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.
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.
> "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.
>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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Sorry but this just isn't true. Of course you need more energy to produce a cow and then eat it than you need to sustain yourself by just eating the cows food.
I think it really depends by what you mean when you say vegan.
If you’re eating vegan cheeses and whatnot you’re probably not doing so hot. Or impossible burgers. Or any other manner of “invented” food that is not essentially basic agrarian or hunter-gatherer.
Conversely, wildlife play important ecological purposes and can be hunted sustainably.
Wild life can also be useful in processing things we cannot eat and grows in abundance (grass) into things we can eat (cows).
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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!!”
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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/
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.)
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.
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).
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.
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.
Anthropogenic climate change denial is entering a territory where it's not just illogical, it's straight-up delusional. Even oil companies accept it and have been studying it for decades (even if their public policy is denial).
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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...
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.
no, it has not
https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/why-clean-energy-...
https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-20...
Strict vegan diets would objectively massively help reduce climate change.
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?
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.
> 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/
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.
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/
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.
Cows are not for eating, they are holy animals in India, more like pets. I hope you are not advocating eating dogs in west!
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"
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.
an odd place to be a hotbed of vegan advocacy.
Many vegans I know were in fact motivated to that choice by realizing that meetings of humans were in fact "meat space."
MY LUNGS ARE ADAPTING! I'VE INHALED A ROAST
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
Have they? How have they done that? I just want to know what you mean here.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of people from bangladesh and india are working in Russia. China and Russia are also investing, and building factories there.
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.
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.
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.
Degrowth is coming. And you don’t have a say in the matter.
There just aren’t mega heatwaves causing famines and there won’t be at 1.5c of warming either.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Wholeheartedly agree
Telling people not to have kids may not be realistic, but... it's also happening already.
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.
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.
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.
We need to get to zero by 2050 then have interventions to sequester CO2 at a low level.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/31/turkmeni...
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.
sabotage achieved
If we need to make such drastic changes to human consumption, have people considered if we have a overpopulation problem?
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.
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
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.
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.
I hope you are wrong that nothing requiring sacrifice can ever be accomplished.
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.
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.
This is ignoring that _not_ solving global warming will make everyone's life worse regardless.
If you’re eating vegan cheeses and whatnot you’re probably not doing so hot. Or impossible burgers. Or any other manner of “invented” food that is not essentially basic agrarian or hunter-gatherer.
Conversely, wildlife play important ecological purposes and can be hunted sustainably.
Wild life can also be useful in processing things we cannot eat and grows in abundance (grass) into things we can eat (cows).
Everything in moderation…
The economies of scale work differently for billions of mouths vs one mouth.
Wildlife hunting has zero emmisions! Even lower emmisions than agricultural products! If you are serious about lowering emmisions, lets push that!!!
This is like claiming seafood is very expensive to produce, and then give imported caviar as an example.
I recommend you check any healthy eating table for vegans and vegetarians. Bread, beans, rice, legumes aren't exactly billionaire luxuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarian_Diet_Pyramid
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."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/27/meat-gas...
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?
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.
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.
Your mileage, ironic phrase noted, may vary.
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.
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."
Though, as always, we can and really should do both.
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.
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.
You also have the oil on your hands, and its not washing off easily.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Then note that a higher temperatures will increase the radiative losses.
100x heat release and it's still about 1% of solar gain.
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.
I am not very surprised, since the people voted for the "drill baby drill" president?
I wouldn't classify that as anemic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-st...
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/CO2-emissions-and-respec...
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.
Maybe try giving it a second pass?
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.
- 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.
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.
Collaboration implies we are all on the same side. Reality suggests some people have made it their business to be on the wrong side.
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)
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
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.
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
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!!”
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.
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.
Oh yeah, would love to see the resilience that would have prevented the Nepalese disaster
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.
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 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.
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.
- 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.
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/
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
billionaires, boomers, decrepit old men, and o&g industry have fucked future generations and humanity.
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...