Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative.
The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect.
This only stops it.
Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.
The technology-will-save-us mentality is part of the reason we are here. We live in a society that doesn't do anything unless it makes money for some set of decrepit old men.
We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition) but people made money doing the opposite. And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US.
No it isn't, the idea that strict vegan diets would have stoped climate change is just nonsense. Run the numbers. "Strict vegan diets" is the attitude of US activists telling the developing world that they need to change their behavior before the US activist is willing to accept driving less or adopting dense urban infill housing.
"Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.
People who refused to acknowledge the reality of human society, refused to acknowledge that the profit system exists whether they want it to or not, are responsible for focusing action on ineffective means of change.
It’s one piece of many. They never said it was the only piece. You’re straw-manning this comment.
And vegan diets would make a big dent, look up agricultural sector emissions, look up beef emissions and methane from their burps. It’s a major factor after transport and electricity.
Yes, but there is zero shot at doing this versus energy and transportation.
The major limiter of veganism is cultural. People love eating meat. It’s a major source of protein and calories, especially in developing countries. Americans are not going vegan, so it’s kind of silly, in my opinion, to focus on it as a solution.
Compare to building nuclear energy or solar / wind + batteries. China, the US, Europe, and India are all well-positioned to do this. The limitation is political will, which is more difficult than it should be, but definitely easier than convincing a critical mass of Americans to go vegan.
Culture can be changed - we changed the attitude toward and prevalence of cigarette smoking in 2-3 generations, we could change other practices as well. Success doesn't need to mean 100% adoption - material changes in attitude toward meat consumption (luxury/celebration vs everyday) would make a material difference in the overall impact. And yes, some/many ranchers, butchers, etc would need to turn to some other industry for income. Solar farms should do pretty well on ranchland. Full disclosure - I'm NOT a vegetarian and love a nice steak. My doctor has recommended I incorporate more plant protein in my diet. But I'm not really trying to convince anyone that they should do the same. I'm mostly reacting to the opinion that it's impossible/silly. My 2 pack a day smoker dad thought the same thing back in the 1960s. By the time he was in his 70s, he was a firm non-smoker. Things can change.
Edit: I'm also not trying to equate eating meat with smoking - one is obviously more harmful to society than the other. I'm just thinking about the cultural change that happened. Culture is malleable. Laws aren't a great way to affect culture, but social pressure is really effective.
Culture can be changed indeed, as can be seen in religion where branches has happened and whole demographics has gone and switched to different religions.
The reason for the decrease in smoking is still being researched and debate, but the main arguments that I have seen is the main role of smoking as social stress relief and as such it has been replaced by other addictions like opium use (mobile phone use, social media, and games has also been argued).
If we consider food culture to be malleable, we definitely should move to aquaculture as a main source of nutrients. Farms on land compete with forests and human activity, and land based farms uses artificial fertilizers (derived from natural gas) and massive amount of fresh water. Shellfish, invertebrates, and seaweed can provide both protein and calories, and has the lowest environmental impact of anything we eat today and can even have a positive environmental impact if farmed correctly. Changing farming from doing harm to doing good would have massive impact, and all it takes is a cultural change.
I think the difference is that smoking is also horrible for the smoker, and many want to quit, but can’t very easily. People don’t want to stop eating meat, driving their SUVs, buying cheap shit on Amazon, and flying to cool vacations. Stopping doing those things doesn’t benefit them unless everyone else stops too, and unlike smoking, we’ve made little progress in the last few decades (other than the progress unlocked by technology that means it’s immediately beneficial to the one making the change, like solar), so I can’t blame anyone for thinking that giving up meat to save the planet is stupid since their entire lifetime of lived experience tells them that the vast majority of their fellow humans are not going to do the same.
It's tied to their identity for a lot of people. The same kinds that will drive a huge SUV to compensate for the hole in their lives where meaning and connection is supposed to be.
I don’t think that is a majority behavior. Few people consume to own the libs. At least far fewer people than those who just like meat more than they care about their marginal contributions to climate change.
I think that’sa harmful oversimplification. You should avoid arguing against a boogeyman version of your political opponents. People vote for crazy candidates for a multitude of reasons. Most people have fairly average opinions on the majority of topics but can only vote for candidates that partially represent their preferences. I for example have fairly radical preferences when it comes to environmental policy but agree more with conservative opinions on other topics. There are no parties in my country that promise to make me completely happy.
Stop being so fucking patronizing. I was raised by these people. Most of my family are still these people. I’ve experienced their bullshit for over 40 years. Your high minded nonsense in no way applies. I see what they cheer for.
Energy policy is set by governments, which makes it a part of the political sphere
Veganism is an individual choice, and individual choices are generally pushed by culture
Of course culture and politics influence each other in a myriad of ways, but when people start to try and push individual choices like being vegan into the political space it is never very popular
I personally would fight tooth and nail to prevent veganism from becoming a law in my country. Failing that I would immediately make plans to move somewhere else.
Going vegan 1 day a week is trivially easy - if everyone does this, the emission reduction is not trivial. We need not have to go full militant vegan to make a dent. And I totally agree with energy/transit/real estate planning being the sectors where a government can twist knobs a bit easier with greater effect. But I strongly believe that we need holistic approaches- reducing emissions on an individual level will move the needle en masse.
If I stopped eating all meat and dairy it would reduce the world's annual emissions by 0.0000000026%, assuming we can ignore animal quantization and market effects which could easily actually reduce the reduction to 0.
It only makes a difference if a whole lot of other people do that. If I decide individually to do it for the climate even though I will be less happy on a vegan diet and it is not also done by a whole lot of other people I've made myself worse off for no benefit.
To get enough people to do it will require government incentives. It's hard to see how incentives specifically for this could be designed to be both effective and not so unpopular as to get the government replaced at the next election.
If it ever comes about it is far more likely to be as the result of something more general such as a revenue neutral carbon tax. That might raise the input costs for meat production shifting some people to non-meat diets. (They will still mostly prefer meat, but this way they might not blame the government as much).
Compare to other things individuals can do, like switch to EVs. For the vast majority of people with good home charging an EV will generally be as good as or better than an ICE car except that it is several thousand dollars more expensive than a similar ICE car.
That's something governments can incentivize. Subsidize the cost difference and subsidize home charging equipment purchase and installation, and you will get people switching. Not because they want to help the climate and are sacrificing something for that, but because it is an improvement to their current driving setup and it helps the climate.
The biggest wins though are in the things individuals don't directly deal with. Replace fossil fuel power plants with renewables backed with storage that just use gas occasionally for example, and to the user it is all just electricity. You don't have to convince individual they need to change their lifestyle to so this kind of change.
The straw man is claiming that "strict vegan diets" are necessary. People bring up "strict vegan diets" to sabotage climate action. It's a hindrance to achieving the very possible change we need.
> People bring up "strict vegan diets" to sabotage climate action.
They also tend to use polarizing identity politics that vilify all men, or all old people, or all white people, etc, even though most of those groups are suffering with everybody else.
how fast do you expect vegan diets to be distributed through society? What is the relation between the expectation of how fast they can be distributed through society and the requirement for speed of distribution to have the desired effect?
Obviously the requirement would have to be significantly quicker than current spread of veganism which would, as you noted, lead to a big dent in the agriculture sector.
How are your calculations taking into account the need to kill off, en masse, cattle and other animals as veganism spreads because they no longer can be considered economically sustaining for the farmer to support them?
I ask because I've never seen any calculation about this! Everybody always seems to think that veganism spreads and the cattle fairy will blink them out of existence.
When I was working for Greenpeace all the holier than thou vegans were all talking about how immoral it was to kill animals for food, not taking into account that once you no longer user those animals for food you need to kill off a lot of them. This taking into account of things always caused me to have a sneaking suspicion that they wanted the animals not to be killed, as if the farmers would be oh well we can't sell you for meat so let's just keep you on in retirement and feed you, but not have you breed, until you die of old age.
Given the influx of sudden and wide spread veganism and the collapse of the meat as food industry, what are the plans for getting rid of the bodies of lots of dead cows? I know what the plans are now with meat as food, cows are butchered, cut up, refrigerated and transported all over the world, but without meet as food none of that will happen because there would not be profit at the end to support it, so please, what is your plan?
Frankly, the whole wide-spread veganism is part of the solution seems to have the weakness of having many problematic moving pieces that are not at all planned for in any meaningful way - that I have ever seen that is.
I think current livestock usage is driven by demand? I don’t think everyone needs to become strictly vegan. If every ate meat just two days a week that would have a big impact. Perfect being the enemy of the good and all that. For example if meat usage was rationed by the government WW2-style that would likely effect demand too.
You might argue that’s a ridiculous suggestion which is fair. The western world did mobilize for something that’s likely to end less of life that if we continue on our current trajectory.
> the idea that strict vegan diets would have stoped climate change is just nonsense
Yeah, where did you get it from? They said "strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition" Would you also have said "the idea that energy transition and ground based mass transit would have stopped climate change is just nonsense", too?
Only to then go on to talk about "the reality of human society", as so often with these top response to the top comment. It's the sophistry two-step.
> "Making money" is the incentive system of society.
Then explain voluntary work or all the people risking their lives for other people they don’t even know.
Human society existed before money.
And nobody said that a vegan diet would have stopped climates change, they said strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition.
Just picking one and say that would help is a nasty tactic.
It’s like saying you need water, food and sleep to live and you say, nope, water alone doesn’t keep you alive.
The reality is, consuming and producing less works but it’s harder then keep going and hope for a technical solution.
Same with being overweight, more sports, less food works but doesn’t make fun.
I push back heartily on anybody bringing up "strict vegan diets" because it is itself a massive straw man, one that mostly promotes inaction and idleness. Michael Mann's 2021 book, and all the interviews around that time, are probably far more effective than I could be at explaining why it's such a bad idea to bring up "strict vegan diets"
Making money is not the only incentive system in society, but it is overwhelmingly the one that controls emissions. Another key one is regulations around housing, which require lots of driving, that's been built deep into our entire land use, and can not be changed on the time scale necessary for climate action.
Moreover, "making money" is the incentive system in all the world's big carbon emitting economies that controls decisions, from China to the US. Sometimes those incentive systems are based on the costs of technology, sometimes they are based on rules that governments make (e.g. China setting the price for energy capacity markets too high, resulting in buliding lots of coal electricity plants that sit mostly idle...)
As somebody who spends almost all of my political effort trying to get ground based mass transit and dense development, I often advocate for them on climate grounds, but only because climate grounds are convincing politically here. They are rounding errors on climate action, in practice, because new development over the course of the next two decades, the crucial two decades of climate cation, will only be a tiny fraction of our built environment.
There's only one true method for climate action: stop extracting fossil fuels to run soceity, and change all industrial processes that emit carbon to neutral methods, and make agriculture carbon neutral or ideally carbon negative. Strict vegan diets helps with deforestation in Brazil, for those that get meat from Brazil, for example. But the plains of the US used to be covered with bison, before they were slaughtered and replaced with cattle. We need to look at the overall ecosystem, where everything is going.
Talking about "strict vegan diets" when they are not needed is merely a recipe for keeping people from adopting far easier, far more effective, and far more necessary action.
Society doesn't require money, but it does seem to require mechanisms for coordinating resources and obligations. Money is one particularly powerful solution to that problem, especially once societies become large enough that most economic interactions occur between people who don't personally know one another.
> And nobody said that a vegan diet would have stopped climates change, they said strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition.
That just makes it less possible.
Consuming and producing less is just not going to happen because there are at least four billion people who don't live the western lifestyle, but want to and there's not much that can stop them.
> People who refused to acknowledge the reality of human society, refused to acknowledge that the profit system exists whether they want it to or not, are responsible for focusing action on ineffective means of change.
Thank you for writing that, because I think it is the key point. It's very easy to blame "decrepit old men" because that makes it someone else's fault - and I get it, as I think that there are a bunch of decrepit old men that deserve a lot of blame.
But democratic societies (and even authoritarian ones that are still somewhat subject to mass unrest) were never going to accept large negative impacts for a consequence that was not immediate and in your face. Like you put it, just go around and ask your average Joe or Jane if they would vote for any candidate who demanded strict vegan diets (or heck, even a lot of the other things on GP's list). You're fooling yourself if you think it's only decrepit old men who don't want that stuff.
And regarding GP's comment that "And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US." Yes, there are some people trying to sabotage this to make money for themselves, but it will not take them too long to fail miserably precisely because the economics are not in their favor. Just look at Texas - not exactly a place known for its love of vegan diets, among other things - and solar, wind and now batteries are now a huge portion of the energy mix and growing fast precisely because it's economical.
That's simply not true.
Politicians have always known how to convince young men to go to war and die for them. Nothing is more selfless.
So politicians could also convince people to change their lifestyles for the worse to prevent catastrophe.
To be fair, often that convincing happened at gunpoint. I would want to live in a society that enforced climate action with weapons. But of course politicians could do a lot more to motivate climate action before guns would be needed.
The person I'm responding to is the one who brought it up.
I live in a very leftist place, and there were always those at climate events demanding "strict vegan diets" however I didn't see these people out in the general world outside of my little leftist bubble, trying to actually get their idea out there.
I agree with Michael Mann that what most of the public only encounters this idea of "strict vegan diets is a required climate solutions" by hearing it from climate denialists poisoning the well of climate action. But I also see this idea online, and in meat space in very isolated areas.
So the idea of "strict vegan diets" is a real idea on the fringe, but its overall effect on climate action has been to turn people against climate action in the US.
I‘m pretty sure they mention a strict vegan diet as only a part of the solution.
And it’s a fact that meat needs more resources and produces more CO2 and methane then plant based food.
It would already help to consume less meat.
It seems to me you focus on vegan diet to use the annoying vegan stereotype for your purposes.
Significant amounts of the third world are already eating de-facto vegetarian or vegan diets. Many for religious reasons (i.e. in India where the vast majority of people either eat no meat or only chicken/fish), and many others for financial reasons.
Strict vegan diets would objectively massively help reduce climate change.
And lentils do taste very good yes. In Spain they make a really nice lentil broth. Though the traditional version has meat in it, it can easily do without. It's just that in Spain meat goes into everything:)
Because the incentive is what drives change. You're not going to convince America or Western Europe to live strict vegan lifestyles if they are adverse to it. Further, as the poor people grow wealthier, they begin to eat more meat unless they have a religious reason (I.e. an incentive) to do so.
Converting to a vegan diet alone won't stop human driven climate change. Therefore, the prospect of climate change won't be enough to convince people to give up meat en masse. That drum has been banged on enough for long enough for that to be obvious.
It's not even just America or Western Europe. As soon as I saw the OP about switching to total veganism, my first thought was about e.g. the Arabian Peninsula where meat is central to every meal, and indeed going without meat is seen as the behavior of adherents of foreign religions. Anyone familiar with that part of the world knows that any fad of societal veganism would take decades to arise, longer than the time we have to tackle climate change.
> The consumption of meat is more common among lower-income groups. Nearly nine out of ten people belonging to the poorest 20% of India's population eat meat, compared to about seven out of ten among the wealthiest 20%.[4]
> Religion also plays a role in dietary habits. Nearly all of the Muslim (99%), Christian (99%) and Buddhists/neo-Buddhist (97%) populations eat meat. Among Hindus, a little over three-quarters consume meat, while Jains and Sikhs have the highest share of vegetarians. Only one-quarter of Jains and half of Sikhs have ever eaten meat.
Punjab and Rajasthan have the highest proportion of vegetarians and also rank on the top of male/female height charts.
Admittedly it's not fully vegan but still.
Indians have long recognized the virtues of a vegetarian diet: both the moral imperative & it's health benefits. That's something everyone should be able to admire.
They consume far less meat and the specific types are the uniquely least polluting types
Chicken/Fish produce an order of magnitude or in some cases two orders of magnitude less pollution than cows do.
Trying to gaslight me on this topic even though I'm right on the part that matters. the "or" stands in for the context of the fact that Chicken/fish are an order of magnitude healthier for the planet, and frankly, for individuals.
1) renewable energy is only a part of climate action, it's not sufficient - renewable energy being cheap alone doesn't help a bit if you don't keep fossil fuel in the ground
2) not technology aligned societies incentive systems, but politics which a) incentivized producing electricity by renewable methods and punishing electricity produced by fossil fuels, which again encouraged research which in return made renewables mostly cheaper than fossil fuels - and we are lucky that the physics aligned with that.
Renewable energy and replacing carbon emitting industrial chemistry with carbon neutral processes are the sum entirely of climate action.
There might be a tiny bit of nuclear built, but we don't have the capability to build enough to make a dent in the time scale we need to, and nuclear is far more expensive than solar plus batteries, so the profit motive means solar wind and batteries will win.
The people that built the technology aligned industrial policy and government incentives to allow them to create the technology, true. But it was technology action that is solving climate change.
There are two groups of people opposed to clean energy, one right wing and one left wing, and they were both extremely wrong about the technology, and the path of technology has been crystal clear for decades.
It was obvious in the 2000s, based on learning rates, that batteries solar and wind were improving at rates that would solve our climate crisis. The only question I had was if nuclear could play a part, and Vogtle, Summer, Olkiluoto, Flamanville, and Hinkley proved decisively that nuclear would not be a big player.
We don't need carbon taxes, those turned out to misalign incentives in weird ways (not all industries are equally sensitive to carbon prices, so applying equal taxes is far less than economically ideal for motivationchanges). Tax credits and guaranteed small purchases turned out to be extremely effective and efficient.
Solar and batteries are great for any region where solar production align with electricity consumption and where the battery solves the issue of night time.
Wind is great to reduce fossil consumption to around 50% in regions where the conditions of solar is not great. After 50% the cost increase significantly as overproduction competes with existing investments and prices drops below zero (see Denmark as an example). Batteries is also prohibitively expensive to cover months of poor production, which is why regions that heavily invest into wind also construct thermal power plants for equal capacity that burn carbon rich fuel for electricity and heat (see all of central/northern Europe). Regions with colder climates also has inverse consumption behavior than warmer climates, which mean that solar produce the least when consumption is highest. This is where nuclear can be economical viable, but only if we discontinue building more thermal power plants that burn cheap fuel. EU voting to have natural gas defined as "green" demonstrate this perfectly well, as well as the complete lack of any political party advocating to building battery as the solution for low wind production.
> But it was technology action that is solving climate change.
what even is this?
> We don't need carbon taxes,
yes we need them, otherwise we will keep emitting CO2 as always
> We don't need carbon taxes, those turned out to misalign incentives in weird ways (not all industries are equally sensitive to carbon prices, so applying equal taxes is far less than economically ideal for motivationchanges).
so? the ones which are most sensitive (usually the ones with the highest footprint) will transition first, others will follow later with increasing cost of emitting co2 - not including difficulty which will rebalance the equation
> Tax credits and guaranteed small purchases turned out to be extremely effective and efficient.
what tax credits and what guaranteed small purchases? and how do they prevent greenhouse gas emissions? and why do we want them if technology already provides the incentives (your claim)?
> "Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.
This personal belief is grounded on an assumption that all mankind follows a neoliberal or even libertarian economic model.
Back to reality, west Europe is firmly a social democracy where states impose behavior through law, regulation, and policy, which is topped by a federal system that coordinates policies. Countries such as China are totalitarian with a centrally managed economy that's guided by N-year strategic plans.
My supposed "personal belief" is not normative it is descriptive.
Misconstruing this as normative, and attributing it to a political belief, is your cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile where actual climate action is coming from.
We must understand the world as it is, if we are to effectively change it to a better state.
> My supposed "personal belief" is not normative it is descriptive.
No, it is a expression of your personal and unsupported beliefs. Asserting that the whole world enforces a libertarian economical system is simply out of touch with reality. I mean, China alone is a totalitarian regimes that still manages it's economy through central planning.
> Back to reality, west Europe is firmly a social democracy where states impose behavior through law, regulation, and policy, which is topped by a federal system that coordinates policies.
And yet, air travel continues to grow (after a small hiatus due to COVID) and state and EU money will be dumped into a new airport near me, to support more than doubling current capacity, much further away from the city (adding tens of millions of car trips to and from the airport).
I'm simply the looney for not taking the kids on low cost European city escapes.
It starts from the “bottom”: people will talk about it, but will pretty much continue to do whatever the fuck they can afford to do. And Europeans, like Americans, can simply afford to much, while harping about what will happen to the world once the BRICS can afford the same.
Seriously, we have the US threatening to sanction (and has) politicians and judges that want to regulate US technology companies. The idea that neoliberalism doesn't have a massive influence on the world is straight up delusional.
Did we forget that EU took an austerity approach following 2008 and all that did was immiserate their population enough where they are voting for fascist/nationalist political parties?
Yes, although I wouldn’t blame the US solely, London also carries a fair amount of responsibility for it. Perhaps not as much as the US, but Thatcherism was certainly the Trojan horse for European entry of neoliberalism in the 1980s.
> This personal belief is grounded on an assumption that all mankind follows a neoliberal or even libertarian economic model.
This personal belief is usually coupled to people who have become wealthy following this belief. So it tracks that they would declare any solution that doesn't allow them to continue their plundering impossible.
You're assuming that we keep the same system and that no sacrificing can be made. Technology is seen as the only solution because of the primary assumption that we need to keep growth and late stage capitalism. Degrowth, relocalisation, lower consumption are all solutions that would work better than technology (there are very serious people out there who demonstrated that technology won't replace the energy we need, Jancovici to name just one).
Technology is the only option in constant system, but with nothing happening, the system won't remain constant for long, and sacrifices will have to be made, not by choice.
Jancovici said a lot of stupid things also, although it seems that he recently acknowledged that renewables could make an impact (and not just "l'épaisseur du trait" as he always said).
I'm not sure what you mean by "degrowth, relocalisation, lower consumption are all solutions that would work better than technology".
People in general do no want to consume less, or buy more expensive stuff created locally, so I think it's easier to create new technologies than to change people mindset, although we probably should try to do both (which we are).
He does says (said) a lot of stupid things, but also has a good analysis in some domains. He’s very influenced by meadows/ world3/ club de Rome and while it’s a toy model it certainly a good thing to have a global view.
> You're assuming that we keep the same system and that no sacrificing can be made.
No. I am not.
I'm saying that unless the incentive system is aligned with our goals, then it's not actually climate action.
Technologists succeeded at doing that.
People who decided to use non-policy driven political action failed utterly at this. The degrowthers are particularly bad at this, but then all their thinking was muddled and riddled with errors about the reality of the science.
Technology makes the system non-constant. Technology is one of the biggest sources of social change.
Technology did that. With lots of government subsidies, and in particular with Germany kick starting a ton of solar industrial development.
Even in the US, with concerted anti-renewable sentiment at all levels of decision makers in both electric utility leadership and government leadership, new electricity is overwhelmingly carbon-free, because the technologists made it the cheapest:
Technologists caused massive social change, by changing the technology. Far more than the people that focused only on culture and changing society through those means.
Sure. That's good, I fully agree with you on that. But is this the solution, or just treating the symptom rather than the root cause?
Technology by itself has never been the problem, the problem is the scaling up of it. Fossil fuels are harmless at a small scale, it's only once you exploit enough of them that you start to see harmful effects. But renewables are no different: we're drawing from the Earth's natural energy allocation, but that's the same energy that heats the planet in the first place -- so as we scale up renewables, we will also end up wrecking the planet. We'd need to scale it up so much it feels preposterous, but it seems obvious to me that if we can, we will. There is no upper limit to energy demand.
And that's what I'm worried about in the long term, I suppose: that surprised Pikachu moment where human ingenuity (and AI, I guess) worked so hard on extracting every bit of solar energy that the rest of the planet, not receiving any of it anymore, predictably turned into an ice ball. This kind of nonsense could never happen if we could properly look and plan ahead as a society, but neither would climate change, so.
Don't get me wrong, it's great that renewables are booming, but we could also have built a sustainable utopia on the back of fossil fuels if we had properly budgeted their use. We need to switch ASAP and start budgeting, because the problems we currently have aren't the only problems we will ever have, and the size of them, unfortunately, tends to scale with energy.
>Livestock production accounts for 14-18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, including 32 percent of methane gas emissions worldwide.
14-18% seems like a fairly significant chunk, no? and what if we just started with not eating beef, all of us, especially the USA? that'd cut down the emissions by quite a large bit
not to mention the abandonment by state energy companies like Georgia Power of their solar/renewable goals and full buy-in to building yet more gas turbines in order to attract hyperscale data centers. I was part of some organizing against this in my city: https://atlpresscollective.com/2025/12/18/public-service-com...
just look at the funding for renewable R&D in the past few years - the reason we have the market we do now is that huge spike (thanks, Obama) in 2009 that drove down the cost of manufacturing and drove up conversion efficiency. that much investment into the renewables sector hasn't been the same since, especially now: https://www.theinvadingsea.com/2025/11/05/fossil-fuels-oil-c...
Also while developed countries are affected , developing countries like Bangladesh, India are disproportionately affected, mostly a function of geography and a lot of history (very high population etc.). Honestly once AI becomes powerful enough most of these people will literally be leftovers with nothing left to contribute to the world with civil war precursors you see in other forms today essentially the same symptom of fight for limited resources.
