The BBC one hurts my brain to watch. Incoherent mess of a script. The DW one on the other hand is pretty good. Watch the first 5 minutes of each and you'll see the difference. Thanks for sharing.
pfisch 14 hours ago [-]
The eu is stupid for not engaging in active climate engineering right now. They are the most at risk and should take decisive action before they end up living in a glacier.
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.
Muromec 13 hours ago [-]
Western democracies at this point can't do anything at that even hints at minimally inconveniencing 5% of the population. Any 5% at that. We are stuck in local maximum even if it slowly and surely slides into the shitter
jjav 5 hours ago [-]
> even hints at minimally inconveniencing 5% of the population
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.
shrubby 32 minutes ago [-]
Yes. Nietzsche once said God is dead and I guess the time has come to say "the systemic change is dead".
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.
tpm 6 hours ago [-]
This is an interesting take because for example the EU car fleet emmission rules, fuel taxes, additional member state polluting car taxes etc. do exactly that. Otherwise ICE cars in the EU would be far far cheaper and the EV marketshare would be much lower.
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.
TeMPOraL 5 hours ago [-]
> This is an interesting take because for example the EU car fleet emmission rules, fuel taxes, additional member state polluting car taxes etc. do exactly that. Otherwise ICE cars in the EU would be far far cheaper and the EV marketshare would be much lower.
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.
tpm 3 hours ago [-]
> I'm guessing someone is bundling hybrids into stats you read
> 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.
drawnwren 8 hours ago [-]
If you look at the derivatives, there is no change a Western Democracy can make that will matter as this plays out.
fragmede 6 hours ago [-]
Humanity being saved by China just dumping money into solar because why not, is certainly a take.
AlecSchueler 5 hours ago [-]
Because "why not?" Do we understand that humanity includes Chinese people? Do we also understand A) the steps they're already taking to reduce emissions and B) how much of their emissions historically and today are in service of Western consumers?
RugnirViking 5 hours ago [-]
i don't accept arguments in the form of B when its a business (our pollution is just serving our customers demand, its their moral responsibility to reduce consumption), and I also don't accept it in country form.
centralisation makes centralised opporunity for change. You have all the power, and also all the responsibility.
actionfromafar 35 minutes ago [-]
Centralisation also comes with upkeep necessary to maintain centralisation. The cost of that upkeep can severaly limit opportunity for change. If you are a dictator, staying in power is priority one, at the cost of everything else.
AlecSchueler 2 hours ago [-]
> i don't accept arguments in the form of B
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.
RugnirViking 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think you get to abdicate responsibilty of some avoidable negative externality of something you do just because some entirely separate function of it is the thing your customers want. If I were a plumber who fixed leaks by diverting the water into the customers' neighbors houses, my customers aren't the ones responsible for the damage it causes. I don't think it matters even if the externality isn't avoidable. I think people who sell murder-for-hire services are culpable of murder, even if they are paid by someone else
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.
sokoloff 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t think looking at first derivative of emissions per capita is more important than absolute measure when thinking of the morality of polluting. If China’s per capita is lower than some other place, they’re doing better. The first derivative tells us that might become untrue, but countries with high historical emissions don’t get a pass because they’re lowering those high levels as compared to a lower emitting country whose emissions are rising.
lmz 1 hours ago [-]
Re: emissions per capita - why should the Chinese be limited to a lower amount than the US citizens? They want a high standard of living too.
RugnirViking 24 seconds ago [-]
that might make sense in a world where the US has been chugging along emitting at a constant rate for many years, to maintain a certain standard of living.- but the reality is the US emissions has been going down for many years, while increasing their standard of living (arguable, but difficult to say that US standard of living is less than half of what it was in the 90s), while china is going up in emissions.
mikojan 6 hours ago [-]
Yea, if those 5% are the top-5% - everybody else gets inconvenienced by Neo-Liberal policies all the time.
AlecSchueler 5 hours ago [-]
The top 5%/over 60s. The overlap is almost total.
tomp 5 hours ago [-]
Pretty much everything the EU does, is inconveniencing most of its population, often in the name of "climate change" (while not actually making any impact).
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)
puszczyk 34 minutes ago [-]
Have you ever visited the EU? Let me help you with the positives: common market, freedom of movement, rule of law, clean and beautiful cities and towns.
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.
reeredfdfdf 2 hours ago [-]
Banning Russian gas is the right thing to do, and good for long-term energy independence & prices.
ricardobayes 2 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't even mind the speed limit beeping if it was paired with correct data. But the rental car I recently used in Germany actively reduced the engine power when it detected going "over the limit", which was frequrently triggered by e.g. motorway exit lane speed limits being incorrectly parsed. Since there is talk in the EU to actively prohibit going over the limit, this issue needs to be urgently fixed.
ColdStream 12 hours ago [-]
I suspect that unless there is a consensus or at least a large majority in favor of it, nothing will be done.
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.
fragmede 6 hours ago [-]
Or course, if Elon Musk decides to do something about it, even if everyone else agrees thinks it's going to cause more problems due to 2nd order effects, what's gonna happen? He gets called a Nazi a couple more times?
pfisch 11 hours ago [-]
>Lets say the EU does geoengineering and then there are crop failures in India the next year.
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.
ColdStream 10 hours ago [-]
Alas, that kind of bravado doesn't go far.
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!"
pepperoni_pizza 2 hours ago [-]
Then they get nuked back and they all die? Like how does that answer means anything?
sva_ 13 hours ago [-]
The EU is not "most at risk" compared to eg south Asia, the middle east, parts of Africa, etc; and this idea that AMOC collapse will turn Europe into a glacier is a blatant exaggeration that does not root itself in reality.
consumer451 12 hours ago [-]
As someone in Central EU farm land, who is currently experiencing desertification...
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.
modo_mario 48 minutes ago [-]
>Then, when the AMOC stops, and we join Canadian weather
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.
tpm 6 hours ago [-]
No we are not in the worst place given relative population density. Look at South & Southeast Asia very carefully - there are countries like Bangladesh with pop. of 177 million in an area of double the Czech Republic (pop. 10 million). They have it much worse than us.
> 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.
marcyb5st 3 hours ago [-]
But if the AMOC collapses the drought you talk about will become the a year round problem. Climate models predict a drop in rainfall between 20 and 50% depending on the region. So agriculture will be fucked.
And the US will be hit by super hurricanes since all the moisture/hot water will linger there supercharging them.
tpm 2 hours ago [-]
The rainfall deficit and soil dryness is already a year-round problem in our region, this summer is just a very extreme version of that. I am reasonably sure it will get worse even without the potential AMOC collapse.
sph 5 hours ago [-]
What’s population density got to do with worsening climate?
tpm 5 hours ago [-]
The parent wrote: "We are actually in the worst place, given realtive population density.". So I reacted to that.
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.
DoctorOetker 5 hours ago [-]
humans are dangerous when they get hungry / thirsty / angry / disillusioned
KellyCriterion 4 hours ago [-]
wrong:
EU is the region with the highest acceleration of most climate parameters
tpm 3 hours ago [-]
Fastest acceleration, possibly, yes. But if another region's climate is for example already close to deadly wet bulb temperature during a large part of the year and only a small change puts them over the threshold, then that regions is more at risk than the EU.
pfisch 11 hours ago [-]
Of the major powers the eu is probably the most at risk. No one else is going to save them and they should be acting to save themselves right now.
mistermann 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
consumer451 12 hours ago [-]
I agree with you. We are actually at huge risk. "Western Civilization" rose out of our stable European climate and that is over now.
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?
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?
pfisch 11 hours ago [-]
>However, we need a global consensus for geoengineering.
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.
sfn42 41 minutes ago [-]
Referring to "AI" as an existential risk is hilarious. They're glorified chatbots, they're not going rogue and taking over the world lol
consumer451 11 hours ago [-]
> Why?
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!
red75prime 10 hours ago [-]
> What if >99% scientific consensus says that that org's upper atmo sulfur injection led to to the most insane monsoon/desertification
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.
consumer451 10 hours ago [-]
> It's a risky approach, but, when the consequences of climate change will become undeniably bad, some countries might try.
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?
sfn42 21 minutes ago [-]
> we cannot pray for Norwegian money
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.
nostrebored 11 hours ago [-]
There’s something odd about the concentration of true believers in ai xrisk and climate change catastrophism. They are both technopessimist in a way that is seen as progressive. Stopping progress in AI would make people’s lives immeasurably worse, while stopping fossil fuel consumption would kill billions of people. But it seems like a particular kind of risk aversion that is blind to upside.
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
macintux 10 hours ago [-]
> Stopping progress in AI would make people’s lives immeasurably worse
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?
defrost 10 hours ago [-]
> Stopping progress in AI would make people’s lives immeasurably worse
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.
6 hours ago [-]
3 hours ago [-]
sublinear 10 hours ago [-]
> Stopping progress in AI would make people’s lives immeasurably worse
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.
Fricken 10 hours ago [-]
Everybody alive today will die. We're mortal, that's just how it goes. So with or without fossil fuels, billions of people will die regardless, that much is baked in. It's a moot point.
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.
fchicken 8 hours ago [-]
Spoken as if climate engineering were an established science with no potential pitfalls or downsides...
D_Alex 5 hours ago [-]
The EU has made a difficult problem even worse by switching from pipeline gas to LNG.
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%.
maxhille 4 hours ago [-]
Putin turned off the gas, not the EU
akd 8 hours ago [-]
They can't do anything, everything is in China's hands and the EU does not have the hard or soft power to make China do or not do anything.
worik 11 hours ago [-]
What could possibly go wrong?
boxed 8 hours ago [-]
...with the current approach? We already know. It's bad.
piokoch 27 minutes ago [-]
Sorry, but what? EU literally destroyed its economy by forcing "green energy", so manufacturing was moved to Asia (who cannot care less about climate and uses whatever cheap energy source thy have so this was a rather stupid move), ETS and ETS-2 systems are putting huge taxes on EU citizens for any kind of emission, including building a house or having non-zero emission flat or house.
