There is no "new normal", we are in a slope. As long as we emit CO2, the climate will get worse. Year after year. With effects like fires accelerating it, or the loss of the Amazon (it's pretty much lost already, isn't it?) that will just result in more CO2 being released.
We don't have to adapt to the situation as it is now, because it is pretty much the best scenario. We have to adapt to the fact that it will get worse, and worse, and worse. And save what we can. Worried about your country not dominating on the AI scene? Wait until your biggest worry is food.
Even if we stopped emissions today, Earth will keep warming up for a couple of decades. We’re not at equilibrium temperature for the current CO2 levels.
>. If there’s dust and haze it might be a respite, apart from famines due to poor harvests.
When the Canada haze hit here the temp dropped from "forecasted 90s" to "pleasant 70s" and not only were the temps lower but there was no direct sun beating down. Me and the boys were expecting some outdoor work we had planned to suck and take a long time. We ran through it in no time flat.
AFAIK, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo(sp?) made it quite a bit harder to build the case for warming. What about the effects of that big kaboom in the Pacific a year or two ago ?
One not very well known fact is that even if we stop emissions today, the elevated CO₂ levels will remain for many centuries.
They way I think/hope we can fix this is two parts:
1. The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale is to permanently sequester it underground. The oil/gas industry can cheaply deposit huge amounts of gas there. The unsolved problem is extracting enough CO₂ from the atmosphere at reasonable cost. People are working on that, but it will probably be decades before it's is approaching practicality.
Which is why we need to do this in the meantime:
2. Spray the stratosphere with SO₂. This reflects some some sunlight and cools the planet. It sounds scary, but is actually safe: https://makesunsets.com/pages/new-faq
> The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale [...] The unsolved problem is extracting
You answered it yourself: it's not possible to get rid of the excess CO2. Think about conservation of energy: we extracted energy by burning stuff and producing CO2. We cannot revert that with less energy than we extracted from doing it in the first place.
1. There is abundant energy on the earth 1kW per sq MTR from the sun.
2. The ocean absorbs a large portion of the CO2 emitted
3. Phytoplankton can eat carbon in the ocean and they use the sun's energy to do it... What they lack is iron.
I agree that it's not easy, but we could in theory use solar energy, which is abundant and cheap. I.e. We can use different energy than the one we got out of the fossil fuels we burned.
> I.e. We can use different energy than the one we got out of the fossil fuels we burned.
We're talking about using more energy than the one we got from the fossil fuels we burned, right? So that means that on top of replacing fossil fuels with renewables, we would need to more than double it in order to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
This, in itself, is impossible. Already we won't be able to replace fossil fuels entirely, we will just end up with less energy in total. We most certainly won't end up with twice as much.
And that's assuming that we could extract the CO2 from the atmosphere with close to the amount of energy we got by burning it in the first place. Which is wrong. CO2 in the atmosphere is actually very costly to extract in terms of energy.
It's not that it's not easy. It's practically impossible.
The total annual CO2 budget of the earth is tremendous; less than 5% of CO2 emissions each year into the atmosphere are from humans. Volcanism, photosynthesis, and other natural sources outweigh humans by far. In numbers, ballpark 730gigatons from natural sources and about 30gt from humans.
If you look at the amount the CO2 levels increase each year in the atmosphere, you'll find that they net increase by 16gt per year or so.
Implying that if we ceased all human CO2 emissions, the atmospheric levels would start recovering at around half the rate they're currently increasing.
This is an absurd statement. Lets use bank accounts instead of CO2 to point out the absurdity.
Imagine every year a company makes $730,000 in revenue but spends $730,000 on various expenses. Its bank balance doesnt change because the income and expenses cancel out.
Now suppose the company starts receiving an additional $30,000 every year while its expenses stay the same. At the end of each year, its bank balance increases by $30,000.
By your logic, someone could argue: "That extra $30,000 can't be responsible for the growing bank balance because it's less than 5% of the company's total annual cash flow of $760,000."
That's obviously nonsense. The bank balance grows *entirely because of the net imbalance*, not because the extra income is a large fraction of the gross cash flowing through the account.
The carbon cycle works the same way. Natural emissions and natural uptake are both enormous and are approximately in balance. That 730 gigatons of CO2 released by natural sources has a corresponding 730 gigatons of CO2 capture from natural sinks. Its human emissions of CO2 that are the extra deposit that creates an ongoing imbalance, and that's why atmospheric CO2 continues to rise.
Also photosynthesis is not a source of CO2, on the contrary it's one of, if not the biggest carbon sink, reclaiming a significant portion of that 730 gigatons of CO2 released by volcanos and other sources.
> The bank balance grows entirely because of the net imbalance
Yes, this is my whole point. You wrote a long condescending comment accusing me of being a climate denier that fully agrees with me.
My point is that the actual amount of atmospheric increase per year is less than the amount humans put into the atmosphere per year, so 1) obviously humans are responsible for CC, and 2) could stop it at any time by dropping emissions below the amount the atmospheric increase amount.
It's unclear which message you're trying to convey, but your math checks out.
The net CO2 impact of natural processes is -19Gt/yr. Humans add +37G/yr for a net +18Gt. If we stopped everything, you'd expect -19Gt/yr; however, natural sinks like the ocean will start off-gassing, cutting the improvement to about half.
Because of how long this switch will take, most IPCC options need 100 to 1000 Gt of net CO2 removal by the end of the century to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees.
Well I agree on that. And even if we cut them to zero, the temperatures will not go down. So the very best we can hope is to keep the temperatures at the current level, and that's assuming that we cut all our emissions.
And the fact remains that we would need unreasonable amounts of energy to extract CO2 from the atmosphere (it was suggested with solar panels and stuff).
I didn't know that if we completely cut emissions, then CO2 would go down (and temperature would not during our lifetime, but they would at least stop rising). But "humans extracting CO2 from the atmosphere to compensate for their emissions" is impossible for the reasons I mentioned.
Very napkin math shows that annual energy consumption from fossil fuels is 500 exajoules. Every day the earth receives 15,000 exajoules in solar energy.
So to cover double the energy consumption of fossil fuels with solar we need to cover 0.2% of the surface in solar. Compare to around 10% covered in farmland.
Again, very back of the envelope math, but in my opinion this does not seem impossible.
It is possible to get rid of excess CO2. Yes it goes against entropy, isn't very efficient and requires a ton of energy but we do have sources of tbe energy required in the form of the sun, nuclear, geothermal etc.
But that doesn't matter while we're still emitting.
> You answered it yourself: it's not possible to get rid of the excess CO2. Think about conservation of energy: we extracted energy by burning stuff and producing CO2.
You can use pyrolysis to reduce usage of energy. Instead of building ethanol using corn etc, some fast growing crop can be converted to biochar using pyrolysis. And stored indefinitely underground or somewhere. Of course this isn't profitable and probably will run in to climate activists roadblocks.
Maybe it's not clear that I'm talking about what to do with the excess CO₂ after we've stopped emitting more!
The stratospheric injections of SO₂ can bring temperatures down to healthy levels. This fixes most of the negative effects of high CO₂, and can go on for centuries if need be...
... but I'd prefer to get that CO₂ out once and for all. Solar powered machines that extracts it from the air and pumps it down to eternal underground cavities should be able to do that once we have much better tech. If it takes decades or centuries doesn't matter too much.
Stratospheric aerosol injection hasn't been tested at any kind of scale, so we do not know whether it would be harmful (e.g. acid rain) or not. It would also be very expensive, so it's not really a practical solution at the moment. It may pan out, but stating "actually safe" is not yet known.
Since the stratosphere is far above the rain cycle, it's very hard to imagine a mechanism whereby this could produce acid rain, and even if it did, acid rain is a much smaller problem than global warming.
> acid rain is a much smaller problem than global warming.
In fact it used to be a common occurence during the heavy industrial pollution in the 20th century. So much that after the pollution stopped, farmers had to start applying sulphur to their fields as nutrients for some crops (I learned about this after unsuccessfully trying to grow tomatoes in alkaline soil).
> In fact it used to be a common occurence during the heavy industrial pollution in the 20th century.
I remember watching news reports about acid rain in the 90s and being terrified that any ominous rain cloud might be full of acid rain which would melt away my town and family.
Yes, volcanoes are relevant data points, but that's also very different to proposed methods of seeding. It does raise the question of whether someone will decide to set off bombs in fault-lines to try and set off an eruption - I recall Trump asking why hurricanes couldn't be disrupted by the early use of bombs.
> acid rain is a much smaller problem than global warming
Possibly, but acid rain can devastate marine ecosystems and cause issues with soil quality, so I'm not convinced that we can just hand-wave it away.
I can foresee greedy capitalists rubbing their hands together over being paid to seed SO2 into the stratosphere and then being paid to clean it up too. There's probably a lot of money to be made selling clean air if we can pollute the atmosphere enough to cause health problems for people.
I'm not sure what you mean by "cleans up itself" as it doesn't just disappear. What is likely is that it gets distributed through various ecosystems and thus is no longer in the stratosphere. What concerns me is our lack of knowledge about that process and secondary effects on ecosystems.
Humanity has a track record of making assumptions about complex systems and treating them like a simple engine.
Best would be to capture CO2, and then solidify the carbon to a compact stable stable state by taking away the oxygen. Then we have a highly concentrated pure carbon form that we can just bury underground. Or add some hydrogen and get this liquid state that we can pump back into those empty underground reservoirs. But maybe we should stop taking it out in the first place...
We get energy by extracting oil and burning it. It takes a lot more energy to do the reverse.
We already cannot stop burning oil today because the economy would implode. I don't think that it is reasonable to think that not only we could stop burning oil entirely, AND at the same time produce more energy than we got from oil just for extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere... And the reality is even worse than that, because on top of all that* we would need more energy to... live.
It's important people understand that we cannot extract the CO2 once it's out there. It's practically impossible, period.
> The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale is to permanently sequester it underground. The oil/gas industry can cheaply deposit huge amounts of gas there. The unsolved problem is extracting enough CO₂ from the atmosphere at reasonable cost.
The bigger unsolved problem is how to get this paid for.
> While there is a growing body of literature and advanced modelling on the topic, which has been developing for many years, there is very little evidence or research on the risks and impacts of SRM. The report outlines these limitations in the evidence base. UNEP is concerned that while the scientific literature shows that SRM, and stratospheric aerosol injection specifically, can cool the globe, there is a dearth of data on the risks and impacts. For technologies that can alter the chemistry of the stratosphere, the world needs much more information to support decision-making.
It's been reduced before through cracking down on pollution. The results are directly suspected to be responsible for an increase in warming rate, both locally and worldwide. The only way in which it would be necessary to keep releasing it, and in increasingly higher quantities, is only if no other measure or action is taken, which is obviously not the intended goal: its purpose is to make up for the damage already done that will linger for longer than anyone currently alive.
The emission reductions in our simulations correspond closely to the emissions reductions realized in East Asia over the period 2010–2023, in magnitude and geographical location. This allows us to put our results in the context of the recent uptick in the observed rate of global mean surface warming. Here, we find that emissions reductions in East Asia have contributed up to 0.05 °C/decade since 2010, explaining a large fraction of the observed increase of 0.06 °C/decade over the same period, after filtering out the effects of interannual variability. (from https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02527-3)
The fundamental reason that climate change is an issue is because it happens over timescales which the ecosystem and human society struggle to keep up. No one reasonable believes we can cool from where we're headed, minus some extreme technical approaches, slowing it down is the goal.
You don't seem to be denying human caused, or maybe you'd say accelerated, climate change. If we could flip a switch and spread the future warming over a millennium instead of half a century I think everyone would take that deal.
> You don't seem to be denying human caused, or maybe you'd say accelerated, climate change. If we could flip a switch and spread the future warming over a millennium instead of half a century I think everyone would take that deal.
You know, that's yet another major problem. You're wrong. If we did that, meltwater water supply would essentially stop (in somewhere between 8 months and 2 years), everywhere on the planet. Big, highly populated areas of our planet will dry up (Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Ganges valley in India depends significantly on meltwater. That's easily 2 billion people)
In the past century, humanity has adapted itself to constant climate change. Any variable that depends on the temperature delta that we depend on will rapidly become problematic if we stop accelerating global warming.
Now I live in Europe. I don't expect water problems here (or only temporary). I do however expect problems. I'm not even sure what but there is a fuckton of things that will change back if global warming slows and I highly doubt that will just go down smoothly.
I know the theory behind green parties is "let's just stop doing what humanity is doing, and nature will save us". I'm kind of hoping people will realize that that, too, is bullshit. We will need to decide and agree what we want the climate to do, and then make it happen. No matter the choice made, this will have existential consequences for a bunch of places on this planet, and nothing can help that.
"Let's stop global warming" is not a solution to ecological problems, and not necessarily a better solution than continuing it. We WILL need to take control of the climate, and that includes dealing with the consequences of whatever decision we make. "stop CO2" is as much a soundbite, and as stupid, as "drill, baby, drill". Thunberg is as problematic as Trump, it's just harder to realize that that is the case.
Not that I think there's a chance in hell that global warming will stop or even just slow down whatever we decide to do in the west. Getting China, South Asia, and now more and more India and in the future Africa to agree to not use fossil fuels is not politically feasible. There is no solution there either.
So my vote? Aerosols to cool the planet. Which one, and how to spread? TBD. And, yes, that may mean the planet cools again BUT ALSO parts of the planet become uninhabitable. We'll need to agree and deal with that.
> If we did that, meltwater water supply would essentially stop (in somewhere between 8 months and 2 years), everywhere on the planet
How? Why? Meltwater comes from the temperature difference between summer and winter, how does it have anything to do with this?
> Any variable that depends on the temperature delta that we depend on will rapidly become problematic if we stop accelerating global warming.
What variable depends on a temperature _delta_?
> Now I live in Europe. I don't expect water problems here (or only temporary).
We have water problems right now. Agriculture has problems, nuclear reactors have to shut down because of too warm(France) or missing (Romania) water. Dry forests leading to more fire.
> I know the theory behind green parties is "let's just stop doing what humanity is doing, and nature will save us".
I have never heard of this, I have a hard time that anybody relevant claims this.
> If we did that, meltwater water supply would essentially stop (in somewhere between 8 months and 2 years)
If we stopped CO2 emissions today and, like you said, warming would continue unabated for decades, why would the meltwater situation change in 2 years?
> You're wrong. If we did that [spread manmade climate change over next millennium], meltwater water supply would essentially stop (in somewhere between 8 months and 2 years), everywhere on the planet.
What exactly are you talking about here? Meltwater amounts would be roughly the same compared to the last millennium, until glaciers start vanishing (only, in that obviously favorably scenario, in 500ish years instead of this century).
I get the impression that you think that manmade climate change is somewhat helpful compensation for natural trending towards ice age. This is not the case at all, because the rate of change is too high. See https://xkcd.com/1732/.
A (natural) looming ice age is not problematic or threathening at all because that happens so slowly that we get many centuries to act.
Isn't it primarily arson?
==
Europe is currently facing a dual crisis of arson-driven wildfires and coordinated sabotage operations. In the summer of 2026, extreme heatwaves have exacerbated wildfire seasons in France, Spain, and Italy, where authorities have linked many blazes to deliberate human ignition. French Interior Minister Sébastien Lecornu reported 162 arrests for suspected arson since early July, noting that 90% of forest fires in France are human-caused. Investigators in Italy’s Calabria region uncovered disturbing tactics, including the release of cats with flammable-soaked rags tied to their tails to spread fire.
Beyond accidental or opportunistic arson, Europe has experienced a wave of state-sponsored sabotage in 2024 and 2025, primarily attributed to Russian intelligence. These attacks involved incendiary devices in packages sent to logistics hubs like DHL in Germany, the UK, and Poland, as well as targeted fires at an IKEA in Vilnius and a warehouse in London. Authorities consider these acts of hybrid warfare aimed at disrupting critical infrastructure and testing delivery channels for larger attacks on the US and Canada.
Key developments in European arson include:
Wildfire Arson: France arrested 162 suspects since July 6, 2026, while Spain’s deadliest blaze in 40 years killed 13 people in Almería.
Calabrian Tactics: Italian officials found evidence of calculated arson using delayed ignition devices and animals to accelerate fire spread in southern Italy.
Sabotage Network: Russian agents have been linked to multiple arson attacks across England, Poland, Lithuania, and Germany, with several suspects convicted or charged for acts of terrorism and espionage.
Legal Fragmentation: The EU lacks a harmonized definition of arson or a centralized criminal database, forcing reliance on fragmented national investigations despite advanced satellite monitoring systems like Copernicus.
All human-caused fires aren't arson, most of these are usually negligence (source: worked in operations at fire service). Not discounting the risk of arson but I find it is used a lot to distract from conditions making the forests a tinder box.
A comment from an earlier thread alleged that Spanish policy says that forests that are destroyed due to fire don't have to be rebuilt, the land can be re-purposed. That's what's driving the arson in Spain.
> In some cases, arson is linked to economic gain: land clearance, insurance fraud, or disputes over grazing rights. Others are sparked by resentment towards environmental restrictions.
This narrative is part of the disinformation campaigns and smoke curtains that pour after the wildfires.
Is was a possibility in the past, but the current situation is different. More often than not, when we examine the coordinated internet rage bait about sinister projects to build in the burnt areas (solar farms, AI plants, etc...) this projects don't exist really. Houses will be simply rebuilt by their owners, no soil change expected.
More often than not, the people starting the rage bait post from a different country also.
But too much still are still arson, and people should know better yet than "I will burn my home and destroy my future for ten juicy bucks that this kind stranger is offering me".
And not all crimes are solved. Some on the 'negligence', 'natural causes' and 'unknown' could be also still arson on disguise.
Ukraine's treat to start bombing 'Ozon' ware stores and to finish with 'Wildberries' actual misery, could do more for stopping this wildfire waves than any of the current measures deployed.
This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing. Meanwhile power from nuclear plants are very expensive, comparatively.
So why should we invest in nuclear energy? I have the impression a lot of the debate about nuclear energy and Germany's decision to fade it out is now driven more by emotion/ignorance than reason.
Nuclear is proportionally expensive for one because we build a lot less and lose insititional knowledge and manufacturing capacity.
Secondly because of ridiculous legislation and europes extreme ability to fuck with it politically.
Thirdly because we don't count the gas plant to cover the intermitency of the renewables as part of the cost and if they'd take those out they'd find they run out of options for the cheap storage options as they become a larger share of the grid nor did they drew out the lifetime cost over the full length of a nuclear plants lifetime (shit gets replaced in the meantime)
At this point it may very well be better to go for renewables for much more of the grid coverage (after they fix their damn grid connections)
But those pushing the cost picture have been everything but honest over the past 2 decades.
I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage and such and a nuclear cost based on one unfinished american plant.
- nuclear increased in price over the period France built a lot of them. China is not currently experiencing cost price reduction in nuclear. Maybe we'd experience scale reductions in cost if we were to build at a much larger scale than that, but given that the world is already spending hundreds of billions just to build a handful of plants....
- nuclear also needs gas plants to handle peaking demands
> I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage
Which one was that? Lazard has always consistently overestimated the cost of solar and solar+storage.
> nuclear increased in price over the period France built a lot of them
Let's not pretend price is any concern of the people shutting down nuclear power. That's just not what it's about. Here is their page on the subject, and as you can clearly read: nuclear power "has no future".
Second, Germany would not have to rebuild nuclear power, as the green party clearly shows. They only need to reopen existing plants.
It is STILL the case that reopening the existing plants would lower prices - a bit. But it would make a very large difference for German CO2 production because coal powerplants are doing baseload now and would be displaced by the nuclear plants. And if the Ukraine and Iran wars keep going it will lower prices a lot (or rather it would prevent another large price spike)
> nuclear also needs gas plants to handle peaking demands
This is not a good argument given that the alternative was to switch to gas for most of the baseload, then lose the gas due to the war in Ukraine, to then switch to coal and LNG (LNG might technically be gas, but due to additional inefficiency it's worse than coal), and now losing all gas supplies (ie. from Qatar) and being forced to use even worse LNG supplies from the US.
Hell you'd think the greens would massively sponsor chemical research into LNG, since LNG efficiency is actually worse than what our bodies do to make fat. In other words: turning gas into liquid fuel (not LNG, actual liquid fuel) is possible to do with a catalyst at much higher efficiency than turning it into LNG. We don't know how, despite the fact that your body is probably doing it (to produce fatty acids) right now as you read this. You want to help climate change? Let's figure that one out, that would actually help CO2 output AND lower prices.
This gets repeated again and again. They are not in conflict with each other - both need to be done in tandem. It is not a this or that strategy - it is an all of the above strategy.
Nuclear is critical for long term generating power. Batteries and solar are good not able to maintain the same level of power quality and duration though are definitely incredibly important.
Nuclear is a high-capex source of electricity. It doesn’t do well economically in a grid where power if essentially free on sunny or windy days but you need a lot of backup power for a few hundred hours per year.
All power projects have to look at economic viability. Every project has different needs and market dynamics. THERE IS NOT A ONE TYPE OF PROJECT WORKS FOR ALL LOCATIONS. Resources mixes vary as do the demands of the power.
I can't stress this enough solar and battery dont work everywhere and they dont provide indefinite power quality. Nor does nuclear. They all need to be resourced where appropriate.
FWIW - there aren't a lot of grids that have the resource mix you described.
If it were true there is no point trying to avert climate change. It will literally require global economic collapse, mass death and starvation and a civilisational reset.
Fortunately, “economy is fossil fuels” is nonsense, so it actually makes sense to try and address this problem.
> Fortunately, “economy is fossil fuels” is nonsense
Is it?
The economy is what we produce and consume. The economy grows when we produce and consume more, it shrinks when we produce and consume less. How do we produce stuff nowadays? With fossil fuels. There is not a single object around you that did not require fossil fuels at some point.
Economy "does well" when we have easy access to fossil fuels, it doesn't when we don't. We can observe the impact on countries where fossil fuels get harder to get. An example would be Europe, where fossil fuels have been harder and harder to get since 2007 (which corresponds to the global peak of conventional oil). Since then, Europe has been slowing down if you look at physical indicators (like which surface is built or what weight is transported by trucks). GDP is artificial, it's arbitrarily modified to "compensate" for inflation.
People in the US love to say that Europe is slowing down because of regulations and laziness and all the smart people moving to the US, but the truth is that it is slowing down because of fossil fuels.
To stop destroying the climate, we need to stop using fossil fuels, and therefore we need to redefine what we expect from "the economy", because without fossil fuels there is no way we keep producing and consuming more.
But that's not all! Even if there was a way (!), it would not resolve the problem of biodiversity loss. We are currently, measurably living in a mass extinction that is happening orders of magnitudes faster than the one of the dinosaurs. If we don't get food problems because of climate change, chances are that we will because of the mass extinction. Climate change is just one existential problem we are facing.
In Europe, we have lost 80% of insects in the last 20 years, and that has NOTHING to do with climate change. Just loss of habitat, which is a consequence of our economy growing (and humans doing what humans do, like tourism and parking lots and cutting trees and overfishing). Climate change will just make that worse, it's just starting.
> It will literally require global economic collapse, mass death and starvation and a civilisational reset.
This is a certainty if we don't do anything. Now the more we do, the more we preserve. It will still be bad, make no mistake. But there is no such thing as "it's too late to act". The less we do, the worse it gets.
> There is not a single object around you that did not require fossil fuels at some point
This is sort of like saying the economy is air or the economy is sand. (What is closer to correct is the economy is, within approximation, energy.)
> the truth is that it is slowing down because of fossil fuels
American emissions per capita have been falling alongside rising GDP/capita. Europe’s malaises are broader than this.
> This is a certainty if we don't do anything
If action requires literally replacing and restarting the global economy, there is no hope. Might as well party. If, on the other hand, it’s a rewiring, it’s rational to do.
I thought we learned our lesson around hyperbolic environmental doomerism, but apparently not.
> American emissions per capita have been falling alongside rising GDP/capita
GDP is artificial. Did you ever check how they correct for inflation? GDP is worth nothing for science, it's just there for economists to do... whatever they do.
> If action requires literally replacing and restarting the global economy, there is no hope. Might as well party.
