0.0002% richest (approximate percentage of billionares in the US). Nobody else matters anymore.
Our destiny is not decided by a abstract superorganism, but a handful of people given godly rights create the rulebook. And to take us with them in the pursuit of suicide.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Positives: no mobile roaming charges
Negatives:
- less efficient home appliances (dishwasher, washing machine, drier)
- cookie law
- car annoyances (e.g. "beep if over the speed limit")
- paper straws
- attached bottle caps
- LED lights
- expensive electricity (a lot of this is caused by individual countries, but probably also the EU plays a role, e.g. by not classifying nuclear as "green" / "renewable" and banning Russian gas)
Also, war is costly—so is preparedness. Sometimes you don’t have a choice, e.g. you have a strong polity neighboring you that insists your are by gods grace their zone of influence.
I’m sad about nuclear to, but that’s on a culture in specific countries; not on Brussels.
Also, there’s heaps of mistakes in the regulations they churn, but that’s another story.
> less efficient home appliances (dishwasher, washing machine, drier)
How exactly are they less efficient?
> cookie law
The fault being those trying to steal my data
> car annoyances (e.g. "beep if over the speed limit")
I haven't seen that
> paper straws
I'll give you that one, however in my country its businesses that stopped it just to customer pressure, not a law, indeed it's perfectly legal to serve plastic straws to people, its just people don't ask for them
> attached bottle caps
These are great
> LED lights
These are also great
> expensive electricity
In my country that's due to the price of gas
> They had enough power to close down all the nuclear power plants in Germany.
But the CDU were the ones who closed down almost all the nuclear power plants in Germany, and as I've shown the CDU are anything but environmentalists, so this is simply wrong.
My "wall of text" is to prove that the CDU are not behaving in the interests of environmentalists, rather nobody here can believe how deeply they've sold their souls to oil & gas.
Germany had enough power to close down all nuclear power plants, because older coal power plants when taken offline have been carefully mothballed (preserved for later restart, when necessary).
In contrast the 2002 German nuclear law (deutsche Atomgesetz (AtG)) requires that nuclear power plants have to be started to be dismantled immidiately after shutting down. There are no technical reasons why nuclear power plant after shutting down, taking out nuclear fuel and decontamination (as is done regularly during maintanance) could not be preserved for 10, 20 or 50 year (you have to mostly periodicaly repair the roof, repair the paint and guard the buildings, e.g. it can be done without large costs).
That's plainly false, as that's just not how markets work over the long term. We only see distortions like this iver the short term due to investor subsidies.
Can you point me to my earlier argument (the time marks are individual comment URLs)
I'm not "crying wolf". You, like most people just don't want to hear it. That's why most (especially the "officially accepted") climate models are unrealistically optimistic even with their worst case scenarios. Because people who tell the truth are considered alarmist and people who sugar coat it are ignored.
Just to be clear, and because some people inexplicably seem to consider this worth even talking about, I'm not saying there won't be any humans anywhere. That might happen but there might also be some habitable places left at least for a while, maybe for a long time. Nobody knows exactly what's going to happen. If 80% of the global population were to perish I would consider this "prophecy" fulfilled. It's not important to me whether some people survive somewhere because the point is I don't want to live through (or, overwhelmingly more likely, die during) the process leading up to that and I don't want to put a new person into the world who will have to live through that. That's where my concern ends, I don't care what happens after the world as we know it is gone.
Humans do inhumane things to each other during hard times, and I guarantee you, regardless of how you define words like adaptation and civilization, there's extremely hard times coming.
I understand that you don’t think you’re being alarmist, of course. But why would I think some random internet commenter is more credible with their predictions that are much worse than the IPCC and other scientific consensus?
To wit: Russian cowboys learn to wrangle a brand new beef industry - https://whyy.org/segments/russian-cowboys-learn-to-wrangle-a...
Getting an early start on skill sets before Siberia replaces the American cattle plains.
The Greens, by the way, extended the lifetime of the existing plants beyond what the CDU had planned. Why are you failing to mention that?
If you were honest about your critique, I can't see how you can possibly make environmentalists responsible for Germany's course - during the last 20 years, they were the 2nd largest of 3 coalition partners during 1 governing period, compared to the CDU being the largest partner during 4 governing periods. From every angle, they deserve the majority of the blame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
In 2002, under the Red-Green government of Gerhard Schröder, the "Act on the structured phase-out of the utilization of nuclear energy for the commercial generation of electricity" took effect, following a drawn-out political debate and lengthy negotiations with nuclear power plant operators. The act legislated for the shut-down of all German nuclear plants by 2021.