The developed countries have so much land, water, resources that they will adapt although inequality within will be an issue and tbh at this point there is never any thought given to the wider world, which if one things about honestly never was.
Renewable energy will power places like Bangladesh towards far greater wealth and prosperity. Aside from the distastefulness of using the term "leftovers" on any group of people, I think its clear that India will become massively more powerful due to their education system, once its further enabled by cheap clean energy and AI.
The US is falling into civil war over stupid culture issues as India is rising. The US is dismantling its education system, its research system, to spend it on wasted defense spending (just in the past few days huge amounts of research money from the National Institutes of Health have been funneled over to DoD. Or DoW, whatever).
Additionally the US's terrible culture war is resulting in slow adoption of cheap energy, which will further lower the US's global position.
There will always be limited resources. If not one, the other. But cheap renewable energy is a great leveler and the US will be leveled far more for its refusal to lead the way with it. India will be hugely ascendant as a massive nation with coordinated, highly educated human resources. Even in the era of AI, perhaps more so, human resources are the ultimate limit on human happiness.
There is a no "culture war" outside of the media and the institutions that are freaking out. Their international arbitrage labor play from the 70s until now is showing itself for the greedy, venal, self-serving system it is. There is a realization about how inequality is created and spreads and that is what is fueling and division here in the US.
Once we rip the institutions that are breeding this inequality out by their roots and replace it with better social safety nets, free medical care, reformed education systems resulting in lower inequality. Then we can tackle planting more trees, bulking out solar, onshoring manufacturing, etc. The "war" is the people who have abused the system so long that they are multi-generational "social elites" complaining that they being called out on it.
I've been vegetarian for 7-8 years and think it'd be great if everyone stopped eating meat, but expecting even a single person to stop who hasn't already expressed interest in it is pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. We should not base our strategies for fighting climate change on hoping all of humanity will take a sudden 180° turn on their natural instincts to eat meat.
I watched a woman break down crying in a grocery store, the guy behind her put 40 lbs of ground beef on the conveyor. She started off as angry “how can you bear the thought of eating all that dead animal?” “Oh it’s not even for me, it’s for my dogs.”
I admire anyone and everyone who wants to be a vegetarian/vegan. Expecting the rest of the world to follow suit is a fools errand.
In medicine there’s this well known axiom that if an intervention regime would technically work, but is something that the patients tend to not follow through, then the intervention regime doesn’t work.
The everyone-should-try-harder mentality doesn't work either unfortunately. It would be great if everyone rode bikes and went vegan but that's never going to happen so we have to stop making people feel bad for buying gas cars and eating cheeseburgers because it just causes division which ultimately hurts progress.
It was oil companies that created the notion of a "carbon footprint" as a way of deflecting blame from them to individuals and now you're falling right into their propaganda with "strict vegan diets" etc. And regardless, we have no alternative but technology to solve the issue because, are you just going to maintain the CO2 status quo in the atmosphere?
Would it work as well, though? The basic idea of "degrowth", to me, is to slow down the car until the braking distance is smaller than the viewing distance, so we're safe no matter what. Whereas technology is more like swerving constantly to avoid obstacles. The latter is just intrinsically more likely to get us into a crash.
I'm not saying degrowth is feasible, mind you. I agree that it probably isn't. But the fact we can't do something doesn't mean the alternatives must be good. It might just mean we're cooked.
No country will ever vote for degrowth so it either has to be done secretively which will cause a populist backlash like in the UK or at gun point. Degrowthers are IMO all basically eco fascists.
The reality of the situation is if you don’t embrace degrowth principles, the planet will probably do it for you. Think mega-wildfores that cause so much devastation that hundreds of thousands of people die from air pollution, or collapse of entire crops and food supply chains due to drought, or mega-heatwaves that wipe out millions.
Degrowth is coming. And you don’t have a say in the matter.
Most of these large wildfires are started by people and a result of bad land management in the form of stopping small fires in fire adapted landscapes. Moreover meddling in insurance markets and NIMBYism causes people to build in burn zones.
There just aren’t mega heatwaves causing famines and there won’t be at 1.5c of warming either.
None of that changes that we now have substantially larger and less controllable fires than we used to. Are you really denying that extreme weather and droughts don’t play a part in dramatically increasing combustibility?
> There just aren’t mega heatwaves causing famines and there won’t be at 1.5c of warming either.
At least we've discovered that trying to get people to behave differently at scale without the presence of an *immediate* emergency is a failed endeavour... So maybe now we can stop that nonsense and focus all of our energy on technological solutions?
I’m guessing the things you listed are the sacrifices /you/ are willing to make but omit the ones you are not willing to make. Do you travel by plane? Do you use AI? Do you have kids? Do you own a car? Etc etc.
This right here, the absolutely preposterous idea that giving up kids is somehow climate action, is exactly the nonsense that a climate activist should never tolerate.
You think climate action is everybody stopping having children?! You think extinction of the human race is the only option?!
"Of course not!" You say, so clearly we must have some children. But how many? If we drastically reduce our population, we will continue with the same broken systems, same energy systems, etc.
Only by keeping society running do we have the energy to switch our society's engine to zero carbon energy sources.
It's insulting to tell people not to have children, it's not realistic, but worst of all, it's not a climate solution to not have children.
"Don't have kids" is just Malthusian nonsense from a prior environmental era, uncritical thinking, pure slop.
And it greatly harms actual climate action when this extremely stupid idea gets associated with the climate movement. Stop. Just stop.
Reducing population will not do anything to help with climate change.
Look at the time scales of action. Look at what needs to done. Advocating population reduction has nothing at all to do with climate action. Please stop.
You're just taking some idea that sounds vaguely "environmental" and extreme, and attributing it to somehow being climate action. It won't reduce emissions to stop climate change.
It's also completely self defeating. Children tend to end up adopting the values of their parents over time. If climate people just remove themselves from the gene pool, their impact on the climate is going to be negligibly small, but there being that many fewer voices of similar values in the future, will have a much more significant impact.
Imagine you're a hyper-partisan and you learn that 'the other side' is spreading messaging amongst themselves encouraging each other to not have children. You're going to be doing backflips, because it's just the collective suicide of an ideology.
> Children tend to end up adopting the values of their parents over time
No, they don't. If that was true, we'd have prehistoric values. (It would mean you could turn matters of culture into genetic arguments, which is fun, I see the temptation, but it's just not true.)
Consider evolution because it's something similar on an even more gradual scale. Species tend to be very much like the things they came from, yet we have obviously a wide array of species over time because small differences can accumulate on their own 'branch' and eventually diverge to the point of creating entirely new species. But if a species chose to just stop having children, it's not going to have anywhere near the numbers it once did, anytime soon. In extreme cases, it just goes extinct.
It's similar with most views and values. Your children will mostly share all of them with you once they reach a certain age. It's something I can even feel happening with my own parents as I age, rather to my distaste. hahah. Anyhow, yeah - there's about a zillion studies on this topic and you can find that parents values are most predictive of those of their children.
And of course with values and other characteristics, even if parental views/values are highly predictive, there's going to be some variance. But you still end up with the fact that if a bunch of people remove themselves from the gene pool, any definingly common characteristics of those individuals are also going to be disproportionately removed from society as well.
This isn't generally the sort of thing that calls for citations since you're presumably a human, and you presumably know plenty of other humans. And once you compare people to their parents, well - the apple doesn't fall far from the tree on average. There are of course plenty of exceptions, but it's also completely fair to call them exceptions.
In looking up some literature on it, it turns out that some studies have even studied and found what I alluded to of people trending ever more towards their parents values as they age. [1] They call it 'delayed activation'. But anyhow, yeah they found the exact same thing where our values become even more alike as we age. Pretty interesting stuff! And I think it makes the age aspect quite critical. I assumed I was one of those exceptions referenced above, yet reality had other plans in mind, in spite of my protestations.
A) I’m not a millennial. B) I have kids. C) I used that as one of several sacrifices that can be made to reduce carbon footprint. I would say it is more valid than “being vegan” since that alone may or may not help. Everyone is very ready to wag their finger about the sacrifices they are willing to make but excuse or ignore the ones they are not.
A) I didn't say you're a millenial. B) Having kids is not an excuse for saying "don't have kids for the sake of the environment!" it's an awful, anti-environmental thing to say no matter what. C) Not having kids is not climate action, it doesn't stop climate change, it's at best a half-measure.
Most of all, when people say "don't have kids for the environment" it actually really hurts environmental action. Pretending that self-sacrifice is inherently environmental action, that we will save the world through sacrifice, is just one of those weird ways that Christian religion has worked its way into people's every day life.
We save the climate by stopping ALL emissions, and then also in the later half of the century actually sequestering CO2 at a pretty consistent rate. We don't get to that by halving the population, that's not a solution in any way. It's not going to be easier to get to zero emissions with half the population, if anything it's going to be harder. And we definitiely won't be sequestering CO2 in the later half of the century if we're dealing with all the challenges of reducing the population by any significant amount.
I'm willing to wag my finger at you, not about sacrifices, but falsely equating climate action with sacrifices. Climate action is one thing and one thing only: reducing emissions and eventually reversing some of them. It is not sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice.
If you look back at this thread, I’m not suggesting anyone should do anything, I’m pointing out the piousness of people suggesting we aren’t doing enough when they themselves have more they could do. Also, having fewer children absolutely would have a positive impact on climate if you subscribe to the ideas that climate change is human caused. I have two kids, I personally, for myself, think it would be irresponsible to have more but I wouldn’t push that on anyone.
I think your own values are coming through pretty clearly. Understandably, telling a parent they shouldnt have had kids is bound to strike a nerve. Having kids is great. Having kids is also the worst single thing you can do for the environment. Both can be true, and having kids definitely doesn't make someone bad.
However putting kids on a pedestal is silly. If we push our civilization above earths sustainable carrying capacity, we are fucked. In isolation having them is beautiful, in the aggregate it can be bad.
> Having kids is also the worst single thing you can do for the environment.
No, just no. You can't show that. You don't understand environmentalism. You're just a Malthusian. It's an assertion that human existence is incompatible with the environment, and that's a completely unacceptable proposition, because it defines "environmentalism" as "extinction."
Reducing the population by half will, at best, reduce emissions by half. That's not going to stop climate change. That's not climate action. That's not anything at all.
I really wish people with your attitude would study ecology, would study biology, would study the world. Life, human and not, all affects the ecosystem. All life depends on other life. We all interact, we all change the world. Life has fundamentally changed the geology of Earth in absolutely drastic ways! Life is impact. Defining environmental purity as the absence is an ideology bereft of life, and the nature of life.
Given you’re using big words without explaining them and decorating your argument with patronizing language like “no, just no”, perhaps I should just yield. Even if you turn out to make a convincing argument later, if you really care about convincing people I implore you to think about how condescending your style is…
But if I may explain my thinking essentially from a responsibility perspective your choice is downstream to a whole life of pollution, and of their kids etc. Depending on how many kids the average person has how polluting the average person is, that seems like a significant contribution.
Despite that you attribute to me some sort of strange degrowth philosophy where I am advocating for extinction, all I am saying is that there is a huge impact to overpopulation if we don’t change our habits. If it is sustainable to have more humans later on due to improvements in conduct, by all means I think thats great.
Is it possible that cutting emissions in half would stop climate change (after some time)? There is a tolerable level of emissions. I vaguely remember that it's half what we're at.
Did you read the link? Spending 1 million bucks to fix all the methane leaks in the world is such an insane bang-for-buck win that I can’t even fathom spending one billion bucks for a tenth of the gain.
The means to do it would be things like uranium steel mills and concrete plants (via hydrogen production) or any of the huge number of industrial uses of heat. The amount of coal and oil burnt to produce industrial heat is mind-boggling.
People are meat eaters. If I was to run a campaign to keep the green movement unpopular, I’d promote enforced veganism as one of its core ideas.
No that's not how the world works. Most of climate change happens not because some decrepit old man lives on his yacht but poor people in third world countries get their first air conditioners. As they should.
The only way is through. Most of are not going to be living the suffocating life you think we should. We will grow, innovate and accelerate out of this.
> Most of climate change happens not because some decrepit old man lives on his yacht but poor people in third world countries get their first air conditioners.
You're confusing acceleration with velocity. Poor people are far from the greatest per capita contributors.
I didn’t ask for the world to have 8 billion people in it, and I sure as hell won’t be stopping enjoying fairly basic luxuries like consuming protein just because others tell me to do so.
If we need to make such drastic changes to human consumption, have people considered if we have a overpopulation problem?
The demographic collapse was a forgine conclusion in the 80s. There is no global overpopulation problem over the next century. There will be food shortages due to a lack of labor and dessicated farmland. It will be rough for the average human.
> There is no global overpopulation problem over the next century
Sure there is. If the mere act of eating a staple food item causes so many carbon emissions it contributes to planetary-scale climate change, you have an overpopulation problem.
> If the mere act of eating a staple food item causes so many carbon emissions it contributes to planetary-scale climate change, you have an overpopulation problem.
That is incorrect. If there is one person who produces the same amount of carbon emissions, it's the same problem which is independent of population count. All resources to sustain life are going to dwindle and secondary effects will continue to amplify, regardless of humans exist at all, over a long enough period of time.
"Overpopulation" is used to define the set of problems (logistics of practical food/water production) that make climate change a secondary concern. Ofc, you can define it how you like to talk past other people.
Overpopulation is the condition through which a population exceeds the sustainable resource carrying capacity of an environment.
If that population consumes a resource at a rate which is not sustainable—which as people upthread are arguing re: emissions and agriculture—then it is an example of overpopulation.
I think that vegan diets never took off primarily because the vast majority of people do not want to follow vegan diets. Money factors such as subsidies are secondary. There are also potential health impacts. I followed a vegetarian diet for a few years when I was younger because of ethical concerns, and I felt healthier once I started eating meat again. This is just anecdotal evidence of course, and many people argue that you can be as healthy or even more healthy vegetarian as you can be omnivorous. But it's a potential psychological factor arguing against the likelihood of mass adoption of veganism.
Mass transit and dense development are potentially doable, but at this point the suburban sprawl + car model has been popular in the US for decades and it would feel like a downgrade for many people to live in smaller places in more heavily urbanized environments. I think that many Americans don't even have a clear idea of what it would look like to raise kids in a multi-story residential building in a city without it seeming like poverty.
Also, in some parts of the US, mass transit and dense urban living run into the problem of anti-social behavior including street violence. Many of the people in the US who care the most about stopping climate change also oppose the kind of intensive policing that would be required to keep crazy dangerous people off buses and clean up troubled neighborhoods enough that the average person would feel safe living there. Violent crime rates have largely been going down since the early 90s, but are still much higher than in Europe. One of the reasons for the high rates, through definitely not the only reason, is the availability of guns, but getting US right-wingers to accept gun restrictions is probably even less probable than getting US left-wingers to accept major crackdowns on street crime.
>We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development
In other words, live a privileged person's life in an expensive city, risk malnutrition with a complicated diet, and don't ever leave the country (on a plane).
As if the sources of climate change are you and me, and not industry in any way. It feels more like a way to say, live like me or almost literally burn in Hell.
Just like it isn’t possible to get politicians to stop spending other people’s money, it isn’t possible to stop enterprises from making as much money as possible while spending as little as possible on a global scale (it may work locally!)
Thus, technology-will-save-us is the rational choice. Drill all the oil, build the biggest datacenters and speedrun to fusion before the collapse so we can sequester the carbon back into the ground and still have energy left to run Haber-Bosch, ideally with hydrolysis instead of natgas.
Disclaimer: I used to be heavily in the sustainability camp in my younger years
Neoliberism is not the only possible system, it is very well possible to change the boundaries of what enterprises can do.
Technology-will-save-us is a quasi-religious belief, not supported by evidence.
Also if it was true that we can't convince politicians and enterprises to change their course now, why should they do later when costs will be much higher?
Relying mostly on technology that doesn't yet exist seems absurd to me.
We have an incredibly hard problem to solve and maybe a narrow window of action, we should use all the tools we have at our disposal: rapid deployment of available solutions, sustained research into better ones, adoption of more frugal lifestyles, development of alternative sociological, political and economical frameworks.
"strict vegan diet" AKA supporting industrial byproducts made into ultraprocessed food made on the other side of the globe rather than consuming vegetables, fish & meat produced locally and ecologically.
I mean, nearly all of my produce, meat, and dairy from a handful of small, local farms. They're all organic, focus on "happy animals", all that. I'll shift to a strict vegan diet once everyone else abandons their giant mega-agriculture lifestyle.
The issue with the global warming advocates is that they seem to believe that in order to solve global warming we need to make everyone's life worse. That was already a non-starter. It's just terrible marketing.
You say it's for the benefit of "decrepit old men," but the fact is that more and more of the globe is being lifted out of poverty and living more comfortably than ever before. The unfortunate fact is that global warming is an unstoppable force now, humans would have to go extinct for it to waiver.
I'm not saying we should do nothing, but I am saying that your framing is exactly why no one listens to global warming advocacy. We are powerless against it, not because of governments, but because people are living better and no one is going to sacrifice that; and even if they did the math doesn't add up to reverse course. The people that say we should all be sacrificing are often the richest among us that don't even know what sacrifice entails, contrary to your point.
Your framing, that no collective action can ever include reduction or sacrifice, implies this is an inevitable and fatal path we cannot come back from.
I hope you are wrong that nothing requiring sacrifice can ever be accomplished.
The only time I can think of that democratic populations have made large and sweeping sacrifices have been when they’re actively engaged in total war. And even then, it usually has to be mandated and enforced pretty ruthlessly by the government.
We simply did not evolve as a species to make large personal individual sacrifices today in order to benefit billions of strangers decades in the future. Never going to happen.
The options here are technology saving us, or eco-totalitarian governments controlling a huge portion of the world’s population. Nothing else will work.
Western activists are ok with this because (a) they don’t imagine that they will be greatly affected and will live a solarpunk luxury lifestyle and (b) they glorify third world poverty and consume media that presents it as a desirable, more authentic way of life, when the truth is that most of those people are desperately trying to claw their way into affluence.
None of the above implies that everyone can achieve a current day Western lifestyle or that current Western lifestyles are sustainable. But average people are going to continue seeking it out, it’s just human nature. Activists who expect people to “just” give up that search are not being realistic.
It's not ignoring that at all, but I challenge you to go back to the person in China or India that suddenly has amenities and tell him they all have to go away, and everything they worked for over 20 years is gone for "the greater good." You're probably only viewing this from a Western view (already wealthy.)
Have you not done enough damage? Human societies are not stable without surplus bribery, the recent authoritarian regressions are a direct product of net 0 policies. Trump is your utopias creature..
We’re so far past this, technology is 100% the only hope and always was. Getting stuck in the mentality that we can shame our way out of this for a decade was (and continues to be) a colossal waste of time.
Don’t forget eating meat, the easiest thing to stop doing (people needs cars and trucks for work, they don’t need cheeseburgers). People can’t be bothered to make any changes, it’s always someone else’s problem.
Replacing those with basically any other meat (pig, chicken, fish) would make a huge difference already. And it's far more realistic than no meat. Indirect demand destruction (from cost increase) through carbon credits or something like that in the future?
Even mildly advocating for veganism as a vegan would be infuriating if it wasn’t so comedic. The mental contortions that even intelligent people will put themselves into in order to either avoid the topic or keep their head in the sand are truly something to behold. And ultimately it often feels like arguing with a past version of yourself, who perhaps held some of the same views.
I just don't advocate, at least not without prompting; it's too maddening. That I'm vegan often becomes known naturally, and once it's established, people in the know tend to start bringing it up on their own. I hardly ever go into advocacy unprompted. I think this is more effective. Just by being present, you might spark the thoughts that lead someone to changing their mind... :)
Yeah, I have noticed this too. and I’m much the same now, over time my “advocacy” is mostly stating my reasons when asked. And sometimes bringing it up in online spaces.
it can be difficult, at least for me, to politely model in the face of what I see as a great injustice. But as you say, it can be maddening to do otherwise and still see no change.
So I do understand and support those who participate in a less passive advocacy as that can be effective for a different group. And keeps “our” voice in the mainstream, even if it is often vilified by popular culture.
To be clear, the money is already being spent, it’s just a question of what we make the priority.
Even just keeping the current roads useable costs billions of dollars, let alone the amount of money spent on highway expansion (which, due to induced demand, causes even more traffic).
In 30 years, every road that exists currently will have been replaced. The question is if it should be replaced with another road, or should some of them have larger sidewalks, bike lanes, bus lanes.
Amsterdam has been doing this for decades and it’s going very well. They spent money that would’ve been spent rebuilding a road on making it a better general transportation option.
Yeah? We need millions of personal, individual trucks? For work, of course, ignore all those white collar job parking lots full of extended cab pickups that get 10mpg.
Have you considered that sometimes people buy automobiles that can accommodate multiple use cases? Just because you don't need to haul hundreds of pounds of supplies every single day doesn't mean that you don't need to do it a couple times a month, or sometimes every day for short bursts of time.
With vehicles being as expensive as they are, some people prioritize the one vehicle that can suit their regular _as well as_ occasional needs.
To put it into terms this crowd might understand better, to a lot of regular people the wildly expensive and overpowered computing hardware we own seems like a ridiculous waste. And certainly, we don't need all that horsepower every minute of the day. But we need it from time to time.
I can see what you're about to say though: those people who buy trucks should just drive some crappy little three cylinder for day-to-day use and rent a truck when they need it. To which I'd ask, how would you react if someone who knew absolutely nothing about what you do on a daily basis told you that you should just buy a dinky little Chromebook and spin up a beefy EC2 instance every time you need some horsepower?
Maybe you don't understand people's needs and motivations as much as you think you do. And this is frankly where a lot of resentment to the climate action stuff comes from. A lot of know-it-alls lecturing people on how their lifestyle is completely idiotic based on very little understanding of how those people might actually be living their lives.
"I see a pickup truck with nothing in the back, therefore in my expert opinion you don't need it."
Hauling "hundreds of pounds of supplies every single day" is a fringe use case, essentialy nobody does this, it's not relevant.
"Maybe you don't understand people's needs and motivations as much as you think you do."
It's the opposite. You're confusing "needs" with "wants" and extrapolating the needs of the very, very few people who genuinely need a truck onto the entire population.
The vast majority of people use their cars to transport only themselves to work each day, then maybe pick/drop off one more person, then maybe go buy groceries.
I don't think you quite understand just how ridiculously niche valid use cases for trucks are. It's literally just towing, or some very specific off-road hauling. Everything else is going to be handled way better by something else, starting with a regular car, ending with a van.
Hell, for most people even a car is way overkill, a bike works perfectly fine to go to work each day, I assure you. So does public transport. You don't need 2 tons of steel just to to move your 100 kg body around.
To your analogy, I can use my dinky little chromebook 99% of the time and only boot up my PC when I actually need the power.
The current potus was directly elected because “know-it-alls” kept trying to jam ideologies down peoples throats. I have this awful feeling we’re going to swing back that way, and the escalation on “both sides” will be an absolute disaster.
Spoiler: It's individuals who are driving that demand. The impact of the decisions of big oil are nothing compared to the collective decisions of individuals.
Big oil isn't going to kick down your door when you buy an EV and switch to solar. There is no rancher in the grocery aisle slipping steaks in your cart.
Spoiler, the oil and other energy industries have done a world changing amount of lobbying and regulatory capture in order to drive decisions that cause more and more fossil fuel use. This includes everything from subsidies to industry stagnating regulations to reduced enforcement to suburban sprawl. Look at how the current US administration shills for big coal. Pretending they haven't shaped the world around the consumers is either naive or bad faith.
Yes, consumers have to stop funding these companies and behaviors. Also, the governments that operate on behalf of those consumers have to drop their corruption and start protecting those people they represent. Both virtuous and nonvirtuous conservatives know neither of these are going to happen, which is why they see massive terraforming technology as the only way out - if someone with power can't get rich(er) fixing it then it won't get fixed.
Using corporate externalities to trivialize individual contribution is utter nonsense, though. Coke does not make plastic bottles because they think it's fun. Big oil executives don't just fill big Scrooge McDuck swimming pools of the black stuff.
Individuals purchase products from companies, driving that demand. Then are absolutely unwilling to make even the tiniest, temporary sacrifices to demand those companies reduce those externalities.
Hell, half of these individuals don't even both to vote. That's straight-up the bare minimum participation trophy level of effort.
Who do you think benefits from the use of oil? Everyone. We’re all guilty, it’s not just oil companies. Goods are transported on ships, railroads, planes, and trucks. Virtually none of these are electrified because of energy density constraints. They all use oil. Anyone that consumes is an oil consumer.
This chain of blaming random persons is both useless and distraction. It failed in the past. And it is not even a good faith argument.
Guilting people for existing in society wont fix anything. Actually regulating largest contributors to the issue can fix things. And individual behavioral changes will logically follow once rules and laws change.