I don't know how you read that from what I say. I say, "if we don't do anything, we're completely screwed. The more we do, the better it gets". But yeah, if we keep doing what we are doing, we're doomed, that's certain.
…all economic metrics are artificial. Society is artificial.
How are you defining an economy? Or is your original statement (“economy is fossil fuels”) just a tautology?
> don't know how you read that from what I say
There is no political system on the planet that can enact and survive economic collapse. If that’s what’s required, this is a fool’s errand.
Fortunately, again, you’re wrong. It’s not required, though I’m sure we’ll keep seeing governments who try the silly route replaced. The best we can do in the meantime is politically sideline folks who believe this stuff.
I said it above. The economy is what we produce and consume. Because the metrics economists use (like GDP) make no sense does not mean that the economy does not exist.
There are physical metrics to measure how the economy is doing (that I mentioned above). For instance, you can look at how many tons of stuff are being moved by trucks. If many trucks move a lot of stuff, then it means that stuff is being produced and consumed.
Another one you can measure is the surface that is being constructed. When humans in a country build houses and buildings, it is a sign that "the economy" is growing.
And it is difficult to cheat with those "physical" metrics. Whereas cheating GDP is absolutely trivial. Do you know how they correct for inflation? There is no way to "measure" inflation, it's a guesstimate. But depending on how you guesstimate it, you increase or decrease the GDP.
What we see in Europe since 2007 (the peak of fossil fuels for Europe) is that trucks are moving less and less stuff, and the surface built by humans in Europe is slowing down. Those physical estimators show that Europe is slowing down, completely correlated to fossil fuels. GDP is growing, sure... but again GDP is "manipulated" (consciously or not, that's not the point) by the numbers we put in the "inflation" box.
> For instance, you can look at how many tons of stuff are being moved by trucks
Gross tonnage is a good input into "what we produce and consume." It's incomplete, however. Grossly. It excludes all services, for example. It's why we abandoned it as a measure after like the early industrial revolution.
(A better one is electricity production, which you can estimate remotely from fuel levels and thermals. It’s also woefully incomplete—the nutters trying to forecast based solely on it are influencers, not fund managers or policymakers, for good reason.)
> Do you know how they correct for inflation?
Yes.
> There is no way to "measure" inflation
This is nonsense. It must be estimated. But so must e.g. "the surface that is being constructed" depending on how one defines surface construction.
There are various measures of inflation of various utility. Some are used to deflate GDP.
Mankiw's Principles of Economics might be a good start if you're serious about your questions. Because by your metrics, decarbonistion is a folly—the measures are probably made up anyway!
> Because by your metrics, decarbonistion is a folly—the measures are probably made up anyway!
Not sure if you're consciously being manipulative or not.
Sure, you are more eloquent than I am. But do you understand my point about estimating inflation being a lot more random than other metrics? Making me say that "any kind of metrics is always folly" is just manipulative, I'm sure you understand that it is not what I mean.
> It excludes all services, for example. It's why we abandoned it as a measure after like the early industrial revolution.
Which I'm sure is important for economists doing economy stuff. But I am convinced that there is value in seeing that after 2007, indicators like gross tonnage have been slowing down, and that is correlated with the evolution of fossil fuels.
We cannot eat services, or use them to heat our apartments, can we? Services are a luxury for when everything below works. The risk with the end of fossil fuels is that it will disrupt everything on top of which services are built. I don't think GDP is bringing much in those discussions.
> do you understand my point about estimating inflation being a lot more random than other metrics?
Yes. I’d argue inflation metrics are about as easy to fuck with as any emissions math I’ve seen. That doesn’t make either fundamentally wrong. But if one is irredeemably wrong, so is the other.
(In any case, you can deflate your own GDP. Nominal GDP contains zero deflation. There is no similar easy fix for emissions calculations, which I read with much wider error bars than any OECD inflation print.)
> Which I'm sure is important for economists doing economy stuff
Not the billions of people employed in services?
> indicators like gross tonnage have been slowing down, and that is correlated with the evolution of fossil fuels
Global gross tonnage is growing [1]. On the sea, your correlation works because that fleet runs on fossil fuels. If you were trying to measure Chinese economic activity using fossil-fuel metrics, on the other hand, you’d fail.
(Again, your instinct isn’t wrong. Energy is, more or less, the economy. That’s why we can decarbonise without lowering living standards. We can keep energy constant or even growing while reducing fossil-fuel use.)
Fossil fuels can be replaced for every use case by electricity from carbon-free sources and some chemistry. The price point for replacement of course varies by application. There is no reason to assume that we can't have the same kind of economy we have today without fossil fuels. Some things will naturally become more expensive, but other things might also became cheaper.
> There is no reason to assume that we can't have the same kind of economy
Has there been, in history, the same kind of economy we have today without fossil fuels? No. That's a first reason.
Are there practical replacements for every use case of fossil fuels? Most definitely not! I don't know where you get that. For those replacements we know, it has never been done at scale, so we don't know if it's possible or not. And for those we don't know... well we don't know. Just have a look at what petrochemicals are used for. And how do you make fertilisers without fossil fuels, at today's scale?
You seem to believe that proof of feasibility is impossible before actually finishing the task. I disagree. And for the record, profit oriented market economies are extremely old. Much older than any large scale use of fossil fuels.
Trade routes spanned Eurasia before we invented writing. Faster transportation and communication only expanded economic ties. Transportation is something that is fairly easy to do without fossil fuels.
> Nuclear is a high-capex source of electricity. It doesn’t do well economically in a grid where power if essentially free on sunny or windy days but you need a lot of backup power for a few hundred hours per year.
Fair enough, but it's still incredibly helpful as a source of no-carbon electricity.
Hydro is great, except for a few problems. The biggest is that they are causing extinction for several species. The second biggest in central and northern Europe is that hydro is already used in every place where its reasonable to build them, with practically no space to further expansion.
Right before the last rush to build nuclear, Europe went through an energy crisis where they did also use reverse hydro. In recent time there has been discussion to modernize and reuse those old installations, but the issue is costs. Buying energy to sell it later, while maintaining and operating the hydro power plants and pumps are not cheap (not to mention building out transmission). Even at current fossil fuel prices, natural gas and oil is cheaper and thus reverse hydro is not economical viable.
Hydro is not renewable when the basins are being refilled by glacial melt as is the case for most of Europe, and precipitation is also becoming more erratic. For example, Iceland is currently relying on hydro power for 70% of its electricity, but current models predict that glacial runoff will peak around 2060 (or earlier, if the arctic temperature continues its upward trend). After that, the potential power to be generated from hydro will gradually decrease, which is why Iceland is now diversifying towards geothermal and wind.
Countries who can do hydro are pretty much doing as much of it as they can. Like... there really isn't much room to increase hydro unless you start inundating valleys.
Ok... but now we're damaging ecosystems by installing hydroelectric power stations and dams and such in these areas.
Besides, not every country can effectively utilize hydroelectric power.
Germany, like other countries, should be investing in a mix of power sources. You probably want your backbone to be nuclear and then renewables where it makes sense with a goal (at least in western countries) of also eliminating reliance on China for renewables/batteries.
We should make sure that the indirect cost for CO2 are added to the price of energy and imported products depending on the mix. It is one of the few areas where I think a market can fix things.
Yea but all other countries would have to pay for the C02 emissions of their militaries too. I bet many would not be able to afford to have one anymore - might be a good thing.
I’ve always thought that was a decent idea but Americans can’t even stomach higher gas prices because of the Iran war. How are they going to handle $7-$8 per gallon or more?
Renewables and batteries are great for peaks though. And not very good for base load
Nuclear is great for base load, not great for peaks
Our current situation is we are building tons of renewables and storage but still burning tons of fossil fuels because they cannot replace the base load very effectively. Nuclear replaces the carbon part of the equation
"Base load" is not an actual demand that needs to be satisfied.
Providing base load is a privilege you get to enjoy if your marginal cost is lower than anyone elses (and you want/can keep running basically all of the time).
Renewables ruin former baseload providers (like nuclear plants) because those plants are basically no longer making money whenever the sun shines (so the economics for nuclear plants got much worse).
> Providing base load is a privilege you get to enjoy if your marginal cost is lower than anyone elses (and you want/can keep running basically all of the time)
The "if you can keep running all of the time" is actually the more important factor of base load than just price.
I guess if you want to look at it through purely a price point thing, does the solar price effectively go to infinity when there are clouds out or it's night time?
Maybe base load is the wrong term for it, I don't know. All I'm saying is that solar and wind aren't generating all of the time, and building out the storage capacity to completely cover our existing needs seems kind of unfathomable.
The politicians in Germany went to great length to promote natural gas as the green technology to be combined with renewables, a strategy they succeed in the European Parliament and still seem to follow even when the fires roams and the pipelines get blown up. There is no seasonal grid battery storage in central and northern Europe, and outside of a few hundred household sized experiment, no grid storage is being built.
Looking at the platforms of political parties who oppose nuclear in a nearby country like Sweden, all of them highlight how thermal power plants are necessary to support further expansion of renewable energy, and those thermal power plants burn some form of fossil fuels. This include the Swedish green party.
What EU need is a ban on fossil fuels in the energy grid. Without that natural gas there is no need to buy gas from current war zones and their participants, and it would significantly decrease emissions. As long as people who oppose nuclear also agree to stop using thermal power plants, same as with the ban on ICE cars that will come into action in a few years, then the discussion of nuclear vs renewables + battery will be a fair one with everyone playing by the same rules.
Naturally in the south part of EU there is little reason to use nuclear plants. Energy demand correlates with solar production, and the need for seasonal storage is minimal. Sadly the same can not be said about central and northern Europe where wind speeds are the current dominant factor when it come to supply of energy, but seasons dictate demand. The size of storage needed for a harsh winter is magnitudes more expensive currently than reducing the need through nuclear, but that will never be tested since what countries there are actually building right now are more thermal power plants to address the issue of low supply during periods of low energy production from wind.
> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage?
Recent report on restarting German nuclear:
> The easiest group of reactors to restart could produce electricity at an average of €37 per megawatt-hour before the end of 2031.The most difficult restarts could produce electricity at roughly €58 per megawatt-hour by the mid 2030s.
That seems very cheap if it means you don't need to build new transmission. The average cost in south of Sweden is much higher than that, which in euro would be around €100 per megawatt-hour.
Prices are also expected to further increase as EU has issued regulations that customers should subsidize regions of poor transmission, in order to enable construction of more wind and solar farms where no such transmission exist.
I wonder how much battery you could install in a typical nuclear site. Maybe even stacked; if we make an apples-to-apples comparison in materials and say we can use the same amount of concrete and metal, could probably have several levels of batteries. Except no water needed, and no waste risks.
The top of this German article [1] has a rendering of a planned 1.4GW power, 6GWh storage battery plant, with the decommissioned nuclear plant in the background. The battery energy storage is a bit smaller in area and of course of lot less tall. Eyeballing, the area is actually very comparable if you deduct the power plant's parking lot. The nuclear plant is Grohnde, a 1.43GW single-reactor plant.
The similar power output is not a coincidence. The biggest bottleneck for new solar and battery storage plants in Germany is getting them connected to the grid, and the freshly decommissioned nuclear plant has a great grid connection that this project wants to reuse
I'm not so sure about the "no water needed" as batteries require cooling (and sometimes heating). And perhaps batteries are not risky like nuclear waste, but by volume there would me much more battery material than nuclear material, and there is fire risk that must be mitigated. You can't just wire up a big stack of batteries, they need carefully designed separation and fire suppression so that if one battery goes into a thermal runaway it doesn't take out the entire installation.
I imagine it wouldn't be nearly in the same ballpark, since one side does not perform the classic mechanical generation from temperature difference, and deal with the associated waste heat.
> They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing.
Yet France, which invested heavily in nuclear[1], has energy prices that are 40% lower than Germany's[2]. Something isn't adding up about the repeated claims that renewables are cheaper than nuclear.
France's nuclear is long paid off, and there were big government investments into building the industry around it because France is a nuclear power. It's not exactly the same tech obviously but when you build nuclear weapons yourself you need a workforce and industry capable of working with the materials. Some of those costs will have found their way under defense headings instead of energy ones.
Germany didn't have this incentive and they don't have the luxury of coasting on previous investments of a bygone era. Germany would have to start from scratch with all this and without the defense component (unless they change their stance on that too)
It depends on how much you value land use and care about the knock on effects of the associated mining. I’d rather figure out how to build out nuclear cheaply like South Korea and China and use more land for wild space. The per hectare land use of nuclear is minuscule.
Just replacing expensive fossil energy with cheap renewables and storage doesn't help. The problem is Jevons paradox. Cheaper energy means more consumption.
A sensible global policy could be:
- Tax carbon positive energy consumption to death. I.e. coal, oil or natural gas.
- Tax (close to) carbon neutral energy consumption at a fixed high rate, e.g. solar, hydro, nuclear or wind. Tax nuclear separately because of its other side effects if you want.
- Use the proceeds to negatively tax carbon negative energy consumption only.
Not that I have any illusions of any policy even remotely like this ever getting enacted. Zero consensus on earth and too many dangerous and selfish idiots.
Jevons paradox is often claimed, but largely irrelevant in this case, imo. If the demand rises, the price rises again, as well. It doesn't force anybody to keep using fossil energy
Price elasticity definitely is a thing, but I'd argue not in the way you see it.
Have a somewhat competitive energy market and falling production prices like we have for carbon neutral energy. What do you think will happen? The market will gobble up any and all production.
Look at what we currently have even with largely fossil energy. The substantial US/EU delta in energy price and energy consumption. Notice how similar the deltas are?
CO2 capture is carbon negative by definition. That's not what I said.
There are some experimental methods of capturing CO2 (or rather just carbon in CO2), but I replied to a proposed negative tax on economic activities that are carbon negative as energy consumtion. There are none. There's only experimental carbon capture with no products and no services generated as an output of this "economic activity" that consumes energy and CO2 as inputs. And it costs money - a lot more money than what CO2-positive economic activities could generate if all their CO2 were to be captured.
A negative tax wants carbon negative processes to exist. That clear direction is more important than whether these processes currently exist.
Experimental olivine based carbon capture looks promising to this uneducated bystander, but what do I know?
In any case, I'm not expecting climate action. Many either don't know how to even start fixing this mess. Others would rather have their own children boil than to potentially give up some material conveniences.
Really? It's certainly not in actual practice - the largest actual carbon capture and sequestration projects on the globe to date are, by definition, carbon release reduction programs that are intended to store back a small percentage of what will be released as part of large natural gas extraction projects.
(eg: proposed Browse Basin (~400 km (250 mi) off NW coast of W.Australia) expansion)
It's a simple (albeit technically complex) proposition - puncture a gas basin, release large amount of CO2, grab some of that and stuff it back in the hole. Overall a net positive amount of CO2 is released, before addressing any further release as a by product of consuming the LNG, etc. But it's called CCS (carbon capture and storage) because carbon is captured and stored.
There are no larger programs at scale on the planet, they are net CO2 release programs, and less CO2 would be in the atmosphere if no LNG was extracted at all.
I think the point of this question is that the Green party of Germany chose in 2003 that closure of nuclear power plants was more important than global warming.
They had this as an explicit choice, and they demanded other parties went along with closing the nuclear power plants. They knew, it was discussed, that keeping them open would help with global warming, and they explicitly chose against that. Then they stood by that choice, and kept standing by it even up to 2023.
Now you obviously can't fault them for the fact that the Ukraine war would make things 10x worse (by forcing Germany back onto coal and LNG), but you CAN fault them for making that choice, and standing by it. This makes them the main responsible party for the current electricity prices problem in Germany.
European green parties have explicitly chosen that their other goals mattered more than global warming. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are absolutely 100% unwilling to make compromises elsewhere to help fix global warming, when they are the ones making a compromise.
And, frankly, if we can't compromise as a country in parliament we may as well stop attempting to do anything about global warming. Green parties are demanding big compromises from everybody else, but cannot give a millimeter themselves? Obviously everybody else is just going to fight them tooth and nail, forever, and we'll get nowhere.
Sorry, let me put a short rant then. The Green party of Germany forced through the shutdown of nuclear power in Germany and stood by that decision, even when it became clear the already bad impact on climate change it had was made 10x worse by the war in Ukraine (forcing Germany to switch to Coal and LNG). Meanwhile this "Green" party, unwilling to make compromises themselves, is using climate change to demand enormous compromises from everyone else, guaranteeing yet another fight to stop climate change legislation.
They do make for a good boogeyman, that's for sure. Other parties really should study them for how they manage to force everybody else to do their bidding while having no actual power. The exit from nuclear and the hated "GEG" / heating act were both conservative CDU initiatives after all, who are now retroactively being attributed to the greens to fuel the conservative culture war.
> how they manage to force everybody else to do their bidding while having no actual power
Oh the traditional European way. "You need 50% of the votes in parliament of a government. It's either us or the extreme right. Here's our list of demands, and a phone number. Kthxbye"
The environmentalists who railed against nuclear for the last 30 years are very much responsible for how many dead dinosaurs we've burnt over that time. Excuse me if I'm skeptical about what they now say about energy policy.
To put it another way, I could flip your statement on its head: Renewables are just a distraction to try to keep us burning dead dinosaurs for longer instead of building durable nuclear power capacity.
One problem with renewables is that they rely a lot on electronics, which relies a lot on petrochemicals (just to build them) and on globalisation. In a world without abundant oil, can we keep producing and maintaining as many solar panels as we need?
Today, pretty much everything you do increases oil dependency. What's clear is that we will have less and less oil (just because... physics: it's limited) and anyway we need to use less and less oil (because climate change).
So the question is: what can we preserve once we don't have oil anymore? And my point was that renewables are piloted with electronics, and we haven't tried building and maintaining that system in a world without oil.
People like to extrapolate the growth of renewables, but they tend to forget that the current growth is totally subsidised by oil: your solar panel was built and transported with oil, period.
If you are serious about the "after the end of oil", you have to wonder if that system works, at scale, without oil. Don't you?
> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing
Our power demands are increasing faster than we can build out renewables and storage.
Despite how much investment we are making into solar, wind, batteries, we're still burning more carbon year over year to make up for the demand for energy. We need a source of energy that can actually replace the base load carbon, not just augment it like renewables are. Nuclear is the most likely source to use for that purpose.
Edit: if we're being honest, we probably should have built out nuclear 20, 30, 40 years ago but we didn't. The expense now is kind of the cost of our poor policy decisions in decades past. We can continue to make poor decisions or we can learn our lesson and eat the cost now to fix those mistakes. I think failing to invest and shift to nuclear now would be yet another instance of passing the buck to the future generations, with even more interest
I don't know exactly what you mean by "like Germany", but singling out Germany seems a strange choice given that the main global offenders are orders of magnitude worse in terms of their greenhouse gas emissions. Germany is currently producing more than half of its electricity from renewables.
Check out this year's edition of Ember's Global Electricity Review [0]. The table on p. 78 lists the following five countries as having the highest CO2-equivalent emissions (in Mt):
| China | 5,565 |
| United States | 1,737 |
| India | 1,395 |
| Russia | 536 |
| Japan | 492 |
In comparison, the whole of the European Union (consisting of 27 individual countries, including Germany) is emitting 587 Mt.
All these numbers should probably be put into perspective, though, by taking the population size into account. But even then, the whole of the EU does not fare too bad.
> should probably be put into perspective, though, by taking the population size into account
Obviously, each individual should have a right to emit a certain amount of GHGs independently from the size of the country he happens to be born in. So the correct list is this (2024 data [1]). Quite surprising in places (e.g. the position of the UK, Australians emitting GHGs at the level of a petro-state, and Canadians too, well above the US).
| Country | MtCO2e/ capita
| Qatar | 54.54
| Kuwait | 38.14
| Bahrain | 35.13
| United Arab Emirates | 25.62
| Oman | 24.02
| Saudi Arabia | 22.79
| Australia | 22.26
| Canada | 19.76
| Russia | 18.02
| United States | 17.34
| New Zealand | 15.59
| South Korea | 12.83
| Ireland | 11.86
| China | 10.81
| Poland | 9.28
| Belgium | 9.15
| Netherlands | 8.35
| Germany | 8.17
| Italy | 6.32
| Spain | 6.16
| Brazil | 5.93
| France | 5.68
| United Kingdom | 5.63
I've left the petro-states in the list because the fact that they have such high per-capita emissions is interesting even if not surprising, but I agree that as small countries they don't really contribute that much to global emissions. I find more interesting the position of Australia, Canada and the US close to the top, and the surprisingly low position of the UK.
As for China, an average Chinese citizen is already contributing 40% less than his average US counterpart to global emissions- do you think we should ask them to make a bigger effort because China has more people? In that case, do you think that simply splitting China in two political entities each with half the population would solve the problem of their emissions?
I know the UK has a lot of wind and solar, and then there's short transport distances: those other countries are famous for hauling goods over long distances through sparsely populated terrain, which the UK doesn't have any of.
I wonder which country is considered to own the emissions from a cargo ship?
But anyway, about China, we agree on one thing: there are a lot of Chinese who are pretty much not participating in emissions. Then there are cities, factories, power stations for factories, and the government which, and this is the important point, has control over those sources of emissions.
If you split it into two nations, what that does is to remove the single point of control, and as a result remove the opportunity to do something about a huge portion of global emissions. Politically speaking splitting China in two sounds like an improvement, and lots of fun, but if you want some entity to control a really large amount of emissions, it's surely a giant authoritarian state that has the power to do it.
If the two halves were different in industrialization - if one had all the peasants and the other had all the factories and factory workers - that would help, since then you have a country that tops both lists, and can be firmly blamed by everyone, and we can stop getting lost in the weeds of "per capita" and the mad idea that individual scum like me and you have any responsibility to solve climate change by reusing plastic bags and so on.
Germany is in Europe and the economist is about Europe, so it makes sense to look at high emitters in Europe, no?
Also, while it's important to look at the global picture, let's not ignore the local effects: air quality in Germany is pretty bad, perhaps the worst in Europe. Poland is pretty bad too, especially in the winter. That's not China's or USA's fault.
Germany is singled out because decided to close their safe and well functioning zero emission power plants for no good reason, thus exploding their CO2 emissions.
Yeah, other emit more, but the rank stupidity of this environmental vandalism deserves the scorn it gets!
I believe they are singled out in a feeble attempt by climate change deniers and fossil fuel boosters to discredit renewables. Which Germany played a pivotal role in kick-starting and which are currently saving the world.
The reason Germany gets singled out is because it was a massive policy misstep and highlights the shortsightedness of the environmental movement. It seems that they have changed their tune about it nuclear - but their entrenched efforts (and concerns in the 80s) killed the last 40 years of nuclear power - arguably inflaming our current CO2 crises by opening the doors wide open for Oil and Gas to fill the void.
In Germany add in that they then needed to rely on Russia to provide natural gas to fill in the void - which drove up the costs of power and made their manufacturing base a little less competitive.... Best intentions don't always prove to be good policy making. That's the TL;DR why Germany gets singled out.
Unlike the states, Germany is densely populated and does not have vast uninhabited areas. Where do you suggest should they store their nuclear waste? Germany has been looking for an appropriate place for the last 50(!) years and does not expect to come to a conclusion any time soon:
In the mean time, they're keeping they're using the sites of their former nuclear power plants as temporary storage locations for the nuclear waste produced while the plants were still running.
While I would agree that it is regrettable Germany sunset their nuclear early when they should've extended the runtime for another 5-10 years to avoid excess carbon emissions since shutdown, but clean energy has already surpassed coal in Germany and they will likely hit net zero in the next decade at current deployment rates of renewables and batteries. [My note: The US states of Illinois and California got this right, subsidizing their existing merchant nuclear generator fleets until more renewables can replace them]
> Germany has various targets in place that require a rapid expansion of wind and solar power, including cutting economy-wide emissions to net-zero by 2045. The nation is also aiming to increase renewables’ share of electricity consumption to 80% by 2030 to achieve a “largely climate neutral” power system by 2035.