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.
zamadatix 12 hours ago [-]
I don't think that's the popular reasoning those downvoting have taken to. Can you think of reasons other than they think doing nothing sounds like a great plan people might be downvoting about? If not, I could share a few concerns with the approach that come to my mind (if it helps). It would have been nice if more of those people just commented directly instead of downvoting and moving on.
blooalien 11 hours ago [-]
> It would have been nice if more of those people just commented directly instead of downvoting and moving on.
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").
bayganyo 15 hours ago [-]
I see what you did there. Bravo.
DoctorOetker 14 hours ago [-]
That BBC documentary shows or exposes very shallow thinking skills at this timestamp 6m42s:
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!
evil-olive 10 hours ago [-]
> The operation as currently described is so inefficient, even for the 1960's!
> 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.
Its not that difficult to do it while in use, you just construct a parallel lock next to the existing ones that can remain in use.
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...
evil-olive 9 hours ago [-]
> you just construct a parallel lock next to the existing ones that can remain in use.
if they had put you in charge instead, do you think you could have gotten it done faster?
DoctorOetker 8 hours ago [-]
Do you read the URL's you submit yourself?
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.
evil-olive 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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?
DoctorOetker 5 hours ago [-]
it's not condescending, it's physics.
anon84873628 13 hours ago [-]
So putting the technical critique aside, are you blaming the BBC for accurately reporting how the canal functions?
zamadatix 12 hours ago [-]
I think they were saying "That BBC documentary shows or exposes very shallow thinking skills <of those involved with designing the canal> at this timestamp". not "<of those making the documentary for not correcting the design of the canal>"
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.
DoctorOetker 10 hours ago [-]
No connection to a lake is necessary, imagine 2 locks in parallel both connected to the same low water level canal section "on the left" and both connected to the same high water level canal to the right (its not necessary to have 2 locks in parallel, its just easier to demonstrate the scheme doesn't require significant energy consumption):
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).
DoctorOetker 10 hours ago [-]
I don't have the resources / time / interest to verify if:
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...
sigmarule 7 hours ago [-]
Surely figuring this out would be a very marginal increase in time spent on writing your large post and series of responses.
DoctorOetker 6 hours ago [-]
not really, when physics is ready knowledge and when I don't care about the politics (i.e. who the retards are).
but I wouldn't protest if you clarify an issue you seem or pretend to care a lot about...
MSM 13 hours ago [-]
> Keep the freshwater, use it for irrigation etc.
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.
DoctorOetker 10 hours ago [-]
no connection to a lake is necessary.
teekert 6 hours ago [-]
Well, the Panama canal could have been at sea level, easy to traverse without the shenanigans, and with some of the wealth it generates flowing to the Panamanians. But then the CIA killed Omar Torrijos.
markdown 13 hours ago [-]
Wow, guy on internet solves problem within seconds. And you didn't even have to visit the site. Incredible.
DoctorOetker 10 hours ago [-]
If you have studied physics, its easy to see water locks can be operated with near zero energy consumption.
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...
hvb2 6 hours ago [-]
You do realize that the problems you raise were not even remotely an issue when this was designed?
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.
cdrnsf 17 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile governments are electing to either do nothing or actively make the problem worse (particularly in the case of the US — expanding fossil fuel extraction, pushing data center build out and attacking renewables like wind).
YZF 15 hours ago [-]
Solar energy is the fastest growing source of energy in the US. That's because it's also the cheapest source of energy. So markets are working.
"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.
HumblyTossed 14 hours ago [-]
I'm in the US and _I_ don't want us to get credit. Even the worst of people do something good every now and then. But if you reward that, they won't change.
ericd 10 hours ago [-]
The self-flagellation has gotten too extreme. Photovoltaics were invented in the US, and the US helped subsidize it to the point where they were an economically viable source of energy.
adaml_623 5 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia says invented in France and developed by the Germans and Japanese. Do you have some references for US involvement?
al_borland 5 hours ago [-]
Encouraging a desirable behavior is a better way to elicit more of that behavior than labeling someone as the worst no matter what. At that point, why wouldn’t they lean into the villain role?
11 hours ago [-]
api 13 hours ago [-]
> Even the worst of people do something good every now and then. But if you reward that, they won't change.
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.
xelxebar 12 hours ago [-]
Goodhart's Law. We want to incentivize right intent in addition to right action. This has nothing to do with degree of perfection and plays a part in why mental state factors significantly into culpability assessment in the law. We want to avoid inadvertently incentivizing reward hacking behavior, especially when the individual rewards are high, overall transparency is low, and the consequences far-reaching.
whatisthiseven 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, none of the major economies get rewarded because fossil fuel usage needs to be zero now, already, to avoid catastrophic warming by the end of the century.
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?
socalgal2 11 hours ago [-]
So what have you done to avoid using fossil fuel in your own life? fossil fuel, like almost all things sold, is a demand driven market. You want it to stop, stop doing things that use it.
Black616Angel 6 hours ago [-]
You call it a demand-driven market like they don't lobby for the usage of coal or gas power plants and sabotage electric mobility and public transit.
croes 10 hours ago [-]
Because it’s different entities.
The market creates more solar power despite the actions of the government
goda90 49 minutes ago [-]
> Fossil fuel extraction is not the problem.
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.
> 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.
kraf 1 hours ago [-]
You can just as easily argue that markets caused all this. They don't incentivize the preservation of the planet or even life at all. There is no reason to believe that anything that comes out of markets organically is good, they don't converge towards worlds that have sound values. If they do in some instance then it's just by happenstance as in the solar example.
I would have agreed with you on giving credit but we did an about face in the last 2 years and now are spending billions of dollars to pay off companies that were already building renewables because we failed when trying to just illegally cancel them[1]
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.
Completely false and epic revisionism. 96.6% of all new energy sources in the US from 2024 to 2026 were green.
Nuclear, batteries, solar, wind, hydro.
You know people can just look this stuff up right?
lovich 10 hours ago [-]
But the government is still paying billions of dollars to end renewable projects because they dont like said contracts, right?
socalgal2 11 hours ago [-]
Cancelling those contracts *IS* letting the market decide
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.
magicalist 11 hours ago [-]
> The RWE paid 1.26 billion to acquire the lease on offshore wind. Payment is a refund.
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.
croes 9 hours ago [-]
Making an offer they can’t refuse isn’t really a market decision
Edit: typo, changed is to isn’t
lovich 10 hours ago [-]
> Cancelling those contracts IS letting the market decide
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
intended 8 hours ago [-]
> Stopping the project now is protecting billions in expenses in the future
?
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.
pennomi 15 hours ago [-]
What a weird, rose-tinted view of the US you have. Just because the markets are working and the US bungled its way into another war over oil doesn’t mean we should ignore the absolutely braindead political opposition to energy modernization.
YZF 15 hours ago [-]
I'm weird. Just to be fair I'll acknowledge that certain political actors in the US deny there's any man made climate change and fight renewable energy because it conflicts with some narrow business or political interests. I'm not denying that.
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.
kalenx 14 hours ago [-]
I don't understand. Are you making the argument that extracting fossil fuel here is better than extracting it elsewhere? Or, perhaps more to the point, you do see that the issue is the use of fossil fuels and that extracting _more_ is just contributing to it?
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.
YZF 13 hours ago [-]
Yes. I am making the argument that if we extract a barrel of oil in Canada that is all in all better than in Russia or Saudi. We have more environmental standards and we put that money towards better things.
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).
sokoloff 48 minutes ago [-]
If you assume fossil fuels are unlimited (or the limit is so much farther than humans will decide to extract), that makes sense.
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.
estearum 11 hours ago [-]
Silly argument. You obviously want to be the very last nation on the planet to run out of fossil fuels.
kalenx 12 hours ago [-]
Fair enough. I'll expand.
> 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?
YZF 11 hours ago [-]
I try to be pragmatic and not religious/ideology driven and I try to take in the complete picture. I think we could all use more of that. A lot of my climate thinking is influenced by someone I know who is also very pragmatic and knows a lot more about this. I am more or less echoing some of those thoughts because I think they're important and I agree with them.
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.
kalenx 2 hours ago [-]
I'm all for pragmatism. The issue is that most people claiming pragmatism are usually, in my experience, simply justifying status quo.
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".
jamesknelson 10 hours ago [-]
> But what about _stop_ fossil fuel usage?
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.
kalenx 2 hours ago [-]
> And how do you propose we do that if we’re not the ones selling the fossils?
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.
croes 9 hours ago [-]
The higher environmental standards that allow drilling in nature reserves?
Sorry that sounds like, if you get murdered than better here because the knives are cleaner.
kalenx 2 hours ago [-]
Well I was trying to go with it for the sake of argument. I don't really think there is a "clean" way to extract fossil fuels, especially in oil sands like in Alberta. My point was that even if that was true, it still doesn't make sense to me.
croes 9 hours ago [-]
But the US government allowed drilling in nature reserves, that is definitely not better than oil from already existing drills in Saudi Arabia.
derriz 14 hours ago [-]
Why does it matter where on the planet the fossil fuels are extracted in terms of dealing with global climate change?
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.
YZF 13 hours ago [-]
It doesn't work like that. If the US and Canada stopped extraction of oil and gas for the most part that shortage would be made up in other places. As we remove our supply from the markets prices would rocket up and countries like Russia and Saudi would make immense profits while making up for most of the losses and not moving the demand needle as far as you think it will move for the environment. There will also be a move back to coal where that's an option (some power stations).
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.
derriz 12 hours ago [-]
Prices would increase making the alternatives more attractive.
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.
blargey 14 hours ago [-]
By your own market argument, increasing oil supply depresses prices and boosts usage. And NA oil isn't particularly clean or environmentally-friendly - the benefits of local production are primarily political, with a side of cheaper gas, which again, is not fighting climate change with market forces.
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.
lovich 14 hours ago [-]
> The other stupid political battle here is boycotting Tesla. How does that make sense? We "punish" Elon by using more fossil fuels.