If the Gov stopped Oil Subsidizes, incentivize the move to renewals and nuclear instead of promoting Oil say 20 years ago, we could keep our A/Cs and 60 degrees (~16C) if we wanted to. The sames goes to flying and beef, make it expensive.
So yes, Governments share by far most of the blame for this. A specific individual is not going to change their life stye unless forced to, that is human nature.
Instead we have had governments in the US being too afraid to do the right thing. The only possible US President that was willing to make big changes climate wise had his election stolen by the Supreme Court in the year 2000.
So here we are still with no politician willing to really force changes on people's life style in the "first world". All they are doing is trying to keep the price of oil low.
One final thing, in the US, if you try to use electricity from all renewals, the price is much higher. And in some cases electricity you receive is still generated from fossil fuels.
Governments and industry are responsible. Personal consumption/waste is not the primary driver of climate change, no matter how much corporations tell us that using paper straws is the solution. It's tough to expect average people to take major action when corporations are essentially given carte blanche.
And who is buying all that stuff from corporations? Who is actually the one consuming?
We can quibble about edge effects like "induced demand", but by and large, people just love cheap energy, cheap calories, and can shift the moral burden by playing "not my responsibility" games.
Well, yeah. Corporations aren't just nefarious evil entities, dumping carbon into the atmosphere for no reason. They're doing it to sell goods. The problem is that a lot of the environmental costs for the manufacture and transport of those goods are externalized and go unpaid.
It's difficult to put the blame for that on the consumer, who has no visibility into manufacturing or logistics, and who has vanishingly-small options for not participating. Buying domestic goods is very difficult or impossible, and goods which are manufactured in more environmentally-safe ways are significantly more expensive (because the costs I mentioned earlier weren't externalized).
If a consumer is presented with two options, one that costs $X and has unknown environmental costs, and one that costs $2X and is marketed as being environmentally safe, the majority will choose the first. This is especially true as economic forces continue to squeeze average people.
Consumers absolutely participate in the problem, but the only process by which it could be corrected is regulation, and the only entity capable of that is the government. (Democracy being what it is, you can however place more blame at the feet of voters.)
I think pinning the blame on them is the wrong way to look at it. Its more a very complex system where each actor's behaviour affect the behavior of other actors. So politicians doing more is super important, consumers doing more is important, companies doing more is important. Everyone's collective effort pushes the flywheel in a different direction.
I have been wondering: more solar means we are making Earth less reflective. Solar energy that might have been reflected back to space is now absorbed by the PV to make electricity. But that delta has to go somewhere? Where does it go in terms of Earth’s temperature. Same with more nuclear… we’d be pumping more energy into the system.
Don’t take this as an argument against these technologies. It’s a huge win to not be increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
Yes, this does happen. Solar farms have an albedo modification effect. The good news is that compared to fossil powered generation, the albedo modification is "paid back" in less than a year due to lower GHG emissions:
"Small reduction in land surface albedo due to solar panel expansion worldwide"
If you download the supplementary information PDF, figure 19 shows a plot of GHG payback times by site. The most common time is about 1 month. The greatest time they found was about 9 months. These times go down as solar panel efficiencies continue to creep upward, because solar panels in 2026 don't have lower albedo than in 2024, but they do have better light-to-electricity conversion efficiency.
We're actually heating the earth in two ways... one is by increasing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The other is simply by using energy; any use of energy means moving something to higher entropy and thus producing heat, even if that energy comes from 100% clean or renewable sources. However, nobody talks about this second way of heating the earth because it's about two orders of magnitude behind the first, i.e. for now pretty insignificant.
As for making the earth less reflective with PV panels... yes, you are right and most of that absorbed solar energy directly contributes to heating the earth because PV panels aren't anywhere near 100% efficient in converting it to electricity, but even the part that is converted to electricity will become heat again in the end, like when it powers AI data centers. (If PV was 100% efficient, then the lack of reflection wouldn't directly do any heating, the heating would all happen when the electricity is used.)
For now that isn't a big concern because the greenhouse gases our civilization is releasing into the atmosphere do so much more heating than all our use of energy, but if we do become 100% renewable and survive that particular danger, then by Jevons' paradox we'll soon be using 10x to 100x more "clean" energy and be heating the earth all the same again.
A solar array makes the earth less reflective by a fixed amount, for as long as the array exists.
Every unit of fossil fuel we burn makes the earth permanently less reflective (or at least something on the order of 100 years). You could compare a 1GW solar array (for its lifetime) to a 1GW coal plant running for x days, though I don't have the value of x.
Current levels of solar panel coverage on Earth are approximately 0%. If we ran the entire Earth on Solar power we’d need ~ half a million square kilometres, around 0.1 percent of the Earth’s surface.
Direct Air Capture at any meaningful scale is predicated on mining billions of tons of refined minerals. The environmental impact of that would be so enormous that it will never be allowed to happen, never mind the severe resource crunch.
It is quite ironic that capitalism and the profit motive are now the best hope for staving off climate change, all thanks to the technologists and entrepreneurs that have mad renewables and storage so cheap.
The 2020s climate action movement in the US (and the UK) was disastrous in their strategy, action, and outcomes. I was there, I followed along because it seemed like the best way to get climate action, but things like Sunrise and XR at their very best did nothing. They focused on all the wrong people, focused on all the wrong levers. They turned allies into enemies, by "protesting" tech companies that were at the forefront of real action. They refused to acknowledge the massive effects of technology change, and the need for quick adoption, and the huge money saving nature of the solution.
I have zero patience for those attitudes now, the difference between a degrowther and a climate change denying politician are minimal in effect, and the effects are all that matter now.
What about energystar? That had significant impact. Remember how we fixed the ozone hole? It’s entirely possible to drive change through policy or community. We just choose not to do it because the Epstein class wants culture war not class war.
Yes, policy does change things!! You give examples where a community got together, changed policy, affecting all of society.
This is precisely the opposite of the disastrous 2020s action, which had no concrete policy demands, which leaned into the culture war. They ceded the ground to the right wing, who does that sort of culture war much better, as they have focused their efforts on it for so long.
With culture war, no policy changes. The fight takes place in vibes.
We need policy, execution in concrete changes of physical things in the real world. That's where Sunrise and XR failed.
I was very specific in the failings of Sunrise and XR and they contrast greatly with efforts like energy star or the Paris accords, and their members would say they same thing in that they tried something very different.
My comments have been very specific, but you can't manage more than a sentence. Further, you have not even engaged with a single one of my words or statements.
>Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.
Removing CO2 from seawater would be more efficient because some of the work is already done for you, and you'd be de-acidifying the ocean long term.
> Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.
Which should probably be nuclear powered, at the required scale. So we could have taken the direct route, instead of solar, bess, wind, water, geothermal...(c.f. Alien, Aliens, 'Atmospheric Processor'...)
Anybody remembering the trash which was sold as 'lightbulbs' for about 15 years, before LED got somewhat acceptable colors? And prices? And longevity?
Mehw, lightbulb baad, eats too much waatt! So lets miniaturize CFLs to be able to screw them in lightbulb sockets! So they get warm because they are so small, the sockets have no airflow, and their own electronics go with a premature blow! Yay!
Because all the stuff required to do that does not grow on trees. Which means it has its own externalities regarding mass flows, EROI, emissions. At present time it just means the externalities have been made into other peoples problems. Regarding mining, tailings, transport, production, and so on.
Serious questions here ... I'm also curious about your actual experience in heavy mineral and energy industry, largest plant you've worked at, scale of operation, etc.
(FWiW in fairness, I've worked a few decades in and around > half a billion tonne per annum mining and worked globally in geophysical mineral and energy exploration)
> I'm also curious about your actual experience in heavy mineral and energy industry, largest plant you've worked at, scale of operation, etc.
None actually, except from the financial side making that happen, lately. Very indirect, at that. And I'm uncomfortable disclosing more, because I don't want to be doxxed. Its all so cozy right now :-)
From longer times ago, very intensive personal studies about stuff like that, at least 'knowing' what a Sankey-diagram or its variations for 'Gesamtstoffmengenkreisläufe'/mass-flows is.
Changing my young and naive opinions in the light of understanding that, and what it means!
Which is less emissions over all sectors for nuclear, vs. everything else. With the exception of big geothermal, maybe. But we didn't do that big so far, and where we have tried, it produced unintended side-effects.
Which leaves the question of where to put that stuff, after it burned out and has been contaminated with afterglowing hotness for a while.
Why not in the Yilgan Craton?
How big do you think the required atmospheric CO2 extractors need to be? Which mass- and energy flows will they have to have? At which count? A few dozen, hundreds, thousands? Maybe more like a grid with about 200 miles distance between them? Including at sea?
I'd guess about 5000 of these 'Atmospheric Processors' would suffice. And the only sufficient fuel we have for that scale is nukkular.
Supposing all anthropogenic emissions went to zero today, we'd still keep warming almost as far as three degrees with all of the disasters and famines that entails, because there's a lag time between existing emissions and their effects.
We need massive bounty programs that pay out irrespective of nationality for every possible kind of improvement and gain to carbon capture technology if we want to prevent 90% of all land on Earth between 30°N and 30°S from slowly turning into copies of the uninhabitable stretches of the Middle East.
Global warming is much faster in the higher latitudes. It has not significantly impacted the region you mentioned much at all. Most impact has been due to intensification of natural cycles like the Indian Monsoons, the Atlantic hurricane season and El Niño, which are not really limited to that particular area of the Globe. The idea that the problem with global warming is that parts of the world will just become too hot to live seems to be mostly misguided.
I'm mostly stopped feeling autistic since adolescence, but climate change is one of those times. It's obviously real, and it's also obvious that shuffling chairs in developing countries is rounding to zero effect. We're converting to cleaner energy anyways because of pollution and better economics, so the push for decarbonization in itself is... what do you call a rounding error when it's already rounding to zero?
And it's FAR from hopeless. Again, global warming is obviously happening. But the amount of adapting and reacting to it is virtually nil. Installing AC. Tree cover in every city. Start serious discussions on what level of risk we want with geoengineering.
Because yes, there absolutely is an acceptable risk level with geoengineering. Planting trees is that. Carbon capture is also that. And better and more effective tech will definitely be available.
But we're in a social climate where I don't even dare write down examples of what those more effective methods would be, because if you're not luddite enough you're the enemy.
I agree with your message overall, but this kind of, I dunno, martyrdom posturing ("But we're in a social climate where I don't even dare write down examples of what those more effective methods would be, because if you're not luddite enough you're the enemy.", "it's not socially acceptable to discuss alternatives to orthodoxy") is funny to see on HN. This is not Xitter or Reddit, no one is going to ban or attempt to dox you and get you fired for saying "We should seriously consider injecting reflective stuff into stratosphere" here. In fact, your message will likely even have a positive rating overall.
When you find yourself stuck in a hole the first step to solving the problem is to stop digging. We're still digging at a superhuman speed. Meanwhile here you are talking about how you aren't worried because ladder building technology is really coming along, but nobody wants to talk about ladders.
Because if I can do nothing and make you do it, you solve it for me, for free. They'll make some argument (like western nations having used up the energy (and paid for it), and want to make them pay for it again. For a lot of countries that, and nothing else, is the purpose of climate action). Now get to work, taxpayer!
Because for most countries (and certainly for the largest oil producer in the world, Russia), global warming saves greatly on winter fuel use and increases agricultural harvests AND allows them to keep their population happy (because nothing keeps populations calm like cheap fuel/energy). That is the net effect, today.
Because for a lot of countries that really are the beneficiaries of causing global warming, ie. the oil producer countries, Russia, Saudi Arabia, US, Venezuela, Norway, and many small ones Azerbeidjan, causing global warming (ie. selling fossil fuels) is often the only reason they have an economy (mostly all except the US). So they demand a LOT of money, for free, to stop it. And nobody will pay that.
The last argument even goes for countries that are not direct oil or coal producers, like India or China but it's effectively the same argument (China runs on coal, and the country works on exports. Without energy no exports, so their coal usage is still increasing. Ie. same argument as above, they only have an economy because they're causing global warming, just more indirectly than Saudi Arabia)
Because WW2 was won with oil, and so countries that either want to start a war ("or fear they'll be the target/victims of the next big war") want access to oil. This argument goes especially for China, who fear they'll be targeted/"victimized" when they attack half of Asia starting with Taiwan and to a lesser extent for India (who feel they'll be at war with Pakistan, and Bangladesh whether they want to or not, and maybe China too) and even for EU countries (ie. for the ones that matter, France and Germany)
Look up China's oil reserves. You'll be collecting your jaw from the floor, I promise.
Summary: because most governments care about various things ... and not at all about people, about you. Mostly governments not even about their own people and certainly not about the climate where you live. They have a million concerns, a lot of which require fossil fuels, and for the people that compose those governments, climate change just doesn't matter.
Plus, if they can just do nothing, you still have to solve global warming. So doing nothing, aside from being very profitable, is also a great tactic to get you to fix it.
In the context of climate change, it is the opinion that more industrialization and technologization cannot help solving the problem, except in a few narrow acceptable directions (solar, wind, hydrogen etc).
An example would be the european reaction to AC. It's a way of using technology to solve warming, its costs are perfectly acceptable, but it is still frown upon because... well, it's beyond the scope of a HN comment to diagnose why, but it's an example of technology being able to mitigate a problem but not being allowed to.
> An example would be the european reaction to AC.
That was over hyped in the media, particularly American.
It's largely senior citizens who oppose AC - they've spent most of their lives in a different climate and would rather not have to handle such an expense.
Meanwhile in some European countries like France demand for AC units doubled this year.
Yeah, important to note that the way the label is used has deviated from its historic meaning. Colloquially it’s something like “someone who rejects new technology” with variable reasons as to why, but historically there’s more nuance and it’s grounded in rejection of technology which worsens working conditions, detracts from craft, and disrupts cottage industry/workers rights/wages/etc. They made more sense than the label presently suggests they did. I suppose you could think of them as activists protecting their crafts and trade privileges that were being undermined by specific machines and their owners
One of the countries that is going up (China) is also doing more than any other country to rapidly roll out renewables both domestically and in other countries, and their emissions have peaked or are near peaking, and is capable of sticking with long term plans. Also a lot of their emissions are from making things for the rest of the world.
The other country that has grown significantly in the last 20 years (India) is still far below using their fair share of the world emission budget, and they are rapidly adding renewables.
The sane way for a planet to use fossil fuels is for countries to use them to build up to the stage where they are wealthy enough to switch to renewables. If the ones that do that earlier stay on fossil fuels too long so that you get climate problems they can't just expect the countries that are not as far a long to just give up on becoming wealthy. They need to heavily subsidize those other countries in renewables so they can shorten or skip the fossil fuel bootstrap stage.
Because of the long time CO2 stays around in the atmosphere, about 40% of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere from human activity came from the US and Europe.
> Meanwhile, they're currently building >200GW of new coal plants
Many are being built as backups and peakers rather than baseload, designed (or retrofitted in the case of existing plants being upgraded) to be able to cycle up and down to balance wind and solar. They are running at low capacity factors, not actually burning much coal.
Many of these are idle so much that their owners have financial difficulty keeping them open, and the government has had to start paying them for their idle time so they won't go under.
Most of the rest are to replace existing plants that cannot not yet be replaced with renewables, so are at worst neutral on coal usage and are usually actually more efficient than the old plants so there is a reduction.
* "Receiving capacity payments subsidies to stabilize grid"
* "We won't run these plants at full capacity"
When their carbon intensity still can't touch natural gas alternatives at scale, state owned enterprises are operating in a command economy, and they have no teeth to their carbon commitments.
They don't have to build new coal at 10:1 versus retirements to "replace aging coal" or stabilize the grid.
Coal is just too cheap and adds diversity,while nobody forces CN to enter climate agreements and looks the other way.
Consumption-based charts are much better, as they account for the actual CO2 emissions of lifestyle in the country (since offshoring manufacturing from developed countries to developing countries doesn't reduce the total emissions, even if it makes our direct emissions stats look better).
Hey, quick question, who does virtually all manufacturing for US and Canadian and EU citizens? And why is the rise of Chinas emissions so coincidentally timed to the fall of those countries'?
I didn't go into the study, but looking at all the little text blurbs about the numbers, I don't see anything about if a US citizen purchasing a product that's made in China counts as US emission, as it obviously should.
My view is that current "emission reduction" just moves jobs to China and India, which decreases overall labor rights and negatively affects the working class..
Still, if you want to have your new iPhone 18/19/20 pro ultra max, it has to be produced somewhere..
So maybe it's time to rethink this and get back to the drawing board..
Actual emissions reductions is different from just shell-gaming emissions from the US column to the China column. Greenwashing is real, but that doesn’t mean reducing emissions isn’t a real thing we can do.
we have had the perfect storm to do a U-turn on most fossile fuels:
- COVID pandemics: everybody at home, less traveling, massive economic reset and massive capitals injected (EU recovery funding, quantitative easing)
- Russian attack on Ucraine, stopping a big chunk of gas and petrol to Europe
- Strait of Hormuz, also chocking oil coming to the rest of the world
We could have said: "oh, let's swap those energy sources to renewables", "oh, let's bind those capitals to de-carbonization projects", "oh, let's plant trees", "oh, let's stop deforestation". A lot of things could have been said and done. But, well, a certain degree of coordinated intelligence is too much to ask.
At this point I have lost all hopes, whatever comes, we have asked for it.
From my perspective, we simply didn’t evolve to have the kind of collective intelligence required. There’s no point in being angry about it, any more than it makes sense to be angry at any other animal for the abilities it hasn’t evolved to have.
Modern economies are addicted to growth, and asset prices are pinned to showing continued growth more than ever. As soon as any global power proposes to take a beat and re-evaluate the trajectory of innovation, they will be left behind. Global leadership is also effectively non-existent and aside from trade, no one seems to be able to really make inroads on big ticket issues. In a time where we need more collaboration that ever, governments seem to be skewing more nationalistic than ever.
Well, to be fair, the whole "enough growth" thought happened to spring into existence at the exact moment where we (the west) have comfortable living standards.
Something other developing nations would need growth for to achieve.
So that's kinda interesting, because degrowth is seen as this conceptual antagonist to the people letting the global south burn, but they both are letting them down - just marginally differently.
Perfect example of "left behind" is EU, shooting itself in leg for many years with dubious results in terms of ecology ... and negligible in global scale.
With politicans, "atleast they're trying" is the worst option.
Either you know what you're doing ... or don't.
Destroying local vital industries with tax burden, to pay subsidies to green bullcrap, and importing everything from other side of planet, that's "leftard ecology".
Why are we framing this as "the fight against climate change"? This framing puts the culprit outside of ourselves, as if it's some external force.
I feel that way of looking at it makes changing impossible. It's our own behaviours and systems that will have to change. There's nothing to fight here, the answer instead lies in collaboration.
Great point. For example, we should encourage collaboration between people building hyperscale data centers, and people not building hyperscale data centers to find some middle ground that is good for the planet.
Collaboration implies we are all on the same side. Reality suggests some people have made it their business to be on the wrong side.
Right now? Nobody is using the hypothetical un-built datacenters that threaten to tax our planet. All the current individual LLM demand is being met by what exists already, yet we're seeing unprecedented amounts of money being spent at the cost of the environment to build out at scale. This is so that jobs that currently earn people money can be replaced with LLMs that earn investors money. Something only the investors want.
How could this happen? I've faithfully sorted all of my recyclables into their respective bins to maximize profit for my city's garbage collection just like they asked
We've gone the "crowdsorting" route but if we didn't go this way the fees for garbage collection would be higher and the city's garbage collection company would still make profits, that's a constant.
They tell you you have a particular type of power. You have the power to sort your trash, nothing wrong with that. But what's left off and out is you have the power to change what dozens, thousands, millions, and billions of people do. "Carbon footprint" was a marketing trick played by the oil industry. It worked great.
What's needed now is something like a "carbon wave", where you evaluate your impact by how quickly you move the entire world forward.
El Niño this year is going to be especially crazy, worst in human history by a large margin looks like. I'm putting together El Niño Climate Week to work on averting the worst impacts. It's a good opportunity to move the conversation forward about how our climate is changing very quickly.
My projects tend to be pretty good schelling points for people that like to take action, in case you're finding the comments here frustrating ("I'm not surprised", "we just need to X", "we're doomed", "it will be fine", etc etc etc)
Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny it and convince most of us that it was our fault and that nothing could be done and that we should just buy their anti-environment-collapse products to protect ourselves.
> Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny
It is, and they are. We keep hitting record X Y and Z temperatures, cyclones, etc, and they're on the brig shouting "it ain't global warming you morons"
After 50 years since I was born for the first I didnt eat grapes from my backyard in Southern Europe because they dried up due to extreme heat. In the rest of my life I might miss any other fruit.
I got invited to a UN conference on climate change. It was a huge deal of course that I could get in; however, the whole time I "felt" important. Everyone did. I question how many of the tens of thousands of people involved actually did important work.
Everyone knew we will miss the 1.5 degree target, btw. This was a few years ago.
Interestingly, financial markets are a good place to see the “price” of some environmental issues. A made up example: “Should I buy bonds that are backed by electricity sales from a yet-to-be-built hydroelectric dam? Will there be enough rainfall to fill the reservoir reliably? I’ll have to receive a higher interest payment to offset that risk.”
Since land warms much faster than water, and Earth's surface is mostly water, then 1.5C average means how much land warming itself? Isn't talking in averages a way to feel better about all this?
From my understanding, the West never truly committed to that goal.
It just said so as a PR thing, so that the much more affected countries quiet down, because "hey hey we said 1.5°". "Oops, sorry, we tried".
The West knows that it will manage even with more than that, but it also knows that not everyone will.
Jury's still out on whether the neglect is just due to apathy or because it might be beneficial. Only time will tell.
I'm not sure if I'd agree with that, because that sounds like what normal humans do.
Systems and politics are not that. Not at all.
They're cold, calculating and fundamentally sociopathic.
A more fitting analogy I think would be "Yes we were bought by a bigger company, but trust us, there will be no changes".
Of course the buyout came with exact plans on who to lay off when, but panic would be bad for business.
It’s way easy to preach vegan diets, solar/wind installations, etc. from the comfy chairs by the citizens of first world countries. But for someone living in a dirt poor country, climate change is the last thing in their mind even though they might be the hardest hit population. For them it’s about survival and meeting basic human needs.
At this point its not preached from comfy first world countries, but rather countries that are getting unbareably hot in the summer. So much that more and more people are going to die each year as a result
It is actually worse than preaching because based on your comment it's pure ignorant superiority. You think 40 degrees celcius for few days in the summer is the apocalypse, then try living in an indian village where the temperatures reaches 50 degrees for one month, where you have to walk miles to get a barrel of water to drink. And then imagine having to live there for the whole life.
Also now you say because there were heat waves in Europe it's not preaching, then what's the excuse before that?
more than 75% of Indians think global warming is happening and say they are worried about it. They think that global warming will harm people in India.
People in India (more in north then in south) report having personally experienced severe heat waves and the effects of global warming, and think that global warming will harm them, their families, and their communities.
Turns out that people living in place with 50 degress who "have to walk miles to get a barrel of water to drink" dont want more extreme weather all that much
Solar/wind installations are demonized from comfy chairs by the citizens of first world countries. Anti environmental agenda is agenda of rich conservatives, CEOs and their western right wing friends.
Dirt poor countries do care about climate change per polls.
Geophysically, there are 3 pillars to climate stabilization:
1. Emitting fewer greenhouse gasses. Need to do that more than ever, but we are now in overshoot so…
2. Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started.
3. Shade Earth. Not regions, The whole globe. There are two ways to do that:
a. Stratospheric aerosols
b. Planetary sunshades in space, at Sun-Earth L1.
That’s the whole solution space, conceptually. As long as we continue to fail within that space, we will suffer compounding effects of unmitigated climate change.
> Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started.
I once did the math, assuming we have enough resources to build a lot of solar panels. Assuming current efficiency levels of solar panels and current commercial feasible levels of direct air carbon capture (DAC), if we annually allocated an amount equal to our current annual solar panel production to building large solar farms dedicated to powering DAC plants, in about 150ish years those plants would be capturing each year an amount about equal to our current total annual emissions.
If we keep expanding solar panel production we could shorten that timeline and build more than just enough to breakeven. The area for those solar farms would be about 1/15th the area of the 5 largest subtropical deserts.
What would we do with all the carbon extracted? That's not really a problem. If we can't think of a good use for it, just mount the solar panels powering the DAC plants a few meters off the ground, convert the carbon to graphite, and dump it under the solar panels. Spread evenly it would only be a few mm thick.
Two of these things will definitely work. One of them is completely untested, poorly understood and with potentially massive consequences for the climate and food production.
There hasn't been a question about this in a decade or more. There was no path, even theoretically, to stopping our CO2 emissions without dramatically lowering quality of life for maybe a couple billion people.
We won't slow climate change. We can build resilience to the effects, and we have good incentives to do so. But we'll keep burning fossil fuels for a very long time.
There was an obvious path that the environmentalists mostly opposed. A decade is plenty of time for massive scale buildout of nuclear power. If we'd started that a decade ago we'd be in a good position now.