It's time to get over the nuclear issue, it's history. It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid, and tens of billions of dollars or euros. Germany deploys ~2GW/month of solar. Total global nuclear generation capacity is ~380GW as of this comment. At current global solar PV deployment rates, even assuming capacity factor delta between solar and nuclear, you could replace total global nuclear generation with ~18 months of solar PV deployment. Batteries and solar will continue to rapidly decline in cost, nuclear will not.
(total annual solar PV deployment is approaching, but not quite yet, at 1TW/year, and continues to increase year over year)
I think that's net zero for electricity only, not net zero for all power generation. It excludes heavy industry and freight shipping, which still have a projected investment window of at least 25 years. Heavy industry in particular would have benefitted from the predictable high-power output of nuclear energy.
Nuclear is an amazing solution for industrial steady state demand... This is data centers, smelters (glass and metal), lots of industrial processes (think auto plants).
But nuclear is terrible at TV pickup situations because it is simply not that responsive.
Delivery to industrial customers (regardless of source) is also much simpler than it is to domestic - and I don't think that were even beginning to address the issues there.
You're free to doubt, healthy skepticism is a good thing imho, there is no will to spend what nuclear would cost and renewables and batteries keep getting cheaper. We're locked on a hockey stick trajectory of their uptake purely through the economics. Spain is phasing out the last of their nuclear for more renewables, for example.
Fossil gas will fill the gap until solar, wind, batteries, and transmission push the last of fossil generation out of the mix, and every year less and less gas will be used until remaining fossil gas generators sit idle.
Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-n... | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~2GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~17 months; per Electricity Maps, only 18.79% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/12mo/monthly)
You realize that "green energy" in EU is dependent on gas and/or coal? When there's no wind or sun, we will gladly burn gas or coal, and call it green energy.
Nuclear doesn't have this requirement. It's truly zero carbon.
Unless you can show me plans to fill this gap with batteries on a national scale, renewables < nuclear
Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. We have solved fusion at a distance with solar and batteries. We're arguing speed and cost of deployment for the collection and storage system. The technology drops in cost rapidly, it lasts for decades with no moving parts and minimal maintenance. It can be trivially recycled today with no further technology advancements needed. It fails gracefully.
Yes, some fossil fuels will be burned to fill energy consumption gaps until we have fully replaced all fossil generation with that produced from the sun. Again, remember the fact that every year we are adding ~1TW of solar that can account for energy consumption growth and push out fossil generation. We won't know until we look back over time, but we are very likely at peak fossil fuel consumption globally. New generation will be clean tech simply out of economics, and old fossil generation will be replaced eventually with clean tech, because it cannot last forever.
> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.
> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.
> To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.
> Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year
Sure, the sun is incredible, but our capacity of actually using that power is the bottleneck. We still have to have energy to dig up the materials and manufacture the panels and batteries and deploy them and such.
China is the top user of energy globally, and they are electrifying everything while moving rapidly to renewables for generation. This is the blueprint the rest of the world will eventually follow. China's clean energy generation will be used to spin the clean tech manufacturing flywheel up faster (which will lead to more global clean tech exports to the world). The sun will power the end to end supply chain for making more solar and batteries.
Nearly a third of new heavy truck sales in China Electric in 2025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676673 - June 2026 ("China targeting EVs to make up 40% of heavy truck sales by 2030 - EVs to make up 20% of heavy truck fleet by 2030 - Trade-in schemes will prioritise EV trucks to boost adoption")
~110GW of nuclear capacity targeted by 2030. I respect their attempt to diversify, iterate, and drive down the cost of nuclear, but it pales in comparison to renewables (~90-100GW of solar installed per month, on average).
> China continues to view nuclear as an electricity source that advances its energy security while also reducing reliance on fossil fuels, as noted in the latest FYP (Part II, Chapter 7): “Promote the safe, reliable, and orderly replacement of fossil fuels with non-fossil energy sources; pursue a multi-pronged approach that combines wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear power; and implement the ten-year plan to double non-fossil energy capacity.” The remarkable growth of renewable energy sources and coal’s continuing preeminence have shaped nuclear energy’s role as a non-carbon-emitting baseload in China’s power generation portfolio (Table 1). Nuclear energy seems to serve as a versatile power source that supplements coal’s role as an energy security enforcer as well as the role of renewables as clean energy boosters. By 2030, China targets 110 gigawatts (GW) of installed nuclear power capacity. If realized, the installed capacity in China will surpass that of the United States unless U.S. capacity—currently the world’s largest—grows substantially from 102.5 GW (gross) in 2025.
I disagree, but I'm not the decision maker so it's irrelevant. Nuclear is throwing good money after bad imho (based on current and projected levelized cost of energy [LCOE]), I think the next five years will prove that out.
> Renewables Remain Lowest Cost New-Build Generation; All Generation Faces Increasing Cost Pressure: Despite rising and inflationary cost pressures across all generation technologies, renewables remain the most cost-competitive form of new-build generation on an unsubsidized basis and will account for the majority of near-term capacity additions in the U.S. Continuous upward revisions to demand projections have driven a sharp increase in announced new-build gas generation despite a 15-year high LCOE, which is expected to continue to rise, and historically long development and equipment delivery timelines.
> China set a 2020 wind target of 210 GW and finished the year with about 282 GW. Its solar target was 110 GW, while delivery reached roughly 253 GW. The later commitment to reach at least 1,200 GW of combined wind and solar by 2030 was crossed in 2024, six years early. By the end of 2025, China had about 640 GW of wind and 1,202 GW of solar, for a combined 1,842 GW. Nuclear moved in the other direction: about 50 GW against a 58 GW target in 2020, and about 62 GW against a 70 GW target in 2025. The current goal of 110 GW by 2030 may still be achieved, but the previous record gives no reason to convert it directly into a forecast.
> This is not evidence that Beijing has quietly abandoned nuclear power. China has the world’s largest reactor construction programme, continues approving new units and is building an increasingly domestic supply chain around designs such as Hualong One. The divergence lies between approval and operation. Another difference is that when renewables blow past targets China set much bigger targets, but when nuclear misses targets, the targets don’t change. That difference is harder to explain than the results.
Certainly sounds like China's nuclear goals are aspirational, based on the data. The construction and messaging gives nuclear proponents hope, but construction is not generation. At some point, you have to deliver.
How can articles on major news sites have typos this bad up for over a month?
"The crisis in France has claimed dozens of lives, with 40 people drowning while attempting to call off from the heat since June 18"
Call off should be "cool off".
And forgive me if this is a stupid question, but don't nuclear power plants produce enough energy that they could power their own cooling? Why do they have to rely on the free cooling provided by a river?
> As long as major countries like Germany are keeping their ban on nuclear power
Frankly, it doesn't matter what Germany or other European nations do - their carbon footprint has dramatically decreased.
The issue is everyone else [0]. China (12 GT), the US (5 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent over half of all global carbon emissions. The EU and UK's combined carbon emissions are half of Asia (excluding China and India) emissions.
Countries like India and Vietnam are expected to see GDP growth in the 6-8% range for the next decade, and both are doubling down on coal [1][2] and other carbon heavy fuels, so emissions are only going to grow further. Any marginal decrease in carbon emissions at this point is too little too late given that much of Asia and South America is expected to see carbon emission grow in the 3-8% range.
Sure, but don't blame China when 90% of the shit you buy is made there, they don't pollute because they're Chinese, they pollute because they're your factory
You know why China became the manufacturing center of the world? Because it was lowest cost, with little regulation and lenient policies including environmental ones. Red carpet, special economic zones. Nobody forced them to.
They have to bear responsibility, and to be fair to them, they have taken steps to address that.
I don't see why CO2 emissions should be stagnant. There's now more people than ever, and everyone buys more shit per capita than ever, that's already a good reason for emissions to grow.
Something can be urgent while no one is doing anything about it. Would not be the first time. That point would be the first of many incoherences in you comment.
I don’t debate that there is urgency, that so much more should be done, etc. but your comment really isn’t helping.
The last time any company was interested to build a nuclear reactor in Germany was in the 1970s. About thirty years before the eventual (first) ban.
We can rant all day about how stupid it was of the conservatives to re-enact the ban on nuclear power without restarting the subsidies for renewables, and lament that they thus ensured that coal power would thus have to replace more of the lost load, but that's all in the past and we can't change that.
If you think we need more nuclear power to fight CO2 emissions, you're 50 years late. That ship has sailed before most of us here were born.
> Worried about your country not dominating on the AI scene?
The thing is, the obsession with the AI race is making this problem so much worse. We're using up so much more energy and burning so much more fossil fuel as a direct result of AI mania.
We're so obsessed with becoming king of the ashes we're not even noticing we're burning the whole damn place down.
It's tragic, it's irresponsible and many here are at the very least complicit.
The fires don't accelerate it much. That wood and shrub would either burn or rot down the line and release methane and co2 anyway.
Forests don't sequester much at all despite what people seem to believe.
Consequentially running a fireplace is a lot more climate neutral than driving a car, taking a flight, utilising the myriads of high carbon footprint goods or having a gas heater or so.
On the other hand the bogs that we're losing (and kelp forests) are a lot better at sequestring co2 but they're small.
Permafrost will also actually accelerate stuff since....well it __was__ permanently forsty.
If we assume that the forests will regrow to their former strength then the fires are indeed not all the consequential. The trees release the stored CO2 when they burn, and new plants will take up an equivalent amount of CO2 again when they grow. The CO2 sequestered in a forest is more or less just the biomass in it (some is in the soil, but not that much)
But if climate change leads to permanently losing those forests, that is an effect we will feel. Still less bad than losing permafrost
If we figured out how to store chopped down trees somewhere where the wood doesn't break down, that would be a really effective way to get CO2 out of the air!
Easier said than done, of course. Sinking millions of trees to the bottom of the ocean might be the most practical way.
The theory is that it can reach a point where it won't be able to survive, and therefore it will die. We are around that limit. It may well be that it has already passed it and therefore it will die.
I didn't mean "it is not there anymore", I meant "we won't be able to preserve it, it may already be too late for that".
Deforestation causes more extreme weather like floods and landslides which also remove fertile soil, and trees don't regenerate quickly enough to prevent that from happening. And global warming also increases weather instability at a rate nature can't adapt to.
So even the existing forests will have a harder time.
Plants need a lot of things, not just CO2; what they are limited by varies from case to case, and conversion to farmland can cause permanent damage which may indeed turn it into a desert.
Fortunately, careful manipulation can reverse desertification.
Agreed. I was just mentioning it because people don't seem to realise that we are on the verge of losing it (and it may actually be that it is too late).
Of course we should fight to preserve as much as we can. Nobody wants to live in a bunker on mars. Almost...
And aside the greenhouse effect, we're also using more power than we've ever used before, building 10Msqft boxes that ultimately turn electricity into heat. We could go all-solar and we'd still be warming our environment.
The amount of heat generated directly by all of the energy use by humans - from fossil, nuclear or renewables - is a tiny, miniscule rounding error compared to the excess heat absorbed by the atmosphere and oceans due to CO2 and the greenhouse effect.
The heat output of every single data centre on earth isn’t even worth thinking about on the scale of the global climate system.
Absolutely, the heat itself is not the problem. I read that every day the earth receives more heat energy from the sun than was ever stored in all the fossil fuels on the planet.
What's more the problem is that we could have spent that energy on much more useful things. Even if these datacenters run on green energy that means that something else isn't. And don't forget that no energy is truly green. Generation requirement, electricity transport and metal extraction for it, maintenance, nuclear fuel extraction and refinement, all these things aren't green. We can make them green as much as possible but increasing demands on energy massively is making the point of reaching carbon neutrality much harder.
I mean european forests are mostly monocultures created after we cut down everything natural we had. Maybe fire/warm resistent trees and forests will be planted. Its not like the fires are destroying 20000 years old ecosystems. Most of the forests were basically dead long before.
> loss of the Amazon (it's pretty much lost already, isn't it?)
Worth comparing Lula versus other Brazilian leader’s records on this. It looks like left-wing leaders are more likely to prioritise climate action because it’s a collective problem/resource
"Being better at fighting fires, though, is not enough."
Yeah, it's nowhere near enough. We need to seriously revamp how we manage forests. They must be regularly cleaned, huge fire breaks between fenced areas and roads must be created and maintained. Prescribed burns on a regular schedule. Houses cannot be too close to the trees, no matter how pretty it looks. A huge clean radius must be maintained between houses and trees and between properties. All this work must be done in the winter and everything must be prepared for the summer. Every year. Everywhere.
I see none of this happening at a proper scale in my country (Portugal). So of course every summer we se huge forest fires. Lives lost, ecosystems destroyed. Next year it happens again...
People keep reiterating this probably because Trump keeps reiterating but it just sounds ridiculous.
How do you clean forests? The debris is part of the forest, not all areas of a forest are easily accessible or feasible to transport debis out of there. A dead tree is actually an ecosystem of fungi and insects. Cleaning it may make it more fire prone as broken sticks and leaves shield the ground from the sun allowing the soil to hold on to moisture a little longer. There is plenty of room for nuance here.
I would need to listen to actual experts on this, the correct solution is probably something akin to resorting wetlands and beavers which act as fantastic self maintaining fire breaks.
However when you suggest things like this you see the actual issues pop up, local farmers protest and others using NIMBY laws to block so they get payouts.
Prescribed burns are a good tool, but they're not a silver bullet. Because of the decades without fires, there's so much debris that fires burn incredibly hot, so you either need people to go in and thin the debris (this is actually a thing they do, as ridiculous as "cleaning the forest" sounds), or deal with the extra damage and risk of a very hot fire. Then you need a decent amount of personnel to make sure the fire doesn't get out of hand (and they regularly do), and do it when the weather is right (wet season, low winds). A prescribed burn is still a forest fire, with all the risks, it's just one that's started at a time and place we control.
The wood in forests is part of the short term carbon cycle. It does not meaningfully affect global warming. The amount of carbon released in a forest fire is miniscule compared to what humans release.
> How do you clean forests? The debris is part of the forest, not all areas of a forest are easily accessible or feasible to transport debis out of there.
Cleaning is huge financial burden and has questionable outcome. Only extreme solution I can think of is fireblocks if situation gets worse which could worsen climate change by clearing trees. Divide forest in to grids, building roads wide enough to fire from spreading. Fill roads up with gravel or concrete to stop fires from spreading. Climate activists would never allow such plan to be implemented.
Yeah, it is a bit dumb to talk about "cleaning" forests. Or at least I've never heard anyone who spouted that line who I thought had any understanding of the situation. Mostly they are just salty that the forests aren't actually profitable for logging, but they can't say it like that.
Like a lot of things in the US, the resources are "there" for this stuff, because it's a lot of individual labor instead of something that can be turned into a massive payoff for a couple of "investors" there's no "market incentive" so nothing will be done.
For context, I live on 40 unimproved acres in CO, and much of my spring and late fall is spent moving downed wood and cutting down thickets of gamble oak.
That is a lot of work, and I hope (over the next decade) to eventually get it somewhat under control. The idea is to not have, for instance, a dead tree leaning up against a living tree and to try and tamp down or increase the space between the floor and the first couple of branches in the trees. I also collect up wood for heating in the winter (better to burn it to stay warm than to lt it go in an eventual wild fire.
This is a lot of strenuous work, and not just because I have some love and respect for the situation of all the individual flora and fauna that populate this chunk of land. I've know several wildland firefighters here and they are doing similar things in a hurry out in the hills with hand tools. Because you can't get large equipment around to do the work- there aren't roads in a lot of these places.
It'll all probably burn at some point, anyhow.
But I try because at least in the couple of acres where I actually live I might be able to get the underbrush cleared so a fire could be fought.
But the idea of setting it on fire is prepostrous- I might as well set the shack where I live on fire while i am at it.
That more or less scales up.
The process of mitigating wildire (usually done on a line near an active fire) is largely a bunch of 25 year olds with shovels and chainsaws.
I am all for that work- I'd much rather have them doing that than geraing up to go to Iran or Cuba or wherever.
But hey, the ecology of this place is fucked. My ancestors destroyed the megagfauna to prevent folks from subsisting off of the concentration camps/ reservations. The folks who are still "into" that racist, genocidal, ecocidal project aren't going to do anything to fix it; they'd rather burn their own houses down first.
being good at fighting fires is part of the problem as that allows people to keep natural limited area fires from happen regularly and then eventually you get one huge fire.
Every forest has different needs. OP is in Portugal, I don't know much about forest there, but the plan seems reasonable for there. The Rocky Mountains need a different plan, but it isn't much different.
Portugal has about 10% forested land, of which an estimated 25% is non-native eucalyptus (an active pyrophyte), and over 50% in some areas. I've seen the aftermath of eucalyptus forest fires while travelling through Alentejo.
This year Europe's fires are not the start. Few years ago we had very extended Australia fires, US/Canada fires, and other not so put in the spotlight fires in other countries around the world. At some point they diverged enough from normal to reach a scale that raised enough eyebrows.
And it is not just forest fires. Floods caused by extreme rainfalls, running out of letters in hurricane seasons, once in a century/millenia extreme weather events happening several times in a decade are increasingly noticeable, and they are just symptoms of bigger but harder to directly perceive global trends like that the global yearly average temperature increased a few tens of degrees or that the ocean is winning heat at a rate of 6 Hiroshima bombs per second.
Climate change will create winners and losers. Losers -- anyone on the equator or within the the tropic of cancer/capricorn. Winners -- those outside those regions or with enough $ to adapt.
Give me solar geoengineering, 2x increase in R&D spending on reducing fossil fuel usage, and funding for direct carbon capture (and a financial incentive to do it).
It's going to get worse before it gets better sadly.
I'm not sure there are all that many winners. There are those that lose big time with some places potentially becoming uninhabitable, and those that merely have to spend a fortune on new flood prevention infrastructure, deal with massive changes to how they do agriculture and forestry in a new climate, and in the future deal with streams of climate refugees from countries on the list of even bigger losers.
Russia and Canada might end up winning from this, but for everyone else it seems like a big negative, with some silver linings
Climate change will almost surely increase growing seasons and agricultural productivity in higher latitudes (for some crops). It will be extremely crop and cultivar dependent, I expect lots of R&D to go into crops that can deal with wider vairety, and generally hotter, conditions.
Where "winning" means surviving in relative comfort until global society disintegrates into a constant state of famine and war and you run out of local resources.
that carbon capture tech is called tree/forest btw. if we plant trillions of trees, we win, not sure how many millions of people and years it would take. probably less than half a war
there are other factors at play like AMOC halting and breakdown of habitats that are codependent with other habitats. you dont get to pick and choose regions since earth is a huge interconnected system itself.
stop drinking the tech kool aid and start with degrowth.
I recently read capitalist realism by Fisher, and I think it is impossible (or very close to it, barring major war/plague/thanos snap) for something like degrowth to be seriously considered. There are simply waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to many incentives at multiple levels and across traditional alliances against it.
Any reason SpaceX cannot just build a giant solar shade at L1? This seems fairly doable on the decade timescale, plus it could do double duty as a weapon.
I did the math out on this for fun a couple years ago. It came put surprisingly reasonable.
Taking estimates for Starship payload to Mars as the likely payload to L1, carrying to L1 enough thin reflective mylar film to block around 0.5% of light to earth would cost between $80-100 billion. Which is a lot but not nearly as much as I expected and not outside the realm of possibility.
We collectively deserve this. The warnings came, but it was framed as "future generations will face these problems", and we collectively kicked the can down the road.
I say "collectively" because many of us don't deserve this and have wanted desperately to address it head on to try and mitigate the damage. But the scope of this problem makes individual contributions effectively meaningless.
It's not clear how bad it has to get before meaningful action takes place. But it will undoubtedly be too little, too late.
I think part of the path to try and address this is to have stories that paint a clear and simple picture of what that would look like and how it would be done. Even then, the issue has been heavily politicized to make it an us versus them problem rather than an "all of us" problem.
small correction: only individual contributions are meaningful. If I consume less and you consume less and many other individuals consume less there simply won't be as much demand for fossil fuels.
The only way I can understand your premise of helplessness is that it provides a convenient excuse for you not to do anything to help. Do you think companies will keep burning fuel at the exact same rate if a billion individuals dont incentivize them to?
Don't worry we will end up spraying the atmosphere to buy more time, and the Earth will cool, and people will believe that the problem is solved and we can just go back to burning fossil fuels.
So the fighting will continue while we keep duct taping and band aiding the problem.
Matt Ridley the coal-mine owning climate-change denier?
I guess disasters might be his area of expertise since he once crashed a bank and led the official pro-Brexit campaign, but the other stuff seems like a conflict of interest.
So Economist is now stating Climate Change is an issue. Where was that magazine in the 80s and 90s. Oh, the were writing how fossil fuels are still a good investment and are still the future. And I expect they stated Trump was the better choice in 2020 and 2024.
So in 2026, this magazine (and others) are reporting how +2C will be far worse than +1.5C. How about reporting stopping at +2C is a pipe dream. We are heading straight to +3C and probably +4C.
Time to start reporting on how we need to stop using fossil fuels now, not later. But even doing that really will not stop us from reaching +2.5C due to inaction by world Gov. over the last 50 years.
You can look up : Antonio Donato Nobre, Victor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva and go from there.
The science is NOT settled, and people are still learning how all this works. They may all be crooks for all i know.
But as is mentionned in another comment, "(...)stop eating meat, stop driving non-electric vehicles, stop using AC, reduce consumption (...)" won't save us if indeed the massive hits to old-growth forest doom us anyhow.
Arguing for arguing’s sake gets old fast when there is nothing left to drink.
What ever happened to biomass energy? I'd rather burn wood in a controlled way that produces the best possible exhaust than have it burn uncontrolled. Encouraging biomass energy would create a market and economic incentives to manage forests.
I was expecting to learn something new from this article, instead I got a bunch of numbers and a careful number of deaths from smoke 'by the end of the century' prediction.
What end of the century ? The way things are going, these cities (in Europe) are going to be unlivable by the end of this decade. They already are. And the fires..
Numbers, percentages, increases, excess, estimated.. We've constructed this abstract parallel universe in which we comfortably live in front of the screens.. and then wonder why the world around us is burning.
Climate change.. Such a comfortable word behind which we can all hide and dispel the responsibility for a life of copious comfort and pleasure.
It's the avocado toasts, the leather jackets, the 1-click-checkouts, the weekend flight to Barcelona, the CL=F price, the bonuses, the 'natural resources' there for us to use and exploit in infinite amounts..
The whole fucking system. That's why the world is burning.
Yeah, I'm guilty of all of the above too. And I have no solution. Just blowing out the smoke from those fires.
As Macron said in 2023: "Who could have predicted the climate crisis?"
The people in charge a either clinically retarded or willingly ignoring the problem, either way we're fucked, the point of no return is behind us now, this is the new normal, and it'll only get worse
In some ways I wonder if these timescales are "beyond comprehension" for most people. You can tell people the temperature will go up in 20 years, but you can't make them feel what it will be like. In the same way you can tell a 10 year old what it's like to be age 35 but they don't get it, and I've heard what it's like to be age 80 but I don't really know and won't for some time.
> You can tell people the temperature will go up in 20 years
I think the biggest issue with the climate change communication is that the scientists decided to focus on a temperature delta.
There is no meaningful temperature delta, it's just something that you get after a lot of aggregation and averaging.
Sure it makes sense for scientists running their models and such, but it should never have been the primary communication tool to politicians and laymen.
I think it would have been significantly better if they invented some new scale, like the Richter scale or the hurricane severity scale, which instead incorporates the effects of the average temperature rising. A scale which directly communicates a sense of how many more fires will we see per year, how many more severe storms, flash floods etc.
I think we've gotten to the point where the question can be asked looking back, not forward: think back to your childhood and how much things have changed since then? If you've lived long enough you can notice these things.
I used to have snow for weeks each winter in my city and now if I get 2-3 days of snow a year it's unusual. Extreme weather events where it rains in one day as much as in one month have become a recurring event to the point we're re-planning sewage systems around these things.
> Arguably it's rational (though selfish) to think like this.
Is it? We are not talking about screwing the climate for the people who will come in 200 years, right? In the last decades we have been saying "if we don't change the trend, your children will most likely die because of the climate change".
Is it rational to be 30 and not care about the fact that we will be screwed long before we reach the age of retirement?
