It is important to keep reminding ourselves that climate change is a real problem for humanity and that each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions. It is a problem that requires solutions, but implementing these solutions involves so much inertia that it can sometimes be painful.
And let's contrast that with the AI hype. It's more the opposite, a kind of solution to problems we didn't really have, but are now being persuaded we do. It would be sensible to invest an equal share of the resources currently being pumped into AI with uncertain outcomes into the complex issue of climate change. And, no, AI won't solve it; unfortunately, it only makes it worse.
> each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.
I have to disagree here.
This idea of a consumer-level personal responsibility for the fossil energy industry's externalized costs is a lot like the plastic producers shifting blame for waste by saying that it's the consumers' fault for not recycling. It's transparent blame-shifting.
The fossil energy industry pulls the carbon out of the ground and distributes it globally. Then it buys and sells politicians and, through mass media, votes, to ensure they maintain the industry's hegemony.
You only have to look at the full-blown slide of the US into a despotic petrostate to understand the causes of the climate crisis.
TL;DW: It is important that individuals show that there is a real problem and that they perform actions that address the problem. This demonstrative behaviour leads to social dynamics where more people feel encouraged to perform actions and to drive larger change.
I agree with you that consumer-level personal responsibility is absolutely not the way to go. To a certain extent I try to non-dogmatically "do the right thing", but I know it's simply a cute hobby.
The only solution is systemic. The incentives need to be in order for businesses and consumers to do the right thing not because it is the right thing, but because it's cheaper or more convenient. That can only be implemented via legislation and investment of public resources, hence from the political level.
And what determines whether the politicians in charge are ones who will implement the changes needed to mitigate the problem, rather than ones who will keep alive the system which is intensifying it? Well, we're back to square one: each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.
And yet, we're not completely stuck. It is absolutely clear that not enough has been done to reduce our carbon emissions, and we're on a bad path on track to ~2.5°C warming in the next century. However, something has been done, and if nothing had been done we could easily be on track to >4°C global warming. That would be much worse.
So, how did we achieve what little we have? Well, because many people have cared, and have made the right decisions. Not enough people, or maybe not good-enough decisions, but some people, and somewhat good decisions.
So, what were the decisions which brought us down from an apocalyptic +4°C to a very bad 2.5°C path? Was it enough consumers making environmentally conscious choices, even if they were less convenient or more expensive. No. It was enough voters wanting their leaders to do something, even if it wasn't quite enough, but it was something. And something isn't nothing.
We will never have enough people voting with their wallet to fight climate change, because our rational understanding of the big-picture cannot overpower our intuitive day-to-day choices. However, we may have enough people voting with their ballot to fight climate change, because the rational big-picture can, sometimes, decide whom we vote for.
For how long though? Solar and wind are very competitive now, electric cars have been good enough to transition to for over a decade, other industries can be decarbonized with the right incentives and enough investment. It's not like there aren't any ideas for how to farm or produce steel cleanly. And nuclear reactors can be made safer and cheaper now.
Seems more like a lack of political will with powerful lobbying interests opposing it and misleading the public. Fossil fuel companies could have listened to their scientists in the 1970s and changed their business models for a transition to cleaner tech a lot sooner.
For a long time to come. The energy density of fossil fuels is very high (about 50x higher than that of lithium ion batteries), there's a ton of infrastructure for handling and transporting them and a ton of infrastructure for using them.
They get turned into plastics and energy, two things which civilization feeds on voraciously.
> The energy density of fossil fuels is very high (about 50x higher than that of lithium ion batteries)
That doesn't make sense. Batteries are an energy container, they're not energy itself. How can it be compared to a fuel? The direct counterpart to oil or coal is wind or solar radiation itself, batteries are used to amortize the supply and store an excess for emergency use, but otherwise those types of energy just immediately go into powering the grid.
The economic case for renewable power is actually extremely good, because unlike fossil fuels, they're effectively infinite and don't need complex infrastructure to extract. They're free. You only need a power plant that directly converts them into power. If we were just able to shift fossil fuel demand towards producing goods like plastics, this would already be massive. However, a lot of powerful people are deeply invested into fossil fuels and will do anything to tip the scales into their favor, despite gradually losing in the energy sector.
It's an immense uphill struggle if you tried to get people to adjust to where transport is less available, and encourage living or working at closer ranges or conversely long range shipping/travel/vacations seen as more of a luxury. Just thinking about it I'm reminded of the outrage that was fabricated/stirred up over "15 minute cities" in the UK where the idea that you'd be able to get to most things you need day-to-day in a 15 minute walk was warped into a scare of state checkpoints, fines and surveillance. Or the retreat from working from home.
It's a huge adjustment from how the past few decades have established expectations, and it'll take a big force to change quickly, similar to covid even though that was short term in hindsight.
Its a case of prisoner's dilemma. Individuals making the proposed lifestyle changes in order to make a genuine dent in AGW amount to jumping on the tracks in order to stop a freight train.
This is the one issue where I feel some sympathy with the right. I hate "Virtue signaling" about as much as they do. I'm sorry, but if you are going to snap at people over eating beef, while you fly/drive all over the country/world unnecessarily, you are absolute full of shyte.
I am not a vegan. My social world in D.C./NYC has many secular, left-wing, vegans. Many of them are friends or loved ones. They demonstrably speak their mind in front of me on countless issues on which we disagree.
I have dined with them countless times at restaurants where they order vegan and I don't. I have never once been "snapped at" about my dietary decisions. Some of these people have dedicated years of their life to non-human animal rights activism.
So I am very skeptical that this shaming occurs at any appreciable scale. I suspect it is mostly psychological projection: one doubts the morality of one's decisions, judges oneself harshly, but experiences this as the judgement of others.
You are correct that this is not a prisoner's dilemma, it is a tragedy of the commons[0]. However, if a wizard could magically control the "personal decisions of 99% of Earth population" and make them optimal for reducing CO2 emissions then, believe me, climate change could be trivially solved.
It is a classic cooperation problem. Perhaps not prisoners dilemma. Perhaps not at individual scale. Probably tragedy of the commons.
Cooperation is not consuming fossil fuels. Defection is consuming fossil fuels.
If you cooperate and other defects you suffer climate impact and expensive energy (expensive everything, worse economic growth than others).
If you defect and other cooperates you suffer climate impact but at least you get cheap energy (cheap everything, more economic growth than others).
People, nations, corporations, etc don’t stop using fossil fuels because they incur a penalty against their competitors if they volunteer to and their competitors don’t.