Nuclear power is expensive. One of the most expensive ways to produce electricity when you capitalize expense of the construction of the plant into the electricty cost. Path forward is wind/solar + storage which is cheapest next to hydropower.
The Wiki page above didn't really go into it much, but how much of the cost of nuclear power is self-inflicted? I.e. regulatory costs and actually paying the cost of externalities up-front. And if we were more consistent at building such facilities and producing said fuel, would there be cost reductions from scale?
~99% of the cost is due to red-tape regulations. It's so obscene that they require certified backup genererators for the backup generators and 3-4 layers of fail safes. Then you need to wait YEARS to get all the permits and licenses. Oh and if you get preapproval for a componant (say the generators) but too much time has passed from installation until you actually are ready to go, you need to go through the process again, hence the constant delays. An actual nuclear power plant is actually stupidly cheap to run if you cut all the red tape. Stupidly. Like $50k of fuel produces $50 million of electricity good.
Edit because I forgot to mention this, if coal or ccgt were regulated like nuclear is, not a single one would be profitable. And even if you take into account every single death due to radiation poisoning (from any source) nuclear would still be the safest power source in the world. Literally worker deaths from installing wind power plants exceed it.
Nuclear power plants are ultimately not that different from coal power plants. Typical estimates for the capital costs of coal power are ~$4000/kW, which can be used as a lower bound for the costs of nuclear power.
The costs are high, because construction industry has suffered from poor productivity growth for decades. Renewables are getting cheaper, because they rely more on mass-produced stuff and less on hiring people to construct a big specialized building to house the power plant. Regulatory costs of nuclear power also largely come from poor quality control in construction industry. Regulators require something specific, subcontractors try doing that but often don't get it right, and regulators order them to tear it down and try again.
The problem is that we attempted to build nuclear power. It just didn’t deliver. There was massive state support behind it.
It is hard looking at Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point C, Hanhikivi and the countless cancelled projects and think: ”That’s what I want some more of!!”
I remember seeing just a few years back, a Greenpeace postlet moaning about dangerous nuclear energy
I think it's pretty clear that nothing meaningful will be done because there's no shock value to entertain the "empaths" like there is with war and other stuff
Indeed. At this point I’d say that the “green movement” has done more damage to the planet than the fossil fuel industry.
The entire Western world (with the exception of France) pretty much stopped building nuclear power plants 40 years ago, because of a single accident that by its most pessimistic estimates killed fewer people in total than coal emissions kill every 3 days. It’s madness.
Nuclear power had already collapsed due to its own costs and timelines.
In hindsight it’s much easier to blame the accidents rather than face the structural problems nuclear power has.
Which has only been exacerbated by renewables and storage disrupting the global energy markets, forcing ”baseload” plants to become peakers. Against their will.
I was a kid in the early 90s and my school book mentioned climate change and need to change energy sources. This could have been, if not prevented, at least greatly mitigated. We have had plenty of time. But well, I guess that our species is not that intelligent after all. Too bad, maybe the next one will be better...
Resilience isn't prevention. Resilience is the systems to clean up after those events. To be able to build new housing for the people who survive, to route around problems.
I think the conversation here is making me more depressed than the news. The number of people who don’t believe collective action is possible, who somehow believe the current techno-capitalist model is determined by god or history or whatever, who don’t have any particular knowledge about history, economic development, etc but are very happy to very loudly yell that the only thing we can do is more of the same but maybe faster - man, y’all call yourselves hackers, but you sure are an incurious and gullible lot.
climate change became to be discussed as an issue since the 80s. I am in my late 40s and I have been hearing about since forever, and yet so little has been done since then. Now you can understand why I, as probably many here, have zero faith in this being solved in any sensible way.
Go and get depressed... or maybe go and eat your Brazilian meat burger, drive your SUV and book your flight to Hawaii, it won't last long.
What’s always struck me as interesting about these conversations is that both you and I and many, many of the other people we talk to are willing to make significant life changes to deal with this problem, and yet we all seem convinced the blocker here is that everyone else is an asshole.
It seems to me that assholes do in fact exist, but by all measures make up a much smaller percentage of the population than we’ve been lead to believe, and so the notion that a bulk majority of people would act in the interests of others and humanity at large is perhaps not the unthinkable notion we’ve been told. It might be that the actual action here is to recognize the people telling us everyone else is an asshole are trying to pull the wool over our eyes and treat them accordingly.
I tend to attribute most problems to low intelligence and/or ignorance more than plain asshole-ness. I don't disregard the complexity of fixing climate change, and the need for global cooperation, but we have had plenty of time and too little was done, even in more peaceful times than today.
I think that the problem won't be solved by us, it will balance itself out. A bigger chunk of the planet will become more hostile, human population will shrink, we will live at much lower scales, consume less and pollute less, for thousands of years to come.
I think the problem is not recognizing the assholes as a separate problem from the ignorance. Ignorant people hear “giant impending calamity that will harm you and your neighbors” and think, “oh, we should do something about that!” They’re currently not doing so because a cabal of assholes has spent half a century muddying the public waters.
And, regarding “living at lower scales and polluting less” - consider how many things in your life are sold to you as disposable items and how many don’t need to be, and how many things can be produced in a substantially more sustainable fashion without negatively impacting their utility or quality. The average person can live an extremely rich, fulfilling, and comfortable life on a low carbon budget.
I mean, I damn sure hope we can do both in parallel, because if we’re gonna wait for everyone to reach enlightenment, we’re sure not gonna make it in time.
There are long histories of cultures managing collective resources democratically over extremely long periods. Both the water temples of Southeast Asia and the rituals around salmon runs and controlled burns in the Pacific Northwest maintained careful husbandry of scarce resources across time periods that extend well beyond the time period since the tragedy of the commons was discovered by the same people who are asserting that kind of coordination to be impossible. This is a cultural problem, and it’s with our culture, not humanity writ large.
With regards to concrete solutions, we could stop pretending that financial optimization and private equity is anything other than looting at scale, we could stop pretending that it’s the god-given destiny of every imaginable product to get shittier and require more rapid disposal and replacement, we could stop imagining that Jeff Bezos shooting people into space is the sign of a functioning economy, but very very directly, we could start actually taxing people and corporations for the long-term effects of their actions, we could prosecute people who attempt to buy, bribe, or market their way past social issues, and we could start incorporating the full cost of, eg, offsetting category 5 hurricanes and large scale droughts or heatwaves in our calculations of the benefits of our modern supply chains and globalized markets. All of those things would be fine starts to drive policy in the directions we want. All of them run afoul of the current winners of the current systems, which is why they’ve been tarred as the unrealistic fantasies of people who aren’t interested in spending the rest of their lives in hermetically-sealed air conditioned boxes so Sam Altman and Elon Musk don’t have to go to therapy.
With respect, those examples are about tiny heterogeneous populations and do not involve tremendous sacrifice. The actions required to make meaningful difference for climate change are orders of magnitude larger.
And your solutions are basically “we could all change our view and start taking coordinated collective action together”, which is not actionable. I mean, it clearly hasn’t happened, and you can villainize whoever you want about that, but the problem remains. You can declare that the problem is cultural, but the problem remains. You can blame Elon or Sam or Trump, but the problem remains. People do not vote for what you want, politicians do not do what you want, and that’s not even getting into the fact that we need action that requires great sacrifice from the majority of the globe, and quickly. What are we actually going to do about it? Do you have anything tangible that people can do today that will make any difference whatsoever? Because if not, why waste my life shaking my fist at the clouds?
Your original derisive comment implied that because we’re hackers, we should be able to do something more here. What is that? How do we hack this?
EDIT since I cant reply:
Many of the “cynical” people you’re deriding here have been doing the actionable things you suggest for decades now. Hell, in the last decade my fellow Americans have elected a man who promised to undo all the climate progress we’ve been fighting for, and then cheered as he did so. They voted for this! Twice!
Can you blame us for realizing that our fellow citizens don’t actually care enough to do the stuff you’re talking about, especially in time?
I’m actually an optimist, I think the future of humanity is bright, I think we’re a remarkable species who can do amazing things. I don’t think we have demonstrated any ability whatsoever to rise to the scope of this challenge in the time required to avoid a lot of suffering in the coming decades.
You’re underestimating both the size and the heterogeneity of those cultures. Politics attains anywhere with a population that exceeds Dunbar’s number, and both of those cultures were easily in the tens to hundreds of thousands. They’re also just two examples out of many - most of human civilization has managed to handle this over time.
And, yes, the solution here is in fact that we change our behavior and build political alliances, starting at the local level and building up. The datacenter fights are a good place to look if you’d like a blueprint, as are the anti-Flock movements, and Minneapolis if you want to see what sharper action looks like. I don’t know what else you’re expecting with regards to “what to do” - I’ve never heard of any effective magic wand, any solution here involves getting off your ass and advocating for what you want.
And, we hack this the way we hack everything else: by actually understanding the system and how it works, not just listening to what we’re being told by the people who built the system, by identifying places of high leverage within the system, and by using those to enact change in the system. To just sit around and say “well, my Econ professor said we’re fucked, so I guess that’s that” is just fucking lazy.
You know, as a follow-up to “democratic populations making sacrifices at scale” - have you _looked_ at the US lately? Our lifestyle is atrocious - we work shitty jobs too many hours, drive everywhere, live in isolating suburbs in crappily-built and ugly houses surrounded by bland box stores hawking shitty wares that break by design, restaurants hawking garbage food by the truckload, and grocery stores that are a bare minimum box-checking exercise with crappy produce and shitty meat, and that’s before you get to the meat factory we call a healthcare system. One trip to a proper first world country ought to be enough to disabuse us of the notion that our choices are value-neutral. It seems like we’ve already collectively sacrificed a ton for the sake of enriching the same people telling us collective sacrifice is impossible.
We already know we need to pump the breaks on AI for a host of safety issues. However, perhaps the biggest concern is the sheer scale of electricity generation they require. One hyperscale data centre can require electricity equivalent to a fair sized city. Many data centre builders are keen to claim they'll use renewable energy sources... eventually. They'll just suck power off the grid "temporarily" or rely on "clean" natural gas for a few years. There are a decent number of states, provinces, etc. whose total emissions will double in a matter of months. Could the timing possibly be worse?
From a warming perspective, it's utter madness to let this build-out proceed unimpeded. New data centres should be required to be net-zero at power-up. Unfortunately, it's a race and the U.S. side of it has an administration that is actively rolling back policies that fight climate change.
Data centers seem tangential to any real problem. The grid should be converting to green energy and regulation that says datacenters must also be power stations is backwards.
A gigawatt is a gigawatt. If you need a gigawatt, you pay for the generation and infrastructure to provide it, whether you're a million people or a single data-centre. The jursidictions that require data-centres to provide their own generation and electrical infrastructure are completely within their rights.
A gigawatt is a gigawatt. Power stations are more efficient the bigger they are. Put data centers in industrial zoning so the infrastructure for both power and water is already there. It's so obvious. Leave the power generating to the power companies. Yes, obviously again, the datacenters should pay for their gigawatts and solar on the roof will help keep the bill down. Why would this specific industry be required to run their own generators?
It’s surreal how quickly this went from being the most important problem in the world to barely being on anyone’s mind, all in less than a decade. I had plenty of problems with the fear-mongering and doomed-by-2030 predictions, but the current situation, where we seem basically fine with doing nothing, is genuinely scary. Technology has its limits, billions of people still aspire to a European standard of living, and global population isn’t expected to peak until near the end of this century.
I just hate this post-Trump, post-Covid, post-Russia-Ukraine-war world. I don’t know what the trigger was, but there must have been a point where things just went to shit. And here we are: an increasingly ultra-capitalistic dystopia where wealth seems to be the only thing that matters.
I'd wager they're not binary (absent/present) issues but have many dimensions and a continuum of possible values and thus "climate change makes this problem worse or different" is something new. Random example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-024-00583-8
HN's community moderation tools seem to fail at times, so I'm responding to ssearyus's comment that is marked [dead]:
ssearyus: At the risk of being immediately downvoted, let me point out that a 250ppm CO2 level is borderline disastrous for plant life -- at 180ppm, plants would starve globally. The increased CO2 levels in recent years (slightly added to by human activities) is immensely helpful for drought-resistance, as stomata do not then need to open as much to get sufficient CO2 with the result that they transpire less water. The above, and the fact the by far the most important GHG in the atmosphere is water vapor (CO2 is comparatively a rounding error) should give reasonable people pause for thought.
My response:
I think there's something you're trying to say, but it doesn't come through clearly in these many points.
- 250ppm is not disastrous for plant life. That's around preindustrial levels of CO2 (280ppm) and plants did just fine
- What do you mean by "starve" here regarding 180ppm?
- And why are you talking about 250ppm and 180ppm specifically? No one is talking about 250ppm or 180ppm as targets (or maybe you are?)
- Water vapor is indeed a greenhouse gas, and contributes to warming. But it's best thought as an accelerant. Warmer temperatures bring more water vapor bring higher temperatures, bring more water vapor etc etc. The rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is so important because it trigger in many ways a feedback loop, one of which is rise in water vapor as a greenhouse gas. The feedback loop caused by temperature/water vapor is one of the reasons we need to be very careful with our human-made emissions.
- "CO2 is comparatively a rounding error": Whether by mass or volume, CO2 is not a rounding error by comparison to water vapor. There's roughly 4 to 6 times the amount of water vapor as CO2. I wouldn't call 25% a rounding error. Maybe there's something I missed here.
- And when you say water vapor is "by far the most important GHG in the atmosphere", does that mean you're working on lowering water vapor levels in the atmosphere? Or what are you working on regarding solving for this? Maybe something with airplane cloud formation trapping heat?
I'd guess part of the reason he got downvoted is this: "The increased CO2 levels in recent years (slightly added to by human activities) [...]".
Pretty much all of the CO2 increase above pre-industrial levels (280 ppm) is due to human activity.
99% of the time when someone says otherwise they are going to continue with a bunch of other equally inaccurate things which they got from scientifically worthless sites and so people just flag and move on.
Makes sense. The challenge I have is that a lot of people on the planet think the same things. So it's more than just some person spouting weird things off a weird website. The entire output of our civilization right now is higher and higher CO2 levels. I appreciate the chance to talk it out. I supposed multiple downvotes is what leads to something being marked "dead".
>Climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, said that "although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we've dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there's a way out."
I need to say WTF, the way out is to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. That means stop using fossil fuels. How many times does this need to be said ? Already it probably has been said millions of times.
Well said. At this point I’ve literally read many thousands of HN comments about climate change over the past two decades that boil down to “we just need magically overcome the unprecedented global scale of the collective action problem we face!”
The top 10% richest humans emit about half of all emissions.
Decile 10 (richest): ~48%
Decile 9: ~15%
Decile 8: ~10%
Decile 7: ~8%
Decile 6: ~6%
Deciles 1 through 5 combined: ~12%, so about 1 to 3% each
I wouldn't necessarily focus on it, but it's something good for your mental model of how to solve the challenge.
The reason I say I wouldn't focus on it is I'm coming around to the idea that "carbon footprint" is effectively a marketing campaign brought on by oil companies to have us focus our individual power where it has the lowest leverage - sorting trash, our own individual emissions, etc, Instead of mobilizing hundreds, thousands, millions, and billions of people to change policy and technology.
Sources like this: www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/richest-1-emit-as-much-planet-heating-pollution-as-two-thirds-of-humanity-oxfam/
The figures aren't based on real measurements of what every person actually emits, they're based on a model that allocates consumption-based CO2 emissions across income groups.
Regardless of that, I agree that making useful policy changes is important, replacing some plastic straws won't make a huge change, but getting rid of coal will.
So that means if you buy something made of steel, and the steel was made in India, you get assigned that part of India's emissions, counted as your emissions. The whole concept of "your emissions" then is based on blaming the blaming the consumer, the buyer, for what the emitter, the seller, did. Implicitly the buyer has a duty to control the seller in the other country, but the sellers (and their legislature) are unable to make choices.
That "top 10% richest" means the 10% of the planet, 800,000,000 people, which is the richest 10%. (It could be understood differently, as if it meant those earning more than 90% of the maximum income anybody has.)
European Union annual CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions have decreased by over 30% since 2005 (no, not just by getting their stuff manufactured in China).
Big congratulations to the world leaders and policy makers who were at the signing of the Paris Accord. Went home. And did very little about it. Now we output more CO2 faster than we ever have in our entire history.
At least the economy is doing okay… oh wait.
Maybe the reason action hasn’t happened is because the solutions would drive down income inequality?
Was hoping my kids wouldn’t have to live with the worst of it but it looks like we failed at that.
This is mostly the UN’s own fault. Nation governments refrain from getting “hardcore” on this because the better options are expensive and they don’t want to be undercut by another country. The UN is supposed to somehow use its deep diplomatic negotiating and deal-making skill to find and enforce agreement between these states so we all adopt the changes together… and penalise the hold-outs (we all know who) together.
Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative.
The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect.
This only stops it.
Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.
The technology-will-save-us mentality is part of the reason we are here. We live in a society that doesn't do anything unless it makes money for some set of decrepit old men.
We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition) but people made money doing the opposite. And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US.
So we get to watch the world burn down around us.
No it isn't, the idea that strict vegan diets would have stoped climate change is just nonsense. Run the numbers. "Strict vegan diets" is the attitude of US activists telling the developing world that they need to change their behavior before the US activist is willing to accept driving less or adopting dense urban infill housing.
"Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.
People who refused to acknowledge the reality of human society, refused to acknowledge that the profit system exists whether they want it to or not, are responsible for focusing action on ineffective means of change.
It’s one piece of many. They never said it was the only piece. You’re straw-manning this comment.
And vegan diets would make a big dent, look up agricultural sector emissions, look up beef emissions and methane from their burps. It’s a major factor after transport and electricity.
Yes, but there is zero shot at doing this versus energy and transportation.
The major limiter of veganism is cultural. People love eating meat. It’s a major source of protein and calories, especially in developing countries. Americans are not going vegan, so it’s kind of silly, in my opinion, to focus on it as a solution.
Compare to building nuclear energy or solar / wind + batteries. China, the US, Europe, and India are all well-positioned to do this. The limitation is political will, which is more difficult than it should be, but definitely easier than convincing a critical mass of Americans to go vegan.
Culture can be changed - we changed the attitude toward and prevalence of cigarette smoking in 2-3 generations, we could change other practices as well. Success doesn't need to mean 100% adoption - material changes in attitude toward meat consumption (luxury/celebration vs everyday) would make a material difference in the overall impact. And yes, some/many ranchers, butchers, etc would need to turn to some other industry for income. Solar farms should do pretty well on ranchland. Full disclosure - I'm NOT a vegetarian and love a nice steak. My doctor has recommended I incorporate more plant protein in my diet. But I'm not really trying to convince anyone that they should do the same. I'm mostly reacting to the opinion that it's impossible/silly. My 2 pack a day smoker dad thought the same thing back in the 1960s. By the time he was in his 70s, he was a firm non-smoker. Things can change.
Edit: I'm also not trying to equate eating meat with smoking - one is obviously more harmful to society than the other. I'm just thinking about the cultural change that happened. Culture is malleable. Laws aren't a great way to affect culture, but social pressure is really effective.
Culture can be changed indeed, as can be seen in religion where branches has happened and whole demographics has gone and switched to different religions.
The reason for the decrease in smoking is still being researched and debate, but the main arguments that I have seen is the main role of smoking as social stress relief and as such it has been replaced by other addictions like opium use (mobile phone use, social media, and games has also been argued).
If we consider food culture to be malleable, we definitely should move to aquaculture as a main source of nutrients. Farms on land compete with forests and human activity, and land based farms uses artificial fertilizers (derived from natural gas) and massive amount of fresh water. Shellfish, invertebrates, and seaweed can provide both protein and calories, and has the lowest environmental impact of anything we eat today and can even have a positive environmental impact if farmed correctly. Changing farming from doing harm to doing good would have massive impact, and all it takes is a cultural change.
I think the difference is that smoking is also horrible for the smoker, and many want to quit, but can’t very easily. People don’t want to stop eating meat, driving their SUVs, buying cheap shit on Amazon, and flying to cool vacations. Stopping doing those things doesn’t benefit them unless everyone else stops too, and unlike smoking, we’ve made little progress in the last few decades (other than the progress unlocked by technology that means it’s immediately beneficial to the one making the change, like solar), so I can’t blame anyone for thinking that giving up meat to save the planet is stupid since their entire lifetime of lived experience tells them that the vast majority of their fellow humans are not going to do the same.
> developing countries – Americans
How come veganism is cultural but alternative energy is political? Could one not be the other?
My washing machine doesn’t care how the electricity is produced, but most people can tell a vegan dish from a steak.
Unless they can't, then they get very angry: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Di55DEnNkUs
It's tied to their identity for a lot of people. The same kinds that will drive a huge SUV to compensate for the hole in their lives where meaning and connection is supposed to be.
I don’t think that is a majority behavior. Few people consume to own the libs. At least far fewer people than those who just like meat more than they care about their marginal contributions to climate change.
A lot of people go into denial/defensive mechanisms if you try and point out what they're doing is bad.
Given who the president of the United States is. They are at least a plurality.
I think that’sa harmful oversimplification. You should avoid arguing against a boogeyman version of your political opponents. People vote for crazy candidates for a multitude of reasons. Most people have fairly average opinions on the majority of topics but can only vote for candidates that partially represent their preferences. I for example have fairly radical preferences when it comes to environmental policy but agree more with conservative opinions on other topics. There are no parties in my country that promise to make me completely happy.
The broken US voting system amplifies the effect.
Stop being so fucking patronizing. I was raised by these people. Most of my family are still these people. I’ve experienced their bullshit for over 40 years. Your high minded nonsense in no way applies. I see what they cheer for.
I don’t claim that nobody matches the stereotype.
Energy policy is set by governments, which makes it a part of the political sphere
Veganism is an individual choice, and individual choices are generally pushed by culture
Of course culture and politics influence each other in a myriad of ways, but when people start to try and push individual choices like being vegan into the political space it is never very popular
I personally would fight tooth and nail to prevent veganism from becoming a law in my country. Failing that I would immediately make plans to move somewhere else.
That's not something most countries want
Going vegan 1 day a week is trivially easy - if everyone does this, the emission reduction is not trivial. We need not have to go full militant vegan to make a dent. And I totally agree with energy/transit/real estate planning being the sectors where a government can twist knobs a bit easier with greater effect. But I strongly believe that we need holistic approaches- reducing emissions on an individual level will move the needle en masse.
> It’s one piece of many
It is one of the last pieces to focus effort on.
If I stopped eating all meat and dairy it would reduce the world's annual emissions by 0.0000000026%, assuming we can ignore animal quantization and market effects which could easily actually reduce the reduction to 0.
It only makes a difference if a whole lot of other people do that. If I decide individually to do it for the climate even though I will be less happy on a vegan diet and it is not also done by a whole lot of other people I've made myself worse off for no benefit.
To get enough people to do it will require government incentives. It's hard to see how incentives specifically for this could be designed to be both effective and not so unpopular as to get the government replaced at the next election.
If it ever comes about it is far more likely to be as the result of something more general such as a revenue neutral carbon tax. That might raise the input costs for meat production shifting some people to non-meat diets. (They will still mostly prefer meat, but this way they might not blame the government as much).
Compare to other things individuals can do, like switch to EVs. For the vast majority of people with good home charging an EV will generally be as good as or better than an ICE car except that it is several thousand dollars more expensive than a similar ICE car.
That's something governments can incentivize. Subsidize the cost difference and subsidize home charging equipment purchase and installation, and you will get people switching. Not because they want to help the climate and are sacrificing something for that, but because it is an improvement to their current driving setup and it helps the climate.
The biggest wins though are in the things individuals don't directly deal with. Replace fossil fuel power plants with renewables backed with storage that just use gas occasionally for example, and to the user it is all just electricity. You don't have to convince individual they need to change their lifestyle to so this kind of change.
The straw man is claiming that "strict vegan diets" are necessary. People bring up "strict vegan diets" to sabotage climate action. It's a hindrance to achieving the very possible change we need.
> People bring up "strict vegan diets" to sabotage climate action.
They also tend to use polarizing identity politics that vilify all men, or all old people, or all white people, etc, even though most of those groups are suffering with everybody else.
how fast do you expect vegan diets to be distributed through society? What is the relation between the expectation of how fast they can be distributed through society and the requirement for speed of distribution to have the desired effect?
Obviously the requirement would have to be significantly quicker than current spread of veganism which would, as you noted, lead to a big dent in the agriculture sector.
How are your calculations taking into account the need to kill off, en masse, cattle and other animals as veganism spreads because they no longer can be considered economically sustaining for the farmer to support them?
I ask because I've never seen any calculation about this! Everybody always seems to think that veganism spreads and the cattle fairy will blink them out of existence.
When I was working for Greenpeace all the holier than thou vegans were all talking about how immoral it was to kill animals for food, not taking into account that once you no longer user those animals for food you need to kill off a lot of them. This taking into account of things always caused me to have a sneaking suspicion that they wanted the animals not to be killed, as if the farmers would be oh well we can't sell you for meat so let's just keep you on in retirement and feed you, but not have you breed, until you die of old age.