Everyday people are generally more pro-renewables and climate action. The politicians can be targeted with bribes by anyone affected by the transition.
A classic collective action problem as described by Mancur Olson.
Agreed that the people in charge do nothing and don't understand the problem.
However, the people in charge (e.g. in France) are elected by the people, and therefore represent it. Do you think that the far-right will care more about the climate crisis? The French people is likely to elect them next year.
It's too easy to vote for people who don't give a shit about the climate crisis, and then blame them.
> either way we're fucked, the point of no return is behind us now
The faster and the harder we react, the more we save. Fires are a good example: because many trees are burning now (therefore they are already dead) and many trees will burn (because the fire won't magically stop), it's worth fighting to preserve as much as we can. Saying "we won't get those dead trees back, so we may as well let the rest of the forest burn" is counter-productive.
We need to act now. And not by electing morons and then blaming them for being morons.
* CO2 emissions are screwing the climate, and CO2 emissions come from fossil fuels. We need to stop using fossil fuels.
* Our way of life depends on fossil fuels. In some cases it's obvious (we transport food in trucks that need oil), but it's too easy to believe that we may replace that with electricity. It's a lot more complicated than that: everything depends on petrochemical products. How do you transport food without plastics? How do you build electronics without petrochemical products (the PCBs need them, for one)? Without electronics, how do you manage solar panels?
* We don't necessarily have to go back to the Middle-Age: first we probably couldn't: we are way too many for that, and second we know a lot more than they did.
But overall, we will have to do a lot less with a lot less. We have to think about what's fundamental, and how we want to preserve it. I'm not saying "choose between a new game console or a new smartphone every two years instead of having both". I'm saying "do you want to preserve some nature? Produce enough food for everybody? Keep some kind of democratic system?".
Of course, it's too much, we cannot do everything that we need, and we won't be able to preserve everything that we want. We need to accept it and start prioritising.
Overall, I would say that a good first step would be to get informed about how bad it is. There are enough books and resources about that. The people need to be informed in order to elect informed people. Too many don't give a shit, spend their free time on TikTok and then blame the ruling class.
Degrowth. Either by choice (degrow as fast as we can to preserve the climate) or not (degrow because we have passed the peak of production of fossil fuels and just don't have enough energy anymore).
We will have less energy, therefore less globalisation, fewer machines, fewer resources, whether we want it or not. We won't be able to keep producing as much as we do now.
So we will have less, and we will produce less. The game is to find a way to do it without collapsing entirely. And the longer we wait, the harder it will get (because the climate will get worse and there will be less and less available fossil fuels to help the transition).
It's a prisoners dilemma. No country can risk de-growth or not develop because some countries either DGAF or actively want climate change to happen (Russia) and will gladly take advantage of anyone who lets their guard down.
The only way climate change stops is with a technological solution.
> As Macron said in 2023: "Who could have predicted the climate crisis?"
The people in charge a either clinically retarded or willingly ignoring the problem,
The "people in charge" as well as the "climate experts" are generally aligned on the climate crisis, but everyone has been surprised by unexpected acceleration and the very sudden swings.
Put differently, you can predict and act, according to the trend, but the sudden and unpredictable timing of these swings is a separate, and more difficult issue to navigate.
For instance, can anyone predict specifically what will happen "next" and "where" and prepare to mitigate the impact?
This is completely wrong. The climate experts are not surprised by this at all. We've known about it for decades. We just didn't give a shit because it was not impacting us directly.
Now it's starting to impact us directly, but we still don't really give a shit. In a few weeks it will be business as usual.
It will get worse every year, and we will be more and more willing to do something as it gets worse. But we will have fewer and fewer resources to do it, and less stuff to save (once a forest disappears, you as a human won't see it come back in your lifetime).
While we haven’t known the exact trajectory of the crisis, it has been known for decades that the trend would generally and increasingly point towards “future is bad” if we didn’t reduce emissions. World leaders bet on having more time to shift away from harmful policy and lost.
The specific swings are a little surprising, but only in the way that a macaroni jumps around in hard to predict directions if you put it in boiling water. We’ve made the weather less predictable, but we knew we were doing it.
What we all need to understand is that after oil, we just won't have enough energy to maintain our current way of life. Not just energy by the way: our way of life relies on petrochemical products (from fertilisers to electronics). Solar panels need electronics, we don't know if we can build/maintain them at scale without computers that need petrochemical products.
So we need as much as we can of everything. Both renewables and nuclear.
I can't tell from that article whether they're opposed to nuclear energy or whether they don't think nuclear is the best use of the money (e.g., compared with renewables).
I always find it interesting when politicians mention temperature target goals.. what are you still talking about, it's done. We now need to worry about the hundreds of millions of people that are neither asylum migrants or economic migrant but survival migrants. The real discussion will become how we keep those out very soon. And since there are no good solutions from the "good" people who ignored everything and got us into this mess it will be the bad people giving us the only remaining "solution": violence.
It's not. The climate will warm as much as we emit CO2. Sure, the CO2 that we have already emitted won't leave. We've passed 1.5C, that won't come back in our lifetime. But the more we emit, the worse it will get. To keep what we have now, we have to stop emitting entirely, right now.
> We now need to worry about the hundreds of millions of people
We need to worry about the problems that are coming from the CO2 we have already emitted, that's true. But we also need to worry a lot about the fact that we are making it worse every single day. We are not reducing our CO2 emissions, we are increasing them right now.
Are you worried about hundreds of millions of refugees? The way it's going, we'll reach 4C. It means that billions of people will have to move.
I don't think we can still use the concept of "refugee" when its entire countries that need to move because their part of the world has become so hot that humans cannot survive outside without life support (that's what will happen to billions of people with 4C). At this point, it's entire countries moving with their military, it's just global war.
hundreds of millions of people coming to europe (i didn't mention) is still lowballing on purpose. sure it's billions, but not all will go to one place was my thinking here.
you are talking reason, you are in the wrong timeline buddy. i'm talking about what we will chose as a society, i feel we can't help ourselves.
You can convince a person (me certainly) that we should stop immediately (or very very short time frame). But most people have experienced their entire lifetime of propaganda and fallacious arguments that words and reason have lost all meaning.
We are still getting cooked so slowly that people will only see unrelated incidents for a long time. World War(s) 3 is what the survivors will call it.
Maybe I've missed it because I don't follow news on this much (apart from "it will get warmer/worse"), but what happens after that? Seems like I've been hearing "by 2100" for the last 20 years, but now that's only 74 years away. Some people alive today will live to see it. Will it just keep getting warmer or will it level off somewhat? Or is it not worth discussing because preceding events will already be such an overwhelming disaster?
> Will it just keep getting warmer or will it level off somewhat?
It will get warmer for every kg of CO2 we emit. If we emitted less every day, it would still warm, but slower. Right now we are emitting more every day, so it will warm faster and faster.
> Or is it not worth discussing because preceding events will already be such an overwhelming disaster?
It's always worth discussing. It is not linear: every extra degree makes it a lot worse than the previous one. We're finding it worrying now with 1.5C? We should do everything we can to stay as close as possible to it. Probably we cannot avoid 2C, and if we keep going with the current emissions, that's 4C. 4C means that billions of people have to leave their country. I think it pretty much means that more than half of us die in a global war?
There is hope: we don't have to reach 4C. But we have to change our way of life for that. Which should be worth it, right? I'm ready to change my way of life to... survive.
Europe (and the world at large, really) can either wait for its demise, through increasingly oppressive climate hostile to human occupation and de-industrialization while the rest of the world continues on the current trajectory, or start getting its shit together and immediately commence climate engineering on a continental scale. Start with stratospheric aerosol injection, and mandate it not unlike "sustainable" aviation fuels on aircraft flying at the minimum altitude required to have any effect, as it should be possible [0], expedite research into other climate engineering efforts including space-based ones, promptly address the complete and utter reliance on fossil fuels and those profiting from it.. if climate change isn't something worth approaching as a war would be, then there's no point discussing it at all. Researchers and journals have been warning of crossing the point of no return and temperature targets for years now, you either submit to it and keep chasing emission reduction targets, or take action. The idea of simply "adapting to it getting worse" is suicidal, hard to sell to the public and depends on bureaucrats not getting kicked out.
We can't trust them for asbestos and leaded gas but we'll trust them with "stratospheric aerosol injection"...
God know what unknown complex system will fuck up and end up making things 10x worse. We'll do literally everything besides consuming and producing less
Neither of those two have anything to do with the suggested technique(s). Humans are already engaging in climate engineering through existing at any meaningful rhythm necessary to sustain 8 billion people on the planet, it's merely by side-effect, aimless, and lacking any coordination and agency. You are not getting billions of people to "consume" and "produce" less. What you're engaging in right now is no different from what oil companies did decades ago in a coordinated effort, shifting blame onto the consumers, and ultimately the swindling of the century when it comes to environmentalism, see [0] for a quick example. You're free to succumb through inaction, the rest of us would rather not, and never depend on failing, moving emission targets dependent on the whims of politicians and the masses electing them, proven to be incapable of entertaining any abstract long-term planning, let alone sticking to it. It's unfathomable some would prefer entertaining the idea of humanity fundamentally altering its nature rather than actively making up for the effects they are influencing while addressing them, through technology available today, but you must've already given up to believe this is "the new normal" like you said.
“French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu warned the country "is going through an unprecedented fire season", with 116,085 hectares (286,852 acres) burned and 13,566 fire starts recorded since January.
The minister revealed in a post on X that nine out of 10 fires "are human-caused and most arise from carelessness: a cigarette butt, a barbecue, work carried out without precaution".”
In my country (EU) when large-scale land-use projects are approved —such as solar panel farms, mining operations, and buildings construction— fires break out and they burn everything in their path, tens of thousands of hectares. This -often- even happens the day after the project's approval (they are not scared). Time ago, laws that prevented construction on protected land after a fire were removed (included more sabotages on prevention that came after that. This along two different governments of supposedly opposite colors).
On television such fires were/are sold/brainwashed as climate change, rather than corruption and psychopaths.
I would recommend to keep an eye on this things, to investigate possible motivations, independently, fire by fire.
Natural causes discarded in the wildfire of Vall d'Uixó in Castellon, Spain. The police suspects that this was (also) provoked.
With a perimeter of 67 Km, the wildfire started in several points at the same time, has devastated 7500 hectares and displaced or confined 38000 people.
This is not even a start, is a: will continue until we address the elephant in the room: Too much of this wildfires are arson by proxy. Crime is always the biggest category in the chart of known causes, and natural causes are always the smaller one (and a very small one indeed, between 5 and 10% or so).
So without criminals, lets say 90% of those forests would keep evolving towards a less and less flammable state and the soil would keep sequestrating carbon, that is exactly what we want and need. Or would be logged, sequestrating carbon also.
Instead to pour acid raining over Europe, why if we try first to harden the current laws, remove the economical rewards, and fight the disinformation campaigns of farm trolls (always deployed at the same periods), until the incentives to burn are reduced?
I get your sarcasm but it's good that a paper very strongly focused on economic activity is on board with the need to tackle climate change. A couple decades ago all the capitalist neoliberal institutions were still trying too pooh-pooh it all under the rug. That is truly over, with the current US administration as the only significant exception.
Our software and AI capabilities have improved astronomically… but nature is still nature. Working with the physical world is still so hard. Humbling, in a way.
People are truly having a climate change discussion fatigue. They hear all the time from politicians, celebrities, influencers, etc. that they should stop eating meat, should not drive non-electric vehicles, should not use AC, reduce consumption, and all other bullshit while the people preaching those have started wars that emit billions of tons of carbon, travel on their private planes to climate change summits, taking their private plane to ski in Aspen and throw lavish parties to celebrate birthdays, etc.
It's basically normal people should sacrifice their standards of livings and pay taxes to reduce carbon emission while the same rules doesn't apply for the other class of the society. Most people are living pay check to pay check and out of all the worries in their minds, climate change is the last thing they can afford to worry about.
Well climate change is happening whether wealthy people are hypocrites or not.
Also there a lot of people in very poor countries (india, south east asia, africa) that are already feeling the effects and need to worry about it a lot.
I would actually say rich people can afford the most to not worry about climate change, because they can stave off the effects better than poor people (moving to colder climates, building cooling systems, or fleeing to mars [1])
> Well climate change is happening whether wealthy people are hypocrites or not. Also there a lot of people in very poor countries (india, south east asia, africa) that are already feeling the effects and need to worry about it a lot.
no shit sherlock, poor people in those countries have been suffering from starvation, diseases and lack of basic necessities even before the climate change was a thing. For them, it's just another misery on top of their already miserable lives.
Nobody gave a shit about those people in poor countries 20-30 years ago, all of a sudden everyone is worries about climate change because Europe is burning. Had it been a monsoon flooding or a drought in South Asia, nobody in the Economist would even bat an eye, let alone publish an article.
The propaganda has done it's job here, because your base assumption is that dealing with climate change is a cost.
But all the research suggests dealing with climate change is the cheaper option.
There's complexities there but you're effectively saying that you're too poor to pay off a credit card. Okay, but your only going to get poorer by not engaging with reality.
> The propaganda has done it's job here, because your base assumption is that dealing with climate change is a cost.
Yes, that is a reasonable base assumption. When in doubt, it's a reasonably safe bet that people have chosen the cheapest and most effective path to something. It isn't always true, but it's true more often than not.
You can label it anyway you want, if you want pay it with all your credit cards be my guest, but one thing for sure is that paying for it even more is not going to make me any richer or even elevate my living standards. That’s the hard reality. Normal people are F’ed either way so absolutely no incentive for me to care at all
This post would make sense if we didn't live a world where the head of the most powerful country in the world says climate change is a scam.
Also, plenty of middle class, comfortable off people refuse to change their comparatively luxurious, king like lives even a little bit unless there is financial upside to them.
well I have good news! normal people don't have to sacrifice, fossil fuel companies do. if the govt mandates something (like with the ozone layer, or with lead acid battery recycling), something that was once impossible becomes possible.
and then what? are people going to ride horses to work? beg on the street because the manufacturing companies have closed and they lost their source of income? or are you just dumb or maybe naive to think that banning CFC and fossil fuel consumption would have the same effect on the everyday lives of normal people?
more developed countries are already prepared for what you describe: people would (continue to) take public transit, and rich people would (continue to) pay for the unemployed to live and retrain until they get new jobs. If a country was missing these basic features it would be scarier.
These firefighting solutions... aren't they a bit outdated and cumbersome? I mean essentially moving water into a given area by planes, copters and vehicles seems a bit primitive, isn't it?
I'm a firm believer that sooner or later we will be extinct by extreme heat and suffocation.
Two weeks ago here in Umbria, Italy the heat was extreme. It was 40°C without a breeze of air, it literally felt like braathing hot air. One morning while I was walking I couldn't believe the amount of dry leaves on the street, by pictures people would have guessed that it was autumn.
I have a really good tolerance to high temperatures but this time I got home very dizzy.
Hope is not too late to revert the current situation, but realistically year after year temperatures have been raising steadly.
This has happened to the earth before, the earth will change, Northern Atlantic will freeze over, stopping the currents of the ocean, and raise water levels at least several meters, enough to flood most cities on the East Coast.
There is no "new normal", we are in a slope. As long as we emit CO2, the climate will get worse. Year after year. With effects like fires accelerating it, or the loss of the Amazon (it's pretty much lost already, isn't it?) that will just result in more CO2 being released.
We don't have to adapt to the situation as it is now, because it is pretty much the best scenario. We have to adapt to the fact that it will get worse, and worse, and worse. And save what we can. Worried about your country not dominating on the AI scene? Wait until your biggest worry is food.
Even if we stopped emissions today, Earth will keep warming up for a couple of decades. We’re not at equilibrium temperature for the current CO2 levels.
I wonder what would happen if there was one of those large volcanic eruptions.
There’s been a few over the last few hundred years. If there’s dust and haze it might be a respite, apart from famines due to poor harvests.
I guess we’ll find out should it happen.
We’re in a more precarious state, and these random natural events could be very tricky.
>. If there’s dust and haze it might be a respite, apart from famines due to poor harvests.
When the Canada haze hit here the temp dropped from "forecasted 90s" to "pleasant 70s" and not only were the temps lower but there was no direct sun beating down. Me and the boys were expecting some outdoor work we had planned to suck and take a long time. We ran through it in no time flat.
You're breathing that 'haze' the whole time though. That can't be good.
AFAIK, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo(sp?) made it quite a bit harder to build the case for warming. What about the effects of that big kaboom in the Pacific a year or two ago ?
One not very well known fact is that even if we stop emissions today, the elevated CO₂ levels will remain for many centuries.
They way I think/hope we can fix this is two parts:
1. The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale is to permanently sequester it underground. The oil/gas industry can cheaply deposit huge amounts of gas there. The unsolved problem is extracting enough CO₂ from the atmosphere at reasonable cost. People are working on that, but it will probably be decades before it's is approaching practicality.
Which is why we need to do this in the meantime:
2. Spray the stratosphere with SO₂. This reflects some some sunlight and cools the planet. It sounds scary, but is actually safe: https://makesunsets.com/pages/new-faq
> The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale [...] The unsolved problem is extracting
You answered it yourself: it's not possible to get rid of the excess CO2. Think about conservation of energy: we extracted energy by burning stuff and producing CO2. We cannot revert that with less energy than we extracted from doing it in the first place.
> It sounds scary, but is actually safe
Famous last words.
1. There is abundant energy on the earth 1kW per sq MTR from the sun. 2. The ocean absorbs a large portion of the CO2 emitted 3. Phytoplankton can eat carbon in the ocean and they use the sun's energy to do it... What they lack is iron.
I agree that it's not easy, but we could in theory use solar energy, which is abundant and cheap. I.e. We can use different energy than the one we got out of the fossil fuels we burned.
> I.e. We can use different energy than the one we got out of the fossil fuels we burned.
We're talking about using more energy than the one we got from the fossil fuels we burned, right? So that means that on top of replacing fossil fuels with renewables, we would need to more than double it in order to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
This, in itself, is impossible. Already we won't be able to replace fossil fuels entirely, we will just end up with less energy in total. We most certainly won't end up with twice as much.
And that's assuming that we could extract the CO2 from the atmosphere with close to the amount of energy we got by burning it in the first place. Which is wrong. CO2 in the atmosphere is actually very costly to extract in terms of energy.
It's not that it's not easy. It's practically impossible.
So the neat thing is that this isn't at all true.
The total annual CO2 budget of the earth is tremendous; less than 5% of CO2 emissions each year into the atmosphere are from humans. Volcanism, photosynthesis, and other natural sources outweigh humans by far. In numbers, ballpark 730gigatons from natural sources and about 30gt from humans.
If you look at the amount the CO2 levels increase each year in the atmosphere, you'll find that they net increase by 16gt per year or so.
Implying that if we ceased all human CO2 emissions, the atmospheric levels would start recovering at around half the rate they're currently increasing.
This is an absurd statement. Lets use bank accounts instead of CO2 to point out the absurdity.
Imagine every year a company makes $730,000 in revenue but spends $730,000 on various expenses. Its bank balance doesnt change because the income and expenses cancel out.
Now suppose the company starts receiving an additional $30,000 every year while its expenses stay the same. At the end of each year, its bank balance increases by $30,000.
By your logic, someone could argue: "That extra $30,000 can't be responsible for the growing bank balance because it's less than 5% of the company's total annual cash flow of $760,000."
That's obviously nonsense. The bank balance grows *entirely because of the net imbalance*, not because the extra income is a large fraction of the gross cash flowing through the account.
The carbon cycle works the same way. Natural emissions and natural uptake are both enormous and are approximately in balance. That 730 gigatons of CO2 released by natural sources has a corresponding 730 gigatons of CO2 capture from natural sinks. Its human emissions of CO2 that are the extra deposit that creates an ongoing imbalance, and that's why atmospheric CO2 continues to rise.
Also photosynthesis is not a source of CO2, on the contrary it's one of, if not the biggest carbon sink, reclaiming a significant portion of that 730 gigatons of CO2 released by volcanos and other sources.
> The bank balance grows entirely because of the net imbalance
Yes, this is my whole point. You wrote a long condescending comment accusing me of being a climate denier that fully agrees with me.
My point is that the actual amount of atmospheric increase per year is less than the amount humans put into the atmosphere per year, so 1) obviously humans are responsible for CC, and 2) could stop it at any time by dropping emissions below the amount the atmospheric increase amount.
It's unclear which message you're trying to convey, but your math checks out.
The net CO2 impact of natural processes is -19Gt/yr. Humans add +37G/yr for a net +18Gt. If we stopped everything, you'd expect -19Gt/yr; however, natural sinks like the ocean will start off-gassing, cutting the improvement to about half.
Because of how long this switch will take, most IPCC options need 100 to 1000 Gt of net CO2 removal by the end of the century to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees.
> The net CO2 impact of natural processes is -19Gt/yr. Humans add +37G/yr for a net +18Gt. If we stopped everything, you'd expect -19Gt/yr
That is the message I am.trying to convey.
> So the neat thing is that this isn't at all true.
Then goes ahead explaining something completely different.
You were talking about how it'll be impossible to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere without burning unreasonable amounts of energy.
I say that's not so. We need only to sufficiently reduce emissions.
> We need only to sufficiently reduce emissions.
Well I agree on that. And even if we cut them to zero, the temperatures will not go down. So the very best we can hope is to keep the temperatures at the current level, and that's assuming that we cut all our emissions.
And the fact remains that we would need unreasonable amounts of energy to extract CO2 from the atmosphere (it was suggested with solar panels and stuff).
I didn't know that if we completely cut emissions, then CO2 would go down (and temperature would not during our lifetime, but they would at least stop rising). But "humans extracting CO2 from the atmosphere to compensate for their emissions" is impossible for the reasons I mentioned.
Very napkin math shows that annual energy consumption from fossil fuels is 500 exajoules. Every day the earth receives 15,000 exajoules in solar energy.
So to cover double the energy consumption of fossil fuels with solar we need to cover 0.2% of the surface in solar. Compare to around 10% covered in farmland.
Again, very back of the envelope math, but in my opinion this does not seem impossible.
This is like saying "of course we can travel at the speed of light. Proof: the light does it, it's possible".
What are we going to replace concrete with?
It is possible to get rid of excess CO2. Yes it goes against entropy, isn't very efficient and requires a ton of energy but we do have sources of tbe energy required in the form of the sun, nuclear, geothermal etc.
But that doesn't matter while we're still emitting.
Surely it matters even more while we're still emitting?
> You answered it yourself: it's not possible to get rid of the excess CO2. Think about conservation of energy: we extracted energy by burning stuff and producing CO2.
You can use pyrolysis to reduce usage of energy. Instead of building ethanol using corn etc, some fast growing crop can be converted to biochar using pyrolysis. And stored indefinitely underground or somewhere. Of course this isn't profitable and probably will run in to climate activists roadblocks.
Maybe it's not clear that I'm talking about what to do with the excess CO₂ after we've stopped emitting more!
The stratospheric injections of SO₂ can bring temperatures down to healthy levels. This fixes most of the negative effects of high CO₂, and can go on for centuries if need be...
... but I'd prefer to get that CO₂ out once and for all. Solar powered machines that extracts it from the air and pumps it down to eternal underground cavities should be able to do that once we have much better tech. If it takes decades or centuries doesn't matter too much.
Stratospheric aerosol injection hasn't been tested at any kind of scale, so we do not know whether it would be harmful (e.g. acid rain) or not. It would also be very expensive, so it's not really a practical solution at the moment. It may pan out, but stating "actually safe" is not yet known.
The Mt Pinatubo volcanic eruption in 1991 actually did inject huge amounts of SO₂ to the stratosphere, and it disappeared over the next few years.
While it remained, northern hemisphere temperatures lowered by ~0.5°C.
USGS report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/pinatubo/self/
Since the stratosphere is far above the rain cycle, it's very hard to imagine a mechanism whereby this could produce acid rain, and even if it did, acid rain is a much smaller problem than global warming.
> acid rain is a much smaller problem than global warming.
In fact it used to be a common occurence during the heavy industrial pollution in the 20th century. So much that after the pollution stopped, farmers had to start applying sulphur to their fields as nutrients for some crops (I learned about this after unsuccessfully trying to grow tomatoes in alkaline soil).