There are other EV manufacturers. Boycotting Tesla != buying ICE vehicles. That’s a bad faith framing.
strictnein 15 hours ago [-]
> What a weird, rose-tinted view of the US you have
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.
Hikikomori 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
well_ackshually 14 hours ago [-]
Markets are fundamentally unable to take into account externalities, but yes, let's "focus on markets and let them take care of the problem". Conveniently ignore the fact that the only reason solar is the cheapest power is because a country put in their political will and power into making it so.
Your sacred market has been killing us all and will continue to keep killing us all if it makes a few pennies.
runarberg 9 hours ago [-]
We have seen 20 years of complete inaction precisely because of this “let the market handle it” nonsense. In 2012 Europe was all in on some cap-and-trade scheme that everybody knew was never going to work, everybody told them it was never gonna work, and it turns out it didn’t work. The markets are still not responding to this catastrophe even today, as we should be at absolute zero and we are not even at net zero.
The markets have failed everybody, and politicians who believed in the markets were wrong, and should be in jail now for criminal negligence.
markdown 12 hours ago [-]
> Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem.
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.
worik 10 hours ago [-]
"banana republic levels of corruption"
That is such an understatement
croes 10 hours ago [-]
> Also consider the US has just removed a sh~tload of fossil fuels from the world economy.
Do you mean the war with Iran that released in the initial weeks over 5 million metric tons of CO₂?
Devasta 13 hours ago [-]
> How about we give the US credit for this?
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.
YZF 12 hours ago [-]
I was poking people a little with that statement. Can't help myself.
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.
estearum 11 hours ago [-]
A car on which you slam on the accelerator and the brakes, and which comes to a stop, is in fact stopping despite your pressing on the accelerator.
> 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.
ColdStream 12 hours ago [-]
> Yes, and usage is not decreasing. As solar is growing, it's only adding capacity, not replacing fossil fuels.
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.
Muromec 13 hours ago [-]
We can't even decrease the /rate/ at which we pump the shit into the air when we need to decrease the total amount of it in.
Ok ok, America is behind petrostates. I'll add that to my comment.
asdfman123 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
derriz 13 hours ago [-]
Foreign state actors?
We have government agents frequenting this website to sew anti-US sentiment? Really?
Could you identify some of them? Or at least one or two of the obvious ones?
asdfman123 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, I could.
But to be serious, there's endless evidence that it's going on, and if you don't believe it I'm not the one with my head in the sand. (That's a common English idiom meaning "not paying attention," for the foreign state actors out there.)
blooalien 10 hours ago [-]
> (That's a common English idiom meaning "not paying attention," for the foreign state actors out there.)
It's even worse than "not paying attention". It's knowing the truth of the situation and actively avoiding acknowledging it to yourself or anyone else. Hiding your head in the sand and shouting "It's not really happening, it's not really happening!" despite knowing that it is indeed happening.
derriz 13 hours ago [-]
Names or evidence. Either will do.
asdfman123 12 hours ago [-]
I don't want to
tomhow 5 hours ago [-]
Don't make insinuations you aren't willing to back with evidence. We've had guidelines against this for years, precisely because these claims make for such repetitive and empty discussion, and this subthread is a perfect specimen of that. Any time anyone provides us with evidence of manipulation of the site, we investigate it and take action.
We – of course – care about manipulation on HN; the only reason this is a site people come to for discussing so many different important topics is that so much effort has gone into ensuring integrity in the content that can be read here. It's just not that easy to engage in astroturfing, shilling, brigading, etc without setting off alarms either in the software or in the many HN users who have finely honed bullshit detectors, because organized, manipulative participation is so clearly different from earnest participation.
12 hours ago [-]
ch4s3 16 hours ago [-]
Data centers use no more than 1.5% of electricity globally[1], and a long LLM query uses only a little more than 5 minutes of general laptop use ~3x the energy of running an LED light for 5 minutes.
So you’re saying we could significantly cut energy use globally by limiting data center build outs?
1.5% is a //huge// amount. If it was a “drop” in your bucket, it would only hold 67 more of those drops.
ch4s3 16 hours ago [-]
No, I'm not saying that and I don't think 1.5% is particularly large. Moreover many of these projects are built out with on site 0 carbon generation so they're in some ways a net benefit.
cogman10 16 hours ago [-]
The largest projects, like Box Elder County Utah and Pecos County Texas, are using fossil fuels.
In fact, I'm unaware of any new AI data center also being built with 0 carbon generation. Do you have a source?
netsharc 14 hours ago [-]
Can I have 1.5% of your net worth?
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"...
cdrnsf 14 hours ago [-]
Like xAI's running gas generators non-stop?
jamiek88 14 hours ago [-]
Link some zero carbon ones if there are ‘many’.
hunter-gatherer 15 hours ago [-]
This is wildly out of touch with reality. Have you never seen a construction site? A 0 carbon generation site doesn't exist.
ch4s3 14 hours ago [-]
You know what’s meant by that, it refers to ongoing generation emissions.
14 hours ago [-]
dofm 14 hours ago [-]
That figure likely doesn't include crypto mining, either. That's another 0.5% or so.
0.5% is about the entire energy consumption of two Swedens or half a Thailand.
BobbyJo 13 hours ago [-]
Only if you hold the view that AI will not lead to use using energy more efficiently.
14 hours ago [-]
asdfman123 14 hours ago [-]
> we could significantly cut energy use globally by limiting data center build outs?
No, we couldn't, because degrowth solutions aren't really an option.
api 13 hours ago [-]
I call degrowth "abstinence based" environmental policy in allegory to abstinence based sex education. The latter is the "we don't need condoms or birth control, just teach people not to have sex" thing, which doesn't work either.
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.
asdfman123 13 hours ago [-]
And right now the fuel for fascism seems to be coming from the newly minted billionaires who own or profit off of the data centers.
wongarsu 15 hours ago [-]
1.5% of electricity. That's a significant difference. Only about 1/7th of all our energy usage is electricity
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
mitthrowaway2 15 hours ago [-]
Wow, even with that being electricity rather than energy, that's orders of magnitude more than I would have guessed. That's a tremendous amount of electricity.
jdiff 15 hours ago [-]
> ~3x the energy of running an LED light for 5 minutes.
Why would this not be the energy of running an LED light for 15 minutes?
rcpt 15 hours ago [-]
It's an unspoken rule in the data center debate that every metric is completely batshit.
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"
ch4s3 14 hours ago [-]
It comes from Our World in Data, highly reputable, and I included the source link.
rcpt 14 hours ago [-]
I'm sure that figure is accurate. And the other person in this thread who commented "the entire energy consumption of two Swedens or half a Thailand" is probably also accurate.
It's not about accuracy, it's about the units people choose when having these discussions
ch4s3 4 minutes ago [-]
I lead with 1.5% of global electricity use. But its import to contextualiza that normal AI usage requires less electricity than an evening of watching TV.
tzs 11 hours ago [-]
Laptop use and LED light use (and most other uses of electricity) are not increasing so rapidly that they can not be accommodated by the normal expansion in electric system capacity that has been part of long term planning for quite a while.
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.
drdrey 15 hours ago [-]
1.5% of electricity, not energy
that would be 0.3% of global energy use
legitster 15 hours ago [-]
When all is said and done, data centers are going to be complimentary to green energy. They can spin up and down to buffer non-linear power nodes.
They also represent investment in economic growth that doesn't come from resource extraction or travel or manufacturing.
ColdStream 12 hours ago [-]
While yes they can spin up and down, there is the deeper question of what it is all for.
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.
HDBaseT 13 hours ago [-]
Building data centers relies on immense manufacturing. The GPUs, systems, cooling, batteries, etc don't come from no where. They have strict replacement schedules too.
Mawr 8 hours ago [-]
> They can spin up and down
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.
yread 15 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, "just" 485 TWh, equal to all electricity consumption of Germany. Drop in the bucket
burningChrome 16 hours ago [-]
The US isn't expanding fossil fuel extraction, its quite the opposite. They're funding the modernization of existing plants in order to take older plants offline:
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.
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."
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.
abrezas 16 hours ago [-]
You are looking at the acceleration but without looking at the initial state.
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
Muromec 13 hours ago [-]
The only relevant metric is ppm in the atmosphere. Every single other, especially per capita ones are distructioo
tzs 11 hours ago [-]
That is both completely right and completely wrong.
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.
OroPla 2 hours ago [-]
> the only way to do it is for every person to have the same share
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.
Mawr 8 hours ago [-]
Clever plan!
1. Get rich from cheap coal
2. Pull up the ladder behind you
I'm sure everyone will comply.
16 hours ago [-]
TacticalCoder 16 hours ago [-]
> A more fair metric would be Co2 emissions/person and I’m getting
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.
mitthrowaway2 15 hours ago [-]
Solution to save the environment: China should separate out Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia as separate independent countries. Hong Kong and Macao too. And then split north-south so that Shanghai and Beijing become their own capitals. Continue this process and eventually the population and emissions of each individual country will be low enough that they can be ignored, thus solving the problem once and for all.
edflsafoiewq 14 hours ago [-]
That is the opposite of what GP said. The point is only the total emissions matter, the climate does not care about "fair" allocations over either people or nation-states.
tzs 11 hours ago [-]
That's a pointless point, because any system to actually control emissions requires allocating them to nation-states, because it is nation-states that actually enforce things on people.
piva00 14 hours ago [-]
The EU has more people than the USA but emits 1/3 of the USA's, what's the exceptionalist excuse for that?
toddy_flogsit 14 hours ago [-]
well, yes we're overfed and over-commercialized. But we also vastly out build, grow and produce Europe. (and you have more people)
piva00 3 hours ago [-]
If using simple metrics like GDP growth, I'm more in the camp of Paul Krugman's argument[0] that such comparisons with simple naïve metrics are insufficient to analyse it.
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.
What is Europe's excuse for having such low wages and output despite having more people?
piva00 7 hours ago [-]
Did I offend you by asking a question?
phartenfeller 5 hours ago [-]
We have a meltdown, maybe we can extract clean energy from here
thinkcontext 15 hours ago [-]
> The US isn't expanding fossil fuel extraction, its quite the opposite.