Given the influx of sudden and wide spread veganism and the collapse of the meat as food industry, what are the plans for getting rid of the bodies of lots of dead cows? I know what the plans are now with meat as food, cows are butchered, cut up, refrigerated and transported all over the world, but without meet as food none of that will happen because there would not be profit at the end to support it, so please, what is your plan?
Frankly, the whole wide-spread veganism is part of the solution seems to have the weakness of having many problematic moving pieces that are not at all planned for in any meaningful way - that I have ever seen that is.
I think current livestock usage is driven by demand? I don’t think everyone needs to become strictly vegan. If every ate meat just two days a week that would have a big impact. Perfect being the enemy of the good and all that. For example if meat usage was rationed by the government WW2-style that would likely effect demand too.
You might argue that’s a ridiculous suggestion which is fair. The western world did mobilize for something that’s likely to end less of life that if we continue on our current trajectory.
> the idea that strict vegan diets would have stoped climate change is just nonsense
Yeah, where did you get it from? They said "strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition" Would you also have said "the idea that energy transition and ground based mass transit would have stopped climate change is just nonsense", too?
Only to then go on to talk about "the reality of human society", as so often with these top response to the top comment. It's the sophistry two-step.
> "Making money" is the incentive system of society.
Then explain voluntary work or all the people risking their lives for other people they don’t even know.
Human society existed before money.
And nobody said that a vegan diet would have stopped climates change, they said strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition.
Just picking one and say that would help is a nasty tactic.
It’s like saying you need water, food and sleep to live and you say, nope, water alone doesn’t keep you alive.
The reality is, consuming and producing less works but it’s harder then keep going and hope for a technical solution.
Same with being overweight, more sports, less food works but doesn’t make fun.
I push back heartily on anybody bringing up "strict vegan diets" because it is itself a massive straw man, one that mostly promotes inaction and idleness. Michael Mann's 2021 book, and all the interviews around that time, are probably far more effective than I could be at explaining why it's such a bad idea to bring up "strict vegan diets"
Making money is not the only incentive system in society, but it is overwhelmingly the one that controls emissions. Another key one is regulations around housing, which require lots of driving, that's been built deep into our entire land use, and can not be changed on the time scale necessary for climate action.
Moreover, "making money" is the incentive system in all the world's big carbon emitting economies that controls decisions, from China to the US. Sometimes those incentive systems are based on the costs of technology, sometimes they are based on rules that governments make (e.g. China setting the price for energy capacity markets too high, resulting in buliding lots of coal electricity plants that sit mostly idle...)
As somebody who spends almost all of my political effort trying to get ground based mass transit and dense development, I often advocate for them on climate grounds, but only because climate grounds are convincing politically here. They are rounding errors on climate action, in practice, because new development over the course of the next two decades, the crucial two decades of climate cation, will only be a tiny fraction of our built environment.
There's only one true method for climate action: stop extracting fossil fuels to run soceity, and change all industrial processes that emit carbon to neutral methods, and make agriculture carbon neutral or ideally carbon negative. Strict vegan diets helps with deforestation in Brazil, for those that get meat from Brazil, for example. But the plains of the US used to be covered with bison, before they were slaughtered and replaced with cattle. We need to look at the overall ecosystem, where everything is going.
Talking about "strict vegan diets" when they are not needed is merely a recipe for keeping people from adopting far easier, far more effective, and far more necessary action.
> Human society existed before money.
Society doesn't require money, but it does seem to require mechanisms for coordinating resources and obligations. Money is one particularly powerful solution to that problem, especially once societies become large enough that most economic interactions occur between people who don't personally know one another.
> And nobody said that a vegan diet would have stopped climates change, they said strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition.
That just makes it less possible.
Consuming and producing less is just not going to happen because there are at least four billion people who don't live the western lifestyle, but want to and there's not much that can stop them.
> Human society existed before money.
That is a very broad claim that can be challenged easily.
Maybe it would make more sense to say: "Money is not everything, and pockets of altruism exist"?
You need a society for money so society comes first means there was society before money
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/monkey-business....
Depends on your definition of money and society.
> People who refused to acknowledge the reality of human society, refused to acknowledge that the profit system exists whether they want it to or not, are responsible for focusing action on ineffective means of change.
Thank you for writing that, because I think it is the key point. It's very easy to blame "decrepit old men" because that makes it someone else's fault - and I get it, as I think that there are a bunch of decrepit old men that deserve a lot of blame.
But democratic societies (and even authoritarian ones that are still somewhat subject to mass unrest) were never going to accept large negative impacts for a consequence that was not immediate and in your face. Like you put it, just go around and ask your average Joe or Jane if they would vote for any candidate who demanded strict vegan diets (or heck, even a lot of the other things on GP's list). You're fooling yourself if you think it's only decrepit old men who don't want that stuff.
And regarding GP's comment that "And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US." Yes, there are some people trying to sabotage this to make money for themselves, but it will not take them too long to fail miserably precisely because the economics are not in their favor. Just look at Texas - not exactly a place known for its love of vegan diets, among other things - and solar, wind and now batteries are now a huge portion of the energy mix and growing fast precisely because it's economical.
That's simply not true. Politicians have always known how to convince young men to go to war and die for them. Nothing is more selfless. So politicians could also convince people to change their lifestyles for the worse to prevent catastrophe.
To be fair, often that convincing happened at gunpoint. I would want to live in a society that enforced climate action with weapons. But of course politicians could do a lot more to motivate climate action before guns would be needed.
who wants a "strict vegan diet" ? I see detractors who want to derail the topic using distasteful, demanding examples..
The person I'm responding to is the one who brought it up.
I live in a very leftist place, and there were always those at climate events demanding "strict vegan diets" however I didn't see these people out in the general world outside of my little leftist bubble, trying to actually get their idea out there.
I agree with Michael Mann that what most of the public only encounters this idea of "strict vegan diets is a required climate solutions" by hearing it from climate denialists poisoning the well of climate action. But I also see this idea online, and in meat space in very isolated areas.
So the idea of "strict vegan diets" is a real idea on the fringe, but its overall effect on climate action has been to turn people against climate action in the US.
> and in meat space
an odd place to be a hotbed of vegan advocacy.
Hah! https://terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/
Many vegans I know were in fact motivated to that choice by realizing that meetings of humans were in fact "meat space."
https://yellow5.com/pokey/archive/index312.html
MY LUNGS ARE ADAPTING! I'VE INHALED A ROAST
I‘m pretty sure they mention a strict vegan diet as only a part of the solution. And it’s a fact that meat needs more resources and produces more CO2 and methane then plant based food.
It would already help to consume less meat.
It seems to me you focus on vegan diet to use the annoying vegan stereotype for your purposes.
ok - I am impressed that you quote Michael Mann! yes agree there are loudmouths on all sides of this topic. Thank you for the considered reply
Significant amounts of the third world are already eating de-facto vegetarian or vegan diets. Many for religious reasons (i.e. in India where the vast majority of people either eat no meat or only chicken/fish), and many others for financial reasons.
Strict vegan diets would objectively massively help reduce climate change.
Religious and too poor to eat meat.
Not exactly selling the idea of “strict vegan diet” to a bunch of people with enough cash for meat and incisors in their jaws.
You got any examples of cultures en mass with “strict vegan diets” because lentils taste delicious?
Buddhists don't eat meat for religious reasons.
And lentils do taste very good yes. In Spain they make a really nice lentil broth. Though the traditional version has meat in it, it can easily do without. It's just that in Spain meat goes into everything:)
why does it matter why they eat vegan? they just demonstrate that its feasable.
Because the incentive is what drives change. You're not going to convince America or Western Europe to live strict vegan lifestyles if they are adverse to it. Further, as the poor people grow wealthier, they begin to eat more meat unless they have a religious reason (I.e. an incentive) to do so.
Converting to a vegan diet alone won't stop human driven climate change. Therefore, the prospect of climate change won't be enough to convince people to give up meat en masse. That drum has been banged on enough for long enough for that to be obvious.
It's not even just America or Western Europe. As soon as I saw the OP about switching to total veganism, my first thought was about e.g. the Arabian Peninsula where meat is central to every meal, and indeed going without meat is seen as the behavior of adherents of foreign religions. Anyone familiar with that part of the world knows that any fad of societal veganism would take decades to arise, longer than the time we have to tackle climate change.
> The consumption of meat is more common among lower-income groups. Nearly nine out of ten people belonging to the poorest 20% of India's population eat meat, compared to about seven out of ten among the wealthiest 20%.[4]
> Religion also plays a role in dietary habits. Nearly all of the Muslim (99%), Christian (99%) and Buddhists/neo-Buddhist (97%) populations eat meat. Among Hindus, a little over three-quarters consume meat, while Jains and Sikhs have the highest share of vegetarians. Only one-quarter of Jains and half of Sikhs have ever eaten meat.
https://www.dataforindia.com/meat-consumption/
That is not true, most people in India don’t eat meat because they are too poor to afford it and hence malnourishment.
Punjab and Rajasthan have the highest proportion of vegetarians and also rank on the top of male/female height charts.
Admittedly it's not fully vegan but still.
Indians have long recognized the virtues of a vegetarian diet: both the moral imperative & it's health benefits. That's something everyone should be able to admire.
> in India where the vast majority of people either eat no meat or only chicken/fish
That is such a misleading comment. ~80% of people in India consume meat. That "or" is doing some incredibly amounts of borderline lying.
https://www.dataforindia.com/meat-consumption/
They consume far less meat and the specific types are the uniquely least polluting types
Chicken/Fish produce an order of magnitude or in some cases two orders of magnitude less pollution than cows do.
Trying to gaslight me on this topic even though I'm right on the part that matters. the "or" stands in for the context of the fact that Chicken/fish are an order of magnitude healthier for the planet, and frankly, for individuals.
> Chicken/Fish produce an order of magnitude or in some cases two orders of magnitude less pollution than cows do.
Cows are not for eating, they are holy animals in India, more like pets. I hope you are not advocating eating dogs in west!
Not remotely what gaslighting means
> They consume far less meat and the specific types are the uniquely least polluting types
Your claim was that 3rd world countries like India "are already eating de-facto vegetarian or vegan diets" which is incorrect. Moving goalposts
> Chicken/Fish produce an order of magnitude or in some cases two orders of magnitude less pollution than cows do.
Cool, irrelevant because the vast majority in India are neither vegetarian or vegan.
> Trying to gaslight me on this topic even though I'm right on the part that matters
This is called "being incorrect but trying to move goalposts"
Veganism would be more popular if vegans weren't so insufferable.
the suffering of the animals being killed for your tastebuds outweighs your suffering of the "vegan-high-horse".
> Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.
no, it has not
https://www.irena.org/News/pressreleases/2025/Jul/91-Percent...
https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/why-clean-energy-...
https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-20...
1) renewable energy is only a part of climate action, it's not sufficient - renewable energy being cheap alone doesn't help a bit if you don't keep fossil fuel in the ground
2) not technology aligned societies incentive systems, but politics which a) incentivized producing electricity by renewable methods and punishing electricity produced by fossil fuels, which again encouraged research which in return made renewables mostly cheaper than fossil fuels - and we are lucky that the physics aligned with that.
Renewable energy and replacing carbon emitting industrial chemistry with carbon neutral processes are the sum entirely of climate action.
There might be a tiny bit of nuclear built, but we don't have the capability to build enough to make a dent in the time scale we need to, and nuclear is far more expensive than solar plus batteries, so the profit motive means solar wind and batteries will win.
The people that built the technology aligned industrial policy and government incentives to allow them to create the technology, true. But it was technology action that is solving climate change.
There are two groups of people opposed to clean energy, one right wing and one left wing, and they were both extremely wrong about the technology, and the path of technology has been crystal clear for decades.
It was obvious in the 2000s, based on learning rates, that batteries solar and wind were improving at rates that would solve our climate crisis. The only question I had was if nuclear could play a part, and Vogtle, Summer, Olkiluoto, Flamanville, and Hinkley proved decisively that nuclear would not be a big player.
We don't need carbon taxes, those turned out to misalign incentives in weird ways (not all industries are equally sensitive to carbon prices, so applying equal taxes is far less than economically ideal for motivationchanges). Tax credits and guaranteed small purchases turned out to be extremely effective and efficient.
Solar and batteries are great for any region where solar production align with electricity consumption and where the battery solves the issue of night time.
Wind is great to reduce fossil consumption to around 50% in regions where the conditions of solar is not great. After 50% the cost increase significantly as overproduction competes with existing investments and prices drops below zero (see Denmark as an example). Batteries is also prohibitively expensive to cover months of poor production, which is why regions that heavily invest into wind also construct thermal power plants for equal capacity that burn carbon rich fuel for electricity and heat (see all of central/northern Europe). Regions with colder climates also has inverse consumption behavior than warmer climates, which mean that solar produce the least when consumption is highest. This is where nuclear can be economical viable, but only if we discontinue building more thermal power plants that burn cheap fuel. EU voting to have natural gas defined as "green" demonstrate this perfectly well, as well as the complete lack of any political party advocating to building battery as the solution for low wind production.
> But it was technology action that is solving climate change.
what even is this?
> We don't need carbon taxes,
yes we need them, otherwise we will keep emitting CO2 as always
> We don't need carbon taxes, those turned out to misalign incentives in weird ways (not all industries are equally sensitive to carbon prices, so applying equal taxes is far less than economically ideal for motivationchanges).
so? the ones which are most sensitive (usually the ones with the highest footprint) will transition first, others will follow later with increasing cost of emitting co2 - not including difficulty which will rebalance the equation
> Tax credits and guaranteed small purchases turned out to be extremely effective and efficient.
what tax credits and what guaranteed small purchases? and how do they prevent greenhouse gas emissions? and why do we want them if technology already provides the incentives (your claim)?
> "Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.
This personal belief is grounded on an assumption that all mankind follows a neoliberal or even libertarian economic model.
Back to reality, west Europe is firmly a social democracy where states impose behavior through law, regulation, and policy, which is topped by a federal system that coordinates policies. Countries such as China are totalitarian with a centrally managed economy that's guided by N-year strategic plans.
My supposed "personal belief" is not normative it is descriptive.
Misconstruing this as normative, and attributing it to a political belief, is your cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile where actual climate action is coming from.
We must understand the world as it is, if we are to effectively change it to a better state.
> My supposed "personal belief" is not normative it is descriptive.
No, it is a expression of your personal and unsupported beliefs. Asserting that the whole world enforces a libertarian economical system is simply out of touch with reality. I mean, China alone is a totalitarian regimes that still manages it's economy through central planning.
> Back to reality, west Europe is firmly a social democracy where states impose behavior through law, regulation, and policy, which is topped by a federal system that coordinates policies.
And yet, air travel continues to grow (after a small hiatus due to COVID) and state and EU money will be dumped into a new airport near me, to support more than doubling current capacity, much further away from the city (adding tens of millions of car trips to and from the airport).
I'm simply the looney for not taking the kids on low cost European city escapes.
It starts from the “bottom”: people will talk about it, but will pretty much continue to do whatever the fuck they can afford to do. And Europeans, like Americans, can simply afford to much, while harping about what will happen to the world once the BRICS can afford the same.
Much of Western Europe has increasingly adopted neoliberal policies over the years, I would not call it “firmly” social democratic anymore.
Seriously, we have the US threatening to sanction (and has) politicians and judges that want to regulate US technology companies. The idea that neoliberalism doesn't have a massive influence on the world is straight up delusional.
Did we forget that EU took an austerity approach following 2008 and all that did was immiserate their population enough where they are voting for fascist/nationalist political parties?
Yes, although I wouldn’t blame the US solely, London also carries a fair amount of responsibility for it. Perhaps not as much as the US, but Thatcherism was certainly the Trojan horse for European entry of neoliberalism in the 1980s.
> This personal belief is grounded on an assumption that all mankind follows a neoliberal or even libertarian economic model.
This personal belief is usually coupled to people who have become wealthy following this belief. So it tracks that they would declare any solution that doesn't allow them to continue their plundering impossible.
You're assuming that we keep the same system and that no sacrificing can be made. Technology is seen as the only solution because of the primary assumption that we need to keep growth and late stage capitalism. Degrowth, relocalisation, lower consumption are all solutions that would work better than technology (there are very serious people out there who demonstrated that technology won't replace the energy we need, Jancovici to name just one).
Technology is the only option in constant system, but with nothing happening, the system won't remain constant for long, and sacrifices will have to be made, not by choice.
Jancovici said a lot of stupid things also, although it seems that he recently acknowledged that renewables could make an impact (and not just "l'épaisseur du trait" as he always said). I'm not sure what you mean by "degrowth, relocalisation, lower consumption are all solutions that would work better than technology". People in general do no want to consume less, or buy more expensive stuff created locally, so I think it's easier to create new technologies than to change people mindset, although we probably should try to do both (which we are).
He does says (said) a lot of stupid things, but also has a good analysis in some domains. He’s very influenced by meadows/ world3/ club de Rome and while it’s a toy model it certainly a good thing to have a global view.
Per IPCC AR6 total power goes from 18TW to 16TW in a good scenario, due to increased efficiency (no Carnot cycle).
Degrowth per IPCC / earth system scientists mean the 10% the richest consuming less power.
It’s much more a wealth distribution problem rather than a technological one. Both IPCC and IPBES agree there.
Can’t wait for the downvotes on that one. That’s the one hill I’ll die on, literally.
Edit: AR6 (WG2+3)
> You're assuming that we keep the same system and that no sacrificing can be made.
No. I am not.
I'm saying that unless the incentive system is aligned with our goals, then it's not actually climate action.
Technologists succeeded at doing that.
People who decided to use non-policy driven political action failed utterly at this. The degrowthers are particularly bad at this, but then all their thinking was muddled and riddled with errors about the reality of the science.
Technology makes the system non-constant. Technology is one of the biggest sources of social change.
> Technologists succeeded at doing that.
Have they? How have they done that? I just want to know what you mean here.
I mean this: https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/why-clean-energy-...
Technology did that. With lots of government subsidies, and in particular with Germany kick starting a ton of solar industrial development.
Even in the US, with concerted anti-renewable sentiment at all levels of decision makers in both electric utility leadership and government leadership, new electricity is overwhelmingly carbon-free, because the technologists made it the cheapest:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
Technologists caused massive social change, by changing the technology. Far more than the people that focused only on culture and changing society through those means.
Sure. That's good, I fully agree with you on that. But is this the solution, or just treating the symptom rather than the root cause?
Technology by itself has never been the problem, the problem is the scaling up of it. Fossil fuels are harmless at a small scale, it's only once you exploit enough of them that you start to see harmful effects. But renewables are no different: we're drawing from the Earth's natural energy allocation, but that's the same energy that heats the planet in the first place -- so as we scale up renewables, we will also end up wrecking the planet. We'd need to scale it up so much it feels preposterous, but it seems obvious to me that if we can, we will. There is no upper limit to energy demand.
And that's what I'm worried about in the long term, I suppose: that surprised Pikachu moment where human ingenuity (and AI, I guess) worked so hard on extracting every bit of solar energy that the rest of the planet, not receiving any of it anymore, predictably turned into an ice ball. This kind of nonsense could never happen if we could properly look and plan ahead as a society, but neither would climate change, so.
Don't get me wrong, it's great that renewables are booming, but we could also have built a sustainable utopia on the back of fossil fuels if we had properly budgeted their use. We need to switch ASAP and start budgeting, because the problems we currently have aren't the only problems we will ever have, and the size of them, unfortunately, tends to scale with energy.
>"Strict vegan diets" is the attitude of US activists telling the developing world that they need to change their behavior
https://woods.stanford.edu/news/meats-environmental-impact
>Livestock production accounts for 14-18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, including 32 percent of methane gas emissions worldwide.
14-18% seems like a fairly significant chunk, no? and what if we just started with not eating beef, all of us, especially the USA? that'd cut down the emissions by quite a large bit
I also feel like the idea that technology will save us can only exist if you're fully ignorant of the sheer amount of money poured into lobbying by various industries into deregulation (like, for eg, the beef industry: https://www.ucs.org/about/news/agribusiness-industry-lobbyin... or Taylor Farms https://www.wired.com/story/diarrhea-outbreak-taylor-farms-m...)
not to mention the abandonment by state energy companies like Georgia Power of their solar/renewable goals and full buy-in to building yet more gas turbines in order to attract hyperscale data centers. I was part of some organizing against this in my city: https://atlpresscollective.com/2025/12/18/public-service-com...
just look at the funding for renewable R&D in the past few years - the reason we have the market we do now is that huge spike (thanks, Obama) in 2009 that drove down the cost of manufacturing and drove up conversion efficiency. that much investment into the renewables sector hasn't been the same since, especially now: https://www.theinvadingsea.com/2025/11/05/fossil-fuels-oil-c...
Also while developed countries are affected , developing countries like Bangladesh, India are disproportionately affected, mostly a function of geography and a lot of history (very high population etc.). Honestly once AI becomes powerful enough most of these people will literally be leftovers with nothing left to contribute to the world with civil war precursors you see in other forms today essentially the same symptom of fight for limited resources.
The developed countries have so much land, water, resources that they will adapt although inequality within will be an issue and tbh at this point there is never any thought given to the wider world, which if one things about honestly never was.
I find almost nothing to agree with here.
Renewable energy will power places like Bangladesh towards far greater wealth and prosperity. Aside from the distastefulness of using the term "leftovers" on any group of people, I think its clear that India will become massively more powerful due to their education system, once its further enabled by cheap clean energy and AI.
The US is falling into civil war over stupid culture issues as India is rising. The US is dismantling its education system, its research system, to spend it on wasted defense spending (just in the past few days huge amounts of research money from the National Institutes of Health have been funneled over to DoD. Or DoW, whatever).
Additionally the US's terrible culture war is resulting in slow adoption of cheap energy, which will further lower the US's global position.
There will always be limited resources. If not one, the other. But cheap renewable energy is a great leveler and the US will be leveled far more for its refusal to lead the way with it. India will be hugely ascendant as a massive nation with coordinated, highly educated human resources. Even in the era of AI, perhaps more so, human resources are the ultimate limit on human happiness.
There is a no "culture war" outside of the media and the institutions that are freaking out. Their international arbitrage labor play from the 70s until now is showing itself for the greedy, venal, self-serving system it is. There is a realization about how inequality is created and spreads and that is what is fueling and division here in the US.
Once we rip the institutions that are breeding this inequality out by their roots and replace it with better social safety nets, free medical care, reformed education systems resulting in lower inequality. Then we can tackle planting more trees, bulking out solar, onshoring manufacturing, etc. The "war" is the people who have abused the system so long that they are multi-generational "social elites" complaining that they being called out on it.
> most of these people will literally be leftovers with nothing left to contribute to the world
A lot of people from bangladesh and india are working in Russia. China and Russia are also investing, and building factories there.
I've been vegetarian for 7-8 years and think it'd be great if everyone stopped eating meat, but expecting even a single person to stop who hasn't already expressed interest in it is pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. We should not base our strategies for fighting climate change on hoping all of humanity will take a sudden 180° turn on their natural instincts to eat meat.
I watched a woman break down crying in a grocery store, the guy behind her put 40 lbs of ground beef on the conveyor. She started off as angry “how can you bear the thought of eating all that dead animal?” “Oh it’s not even for me, it’s for my dogs.”
I admire anyone and everyone who wants to be a vegetarian/vegan. Expecting the rest of the world to follow suit is a fools errand.
In medicine there’s this well known axiom that if an intervention regime would technically work, but is something that the patients tend to not follow through, then the intervention regime doesn’t work.
Yep. "Just eat less" would work, but patients don't do that, so semaglutide it is.
The everyone-should-try-harder mentality doesn't work either unfortunately. It would be great if everyone rode bikes and went vegan but that's never going to happen so we have to stop making people feel bad for buying gas cars and eating cheeseburgers because it just causes division which ultimately hurts progress.
It was oil companies that created the notion of a "carbon footprint" as a way of deflecting blame from them to individuals and now you're falling right into their propaganda with "strict vegan diets" etc. And regardless, we have no alternative but technology to solve the issue because, are you just going to maintain the CO2 status quo in the atmosphere?
Technology is more feasible than politically driven "degrowth" or any of the other proposals.
Would it work as well, though? The basic idea of "degrowth", to me, is to slow down the car until the braking distance is smaller than the viewing distance, so we're safe no matter what. Whereas technology is more like swerving constantly to avoid obstacles. The latter is just intrinsically more likely to get us into a crash.
I'm not saying degrowth is feasible, mind you. I agree that it probably isn't. But the fact we can't do something doesn't mean the alternatives must be good. It might just mean we're cooked.
No country will ever vote for degrowth so it either has to be done secretively which will cause a populist backlash like in the UK or at gun point. Degrowthers are IMO all basically eco fascists.
The reality of the situation is if you don’t embrace degrowth principles, the planet will probably do it for you. Think mega-wildfores that cause so much devastation that hundreds of thousands of people die from air pollution, or collapse of entire crops and food supply chains due to drought, or mega-heatwaves that wipe out millions.