So when the Greens first came to power in the Schröder administration of 1998 they achieved their major political goal for which they had fought for 20 years: abandoning nuclear energy in Germany.
The Greens wanted swift abandoning of nuclear energy in Germany already in the 2000s, but the government would have to compensate the nuclear power plant owners for the costs of building the nuclear power plants (multiple bilion DM in the 2000s, most of the nuclear power plants were still new and the costs of construction were still not payed by the electricity). Therefor the Government negotiated with each electric utility company a rest quota of nuclear produced electricity and as a result nuclear electricity production would continue until 2021 (with a planned decrease in production every year).
In 2007 amid fears that Russian energy supplies to western Europe might not be reliable, conservative politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel and Economics Minister Michael Glos, continue to question the decision to phase out nuclear power in Germany.
In September 2010, German government policy shifted back toward nuclear energy and the government wanted to extend the use of nuclear energy in Germany.
After the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, the conservative German government reversed it's nuclear position and returned back the original 2002 Red-Green nuclear phase-out time table.
The current conservative German government under Merz again reversed it's nuclear position towards a more pro-nuclear stance, but decided that it's too expensive to revive the nuclear industry.
I would not say that the current German Green party are environmentalists, currently they are mostly renewable industry lobbyists. CDU has connections to German heavy industry. SPD had strong connection to coal mining regions and coal unions. FDP connections to German car manufacturing.
What is the point of this statement if desalination isn’t actually needed here?
Is saving shipping fuel or saving freshwater during a drought that is expected to worsen significantly "(un)necessary"? Is human prosperity "(un)necessary"?
Why are you bending over backwards to defend wasting precious resources?
Congratulations.
Suppose you drink water from a river and piss in the river so the water ends up in the ocean, later someone diverts this river upstream straight to the ocean, would you really not care that the water no longer passes through your body?
Does the knowledge that the water has returned to the ocean quench your thirst?
The Panama Canal operators are throttling shipping capacity by about 10%.
May I inform your employer you are ready to swallow a 10% reduction in pay check?
centralisation makes centralised opporunity for change. You have all the power, and also all the responsibility.
Just like people are doing here.
In reality China is the main reason climate change got worse for the last 20 years. Ask ChatGPT who contributed to CO2 growth most in the past 20 years, Chinese industry was not just the biggest contributor to CO2 emission growth every year but most years bigger than everyone else combined. And the only real exception was 2020, when China shut down a lot faster for COVID, and a LOT more draconian, than everybody else.
Also: China is STILL increasing coal use. STILL building new coal plants. Now, I get why (same reason even Germany is considering it), but that doesn't change the facts.
Feel free to share why not. At the end of the China is still part of a global system dominated by capitalism and they have to play the markets game in order to survive.
They could easily fully do things their own way but that would mean, for example, chance of private intellectual property, which would mean no WTO membership, which would mean massively reduced capacity for trade, which would put them at such a disadvantage they'd inevitably collapse.
If the argument were about slavery instead - slavery enables cheaper goods, ergo by buying our products, some of which were made using slavery, but we refuse to reveal which ones, but nonetheless by buying them you support slavery and are morally responsible for the slavery not us. Nobody would accept this framing.
I agree that China has done very well from manufacturing and trade, and would not have done as well if they had not industrialised at a large scale. But that doesn't change the fact that industrialisation of this kind causes pollution and is damaging the planet and it especially doesn't mean that China has no moral obligation to do as much as it can to reduce emissions.
I also don't believe the argument that the pollution is inherent to production, or that there is no way to satisfy demand without pollution. (or that china, specifically, derserves to be the one to profit from satisfying that demand). Production of almost all commodities can be done without massive emissions these days, and even when it couldn't, nobody was forced to ramp up production
Someone will inevitably jump in here to point out that china makes a lot of solar or whatever. Sure, they do. They also make a lot of wind power. Their emissions per capita are trending in the wrong direction though. Europe's have been going DOWN since the 1970s, and china's are going UP. China's emissions per capita are roughly equal with the EU at the moment and are going up - pretty soon they will catch up and surpass the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
if you look at co2 emission per capita you can see how China is actually an example to follow, we can't say the same for USA, India or EU. you can ask this to chatgpt, or you could also ... search? for this data, it's publicly available.