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.
> 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.
foota 13 hours ago [-]
The quote you pulled for China is conveniently 3 years old and missing the global context that it was in response to supply issues with other fossil fuels, not a reflection in meeting demand.
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.
netsharc 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
"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...
Muromec 13 hours ago [-]
Time to prise unelected Ursula and carbon border adjustment I guess
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 is at a higher installed capacity by 6x from overall and 30% by per capita capacity. They're growing installed capacity from your source at 45% y/y as compared to 20% in the US.
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).
jimbokun 13 hours ago [-]
I know.
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.
Mawr 8 hours ago [-]
The sun doesn't shine half the time, wind is random, and long-term storage is a pipe dream.
We are doing a lot. Almost 90% of electricity capacity added last year was renewables. Nearly 1 in 3 cars sold are now EVs. The world is spending over $2 trillion every year on low‑carbon energy investment. Solar and wind have already avoided more than 2 gigatons of CO2 being added to the atmosphere. In the US, the IRA will drop emissions 40% to below 2005 levels.
What do you mean we are doing nothing?
rcpt 14 hours ago [-]
The federal government is paying energy companies to cancel plans to build wind farms:
Yes we're still building renewable energy, but goddamn is our government making it hard.
api 13 hours ago [-]
We are still building renewable energy even with a stupid government because it's now cheaper than fossil fuels in many markets.
ColdStream 12 hours ago [-]
We are doing loads, I just fear we cannot outrun Jevon's paradox. Until we start actively reducing emissions, we are just adding to the scale of consumption with no end in sight.
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.
thrance 13 hours ago [-]
That's added capacity. Fossil fuel use is at an all times high. Everything else is meaningless.
CGMthrowaway 1 hours ago [-]
Peak oil is not really a thing anymore, we are on to global mean surface temperatures now.
asdfman123 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
fulafel 9 hours ago [-]
The voters bear much of the blame too. The oil, gas and coal producing countries that still have democracies need to stop voting for short term profits and star voting for rapid rampdown of fossils production.
llm_nerd 15 hours ago [-]
This is the very definition of the Tragedy of the Commons. Without everyone committing to common limits, it is folly for anyone to.
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.
foota 13 hours ago [-]
Calling China a country that "bred like rabbits" over the past few decades is first of all offensive and second of all stupid for a country that has one of the biggest problems with their coming population pyramid and limited couples to a single child for most of the last 40 years.
llm_nerd 12 hours ago [-]
Bizarre comment. I think the best is when you declare it "stupid" because China got its population explosion under control...at 1.4 BILLION PEOPLE. And the problem is that today everyone always waves away China bringing enormous greenhouse gas burning capacity online by saying "oh well...per capita...", and it's incredibly weird.
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.
jpleyden98 11 hours ago [-]
Per capita is the only metric that matters as it attributes equal worth to each human life.
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
> 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.
estearum 11 hours ago [-]
Why does it matter how many people exist within a specific arbitrary line on a map?
If China or India split into 5 different political systems each, suddenly the calculus changes?
Talk about foolish.
gsky 4 hours ago [-]
They should better colonize other countries like Europeans did to reduce populations.
imperio59 12 hours ago [-]
China is the biggest problem. US Carbon emissions are going down, China's are exploding.
"Exploding" while the US still emits 50% more than China and has been emitting more than double and triple before recent years.
ColdStream 12 hours ago [-]
This was one of the big fears. That countries that had far more people than the western world would end up trying to chase that middle class lifestyle. And yet here we are.
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.
This just isn't true. Chinas emissions peaked back in 2024.
appointment 2 hours ago [-]
Although they may increase this year because the Chinese government has been encouraging the substitution of coal for gas & oil during the Iran crisis.
This has been aided by the fact that energy has been heavily politicized. Fossil fuels are 'murican and renewables are woke. It's horrifying.
virissimo 16 hours ago [-]
Does your hypothesis predict that Texas would be one of the most renewable-energy-heavy states in the U.S.?
bix6 16 hours ago [-]
That’s just economics. That doesn’t excuse what the current admin has done in terms of prioritization.
HeyLaughingBoy 16 hours ago [-]
That "just" is really doing a lot of heavy lifting.
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.
schubidubiduba 15 hours ago [-]
Economics only make the country work when societal costs are not externalised by those that cause them. Which they have been, always, by fossil fuel companies.
strictnein 14 hours ago [-]
Most of the benefits of cheap energy are also externalized. Why do we focus on one but not the other?
Daishiman 13 hours ago [-]
Because cheap fossil fuels's benefits will dissipate in two decades if we can move to green energy while the downsides project into whatever time remains of organized human civilization.
strictnein 13 hours ago [-]
The benefits of fossil fuels will also be felt for centuries as well. It's what moved us into the comfortable lives we all enjoy today and lifted billions out of poverty.
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.
Fricken 2 hours ago [-]
From the perspective of our evolutionary fitness function the most critical thing is to eliminate existential risk, and from the dawn of the industrial revolution to now all we've done is create them. Fossil Fuels allow us to keep 8 billion people alive at the same time temporarily, which is a reckless and irresponsible thing to do. If it isn't sustainable it's a joke.
Daishiman 10 hours ago [-]
This can't be denied but the reality is that the fossil fuel industry has done everything in its power to delay the transition to other forms of energy for the past 50 years with great success and to their benefit. What could have been a successful transition to nuclear and solar would have implied maybe up to 30% of the emissions we have created thus far, which would have drastically changed the panorama of climate change where we wouldn't be in the position where we are today.
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.
datsci_est_2015 15 hours ago [-]
Which makes it all the more remarkable given the century+ headstart fossil fuels had in entrenching itself in our political process and power structures.
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.
15 hours ago [-]
idontwantthis 15 hours ago [-]
You are ignoring the fact that the Trump administration has taken proactive steps to interfere with economics and prevent people and companies from building cheaper clean energy. They have tried to ban offshore windfarms and when that didn’t work they straight up paid Total $1billion to build fossil fuel plants instead. They spend millions to tear out already installed chargers from federal property. They illegally clawed back funding states and companies were already spending on clean energy. They eliminated tax benefits for electric cars, causing car companies to spend several billion dollars to completely reverse their production strategies.
agentultra 15 hours ago [-]
In an ideal world where the market is perfect, maybe.
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.
triceratops 11 hours ago [-]
The F150 Lightning would be Texas's best-selling vehicle if their hypothesis was untrue.
smt88 16 hours ago [-]
It’s not a hypothesis. It’s an observation of reality. The current administration canceled massive renewable projects and has incentivized reopening coal plants, subsidized fossil fuels, and opened government land to oil drilling.
maxdo 16 hours ago [-]
China is doing it the right way : use fossils but pouring that money into renewables. Use economic forces to cut the dependency . Everything else is just pipe dream building never happened utopian communism 2.0 .
BarnabyQJones 16 hours ago [-]
How many degrees hotter will it get as a consequence? How many windmills will it take to make the world a degree colder?
Serious question.
15 hours ago [-]
beej71 16 hours ago [-]
The almighty buck wins at the end of the day. But how long the day is, that's political.
noosphr 15 hours ago [-]
It's funny that environmentalists would rather see the world burn than solve all emissions problems with nuclear.
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.
vkou 15 hours ago [-]
> It's funny that environmentalists would rather see the world burn than solve all emissions problems with nuclear.
This criticism would hold more weight if environmentalists held a shred of power. They aren't the ones at the steering wheel.
noosphr 14 hours ago [-]
They had enough power to close down all the nuclear power plants in Germany.
jurip 8 hours ago [-]
Or, perhaps, them not being in power, it wasn't them who shut them down?
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.
Timon3 2 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, the famously environmentalist CDU. Obviously the center-right conservative party consists 100% of environmentalists, that's why they fight so hard to push back the ICE ban, prop up the oil & gas industry (just look up Katharina Reiche if you want to feel sick for a bit), and why they run smear campaigns against the Greens.
vkou 12 hours ago [-]
And despite that, this is what Germany achieved in the past 35 years.
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.
So are you saying Germany achieved a greater reduction due to shutting down nuclear than they would have otherwise? If not, your argument is moot.
kunai 11 hours ago [-]
Environmentalists have no power whatsoever and most of the people in the younger generation do not have the same antipathy towards nuclear power because we grew up in a post-SALT world and haven't lived through the spectre of reactors being used for nuclear proliferation and weapons production.
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.
b5n 15 hours ago [-]
Until the incoming administration declares that safely storing nuclear waste is woke and allows their close friends or maybe even their own companies to just dump it in a desert at a premium because the bible never mentions the associated hazards.
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.
...
noosphr 14 hours ago [-]
Still better than climate change. But thanks for making my point for me.
Mawr 7 hours ago [-]
> just dump it in a desert
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.
ColdStream 12 hours ago [-]
Hahaha... sigh... takes a swig!
switchbak 14 hours ago [-]
Man, the knee-jerk downvotes for this are awful.
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.
lbriner 17 hours ago [-]
When I was younger, I remember thinking, "a few degrees, what difference does that make?" Then when I grew older I realised that in Climate science a few degrees is the difference between survival and annihilation. A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world.
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!
larsfaye 17 hours ago [-]
>I am glad that I live far away from the effects
Are you not on planet earth? Unless you're on Mars, you're not far away from any effects.
ceejayoz 17 hours ago [-]
There are regions on the planet that will likely fare better than others, though.
consumer451 16 hours ago [-]
Maybe you will require less insulation reconfiguration than some other regions, but it will be hard to escape the effects of billions of people suffering.
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."
mullingitover 16 hours ago [-]
And we can tell ourselves that those regions which fare better will be left entirely alone. No one is going to, say, kill all the inhabitants and take the land from them.
hackable_sand 11 hours ago [-]
You can't own land, so that solves that issue.