Degrowth is coming. And you don’t have a say in the matter.
Most of these large wildfires are started by people and a result of bad land management in the form of stopping small fires in fire adapted landscapes. Moreover meddling in insurance markets and NIMBYism causes people to build in burn zones.
There just aren’t mega heatwaves causing famines and there won’t be at 1.5c of warming either.
None of that changes that we now have substantially larger and less controllable fires than we used to. Are you really denying that extreme weather and droughts don’t play a part in dramatically increasing combustibility?
> There just aren’t mega heatwaves causing famines and there won’t be at 1.5c of warming either.
Oh we’re going way past 1.5C.
At least we've discovered that trying to get people to behave differently at scale without the presence of an *immediate* emergency is a failed endeavour... So maybe now we can stop that nonsense and focus all of our energy on technological solutions?
I fear ideologists who’d rather engineer emergencies
I’m guessing the things you listed are the sacrifices /you/ are willing to make but omit the ones you are not willing to make. Do you travel by plane? Do you use AI? Do you have kids? Do you own a car? Etc etc.
> Do you have kids?
This right here, the absolutely preposterous idea that giving up kids is somehow climate action, is exactly the nonsense that a climate activist should never tolerate.
You think climate action is everybody stopping having children?! You think extinction of the human race is the only option?!
"Of course not!" You say, so clearly we must have some children. But how many? If we drastically reduce our population, we will continue with the same broken systems, same energy systems, etc.
Only by keeping society running do we have the energy to switch our society's engine to zero carbon energy sources.
It's insulting to tell people not to have children, it's not realistic, but worst of all, it's not a climate solution to not have children.
"Don't have kids" is just Malthusian nonsense from a prior environmental era, uncritical thinking, pure slop.
And it greatly harms actual climate action when this extremely stupid idea gets associated with the climate movement. Stop. Just stop.
Reducing population is a perfectly valid (partial) solution, and it also doesn't mean extinction.
Telling people not to have kids may not be realistic, but... it's also happening already.
Reducing population will not do anything to help with climate change.
Look at the time scales of action. Look at what needs to done. Advocating population reduction has nothing at all to do with climate action. Please stop.
You're just taking some idea that sounds vaguely "environmental" and extreme, and attributing it to somehow being climate action. It won't reduce emissions to stop climate change.
It's also completely self defeating. Children tend to end up adopting the values of their parents over time. If climate people just remove themselves from the gene pool, their impact on the climate is going to be negligibly small, but there being that many fewer voices of similar values in the future, will have a much more significant impact.
Imagine you're a hyper-partisan and you learn that 'the other side' is spreading messaging amongst themselves encouraging each other to not have children. You're going to be doing backflips, because it's just the collective suicide of an ideology.
> Children tend to end up adopting the values of their parents over time
No, they don't. If that was true, we'd have prehistoric values. (It would mean you could turn matters of culture into genetic arguments, which is fun, I see the temptation, but it's just not true.)
Consider evolution because it's something similar on an even more gradual scale. Species tend to be very much like the things they came from, yet we have obviously a wide array of species over time because small differences can accumulate on their own 'branch' and eventually diverge to the point of creating entirely new species. But if a species chose to just stop having children, it's not going to have anywhere near the numbers it once did, anytime soon. In extreme cases, it just goes extinct.
It's similar with most views and values. Your children will mostly share all of them with you once they reach a certain age. It's something I can even feel happening with my own parents as I age, rather to my distaste. hahah. Anyhow, yeah - there's about a zillion studies on this topic and you can find that parents values are most predictive of those of their children.
And of course with values and other characteristics, even if parental views/values are highly predictive, there's going to be some variance. But you still end up with the fact that if a bunch of people remove themselves from the gene pool, any definingly common characteristics of those individuals are also going to be disproportionately removed from society as well.
You're saying it again! It's still not true. People think about the values that they're handed.
This isn't generally the sort of thing that calls for citations since you're presumably a human, and you presumably know plenty of other humans. And once you compare people to their parents, well - the apple doesn't fall far from the tree on average. There are of course plenty of exceptions, but it's also completely fair to call them exceptions.
In looking up some literature on it, it turns out that some studies have even studied and found what I alluded to of people trending ever more towards their parents values as they age. [1] They call it 'delayed activation'. But anyhow, yeah they found the exact same thing where our values become even more alike as we age. Pretty interesting stuff! And I think it makes the age aspect quite critical. I assumed I was one of those exceptions referenced above, yet reality had other plans in mind, in spite of my protestations.
[1] - https://sci-hub.si/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
A) I’m not a millennial. B) I have kids. C) I used that as one of several sacrifices that can be made to reduce carbon footprint. I would say it is more valid than “being vegan” since that alone may or may not help. Everyone is very ready to wag their finger about the sacrifices they are willing to make but excuse or ignore the ones they are not.
A) I didn't say you're a millenial. B) Having kids is not an excuse for saying "don't have kids for the sake of the environment!" it's an awful, anti-environmental thing to say no matter what. C) Not having kids is not climate action, it doesn't stop climate change, it's at best a half-measure.
Most of all, when people say "don't have kids for the environment" it actually really hurts environmental action. Pretending that self-sacrifice is inherently environmental action, that we will save the world through sacrifice, is just one of those weird ways that Christian religion has worked its way into people's every day life.
We save the climate by stopping ALL emissions, and then also in the later half of the century actually sequestering CO2 at a pretty consistent rate. We don't get to that by halving the population, that's not a solution in any way. It's not going to be easier to get to zero emissions with half the population, if anything it's going to be harder. And we definitiely won't be sequestering CO2 in the later half of the century if we're dealing with all the challenges of reducing the population by any significant amount.
I'm willing to wag my finger at you, not about sacrifices, but falsely equating climate action with sacrifices. Climate action is one thing and one thing only: reducing emissions and eventually reversing some of them. It is not sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice.
If you look back at this thread, I’m not suggesting anyone should do anything, I’m pointing out the piousness of people suggesting we aren’t doing enough when they themselves have more they could do. Also, having fewer children absolutely would have a positive impact on climate if you subscribe to the ideas that climate change is human caused. I have two kids, I personally, for myself, think it would be irresponsible to have more but I wouldn’t push that on anyone.
> It is not sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice.
Wholeheartedly agree
I think your own values are coming through pretty clearly. Understandably, telling a parent they shouldnt have had kids is bound to strike a nerve. Having kids is great. Having kids is also the worst single thing you can do for the environment. Both can be true, and having kids definitely doesn't make someone bad.
However putting kids on a pedestal is silly. If we push our civilization above earths sustainable carrying capacity, we are fucked. In isolation having them is beautiful, in the aggregate it can be bad.
> Having kids is also the worst single thing you can do for the environment.
No, just no. You can't show that. You don't understand environmentalism. You're just a Malthusian. It's an assertion that human existence is incompatible with the environment, and that's a completely unacceptable proposition, because it defines "environmentalism" as "extinction."
Reducing the population by half will, at best, reduce emissions by half. That's not going to stop climate change. That's not climate action. That's not anything at all.
I really wish people with your attitude would study ecology, would study biology, would study the world. Life, human and not, all affects the ecosystem. All life depends on other life. We all interact, we all change the world. Life has fundamentally changed the geology of Earth in absolutely drastic ways! Life is impact. Defining environmental purity as the absence is an ideology bereft of life, and the nature of life.
Given you’re using big words without explaining them and decorating your argument with patronizing language like “no, just no”, perhaps I should just yield. Even if you turn out to make a convincing argument later, if you really care about convincing people I implore you to think about how condescending your style is…
But if I may explain my thinking essentially from a responsibility perspective your choice is downstream to a whole life of pollution, and of their kids etc. Depending on how many kids the average person has how polluting the average person is, that seems like a significant contribution.
Despite that you attribute to me some sort of strange degrowth philosophy where I am advocating for extinction, all I am saying is that there is a huge impact to overpopulation if we don’t change our habits. If it is sustainable to have more humans later on due to improvements in conduct, by all means I think thats great.
Is it possible that cutting emissions in half would stop climate change (after some time)? There is a tolerable level of emissions. I vaguely remember that it's half what we're at.
No, look at the numbers in the IPCC reports. Cutting emissions in half is not enough.
We need to get to zero by 2050 then have interventions to sequester CO2 at a low level.
You really had to throw veganism into the mix there…?
I think that convincing people to go vegan is one of the least plausible ways to combat climate change, but livestock are responsible for 10-20% of greenhouse gas emissions: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...
There is much lower-hanging fruit than demanding people alter their diets.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/31/turkmeni...
Thing is, we need to reach for high-hanging fruits
Did you read the link? Spending 1 million bucks to fix all the methane leaks in the world is such an insane bang-for-buck win that I can’t even fathom spending one billion bucks for a tenth of the gain.
But sure, go for it. Logic be damned.
The means to do it would be things like uranium steel mills and concrete plants (via hydrogen production) or any of the huge number of industrial uses of heat. The amount of coal and oil burnt to produce industrial heat is mind-boggling.
People are meat eaters. If I was to run a campaign to keep the green movement unpopular, I’d promote enforced veganism as one of its core ideas.
No that's not how the world works. Most of climate change happens not because some decrepit old man lives on his yacht but poor people in third world countries get their first air conditioners. As they should.
The only way is through. Most of are not going to be living the suffocating life you think we should. We will grow, innovate and accelerate out of this.
> Most of climate change happens not because some decrepit old man lives on his yacht but poor people in third world countries get their first air conditioners.
You're confusing acceleration with velocity. Poor people are far from the greatest per capita contributors.
I didn’t ask for the world to have 8 billion people in it, and I sure as hell won’t be stopping enjoying fairly basic luxuries like consuming protein just because others tell me to do so.
If we need to make such drastic changes to human consumption, have people considered if we have a overpopulation problem?
The demographic collapse was a forgine conclusion in the 80s. There is no global overpopulation problem over the next century. There will be food shortages due to a lack of labor and dessicated farmland. It will be rough for the average human.
> There is no global overpopulation problem over the next century
Sure there is. If the mere act of eating a staple food item causes so many carbon emissions it contributes to planetary-scale climate change, you have an overpopulation problem.
> If the mere act of eating a staple food item causes so many carbon emissions it contributes to planetary-scale climate change, you have an overpopulation problem.
That is incorrect. If there is one person who produces the same amount of carbon emissions, it's the same problem which is independent of population count. All resources to sustain life are going to dwindle and secondary effects will continue to amplify, regardless of humans exist at all, over a long enough period of time.
"Overpopulation" is used to define the set of problems (logistics of practical food/water production) that make climate change a secondary concern. Ofc, you can define it how you like to talk past other people.
Overpopulation is the condition through which a population exceeds the sustainable resource carrying capacity of an environment.
If that population consumes a resource at a rate which is not sustainable—which as people upthread are arguing re: emissions and agriculture—then it is an example of overpopulation.
I think that vegan diets never took off primarily because the vast majority of people do not want to follow vegan diets. Money factors such as subsidies are secondary. There are also potential health impacts. I followed a vegetarian diet for a few years when I was younger because of ethical concerns, and I felt healthier once I started eating meat again. This is just anecdotal evidence of course, and many people argue that you can be as healthy or even more healthy vegetarian as you can be omnivorous. But it's a potential psychological factor arguing against the likelihood of mass adoption of veganism.
Mass transit and dense development are potentially doable, but at this point the suburban sprawl + car model has been popular in the US for decades and it would feel like a downgrade for many people to live in smaller places in more heavily urbanized environments. I think that many Americans don't even have a clear idea of what it would look like to raise kids in a multi-story residential building in a city without it seeming like poverty.
Also, in some parts of the US, mass transit and dense urban living run into the problem of anti-social behavior including street violence. Many of the people in the US who care the most about stopping climate change also oppose the kind of intensive policing that would be required to keep crazy dangerous people off buses and clean up troubled neighborhoods enough that the average person would feel safe living there. Violent crime rates have largely been going down since the early 90s, but are still much higher than in Europe. One of the reasons for the high rates, through definitely not the only reason, is the availability of guns, but getting US right-wingers to accept gun restrictions is probably even less probable than getting US left-wingers to accept major crackdowns on street crime.
>We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development
In other words, live a privileged person's life in an expensive city, risk malnutrition with a complicated diet, and don't ever leave the country (on a plane).
As if the sources of climate change are you and me, and not industry in any way. It feels more like a way to say, live like me or almost literally burn in Hell.
Just like it isn’t possible to get politicians to stop spending other people’s money, it isn’t possible to stop enterprises from making as much money as possible while spending as little as possible on a global scale (it may work locally!)
Thus, technology-will-save-us is the rational choice. Drill all the oil, build the biggest datacenters and speedrun to fusion before the collapse so we can sequester the carbon back into the ground and still have energy left to run Haber-Bosch, ideally with hydrolysis instead of natgas.
Disclaimer: I used to be heavily in the sustainability camp in my younger years
Neoliberism is not the only possible system, it is very well possible to change the boundaries of what enterprises can do. Technology-will-save-us is a quasi-religious belief, not supported by evidence. Also if it was true that we can't convince politicians and enterprises to change their course now, why should they do later when costs will be much higher?
Relying mostly on technology that doesn't yet exist seems absurd to me. We have an incredibly hard problem to solve and maybe a narrow window of action, we should use all the tools we have at our disposal: rapid deployment of available solutions, sustained research into better ones, adoption of more frugal lifestyles, development of alternative sociological, political and economical frameworks.
Apparently between technology and soul crushing authoritarianism at an unprecedented scale, you would much rather the latter than the former.
"strict vegan diet" AKA supporting industrial byproducts made into ultraprocessed food made on the other side of the globe rather than consuming vegetables, fish & meat produced locally and ecologically.
I mean, nearly all of my produce, meat, and dairy from a handful of small, local farms. They're all organic, focus on "happy animals", all that. I'll shift to a strict vegan diet once everyone else abandons their giant mega-agriculture lifestyle.
> strict vegan diets
sabotage achieved
Ah yes, the profit motive kept us off of strict vegan diets. Right, sure.
The issue with the global warming advocates is that they seem to believe that in order to solve global warming we need to make everyone's life worse. That was already a non-starter. It's just terrible marketing.
You say it's for the benefit of "decrepit old men," but the fact is that more and more of the globe is being lifted out of poverty and living more comfortably than ever before. The unfortunate fact is that global warming is an unstoppable force now, humans would have to go extinct for it to waiver.
I'm not saying we should do nothing, but I am saying that your framing is exactly why no one listens to global warming advocacy. We are powerless against it, not because of governments, but because people are living better and no one is going to sacrifice that; and even if they did the math doesn't add up to reverse course. The people that say we should all be sacrificing are often the richest among us that don't even know what sacrifice entails, contrary to your point.
Your framing, that no collective action can ever include reduction or sacrifice, implies this is an inevitable and fatal path we cannot come back from.
I hope you are wrong that nothing requiring sacrifice can ever be accomplished.
The only time I can think of that democratic populations have made large and sweeping sacrifices have been when they’re actively engaged in total war. And even then, it usually has to be mandated and enforced pretty ruthlessly by the government.
We simply did not evolve as a species to make large personal individual sacrifices today in order to benefit billions of strangers decades in the future. Never going to happen.
The options here are technology saving us, or eco-totalitarian governments controlling a huge portion of the world’s population. Nothing else will work.
This sacrifice involves putting millions back in poverty. I don't think you understand what I'm saying.
Western activists are ok with this because (a) they don’t imagine that they will be greatly affected and will live a solarpunk luxury lifestyle and (b) they glorify third world poverty and consume media that presents it as a desirable, more authentic way of life, when the truth is that most of those people are desperately trying to claw their way into affluence.
None of the above implies that everyone can achieve a current day Western lifestyle or that current Western lifestyles are sustainable. But average people are going to continue seeking it out, it’s just human nature. Activists who expect people to “just” give up that search are not being realistic.
> to solve global warming we need to make everyone's life worse
This is ignoring that _not_ solving global warming will make everyone's life worse regardless.
It's not ignoring that at all, but I challenge you to go back to the person in China or India that suddenly has amenities and tell him they all have to go away, and everything they worked for over 20 years is gone for "the greater good." You're probably only viewing this from a Western view (already wealthy.)
Have you not done enough damage? Human societies are not stable without surplus bribery, the recent authoritarian regressions are a direct product of net 0 policies. Trump is your utopias creature..
what's your proposed path to "strict vegan diets" exactly?
Like "stop consuming" was a realistic idea lol.
Oh, it is. That idea absolutely terrifies china. Their entire economy is predicated on global consumption.
We need to use AI to redevelop AI datacenters in order to cancel the harms.
We need to use AI to solve for global warming.
Is there a more appropriate use for AI?
We’re so far past this, technology is 100% the only hope and always was. Getting stuck in the mentality that we can shame our way out of this for a decade was (and continues to be) a colossal waste of time.
Nah, believing technology saving us is full copium and makes us not take action.
I never said I believed it was going to save us.
>Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative.
And individual action has switched to just holding governments and industry responsible. Which basically amounts to giving up.
"Welp, just gonna buy this truck, enjoy my burgers, set the AC at 68 and fly on all vacations this year because it's nothing compared to Big Oil."
Don’t forget eating meat, the easiest thing to stop doing (people needs cars and trucks for work, they don’t need cheeseburgers). People can’t be bothered to make any changes, it’s always someone else’s problem.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/27/meat-gas...
Why should I stop eating meat, just so that Taylor Swift can fly everywhere with two jets !?
Fuck that, we're on this boat together, and we'll all go to the bottom together.
Wow great thanks for the intelligent reply
Even cutting back on meat can have an impact. Halving quantities in cooking etc. really is hardly noticeable.
Yeah I think this is a much better path. If you mix chicken with jackfruit 50/50 in tacos, for example, it’s barely noticeable.
We’re not going to convince Americans to give up meat, but if we can reduce consumption when they do eat it, we can make incremental change.
More specifically, beef and lamb.
https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
Replacing those with basically any other meat (pig, chicken, fish) would make a huge difference already. And it's far more realistic than no meat. Indirect demand destruction (from cost increase) through carbon credits or something like that in the future?
Even mildly advocating for veganism as a vegan would be infuriating if it wasn’t so comedic. The mental contortions that even intelligent people will put themselves into in order to either avoid the topic or keep their head in the sand are truly something to behold. And ultimately it often feels like arguing with a past version of yourself, who perhaps held some of the same views.
I just don't advocate, at least not without prompting; it's too maddening. That I'm vegan often becomes known naturally, and once it's established, people in the know tend to start bringing it up on their own. I hardly ever go into advocacy unprompted. I think this is more effective. Just by being present, you might spark the thoughts that lead someone to changing their mind... :)
Yeah, I have noticed this too. and I’m much the same now, over time my “advocacy” is mostly stating my reasons when asked. And sometimes bringing it up in online spaces.
it can be difficult, at least for me, to politely model in the face of what I see as a great injustice. But as you say, it can be maddening to do otherwise and still see no change.
So I do understand and support those who participate in a less passive advocacy as that can be effective for a different group. And keeps “our” voice in the mainstream, even if it is often vilified by popular culture.
People need cars... But not trucks for work :)
People need cars because we designed our environments to require them. It was a choice, not an inevitability.
And here we are. Needing cars. Unless you want to spend the big money of rebuilding cities.
To be clear, the money is already being spent, it’s just a question of what we make the priority. Even just keeping the current roads useable costs billions of dollars, let alone the amount of money spent on highway expansion (which, due to induced demand, causes even more traffic).
In 30 years, every road that exists currently will have been replaced. The question is if it should be replaced with another road, or should some of them have larger sidewalks, bike lanes, bus lanes. Amsterdam has been doing this for decades and it’s going very well. They spent money that would’ve been spent rebuilding a road on making it a better general transportation option.
I've managed to avoid driving one for all but 1-2 years of my life, and I'm 42.
Your mileage, ironic phrase noted, may vary.
Yeah people never haul anything with trucks for work
Uhh a lot of people need trucks for their work
That seems not to be the case in large parts of Europe. Why do you think that is?
Yeah? We need millions of personal, individual trucks? For work, of course, ignore all those white collar job parking lots full of extended cab pickups that get 10mpg.
Have you considered that sometimes people buy automobiles that can accommodate multiple use cases? Just because you don't need to haul hundreds of pounds of supplies every single day doesn't mean that you don't need to do it a couple times a month, or sometimes every day for short bursts of time.
With vehicles being as expensive as they are, some people prioritize the one vehicle that can suit their regular _as well as_ occasional needs.
To put it into terms this crowd might understand better, to a lot of regular people the wildly expensive and overpowered computing hardware we own seems like a ridiculous waste. And certainly, we don't need all that horsepower every minute of the day. But we need it from time to time.
I can see what you're about to say though: those people who buy trucks should just drive some crappy little three cylinder for day-to-day use and rent a truck when they need it. To which I'd ask, how would you react if someone who knew absolutely nothing about what you do on a daily basis told you that you should just buy a dinky little Chromebook and spin up a beefy EC2 instance every time you need some horsepower?
Maybe you don't understand people's needs and motivations as much as you think you do. And this is frankly where a lot of resentment to the climate action stuff comes from. A lot of know-it-alls lecturing people on how their lifestyle is completely idiotic based on very little understanding of how those people might actually be living their lives.
"I see a pickup truck with nothing in the back, therefore in my expert opinion you don't need it."
Hauling "hundreds of pounds of supplies every single day" is a fringe use case, essentialy nobody does this, it's not relevant.
"Maybe you don't understand people's needs and motivations as much as you think you do."
It's the opposite. You're confusing "needs" with "wants" and extrapolating the needs of the very, very few people who genuinely need a truck onto the entire population.
The vast majority of people use their cars to transport only themselves to work each day, then maybe pick/drop off one more person, then maybe go buy groceries.
I don't think you quite understand just how ridiculously niche valid use cases for trucks are. It's literally just towing, or some very specific off-road hauling. Everything else is going to be handled way better by something else, starting with a regular car, ending with a van.
Hell, for most people even a car is way overkill, a bike works perfectly fine to go to work each day, I assure you. So does public transport. You don't need 2 tons of steel just to to move your 100 kg body around.
To your analogy, I can use my dinky little chromebook 99% of the time and only boot up my PC when I actually need the power.
The current potus was directly elected because “know-it-alls” kept trying to jam ideologies down peoples throats. I have this awful feeling we’re going to swing back that way, and the escalation on “both sides” will be an absolute disaster.
Only if "a lot" means <0.1% of people, at most.
Yeah, good catch, thanks.
Government is the means by which the electorate acts collectively. Pushing for policy changes is not giving up.
Acting politically for what matters is not giving up :)
Though, as always, we can and really should do both.
Well, truth be told.. It _is_ nothing compared to Big Oil.
Spoiler: It's individuals who are driving that demand. The impact of the decisions of big oil are nothing compared to the collective decisions of individuals.
Big oil isn't going to kick down your door when you buy an EV and switch to solar. There is no rancher in the grocery aisle slipping steaks in your cart.
Spoiler, the oil and other energy industries have done a world changing amount of lobbying and regulatory capture in order to drive decisions that cause more and more fossil fuel use. This includes everything from subsidies to industry stagnating regulations to reduced enforcement to suburban sprawl. Look at how the current US administration shills for big coal. Pretending they haven't shaped the world around the consumers is either naive or bad faith.
Yes, consumers have to stop funding these companies and behaviors. Also, the governments that operate on behalf of those consumers have to drop their corruption and start protecting those people they represent. Both virtuous and nonvirtuous conservatives know neither of these are going to happen, which is why they see massive terraforming technology as the only way out - if someone with power can't get rich(er) fixing it then it won't get fixed.
>The impact of the decisions of big oil are nothing compared to the collective decisions of individuals.
Spoiler, you exist in incredible luxury because YOU benefited from paying for goods and services made extremely cheap from oil.
You also have the oil on your hands, and its not washing off easily.
Yes they are, in the form of lobbying to remove subsidies and adding tax penalties to EV/solar purchases.
Using corporate externalities to trivialize individual contribution is utter nonsense, though. Coke does not make plastic bottles because they think it's fun. Big oil executives don't just fill big Scrooge McDuck swimming pools of the black stuff.
Individuals purchase products from companies, driving that demand. Then are absolutely unwilling to make even the tiniest, temporary sacrifices to demand those companies reduce those externalities.
Hell, half of these individuals don't even both to vote. That's straight-up the bare minimum participation trophy level of effort.
Who do you think benefits from the use of oil? Everyone. We’re all guilty, it’s not just oil companies. Goods are transported on ships, railroads, planes, and trucks. Virtually none of these are electrified because of energy density constraints. They all use oil. Anyone that consumes is an oil consumer.
This chain of blaming random persons is both useless and distraction. It failed in the past. And it is not even a good faith argument.
Guilting people for existing in society wont fix anything. Actually regulating largest contributors to the issue can fix things. And individual behavioral changes will logically follow once rules and laws change.