> China is STILL increasing coal use. STILL building new coal plants. this is misleading, yes they are building coal plants but not using them, that is the backup plan for "rainy days" . and the coal usage is going down.
Compared to, say, rolling back windfarms and redirecting that money (almost a billion) into dodgy neighbours rolling coal ventures.
Your prefer the US approach then?
It has never made sense to me that people are willing to ignore the trends and argue in platitudes.
I also don't agree that just because someone else became rich through some negative process (crime, perhaps), that everyone has a right to the same. This sort of thinking is the way the world burns
What that person emitted in 2025 has no bearing on their 2027 “allowance”.
We can certainly discuss how much is an appropriate, sustainable, or defensible per-person amount, but I’m only interested in the 2027 amounts, not the increase in their amount versus a prior period, nor in allowing past large emitters to continue at higher rates than past low-emitters.
(I think we strongly agree on your last paragraph’s point. That was the point of my GP post, but maybe it didn’t land somehow.)
I also don't agree that just because someone else became rich through some negative process (crime, perhaps), that everyone has a right to the same. This sort of thinking is the way the world burns.
I don't get a free pass to behave like a mafia boss just because I really really want to have a bunch of money like one
I made no such suggestion, only that China isn't solely responsible for the future of humanity, which was the claim I responded to.
Because every person has their own planet?
It would seem far more weird to me to argue the opposite: “These people have the right to emit 2x or 10x as much as these other people!” (Or equivalently, “these people are only allowed to emit 10% or 50% of what these other people are…”)
The issue is that in the current situation, that effectively means we might as well give up on the idea of doing anything about climate change.
Besides, people don't care about CO2 emissions, only factory owners do, governments do. People care about energy available for use for them personally. In fact people generally dislike anything that emits CO2, from cars (somewhat) to coal mines and plants (which people dislike A LOT). If you care about "everyone", there's no need to give people CO2 emission rights, just energy.
my read is yes and yes
are you suggesting it should instead be yes and no? that because the sons want to be rich they are morally in the right for going into a life of crime, even knowing the consequences?
At least the father has a natural lifespan and the ill gotten riches would go to the son(s). Can we say the same thing about the riches of say, the USA? If China does nothing then they will inherit all of it? Or will the US just keep its fortune gained through whatever means, and just tell other up and coming countries to suck rocks and know their place while using the Earth as justification?
Or because they will inherit money? Do you really believe what you are saying?
China doesn't get a pass to pollute at historic US levels for their industrialization because they have the benefit of having learned from our mistakes. Rejecting the "No Fair! It's my turn to needlessly destroy the planet just to make myself richer!" argument isn't hypocrisy, it's just acknowledgement of history and the progress we've made in dealing with the problems we ran into while we were industrializing without the benefit of anyone else's past experience.
China and every other developing country has already been benefiting enormously from the example of developed nations, but they want to cherry pick the things that maximize their wealth while ignoring everything else at the expense of every living thing on Earth. They want to point to the damage we caused while we were stumbling around in the dark with no idea where we were going, even though today the sun is shining and they've got all the maps we made and GPS to guide them.
Even though the planet is shared, the earlier developed nations have gained advantages from their polluting (and at many times, colonial) past that allowed them to pull ahead of other countries. Now they want to stop others going down the same path without giving up their entrenched advantage. That is pulling the ladder up.
Either give up those advantages in the form of reparations (will never happen) or remove any pretense of moral superiority when all you are doing is just preserving your leading position gained using practices you now decry.
Reparations are already in progress and have been for generations. Extensive efforts have been made to start restoring the polluted land and water. Workers rights and health have been improved. The use of slavery has been greatly reduced. The ozone layer is recovering. Trillions have been spent on research and development into ways to help repair and prevent the damage developed nations have inflicted on the planet. Even after all this time we're still working on rebuilding what was destroyed and we've still got a long away to go. in some areas we're actually backsliding. We can't let every developing nation destroy our progress and set us back as if nobody knows any better. Our past was both costly and profitable. We made many of our mistakes out of ignorance, but we know better now and everybody needs to start acting like it.
It's not all a burden for the now developing countries either. They get the benefit of not having to start their industrialization from nothing. They've got access to centuries of knowledge and technology the developed world obtained at great cost. Having the perspective and advantage of all that history and progress however also makes it unacceptable for them to make the same costly mistakes just to satisfy their greed. Now that we all know what is at stake, it falls on everyone to make sure that many of humanity's past sins aren't repeated.