> In fact it used to be a common occurence during the heavy industrial pollution in the 20th century.
I remember watching news reports about acid rain in the 90s and being terrified that any ominous rain cloud might be full of acid rain which would melt away my town and family.
Yes, volcanoes are relevant data points, but that's also very different to proposed methods of seeding. It does raise the question of whether someone will decide to set off bombs in fault-lines to try and set off an eruption - I recall Trump asking why hurricanes couldn't be disrupted by the early use of bombs.
> acid rain is a much smaller problem than global warming
Possibly, but acid rain can devastate marine ecosystems and cause issues with soil quality, so I'm not convinced that we can just hand-wave it away.
I can foresee greedy capitalists rubbing their hands together over being paid to seed SO2 into the stratosphere and then being paid to clean it up too. There's probably a lot of money to be made selling clean air if we can pollute the atmosphere enough to cause health problems for people.
The SO₂ cleans up itself in ~2 years.
I'm not sure what you mean by "cleans up itself" as it doesn't just disappear. What is likely is that it gets distributed through various ecosystems and thus is no longer in the stratosphere. What concerns me is our lack of knowledge about that process and secondary effects on ecosystems.
Humanity has a track record of making assumptions about complex systems and treating them like a simple engine.
The process is well understood: https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/25/3821/2025/acp-25-3821...
> 2. Spray the stratosphere with SO₂. This reflects some some sunlight and cools the planet. It sounds scary, but is actually safe: [...]
The Pina2bo strategy!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57094295-termination-sho...
Best would be to capture CO2, and then solidify the carbon to a compact stable stable state by taking away the oxygen. Then we have a highly concentrated pure carbon form that we can just bury underground. Or add some hydrogen and get this liquid state that we can pump back into those empty underground reservoirs. But maybe we should stop taking it out in the first place...
We get energy by extracting oil and burning it. It takes a lot more energy to do the reverse.
We already cannot stop burning oil today because the economy would implode. I don't think that it is reasonable to think that not only we could stop burning oil entirely, AND at the same time produce more energy than we got from oil just for extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere... And the reality is even worse than that, because on top of all that* we would need more energy to... live.
It's important people understand that we cannot extract the CO2 once it's out there. It's practically impossible, period.
You are talking about trees...
Trees that disappear in huge fires more and more often, unfortunately.
> The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale is to permanently sequester it underground. The oil/gas industry can cheaply deposit huge amounts of gas there. The unsolved problem is extracting enough CO₂ from the atmosphere at reasonable cost.
The bigger unsolved problem is how to get this paid for.
> It sounds scary, but is actually safe
Posted by the account, BurningFrog. You can't make this shit up.
Forgive me if I do not take "making sunsets" as a credible source of information.
There's a body of research that covers existential risks associated with sai and srm:
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00163...
- https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/climate/articles/10.338...
- https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017EF00...
Further from an actual credible source:
https://www.unep.org/resources/report/Solar-Radiation-Modifi...
> While there is a growing body of literature and advanced modelling on the topic, which has been developing for many years, there is very little evidence or research on the risks and impacts of SRM. The report outlines these limitations in the evidence base. UNEP is concerned that while the scientific literature shows that SRM, and stratospheric aerosol injection specifically, can cool the globe, there is a dearth of data on the risks and impacts. For technologies that can alter the chemistry of the stratosphere, the world needs much more information to support decision-making.
No, it is not "safe" by any measure.
It also reduces efficiency of solar energy generation by 5-15%, so we had better build out additional energy supply to account for that.
https://www.science-gate.com/IJAAS/Articles/2025/2025-12-01/...
Only safe if we never stop doing it once we start I think? Otherwise it ends up being worse than if we had not done it in the first place
It's been reduced before through cracking down on pollution. The results are directly suspected to be responsible for an increase in warming rate, both locally and worldwide. The only way in which it would be necessary to keep releasing it, and in increasingly higher quantities, is only if no other measure or action is taken, which is obviously not the intended goal: its purpose is to make up for the damage already done that will linger for longer than anyone currently alive.
The emission reductions in our simulations correspond closely to the emissions reductions realized in East Asia over the period 2010–2023, in magnitude and geographical location. This allows us to put our results in the context of the recent uptick in the observed rate of global mean surface warming. Here, we find that emissions reductions in East Asia have contributed up to 0.05 °C/decade since 2010, explaining a large fraction of the observed increase of 0.06 °C/decade over the same period, after filtering out the effects of interannual variability. (from https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02527-3)
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The fundamental reason that climate change is an issue is because it happens over timescales which the ecosystem and human society struggle to keep up. No one reasonable believes we can cool from where we're headed, minus some extreme technical approaches, slowing it down is the goal.
You don't seem to be denying human caused, or maybe you'd say accelerated, climate change. If we could flip a switch and spread the future warming over a millennium instead of half a century I think everyone would take that deal.
> You don't seem to be denying human caused, or maybe you'd say accelerated, climate change. If we could flip a switch and spread the future warming over a millennium instead of half a century I think everyone would take that deal.
You know, that's yet another major problem. You're wrong. If we did that, meltwater water supply would essentially stop (in somewhere between 8 months and 2 years), everywhere on the planet. Big, highly populated areas of our planet will dry up (Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Ganges valley in India depends significantly on meltwater. That's easily 2 billion people)
In the past century, humanity has adapted itself to constant climate change. Any variable that depends on the temperature delta that we depend on will rapidly become problematic if we stop accelerating global warming.
Now I live in Europe. I don't expect water problems here (or only temporary). I do however expect problems. I'm not even sure what but there is a fuckton of things that will change back if global warming slows and I highly doubt that will just go down smoothly.
I know the theory behind green parties is "let's just stop doing what humanity is doing, and nature will save us". I'm kind of hoping people will realize that that, too, is bullshit. We will need to decide and agree what we want the climate to do, and then make it happen. No matter the choice made, this will have existential consequences for a bunch of places on this planet, and nothing can help that.
"Let's stop global warming" is not a solution to ecological problems, and not necessarily a better solution than continuing it. We WILL need to take control of the climate, and that includes dealing with the consequences of whatever decision we make. "stop CO2" is as much a soundbite, and as stupid, as "drill, baby, drill". Thunberg is as problematic as Trump, it's just harder to realize that that is the case.
Not that I think there's a chance in hell that global warming will stop or even just slow down whatever we decide to do in the west. Getting China, South Asia, and now more and more India and in the future Africa to agree to not use fossil fuels is not politically feasible. There is no solution there either.
So my vote? Aerosols to cool the planet. Which one, and how to spread? TBD. And, yes, that may mean the planet cools again BUT ALSO parts of the planet become uninhabitable. We'll need to agree and deal with that.
> If we did that, meltwater water supply would essentially stop (in somewhere between 8 months and 2 years), everywhere on the planet
How? Why? Meltwater comes from the temperature difference between summer and winter, how does it have anything to do with this?
> Any variable that depends on the temperature delta that we depend on will rapidly become problematic if we stop accelerating global warming.
What variable depends on a temperature _delta_?
> Now I live in Europe. I don't expect water problems here (or only temporary).
We have water problems right now. Agriculture has problems, nuclear reactors have to shut down because of too warm(France) or missing (Romania) water. Dry forests leading to more fire.
> I know the theory behind green parties is "let's just stop doing what humanity is doing, and nature will save us".
I have never heard of this, I have a hard time that anybody relevant claims this.
> If we did that, meltwater water supply would essentially stop (in somewhere between 8 months and 2 years)
If we stopped CO2 emissions today and, like you said, warming would continue unabated for decades, why would the meltwater situation change in 2 years?
> You're wrong. If we did that [spread manmade climate change over next millennium], meltwater water supply would essentially stop (in somewhere between 8 months and 2 years), everywhere on the planet.
What exactly are you talking about here? Meltwater amounts would be roughly the same compared to the last millennium, until glaciers start vanishing (only, in that obviously favorably scenario, in 500ish years instead of this century).
I get the impression that you think that manmade climate change is somewhat helpful compensation for natural trending towards ice age. This is not the case at all, because the rate of change is too high. See https://xkcd.com/1732/.
A (natural) looming ice age is not problematic or threathening at all because that happens so slowly that we get many centuries to act.
Isn't it primarily arson? == Europe is currently facing a dual crisis of arson-driven wildfires and coordinated sabotage operations. In the summer of 2026, extreme heatwaves have exacerbated wildfire seasons in France, Spain, and Italy, where authorities have linked many blazes to deliberate human ignition. French Interior Minister Sébastien Lecornu reported 162 arrests for suspected arson since early July, noting that 90% of forest fires in France are human-caused. Investigators in Italy’s Calabria region uncovered disturbing tactics, including the release of cats with flammable-soaked rags tied to their tails to spread fire.
Beyond accidental or opportunistic arson, Europe has experienced a wave of state-sponsored sabotage in 2024 and 2025, primarily attributed to Russian intelligence. These attacks involved incendiary devices in packages sent to logistics hubs like DHL in Germany, the UK, and Poland, as well as targeted fires at an IKEA in Vilnius and a warehouse in London. Authorities consider these acts of hybrid warfare aimed at disrupting critical infrastructure and testing delivery channels for larger attacks on the US and Canada.
Key developments in European arson include:
Wildfire Arson: France arrested 162 suspects since July 6, 2026, while Spain’s deadliest blaze in 40 years killed 13 people in Almería. Calabrian Tactics: Italian officials found evidence of calculated arson using delayed ignition devices and animals to accelerate fire spread in southern Italy. Sabotage Network: Russian agents have been linked to multiple arson attacks across England, Poland, Lithuania, and Germany, with several suspects convicted or charged for acts of terrorism and espionage. Legal Fragmentation: The EU lacks a harmonized definition of arson or a centralized criminal database, forcing reliance on fragmented national investigations despite advanced satellite monitoring systems like Copernicus.
All human-caused fires aren't arson, most of these are usually negligence (source: worked in operations at fire service). Not discounting the risk of arson but I find it is used a lot to distract from conditions making the forests a tinder box.
A comment from an earlier thread alleged that Spanish policy says that forests that are destroyed due to fire don't have to be rebuilt, the land can be re-purposed. That's what's driving the arson in Spain.
I have no way to evaluate the veracity of this site, but https://inspain.news/spains-wildfire-tragedy-now-has-a-human... says:
> In some cases, arson is linked to economic gain: land clearance, insurance fraud, or disputes over grazing rights. Others are sparked by resentment towards environmental restrictions.
this is really interesting. i bet they want to put dc's on it.
This narrative is part of the disinformation campaigns and smoke curtains that pour after the wildfires.
Is was a possibility in the past, but the current situation is different. More often than not, when we examine the coordinated internet rage bait about sinister projects to build in the burnt areas (solar farms, AI plants, etc...) this projects don't exist really. Houses will be simply rebuilt by their owners, no soil change expected.
More often than not, the people starting the rage bait post from a different country also.
But too much still are still arson, and people should know better yet than "I will burn my home and destroy my future for ten juicy bucks that this kind stranger is offering me".
And not all crimes are solved. Some on the 'negligence', 'natural causes' and 'unknown' could be also still arson on disguise.
Ukraine's treat to start bombing 'Ozon' ware stores and to finish with 'Wildberries' actual misery, could do more for stopping this wildfire waves than any of the current measures deployed.
As long as major countries like Germany are keeping their ban on nuclear power, climate change cannot be that urgent.
This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing. Meanwhile power from nuclear plants are very expensive, comparatively. So why should we invest in nuclear energy? I have the impression a lot of the debate about nuclear energy and Germany's decision to fade it out is now driven more by emotion/ignorance than reason.
Nuclear is proportionally expensive for one because we build a lot less and lose insititional knowledge and manufacturing capacity. Secondly because of ridiculous legislation and europes extreme ability to fuck with it politically. Thirdly because we don't count the gas plant to cover the intermitency of the renewables as part of the cost and if they'd take those out they'd find they run out of options for the cheap storage options as they become a larger share of the grid nor did they drew out the lifetime cost over the full length of a nuclear plants lifetime (shit gets replaced in the meantime)
At this point it may very well be better to go for renewables for much more of the grid coverage (after they fix their damn grid connections) But those pushing the cost picture have been everything but honest over the past 2 decades. I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage and such and a nuclear cost based on one unfinished american plant.
- nuclear increased in price over the period France built a lot of them. China is not currently experiencing cost price reduction in nuclear. Maybe we'd experience scale reductions in cost if we were to build at a much larger scale than that, but given that the world is already spending hundreds of billions just to build a handful of plants....
- nuclear also needs gas plants to handle peaking demands
> I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage
Which one was that? Lazard has always consistently overestimated the cost of solar and solar+storage.
> nuclear increased in price over the period France built a lot of them
Let's not pretend price is any concern of the people shutting down nuclear power. That's just not what it's about. Here is their page on the subject, and as you can clearly read: nuclear power "has no future".
https://www.gruene-bundestag.de/unsere-politik/was-unsere-po...
Second, Germany would not have to rebuild nuclear power, as the green party clearly shows. They only need to reopen existing plants.
It is STILL the case that reopening the existing plants would lower prices - a bit. But it would make a very large difference for German CO2 production because coal powerplants are doing baseload now and would be displaced by the nuclear plants. And if the Ukraine and Iran wars keep going it will lower prices a lot (or rather it would prevent another large price spike)
https://www.ewi.uni-koeln.de/de/aktuelles/gasverstromung-und...
> nuclear also needs gas plants to handle peaking demands
This is not a good argument given that the alternative was to switch to gas for most of the baseload, then lose the gas due to the war in Ukraine, to then switch to coal and LNG (LNG might technically be gas, but due to additional inefficiency it's worse than coal), and now losing all gas supplies (ie. from Qatar) and being forced to use even worse LNG supplies from the US.
Hell you'd think the greens would massively sponsor chemical research into LNG, since LNG efficiency is actually worse than what our bodies do to make fat. In other words: turning gas into liquid fuel (not LNG, actual liquid fuel) is possible to do with a catalyst at much higher efficiency than turning it into LNG. We don't know how, despite the fact that your body is probably doing it (to produce fatty acids) right now as you read this. You want to help climate change? Let's figure that one out, that would actually help CO2 output AND lower prices.
This gets repeated again and again. They are not in conflict with each other - both need to be done in tandem. It is not a this or that strategy - it is an all of the above strategy.
Nuclear is critical for long term generating power. Batteries and solar are good not able to maintain the same level of power quality and duration though are definitely incredibly important.
Nuclear is a high-capex source of electricity. It doesn’t do well economically in a grid where power if essentially free on sunny or windy days but you need a lot of backup power for a few hundred hours per year.
All power projects have to look at economic viability. Every project has different needs and market dynamics. THERE IS NOT A ONE TYPE OF PROJECT WORKS FOR ALL LOCATIONS. Resources mixes vary as do the demands of the power.
I can't stress this enough solar and battery dont work everywhere and they dont provide indefinite power quality. Nor does nuclear. They all need to be resourced where appropriate.
FWIW - there aren't a lot of grids that have the resource mix you described.
> It doesn’t do well economically
Well, economy is fossil fuels. In the world after fossil fuels, we may have to redefine what "economy" means.
That seems to have very low chances of success.
If you define "success" as "we prevent climate change", there is zero chance of success.
But it is not binary: the less we do, the worse it will get. It's not about whether we "succeed" or not, it's about how bad we let it become.
If it were true there is no point trying to avert climate change. It will literally require global economic collapse, mass death and starvation and a civilisational reset.
Fortunately, “economy is fossil fuels” is nonsense, so it actually makes sense to try and address this problem.
> Fortunately, “economy is fossil fuels” is nonsense
Is it?
The economy is what we produce and consume. The economy grows when we produce and consume more, it shrinks when we produce and consume less. How do we produce stuff nowadays? With fossil fuels. There is not a single object around you that did not require fossil fuels at some point.
Economy "does well" when we have easy access to fossil fuels, it doesn't when we don't. We can observe the impact on countries where fossil fuels get harder to get. An example would be Europe, where fossil fuels have been harder and harder to get since 2007 (which corresponds to the global peak of conventional oil). Since then, Europe has been slowing down if you look at physical indicators (like which surface is built or what weight is transported by trucks). GDP is artificial, it's arbitrarily modified to "compensate" for inflation.
People in the US love to say that Europe is slowing down because of regulations and laziness and all the smart people moving to the US, but the truth is that it is slowing down because of fossil fuels.
To stop destroying the climate, we need to stop using fossil fuels, and therefore we need to redefine what we expect from "the economy", because without fossil fuels there is no way we keep producing and consuming more.
But that's not all! Even if there was a way (!), it would not resolve the problem of biodiversity loss. We are currently, measurably living in a mass extinction that is happening orders of magnitudes faster than the one of the dinosaurs. If we don't get food problems because of climate change, chances are that we will because of the mass extinction. Climate change is just one existential problem we are facing.
In Europe, we have lost 80% of insects in the last 20 years, and that has NOTHING to do with climate change. Just loss of habitat, which is a consequence of our economy growing (and humans doing what humans do, like tourism and parking lots and cutting trees and overfishing). Climate change will just make that worse, it's just starting.
> It will literally require global economic collapse, mass death and starvation and a civilisational reset.
This is a certainty if we don't do anything. Now the more we do, the more we preserve. It will still be bad, make no mistake. But there is no such thing as "it's too late to act". The less we do, the worse it gets.
> There is not a single object around you that did not require fossil fuels at some point
This is sort of like saying the economy is air or the economy is sand. (What is closer to correct is the economy is, within approximation, energy.)
> the truth is that it is slowing down because of fossil fuels
American emissions per capita have been falling alongside rising GDP/capita. Europe’s malaises are broader than this.
> This is a certainty if we don't do anything
If action requires literally replacing and restarting the global economy, there is no hope. Might as well party. If, on the other hand, it’s a rewiring, it’s rational to do.
I thought we learned our lesson around hyperbolic environmental doomerism, but apparently not.
> American emissions per capita have been falling alongside rising GDP/capita
GDP is artificial. Did you ever check how they correct for inflation? GDP is worth nothing for science, it's just there for economists to do... whatever they do.
> If action requires literally replacing and restarting the global economy, there is no hope. Might as well party.
I don't know how you read that from what I say. I say, "if we don't do anything, we're completely screwed. The more we do, the better it gets". But yeah, if we keep doing what we are doing, we're doomed, that's certain.
> GDP is artificial
…all economic metrics are artificial. Society is artificial.
How are you defining an economy? Or is your original statement (“economy is fossil fuels”) just a tautology?
> don't know how you read that from what I say
There is no political system on the planet that can enact and survive economic collapse. If that’s what’s required, this is a fool’s errand.
Fortunately, again, you’re wrong. It’s not required, though I’m sure we’ll keep seeing governments who try the silly route replaced. The best we can do in the meantime is politically sideline folks who believe this stuff.
> How are you defining an economy?
I said it above. The economy is what we produce and consume. Because the metrics economists use (like GDP) make no sense does not mean that the economy does not exist.
There are physical metrics to measure how the economy is doing (that I mentioned above). For instance, you can look at how many tons of stuff are being moved by trucks. If many trucks move a lot of stuff, then it means that stuff is being produced and consumed.
Another one you can measure is the surface that is being constructed. When humans in a country build houses and buildings, it is a sign that "the economy" is growing.
And it is difficult to cheat with those "physical" metrics. Whereas cheating GDP is absolutely trivial. Do you know how they correct for inflation? There is no way to "measure" inflation, it's a guesstimate. But depending on how you guesstimate it, you increase or decrease the GDP.
What we see in Europe since 2007 (the peak of fossil fuels for Europe) is that trucks are moving less and less stuff, and the surface built by humans in Europe is slowing down. Those physical estimators show that Europe is slowing down, completely correlated to fossil fuels. GDP is growing, sure... but again GDP is "manipulated" (consciously or not, that's not the point) by the numbers we put in the "inflation" box.
> For instance, you can look at how many tons of stuff are being moved by trucks
Gross tonnage is a good input into "what we produce and consume." It's incomplete, however. Grossly. It excludes all services, for example. It's why we abandoned it as a measure after like the early industrial revolution.
(A better one is electricity production, which you can estimate remotely from fuel levels and thermals. It’s also woefully incomplete—the nutters trying to forecast based solely on it are influencers, not fund managers or policymakers, for good reason.)
> Do you know how they correct for inflation?
Yes.
> There is no way to "measure" inflation
This is nonsense. It must be estimated. But so must e.g. "the surface that is being constructed" depending on how one defines surface construction.
There are various measures of inflation of various utility. Some are used to deflate GDP.
Mankiw's Principles of Economics might be a good start if you're serious about your questions. Because by your metrics, decarbonistion is a folly—the measures are probably made up anyway!
> Because by your metrics, decarbonistion is a folly—the measures are probably made up anyway!
Not sure if you're consciously being manipulative or not.
Sure, you are more eloquent than I am. But do you understand my point about estimating inflation being a lot more random than other metrics? Making me say that "any kind of metrics is always folly" is just manipulative, I'm sure you understand that it is not what I mean.
> It excludes all services, for example. It's why we abandoned it as a measure after like the early industrial revolution.
Which I'm sure is important for economists doing economy stuff. But I am convinced that there is value in seeing that after 2007, indicators like gross tonnage have been slowing down, and that is correlated with the evolution of fossil fuels.
We cannot eat services, or use them to heat our apartments, can we? Services are a luxury for when everything below works. The risk with the end of fossil fuels is that it will disrupt everything on top of which services are built. I don't think GDP is bringing much in those discussions.
> do you understand my point about estimating inflation being a lot more random than other metrics?
Yes. I’d argue inflation metrics are about as easy to fuck with as any emissions math I’ve seen. That doesn’t make either fundamentally wrong. But if one is irredeemably wrong, so is the other.
(In any case, you can deflate your own GDP. Nominal GDP contains zero deflation. There is no similar easy fix for emissions calculations, which I read with much wider error bars than any OECD inflation print.)
> Which I'm sure is important for economists doing economy stuff
Not the billions of people employed in services?
> indicators like gross tonnage have been slowing down, and that is correlated with the evolution of fossil fuels
Global gross tonnage is growing [1]. On the sea, your correlation works because that fleet runs on fossil fuels. If you were trying to measure Chinese economic activity using fossil-fuel metrics, on the other hand, you’d fail.
(Again, your instinct isn’t wrong. Energy is, more or less, the economy. That’s why we can decarbonise without lowering living standards. We can keep energy constant or even growing while reducing fossil-fuel use.)
[1] https://unctadstat.unctad.org/insights/theme/107
> Global gross tonnage is growing [1]
In Europe?
Fossil fuels can be replaced for every use case by electricity from carbon-free sources and some chemistry. The price point for replacement of course varies by application. There is no reason to assume that we can't have the same kind of economy we have today without fossil fuels. Some things will naturally become more expensive, but other things might also became cheaper.
> There is no reason to assume that we can't have the same kind of economy
Has there been, in history, the same kind of economy we have today without fossil fuels? No. That's a first reason.
Are there practical replacements for every use case of fossil fuels? Most definitely not! I don't know where you get that. For those replacements we know, it has never been done at scale, so we don't know if it's possible or not. And for those we don't know... well we don't know. Just have a look at what petrochemicals are used for. And how do you make fertilisers without fossil fuels, at today's scale?
You seem to believe that proof of feasibility is impossible before actually finishing the task. I disagree. And for the record, profit oriented market economies are extremely old. Much older than any large scale use of fossil fuels.
> And for the record, profit oriented market economies are extremely old.
Of course it works if you take the part that is convenient to your argument. What about globalised economies?
Trade routes spanned Eurasia before we invented writing. Faster transportation and communication only expanded economic ties. Transportation is something that is fairly easy to do without fossil fuels.
> Nuclear is a high-capex source of electricity. It doesn’t do well economically in a grid where power if essentially free on sunny or windy days but you need a lot of backup power for a few hundred hours per year.
Fair enough, but it's still incredibly helpful as a source of no-carbon electricity.
There will always be a need for on-demand power. Renewables are great, but cannot deal with peaks as easily and capacity is dependent on weather.