If the Gov stopped Oil Subsidizes, incentivize the move to renewals and nuclear instead of promoting Oil say 20 years ago, we could keep our A/Cs and 60 degrees (~16C) if we wanted to. The sames goes to flying and beef, make it expensive.
So yes, Governments share by far most of the blame for this. A specific individual is not going to change their life stye unless forced to, that is human nature.
Instead we have had governments in the US being too afraid to do the right thing. The only possible US President that was willing to make big changes climate wise had his election stolen by the Supreme Court in the year 2000.
So here we are still with no politician willing to really force changes on people's life style in the "first world". All they are doing is trying to keep the price of oil low.
One final thing, in the US, if you try to use electricity from all renewals, the price is much higher. And in some cases electricity you receive is still generated from fossil fuels.
Governments and industry are responsible. Personal consumption/waste is not the primary driver of climate change, no matter how much corporations tell us that using paper straws is the solution. It's tough to expect average people to take major action when corporations are essentially given carte blanche.
And who is buying all that stuff from corporations? Who is actually the one consuming?
We can quibble about edge effects like "induced demand", but by and large, people just love cheap energy, cheap calories, and can shift the moral burden by playing "not my responsibility" games.
From the IPCC report, 2/3rds of all global emissions are directly tied to consumption.
Well, yeah. Corporations aren't just nefarious evil entities, dumping carbon into the atmosphere for no reason. They're doing it to sell goods. The problem is that a lot of the environmental costs for the manufacture and transport of those goods are externalized and go unpaid.
It's difficult to put the blame for that on the consumer, who has no visibility into manufacturing or logistics, and who has vanishingly-small options for not participating. Buying domestic goods is very difficult or impossible, and goods which are manufactured in more environmentally-safe ways are significantly more expensive (because the costs I mentioned earlier weren't externalized).
If a consumer is presented with two options, one that costs $X and has unknown environmental costs, and one that costs $2X and is marketed as being environmentally safe, the majority will choose the first. This is especially true as economic forces continue to squeeze average people.
Consumers absolutely participate in the problem, but the only process by which it could be corrected is regulation, and the only entity capable of that is the government. (Democracy being what it is, you can however place more blame at the feet of voters.)
I think pinning the blame on them is the wrong way to look at it. Its more a very complex system where each actor's behaviour affect the behavior of other actors. So politicians doing more is super important, consumers doing more is important, companies doing more is important. Everyone's collective effort pushes the flywheel in a different direction.
I have been wondering: more solar means we are making Earth less reflective. Solar energy that might have been reflected back to space is now absorbed by the PV to make electricity. But that delta has to go somewhere? Where does it go in terms of Earth’s temperature. Same with more nuclear… we’d be pumping more energy into the system.
Don’t take this as an argument against these technologies. It’s a huge win to not be increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
Yes, this does happen. Solar farms have an albedo modification effect. The good news is that compared to fossil powered generation, the albedo modification is "paid back" in less than a year due to lower GHG emissions:
"Small reduction in land surface albedo due to solar panel expansion worldwide"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01619-w
If you download the supplementary information PDF, figure 19 shows a plot of GHG payback times by site. The most common time is about 1 month. The greatest time they found was about 9 months. These times go down as solar panel efficiencies continue to creep upward, because solar panels in 2026 don't have lower albedo than in 2024, but they do have better light-to-electricity conversion efficiency.
We're actually heating the earth in two ways... one is by increasing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The other is simply by using energy; any use of energy means moving something to higher entropy and thus producing heat, even if that energy comes from 100% clean or renewable sources. However, nobody talks about this second way of heating the earth because it's about two orders of magnitude behind the first, i.e. for now pretty insignificant.
As for making the earth less reflective with PV panels... yes, you are right and most of that absorbed solar energy directly contributes to heating the earth because PV panels aren't anywhere near 100% efficient in converting it to electricity, but even the part that is converted to electricity will become heat again in the end, like when it powers AI data centers. (If PV was 100% efficient, then the lack of reflection wouldn't directly do any heating, the heating would all happen when the electricity is used.)
For now that isn't a big concern because the greenhouse gases our civilization is releasing into the atmosphere do so much more heating than all our use of energy, but if we do become 100% renewable and survive that particular danger, then by Jevons' paradox we'll soon be using 10x to 100x more "clean" energy and be heating the earth all the same again.
Compare anthropogenic heat release to daily solar gain and radiative losses.
Then note that a higher temperatures will increase the radiative losses.
100x heat release and it's still about 1% of solar gain.
A solar array makes the earth less reflective by a fixed amount, for as long as the array exists.
Every unit of fossil fuel we burn makes the earth permanently less reflective (or at least something on the order of 100 years). You could compare a 1GW solar array (for its lifetime) to a 1GW coal plant running for x days, though I don't have the value of x.
Current levels of solar panel coverage on Earth are approximately 0%. If we ran the entire Earth on Solar power we’d need ~ half a million square kilometres, around 0.1 percent of the Earth’s surface.
Population decrease will have the biggest impact.
Yeah and there's two ways to get there - planned and unplanned. It'll happen one way or the other.
Decades too late unless you suggest we start killing people.
Good news then: most of the world already has a decreasing population or about to start decreasing. Only exception being Africa.
Yes, but you cannot say that. We need more people, for money.
The unpopular answers are usually the correct ones.
> Government action has been anemic at best.
I am not very surprised, since the people voted for the "drill baby drill" president?
I wouldn't classify that as anemic.
Direct Air Capture at any meaningful scale is predicated on mining billions of tons of refined minerals. The environmental impact of that would be so enormous that it will never be allowed to happen, never mind the severe resource crunch.
It is quite ironic that capitalism and the profit motive are now the best hope for staving off climate change, all thanks to the technologists and entrepreneurs that have mad renewables and storage so cheap.
The 2020s climate action movement in the US (and the UK) was disastrous in their strategy, action, and outcomes. I was there, I followed along because it seemed like the best way to get climate action, but things like Sunrise and XR at their very best did nothing. They focused on all the wrong people, focused on all the wrong levers. They turned allies into enemies, by "protesting" tech companies that were at the forefront of real action. They refused to acknowledge the massive effects of technology change, and the need for quick adoption, and the huge money saving nature of the solution.
I have zero patience for those attitudes now, the difference between a degrowther and a climate change denying politician are minimal in effect, and the effects are all that matter now.
What about energystar? That had significant impact. Remember how we fixed the ozone hole? It’s entirely possible to drive change through policy or community. We just choose not to do it because the Epstein class wants culture war not class war.
I had thought this administration had killed energy star, but it seems like it actually survived. A rare piece of good news:
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/03/nx-s1-5684126/energy-star-tru...
Yes, policy does change things!! You give examples where a community got together, changed policy, affecting all of society.
This is precisely the opposite of the disastrous 2020s action, which had no concrete policy demands, which leaned into the culture war. They ceded the ground to the right wing, who does that sort of culture war much better, as they have focused their efforts on it for so long.
With culture war, no policy changes. The fight takes place in vibes.
We need policy, execution in concrete changes of physical things in the real world. That's where Sunrise and XR failed.
The Paris Accords have very specific policy goals. Your criticism is incoherent.
The Paris Accords are the exact opposite of the 2020s movements I criticize, Sunrise and XR.
Another sweeping claim that doesn't actually say anything. How is it the "exact opposite"?
I was very specific in the failings of Sunrise and XR and they contrast greatly with efforts like energy star or the Paris accords, and their members would say they same thing in that they tried something very different.
My comments have been very specific, but you can't manage more than a sentence. Further, you have not even engaged with a single one of my words or statements.
You haven't made any specific claims to engage with, just vague polemics.
I see. Thanks!
>Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.
Removing CO2 from seawater would be more efficient because some of the work is already done for you, and you'd be de-acidifying the ocean long term.
> Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.
Which should probably be nuclear powered, at the required scale. So we could have taken the direct route, instead of solar, bess, wind, water, geothermal...(c.f. Alien, Aliens, 'Atmospheric Processor'...)
Anybody remembering the trash which was sold as 'lightbulbs' for about 15 years, before LED got somewhat acceptable colors? And prices? And longevity?
Mehw, lightbulb baad, eats too much waatt! So lets miniaturize CFLs to be able to screw them in lightbulb sockets! So they get warm because they are so small, the sockets have no airflow, and their own electronics go with a premature blow! Yay!
> Which should probably be nuclear powered, at the required scale.
Why?
Why not capture CO2, pump carbonated water into the Yilgarn Craton, recover the created hydrogen to both provide power and water to carbonate?
Because all the stuff required to do that does not grow on trees. Which means it has its own externalities regarding mass flows, EROI, emissions. At present time it just means the externalities have been made into other peoples problems. Regarding mining, tailings, transport, production, and so on.
What tailings, what transport?
Serious questions here ... I'm also curious about your actual experience in heavy mineral and energy industry, largest plant you've worked at, scale of operation, etc.
(FWiW in fairness, I've worked a few decades in and around > half a billion tonne per annum mining and worked globally in geophysical mineral and energy exploration)
> I'm also curious about your actual experience in heavy mineral and energy industry, largest plant you've worked at, scale of operation, etc.
None actually, except from the financial side making that happen, lately. Very indirect, at that. And I'm uncomfortable disclosing more, because I don't want to be doxxed. Its all so cozy right now :-)
From longer times ago, very intensive personal studies about stuff like that, at least 'knowing' what a Sankey-diagram or its variations for 'Gesamtstoffmengenkreisläufe'/mass-flows is.
Changing my young and naive opinions in the light of understanding that, and what it means!
Which is less emissions over all sectors for nuclear, vs. everything else. With the exception of big geothermal, maybe. But we didn't do that big so far, and where we have tried, it produced unintended side-effects.
Which leaves the question of where to put that stuff, after it burned out and has been contaminated with afterglowing hotness for a while.
Why not in the Yilgan Craton?
How big do you think the required atmospheric CO2 extractors need to be? Which mass- and energy flows will they have to have? At which count? A few dozen, hundreds, thousands? Maybe more like a grid with about 200 miles distance between them? Including at sea?
I'd guess about 5000 of these 'Atmospheric Processors' would suffice. And the only sufficient fuel we have for that scale is nukkular.
the best CO2 capture are trees
Probably algae.
Land only slightly beats the ocean, like a 53-47 split or something, and trees are only part of the primary production on land: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_production
This is also why you sometimes see startups pumping green goo through plastic pipes for home-scale solar biofuel systems.
They are good at capture, but not sequestration.
Supposing all anthropogenic emissions went to zero today, we'd still keep warming almost as far as three degrees with all of the disasters and famines that entails, because there's a lag time between existing emissions and their effects.
We need massive bounty programs that pay out irrespective of nationality for every possible kind of improvement and gain to carbon capture technology if we want to prevent 90% of all land on Earth between 30°N and 30°S from slowly turning into copies of the uninhabitable stretches of the Middle East.
Global warming is much faster in the higher latitudes. It has not significantly impacted the region you mentioned much at all. Most impact has been due to intensification of natural cycles like the Indian Monsoons, the Atlantic hurricane season and El Niño, which are not really limited to that particular area of the Globe. The idea that the problem with global warming is that parts of the world will just become too hot to live seems to be mostly misguided.
I think the way to frame this is: what would happen if we burned all known fossil fuel reserves? That is the trajectory we are on.
The answer there is >6C global increase, and that would cause beyond disaster movie-level scenarios.
Anything and everything we can do to stop that is important.
Just Zeroing isn't enough, what ever efforts we put into negating it never seems to have frontpage
might not be entirely accurate:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-st...
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/CO2-emissions-and-respec...
We need to print much more money!
I'm mostly stopped feeling autistic since adolescence, but climate change is one of those times. It's obviously real, and it's also obvious that shuffling chairs in developing countries is rounding to zero effect. We're converting to cleaner energy anyways because of pollution and better economics, so the push for decarbonization in itself is... what do you call a rounding error when it's already rounding to zero?
And it's FAR from hopeless. Again, global warming is obviously happening. But the amount of adapting and reacting to it is virtually nil. Installing AC. Tree cover in every city. Start serious discussions on what level of risk we want with geoengineering.
Because yes, there absolutely is an acceptable risk level with geoengineering. Planting trees is that. Carbon capture is also that. And better and more effective tech will definitely be available.
But we're in a social climate where I don't even dare write down examples of what those more effective methods would be, because if you're not luddite enough you're the enemy.
I'm not going to lie, and this is not meant as an insult, but I could not comprehend what a single sentence here is trying to say.
I didn't find it particularly inaccessible, and I do agree with most of the points made.
Maybe try giving it a second pass?
They're saying "I can see logical ways we can deal with this but the common folk are afraid of technology and change"
More like "it's not socially acceptable to discuss alternatives to orthodoxy", but yes.
I agree with your message overall, but this kind of, I dunno, martyrdom posturing ("But we're in a social climate where I don't even dare write down examples of what those more effective methods would be, because if you're not luddite enough you're the enemy.", "it's not socially acceptable to discuss alternatives to orthodoxy") is funny to see on HN. This is not Xitter or Reddit, no one is going to ban or attempt to dox you and get you fired for saying "We should seriously consider injecting reflective stuff into stratosphere" here. In fact, your message will likely even have a positive rating overall.
When you find yourself stuck in a hole the first step to solving the problem is to stop digging. We're still digging at a superhuman speed. Meanwhile here you are talking about how you aren't worried because ladder building technology is really coming along, but nobody wants to talk about ladders.
Because if I can do nothing and make you do it, you solve it for me, for free. They'll make some argument (like western nations having used up the energy (and paid for it), and want to make them pay for it again. For a lot of countries that, and nothing else, is the purpose of climate action). Now get to work, taxpayer!
Because for most countries (and certainly for the largest oil producer in the world, Russia), global warming saves greatly on winter fuel use and increases agricultural harvests AND allows them to keep their population happy (because nothing keeps populations calm like cheap fuel/energy). That is the net effect, today.
Because for a lot of countries that really are the beneficiaries of causing global warming, ie. the oil producer countries, Russia, Saudi Arabia, US, Venezuela, Norway, and many small ones Azerbeidjan, causing global warming (ie. selling fossil fuels) is often the only reason they have an economy (mostly all except the US). So they demand a LOT of money, for free, to stop it. And nobody will pay that.
The last argument even goes for countries that are not direct oil or coal producers, like India or China but it's effectively the same argument (China runs on coal, and the country works on exports. Without energy no exports, so their coal usage is still increasing. Ie. same argument as above, they only have an economy because they're causing global warming, just more indirectly than Saudi Arabia)
Because WW2 was won with oil, and so countries that either want to start a war ("or fear they'll be the target/victims of the next big war") want access to oil. This argument goes especially for China, who fear they'll be targeted/"victimized" when they attack half of Asia starting with Taiwan and to a lesser extent for India (who feel they'll be at war with Pakistan, and Bangladesh whether they want to or not, and maybe China too) and even for EU countries (ie. for the ones that matter, France and Germany)
Look up China's oil reserves. You'll be collecting your jaw from the floor, I promise.
Summary: because most governments care about various things ... and not at all about people, about you. Mostly governments not even about their own people and certainly not about the climate where you live. They have a million concerns, a lot of which require fossil fuels, and for the people that compose those governments, climate change just doesn't matter.
Plus, if they can just do nothing, you still have to solve global warming. So doing nothing, aside from being very profitable, is also a great tactic to get you to fix it.
Can you explain what 'Luddite' means in a broader context? Not all of us grew up learning British history :)
In the context of climate change, it is the opinion that more industrialization and technologization cannot help solving the problem, except in a few narrow acceptable directions (solar, wind, hydrogen etc).
An example would be the european reaction to AC. It's a way of using technology to solve warming, its costs are perfectly acceptable, but it is still frown upon because... well, it's beyond the scope of a HN comment to diagnose why, but it's an example of technology being able to mitigate a problem but not being allowed to.
> An example would be the european reaction to AC.
That was over hyped in the media, particularly American.
It's largely senior citizens who oppose AC - they've spent most of their lives in a different climate and would rather not have to handle such an expense.
Meanwhile in some European countries like France demand for AC units doubled this year.
Luddite: someone who is against using technology out of fear (of economic opportunities mostly)
Yeah, important to note that the way the label is used has deviated from its historic meaning. Colloquially it’s something like “someone who rejects new technology” with variable reasons as to why, but historically there’s more nuance and it’s grounded in rejection of technology which worsens working conditions, detracts from craft, and disrupts cottage industry/workers rights/wages/etc. They made more sense than the label presently suggests they did. I suppose you could think of them as activists protecting their crafts and trade privileges that were being undermined by specific machines and their owners
More generously: someone who resists new technologies due to their perceived harmful effects (economic but also social and environmental)
It's hard to have people use data in these types of conversations, so I'll just link two charts.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...
Notice which countries are going down. Notice which countries are going up.
That's such a narrow minded point of view. Yeah, who produces your laptop ? Your lawnmower ? Heck, even your knifes ?
One of the countries that is going up (China) is also doing more than any other country to rapidly roll out renewables both domestically and in other countries, and their emissions have peaked or are near peaking, and is capable of sticking with long term plans. Also a lot of their emissions are from making things for the rest of the world.
The other country that has grown significantly in the last 20 years (India) is still far below using their fair share of the world emission budget, and they are rapidly adding renewables.
The sane way for a planet to use fossil fuels is for countries to use them to build up to the stage where they are wealthy enough to switch to renewables. If the ones that do that earlier stay on fossil fuels too long so that you get climate problems they can't just expect the countries that are not as far a long to just give up on becoming wealthy. They need to heavily subsidize those other countries in renewables so they can shorten or skip the fossil fuel bootstrap stage.
Because of the long time CO2 stays around in the atmosphere, about 40% of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere from human activity came from the US and Europe.
Also a lot of their emissions are from making things for the rest of the world.
That doesn't make it righteous and is a common critique of their coal powered PV manufacturing base.
They're playing games with carbon commitments with arbitrary reduction goals from undefined peaks. We can't trust them.
Meanwhile, they're currently building >200GW of new coal plants.
> Meanwhile, they're currently building >200GW of new coal plants
Many are being built as backups and peakers rather than baseload, designed (or retrofitted in the case of existing plants being upgraded) to be able to cycle up and down to balance wind and solar. They are running at low capacity factors, not actually burning much coal.
Many of these are idle so much that their owners have financial difficulty keeping them open, and the government has had to start paying them for their idle time so they won't go under.
Most of the rest are to replace existing plants that cannot not yet be replaced with renewables, so are at worst neutral on coal usage and are usually actually more efficient than the old plants so there is a reduction.
Yeah, we've heard these:
* "More efficient, next gen coal plants"
* "Receiving capacity payments subsidies to stabilize grid"
* "We won't run these plants at full capacity"
When their carbon intensity still can't touch natural gas alternatives at scale, state owned enterprises are operating in a command economy, and they have no teeth to their carbon commitments.
They don't have to build new coal at 10:1 versus retirements to "replace aging coal" or stabilize the grid.
Coal is just too cheap and adds diversity,while nobody forces CN to enter climate agreements and looks the other way.
Consumption-based charts are much better, as they account for the actual CO2 emissions of lifestyle in the country (since offshoring manufacturing from developed countries to developing countries doesn't reduce the total emissions, even if it makes our direct emissions stats look better).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
Hey, quick question, who does virtually all manufacturing for US and Canadian and EU citizens? And why is the rise of Chinas emissions so coincidentally timed to the fall of those countries'?
I didn't go into the study, but looking at all the little text blurbs about the numbers, I don't see anything about if a US citizen purchasing a product that's made in China counts as US emission, as it obviously should.
Are we forcing China to make stuff for us?
Yes, by paying money.
If China suddenly stopped exporting to the US overnight, you can bet you would.
My view is that current "emission reduction" just moves jobs to China and India, which decreases overall labor rights and negatively affects the working class..
Still, if you want to have your new iPhone 18/19/20 pro ultra max, it has to be produced somewhere..
So maybe it's time to rethink this and get back to the drawing board..
Actual emissions reductions is different from just shell-gaming emissions from the US column to the China column. Greenwashing is real, but that doesn’t mean reducing emissions isn’t a real thing we can do.
we have had the perfect storm to do a U-turn on most fossile fuels:
- COVID pandemics: everybody at home, less traveling, massive economic reset and massive capitals injected (EU recovery funding, quantitative easing)
- Russian attack on Ucraine, stopping a big chunk of gas and petrol to Europe
- Strait of Hormuz, also chocking oil coming to the rest of the world
We could have said: "oh, let's swap those energy sources to renewables", "oh, let's bind those capitals to de-carbonization projects", "oh, let's plant trees", "oh, let's stop deforestation". A lot of things could have been said and done. But, well, a certain degree of coordinated intelligence is too much to ask.
At this point I have lost all hopes, whatever comes, we have asked for it.
From my perspective, we simply didn’t evolve to have the kind of collective intelligence required. There’s no point in being angry about it, any more than it makes sense to be angry at any other animal for the abilities it hasn’t evolved to have.
The story does not link to the report itself, which can be found here: https://www.unep.org/resources/limiting-overshoot-navigating...
Modern economies are addicted to growth, and asset prices are pinned to showing continued growth more than ever. As soon as any global power proposes to take a beat and re-evaluate the trajectory of innovation, they will be left behind. Global leadership is also effectively non-existent and aside from trade, no one seems to be able to really make inroads on big ticket issues. In a time where we need more collaboration that ever, governments seem to be skewing more nationalistic than ever.
Well, to be fair, the whole "enough growth" thought happened to spring into existence at the exact moment where we (the west) have comfortable living standards.
Something other developing nations would need growth for to achieve.
So that's kinda interesting, because degrowth is seen as this conceptual antagonist to the people letting the global south burn, but they both are letting them down - just marginally differently.
Perfect example of "left behind" is EU, shooting itself in leg for many years with dubious results in terms of ecology ... and negligible in global scale.
Hey at least they are trying.
With politicans, "atleast they're trying" is the worst option. Either you know what you're doing ... or don't. Destroying local vital industries with tax burden, to pay subsidies to green bullcrap, and importing everything from other side of planet, that's "leftard ecology".
Why are we framing this as "the fight against climate change"? This framing puts the culprit outside of ourselves, as if it's some external force.
I feel that way of looking at it makes changing impossible. It's our own behaviours and systems that will have to change. There's nothing to fight here, the answer instead lies in collaboration.
Great point. For example, we should encourage collaboration between people building hyperscale data centers, and people not building hyperscale data centers to find some middle ground that is good for the planet.
Collaboration implies we are all on the same side. Reality suggests some people have made it their business to be on the wrong side.
Who is using the hyperscale data centers?
Right now? Nobody is using the hypothetical un-built datacenters that threaten to tax our planet. All the current individual LLM demand is being met by what exists already, yet we're seeing unprecedented amounts of money being spent at the cost of the environment to build out at scale. This is so that jobs that currently earn people money can be replaced with LLMs that earn investors money. Something only the investors want.
How could this happen? I've faithfully sorted all of my recyclables into their respective bins to maximize profit for my city's garbage collection just like they asked
We've gone the "crowdsorting" route but if we didn't go this way the fees for garbage collection would be higher and the city's garbage collection company would still make profits, that's a constant.
Telling you that you have power is one of the ways by which they ensure that you don’t have any power. Elections work the same way.
They tell you you have a particular type of power. You have the power to sort your trash, nothing wrong with that. But what's left off and out is you have the power to change what dozens, thousands, millions, and billions of people do. "Carbon footprint" was a marketing trick played by the oil industry. It worked great.
What's needed now is something like a "carbon wave", where you evaluate your impact by how quickly you move the entire world forward.
There's a new book on this to that just arrived to me last week: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-carbon-wave-leah-c-stok...
Want to do something about this?
El Niño this year is going to be especially crazy, worst in human history by a large margin looks like. I'm putting together El Niño Climate Week to work on averting the worst impacts. It's a good opportunity to move the conversation forward about how our climate is changing very quickly.
https://elninoclimateweek.com
My projects tend to be pretty good schelling points for people that like to take action, in case you're finding the comments here frustrating ("I'm not surprised", "we just need to X", "we're doomed", "it will be fine", etc etc etc)
Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny it and convince most of us that it was our fault and that nothing could be done and that we should just buy their anti-environment-collapse products to protect ourselves.
> Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny
It is, and they are. We keep hitting record X Y and Z temperatures, cyclones, etc, and they're on the brig shouting "it ain't global warming you morons"
After 50 years since I was born for the first I didnt eat grapes from my backyard in Southern Europe because they dried up due to extreme heat. In the rest of my life I might miss any other fruit.
I got invited to a UN conference on climate change. It was a huge deal of course that I could get in; however, the whole time I "felt" important. Everyone did. I question how many of the tens of thousands of people involved actually did important work.
Everyone knew we will miss the 1.5 degree target, btw. This was a few years ago.
Interestingly, financial markets are a good place to see the “price” of some environmental issues. A made up example: “Should I buy bonds that are backed by electricity sales from a yet-to-be-built hydroelectric dam? Will there be enough rainfall to fill the reservoir reliably? I’ll have to receive a higher interest payment to offset that risk.”