AlecSchueler 5 hours ago [-]
The bad news is we're all reliant on global supply chains. And even ignoring the human side your ecosystem is probably reliant in some way on things like the migrations of birds and fish etc etc
geraneum 8 hours ago [-]
Do you happen to source everything you consume locally? From the phone and computer to building materials, clothing, food, healthcare equipment, etc.? If not, you’re in for a surprise when shit hits the fan.
Muromec 13 hours ago [-]
Luckily the residents of the regions that fare worse will not know what those other regions are.
bix6 16 hours ago [-]
Not for long.
grougnax 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
TiredOfLife 6 hours ago [-]
I live in a region where due to global warming our winters are colder than usual, also summers are colder (except for like a week where it was much hotter)
giarc 15 hours ago [-]
I fell in the same trap "So it'll be 25C in summer instead of 23C!". Sometimes it's small things that make you realize how small changes make big impacts. For example, I was watching a documentary about caribou in Northern Canada. A whole herd starved and died because of a slight warming during winter. Normally they dig through the snow to find food in the winter. But a slight warming meant the snow fell as freezing rain and left a thick layer of ice on top of the snow. The caribou couldn't dig through it and therefore couldn't eat and they died. A tiny change in temperature wiped out a huge colony.
wcfrobert 16 hours ago [-]
It's like interest rates. I used to think it's weird why people are so obsessed with a couple percentage points. But it's turns out those couple of percent could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars difference for a 30 year mortgage
AlecSchueler 5 hours ago [-]
> I am glad that I live far away from the effects
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.
ColdStream 12 hours ago [-]
Someone I know who worked in the climate sciences once put it so clearly to me.
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.
flakeoil 5 hours ago [-]
I think this talk about 1.5C or 2C degree increase is confusing and make the issue look less alarming.
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.
olmo23 3 hours ago [-]
Eurostar has upgraded the technical specifications for its new fleet of double-decker trains to operate in temperatures of up to 55°C (131°F).
yodsanklai 16 hours ago [-]
> A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world.
Ice age was only 6 degrees less than now, half of Europe was under ice
Windchaser 15 hours ago [-]
And when the Earth was 3C cooler, NYC was nearly under an ice sheet.
The current estimate is that we're heading for +3C warmer, which is gonna have some big impacts.
ColdStream 11 hours ago [-]
Not only are we heading there it might be a lot quicker than we anticipate. The warming is accelerating quickly as the CO2 is cumulative and the feed back loops get more intense.
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.
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.
Fricken 2 hours ago [-]
2-3°C of warming by 2050, 4-5°C by 2100. There's no rule saying it will stop there.
Sea water temperature here in Valencia was something crazy this year. I do not remember anything like this before.
cameldrv 15 hours ago [-]
Honestly I think American scientists not speaking in Fahrenheit units to an American audience is an incredibly simple and stupid, but very significant cause of the problem.
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.
N_Lens 6 hours ago [-]
I like the 30 year mortgage analogy, something people can connect with. 2% increase in mortgage rate likely means low 6 figures difference in total interest paid.
triska 17 hours ago [-]
> "a few degrees, what difference does that make?"
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.
ColdStream 11 hours ago [-]
I said this elsewhere. Land temperature raises quicker than oceans. So a 2c increase globally is actually a 4c over land. If we hit 3c, that will be 6c over land.
So with a fever, 37c jumped up to 43c goes from normal and stable to a very quick death.
Isaackoz 16 hours ago [-]
Think even bigger. 1 degrees inside your house? Not noticeable at all. But on a planet-wide scale? A 1 degree difference requires a LOT of energy.
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.
ColdStream 11 hours ago [-]
Funnily enough the water temperature is why many are so focused on the arctic sea ice. It is acting as a buffer that is keeping large parts of the ocean cooler beyond both reflecting sun light and also actively melting and releasing cool water into the ocean.
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.
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.
acuozzo 14 hours ago [-]
Just figure out how many 7-foot-tall persons you'd have to add to your country to increase the average height by 1 inch.
7 feet = 2.1336 meters
1 inch = 2.54 centimeters
charcircuit 16 hours ago [-]
The temperature of a fever is not measuring the temperature outside.
groby_b 16 hours ago [-]
This may be hard to understand, but that was an illustrative example on why sometimes a few degree difference have bigger absolute impact than you'd expect from the purely numerical value.
Nobody (well, almost nobody, I guess) considered it an explanation or model of climate change.
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fragmede 13 hours ago [-]
It's a marketing copy thing. If instead of 1 degree, they said 1.4 million TWh, which is the amount of energy needed to heat the Earth by 1 degree, it would hit better extreme number emotional buttons, but I'm not in charge of things.
stouset 13 hours ago [-]
Frankly I think expressing it in Celsius has made Americans think it’s less of a problem than it is. It took me awhile to realize that it’s basically 4°F, which is enormous.
cmrdporcupine 15 hours ago [-]
> 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!
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.
ColdStream 11 hours ago [-]
Cortisol is the hormone that creates tight social bonds. It is what make you love your kids so much. So the secret to a loving and kind society is to just pour this stuff in the drinking water supply, right?
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.
Otterly99 1 hours ago [-]
You are mixing two hormones effect together.
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).
sph 5 hours ago [-]
s/cortisol/oxytocin/g
Cortisol is the stress hormone. It doesn’t build strong social bonds.
TacticalCoder 12 hours ago [-]
> Plus watching the Children of Men style xenophobia and callous disregard for climate refugees set in all over the world.
There are no climate refugees... Yet.
toomuchtodo 17 hours ago [-]
“Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it.”
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.
(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)
abdullahkhalids 15 hours ago [-]
Almost no one has the capability to intuitively understand cascading failure modes in complex systems. Especially, those with non-linear or flip-flop behaviour. It takes a lot of education to understand very particular types of complex systems, and then more effort to generalize those lessons to other types of systems.
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.
Forgeties79 17 hours ago [-]
Even the US military treats climate change as not only real but as a destabilizing threat.
What other endorsement could one possibly need?
_djo_ 1 hours ago [-]
It used to. The deeply ideological current administration has decreed that it may no longer do so, and must instead pretend that climate change doesn't exist. [0][1]
The US Military hit it right on the head. Climate change is a risk multiplier. It takes already potentially big issues and makes them so much worse.
lbriner 16 hours ago [-]
"Yeah but they would say that, they are part of the system"
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.
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ColdStream 11 hours ago [-]
The future because of resource decline per capita and climate blow back, I suspect the future for many in the west will merely look like a rising tide of poverty.
jimt1234 17 hours ago [-]
This is exactly what I hear from my MAGA relatives: Why should I care if the ocean rises a few inches? I don't own beachfront property in Florida.
shoobiedoo 16 hours ago [-]
Well, at least they are honest about their stupidity. I live in Japan and am constantly shocked how many raised SUVs with the oversized max-grip tires in cities. Japan used to be a "doing it right" country in terms of not going overboard with waste. If you asked them why, they would probably say "it's cool!".
Turns out humans will always choose status symbols and vanity over facts. Oh well
horacemorace 16 hours ago [-]
Humans simply choose whatever is comfortable and conforming. If their tribal mantra is solar panels, they’ll do that just like they’ll do anything else.
HeyLaughingBoy 16 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry, but why is this a surprise?
shoobiedoo 16 hours ago [-]
Besides my saying that it used to be contrary to Japanese cultural expectations (もったいない)?
mikestew 15 hours ago [-]
You’re assuming they bothered to read your comment before jumping to “why u surprised, bro? Derp, derp!”
From what we've seen, so far the (not projected to be underwater) coastal areas might be the areas spared in this scenario too, because being by the water still moderates temperature swings.
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.
ElProlactin 17 hours ago [-]
Your relatives clearly aren't MAGA if they're not concerned about what rising sea levels will do to Mar-a-Lago.
Terr_ 16 hours ago [-]
Careful, that's a pitfall there if we assume MAGA words reflect an internal belief system.
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.
ColdStream 11 hours ago [-]
You know we might just be seeing the starting seed of the future legend of the Merica Atlantis.
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. ;)
twothreeone 16 hours ago [-]
I mean they're right, rising oceans will be a drop in the bucket for the majority of us. Unless we act together, human civilization will end through the combination of breakdown of global trade, mass migration due to heat and resource wars, and collapse of our food chain. Ocean levels are just one of the side effects that goes along with rising global temperatures.
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.
> Of course MAGA people will probably only notice once the shelves aren't being restocked.
And then they'll blame Obama.
jibcage 16 hours ago [-]
US beef production is actually slightly higher than 30 years ago. What has fallen is the cattle headcount (now the smallest since 1951) but heavier animals have kept total output up. The recent herd shrinkage owes more to drought economics and the normal boom and bust cycle of ranching than to cattle becoming unraisable.
twothreeone 15 hours ago [-]
Right, exactly that was what I meant. Thanks for clarifying. I remember being surprised by this when I heard it on NPR a few weeks ago.
asphodele 16 hours ago [-]
With less ice around than there used to be, the same incident energy can do a lot more ocean heating. It takes 80 calories to convert 1 gram of ice at 0C to 1 gram of water at 0C. Once the ice is melted, a further 80 calories can raise the temperature of the gram of water at 0C to 80C
ColdStream 11 hours ago [-]
Yep, once you learn about Latent temperature fusion, ones view on these things change drastically.
It also explains why boiling water doesn't spontaneously just explode into vapor once it hits that temperature
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.
0cf8612b2e1e 11 hours ago [-]
Solar + wind were 99% of new generation capacity last year. Fossil fuel usage dropped for one of the first times ever. Renewables generated more than coal.
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.
apothegm 53 seconds ago [-]
[delayed]
thelastgallon 8 hours ago [-]
That 99% may be just Australia and not the entire world? There seems to be a ton of new coal and gas plants still coming online, 95% of them in China and India. 100 GW of new coal plants and 100 GW of gas. There are probably ~1000 gas plants in the pipeline just in US for data centers. And a ton more onsite gas turbines, like Musks Colossus DC, 1GW of compute powered by gas turbines.
> 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
0cf8612b2e1e 7 hours ago [-]
Even the title and first line of that article supports my point, “New coal plants hit ‘10-year’ global high in 2025 – but power output still fell”.