The assumption here is that fossil fuels are actually cheaper. But an electric car pays back the higher upfront cost in fuel savings in significantly fewer miles than most cars will have put on them. Solar generates power at a lower cost per kWh than coal.
The fossil fuel industry has to be actively sustained through subsidies and government regulation hostile to alternatives. Maybe that wasn't true 50 years ago before the alternatives got viable and cheap, but if it's not true now then why did we stop subsidizing electric cars while we still subsidize oil companies?
WDYM personal decisions don't matter? Industrial and agricultural sectors, which both in sum contribute 50% of total greenhouse gas emissions, produce what is in demand from consumers. Another 15% of emissions is from personal vehicles. Changing personal habits is the only way we can ever reach some utopian climate targets. Utopian because old habits die hard.
I never understood this. The companies sold you fossil fuel, you burnt it and got benefits out of it: transportation, energy, heating, constructions, fertilizers and food, etc. You want them to pay for the negative consequences of your fossil fuel consumption while you keep all the generated benefits?
> You want them to pay for the negative consequences of your fossil fuel consumption
No I want them to pay for the negative consequences of the lies they spread. I paid them for fuel, and I got fuel. I did not think I was paying for lies and I never wanted them.
Where does the chain end? I burn diesel in my tractor to harvest corn. Should the feedlot that buys my corn pay for the tractor’s emissions? Should the slaughterhouse that processes the cattle pay? Should the supermarket that stocks the beef pay? Should the family who grills the steak on Sunday pay? Or just the one who eats the largest portion?
You either tax the fuel and pass the cost down to the consumers, or decide as a society to share the cost of the externalities and use general taxation for that.
So… it’s like you completely understand the issue :)
And obviously, you tax the fuel at the source, right when it comes out of the ground. Higher prices get passed down, changing behavior because the products externalities are priced correctly from the start.
You can. Everything- including basic things like food, transportation, construction, healthcare- will become more expensive, of course. My objection was to ask fossil fuel companies to pay after you already bought and burned your fuel cheap.
Here, in the first scenario it directly punishes consumers for consuming more. In the second, it punishes everyone equally on everyone's consumption, which is unlikely to lead to behavior change. So yes, we should tax fossil fuels much more.
However, the first scenario will pass the increased cost of fuel down to the consumers affecting poorer people disproportionately. Example: some good that is produced with fossil fuels (including food) will become too expensive for low-income people, while richer (and more polluting) people will not feel the difference that much.
If you go for general taxation, you distribute the cost proportionally to income, making rich people pay more. Probably the ideal is a mix of both.
Why should all of society pay for these externalities? If some people manage to improve their energy supply and don't require dirty fuels, why should they be forced to subsidize those who won't?
Taxing the carbon at the source is simply correctly pricing it, and because it makes it impossible to shift the externalities away from the producer it fixes the accounting problem that falsely makes fossil fuels appear cheap.
The amount of fossil fuels that a working class individual burns are a rounding error compared to what big companies burn. How many private jets are in the air right now? Even if you drive the most energy inefficient truck ever produced, run your home HVAC at max, and buy gasoline just to burn in your back yard, you will never measure up. It's like saying we need to dry the oceans, so you should stop peeing in it.
> if you drive the most energy inefficient truck ever produced
Sorry, but how was that truck produced? Where did the energy to make it come from? How was your home built, where did the energy come from? Where did the materials come from? How did the workers come to the job? What did they eat, and what do you eat? Do you go to an office? How was it built? How do you and your colleagues get there? Do your children go to school? Do you go to hospitals when you're sick? Etc.
No, what we wanted for decades is for cars to shift to the free market of electric energy, just like every one of our other appliances have for decades. Electricity is a free market - can be generated by hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, even nuclear. If tomorrow they invent clean fusion power then electric cars would be able to benefit.
The cars being locked into fossil fuels is the result of fossil fuel subsidies from the government. Otherwise, OPEC raising prices would have long ago led to improvements in battery technology and electric cars. But the federal government shields the fossil fuels companies to make sure the “price at the pump” is small.
We should be raising pigovian taxes on fossil fuels at the point of extraction, and redistribute it to all our citizens as a UBI. Alaska has been doing this for decades and they have almost the lowest GINI index of all states year after year.
Just like we want bottling and clothing companies to shift from plastics to bidegradeable materials. But you like to keep individuals distracted and blame them for using a straw and a bag, as if THAT is the main cause of pollution. And plastic recycling was a total scam designed to keep people distracted from forcing change on corporations pollution and unsustainable practices upstream.
I'm an environmentalist and I agree with this framing. The solution is going to be painful and must increase prices on products and services that fossil fuels are currently the cheapest solution for. If you're not willing to personally sacrifice anything to reduce fossil fuel consumption you can see why carbon taxes are not popular, right? France's protests against them, for example, are a good example of a populist reaction against attempts to regulate the economy to have less emissions.
While arguments can be made at the futility of individual action against a system action, it’s not like companies are making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash. There are consumers of what is being produced!
Society’s choices and lifestyles are the cause of fossil fuel consumption, at a very high level. The plastic bag exists because it has users.
There are quantitative arguments against many silly consumer-focused initiatives. In aggregate tho companies aren’t burning fossil fuels for fun. Burning fossil fuels costs money, and a lot of people would rather not spend that money!!
> it’s not like companies are making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash
Sure they do. You even mention one in the venerable plastic bag. Is it the best bag? No, of course not. Is it a good bag? Absolutely not. Is it the cheapest bag to produce? You betcha.
The plastic bag is sold to businesses! If every supermarket in the world decided to never buy another plastic bag then they would no longer be produced!
There can be a futility to it all in that the “ideal option” simply isn’t produced of course.
I find boots theory is often a bit too convenient in this topic though. There is unlikely to be magic structural solutions that allow every part of your life to remain as convenient. At one point our lives will have to change in structure.
EDIT: to be extra clear, I think systemic coordinated changes is needed. I just think the “it’s the corporations doing this!” narrative to obscure the needs for reorganization of daily life on top of systemic change
I remember when that switch at grocers from paper to plastic was taking hold, and you could choose. "Paper or plastic?" was the question asked. Some comedian (probably) had a good one liner: "That'll be 42.39. Kill a tree or choke a fish?"