Maybe if I develop really strong anxiety about this, it's gonna solve the problem
I'm guessing you're being facetious? The options aren't to either develop anxiety or not care at all.
I do find the coping methods strange. You have people throwing the match for no reason, or crying like children.
Maybe if you don't, the problem will go away.
Since land warms much faster than water, and Earth's surface is mostly water, then 1.5C average means how much land warming itself? Isn't talking in averages a way to feel better about all this?
From my understanding, the West never truly committed to that goal. It just said so as a PR thing, so that the much more affected countries quiet down, because "hey hey we said 1.5°". "Oops, sorry, we tried".
The West knows that it will manage even with more than that, but it also knows that not everyone will.
Jury's still out on whether the neglect is just due to apathy or because it might be beneficial. Only time will tell.
It was a New Year’s resolution that was broken by the next morning.
I'm not sure if I'd agree with that, because that sounds like what normal humans do.
Systems and politics are not that. Not at all. They're cold, calculating and fundamentally sociopathic.
A more fitting analogy I think would be "Yes we were bought by a bigger company, but trust us, there will be no changes". Of course the buyout came with exact plans on who to lay off when, but panic would be bad for business.
It’s way easy to preach vegan diets, solar/wind installations, etc. from the comfy chairs by the citizens of first world countries. But for someone living in a dirt poor country, climate change is the last thing in their mind even though they might be the hardest hit population. For them it’s about survival and meeting basic human needs.
At this point its not preached from comfy first world countries, but rather countries that are getting unbareably hot in the summer. So much that more and more people are going to die each year as a result
It is actually worse than preaching because based on your comment it's pure ignorant superiority. You think 40 degrees celcius for few days in the summer is the apocalypse, then try living in an indian village where the temperatures reaches 50 degrees for one month, where you have to walk miles to get a barrel of water to drink. And then imagine having to live there for the whole life.
Also now you say because there were heat waves in Europe it's not preaching, then what's the excuse before that?
more than 75% of Indians think global warming is happening and say they are worried about it. They think that global warming will harm people in India.
People in India (more in north then in south) report having personally experienced severe heat waves and the effects of global warming, and think that global warming will harm them, their families, and their communities.
Turns out that people living in place with 50 degress who "have to walk miles to get a barrel of water to drink" dont want more extreme weather all that much
Solar/wind installations are demonized from comfy chairs by the citizens of first world countries. Anti environmental agenda is agenda of rich conservatives, CEOs and their western right wing friends.
Dirt poor countries do care about climate change per polls.
> Dirt poor countries do care about climate change per polls.
Which polls? the ones by Western NGOs that made out of thin air?
Good. The sooner human dies out the better.
Geophysically, there are 3 pillars to climate stabilization:
1. Emitting fewer greenhouse gasses. Need to do that more than ever, but we are now in overshoot so…
2. Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started.
3. Shade Earth. Not regions, The whole globe. There are two ways to do that:
a. Stratospheric aerosols b. Planetary sunshades in space, at Sun-Earth L1.
That’s the whole solution space, conceptually. As long as we continue to fail within that space, we will suffer compounding effects of unmitigated climate change.
> Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started.
I once did the math, assuming we have enough resources to build a lot of solar panels. Assuming current efficiency levels of solar panels and current commercial feasible levels of direct air carbon capture (DAC), if we annually allocated an amount equal to our current annual solar panel production to building large solar farms dedicated to powering DAC plants, in about 150ish years those plants would be capturing each year an amount about equal to our current total annual emissions.
If we keep expanding solar panel production we could shorten that timeline and build more than just enough to breakeven. The area for those solar farms would be about 1/15th the area of the 5 largest subtropical deserts.
What would we do with all the carbon extracted? That's not really a problem. If we can't think of a good use for it, just mount the solar panels powering the DAC plants a few meters off the ground, convert the carbon to graphite, and dump it under the solar panels. Spread evenly it would only be a few mm thick.
Two of these things will definitely work. One of them is completely untested, poorly understood and with potentially massive consequences for the climate and food production.
Precisely! The world needs to spend 15 billions a year on reflective aerosols while it reduces emissions thanks to renewables.
This will not address the acidification of the oceans which is very bad but something is better than nothing.
Carbon capture is way too slow to work. It’s a rounding error.
There hasn't been a question about this in a decade or more. There was no path, even theoretically, to stopping our CO2 emissions without dramatically lowering quality of life for maybe a couple billion people.
We won't slow climate change. We can build resilience to the effects, and we have good incentives to do so. But we'll keep burning fossil fuels for a very long time.
There was an obvious path that the environmentalists mostly opposed. A decade is plenty of time for massive scale buildout of nuclear power. If we'd started that a decade ago we'd be in a good position now.
Nuclear power is expensive. One of the most expensive ways to produce electricity when you capitalize expense of the construction of the plant into the electricty cost. Path forward is wind/solar + storage which is cheapest next to hydropower.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
The Wiki page above didn't really go into it much, but how much of the cost of nuclear power is self-inflicted? I.e. regulatory costs and actually paying the cost of externalities up-front. And if we were more consistent at building such facilities and producing said fuel, would there be cost reductions from scale?
~99% of the cost is due to red-tape regulations. It's so obscene that they require certified backup genererators for the backup generators and 3-4 layers of fail safes. Then you need to wait YEARS to get all the permits and licenses. Oh and if you get preapproval for a componant (say the generators) but too much time has passed from installation until you actually are ready to go, you need to go through the process again, hence the constant delays. An actual nuclear power plant is actually stupidly cheap to run if you cut all the red tape. Stupidly. Like $50k of fuel produces $50 million of electricity good.
Edit because I forgot to mention this, if coal or ccgt were regulated like nuclear is, not a single one would be profitable. And even if you take into account every single death due to radiation poisoning (from any source) nuclear would still be the safest power source in the world. Literally worker deaths from installing wind power plants exceed it.
Nuclear power plants are ultimately not that different from coal power plants. Typical estimates for the capital costs of coal power are ~$4000/kW, which can be used as a lower bound for the costs of nuclear power.
The costs are high, because construction industry has suffered from poor productivity growth for decades. Renewables are getting cheaper, because they rely more on mass-produced stuff and less on hiring people to construct a big specialized building to house the power plant. Regulatory costs of nuclear power also largely come from poor quality control in construction industry. Regulators require something specific, subcontractors try doing that but often don't get it right, and regulators order them to tear it down and try again.
Also Uranium has 3.5x in price over the last 6 years and will continue to go up. its a really rare element/isotope.
The problem is that we attempted to build nuclear power. It just didn’t deliver. There was massive state support behind it.
It is hard looking at Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point C, Hanhikivi and the countless cancelled projects and think: ”That’s what I want some more of!!”
yup.
I remember seeing just a few years back, a Greenpeace postlet moaning about dangerous nuclear energy
I think it's pretty clear that nothing meaningful will be done because there's no shock value to entertain the "empaths" like there is with war and other stuff
Indeed. At this point I’d say that the “green movement” has done more damage to the planet than the fossil fuel industry.
The entire Western world (with the exception of France) pretty much stopped building nuclear power plants 40 years ago, because of a single accident that by its most pessimistic estimates killed fewer people in total than coal emissions kill every 3 days. It’s madness.
What was the fossil fuel industry plan to massively shrink the fossil fuel industry exactly?
Nuclear power had already collapsed due to its own costs and timelines.
In hindsight it’s much easier to blame the accidents rather than face the structural problems nuclear power has.
Which has only been exacerbated by renewables and storage disrupting the global energy markets, forcing ”baseload” plants to become peakers. Against their will.
Quality of life will be dramatically lower for many because we did not take action
Same reason we have Social Security. People can't plan on a long horizon.
What if lots of people stop having kids? Then the amount of people who have a lower quality of life can be reduced.
Antinatalism is becoming a more reasonable philosophy every day.
What do you mean, "if"? It's happening worldwide as we speak. It's still not enough.
I was a kid in the early 90s and my school book mentioned climate change and need to change energy sources. This could have been, if not prevented, at least greatly mitigated. We have had plenty of time. But well, I guess that our species is not that intelligent after all. Too bad, maybe the next one will be better...
Maybe it will be a good incentive to rebuild our global infrastructure without having to go through a world war ?
Say this to global warlords not to random user on Hacker News
fourth airport opening in the DC area this week, the news says
> We can build resilience to the effects
Oh yeah, would love to see the resilience that would have prevented the Nepalese disaster
Yeah, not build in the lowest point where there is a glacier upstream
The US version: kill the national flood insurance program so we stop subsidizing property owners in disaster prone areas.
Resilience isn't prevention. Resilience is the systems to clean up after those events. To be able to build new housing for the people who survive, to route around problems.
I think the conversation here is making me more depressed than the news. The number of people who don’t believe collective action is possible, who somehow believe the current techno-capitalist model is determined by god or history or whatever, who don’t have any particular knowledge about history, economic development, etc but are very happy to very loudly yell that the only thing we can do is more of the same but maybe faster - man, y’all call yourselves hackers, but you sure are an incurious and gullible lot.
climate change became to be discussed as an issue since the 80s. I am in my late 40s and I have been hearing about since forever, and yet so little has been done since then. Now you can understand why I, as probably many here, have zero faith in this being solved in any sensible way.
Go and get depressed... or maybe go and eat your Brazilian meat burger, drive your SUV and book your flight to Hawaii, it won't last long.
What’s always struck me as interesting about these conversations is that both you and I and many, many of the other people we talk to are willing to make significant life changes to deal with this problem, and yet we all seem convinced the blocker here is that everyone else is an asshole.
It seems to me that assholes do in fact exist, but by all measures make up a much smaller percentage of the population than we’ve been lead to believe, and so the notion that a bulk majority of people would act in the interests of others and humanity at large is perhaps not the unthinkable notion we’ve been told. It might be that the actual action here is to recognize the people telling us everyone else is an asshole are trying to pull the wool over our eyes and treat them accordingly.
I tend to attribute most problems to low intelligence and/or ignorance more than plain asshole-ness. I don't disregard the complexity of fixing climate change, and the need for global cooperation, but we have had plenty of time and too little was done, even in more peaceful times than today.
I think that the problem won't be solved by us, it will balance itself out. A bigger chunk of the planet will become more hostile, human population will shrink, we will live at much lower scales, consume less and pollute less, for thousands of years to come.
I hope I will be proven wrong.
I think the problem is not recognizing the assholes as a separate problem from the ignorance. Ignorant people hear “giant impending calamity that will harm you and your neighbors” and think, “oh, we should do something about that!” They’re currently not doing so because a cabal of assholes has spent half a century muddying the public waters.
And, regarding “living at lower scales and polluting less” - consider how many things in your life are sold to you as disposable items and how many don’t need to be, and how many things can be produced in a substantially more sustainable fashion without negatively impacting their utility or quality. The average person can live an extremely rich, fulfilling, and comfortable life on a low carbon budget.
> low intelligence
You have a lot of personal problems to fix before you have to worry about climate disaster.
I mean, I damn sure hope we can do both in parallel, because if we’re gonna wait for everyone to reach enlightenment, we’re sure not gonna make it in time.
Can you point to any examples where democratic populations have engaged in the kinds of sacrifice at scale needed to avert this problem?
Do you have any specific, actionable proposals to solve this problem that don’t rely on us magically solving the collective action problem?
A vague sense that “we can do it if we just try!” is no better than what you’re decrying.
There are long histories of cultures managing collective resources democratically over extremely long periods. Both the water temples of Southeast Asia and the rituals around salmon runs and controlled burns in the Pacific Northwest maintained careful husbandry of scarce resources across time periods that extend well beyond the time period since the tragedy of the commons was discovered by the same people who are asserting that kind of coordination to be impossible. This is a cultural problem, and it’s with our culture, not humanity writ large.
With regards to concrete solutions, we could stop pretending that financial optimization and private equity is anything other than looting at scale, we could stop pretending that it’s the god-given destiny of every imaginable product to get shittier and require more rapid disposal and replacement, we could stop imagining that Jeff Bezos shooting people into space is the sign of a functioning economy, but very very directly, we could start actually taxing people and corporations for the long-term effects of their actions, we could prosecute people who attempt to buy, bribe, or market their way past social issues, and we could start incorporating the full cost of, eg, offsetting category 5 hurricanes and large scale droughts or heatwaves in our calculations of the benefits of our modern supply chains and globalized markets. All of those things would be fine starts to drive policy in the directions we want. All of them run afoul of the current winners of the current systems, which is why they’ve been tarred as the unrealistic fantasies of people who aren’t interested in spending the rest of their lives in hermetically-sealed air conditioned boxes so Sam Altman and Elon Musk don’t have to go to therapy.
With respect, those examples are about tiny heterogeneous populations and do not involve tremendous sacrifice. The actions required to make meaningful difference for climate change are orders of magnitude larger.
And your solutions are basically “we could all change our view and start taking coordinated collective action together”, which is not actionable. I mean, it clearly hasn’t happened, and you can villainize whoever you want about that, but the problem remains. You can declare that the problem is cultural, but the problem remains. You can blame Elon or Sam or Trump, but the problem remains. People do not vote for what you want, politicians do not do what you want, and that’s not even getting into the fact that we need action that requires great sacrifice from the majority of the globe, and quickly. What are we actually going to do about it? Do you have anything tangible that people can do today that will make any difference whatsoever? Because if not, why waste my life shaking my fist at the clouds?
Your original derisive comment implied that because we’re hackers, we should be able to do something more here. What is that? How do we hack this?
EDIT since I cant reply:
Many of the “cynical” people you’re deriding here have been doing the actionable things you suggest for decades now. Hell, in the last decade my fellow Americans have elected a man who promised to undo all the climate progress we’ve been fighting for, and then cheered as he did so. They voted for this! Twice!
Can you blame us for realizing that our fellow citizens don’t actually care enough to do the stuff you’re talking about, especially in time?
I’m actually an optimist, I think the future of humanity is bright, I think we’re a remarkable species who can do amazing things. I don’t think we have demonstrated any ability whatsoever to rise to the scope of this challenge in the time required to avoid a lot of suffering in the coming decades.
You’re underestimating both the size and the heterogeneity of those cultures. Politics attains anywhere with a population that exceeds Dunbar’s number, and both of those cultures were easily in the tens to hundreds of thousands. They’re also just two examples out of many - most of human civilization has managed to handle this over time.
And, yes, the solution here is in fact that we change our behavior and build political alliances, starting at the local level and building up. The datacenter fights are a good place to look if you’d like a blueprint, as are the anti-Flock movements, and Minneapolis if you want to see what sharper action looks like. I don’t know what else you’re expecting with regards to “what to do” - I’ve never heard of any effective magic wand, any solution here involves getting off your ass and advocating for what you want.
And, we hack this the way we hack everything else: by actually understanding the system and how it works, not just listening to what we’re being told by the people who built the system, by identifying places of high leverage within the system, and by using those to enact change in the system. To just sit around and say “well, my Econ professor said we’re fucked, so I guess that’s that” is just fucking lazy.
You know, as a follow-up to “democratic populations making sacrifices at scale” - have you _looked_ at the US lately? Our lifestyle is atrocious - we work shitty jobs too many hours, drive everywhere, live in isolating suburbs in crappily-built and ugly houses surrounded by bland box stores hawking shitty wares that break by design, restaurants hawking garbage food by the truckload, and grocery stores that are a bare minimum box-checking exercise with crappy produce and shitty meat, and that’s before you get to the meat factory we call a healthcare system. One trip to a proper first world country ought to be enough to disabuse us of the notion that our choices are value-neutral. It seems like we’ve already collectively sacrificed a ton for the sake of enriching the same people telling us collective sacrifice is impossible.
We already know we need to pump the breaks on AI for a host of safety issues. However, perhaps the biggest concern is the sheer scale of electricity generation they require. One hyperscale data centre can require electricity equivalent to a fair sized city. Many data centre builders are keen to claim they'll use renewable energy sources... eventually. They'll just suck power off the grid "temporarily" or rely on "clean" natural gas for a few years. There are a decent number of states, provinces, etc. whose total emissions will double in a matter of months. Could the timing possibly be worse?
From a warming perspective, it's utter madness to let this build-out proceed unimpeded. New data centres should be required to be net-zero at power-up. Unfortunately, it's a race and the U.S. side of it has an administration that is actively rolling back policies that fight climate change.
Data centers seem tangential to any real problem. The grid should be converting to green energy and regulation that says datacenters must also be power stations is backwards.
A gigawatt is a gigawatt. If you need a gigawatt, you pay for the generation and infrastructure to provide it, whether you're a million people or a single data-centre. The jursidictions that require data-centres to provide their own generation and electrical infrastructure are completely within their rights.
A gigawatt is a gigawatt. Power stations are more efficient the bigger they are. Put data centers in industrial zoning so the infrastructure for both power and water is already there. It's so obvious. Leave the power generating to the power companies. Yes, obviously again, the datacenters should pay for their gigawatts and solar on the roof will help keep the bill down. Why would this specific industry be required to run their own generators?
It’s surreal how quickly this went from being the most important problem in the world to barely being on anyone’s mind, all in less than a decade. I had plenty of problems with the fear-mongering and doomed-by-2030 predictions, but the current situation, where we seem basically fine with doing nothing, is genuinely scary. Technology has its limits, billions of people still aspire to a European standard of living, and global population isn’t expected to peak until near the end of this century.
I just hate this post-Trump, post-Covid, post-Russia-Ukraine-war world. I don’t know what the trigger was, but there must have been a point where things just went to shit. And here we are: an increasingly ultra-capitalistic dystopia where wealth seems to be the only thing that matters.
Because it’s truly a first world problem. Rest of the world has other problems like hunger, clean drinking water and other basic necessities to solve
Aren't those "other problems" somewhat affected by climate change though?
All those problems were already there even before climate change was a topic, so nothing new regarding that front
I'd wager they're not binary (absent/present) issues but have many dimensions and a continuum of possible values and thus "climate change makes this problem worse or different" is something new. Random example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-024-00583-8
I don't think GP was claiming they weren't.
HN's community moderation tools seem to fail at times, so I'm responding to ssearyus's comment that is marked [dead]:
ssearyus: At the risk of being immediately downvoted, let me point out that a 250ppm CO2 level is borderline disastrous for plant life -- at 180ppm, plants would starve globally. The increased CO2 levels in recent years (slightly added to by human activities) is immensely helpful for drought-resistance, as stomata do not then need to open as much to get sufficient CO2 with the result that they transpire less water. The above, and the fact the by far the most important GHG in the atmosphere is water vapor (CO2 is comparatively a rounding error) should give reasonable people pause for thought.
My response: I think there's something you're trying to say, but it doesn't come through clearly in these many points.
- 250ppm is not disastrous for plant life. That's around preindustrial levels of CO2 (280ppm) and plants did just fine
- What do you mean by "starve" here regarding 180ppm?
- And why are you talking about 250ppm and 180ppm specifically? No one is talking about 250ppm or 180ppm as targets (or maybe you are?)
- Water vapor is indeed a greenhouse gas, and contributes to warming. But it's best thought as an accelerant. Warmer temperatures bring more water vapor bring higher temperatures, bring more water vapor etc etc. The rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is so important because it trigger in many ways a feedback loop, one of which is rise in water vapor as a greenhouse gas. The feedback loop caused by temperature/water vapor is one of the reasons we need to be very careful with our human-made emissions.
- "CO2 is comparatively a rounding error": Whether by mass or volume, CO2 is not a rounding error by comparison to water vapor. There's roughly 4 to 6 times the amount of water vapor as CO2. I wouldn't call 25% a rounding error. Maybe there's something I missed here.
- And when you say water vapor is "by far the most important GHG in the atmosphere", does that mean you're working on lowering water vapor levels in the atmosphere? Or what are you working on regarding solving for this? Maybe something with airplane cloud formation trapping heat?
I'd guess part of the reason he got downvoted is this: "The increased CO2 levels in recent years (slightly added to by human activities) [...]".
Pretty much all of the CO2 increase above pre-industrial levels (280 ppm) is due to human activity.
99% of the time when someone says otherwise they are going to continue with a bunch of other equally inaccurate things which they got from scientifically worthless sites and so people just flag and move on.
Makes sense. The challenge I have is that a lot of people on the planet think the same things. So it's more than just some person spouting weird things off a weird website. The entire output of our civilization right now is higher and higher CO2 levels. I appreciate the chance to talk it out. I supposed multiple downvotes is what leads to something being marked "dead".
>Climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, said that "although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we've dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there's a way out."
I need to say WTF, the way out is to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. That means stop using fossil fuels. How many times does this need to be said ? Already it probably has been said millions of times.
In practical terms, that’s closer to stating the problem than it is to stating the solution.
Well said. At this point I’ve literally read many thousands of HN comments about climate change over the past two decades that boil down to “we just need magically overcome the unprecedented global scale of the collective action problem we face!”
Hope y'all are having fun with GPT-69 and 50 agent swarms at least! (queue the angry downvotes)
Are you saying Germany ruined it's industry for nothing?
Not surprising when leader of the free world is doing such shenanigans - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/06/rwe-deal-win...
When will the rich, say top 10% of planet decrease their emissions?
How exactly would that make a dent? CO2 sources:
- Electricity + heat production ~40–42%
- Industry + manufacturing ~20–22%
- Road transport ~12–13%
- Deforestation & land-use change ~10%
- Direct fuel use in buildings ~5–6%
- Aviation ~2–3%
- Shipping ~2–3%
- Rail, pipelines & other transport ~1%
- Flaring / other energy & industrial sources ~2–4%
I'm guessing the private jets is what you're hinting at? Aviation above includes all flights, not just private jets.
The top 10% richest humans emit about half of all emissions.
Decile 10 (richest): ~48%
Decile 9: ~15%
Decile 8: ~10%
Decile 7: ~8%
Decile 6: ~6%
Deciles 1 through 5 combined: ~12%, so about 1 to 3% each
I wouldn't necessarily focus on it, but it's something good for your mental model of how to solve the challenge.
The reason I say I wouldn't focus on it is I'm coming around to the idea that "carbon footprint" is effectively a marketing campaign brought on by oil companies to have us focus our individual power where it has the lowest leverage - sorting trash, our own individual emissions, etc, Instead of mobilizing hundreds, thousands, millions, and billions of people to change policy and technology.
Sources like this: www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/richest-1-emit-as-much-planet-heating-pollution-as-two-thirds-of-humanity-oxfam/
The figures aren't based on real measurements of what every person actually emits, they're based on a model that allocates consumption-based CO2 emissions across income groups.
Regardless of that, I agree that making useful policy changes is important, replacing some plastic straws won't make a huge change, but getting rid of coal will.
So that means if you buy something made of steel, and the steel was made in India, you get assigned that part of India's emissions, counted as your emissions. The whole concept of "your emissions" then is based on blaming the blaming the consumer, the buyer, for what the emitter, the seller, did. Implicitly the buyer has a duty to control the seller in the other country, but the sellers (and their legislature) are unable to make choices.
That "top 10% richest" means the 10% of the planet, 800,000,000 people, which is the richest 10%. (It could be understood differently, as if it meant those earning more than 90% of the maximum income anybody has.)
European Union annual CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions have decreased by over 30% since 2005 (no, not just by getting their stuff manufactured in China).
The top 10% of the planet aren’t “the rich”, what a gross and incendiary misuse of the term.
The top 10% richest humans emit about half of all emissions.
Decile 10 (richest): ~48%
Decile 9: ~15%
Decile 8: ~10%
Decile 7: ~8%
Decile 6: ~6%
Deciles 1 through 5 combined: ~12%, so about 1 to 3% each
Sources like this: www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/richest-1-emit-as-much-planet-heating-pollution-as-two-thirds-of-humanity-oxfam/
If you live in better material conditions than 90% of the world population, you're rich, by definition. This is nearly half the global CO2 footprint.
What would _you_ call the top 10% richest people in the world? Middle upper, upper, upper, upper class?
95% of the top 10% are middle class, because the vast majority of the world’s population are middle or lower class.
Big congratulations to the world leaders and policy makers who were at the signing of the Paris Accord. Went home. And did very little about it. Now we output more CO2 faster than we ever have in our entire history.
At least the economy is doing okay… oh wait.
Maybe the reason action hasn’t happened is because the solutions would drive down income inequality?
Was hoping my kids wouldn’t have to live with the worst of it but it looks like we failed at that.
Burn baby burn!
Buddy with all 24/7 gas powered data centers in the works we’ll be lucky to keep below 3 C.
This is not bad news. At some time we should decide to get along with Mother Nature.
The Industrial party of the last 2 centuries is over. We should love the trees, the animals, the land and leave ASAP from the cities.
Unfortunately, the plutocracy has different plans.
anybody still grinding out a 9-5 for a trust fund baby at this point is wasting their life.
billionaires, boomers, decrepit old men, and o&g industry have fucked future generations and humanity.
This is mostly the UN’s own fault. Nation governments refrain from getting “hardcore” on this because the better options are expensive and they don’t want to be undercut by another country. The UN is supposed to somehow use its deep diplomatic negotiating and deal-making skill to find and enforce agreement between these states so we all adopt the changes together… and penalise the hold-outs (we all know who) together.