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:
..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%).
Also, a whole 200GW new coal+gas capacity in the pipeline! OMG! In 2025, the world installed 647GW of solar capacity, generating 2778 TWh.
Guys, stop trying to solve climate change. You can't solve "wanting the wrong thing".
toasty228 4 hours ago [-]
> With the growth in solar, it is easy to think that we can solve it,
90% of things you can buy/use would not exist without fossil fuels, including food, medicine, clothes, roads, tires, electronics, solar panels, windmills, etc.
deadbunny 4 hours ago [-]
Sounds super valuable, we should probably stop setting a finite resource on fire.
jgord 15 hours ago [-]
Recent studies estimate climate warming is happening faster than it was, ballpark +0.3C per decade.
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.
Valakas_ 1 hours ago [-]
But in 50 years we'll defo have technology to remove that CO2.
convolvatron 15 hours ago [-]
does it stop? the more co2 the more heat is retained. so the relation between co2 and temperature is an integral over time. were we suddenly to stop burning things how far does it go up before infrared emissions equilibrate with the larger thermal flux? that and the lower albedo and other knockoff effects may continue to make things worse even if we were to stop.
frozenwind 22 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps there are other mechanisms at play here? What about the AMOC collapse. IF too much heat disrupts some weather patterns which are heating the northenr emisphere, that would mean an increase in the ice cover again and therefore more heat reflection again.
jgord 14 hours ago [-]
yeah, Id actually like to see a reasonable prediction of the trajectory, factoring in recent few years data [ faster warming, current emissions, cleaner air / reduced aerosols and issues like those you mention such as equilibration and ocean heat buffering ]
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.
cb321 16 hours ago [-]
The "scatter line plot" in TFA is all same shade of red on white with no year labels. This seems like a missed visualization opportunity. Using some kind of color scheme/gradient to represent the 1979-2026 years in a way that can show long-term "trend". (A 50 frame movie at, say, 5 fps with same axes or maybe "all years" as faded background as the current year pops around in bold is another possibility, but a scientific paper format doesn't let people do .mp4s.) I know I've seen multi-colored "scatter lines" in IPCC reports. Seemed worth asking rather than doing it myself.
black_puppydog 16 hours ago [-]
Yeah, kinda like the spirals used for (air?) temperature:
There are still ~4 months till peak El Niño, and then some months to spread effects.
WithinReason 16 hours ago [-]
> ... so far
That's what "on record" means
gmuslera 15 hours ago [-]
Is not the same a record that may be broken in the next 100 years than one that will be broken most days till end of year. One is an event, the other is a running process with no clear end, besides that won’t be the current point.
willmeyers 17 hours ago [-]
This El Niño is going to be interesting come Christmas time. Lot's of weather and climate unpredictability coming to a region near you!
defgeneric 8 hours ago [-]
Incidentally, the term El Niño came from Christmas time (the waters warm around Christmas time, or when the baby boy comes).
ColdStream 11 hours ago [-]
A preview of 2035.
didgetmaster 16 hours ago [-]
I hope so! The area I live in has been experiencing drought and everyone seems to be predicting a wet period coming from this.
Personally, I don't put much faith in weather predictions that are more than a week away.
cogman10 15 hours ago [-]
El nino predictions are pretty spot on. They won't be able to tell you "There will be a storm on the 30th" but they will be able to tell you that you should expect flash floods next year.
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.
kbrisso 15 hours ago [-]
Predicting El Niño vs. La Niña vs. neutral: relatively reliable.
Predicting how strong the El Niño will be: harder.
Predicting exactly what it will do to rainfall, temperatures, storms, or snowfall: substantially less reliable.
didgetmaster 14 hours ago [-]
And yet people will put forth dire predictions (drought, flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, etc.) every chance they get. No wonder so many people think it is all a hoax.
perrygeo 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, scientists have put forth dire predictions of extreme weather. Here's the thhing though - we actually see measurable increases in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events. They put forth dire predictions.. and they are absolutely correct. It's right there in the observational record.
zero-sharp 17 hours ago [-]
I remember watching a documentary which talked about feedback loops in the climate. It might have been in the context of history. If the ocean warms up enough, it causes the CO2 in the ocean itself (either in the deposits or the gas saturated in the water) to get released into the atmosphere. Maybe I'm not using the right technical words, but there is a certain amount of CO2 that sits within the ocean that is separate from the atmosphere. In any case, after a certain point it becomes a feedback loop: warmer climate -> more CO2 joins the atmosphere -> warmer climate.
ColdStream 11 hours ago [-]
We don't even need the oceans temperature to rise, as the arctic tundra permafrost melts the amount of plant material ready to release its CO2 is massive. Some estimate think it would double the amount of our total emissions if all of it defrosts.
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
Warmer water holds less dissolved gases of all kinds, including CO2. You can see this yourself by heating water in your kitchen. Well below the boiling point, you can observe tiny bubbles, which are composed of nitrogen and oxygen dissolved in the water coming out of solution. The oceans will eventually become carbon sources, not carbon sinks, if they warm enough, but that's not projected to happen this century.
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.
sl-1 3 hours ago [-]
And one scary observation related to this is that warm water will also hold less oxygen for marine life, literally throttling that part of our life-support.
Yes I think so too. It wasn't CO2, but methane in the form of methane hydrate.
julienchastang 15 hours ago [-]
Does anybody else feel like this is the answer to the Fermi paradox? Advanced civilizations simply exploit, consume, and pollute their way of existence.
sajithdilshan 3 hours ago [-]
Most probably it's because the universe is vast and as humans we cannot comprehend how far the stars are. No matter how advanced an alien civilization is, physics prohibits objects with mass travelling faster than light and that's tru for any civilization.
PowerElectronix 3 hours ago [-]
Nah, they can't go multiplanetary because faster than rocket powered travel in space must be impossible and they die of radiation during the journey.
Planetary runaway heating can be worked with with underground cities.
deepfriedchokes 15 hours ago [-]
As they say, “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Perhaps humanity shouldn’t have absolute power over the planet. Perhaps we should check our own power to save ourselves. We’ve done it with government, to insure stability and longevity, why not the planet?
ColdStream 10 hours ago [-]
Love the planet as you love your self. Just be.
Easy to say, difficult to do.
slidehero 12 hours ago [-]
>why not the planet?
greed
cogman10 14 hours ago [-]
Honestly, I think an easier answer is that intelligent life is simply very rare and interstellar travel is very hard. We may be the only intelligent life within our galaxy. Or perhaps just 1 in 100. In either case, it'd take a LONG time before we ever found or met another civilization.
jesse_dot_id 15 hours ago [-]
It's as easy of an answer to accept as any other hypothesis. I think we're all living within a simulation to create, solve, and document as many problems as we can with the technologies our specific environment allows us to develop; that our simulation is air-gapped away from the others performing the same work so as to not contaminate the data.
ColdStream 10 hours ago [-]
It has been brought up before and it seems plausible. There is no guarantee that we have to leave the planet in any meaningful way or even survive for that matter.
swingboy 15 hours ago [-]
14 billion years and not a single piece of evidence of a prior civilization.
toasty228 4 hours ago [-]
The universe is vast, both in space and time. You would not detect anything from a past civilization that died a few millions of years ago in the closest solar system, which is really not that far in either time nor space
swingboy 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
2OEH8eoCRo0 14 hours ago [-]
What if we found ourselves on a planet that didn't have fossil fuels?
ColdStream 10 hours ago [-]
Then there is a good chance we would never have moved up to a technological state that allowed us to leave the planet. We probably wouldn't also be facing blow back from digging up and burning the planets solar battery.
PowerElectronix 3 hours ago [-]
We'd go mass extinction and be the fossil fuels for the next intelligent species that appears.
Ancalagon 15 hours ago [-]
Promoting sociopathy via a capitalist hierarchy that ruin the planet for their own selfish gain feels like a very primate thing to do. I bet there would be many other forms of communal, generous intelligent civilizations with longer-term thinking capability, especially if they lived longer than ~75 years on average. So consider my take on this statement inconclusive.
yboris 17 hours ago [-]
My favorite source of graphs about this ongoing catastrophe: https://x.com/EliotJacobson - retired professor of mathematics and computer science
Posting them on x.com and his Substack is all AI generated hero images so one wonders if he's more interested in the line going up for engagement purposes.
We knew about this all since the 1980's. Carl Sagan testified before congress in 1985 [1]. That's over 40 years ago.
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, ...
The weather this year up in Canada here has been extremely odd. Constantly. You can tell something is off.
Noaidi 16 hours ago [-]
I live in a minivan and drive around the United States every year. I started noticing it two years ago, but last year was really difficult for me to go to the usual places I went. I’m up in the Pacific Northwest right now and I’m not even planning where I’m gonna go this year because I’m definitely gonna just be following the weather.
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.
johnnyApplePRNG 14 hours ago [-]
That's crazy! Are you enjoying the van life? Always dreamed of doing it myself.
contingencies 15 hours ago [-]
In Sydney it has been raining almost non stop for a year. Really odd. Garden loves it, I'm planting non-endemic native (primarily tropical) species from further north along the coast. I expect a snap-back to extreme drought during this or the subsequent summer. But come further warming, we'll have a jungle.
BLKNSLVR 13 hours ago [-]
I get the feeling the coming summer is going to be brutal.
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.
SA (still). Not sure if I am who you think I am...
Wermspowke?
ColdStream 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah, in Melbourne here. It feels like Winter never really got going. Yeah, there is some rain and there have been a hand full of cold mornings at best. I do wonder how this summer is going to go, it is going to hit right at the peak of El Nino and they are anticipating some very dry conditions.
Worrying news, but honestly not surprising anymore. What's interesting is that El Niño hasn't even peaked yet, if it gets as strong as they're predicting 2027 is gonna be even hotter.