> Is it the best bag? No, of course not. Is it a good bag? Absolutely not
Plastic is absolutely the best packaging material ever created, it's so good, it feels like magic. It's light, it's cheap, it's waterproof, it's durable and doesn't just decompose, it comes in a miriad shapes and forms and so on. There is a reason it's everywhere
One of those adjectives describes the plastic bag I'm familiar with. Sometimes it lasts long enough to get the food in the house without spilling through a hole which spontaneously appeared in the bag.
Would you be ok if stores offered the option between a cheap plastic bag and a more expensive non-plastic one? (All the stores here already do it, btw).
I think the externalities of plastic recycling must be internalized economically by requiring all manufacturers of items to pre-pay for the recycling of said items up front, as part of the manufacturing cost. Similar to how bottle returns are managed, which has been very successful. Items which are provably biodegradable or designed to facilitate repair may be exempt.
Plastic bags are already taxed where I live. Consumers pay that tax, obviously. Other costs imposed on producers of plastic items will just be passed down to consumers.
> Society’s choices and lifestyles are the cause of fossil fuel consumption, at a very high level. The plastic bag exists because it has users.
Society's choices and lifestyles don't exist in some rational-individualistic vacuum. Companies advertise products while hiding known risks and side effects of what they're pushing. Cigarettes. Oil. PFOA/PFAS.
They all knew, and they did and continue to do it anyway. Regulatory capture solved all their problems by removing accountability.
This presupposes that consumers have infinite capacity to ingest the minute details of every single product they come into contact with.
Yes, the plastic bag has users. Do you really expect every single shopper to investigate how the bag at <grocery co> was made and if the plastic is recycled? What if they also have to do the same for every single thing they interact with every single day?
It's much easier to ask the people that work with the minutia of plastic bags every day, namely the people who make them, to maybe fix this problem.
Problem is that we if we all stand in a circle and point fingers at the next guy who is to blame, that doesn't really move us toward any sort of solutions.
In fact the reason it's so easy to find others to blame is that the responsibility is a shared one. Holding consumers responsible doesn't absolve producers, or governments for their participation. All have to be held responsible for their actions. That's the only way forward.
> Problem is that we if we all stand in a circle and point fingers at the next guy who is to blame, that doesn't really move us toward any sort of solutions.
Because of the power of lobbyists and their war chests full of cash, even if we made that circle surrounding our congress critter so everyone was pointing at them, we'd still have no effect. Our shame circle would only be uncomfortable for a short time which would quickly be assuaged by the soothing feeling of another large donation from a lobbyist.
Indeed, the biggest personal responsibility is to make this a top political priority when deciding who to elect. Nothing will change until we consistenly fire leaders who refuse to act decisively on this.
If you drive a fossil fuel vehicle, you have chosen to buy into this. If you drive it 3 blocks when you could walk, you've chosen to go the way the fuel company wants you to. That's you.
Plastic is a bit different, you didn't choose the packaging. And you probably don't have the option to recycle anyway. Putting in a special bin doesn't change the fact that it's probably going to a landfill anyway.
Some of it's consumer level. Do what you can. Don't whatabout it.
Plastic is a fantastic material, that's why it's chosen for the packaging. I also don't see the problem sending it to a landfill as long as it stays there.
There is nothing g to “disagree” about.
Of course systemic changes are required.
But if the individual improve their actions it will have a meaningful impact too
Without systemic change the impact of individuals wont be meaningful. Maybe on a spiritual level but they won’t contribute meaningfully to the climate change (or non-change)
It won’t and believing it will is part of ensuring nothing changes. All energy you spend on personally changing should be instead spent lobbying, organizing, and otherwise working politically to effect systemic change. There is no value in individual change. It’s worse than doing nothing.
If everyone chose to eat veggie burgers and seitan steaks instead of using beef, the climate's trajectory would immediately improve. For all the responsibility of industry, many individual world citizens could, and many have, changed their lifestyle due to the moral issue of climate-changing emissions.
> that each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions
I‘ve travelled quite a bit and I find it hard to convince myself that I as a city dweller contribute any meaningful amount to pollution or waste. I‘ve seen rivers of trash flow directly into the ocean. The rich and wealthy pollute disproportionally in such a way that I don‘t think offloading the responsibility to the general public is fair.
The concern about climate is well placed. Ripple et al. lay out a serious case that we may be closer to tipping cascades than models predict, with the Greenland Ice Sheet potentially vulnerable to tipping below 2°C warming, well before 2050.
But "invest an equal share of the resources currently being pumped into AI into climate" misidentifies the bottleneck. Marine cloud brightening could produce meaningful planetary cooling for roughly $5 billion per year at scale (NAS estimate). That's like what? 1% of what was spent on AI infrastructure last year?
The money exists. What doesn't exist is the political coordination to spend it.
The goddamn Alameda city council shut down a University of Washington MCB field test in 2024 because nobody told them it was happening on their property. Go look it up.
This's the actual bottleneck: governance, coordination, and political will, not capital.
When someone says "we should invest resources in X instead of Y," it's worth asking who "we" is and what mechanism they're proposing. AI investment is private capital chasing returns. You can't redirect it to climate by wishing. The implicit model, that Society has a budget and we're choosing wrong, assumes a resource allocation authority that doesn't exist. If you want to argue for creating one, that's a real position, but it should be stated openly rather than hidden inside "it would be sensible."
Also ... "AI won't solve it; it only makes it worse" is doing a ton of work! The energy consumption concern has real merit. But materials science, grid optimization, and climate modeling are direct climate contributions happening now. Google has saved energy in its datacenters ... using AI!
Blanket dismissal of an entire domain of capability isn't seriousness, it's pattern matching. (Ironically, there's a phrase for systems that produce plausible-sounding output by matching patterns without engaging with underlying structure. We're told to be worried about them.)
Capital, and by relation the system that centers the idea of Capital as a method for moving around resources is at the very center of this.
Since Capital follows near-term incentive, if the "pollute the world" path has a greater near-term incentive, that's where the market will follow. If a single member of the system goes for long-term incentive(not cooking the earth), other near-term incentive chasers will eat their lunch and remove a player.
The system itself is a tight feedback loop searching for local maxima, and the local max is often the most destructive. With chasing the local maxima, also comes profit and capital that influence the political system.
What you've done here is called a fully-general counterargument. You should be suspicious of these!
If capital inevitably follows destructive local maxima and defectors get eaten, then no coordination problem has ever been solved, right?
But we banned CFCs! We got lead out of gasoline! The Montreal Protocol exists and worked.
What you're describing is the default behavior of uncoordinated markets, not a physical law. The entire history of regulation and international treaties consists of mechanisms that override local incentive gradients. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes they work.