Hydro is renewable, can deal with peaks and not directly dependent on weather.
Use its power down when in need of electricity. Bring water up hill when too much electricity is available.
Hydro is great, except for a few problems. The biggest is that they are causing extinction for several species. The second biggest in central and northern Europe is that hydro is already used in every place where its reasonable to build them, with practically no space to further expansion.
Right before the last rush to build nuclear, Europe went through an energy crisis where they did also use reverse hydro. In recent time there has been discussion to modernize and reuse those old installations, but the issue is costs. Buying energy to sell it later, while maintaining and operating the hydro power plants and pumps are not cheap (not to mention building out transmission). Even at current fossil fuel prices, natural gas and oil is cheaper and thus reverse hydro is not economical viable.
Hydro is not renewable when the basins are being refilled by glacial melt as is the case for most of Europe, and precipitation is also becoming more erratic. For example, Iceland is currently relying on hydro power for 70% of its electricity, but current models predict that glacial runoff will peak around 2060 (or earlier, if the arctic temperature continues its upward trend). After that, the potential power to be generated from hydro will gradually decrease, which is why Iceland is now diversifying towards geothermal and wind.
Won't climate change lead to more droughts making hydro less stable in the future?
Countries who can do hydro are pretty much doing as much of it as they can. Like... there really isn't much room to increase hydro unless you start inundating valleys.
Ok... but now we're damaging ecosystems by installing hydroelectric power stations and dams and such in these areas.
Besides, not every country can effectively utilize hydroelectric power.
Germany, like other countries, should be investing in a mix of power sources. You probably want your backbone to be nuclear and then renewables where it makes sense with a goal (at least in western countries) of also eliminating reliance on China for renewables/batteries.
Dogmatism about renewables is self-defeating.
We should make sure that the indirect cost for CO2 are added to the price of energy and imported products depending on the mix. It is one of the few areas where I think a market can fix things.
That would mean we all pay for the CO2 emissions of the US army since they are the world's largest single institution consumer.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333873233_Hidden_ca...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/12/elephant-in-the-ro...
Yea but all other countries would have to pay for the C02 emissions of their militaries too. I bet many would not be able to afford to have one anymore - might be a good thing.
I’ve always thought that was a decent idea but Americans can’t even stomach higher gas prices because of the Iran war. How are they going to handle $7-$8 per gallon or more?
But nuclear also can't deal with peaks.
Renewables and batteries are great for peaks though. And not very good for base load
Nuclear is great for base load, not great for peaks
Our current situation is we are building tons of renewables and storage but still burning tons of fossil fuels because they cannot replace the base load very effectively. Nuclear replaces the carbon part of the equation
"Base load" is not an actual demand that needs to be satisfied.
Providing base load is a privilege you get to enjoy if your marginal cost is lower than anyone elses (and you want/can keep running basically all of the time).
Renewables ruin former baseload providers (like nuclear plants) because those plants are basically no longer making money whenever the sun shines (so the economics for nuclear plants got much worse).
> Providing base load is a privilege you get to enjoy if your marginal cost is lower than anyone elses (and you want/can keep running basically all of the time)
The "if you can keep running all of the time" is actually the more important factor of base load than just price.
I guess if you want to look at it through purely a price point thing, does the solar price effectively go to infinity when there are clouds out or it's night time?
Maybe base load is the wrong term for it, I don't know. All I'm saying is that solar and wind aren't generating all of the time, and building out the storage capacity to completely cover our existing needs seems kind of unfathomable.
That’s why they mentioned batteries.
The politicians in Germany went to great length to promote natural gas as the green technology to be combined with renewables, a strategy they succeed in the European Parliament and still seem to follow even when the fires roams and the pipelines get blown up. There is no seasonal grid battery storage in central and northern Europe, and outside of a few hundred household sized experiment, no grid storage is being built.
Looking at the platforms of political parties who oppose nuclear in a nearby country like Sweden, all of them highlight how thermal power plants are necessary to support further expansion of renewable energy, and those thermal power plants burn some form of fossil fuels. This include the Swedish green party.
What EU need is a ban on fossil fuels in the energy grid. Without that natural gas there is no need to buy gas from current war zones and their participants, and it would significantly decrease emissions. As long as people who oppose nuclear also agree to stop using thermal power plants, same as with the ban on ICE cars that will come into action in a few years, then the discussion of nuclear vs renewables + battery will be a fair one with everyone playing by the same rules.
Naturally in the south part of EU there is little reason to use nuclear plants. Energy demand correlates with solar production, and the need for seasonal storage is minimal. Sadly the same can not be said about central and northern Europe where wind speeds are the current dominant factor when it come to supply of energy, but seasons dictate demand. The size of storage needed for a harsh winter is magnitudes more expensive currently than reducing the need through nuclear, but that will never be tested since what countries there are actually building right now are more thermal power plants to address the issue of low supply during periods of low energy production from wind.
> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage?
Recent report on restarting German nuclear:
> The easiest group of reactors to restart could produce electricity at an average of €37 per megawatt-hour before the end of 2031.The most difficult restarts could produce electricity at roughly €58 per megawatt-hour by the mid 2030s.
* https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restarting-german...
* PDF: https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/_files/ugd/ae75b7_bc5db59...
That seems very cheap if it means you don't need to build new transmission. The average cost in south of Sweden is much higher than that, which in euro would be around €100 per megawatt-hour.
Prices are also expected to further increase as EU has issued regulations that customers should subsidize regions of poor transmission, in order to enable construction of more wind and solar farms where no such transmission exist.
Okay, and how does compare to other options? And do you have sources without an obvious conflict of interest?
I wonder how much battery you could install in a typical nuclear site. Maybe even stacked; if we make an apples-to-apples comparison in materials and say we can use the same amount of concrete and metal, could probably have several levels of batteries. Except no water needed, and no waste risks.
The top of this German article [1] has a rendering of a planned 1.4GW power, 6GWh storage battery plant, with the decommissioned nuclear plant in the background. The battery energy storage is a bit smaller in area and of course of lot less tall. Eyeballing, the area is actually very comparable if you deduct the power plant's parking lot. The nuclear plant is Grohnde, a 1.43GW single-reactor plant.
The similar power output is not a coincidence. The biggest bottleneck for new solar and battery storage plants in Germany is getting them connected to the grid, and the freshly decommissioned nuclear plant has a great grid connection that this project wants to reuse
1: https://www.heise.de/news/Mehr-als-1-4-Gigawatt-Riesige-Batt...
I'm not so sure about the "no water needed" as batteries require cooling (and sometimes heating). And perhaps batteries are not risky like nuclear waste, but by volume there would me much more battery material than nuclear material, and there is fire risk that must be mitigated. You can't just wire up a big stack of batteries, they need carefully designed separation and fire suppression so that if one battery goes into a thermal runaway it doesn't take out the entire installation.
I imagine it wouldn't be nearly in the same ballpark, since one side does not perform the classic mechanical generation from temperature difference, and deal with the associated waste heat.
> They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing.
Yet France, which invested heavily in nuclear[1], has energy prices that are 40% lower than Germany's[2]. Something isn't adding up about the repeated claims that renewables are cheaper than nuclear.
[1] https://montel.energy/resources/blog/two-different-energy-sy...
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
France's nuclear is long paid off, and there were big government investments into building the industry around it because France is a nuclear power. It's not exactly the same tech obviously but when you build nuclear weapons yourself you need a workforce and industry capable of working with the materials. Some of those costs will have found their way under defense headings instead of energy ones.
Germany didn't have this incentive and they don't have the luxury of coasting on previous investments of a bygone era. Germany would have to start from scratch with all this and without the defense component (unless they change their stance on that too)
German energy prices aren't driven by renewables.
Germany still has expensive thermal power plants which dictate the price of electricity given the bidding system used for pricing it.
Sweden and Norway have very cheap electricity while mostly being renewables.
It depends on how much you value land use and care about the knock on effects of the associated mining. I’d rather figure out how to build out nuclear cheaply like South Korea and China and use more land for wild space. The per hectare land use of nuclear is minuscule.
> wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage?
How about taking the money spent on fossil energies and invest it in both nuclear and renewables?
Why not spend it on the most cost efficient option with the best long term prospects?
It’s not either/or. We must spend on all options.
Just replacing expensive fossil energy with cheap renewables and storage doesn't help. The problem is Jevons paradox. Cheaper energy means more consumption.
A sensible global policy could be:
- Tax carbon positive energy consumption to death. I.e. coal, oil or natural gas.
- Tax (close to) carbon neutral energy consumption at a fixed high rate, e.g. solar, hydro, nuclear or wind. Tax nuclear separately because of its other side effects if you want.
- Use the proceeds to negatively tax carbon negative energy consumption only.
Not that I have any illusions of any policy even remotely like this ever getting enacted. Zero consensus on earth and too many dangerous and selfish idiots.
Our children will be boiling frogs and angry.
Jevons paradox is often claimed, but largely irrelevant in this case, imo. If the demand rises, the price rises again, as well. It doesn't force anybody to keep using fossil energy
Price elasticity definitely is a thing, but I'd argue not in the way you see it.
Have a somewhat competitive energy market and falling production prices like we have for carbon neutral energy. What do you think will happen? The market will gobble up any and all production.
Look at what we currently have even with largely fossil energy. The substantial US/EU delta in energy price and energy consumption. Notice how similar the deltas are?
> carbon negative energy consumption
There is no carbon negative energy consumtion.
CO2 capture can be carbon negative, even if it consumes energy.
CO2 capture is carbon negative by definition. That's not what I said.
There are some experimental methods of capturing CO2 (or rather just carbon in CO2), but I replied to a proposed negative tax on economic activities that are carbon negative as energy consumtion. There are none. There's only experimental carbon capture with no products and no services generated as an output of this "economic activity" that consumes energy and CO2 as inputs. And it costs money - a lot more money than what CO2-positive economic activities could generate if all their CO2 were to be captured.
A negative tax wants carbon negative processes to exist. That clear direction is more important than whether these processes currently exist.
Experimental olivine based carbon capture looks promising to this uneducated bystander, but what do I know?
In any case, I'm not expecting climate action. Many either don't know how to even start fixing this mess. Others would rather have their own children boil than to potentially give up some material conveniences.
> CO2 capture is carbon negative by definition
Really? It's certainly not in actual practice - the largest actual carbon capture and sequestration projects on the globe to date are, by definition, carbon release reduction programs that are intended to store back a small percentage of what will be released as part of large natural gas extraction projects.
(eg: proposed Browse Basin (~400 km (250 mi) off NW coast of W.Australia) expansion)
(also: Chevron’s Gorgon project, the biggest CCS operation: https://australia.chevron.com/what-we-do/gorgon-project/carb... -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Carbon_Dioxide_Injectio... -- https://ieefa.org/resources/gorgon-ccs-underperformance-hits... -- https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12... )
It's a simple (albeit technically complex) proposition - puncture a gas basin, release large amount of CO2, grab some of that and stuff it back in the hole. Overall a net positive amount of CO2 is released, before addressing any further release as a by product of consuming the LNG, etc. But it's called CCS (carbon capture and storage) because carbon is captured and stored.
There are no larger programs at scale on the planet, they are net CO2 release programs, and less CO2 would be in the atmosphere if no LNG was extracted at all.
I think the point of this question is that the Green party of Germany chose in 2003 that closure of nuclear power plants was more important than global warming.
They had this as an explicit choice, and they demanded other parties went along with closing the nuclear power plants. They knew, it was discussed, that keeping them open would help with global warming, and they explicitly chose against that. Then they stood by that choice, and kept standing by it even up to 2023.
Now you obviously can't fault them for the fact that the Ukraine war would make things 10x worse (by forcing Germany back onto coal and LNG), but you CAN fault them for making that choice, and standing by it. This makes them the main responsible party for the current electricity prices problem in Germany.
European green parties have explicitly chosen that their other goals mattered more than global warming. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are absolutely 100% unwilling to make compromises elsewhere to help fix global warming, when they are the ones making a compromise.
And, frankly, if we can't compromise as a country in parliament we may as well stop attempting to do anything about global warming. Green parties are demanding big compromises from everybody else, but cannot give a millimeter themselves? Obviously everybody else is just going to fight them tooth and nail, forever, and we'll get nowhere.
I think that is what is meant by that question.
I'm sorry, but your comment to me just reads like a long rant about the Green party.
Sorry, let me put a short rant then. The Green party of Germany forced through the shutdown of nuclear power in Germany and stood by that decision, even when it became clear the already bad impact on climate change it had was made 10x worse by the war in Ukraine (forcing Germany to switch to Coal and LNG). Meanwhile this "Green" party, unwilling to make compromises themselves, is using climate change to demand enormous compromises from everyone else, guaranteeing yet another fight to stop climate change legislation.
They do make for a good boogeyman, that's for sure. Other parties really should study them for how they manage to force everybody else to do their bidding while having no actual power. The exit from nuclear and the hated "GEG" / heating act were both conservative CDU initiatives after all, who are now retroactively being attributed to the greens to fuel the conservative culture war.
> how they manage to force everybody else to do their bidding while having no actual power
Oh the traditional European way. "You need 50% of the votes in parliament of a government. It's either us or the extreme right. Here's our list of demands, and a phone number. Kthxbye"
Of course it would, but there's less profit for capitalists to make with distributed sovereign renewable energy.
30 years ago the answer was nuclear. Not today, it's just a distraction to try to keep us burning dead dinosaurs for longer.
The environmentalists who railed against nuclear for the last 30 years are very much responsible for how many dead dinosaurs we've burnt over that time. Excuse me if I'm skeptical about what they now say about energy policy.
To put it another way, I could flip your statement on its head: Renewables are just a distraction to try to keep us burning dead dinosaurs for longer instead of building durable nuclear power capacity.
If you have $1b to spend today, you can generate more energy and more quickly by installing solar or wind than you can by installing nuclear
One problem with renewables is that they rely a lot on electronics, which relies a lot on petrochemicals (just to build them) and on globalisation. In a world without abundant oil, can we keep producing and maintaining as many solar panels as we need?
Nuclear is different in that regard.
"renewables increase oil dependency" now that is an argument I haven't seen before.
Today, pretty much everything you do increases oil dependency. What's clear is that we will have less and less oil (just because... physics: it's limited) and anyway we need to use less and less oil (because climate change).
So the question is: what can we preserve once we don't have oil anymore? And my point was that renewables are piloted with electronics, and we haven't tried building and maintaining that system in a world without oil.
People like to extrapolate the growth of renewables, but they tend to forget that the current growth is totally subsidised by oil: your solar panel was built and transported with oil, period.
If you are serious about the "after the end of oil", you have to wonder if that system works, at scale, without oil. Don't you?
> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing
Our power demands are increasing faster than we can build out renewables and storage.
Despite how much investment we are making into solar, wind, batteries, we're still burning more carbon year over year to make up for the demand for energy. We need a source of energy that can actually replace the base load carbon, not just augment it like renewables are. Nuclear is the most likely source to use for that purpose.
Edit: if we're being honest, we probably should have built out nuclear 20, 30, 40 years ago but we didn't. The expense now is kind of the cost of our poor policy decisions in decades past. We can continue to make poor decisions or we can learn our lesson and eat the cost now to fix those mistakes. I think failing to invest and shift to nuclear now would be yet another instance of passing the buck to the future generations, with even more interest
I don't know exactly what you mean by "like Germany", but singling out Germany seems a strange choice given that the main global offenders are orders of magnitude worse in terms of their greenhouse gas emissions. Germany is currently producing more than half of its electricity from renewables.
Check out this year's edition of Ember's Global Electricity Review [0]. The table on p. 78 lists the following five countries as having the highest CO2-equivalent emissions (in Mt):
In comparison, the whole of the European Union (consisting of 27 individual countries, including Germany) is emitting 587 Mt.All these numbers should probably be put into perspective, though, by taking the population size into account. But even then, the whole of the EU does not fare too bad.
[0] https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electric...
> should probably be put into perspective, though, by taking the population size into account
Obviously, each individual should have a right to emit a certain amount of GHGs independently from the size of the country he happens to be born in. So the correct list is this (2024 data [1]). Quite surprising in places (e.g. the position of the UK, Australians emitting GHGs at the level of a petro-state, and Canadians too, well above the US).
1 - from here: https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025?vis=ghgpop#emissi...[flagged]
I've left the petro-states in the list because the fact that they have such high per-capita emissions is interesting even if not surprising, but I agree that as small countries they don't really contribute that much to global emissions. I find more interesting the position of Australia, Canada and the US close to the top, and the surprisingly low position of the UK.
As for China, an average Chinese citizen is already contributing 40% less than his average US counterpart to global emissions- do you think we should ask them to make a bigger effort because China has more people? In that case, do you think that simply splitting China in two political entities each with half the population would solve the problem of their emissions?
I know the UK has a lot of wind and solar, and then there's short transport distances: those other countries are famous for hauling goods over long distances through sparsely populated terrain, which the UK doesn't have any of.
I wonder which country is considered to own the emissions from a cargo ship?
But anyway, about China, we agree on one thing: there are a lot of Chinese who are pretty much not participating in emissions. Then there are cities, factories, power stations for factories, and the government which, and this is the important point, has control over those sources of emissions.
If you split it into two nations, what that does is to remove the single point of control, and as a result remove the opportunity to do something about a huge portion of global emissions. Politically speaking splitting China in two sounds like an improvement, and lots of fun, but if you want some entity to control a really large amount of emissions, it's surely a giant authoritarian state that has the power to do it.
If the two halves were different in industrialization - if one had all the peasants and the other had all the factories and factory workers - that would help, since then you have a country that tops both lists, and can be firmly blamed by everyone, and we can stop getting lost in the weeds of "per capita" and the mad idea that individual scum like me and you have any responsibility to solve climate change by reusing plastic bags and so on.
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Germany is in Europe and the economist is about Europe, so it makes sense to look at high emitters in Europe, no?
Also, while it's important to look at the global picture, let's not ignore the local effects: air quality in Germany is pretty bad, perhaps the worst in Europe. Poland is pretty bad too, especially in the winter. That's not China's or USA's fault.
> let's not ignore the local effects: air quality in Germany is pretty bad, perhaps the worst in Europe
What... you know you could've looked this up pretty easily before posting?
https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/sites/default/files/styles/...
Both Berlin and Munich rank higher in terms of dirty air than the first polish city, Wroclaw: https://www.iqair.com/world-air-quality-ranking
That's LIVE data that will change hour to hour. When I opened it the list looked very different.
I provided you a map showing historical data collected over a year.
I did: https://aqicn.org/map/europe/
That's a real time map that will change by the hour. What I see now is probably not what you saw when you opened it.
Germany is singled out because decided to close their safe and well functioning zero emission power plants for no good reason, thus exploding their CO2 emissions.
Yeah, other emit more, but the rank stupidity of this environmental vandalism deserves the scorn it gets!
> thus exploding their CO2 emissions
Except their emissions have continued to go down.
Whether you count just electricity or economy wide.
And even before this "explosion" they were about half the US on per capita economy wide and now are less than half.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
I believe they are singled out in a feeble attempt by climate change deniers and fossil fuel boosters to discredit renewables. Which Germany played a pivotal role in kick-starting and which are currently saving the world.
The reason Germany gets singled out is because it was a massive policy misstep and highlights the shortsightedness of the environmental movement. It seems that they have changed their tune about it nuclear - but their entrenched efforts (and concerns in the 80s) killed the last 40 years of nuclear power - arguably inflaming our current CO2 crises by opening the doors wide open for Oil and Gas to fill the void.
In Germany add in that they then needed to rely on Russia to provide natural gas to fill in the void - which drove up the costs of power and made their manufacturing base a little less competitive.... Best intentions don't always prove to be good policy making. That's the TL;DR why Germany gets singled out.
Unlike the states, Germany is densely populated and does not have vast uninhabited areas. Where do you suggest should they store their nuclear waste? Germany has been looking for an appropriate place for the last 50(!) years and does not expect to come to a conclusion any time soon:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-scrap-deadline-...
In the mean time, they're keeping they're using the sites of their former nuclear power plants as temporary storage locations for the nuclear waste produced while the plants were still running.
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/What-now-for-Germany-s-re...
On top of all that, there's new challenges like this: https://www.msn.com/en-us/urban-infrastructure/energy-infras...
Nuclear waste is a complete non-issue. The area you need to store it is tiny and you do not at all need vast uninhabited areas for it.
Right. That's why 50 years of searching has not been enough in Germany.
It becomes a local politics issue.
While I agree that the ban is stupid, Hungarys nuclear power plant closed today due to lack of water: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungarys-paks-nuclea...
Thats not a property of nuclear power plants but of having been built some 60 years ago when nobody took that into account.
While I would agree that it is regrettable Germany sunset their nuclear early when they should've extended the runtime for another 5-10 years to avoid excess carbon emissions since shutdown, but clean energy has already surpassed coal in Germany and they will likely hit net zero in the next decade at current deployment rates of renewables and batteries. [My note: The US states of Illinois and California got this right, subsidizing their existing merchant nuclear generator fleets until more renewables can replace them]
Largest battery storage in Germany set for partial commissioning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104584 - July 2026
Analysis: Wind and solar power overtake fossil fuels in Germany for first time ever - https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-wind-and-solar-power-ov... - July 28th, 2026
> Germany has various targets in place that require a rapid expansion of wind and solar power, including cutting economy-wide emissions to net-zero by 2045. The nation is also aiming to increase renewables’ share of electricity consumption to 80% by 2030 to achieve a “largely climate neutral” power system by 2035.
It's time to get over the nuclear issue, it's history. It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid, and tens of billions of dollars or euros. Germany deploys ~2GW/month of solar. Total global nuclear generation capacity is ~380GW as of this comment. At current global solar PV deployment rates, even assuming capacity factor delta between solar and nuclear, you could replace total global nuclear generation with ~18 months of solar PV deployment. Batteries and solar will continue to rapidly decline in cost, nuclear will not.
(total annual solar PV deployment is approaching, but not quite yet, at 1TW/year, and continues to increase year over year)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
I think that's net zero for electricity only, not net zero for all power generation. It excludes heavy industry and freight shipping, which still have a projected investment window of at least 25 years. Heavy industry in particular would have benefitted from the predictable high-power output of nuclear energy.
This needs to be higher up.
Nuclear is an amazing solution for industrial steady state demand... This is data centers, smelters (glass and metal), lots of industrial processes (think auto plants).
But nuclear is terrible at TV pickup situations because it is simply not that responsive.
Delivery to industrial customers (regardless of source) is also much simpler than it is to domestic - and I don't think that were even beginning to address the issues there.
> and they will likely hit net zero in the next decade at current deployment rates of renewables and batteries.
In and around winter? I think that's a fantasy.
> they will likely hit net zero in the next decade at current deployment rates of renewables and batteries.
X to doubt, I'll believe it when I see it, for now they are like a galaxy away from that goal.
And also that'll be even harder to reach if they want to improve their atrociously low electricity heating rate.
You're free to doubt, healthy skepticism is a good thing imho, there is no will to spend what nuclear would cost and renewables and batteries keep getting cheaper. We're locked on a hockey stick trajectory of their uptake purely through the economics. Spain is phasing out the last of their nuclear for more renewables, for example.
Fossil gas will fill the gap until solar, wind, batteries, and transmission push the last of fossil generation out of the mix, and every year less and less gas will be used until remaining fossil gas generators sit idle.
Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-n... | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~2GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~17 months; per Electricity Maps, only 18.79% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/12mo/monthly)
You realize that "green energy" in EU is dependent on gas and/or coal? When there's no wind or sun, we will gladly burn gas or coal, and call it green energy.
Nuclear doesn't have this requirement. It's truly zero carbon.
Unless you can show me plans to fill this gap with batteries on a national scale, renewables < nuclear
Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. We have solved fusion at a distance with solar and batteries. We're arguing speed and cost of deployment for the collection and storage system. The technology drops in cost rapidly, it lasts for decades with no moving parts and minimal maintenance. It can be trivially recycled today with no further technology advancements needed. It fails gracefully.