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...
cogman10 15 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that 2027 is when all the energy stored in the ocean will ultimately be released in the form of massive storms. IDK if it'll be hotter or not, but it's predicted to be pretty insane, particularly throughout the southern US.
aliasxneo 15 hours ago [-]
I try to do my part to the best of my ability. But obviously it's only a droplet in the ocean (hah). But if I'm being honest, what scares me far more than this is the capability of humans to "force" a solution on the world.
jeroenhd 3 hours ago [-]
We fixed the hole in the ozone layer. All the countries came together, worked together, and fixed the problem threatening to doom us all with skin cancer and worse. Humanity can come together.
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.
epolanski 13 hours ago [-]
If one would have to do the best of its ability then one should adapt very quickly its consumption patterns (stop buying so many things, get minimalist), food patterns (food is likely the per-capita biggest environmental destroyer, eating fish and beef is very taxing on the planet e.g.), travel patterns (no airplanes, use bikes/feet/public transports, cars as last resort).
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.
ColdStream 10 hours ago [-]
Pretty much this.
While each action is tiny, collectively they add up.
The rain drop doesn't blame itself for the flood.
zmmmmm 15 hours ago [-]
The big question / risk is whether there are unknown tipping points where things run away. Many are talked about - ice melting, reducing reflectivity, more heating causes more heating etc. But some fraction of these are probably unknowable.
elorant 17 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile, canned sardines went 20% up in the last month in Greece. And that's while we have plenty of local production. I can't imagine what it would be in countries where they import everything. Give it a few years and all fish food prices could go up substantially.
stevenwoo 16 hours ago [-]
It hasn’t gone up yet here in California but I see from the boxes I usually eat that these are sourced from Vietnam (in spite of Monterrey being a short trip away) so these could come from China (one of the usual tariff bypass mechanisms) and hence anywhere in the world (ghost fleets) and possibly not reflect real world ecosystem pressure until multiple fishery collapse.
ColdStream 10 hours ago [-]
Multiple fishery collapses are probably incoming in the next decade or so. For as much as we have and do catch from the ocean, it is as a whole a fairly nutrient bare place by comparison to the land. Its scale and exploitation beyond recovery has allowed it to look far more prosperous than it really is.
asdfman123 14 hours ago [-]
The good news for gulf coast residents is El Nino wind shear will do a lot to disrupt hurricane formation this year.
The bad news is that if it's hot again next year, La Nina will actually help hurricanes form.
ang_cire 17 hours ago [-]
As someone who works in risk management, I think I have a hard time understanding how anyone can be so blase about climate change.
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.
nehal3m 17 hours ago [-]
I do care. I see a species ending disaster hanging over the future. I recycle, I have solar panels, a heat pump, an EV (that I leave on my driveway whenever my bicycle will do the job). But the planet is being ruined by greed on an unfathomable scale and aside from doing what I can and voting for parties that see the problem, I feel like there’s not a god damn thing I can do about it.
forinti 15 hours ago [-]
The UN sustainability index once listed Cuba as the only sustainable economy. Another year it was Ecuador. Cuba might be eligible again because of the embargo. My point is that you can't convince folks in rich countries to be truly sustainable and you can't convince the rest to not aim for a higher standard of living. Putin said something like that and he was right.
And we keep coming up with ideas to make it worse: blockchain and now AI.
ColdStream 10 hours ago [-]
Bingo. A lot of what passes for solutions are fairly anemic. We will swap out any technology for a similar less intensive alternative but the instant we have to actively change our lifestyle it is largely ignored.
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.
stevenwoo 16 hours ago [-]
I think if you should be able to at least have the peace of mind that you did all you could (within reason, short of pulling a Ted Kaczynski or his modern equivalent Luigi Mangione). Maybe it’s inevitable - history shows tons of species go extinct and maybe unbridled capitalism is how we go, maybe seven million years give or take is all humans will have. Maybe I absorbed too much of Meditations by Aurelius.
keybored 16 hours ago [-]
This consumer/suburbia-level checklist of individual eco merit is more of a scapegoating ritual than something that makes a difference. This is not a job for solar panel rebates. It’s more of a job for things like Extinction Rebellion; political demonstrations and activism that forces the issue. Which in turn (if successful) will lead to real organized work towards and ecological future. One where we are chipping in together rather than hunking down in our single-home bunkers with our plastic recycling and electric bicycles.
Although things like adoption of EVs does probably have a great positive impact on the local pollution levels.
nehal3m 16 hours ago [-]
I agree, you can’t shop your way out of political issues and joining a polity is probably the best thing you can do. Still, having to make a choice I’d opt for buying the more sustainable option.
epolanski 13 hours ago [-]
What about food and overall consumption?
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.
xdc0 15 hours ago [-]
These are the reasons I can think of:
- 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.
ColdStream 10 hours ago [-]
The term 'Hyperobject' summarized it perfectly. Essentially the problem operates at such a large scale and requires such a level of systemic thinking that it becomes the scope of most people. Not because they are stupid but simply because just a side effect of it being such a large subject.
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.
wing-_-nuts 16 hours ago [-]
>This is literally going to kill millions.
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.
Yizahi 16 hours ago [-]
There is a tiny problem with that hypothesis - there are I think at most 3 potentially viable climate reversal options - DAC, sun shield and aerosol injection in the atmosphere. All 3 options are likely cost through the nose and will require sums and efforts on a global scale. Any single country attempting them on its own, would require to set aside double digit amounts of its GDP for decades, effectively crippling itself economically, while the world passes them by. And all option would require decades, if not centuries of constant work because we don't have any meaningful net negative DAC tech, we don't have any sun shield expertise outside of the JWST and a few small science experiments, and we don't have the required planes to seed atmosphere and neither they are net negative yet. By we I mean both whole globe or any single country.
majormajor 15 hours ago [-]
Game of chicken. Wait as long as you can because as it starts to get worse for everyone, maybe more and more countries will join in on the efforts.
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!)
Yizahi 4 hours ago [-]
> Set aside 30% of that
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 millions it will kill first won't be among the overconsumers who are driving climate change.
ygjb 17 hours ago [-]
Millions? I don't usually meet many optimistic people in risk management :(
sajithdilshan 16 hours ago [-]
> This is literally going to kill millions.
Unfortunately, given current trajectory that's how the mother nature is going to bring back balance. I wouldn't be surprised even billions die.
osigurdson 16 hours ago [-]
Do you have any credible source indicating that "billions will die"?
sajithdilshan 15 hours ago [-]
what I stated was "I wouldn't be surprised even billions die.", that implies that it's my understanding and opinion and I do not need to link a source for my own opinion.
osigurdson 15 hours ago [-]
If I stated that "I think everything will be completely fine", I would expect people to challenge me on that to provide some kind of evidence. Hyperbolic statements on both sides of the argument are not constructive.
thunderfork 15 hours ago [-]
You've mistaken a statement for an argument
ColdStream 10 hours ago [-]
Yep, get in balance with nature or it will do it for you. And you don't want that.
criddell 16 hours ago [-]
> This is literally going to kill millions.
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.
reverius42 16 hours ago [-]
Covid killed over a million Americans and still half the population thinks the vaccine was worse than the disease.
Good read. I do think it's giving too much credit to our evolutionary instincts, though, and not enough to personal and political choices.
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.
jazzpush2 14 hours ago [-]
This was a fun, light read, but nowhere near 'best', hardly more than a fun opinion piece, and even then it completely ignored relevant topics (class inequality at foot, performative climate action [taylor swift], disparate impacts).
zem 14 hours ago [-]
it's the clearest layman-accessible overview of all the issues at play that I've seen. if you know a better one feel free to recommend it.
chasd00 17 hours ago [-]
so I don't want to ignore it nor the evidence, now what?
ang_cire 17 hours ago [-]
So now use whatever political power you have to push for changes to mitigate, respond, or prevent as much of it as possible?
HDBaseT 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
16 hours ago [-]
locallost 16 hours ago [-]
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?
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.
ColdStream 10 hours ago [-]
> My point is: my carbon footprint is pretty low, and I try to be mindful about not wasting resources.
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.
locallost 6 hours ago [-]
That was exactly my point.
keybored 16 hours ago [-]
> Is your carbon footprint below what is sustainable?
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.
aqfamnzc 14 hours ago [-]
I don't think GP is trying to say they're so much better than the rest. Their point is that the majority of earth-dwellers, including their own relatively climate-conscious lifestyle, are not (and are not willing to) do nearly enough to meaningfully affect the situation.
locallost 13 hours ago [-]
Honestly the only thing I see here that is a waste of time is trying to communicate with people that don't read and stick to canned tired responses they iterate on like an LLM.
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?
smcg 17 hours ago [-]
they don't care who lives or dies. they probably think it only affects "bad" people.
kypro 15 hours ago [-]
I'm very concerned personally, but I find it easy to inhabit many minds on this topic...
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.
Imustaskforhelp 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
dripdry45 16 hours ago [-]
The thought and consideration is worth the time, I think.
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
livinglist 16 hours ago [-]
I scuba dive in Monterey, CA every other weekend, and just came back from a liveaboard in Galapagos in May. The water is much warmer this year, and it is very noticeable because usually in Galapagos, divers are expected to wear 8mm wetsuit or dry suit to be comfortable in the water, but this year even a 5mm made me feel too warm. In Monterey, water temp used to be around 11-13°C but this year it’s easily above 16°C, divers also reported more sightings of spiny lobsters which were rare in Monterey because water was too cold for them.
ricardobayes 2 hours ago [-]
This seems to be directly linked to the lowered maritime shipping emissions, especially sulphur aerosols.
Perhaps we should stop doing ad-hoc interventions until we can figure out a good, global path to tackle this challenge.
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.
An excellent reminder Jancovici makes in his climate presentations, is that the difference between 1950 climate and the last Ice Age is only 4 to 5°C. Obviously, 8 billion humans wouldn't be able to live in the last Ice Age.
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.
anonu 14 hours ago [-]
Lets hope that those touting a "reversion to the mean" are right.
mempko 12 hours ago [-]
they are not
smetannik 15 hours ago [-]
Next year will be a new record
Varelion 17 hours ago [-]
Thank God we have a new technology that is aggressively using water, power, and making the world increasingly hotter.