"The system itself is a tight feedback loop" treats the system as fixed rather than something humans have repeatedly modified. The question is whether we'll add the right feedback loops fast enough, not whether adding them is metaphysically impossible.
My original point stands: the bottleneck on MCB isn't that capital won't fund it. It's that the Alameda city council didn't know a field test was happening on their waterfront and NIMBY ... people ... made noise. Governance failure, not capitalism failure.
It's also worth distinguishing uncoordinated markets from ungoverned markets. Markets exhibit vast and sophisticated organic coordination without state prodding. I don't just mean to pick at this word "uncoordinated" but more deeply at the particular issue of near- or far-sightedness. Has it actually been established that organic economic coordination does worse at protecting "the future" than some particular alternatives?
> But we banned CFCs! We got lead out of gasoline! The Montreal Protocol exists and worked.
None of these were done via capitalism, they were done in opposition to it.
And I know you weren't claiming they were, but the problem is all the power centers behind global capitalism have captured government (at least in the US) completely and are doing everything in their power to strip existing regulations and make sure the only new ones aren't in the name of the common good, but only to build moats for themselves.
It is great that we solved these problems in the past, but we are increasingly not doing that sort of thing at all anymore.
The government is failing to control the problem because it got bought out by the capitalists who run the companies that continue to cause the damage. The law in the US explicitly allows this, though it's "decent" enough to hide it in a paper bag.
It's certainly a governance failure, but I'm not sure what the fix for it is, and I don't see how capitalism gets off scot-free.
People will have to vote for non-captured candidates (good luck finding them) or protest in large enough numbers that the system will change. Those people will also have to be critical thinkers to a degree that they can consciously push back against the wall of marketing and propaganda pumped out by those in power with money. And they will have to self educate since governments generally don't teach people these skills while they have them in school for 12 or more years. From my point of view the future looks pretty grim but I'm certainly hoping to be surprised or corrected!
> Marine cloud brightening could produce meaningful planetary cooling for roughly $5 billion per year at scale (NAS estimate).
Eh. Cloud brightening is a temporary hack, stops working as soon as you stop actively doing it, and isn't an alternative to switching away from fossil fuels. It's probably worth doing to push back the "ice melts and releases more carbon" thing but let's not confuse it with the extent of what needs to be done. You can't actually solve the problem for $5B/year.
> AI investment is private capital chasing returns.
Getting private capital to work for you is a good way to solve the problem. The real problem is politics.
The EV tax credits and the subsidies oil companies get were costing about the same amount of money, but we only got rid of one of them. Nuclear should cost less than fossil fuels, but we're told that fission is scary and Deepwater Horizon is nothing but spilled milk so the one with the much better environmental record has to be asymmetrically regulated into uncompetitiveness.
If we actually wanted to solve it we'd do the "carbon tax but 100% of the money gets sent back to the people as checks" thing, since then you're not screwing everyone because on average the check and the tax cancel out and corporations pay the tax too but only people get the check. Then everyone, but especially the heaviest users, would have the incentive to switch to alternative energy and more efficient vehicles etc., because everybody gets the same check but the people putting thousands of miles on non-hybrid panzers pay more in tax.
The "problem" is that it would actually work, which is highly objectionable to the oil industry and countries like Russia since it would cause their income to go away, hence politics.
Cooling the planet is neither a technical nor financial problem. The problem is that environmentalists want this to be a moral issue. They already decided on the solution. If the solution is not environmental communism with them in power, they will not have it.
Unfortunately, more people seems to care about getting AI to play SimCity than the environment.
Renewable energy technology is ready, right now today, to replace fossil fuels. All we have to do is start doing it, but the Oil lobby is just too strong apparently. There is no political will. I wish I was wrong, but I just don't see humanity pulling together to solve this one.
> Renewable energy technology is ready, right now today, to replace fossil fuels. All we have to do is start doing it, but the Oil lobby is just too strong apparently. There is no political will. I wish I was wrong, but I just don't see humanity pulling together to solve this one.
Sorry, but its really not. Perhaps in some sectors such as ground transportation, but definitely not in air and sea transport and fertilizer production, and many industrial processes. At least not at scale, where would have to make massive lifestyle sacrifices which are not politically acceptable outside of extreme authoritarian states who have no reason to do this anyway.
Solar is so cheap and getting cheaper than we can power those sectors with air-to-fuel plants. A carbon tax would go a long way towards leveling the playing field with carbon neutral or carbon negative alternatives to fossil fuels.
We are a planet of 8 billion people, interest will vary widely. Expecting everyone to swarm on the same issue at the same time is simply not how humanity has worked in the past. Innovation often happens because many people go different directions, testing what works and what doesn't. Getting AI to play SimCity may be a stepping stone to real life urban planning, or it may be nothing, who knows?
Humanity in the past has acted to eradicate Polio through global vaccinations, fix the Y2K computer bug, allow the Ozone hole to repair by banning CFCs, form a United Nations to prevent WW3 among other things.
If you're looking to experience a "climate change" simulator, kind of, the game Oxygen Not Included is an interesting chemistry sandbox where you need to balance things like O2, heat, food, etc in a "terrarium" of sorts. The parallels to climate change are similar to real life--most of the game ending problems you encounter are from short sighted thinking earlier on/kicking the can down the road.
> And, no, AI won't solve it; unfortunately, it only makes it worse.
A conclusive argument for this still seems out of reach. AI does solve some problems, and it's not exactly clear which problems AI "only makes worse". It's not clear how much energy all of our AI systems will use, and while it's tempting to outright believe they'll simply use more and more, even that's not yet clear based on arguments presented.
> It's not clear how much energy all of our AI systems will use, and while it's tempting to outright believe they'll simply use more and more, even that's not yet clear based on arguments presented.
For the last 20 years, power consumption of HPC is increased per cubic inch as systems are miniaturized and density increased. The computing capacity increased more than the power use, but this doesn't mean we didn't invent more inefficient ways to undo significant part of that improvement.
It's same for AI. Cards like Groq and inference oriented hardware doesn't consume as power as training oriented cards, but this doesn't mean total power use will reduce. On the contrary. It'll increase exponentially. Considering AI companies doesn't care about efficiency yet means we're wasting tons of energy, too.
I'll not enter into the water consumption debacle, because open-loop systems waste enormous amounts of water.
All in all, we're wasting a lot of water and energy which would sustain large cities and large number of people.