Yes, some fossil fuels will be burned to fill energy consumption gaps until we have fully replaced all fossil generation with that produced from the sun. Again, remember the fact that every year we are adding ~1TW of solar that can account for energy consumption growth and push out fossil generation. We won't know until we look back over time, but we are very likely at peak fossil fuel consumption globally. New generation will be clean tech simply out of economics, and old fossil generation will be replaced eventually with clean tech, because it cannot last forever.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/solar-panel-prices-... (solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled)
https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline (lithium-ion battery prices fell by 19% every time global cumulative production doubled)
Ember Energ: Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... - June 21st, 2025
The Economist: The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40746617 - June 2024 (66 comments)
> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.
> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.
> To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.
(think in systems)
> Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year
Sure, the sun is incredible, but our capacity of actually using that power is the bottleneck. We still have to have energy to dig up the materials and manufacture the panels and batteries and deploy them and such.
China is the top user of energy globally, and they are electrifying everything while moving rapidly to renewables for generation. This is the blueprint the rest of the world will eventually follow. China's clean energy generation will be used to spin the clean tech manufacturing flywheel up faster (which will lead to more global clean tech exports to the world). The sun will power the end to end supply chain for making more solar and batteries.
Ember Energy: From scale to system: navigating the next phase of China’s battery storage - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/from-scale-to-syste... - July 16th, 2026
China Battery Storage Use Surges After Policy Shift, Ember Energy Says - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-15/china-bat... | https://archive.today/QBXxV - July 15th, 2026
China Crosses Energy Milestone as Coal Falls Below 50% of Power - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110187 - July 2026
Nearly a third of new heavy truck sales in China Electric in 2025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676673 - June 2026 ("China targeting EVs to make up 40% of heavy truck sales by 2030 - EVs to make up 20% of heavy truck fleet by 2030 - Trade-in schemes will prioritise EV trucks to boost adoption")
China Is The World’s First Electrostate - https://cleantechnica.com/2025/05/26/china-is-the-worlds-fir... - May 26th, 2025
China’s Oil & Gas Giant Sinopec Says Peak Oil Demand Already Happened In China - https://cleantechnica.com/2023/10/11/chinas-oil-gas-giant-si... - October 11th, 2023
China is also building more nuclear than anyone else
https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/china-building-half...
:)
~110GW of nuclear capacity targeted by 2030. I respect their attempt to diversify, iterate, and drive down the cost of nuclear, but it pales in comparison to renewables (~90-100GW of solar installed per month, on average).
Lets see what 2030 looks like.
China’s Nuclear Energy Priorities Under Its 15th Five-Year Plan - https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-nuclear-energy-prioriti... - May 11th, 2026
> China continues to view nuclear as an electricity source that advances its energy security while also reducing reliance on fossil fuels, as noted in the latest FYP (Part II, Chapter 7): “Promote the safe, reliable, and orderly replacement of fossil fuels with non-fossil energy sources; pursue a multi-pronged approach that combines wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear power; and implement the ten-year plan to double non-fossil energy capacity.” The remarkable growth of renewable energy sources and coal’s continuing preeminence have shaped nuclear energy’s role as a non-carbon-emitting baseload in China’s power generation portfolio (Table 1). Nuclear energy seems to serve as a versatile power source that supplements coal’s role as an energy security enforcer as well as the role of renewables as clean energy boosters. By 2030, China targets 110 gigawatts (GW) of installed nuclear power capacity. If realized, the installed capacity in China will surpass that of the United States unless U.S. capacity—currently the world’s largest—grows substantially from 102.5 GW (gross) in 2025.
My point is that China realizes that their energy goals should include a nuclear plan too
If you're going to point at them and say "we should be doing what they're doing" then part of that includes doing nuclear.
I disagree, but I'm not the decision maker so it's irrelevant. Nuclear is throwing good money after bad imho (based on current and projected levelized cost of energy [LCOE]), I think the next five years will prove that out.
Lazard Levelized Cost of Energy+ 2026 - https://www.lazard.com/media/kcfconhf/lazards-lcoeplus_vf.pd... [pdf]
> Renewables Remain Lowest Cost New-Build Generation; All Generation Faces Increasing Cost Pressure: Despite rising and inflationary cost pressures across all generation technologies, renewables remain the most cost-competitive form of new-build generation on an unsubsidized basis and will account for the majority of near-term capacity additions in the U.S. Continuous upward revisions to demand projections have driven a sharp increase in announced new-build gas generation despite a 15-year high LCOE, which is expected to continue to rise, and historically long development and equipment delivery timelines.
China Keeps Beating Renewable Targets And Missing Nuclear Ones - https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/25/china-renewable-targets... - July 25th, 2026
> China set a 2020 wind target of 210 GW and finished the year with about 282 GW. Its solar target was 110 GW, while delivery reached roughly 253 GW. The later commitment to reach at least 1,200 GW of combined wind and solar by 2030 was crossed in 2024, six years early. By the end of 2025, China had about 640 GW of wind and 1,202 GW of solar, for a combined 1,842 GW. Nuclear moved in the other direction: about 50 GW against a 58 GW target in 2020, and about 62 GW against a 70 GW target in 2025. The current goal of 110 GW by 2030 may still be achieved, but the previous record gives no reason to convert it directly into a forecast.
> This is not evidence that Beijing has quietly abandoned nuclear power. China has the world’s largest reactor construction programme, continues approving new units and is building an increasingly domestic supply chain around designs such as Hualong One. The divergence lies between approval and operation. Another difference is that when renewables blow past targets China set much bigger targets, but when nuclear misses targets, the targets don’t change. That difference is harder to explain than the results.
Certainly sounds like China's nuclear goals are aspirational, based on the data. The construction and messaging gives nuclear proponents hope, but construction is not generation. At some point, you have to deliver.
Germany is not a major country. The 1. Something percent it contributes to the global co2 output just do not matter much.
If you purely think about the climate and don’t care for things like fair resource distribution, forget about the Germans.
Update: Actually if every country with a per capita higher emissions than Germany would drop to German standards we would reduce co2 emissions by 25%.
That sounds like a goal, sind this is even possible without nuclear power, it should be easy for the is and china, who could throw it into the mix.
Nuclear Power is useless in a climate change scenario.
France and Spain are having to shut down their nuclear plants because they can't cool them during heatwaves: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/weather/extreme-weather-events/fra...
How can articles on major news sites have typos this bad up for over a month?
"The crisis in France has claimed dozens of lives, with 40 people drowning while attempting to call off from the heat since June 18"
Call off should be "cool off".
And forgive me if this is a stupid question, but don't nuclear power plants produce enough energy that they could power their own cooling? Why do they have to rely on the free cooling provided by a river?
Which major countries other than Germany and Italy have a ban on nuclear power?
Iran. But the ban comes from outside.
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We've ran out of time. Even if political will shifted immediately, getting new nuclear plants on the grid is going to take a decade or more.
In the meantime batteries + solar or wind can be built quickly and hooked up pretty much anywhere.
Even if we had nuclear fusion, solar+batteries could still win on cost and time to deploy!
> Even if we had nuclear fusion, solar+batteries could still win on cost and time to deploy!
In a world with abundant fossil fuels on which globalisation relies.
The question is: what happens when it stops? Can renewables win in a world without abundant oil? We don't know, we haven't tried.
"we"? Looking at electricitymaps, everyone except maybe Nebraska and Mongolia is making progress.
The supply chain already exists, available worldwide as long as you don't bomb your suppliers.
Germany's CO2 output is at 1.6% worldwide. Totally irrelevant. https://www.iea.org/countries/germany/emissions
The same people who dismiss green policies as damaging to the economic are often the ones calling for nuclear power.
I like a daily paradox.
> As long as major countries like Germany are keeping their ban on nuclear power
Frankly, it doesn't matter what Germany or other European nations do - their carbon footprint has dramatically decreased.
The issue is everyone else [0]. China (12 GT), the US (5 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent over half of all global carbon emissions. The EU and UK's combined carbon emissions are half of Asia (excluding China and India) emissions.
Countries like India and Vietnam are expected to see GDP growth in the 6-8% range for the next decade, and both are doubling down on coal [1][2] and other carbon heavy fuels, so emissions are only going to grow further. Any marginal decrease in carbon emissions at this point is too little too late given that much of Asia and South America is expected to see carbon emission grow in the 3-8% range.
[0] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mul...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-looks-more-c...
Your link shows the US also decreased their carbon footprint, and a big part of the rest of the world stays kinda stable.
India and most of ASEAN (Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc) are expected to see GDP grow rates in the 6-8% range for the next decade.
Their carbon footprint is only going to increase as a result.
India [0], Vietnam [1], and others have all doubled down on coal for energy security reasons.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mul...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-looks-more-c...
It should be illegal in 2026 to have such a naive view.
co2 per country or capita doesn't mean shit when the world uses China as a factory:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-embedded-in-...
The effects of climate change aren't felt on a per capita basis.
Edit: can't reply
> they don't pollute because they're Chinese, they pollute because they're your factory
If that was the case, then global CO2 emissions would have been stagnant for 30 years, not rising.
Sure, but don't blame China when 90% of the shit you buy is made there, they don't pollute because they're Chinese, they pollute because they're your factory
You know why China became the manufacturing center of the world? Because it was lowest cost, with little regulation and lenient policies including environmental ones. Red carpet, special economic zones. Nobody forced them to.
They have to bear responsibility, and to be fair to them, they have taken steps to address that.
I don't see why CO2 emissions should be stagnant. There's now more people than ever, and everyone buys more shit per capita than ever, that's already a good reason for emissions to grow.
Lets just name names. China. India.
And every country which moved their factories there
This is just trolling. So. Boring.
Something can be urgent while no one is doing anything about it. Would not be the first time. That point would be the first of many incoherences in you comment.
I don’t debate that there is urgency, that so much more should be done, etc. but your comment really isn’t helping.
The last time any company was interested to build a nuclear reactor in Germany was in the 1970s. About thirty years before the eventual (first) ban.
We can rant all day about how stupid it was of the conservatives to re-enact the ban on nuclear power without restarting the subsidies for renewables, and lament that they thus ensured that coal power would thus have to replace more of the lost load, but that's all in the past and we can't change that.
If you think we need more nuclear power to fight CO2 emissions, you're 50 years late. That ship has sailed before most of us here were born.
> Worried about your country not dominating on the AI scene?
The thing is, the obsession with the AI race is making this problem so much worse. We're using up so much more energy and burning so much more fossil fuel as a direct result of AI mania.
We're so obsessed with becoming king of the ashes we're not even noticing we're burning the whole damn place down.
It's tragic, it's irresponsible and many here are at the very least complicit.
The fires don't accelerate it much. That wood and shrub would either burn or rot down the line and release methane and co2 anyway. Forests don't sequester much at all despite what people seem to believe.
Consequentially running a fireplace is a lot more climate neutral than driving a car, taking a flight, utilising the myriads of high carbon footprint goods or having a gas heater or so.
On the other hand the bogs that we're losing (and kelp forests) are a lot better at sequestring co2 but they're small. Permafrost will also actually accelerate stuff since....well it __was__ permanently forsty.
If we assume that the forests will regrow to their former strength then the fires are indeed not all the consequential. The trees release the stored CO2 when they burn, and new plants will take up an equivalent amount of CO2 again when they grow. The CO2 sequestered in a forest is more or less just the biomass in it (some is in the soil, but not that much)
But if climate change leads to permanently losing those forests, that is an effect we will feel. Still less bad than losing permafrost
If we figured out how to store chopped down trees somewhere where the wood doesn't break down, that would be a really effective way to get CO2 out of the air!
Easier said than done, of course. Sinking millions of trees to the bottom of the ocean might be the most practical way.
Those space datacenters that SpaceX is building, can't they make them out of wood?
Will they weigh the same as a duck?
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp_l5ntikaU)
Their huge solar panels will surely block some sunlight!
That will lower the warming!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar_carbon_removal
https://www.jameslovelock.org/the-earth-is-about-to-catch-a-...
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceo...
https://rogerhallam.com/the-insurance-industry-predicts-mass...
https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p...
> (it's pretty much lost already, isn't it?)
Not even close. Look at satellite imaging.
Not only is the Amazon far from lost, the jungles in Africa/Borneo/PNG all look to be doing surprisingly okay.
It still got damaged a lot : https://www.maapprogram.org/amazon-tipping-point/
The theory is that it can reach a point where it won't be able to survive, and therefore it will die. We are around that limit. It may well be that it has already passed it and therefore it will die.
I didn't mean "it is not there anymore", I meant "we won't be able to preserve it, it may already be too late for that".
How is the Amazon going to die? Don't plants kinda like co2? Do you think it'll just become a desert somehow or something?
Deforestation causes more extreme weather like floods and landslides which also remove fertile soil, and trees don't regenerate quickly enough to prevent that from happening. And global warming also increases weather instability at a rate nature can't adapt to.
So even the existing forests will have a harder time.
Plants need a lot of things, not just CO2; what they are limited by varies from case to case, and conversion to farmland can cause permanent damage which may indeed turn it into a desert.
Fortunately, careful manipulation can reverse desertification.
Where can I find details on this theory?
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound...
> the loss of the Amazon (it's pretty much lost already, isn't it?)
No, it’s not lost already. We should attempt to preserve what remains, not assume failure is inevitable.
Agreed. I was just mentioning it because people don't seem to realise that we are on the verge of losing it (and it may actually be that it is too late).
Of course we should fight to preserve as much as we can. Nobody wants to live in a bunker on mars. Almost...
> As long as we emit CO2
And aside the greenhouse effect, we're also using more power than we've ever used before, building 10Msqft boxes that ultimately turn electricity into heat. We could go all-solar and we'd still be warming our environment.
The amount of heat generated directly by all of the energy use by humans - from fossil, nuclear or renewables - is a tiny, miniscule rounding error compared to the excess heat absorbed by the atmosphere and oceans due to CO2 and the greenhouse effect.
The heat output of every single data centre on earth isn’t even worth thinking about on the scale of the global climate system.
Absolutely, the heat itself is not the problem. I read that every day the earth receives more heat energy from the sun than was ever stored in all the fossil fuels on the planet.
What's more the problem is that we could have spent that energy on much more useful things. Even if these datacenters run on green energy that means that something else isn't. And don't forget that no energy is truly green. Generation requirement, electricity transport and metal extraction for it, maintenance, nuclear fuel extraction and refinement, all these things aren't green. We can make them green as much as possible but increasing demands on energy massively is making the point of reaching carbon neutrality much harder.
I mean european forests are mostly monocultures created after we cut down everything natural we had. Maybe fire/warm resistent trees and forests will be planted. Its not like the fires are destroying 20000 years old ecosystems. Most of the forests were basically dead long before.
> loss of the Amazon (it's pretty much lost already, isn't it?)
Worth comparing Lula versus other Brazilian leader’s records on this. It looks like left-wing leaders are more likely to prioritise climate action because it’s a collective problem/resource
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"Being better at fighting fires, though, is not enough."
Yeah, it's nowhere near enough. We need to seriously revamp how we manage forests. They must be regularly cleaned, huge fire breaks between fenced areas and roads must be created and maintained. Prescribed burns on a regular schedule. Houses cannot be too close to the trees, no matter how pretty it looks. A huge clean radius must be maintained between houses and trees and between properties. All this work must be done in the winter and everything must be prepared for the summer. Every year. Everywhere.
I see none of this happening at a proper scale in my country (Portugal). So of course every summer we se huge forest fires. Lives lost, ecosystems destroyed. Next year it happens again...
It's only going to get worse.
>They must be regularly cleaned
People keep reiterating this probably because Trump keeps reiterating but it just sounds ridiculous.
How do you clean forests? The debris is part of the forest, not all areas of a forest are easily accessible or feasible to transport debis out of there. A dead tree is actually an ecosystem of fungi and insects. Cleaning it may make it more fire prone as broken sticks and leaves shield the ground from the sun allowing the soil to hold on to moisture a little longer. There is plenty of room for nuance here.
I would need to listen to actual experts on this, the correct solution is probably something akin to resorting wetlands and beavers which act as fantastic self maintaining fire breaks.
However when you suggest things like this you see the actual issues pop up, local farmers protest and others using NIMBY laws to block so they get payouts.
Prescribed burns are a good way to clean forests!
Burn the debris every 10-20 years rather than let it accumulate and become unstoppable disaster fires once a century.
This tends to be very hard hard to do in a democratic system though. People really don't like their forests burning.
Prescribed burns are a good tool, but they're not a silver bullet. Because of the decades without fires, there's so much debris that fires burn incredibly hot, so you either need people to go in and thin the debris (this is actually a thing they do, as ridiculous as "cleaning the forest" sounds), or deal with the extra damage and risk of a very hot fire. Then you need a decent amount of personnel to make sure the fire doesn't get out of hand (and they regularly do), and do it when the weather is right (wet season, low winds). A prescribed burn is still a forest fire, with all the risks, it's just one that's started at a time and place we control.
I find it ironic to discuss how burning forests is going to help fight the consequences of… too much CO2?
The wood in forests is part of the short term carbon cycle. It does not meaningfully affect global warming. The amount of carbon released in a forest fire is miniscule compared to what humans release.
> How do you clean forests? The debris is part of the forest, not all areas of a forest are easily accessible or feasible to transport debis out of there.
Cleaning is huge financial burden and has questionable outcome. Only extreme solution I can think of is fireblocks if situation gets worse which could worsen climate change by clearing trees. Divide forest in to grids, building roads wide enough to fire from spreading. Fill roads up with gravel or concrete to stop fires from spreading. Climate activists would never allow such plan to be implemented.
Yeah, it is a bit dumb to talk about "cleaning" forests. Or at least I've never heard anyone who spouted that line who I thought had any understanding of the situation. Mostly they are just salty that the forests aren't actually profitable for logging, but they can't say it like that.
Like a lot of things in the US, the resources are "there" for this stuff, because it's a lot of individual labor instead of something that can be turned into a massive payoff for a couple of "investors" there's no "market incentive" so nothing will be done.
For context, I live on 40 unimproved acres in CO, and much of my spring and late fall is spent moving downed wood and cutting down thickets of gamble oak.
That is a lot of work, and I hope (over the next decade) to eventually get it somewhat under control. The idea is to not have, for instance, a dead tree leaning up against a living tree and to try and tamp down or increase the space between the floor and the first couple of branches in the trees. I also collect up wood for heating in the winter (better to burn it to stay warm than to lt it go in an eventual wild fire.
This is a lot of strenuous work, and not just because I have some love and respect for the situation of all the individual flora and fauna that populate this chunk of land. I've know several wildland firefighters here and they are doing similar things in a hurry out in the hills with hand tools. Because you can't get large equipment around to do the work- there aren't roads in a lot of these places.
It'll all probably burn at some point, anyhow.
But I try because at least in the couple of acres where I actually live I might be able to get the underbrush cleared so a fire could be fought.
But the idea of setting it on fire is prepostrous- I might as well set the shack where I live on fire while i am at it.
That more or less scales up.
The process of mitigating wildire (usually done on a line near an active fire) is largely a bunch of 25 year olds with shovels and chainsaws.
I am all for that work- I'd much rather have them doing that than geraing up to go to Iran or Cuba or wherever.
But hey, the ecology of this place is fucked. My ancestors destroyed the megagfauna to prevent folks from subsisting off of the concentration camps/ reservations. The folks who are still "into" that racist, genocidal, ecocidal project aren't going to do anything to fix it; they'd rather burn their own houses down first.
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I think most of the fires are in manmade forests, where puffer space is nonexistent.
being good at fighting fires is part of the problem as that allows people to keep natural limited area fires from happen regularly and then eventually you get one huge fire.
> All this work must be done in the winter and everything must be prepared for the summer. Every year. Everywhere.
Good luck doing any work in the winter in places like, oh say, the Rocky Mountains.
Every forest has different needs. OP is in Portugal, I don't know much about forest there, but the plan seems reasonable for there. The Rocky Mountains need a different plan, but it isn't much different.
Portugal has about 10% forested land, of which an estimated 25% is non-native eucalyptus (an active pyrophyte), and over 50% in some areas. I've seen the aftermath of eucalyptus forest fires while travelling through Alentejo.
Portugal is 35k square miles. The Rockies are 300k square miles, much of it, notably, is mountainous.
I do not think “cleaning” it is going to work, so I’m curious what this “not much different” plan looks like.
See a forester. I would not assume the entire Rockies need the same plan.
In general I would say start fires near towns, and let fires that start elsewhere burn.
And what is you suggestion for the lack of rain everywhere?
https://www.rts.ch/info/regions/fribourg/2026/article/secher...
Making your forests "fireproof" isn't going to save you from desertification.
http://archive.today/o61rE
Using nextDNS, this page redirects me to a Russian ISP (TTK) block page for some reason and I’m nowhere near Russia (!)
Never seen the point of sharing a paywall article in HN... This helps.
This year Europe's fires are not the start. Few years ago we had very extended Australia fires, US/Canada fires, and other not so put in the spotlight fires in other countries around the world. At some point they diverged enough from normal to reach a scale that raised enough eyebrows.
And it is not just forest fires. Floods caused by extreme rainfalls, running out of letters in hurricane seasons, once in a century/millenia extreme weather events happening several times in a decade are increasingly noticeable, and they are just symptoms of bigger but harder to directly perceive global trends like that the global yearly average temperature increased a few tens of degrees or that the ocean is winning heat at a rate of 6 Hiroshima bombs per second.
bah, all is not lost.
Climate change will create winners and losers. Losers -- anyone on the equator or within the the tropic of cancer/capricorn. Winners -- those outside those regions or with enough $ to adapt.
Give me solar geoengineering, 2x increase in R&D spending on reducing fossil fuel usage, and funding for direct carbon capture (and a financial incentive to do it).
It's going to get worse before it gets better sadly.
I'm not sure there are all that many winners. There are those that lose big time with some places potentially becoming uninhabitable, and those that merely have to spend a fortune on new flood prevention infrastructure, deal with massive changes to how they do agriculture and forestry in a new climate, and in the future deal with streams of climate refugees from countries on the list of even bigger losers.
Russia and Canada might end up winning from this, but for everyone else it seems like a big negative, with some silver linings
Climate change will almost surely increase growing seasons and agricultural productivity in higher latitudes (for some crops). It will be extremely crop and cultivar dependent, I expect lots of R&D to go into crops that can deal with wider vairety, and generally hotter, conditions.
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4974
Where "winning" means surviving in relative comfort until global society disintegrates into a constant state of famine and war and you run out of local resources.
> Give me...
Who's going to give you any of this in time?
that carbon capture tech is called tree/forest btw. if we plant trillions of trees, we win, not sure how many millions of people and years it would take. probably less than half a war
there are other factors at play like AMOC halting and breakdown of habitats that are codependent with other habitats. you dont get to pick and choose regions since earth is a huge interconnected system itself.
stop drinking the tech kool aid and start with degrowth.
I recently read capitalist realism by Fisher, and I think it is impossible (or very close to it, barring major war/plague/thanos snap) for something like degrowth to be seriously considered. There are simply waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to many incentives at multiple levels and across traditional alliances against it.
Consequences of inaction, as predicted, will continue until you can't live there anymore.
Any reason SpaceX cannot just build a giant solar shade at L1? This seems fairly doable on the decade timescale, plus it could do double duty as a weapon.
I did the math out on this for fun a couple years ago. It came put surprisingly reasonable.
Taking estimates for Starship payload to Mars as the likely payload to L1, carrying to L1 enough thin reflective mylar film to block around 0.5% of light to earth would cost between $80-100 billion. Which is a lot but not nearly as much as I expected and not outside the realm of possibility.
I love how you didn't even take a beat before suggesting that it be used as a weapon.
We collectively deserve this. The warnings came, but it was framed as "future generations will face these problems", and we collectively kicked the can down the road.
I say "collectively" because many of us don't deserve this and have wanted desperately to address it head on to try and mitigate the damage. But the scope of this problem makes individual contributions effectively meaningless.
It's not clear how bad it has to get before meaningful action takes place. But it will undoubtedly be too little, too late.
I think part of the path to try and address this is to have stories that paint a clear and simple picture of what that would look like and how it would be done. Even then, the issue has been heavily politicized to make it an us versus them problem rather than an "all of us" problem.
small correction: only individual contributions are meaningful. If I consume less and you consume less and many other individuals consume less there simply won't be as much demand for fossil fuels.