0xy 11 hours ago [-]
It is not aggressively using water. That figure was a lie produced by a likely CCP spy, and later retracted ("oops!"). [1]
I know. Banning internal combustion engines is a good first step.
Zambyte 15 hours ago [-]
Seriously. People fuss over LLM energy consumption, but I did the math on my rig, and if I were to use my machine at full tilt for all of my waking hours, I would use roughly 1/10th the amount of energy the average American uses driving.
By the way, I highly recommend the Priority 600 :-)
infinitezest 14 hours ago [-]
I think OP is talking about datacenters which likely use a little more power than your home rig.
Zambyte 10 hours ago [-]
And I use SOTA models that are hosted on hardware I don't have access to a handful of times a month at this point, and most of the people I talk to regarding LLM usage are either in the same boat, or are asking about hosting things themselves. The diminishing returns for using the best of the best models just aren't worth it for most things anymore.
the_sleaze_ 11 hours ago [-]
Extrapolate
belorn 13 hours ago [-]
I have said multiple times that we should ban combustion engines in the energy grid. Sadly there isn't a single party that support such action here in Sweden, and the largest supporter of thermal power plants are the green party who see it as essential to enable renewable energy (is written as such in their party platform, website, and argued in public debates).
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.
HDBaseT 13 hours ago [-]
I will kill myself the day I can no longer drive an internal combustion engine.
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.
thelastgallon 10 hours ago [-]
The things that will work, but can't be done: Walk/bike instead of vehicles, no crypto and AI (tremendous hype and speculators and grifters), Lower population (religions are opposed to it), degrowth (nobody wants to live a relatively substandard life, all the stuff is for status signaling), fly less, don't eat as much beef, etc. Degrowth is the best way, but nobody can walk entire population down that path. It has to be everyone or no one will do it because its all comparison based living.
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.
jauntywundrkind 16 hours ago [-]
Not adding anything super major here, but to repeat the broadcast: this has such a broad danger to it, is a core driver of ocean acidification (along with the ambient CO2 the ocean sinks up), by reducing the oxygen carrying capacity of water.
> 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.
I always will think of how everyone laughed at Bernie Sanders' reply in ~2016 to "What is the greatest threat to national security" and he replied "Climate change".
It's going to get ugly when large swaths of the human population struggles to get food & clean water.
bamboozled 14 hours ago [-]
Last night I had insomnia due to stress, and I was compulsively scrolling social media. The comments section of most videos just made me realize how actually fucked we are.
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.
teloli 5 hours ago [-]
Quitting social media is probably one of the best things you could do to bring stress levels back to normal!
bamboozled 54 minutes ago [-]
It was mostly Youtube but yes, it's social media, I just couldn't imagine quitting YT!
jesse_dot_id 15 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, nothing is really going to happen to mitigate this until it starts fucking up things (literal things, property, etc) for the richest people. Then, miraculously, all of our scientific focuses will be realigned to find solutions.
josefritzishere 13 hours ago [-]
That sounds bad.
jambalaya8 13 hours ago [-]
Of all of the side effects, the top-down worst problem will be the effects on phytoplanktons, and how that will affect the marine, and thus terrestrial, food chain.
bpavuk 15 hours ago [-]
okay, now we are boiling the ocean. literally.
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.
xyst 14 hours ago [-]
humanity is quite literally cooking.
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.
kylehotchkiss 14 hours ago [-]
I often think of how much of government lethargy to climate change is because of miserable marketing like Greta thunburg yelling at a bunch of old EU bureaucrats or teenagers throwing paint at art or glueing themselves to highways.
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
grougnax 2 hours ago [-]
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vee-kay 2 hours ago [-]
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lanon123 15 hours ago [-]
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lanon123 15 hours ago [-]
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s5300 15 hours ago [-]
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npc36586 14 hours ago [-]
Humanity has only a few weeks left. Because some awful people decided to vote for Trump.
karol 17 hours ago [-]
OMG, that's like 200 years of 4.5bn?
jgord 15 hours ago [-]
to be fair.. almost all of human civilization happened over the last ~10k years, the Holocene, during which the climate was unusually stable.
Its reasonable to question whether our agriculture at scale is adaptable to such sudden climate change.
hydrolox 15 hours ago [-]
it's not just reasonable to question, it's all but obvious and anyone who comes up with a retort like "what about millions/billions of years before civilization" is being, at best, insincere
lolive 14 hours ago [-]
Cons: So long polar bears [and decent weather]
Pros: my next iPhone will travel faster from China to Europe.
#alwaysLookAtTheBrightSideOfLife
floro 15 hours ago [-]
The biggest lie we're being told in the west is that we have a hand in climate change. China produces 60% of global Co2. When you look at the graph, Europe isn't even visible.
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.
Windchaser 15 hours ago [-]
> The biggest lie we're being told in the west is that we have a hand in climate change.
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.
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!
floro 7 hours ago [-]
>has played
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.
pioyi 6 hours ago [-]
China is below the US and Russia per capita. You can't compare a country with 1.4 billion people to the US.
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.
contingencies 15 hours ago [-]
Also, to be more holistic in evaluating things through this icky nationalist lens, China has been a globally significant contributor to alternate fuels including solar and micro-hydro, plus the transition to EVs notably including EV buses (now becoming globally popular) and high speed rail.
0xy 11 hours ago [-]
96.6% of new energy capacity in the US came from green sources from 2024 to 2026 (nuclear, batteries, wind, hydro, solar). In China, in that time period, they built 52 brand new coal plants.
Dumblydorr 15 hours ago [-]
Per capita emissions are way higher in the USA. It’d make a much bigger dent if Americans changed their ways than citizens of developing nations.
Quarrelsome 12 hours ago [-]
go to shop, notice that much food has been flown in from the four corners of the earth just to satisfy you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
centralisation makes centralised opporunity for change. You have all the power, and also all the responsibility.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
EU is the region with the highest acceleration of most climate parameters
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49427651
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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%.
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.
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").
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-...
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.
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?
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).
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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...
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...
Nuclear, batteries, solar, wind, hydro.
You know people can just look this stuff up right?
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.
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.
Edit: typo, changed is to isn’t
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
?
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.
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.
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).
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".
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.
Sorry that sounds like, if you get murdered than better here because the knives are cleaner.
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.
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.
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.
There are other EV manufacturers. Boycotting Tesla != buying ICE vehicles. That’s a bad faith framing.
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.
Your sacred market has been killing us all and will continue to keep killing us all if it makes a few pennies.
The markets have failed everybody, and politicians who believed in the markets were wrong, and should be in jail now for criminal negligence.
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.
That is such an understatement
Do you mean the war with Iran that released in the initial weeks over 5 million metric tons of CO₂?
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
We have government agents frequenting this website to sew anti-US sentiment? Really?
Could you identify some of them? Or at least one or two of the obvious ones?
But to be serious, there's endless evidence that it's going on, and if you don't believe it I'm not the one with my head in the sand. (That's a common English idiom meaning "not paying attention," for the foreign state actors out there.)
It's even worse than "not paying attention". It's knowing the truth of the situation and actively avoiding acknowledging it to yourself or anyone else. Hiding your head in the sand and shouting "It's not really happening, it's not really happening!" despite knowing that it is indeed happening.
We – of course – care about manipulation on HN; the only reason this is a site people come to for discussing so many different important topics is that so much effort has gone into ensuring integrity in the content that can be read here. It's just not that easy to engage in astroturfing, shilling, brigading, etc without setting off alarms either in the software or in the many HN users who have finely honed bullshit detectors, because organized, manipulative participation is so clearly different from earnest participation.
[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.
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"...
0.5% is about the entire energy consumption of two Swedens or half a Thailand.
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.
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?
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
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.
that would be 0.3% of global energy use
They also represent investment in economic growth that doesn't come from resource extraction or travel or manufacturing.
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.
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
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.
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...
What is Europe's excuse for having such low wages and output despite having more people?
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).
To say they’re winning the race implies there even is a race.
It’s a super car vs a snail.
[1] https://etangonam.com/?p=805
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.
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.
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.
"Exploding" while the US still emits 50% more than China and has been emitting more than double and triple before recent years.
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.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Are you not on planet earth? Unless you're on Mars, you're not far away from any effects.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...
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.
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.
So with a fever, 37c jumped up to 43c goes from normal and stable to a very quick death.
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.
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.
7 feet = 2.1336 meters 1 inch = 2.54 centimeters
Nobody (well, almost nobody, I guess) considered it an explanation or model of climate change.
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.
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.
There are no climate refugees... Yet.
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?
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/14/pentagon...
[1] https://www.eenews.net/articles/pentagon-starts-purging-clim...
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.
Turns out humans will always choose status symbols and vanity over facts. Oh well
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48223674
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.
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. ;)
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.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0906865106
And then they'll blame Obama.
It also explains why boiling water doesn't spontaneously just explode into vapor once it hits that temperature
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuAKnbIr6TE
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.
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
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:
Also, a whole 200GW new coal+gas capacity in the pipeline! OMG! In 2025, the world installed 647GW of solar capacity, generating 2778 TWh.https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...
90% of things you can buy/use would not exist without fossil fuels, including food, medicine, clothes, roads, tires, electronics, solar panels, windmills, etc.
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.
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.
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5190/
There are still ~4 months till peak El Niño, and then some months to spread effects.
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.
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.
Planetary runaway heating can be worked with with underground cities.
Easy to say, difficult to do.
greed
Example: https://x.com/EliotJacobson/status/2091911667903041543
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, ...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI
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.
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.
Wermspowke?
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...
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.
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.
The bad news is that if it's hot again next year, La Nina will actually help hurricanes form.
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.
And we keep coming up with ideas to make it worse: blockchain and now AI.
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.
Although things like adoption of EVs does probably have a great positive impact on the local pollution levels.
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.
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.
[0]: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/snowdrift-dilemma
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.
- 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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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)
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.
[1] https://x.com/tbpn/status/1990950527128252856
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.
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.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.