Outside AI independently uncovering some energy breakthrough there is nothing it can do to help, only hurt. We already have a source of clean, cheap, unlimited energy, we aren't rolling it out the way we could and should because some rich people would rather have us on a subscription plan where we literally light our source of energy on fire so we have to keep coming back for more.
We could certainly do better but switching isn't as simple as you imply. You also conveniently left out the part where activists historically blocked nuclear buildout.
Perhaps someday. For now, it amount of energy used to produce and run these models is astronomical. It may be the case AI is a net positive for the environment at some point, but as it stands that is nothing but speculation. The reality is it is making the situation worse.
I agree to an extent that each of us contributes in a manner, but the manner that we contribute is not certain. A person who puts more effort into reducing their own personal climate impact could be doing worse than using the same effort to enact systemic change. It could be bailing water on a sinking ship instead of fixing the leak. The problem is you might not appear to be doing anything in isolation. Just spending that extra effort at work and sending the money earned to the ship patching people so they can get what they need would fix the problem better. If you choose bailing are you not just choosing something visible but ineffective over achieving the desired outcome but just being a boring taxpayer.
As for AI, to characterise it as a "solution to problems we didn't really have" is placing your opinion over others. They may be right or wrong about it but many AI proponents firmly believe that AI can provide solutions to real world problems that we definitely have. You may disagree about their potential effectiveness, and that's ok, but at least tolerate that people might have different ideas about how to make the world better.
The difference is emblematic of the difficulty in getting attention for climate mitigation. AI succeeds because you can sell a service to an individual human which will give them advantages over other humans. Climate change mitigation fails because you are trying to sell a service to humanity which will result in a better end state over some other hypothetical imagined future. Humans make decisions, not humanity, and many of them are pretty bad with both hypotheticals and imagination. It's no wonder that a product designed to make them do better at what they do, right now is more successful than one designed to make everybody do better than what would otherwise have resulted, 50-100 years in the future when they'll likely be dead.
Any kind of workable solution to large, societal-level problems needs to deal with the principal agent issue. Society doesn't actually exist; humanity doesn't actually exist. These are abstractions we use to label the behavior of individual people. You need to operate on the level of individual people to get any sort of outcome.
(FWIW, this is a major reason why concepts like markets, capitalism, democracy, rule of law, and federalism have been successful. They work by aligning incentives so that when one person takes an action that is good for themselves, they more-or-less end up benefitting the people around them too.)
I think if the hope is that the whole world comes together to reduce emissions to a meaningful level, there is little to no chance of that. Even in the face of clear evidence, many leaders either do not believe it or do not think it will affect them in their lifetime. Capitalism and globalization march to a different drum.
The hope becomes that we can innovate our way out of the problem with technology, that is the race to the finish. AI will likely help us get there faster, but 2nd place will not be an option.
You could say industrialization was a solution to a problem we didn't have...but efficiency and profit is always the pursuit of business, and unfortunately that is a lot of the world we live in.
And I say this as someone who loves the idea of energy that doesn't come from burning things.
Imagine if we had laws that required all LLM compute to come from solar, or other sustainable power sources. We could have used the market's thirst for AI as a backchannel way to force creation of new sustainable energy.
In contrast to Elon/XAI's illegal methane fuled datacenter in memphis
As a human living on this planet, with roughly another 50 years left, I say we allow our actions to continue. We are unable to stop those in power and with high influence from doing anything; we deserve what is coming. Earth will be fine without us. Good luck everyone!
every year (month?) that passes people are saying the end of the world is right around the corner due to climate change. then 10 yrs passes, nothing happens, and they keep saying the same stuff.
the system warning you the world is in big trouble dont remind you 'their side' has been saying the sky is falling for ~40+ yrs.
I've started composting. I'm sure that'll outweigh the average Vegas visitor's emissions. /s
I'm being a bit facetious obviously, but it does feel a bit like tilting against windmills. We need policy and systemic changes, if we're relying on individuals to all collectively start doing the "right thing", we're sunk.
I agree. But at least in a democratic system, the "each and everyone of us" are politicians that each and everyone elects. So it starts from the basis, IMHO.
You laugh but if everyone changed just some of their behavior, we would be in a much better place.
We used to reuse glass jars, now it’s plastic. We used to can goods, now it’s plastic. We used to use refillable bottles, now it’s plastic. We used to have car doors that went “thunk” when you slammed them shut, now it’s plastic.
If we each are mindful of the amount of trash/litter/waste we produce and take an active step towards minimizing it, we would all be in a better place.
The problem is that a single consumer can't throw themselves into the gears of the industrial machine to slow its progress. If you stop buying food in plastic containers, the food will still be produced, and it will still be purchased by the large multinational corporations that have supply contracts with the food industry, it will just go straight into a landfill when its expiration date passes instead of being purchased. Unsold subsidized produce, which took petroleum based fertilizers to grow, and petroleum powered equipment to cultivate and distribute, will rot in a landfill. Farmers won't stop growing it if you stop buying it. The damage has already been done by the time you make the choice to purchase it or not, and it takes more than a handful of people making a conscientious decision to reduce waste to stop the waste from happening in the first place. And that's if you even have a choice in the first place. The only way to eliminate carbon emissions is to return to manual labor and subsistence farming, and since all the arable acreage is owned by land barons and the price is so high, even that is out of reach of the average consumer. We are trapped.
If you buy an electric car, consider the amount of petroleum it took to forge the steel, power the aluminum smelters, and ship the components around the world on titanic ships. How long does it take to pay off the carbon debt that was incurred by getting rid of that old polluting car? How much petroleum would it take to relocate to a locality with clean-energy powered public transit? What other externalities are incurred by such a choice, and are they greater than simply maintaining the status quo? Is it even within the means of the majority to make such a choice?
Consider that aviation is a much larger contributor to emissions. Airlines will consistently fly completely empty planes just so they can maintain a parking spot at a given airport. Or compare the carbon emissions of the military to the rest of society. Or the quantity of flare gas that gets uselessly burned off by oil rigs. All market forces which a single consumer or group of consumers is powerless to stop. And all of which are backed by investors with more clout to sway the powers that be than you or I will ever have.
As a sibling commenter said, it's a fun hobby and makes us feel a little better about ourselves, but it's a drop in the bucket. A depressing state of affairs to be sure.
I get what you're saying. I lived on a sailboat with solar so I understand... The sailboat I lived on was made with fiberglass, a petrochemical product. We would still be in a better place though even if the inevitable demise will still occur. It would just occur later.
the great thing about these sorts of personal choices is that you can make them for yourself without having to be afraid of any of the consequences that would come from actually confronting power.