The only way I can understand your premise of helplessness is that it provides a convenient excuse for you not to do anything to help. Do you think companies will keep burning fuel at the exact same rate if a billion individuals dont incentivize them to?
Don't worry we will end up spraying the atmosphere to buy more time, and the Earth will cool, and people will believe that the problem is solved and we can just go back to burning fossil fuels.
So the fighting will continue while we keep duct taping and band aiding the problem.
Counter argument from Matt Ridley:
Why the flames of Britain's wildfires have been fanned by the Green agenda as much as the weather
https://www.dailymail.com/debate/article-16017973/Britains-w...
Matt Ridley the coal-mine owning climate-change denier?
I guess disasters might be his area of expertise since he once crashed a bank and led the official pro-Brexit campaign, but the other stuff seems like a conflict of interest.
Now do Lord Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley.
Gotta get all the both sides of climate change deniers.
And what is the responsibility of the Greens in the lack of rain that causes Swiss cows to be moved back from their fields?
https://www.rts.ch/info/regions/fribourg/2026/article/secher...
And what is the responsibility of the Greens in the acidification of the oceans?
Etc, etc, etc.
So Economist is now stating Climate Change is an issue. Where was that magazine in the 80s and 90s. Oh, the were writing how fossil fuels are still a good investment and are still the future. And I expect they stated Trump was the better choice in 2020 and 2024.
So in 2026, this magazine (and others) are reporting how +2C will be far worse than +1.5C. How about reporting stopping at +2C is a pipe dream. We are heading straight to +3C and probably +4C.
Time to start reporting on how we need to stop using fossil fuels now, not later. But even doing that really will not stop us from reaching +2.5C due to inaction by world Gov. over the last 50 years.
Their infamous editorial Drowning in oil (4 March 1999) bottom-ticked the oil price.
For those who have heard enough of "As long as we emit CO2, the climate will get worse", these rabbit holes I recently discovered : new science about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_river and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biotic_pump.
You can look up : Antonio Donato Nobre, Victor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva and go from there.
The science is NOT settled, and people are still learning how all this works. They may all be crooks for all i know.
But as is mentionned in another comment, "(...)stop eating meat, stop driving non-electric vehicles, stop using AC, reduce consumption (...)" won't save us if indeed the massive hits to old-growth forest doom us anyhow.
Arguing for arguing’s sake gets old fast when there is nothing left to drink.
What ever happened to biomass energy? I'd rather burn wood in a controlled way that produces the best possible exhaust than have it burn uncontrolled. Encouraging biomass energy would create a market and economic incentives to manage forests.
Have you ever been in a "farmed" forest? It's basically devoid of life besides trees. It's weird as hell.
I was expecting to learn something new from this article, instead I got a bunch of numbers and a careful number of deaths from smoke 'by the end of the century' prediction.
What end of the century ? The way things are going, these cities (in Europe) are going to be unlivable by the end of this decade. They already are. And the fires..
Numbers, percentages, increases, excess, estimated.. We've constructed this abstract parallel universe in which we comfortably live in front of the screens.. and then wonder why the world around us is burning.
Climate change.. Such a comfortable word behind which we can all hide and dispel the responsibility for a life of copious comfort and pleasure.
It's the avocado toasts, the leather jackets, the 1-click-checkouts, the weekend flight to Barcelona, the CL=F price, the bonuses, the 'natural resources' there for us to use and exploit in infinite amounts..
The whole fucking system. That's why the world is burning.
Yeah, I'm guilty of all of the above too. And I have no solution. Just blowing out the smoke from those fires.
As Macron said in 2023: "Who could have predicted the climate crisis?"
The people in charge a either clinically retarded or willingly ignoring the problem, either way we're fucked, the point of no return is behind us now, this is the new normal, and it'll only get worse
In some ways I wonder if these timescales are "beyond comprehension" for most people. You can tell people the temperature will go up in 20 years, but you can't make them feel what it will be like. In the same way you can tell a 10 year old what it's like to be age 35 but they don't get it, and I've heard what it's like to be age 80 but I don't really know and won't for some time.
> You can tell people the temperature will go up in 20 years
I think the biggest issue with the climate change communication is that the scientists decided to focus on a temperature delta.
There is no meaningful temperature delta, it's just something that you get after a lot of aggregation and averaging.
Sure it makes sense for scientists running their models and such, but it should never have been the primary communication tool to politicians and laymen.
I think it would have been significantly better if they invented some new scale, like the Richter scale or the hurricane severity scale, which instead incorporates the effects of the average temperature rising. A scale which directly communicates a sense of how many more fires will we see per year, how many more severe storms, flash floods etc.
I think we've gotten to the point where the question can be asked looking back, not forward: think back to your childhood and how much things have changed since then? If you've lived long enough you can notice these things.
I used to have snow for weeks each winter in my city and now if I get 2-3 days of snow a year it's unusual. Extreme weather events where it rains in one day as much as in one month have become a recurring event to the point we're re-planning sewage systems around these things.
Arguably it's rational (though selfish) to think like this.
Life is short, there's no point freezing and living off leaves for the next few decades when you'll be old in the blink of an eye anyway
> Arguably it's rational (though selfish) to think like this.
Is it? We are not talking about screwing the climate for the people who will come in 200 years, right? In the last decades we have been saying "if we don't change the trend, your children will most likely die because of the climate change".
Is it rational to be 30 and not care about the fact that we will be screwed long before we reach the age of retirement?
Setting aside the fact that I want to leave things in a good place for my kids, neighbors' kids, nieces, nephews and all their friends...
Setting aside the fact that even if I was so selfish to care about my personal legacy, I'd want the world around long enough to learn about it...
there's no point freezing and living off leaves for the next few decades
I don't think the ask here is so unreasonable. It's disingenuous to frame it this way.
> “the people in charge”
The everyday person votes for those in charge, and the everyday person couldn’t care less.
Everyday people are generally more pro-renewables and climate action. The politicians can be targeted with bribes by anyone affected by the transition.
A classic collective action problem as described by Mancur Olson.
> As Macron said in 2023: "Who could have predicted the climate crisis?"
The oil companies in the 1970s for one:
* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063
Agreed that the people in charge do nothing and don't understand the problem.
However, the people in charge (e.g. in France) are elected by the people, and therefore represent it. Do you think that the far-right will care more about the climate crisis? The French people is likely to elect them next year.
It's too easy to vote for people who don't give a shit about the climate crisis, and then blame them.
> either way we're fucked, the point of no return is behind us now
The faster and the harder we react, the more we save. Fires are a good example: because many trees are burning now (therefore they are already dead) and many trees will burn (because the fire won't magically stop), it's worth fighting to preserve as much as we can. Saying "we won't get those dead trees back, so we may as well let the rest of the forest burn" is counter-productive.
We need to act now. And not by electing morons and then blaming them for being morons.
> Do you think that the far-right will care more about the climate crisis?
Far right, far left, far center, it's all the same: money, power, money, power, stay in the EU, free market, money, power.
People could vote for candidates who care. They just don't.
Nobody cares enough, they all like the status quo, unless you want to vote for insane royalists &co
I said "people who care about the climate emergency", where did you see "royalists & co"?
Who are they? They all are for growth, increased productivity, increase standard of living, global commerce races to the bottom
They want to keep everything exactly the same but somehow stamp it "green"
Because they are those that get elected. People just have to vote for those who are not for growth.
> We need to act now.
What does this look like, precisely, in practice?
The people here maintain a list of things: https://drawdown.org/explorer
Chiefly we need to replace fossil fuels with electricity from carbon free sources and electrify transportation, heating, and industry.
> Chiefly we need to replace fossil fuels with electricity from carbon free sources and electrify transportation, heating, and industry.
That's happening. For instance, China now generates less than half its energy from coal for the first time, as reported earlier today: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-generates-less...
First, we have to accept the facts:
* CO2 emissions are screwing the climate, and CO2 emissions come from fossil fuels. We need to stop using fossil fuels.
* Our way of life depends on fossil fuels. In some cases it's obvious (we transport food in trucks that need oil), but it's too easy to believe that we may replace that with electricity. It's a lot more complicated than that: everything depends on petrochemical products. How do you transport food without plastics? How do you build electronics without petrochemical products (the PCBs need them, for one)? Without electronics, how do you manage solar panels?
* We don't necessarily have to go back to the Middle-Age: first we probably couldn't: we are way too many for that, and second we know a lot more than they did.
But overall, we will have to do a lot less with a lot less. We have to think about what's fundamental, and how we want to preserve it. I'm not saying "choose between a new game console or a new smartphone every two years instead of having both". I'm saying "do you want to preserve some nature? Produce enough food for everybody? Keep some kind of democratic system?".
Of course, it's too much, we cannot do everything that we need, and we won't be able to preserve everything that we want. We need to accept it and start prioritising.
Overall, I would say that a good first step would be to get informed about how bad it is. There are enough books and resources about that. The people need to be informed in order to elect informed people. Too many don't give a shit, spend their free time on TikTok and then blame the ruling class.
> we will have to do a lot less with a lot less.
What do you mean by this?
Degrowth. Either by choice (degrow as fast as we can to preserve the climate) or not (degrow because we have passed the peak of production of fossil fuels and just don't have enough energy anymore).
We will have less energy, therefore less globalisation, fewer machines, fewer resources, whether we want it or not. We won't be able to keep producing as much as we do now.
So we will have less, and we will produce less. The game is to find a way to do it without collapsing entirely. And the longer we wait, the harder it will get (because the climate will get worse and there will be less and less available fossil fuels to help the transition).
Find the closest maths teacher with a polish last name and ask them
Politicians are selling to their audiences, there's no more truth in their words than any other sales/marketing scheme.
Of course we're fucked.
It's a prisoners dilemma. No country can risk de-growth or not develop because some countries either DGAF or actively want climate change to happen (Russia) and will gladly take advantage of anyone who lets their guard down.
The only way climate change stops is with a technological solution.
> As Macron said in 2023: "Who could have predicted the climate crisis?" The people in charge a either clinically retarded or willingly ignoring the problem,
The "people in charge" as well as the "climate experts" are generally aligned on the climate crisis, but everyone has been surprised by unexpected acceleration and the very sudden swings.
Put differently, you can predict and act, according to the trend, but the sudden and unpredictable timing of these swings is a separate, and more difficult issue to navigate.
For instance, can anyone predict specifically what will happen "next" and "where" and prepare to mitigate the impact?
This is completely wrong. The climate experts are not surprised by this at all. We've known about it for decades. We just didn't give a shit because it was not impacting us directly.
Now it's starting to impact us directly, but we still don't really give a shit. In a few weeks it will be business as usual.
It will get worse every year, and we will be more and more willing to do something as it gets worse. But we will have fewer and fewer resources to do it, and less stuff to save (once a forest disappears, you as a human won't see it come back in your lifetime).
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> but everyone has been surprised by unexpected acceleration and the very sudden swings
It's been predicted for decades, in multiple reports, over and over and over and over again... No excuses
> can anyone predict specifically what will happen "next" and "where" and prepare to mitigate the impact?
Something bad, duh? And reduce emissions, duh?
The things people have been predicting and advocating for during the past like 50 years at that point. Are we still debating these details lol?
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While we haven’t known the exact trajectory of the crisis, it has been known for decades that the trend would generally and increasingly point towards “future is bad” if we didn’t reduce emissions. World leaders bet on having more time to shift away from harmful policy and lost.
The specific swings are a little surprising, but only in the way that a macaroni jumps around in hard to predict directions if you put it in boiling water. We’ve made the weather less predictable, but we knew we were doing it.
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I'm not into blaming people like this.
What we all need to understand is that after oil, we just won't have enough energy to maintain our current way of life. Not just energy by the way: our way of life relies on petrochemical products (from fertilisers to electronics). Solar panels need electronics, we don't know if we can build/maintain them at scale without computers that need petrochemical products.
So we need as much as we can of everything. Both renewables and nuclear.
Who is opposing nuclear power? Or are you trying to imply that advocating for renewables is “opposing nuclear power”?
Plenty of people oppose it, about 36% of Germany for one example https://www.dw.com/en/german-poll-majority-for-return-to-nuc...
I can't tell from that article whether they're opposed to nuclear energy or whether they don't think nuclear is the best use of the money (e.g., compared with renewables).
The french "far" left party getting 30%+ of votes does
Are they getting 30% of votes because they oppose nuclear power? Is that the single issue for that party's supporters?
Water: https://www.dw.com/en/danube-water-levels-hungary-romania-cu...
How did you get that from a quarter of a sentence haha
I always find it interesting when politicians mention temperature target goals.. what are you still talking about, it's done. We now need to worry about the hundreds of millions of people that are neither asylum migrants or economic migrant but survival migrants. The real discussion will become how we keep those out very soon. And since there are no good solutions from the "good" people who ignored everything and got us into this mess it will be the bad people giving us the only remaining "solution": violence.
> what are you still talking about, it's done
It's not. The climate will warm as much as we emit CO2. Sure, the CO2 that we have already emitted won't leave. We've passed 1.5C, that won't come back in our lifetime. But the more we emit, the worse it will get. To keep what we have now, we have to stop emitting entirely, right now.
> We now need to worry about the hundreds of millions of people
We need to worry about the problems that are coming from the CO2 we have already emitted, that's true. But we also need to worry a lot about the fact that we are making it worse every single day. We are not reducing our CO2 emissions, we are increasing them right now.
Are you worried about hundreds of millions of refugees? The way it's going, we'll reach 4C. It means that billions of people will have to move.
I don't think we can still use the concept of "refugee" when its entire countries that need to move because their part of the world has become so hot that humans cannot survive outside without life support (that's what will happen to billions of people with 4C). At this point, it's entire countries moving with their military, it's just global war.
hundreds of millions of people coming to europe (i didn't mention) is still lowballing on purpose. sure it's billions, but not all will go to one place was my thinking here.
you are talking reason, you are in the wrong timeline buddy. i'm talking about what we will chose as a society, i feel we can't help ourselves.
You can convince a person (me certainly) that we should stop immediately (or very very short time frame). But most people have experienced their entire lifetime of propaganda and fallacious arguments that words and reason have lost all meaning.
We are still getting cooked so slowly that people will only see unrelated incidents for a long time. World War(s) 3 is what the survivors will call it.
>by the end of the century
Maybe I've missed it because I don't follow news on this much (apart from "it will get warmer/worse"), but what happens after that? Seems like I've been hearing "by 2100" for the last 20 years, but now that's only 74 years away. Some people alive today will live to see it. Will it just keep getting warmer or will it level off somewhat? Or is it not worth discussing because preceding events will already be such an overwhelming disaster?
> Will it just keep getting warmer or will it level off somewhat?
It will get warmer for every kg of CO2 we emit. If we emitted less every day, it would still warm, but slower. Right now we are emitting more every day, so it will warm faster and faster.
> Or is it not worth discussing because preceding events will already be such an overwhelming disaster?
It's always worth discussing. It is not linear: every extra degree makes it a lot worse than the previous one. We're finding it worrying now with 1.5C? We should do everything we can to stay as close as possible to it. Probably we cannot avoid 2C, and if we keep going with the current emissions, that's 4C. 4C means that billions of people have to leave their country. I think it pretty much means that more than half of us die in a global war?
There is hope: we don't have to reach 4C. But we have to change our way of life for that. Which should be worth it, right? I'm ready to change my way of life to... survive.
Europe (and the world at large, really) can either wait for its demise, through increasingly oppressive climate hostile to human occupation and de-industrialization while the rest of the world continues on the current trajectory, or start getting its shit together and immediately commence climate engineering on a continental scale. Start with stratospheric aerosol injection, and mandate it not unlike "sustainable" aviation fuels on aircraft flying at the minimum altitude required to have any effect, as it should be possible [0], expedite research into other climate engineering efforts including space-based ones, promptly address the complete and utter reliance on fossil fuels and those profiting from it.. if climate change isn't something worth approaching as a war would be, then there's no point discussing it at all. Researchers and journals have been warning of crossing the point of no return and temperature targets for years now, you either submit to it and keep chasing emission reduction targets, or take action. The idea of simply "adapting to it getting worse" is suicidal, hard to sell to the public and depends on bureaucrats not getting kicked out.
0. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
We can't trust them for asbestos and leaded gas but we'll trust them with "stratospheric aerosol injection"...
God know what unknown complex system will fuck up and end up making things 10x worse. We'll do literally everything besides consuming and producing less
Neither of those two have anything to do with the suggested technique(s). Humans are already engaging in climate engineering through existing at any meaningful rhythm necessary to sustain 8 billion people on the planet, it's merely by side-effect, aimless, and lacking any coordination and agency. You are not getting billions of people to "consume" and "produce" less. What you're engaging in right now is no different from what oil companies did decades ago in a coordinated effort, shifting blame onto the consumers, and ultimately the swindling of the century when it comes to environmentalism, see [0] for a quick example. You're free to succumb through inaction, the rest of us would rather not, and never depend on failing, moving emission targets dependent on the whims of politicians and the masses electing them, proven to be incapable of entertaining any abstract long-term planning, let alone sticking to it. It's unfathomable some would prefer entertaining the idea of humanity fundamentally altering its nature rather than actively making up for the effects they are influencing while addressing them, through technology available today, but you must've already given up to believe this is "the new normal" like you said.
0. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
Sounds like a threat
“French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu warned the country "is going through an unprecedented fire season", with 116,085 hectares (286,852 acres) burned and 13,566 fire starts recorded since January. The minister revealed in a post on X that nine out of 10 fires "are human-caused and most arise from carelessness: a cigarette butt, a barbecue, work carried out without precaution".”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg34128nvpo
In my country (EU) when large-scale land-use projects are approved —such as solar panel farms, mining operations, and buildings construction— fires break out and they burn everything in their path, tens of thousands of hectares. This -often- even happens the day after the project's approval (they are not scared). Time ago, laws that prevented construction on protected land after a fire were removed (included more sabotages on prevention that came after that. This along two different governments of supposedly opposite colors).
On television such fires were/are sold/brainwashed as climate change, rather than corruption and psychopaths.
I would recommend to keep an eye on this things, to investigate possible motivations, independently, fire by fire.
Simple advice, hard to follow
strong El Niño event
Natural causes discarded in the wildfire of Vall d'Uixó in Castellon, Spain. The police suspects that this was (also) provoked.
With a perimeter of 67 Km, the wildfire started in several points at the same time, has devastated 7500 hectares and displaced or confined 38000 people.
This is not even a start, is a: will continue until we address the elephant in the room: Too much of this wildfires are arson by proxy. Crime is always the biggest category in the chart of known causes, and natural causes are always the smaller one (and a very small one indeed, between 5 and 10% or so).
So without criminals, lets say 90% of those forests would keep evolving towards a less and less flammable state and the soil would keep sequestrating carbon, that is exactly what we want and need. Or would be logged, sequestrating carbon also.
Instead to pour acid raining over Europe, why if we try first to harden the current laws, remove the economical rewards, and fight the disinformation campaigns of farm trolls (always deployed at the same periods), until the incentives to burn are reduced?
See also: https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5977751-trump-f...
There's a point where "head in stand" becomes deliberately malicious.
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I've seen too many videos of people deliberately creating these fires to believe a single "this is because of human made climate change".
The climate change part is the heat making the forests more dry so the manmade fires get bigger.
Arson is the main culprit not climate change
Climate change made the forests drier so the effects of arson are worse.
[citation needed]
I was getting a bit worried so it's good to see an economist headline saying this will happen - now I can relax
I get your sarcasm but it's good that a paper very strongly focused on economic activity is on board with the need to tackle climate change. A couple decades ago all the capitalist neoliberal institutions were still trying too pooh-pooh it all under the rug. That is truly over, with the current US administration as the only significant exception.
Our software and AI capabilities have improved astronomically… but nature is still nature. Working with the physical world is still so hard. Humbling, in a way.
People are truly having a climate change discussion fatigue. They hear all the time from politicians, celebrities, influencers, etc. that they should stop eating meat, should not drive non-electric vehicles, should not use AC, reduce consumption, and all other bullshit while the people preaching those have started wars that emit billions of tons of carbon, travel on their private planes to climate change summits, taking their private plane to ski in Aspen and throw lavish parties to celebrate birthdays, etc.
It's basically normal people should sacrifice their standards of livings and pay taxes to reduce carbon emission while the same rules doesn't apply for the other class of the society. Most people are living pay check to pay check and out of all the worries in their minds, climate change is the last thing they can afford to worry about.
Well climate change is happening whether wealthy people are hypocrites or not. Also there a lot of people in very poor countries (india, south east asia, africa) that are already feeling the effects and need to worry about it a lot.
I would actually say rich people can afford the most to not worry about climate change, because they can stave off the effects better than poor people (moving to colder climates, building cooling systems, or fleeing to mars [1])
[1] https://www.spacex.com/humanspaceflight/mars
I think you missed the point of the parent comment. It wasn’t about rich people.
> Well climate change is happening whether wealthy people are hypocrites or not. Also there a lot of people in very poor countries (india, south east asia, africa) that are already feeling the effects and need to worry about it a lot.
no shit sherlock, poor people in those countries have been suffering from starvation, diseases and lack of basic necessities even before the climate change was a thing. For them, it's just another misery on top of their already miserable lives.
Nobody gave a shit about those people in poor countries 20-30 years ago, all of a sudden everyone is worries about climate change because Europe is burning. Had it been a monsoon flooding or a drought in South Asia, nobody in the Economist would even bat an eye, let alone publish an article.
The propaganda has done it's job here, because your base assumption is that dealing with climate change is a cost.
But all the research suggests dealing with climate change is the cheaper option.
There's complexities there but you're effectively saying that you're too poor to pay off a credit card. Okay, but your only going to get poorer by not engaging with reality.
> The propaganda has done it's job here, because your base assumption is that dealing with climate change is a cost.
Yes, that is a reasonable base assumption. When in doubt, it's a reasonably safe bet that people have chosen the cheapest and most effective path to something. It isn't always true, but it's true more often than not.
You can label it anyway you want, if you want pay it with all your credit cards be my guest, but one thing for sure is that paying for it even more is not going to make me any richer or even elevate my living standards. That’s the hard reality. Normal people are F’ed either way so absolutely no incentive for me to care at all
Not paying off your credit cards makes you poorer
This post would make sense if we didn't live a world where the head of the most powerful country in the world says climate change is a scam.
Also, plenty of middle class, comfortable off people refuse to change their comparatively luxurious, king like lives even a little bit unless there is financial upside to them.
well I have good news! normal people don't have to sacrifice, fossil fuel companies do. if the govt mandates something (like with the ozone layer, or with lead acid battery recycling), something that was once impossible becomes possible.
and then what? are people going to ride horses to work? beg on the street because the manufacturing companies have closed and they lost their source of income? or are you just dumb or maybe naive to think that banning CFC and fossil fuel consumption would have the same effect on the everyday lives of normal people?
more developed countries are already prepared for what you describe: people would (continue to) take public transit, and rich people would (continue to) pay for the unemployed to live and retrain until they get new jobs. If a country was missing these basic features it would be scarier.
People on this forum are not living paycheck to paycheck yet you can see them cope like everyone else, we're truly fucked
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These firefighting solutions... aren't they a bit outdated and cumbersome? I mean essentially moving water into a given area by planes, copters and vehicles seems a bit primitive, isn't it?
I'm a firm believer that sooner or later we will be extinct by extreme heat and suffocation.
Two weeks ago here in Umbria, Italy the heat was extreme. It was 40°C without a breeze of air, it literally felt like braathing hot air. One morning while I was walking I couldn't believe the amount of dry leaves on the street, by pictures people would have guessed that it was autumn.
I have a really good tolerance to high temperatures but this time I got home very dizzy.
Hope is not too late to revert the current situation, but realistically year after year temperatures have been raising steadly.
above ~35 C a breeze makes it worse.
This has happened to the earth before, the earth will change, Northern Atlantic will freeze over, stopping the currents of the ocean, and raise water levels at least several meters, enough to flood most cities on the East Coast.
It never happened this fast, by a fat margin
yup. we are probably burning 10k years of fossilized plant matter every year. The biosphere can't handle that.