I make lots of compost for my own use. Composting is at best delaying carbon release. As soon as you stop recycling materials the carbon will be released to the atmosphere. In permaculture circles the goal is to close open loops of waste/resources. If you want to permanently lock carbon in your soil, and improve fertility, make biochar. Throwing charcoal in your compost is the easiest way to make it into biochar. It really works and is a permanent amendment.
If you wanted you could even weigh the raw charcoal to quantify the carbon you have sequestered.
None of the loops are open in the sense that it's all within the earth system as a whole. The issue is extracting carbon from geological deposits. Stuff about farming and methane is temporary and short term.
I don't mean to suggest we shouldn't compost or recycle things. Just that such measures are only indirectly related to carbon emissions.
We either stop extracting hydrocarbons from deep within the crust or else the problem will persist. (I guess technically we could industrially sequester the equivalent but that would almost certainly defeat the cost-benefit of extraction.)
So are humans (we breathe out CO2 constantly!). A process emitting greenhouse gases is not an inherent reason to eschew it, so long as the entire end-to-end process isn't net-positive.
Use that compost to fertilise a tree, and you are still net negative on carbon, versus sending those food scraps to the local trash incinerator.
It's all a cycle, They put carbon in, they release carbon out. At least the average American is doing a commendable job in increasing their personal carbon sequestration.
There simply is no solution to this problem. We would all need to stop driving, flying, and eating meat. Most families (in the US, anyway) would suffer unemployment and starvation if they couldnt drive to work.
Humans will continue to do whatever is needed to survive,, and that currently involves driving, flying, and eating meat. They will only stop when those behaviours are either not possible, or hinder survival.
Work on local things to make your own city better. Plenty of stuff that's not too difficult, even if it won't fix everything:
* Multifamily housing is much more energy efficient. Is it legal to build throughout your city, or does zoning prevent it?
* Is there good bicycle infrastructure so people don't have to drive for everything?
* Does your city still have expensive parking mandates that lock in car dependency? Get rid of those. They also get in the way of places becoming more walkable.
* This one hurts, but: eat less beef.
* Advocate for good transit as another way for people to get around without driving a personal vehicle.
* What can be done in your city/region to electrify heating for homes and businesses?
* What can your region do to build more renewable energy capacity?
Those are all things where even a few voices can sometimes make a difference.
Individual habits will not be decisive in fighting climate change. Telling people to follow this advice will (a) inconvenience them in the short term (b) lull them to a false sense of security that they are fighting climate change (c) set them up for disappointment when climate change happens anyway, and (d) worst of all, these suggestions let the real perpetrators off the hook.
If you want to see real progress on the climate, a few thousand people changing their daily habits is not enough. Governments need to take action and hold industry to account. That looks to be an increasingly unlikely event, but that doesn't justify taking ineffective action instead as a placebo.
It reminds me of the '90s when we are all told that recycling was necessary for saving the environment. Decades later, we'll still spending time sorting our garbage, despite evidence that no one wants recyclable waste, it still ends up dumped somewhere, and it costs more money to handle. [1]
But individual behavior is not about preventing climate change, it’s about doing what’s right. It’s wrong to pollute the environment, one way or another. A single person not stealing won’t reduce the crime rate in a country yet it is the right thing to do.
That's not a fair comparison. Everything we do affects the environment. The goal is to limit that effect where it matters. It's not ethical, it's practical.
Maybe, but it does handle individual moral culpability.
Each kg of ghg is some number of deaths. The goal should be to lower it as much as possible.
I’m lucky enough that I can afford to live somewhere that I don’t need a car, and electricity is generated from renewables. I know it’s not possible for everyone, but if you can make it happen where you live, then the number of deaths you will be responsible for will greatly decrease.
My advice is to install air conditioning, and choose a place to live that will be affected as little as possible. Avoid the Maldives or New Orleans, perhaps choose somewhere a little hilly and cool with good connectivity.
> Apart from eating less beef, every single suggestion in the post your are responding to is about infrastructure and advocacy, not individual habits.
Exactly. That's why it's ineffective to evangelize this as individual effort. If you want to live in a multifamily home, they have to be zoned, funded, and built. That requires lobbying the government, moral rectitude.
I did not write 'individual habits' - you did. Things like zoning are not individual choices at all. But they are something that you and a few friends might be able to influence at city hall.
None of this "lulls" involved people, nor lets anyone off the hook.
These are things that ordinary people without a lot of money or power can work on today in a country like, say, the US, where the federal government is in the hands of evil people and is not going to be doing much in terms of climate change in the near future.
The federal government may be a lost cause for the moment, but your city or state might provide an avenue to get some things done. Those things won't fix the whole problem, but they're still progress, and the connections you make while doing those things will be useful in future, bigger fights.
> These are things that ordinary people without a lot of money or power can work on toda
I agree: people can work on this individually. And it won't make a lick of difference.
How many items on this list require government action? How many require corporations' cooperation. What am I going to do, build the bike lanes myself as a hobby?
> these suggestions let the real perpetrators off the hook.
This can't be said enough. It simply cannot be said enough. It cuts right to the heart of how we view the world in the west: as autonomous, separate individuals, with no communal counterweight and certainly no model of power (some entities in the world have vastly more power than others) We assume that because our constitutions grant us equal rights or whatever, we all have equal responsibility and equal power.
But polluters, the biggest sources of emissions, have way more power and way, way less responsibility. And yet we continue to tell ourselves to focus on our own individual behaviors to combat global heating. The effects are real, but tiny, and our elites continue getting away with our annihilation.
For those in the US, I'd add lobbying your congresspeople to support the revival of the Energy Permitting Reform Act. It's something that didn't make it across the line before the end of the last congress, but basically, making it easier to bring new generation capacity on the electrical grid disproportionately benefits renewables, because they make up the vast majority of wattage waiting in the queue. As we've seen by the explosion of deployment in less regulated grids (Texas, and most of the world), the economics now favor solar+storage and wind, we just have to let people build as much of it as they want to.
> I feel like especially the West is regressing on climate change with the rise of the far right
Is it the "far right"? Or is it that technology and fertility have actually lowered the risks substantially?
Solar plus batteries, right now, seems to be the cheapest form of new energy. Given that, you would expect most of new energy to be "green". (And if you look at the stats, that seems to be coming true.)
Electrification of transportation is happening quickly. China is cranking out cheap electric cars that are generally better than ICE cars of yesterday. And the world seems to be transitioning.
And fertility rates are dropping everywhere. So the amount of people we will need to support in the future continues to decline.
I've mostly stopped worrying about climate change. Not because I don't think it is real. But because I think we are clearly on the path to mitigating the worse scenarios.
Yes, it is. They're committed to "Every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out". [0]. They keep saying this to us, and we don't seem to believe them. I like your optimism, and I'm not denying a lot of what you're saying -- renewables fast becoming the cheapest energy. But that's not deterring people: the far right here in the US are about to dismantle the government's legal rationale for regulating emissions. They're laughing at us right now, doing victory laps. They're telling polluters to take the gloves off.
These people are terrorists, extremists, and they're in charge of the world's single most powerful economy and military. They're obsessed with domination, with doing violence to the weak and the poor and to nature. It's pure Freudian thanatos.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the "far-right", but you seem to be implying this 'every molecule' quote (or more charitably, the goal) is of the "far-right" in the U.S. In reality the quote is from Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman. I mean, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Saudi Arabia is considered far-right governed but I doubt your wording is giving the correct impression to readers.
Yes, I know it's a Saudi quote. They're also far right. They're bosom buddies with the same right-wing (Democratic) and far-right (Republican) US economic and governmental elites for decades. I don't think anyone would dispute this. In fact, it's so humdrum a set of facts that I think the burden would be on someone else to show that "no, actually, US elites are not into the whole 'every molecule of hydrocarbon' thing". But their behavior doesn't indicate that they disagree.
It's thus, yes, the correct impression for readers.
The Heritage Foundation (Project 2025, far-right, anti-climate) is working with the Heartland Institute (spreading climate science denial across UK / EU) / Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC, Jordan Peterson)
They do not like EU rules that hold US firms accountable to climate laws.
Sorry, I'm not saying the far-right isn't (whatever) anti-climate change.
I just meant that I don't think the lack of concern is necessarily due to them. I think it may have more to do with the reality that we are already on a good path.
There are actions you can cheer on, like China's quick adoption of renewable energy. You can't make it happen yourself but you can bring peoples' attention to good things, encourage those within your circle of influence, and vote for representation that shares your views.
As for what "we" collectively can do... let's assume you are speaking of areas of research. We may need to focus on researching adaptation techniques for the areas that are going to be the hardest hit, or that have the fewest resources to cope. It's a sad topic but it may be needed. Assume the worst, hope for the best, and plan for what you can.
The answer to that question is always the same. Join a party and become politically active. Or, if you really can't find any party that represents your views, join an NGO and become active in it. If you're too lazy for that, consider paying an NGO that does spectacular actions that have a public impact. And never vote for any parties that don't do anything for climate control, of course.
this is like a tiktok rage bait way of thinking. western nations have largely peaked on carbon emissions. china is slowing down and will peak soon. there are a lot of countries that still are growing in emissions, sure, but you are not looking at this scientifically.
Scientifically according to the article, the world is on an emissions path to 2.8°C warming, not accounting for the extra rate of warming we've seen in recent years. And this puts us at greater risk of hitting tipping points into an even warmer planet. So the status quo isn't cutting it.
If you are a US citizen, voting Trump out might be unironically the most significant decision your country could make for the next 100 years of mankind.
Not because the alternative is so great, but because Trump is so horrible that it's not even a question. We really don't need someone who doesn't even acknowledge climate change in charge of the world's biggest economy.
As a 52 year old who never believed we would take climate change seriously (and who is more convinced than ever I was correct as society actually regresses on this issue) I did what I had to do -- I purposefully didn't have children.
Good luck to those of you who did.
This ain't my problem. I'll be dead (or close enough) when the shit fully hits the fan and won't have doomed any offspring to the upcoming migration/resources wars
Not an expert in any of that, but I think overall impact may be greater if people with sufficient means take a more hands-on approach that grants visibility of where money is going. I lean environmentalist be the truth is that there’s a good deal of well-marketed snake oil in the environmental space.
The issue with quibbling over impact is my experience is that people end up doing neither. I recently started a Master's in ecology so I don't have a good idea of what's cost effective right now but I know the field is pretty shockingly underfunded (both for general research and conservation projects). I learned the "fun" fact recently that bird populations in the US are down ~30% in the last 55 years.
A fair assessment. Doing nothing is not the answer to the risk of doing the wrong thing. It's probably worth some time spent on due diligence when selecting groups to donate to, regardless.
Die a horrible death while watching a group of hateful people scream that it’s all the immigrants fault and that they ate all the cats and dogs, I guess …
Fear and egoism is probably causing the rise of the far-right, fear of not having enough, and egoism of "Why do I have to share?" (and being dumb enough to believe "make it great again" lies). And then the idiotic "center" who doesn't want to lose voters start moving to the right. With the decaying planet less capable of producing food, there'll be less, and there'll be more of that scarcity mindset (although do we even have scarcity, maybe it's just the uneven distribution, with billionaires eating cows that's been fed grass that's grown with the purest glacier water flown by helicopter from the Swiss alps...).
In one aspect, the autocratic rule of Xi Jinping has a positive: "We're going to cover the whole mountain with solar panels, and force electrification of cars." and there's no busybodies protesting and threatening to vote his party out of office.
Ever admitting the positives of autocrats for their apparent efficiency disqualifies surrounding suppositions. And that's not an ad hominen, that's just Bayesian.
the west is regressing on climate because, quite frankly, almost anything we do is pointless. we're not the ones who need to do anything to have an impact on the world. the entities that must do something don't want to
> Policymakers and the public, however, remain largely unaware of the risks posed by such a practically irreversible transition
Most people still underestimate what it means for the earth system to change from the current stable state into another state, which might need many years to become stable again. And that new stable state might be a lot less favourable for us humans.
People really fail to grasp the significance of this part.
One of our most common apocalyptic fantasies lays this out quite well: nuclear annihilation. The common narrative is about the post-apocalyptic world and rebuilding. But this presumes a new normal has been established.
With climate change we will continue to experience more extreme changes at a faster rate over time with no chance of a "new normal" in our lives.
It took hundreds of thousands of years for humans to develop agriculture. It's no coincidence that this development happened during one of the most stable periods of climate the planet has ever seen. People love to wax poetic on human adaptability, but we were effectively playing on "easy" mode.
While the other side of climate change might be a more hostile earth, the transition period will be worse because you can't adapt. In our lifetimes we may live to see a period of record heat waves in Europe, followed by a transition of Europe to that is dramatically colder (and who knows, maybe back again).
The other major problem is as stability decreases so does our ability to predict the future. It's hard to even know what we might be facing in the coming years, but high variance is usually not great for complex life.
It's not that policymakers are unaware. It's that some of them are allergic to true things that they find inconvenient, and have made false premises a pillar of their platform. Calling that "unaware" is giving them too much credit and understanding.
I think it's both. That large shifts on a global scale of everyday things that we take for granted as well as historical differences on a geological time scale are genuinely difficult for non-experts to wrap their heads around.
And also as you say that many politicians are disincentivized to try in the first place.
Thinking this is "bothsidesing" is you contributing to the problem. The Democrats and Republicans have both abandoned scientific rigor on this topic. When either talks about it, it is almost purely an excuse to smuggle in unrelated policy objectives.
A group of politicians can have strong disagreements where none has a grasp on reality. That is where we are with climate change. It is one of the reasons I stopped working on it at a policy level.
Many may also believe that they and the only parts of their con$tituency they care about will be able to avoid the consequences. And some may have come to believe the party line; if you repeat a falsehood often enough as a loyalty test, you may forget that it's a falsehood.
For business trips, the choice is between two hours and two days, and unfortunately my body goes haywire if I don't eat some meat at least a couple of days per week (talking about 200g/300g total though. Not kilos of it).
On the other hand, I'd happily take trains as more high speed lines open in my country, and reduce meat consumption to bare minimum my body can tolerate.
For personal transportation, going fully electric won't be possible due to my circumstances, but I'd happily switch to a hybrid which would convert 75% of my in-city travel to electric (which I'm actively planning to do).
I also work on projects which tries to reduce footprint of data centers and computation, so there's that.
> my body goes haywire if I don't eat some meat at least a couple of days per week
Isn't this just a nutrient deficiency in whatever you were eating instead of meat? Meat is "convenient" because it's high in a wide variety of minerals, vitamins, essential amino acids, etc. that your body can't make. (The animals mostly can't make them either but guess what livestock eats.) There are plants that contain each of them, but few if any that contain all of them, and then if you're missing one you're going to have a bad time. So the problem there is almost certainly that you need to eat some different plants than that the thing you were missing is only found in animals.
I can't speak for the OP but it is well-established that there are significant genetic adaptations to the amount of meat in the diet, or a loss of genetic adaptation for metabolizing some plant staples. This is no different than the genetics that cause significant variation in the ability to metabolize legumes, lactose, alcohol, etc. Local optimizations.
There are ethnic populations that have reduced capacity to efficiently metabolize some plant-based diets due to thousands of years of selection pressure (or lack thereof). A diverse plant-based diet won't kill them, they simply lack the enzymes to have a good experience with it because for thousands of years they had little use for those genes.
It is a relatively small population globally, as it tends to coincide with regions that weren't conducive to supporting large populations thousands of years ago. The current distribution has significant overlap with the developed world though.
I have to imagine that someone with meat-adapted genetics is going to suffer quality of life issues on a purely plant-based diet. Everyone has a set of foods like that.
Might be lack of understanding of essential nutrients and associated planning. But also might not be related to that at all. The gut microbiome is impacted by your food choices, varies from person to person, and can have severe impacts on your overall health.
Nope. Some aminoacids and compounds are only present in meat. These aminoacids and compounds are the ones which boosted our brain capacity and allowed us to evolve to that point.
I eat (and like to eat) tons of veggies, yet I feel my brain capacity declines and I crave esp. meat if I don't eat it for a long time (for two weeks or whatnot). As I said, I don't need two ribeye steaks per week. My body is very good at signaling what it needs, and I prefer to listen to it.
What I eat is Mediterranean cuisine 99% of the time, and it's pretty well balanced, yet eliminating meat is not possible for me. So, my diet is not junk food peppered by meat. It's mostly veggies and legumes (beans, lentil, whatnot), peppered with meat. Yet, I need it, and this is something I tested over and over more than two decades.
On the other hand, my wife is completely opposite of me. She can go a month or so without meat. So, not every person is the same, and assuming that every human being works the same is a big mistake made by modern medicine. For example, my brain chemistry is also different and I consume B12 much more than a typical human, so I need to use B-complex supplements more.
Notice that many of the plants high in some of these aren't that common, e.g. what percentage of people regularly eat pumpkin seeds or spirulina?
> So, not every person is the same, and assuming that every human being works the same is a big mistake made by modern medicine.
It's not that you need the same diet as every other person, it's that you have to eat the specific things you need, which a random selection of plants may or may not contain in the right amounts.
> For example, my brain chemistry is also different and I consume B12 much more than a typical human, so I need to use B-complex supplements more.
B12 in particular is a pain because it's only produced by bacteria (commonly found in soil) so the options are unwashed vegetables, meat from animals that eat unwashed vegetables, or supplements. And on top of that because of the way it's absorbed, a B12 pill either has to be taken multiple times a day several hours apart or has to be 100x as much to make up for the absorption rate falling off a cliff after a threshold amount which is below the RDA.
It’s hard to convince people not to eat food and take a plane when billionaires do whatever they like at 1000x the carbon footprint, when millions of people drive to work and when base load power is built on fossil fuels. To me eating protein and taking a plane seem benign.
If the plane doesn't use synthetic fuel that's a political problem that I can't realistically solve as an individual.
The methane from raising animals exists in an overall equilibrium. It isn't extractive and the total magnitude of the effects of that chemical system is comparatively minor.
Water vapor (clouds) is a stonger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. We already got measurably higher temperatures, so we also have higher water evaporation, and from the last 5 years it looks like it happens every year.
So the runaway is already happening, until something stops it near hothouse conditions or hopefully earlier than that.
Thank you for saying this. If you want to know the answer to what causes climate problems, you need to go back to the era of dinosaurs, where CO2 levels were multiple times higher than today. Trees could thrive because they could breathe in a lot of CO2. Dinosaurs got so big because there were plenty of food. How could dinosaurs happily live with such high CO2 levels? The key is that there were plenty of forests. Peter Wohlleben's book "The Power of Trees: How Ancient Forests Can Save Us if We Let Them" explains how forests naturally circulate water.
The climate system in those prehistoric times was in a different stable state. The world that we live in has different ecosystems that are well-adapted to the current stable state and we will likely face a mass-extinction event once the ecological scales tip over.
The problem is also the speed in which the CO2 levels are rising. Such a massive change in such a short geological time is very unusual.
Water vapor (clouds) also reflects sunlight. So it's complicated. We know the planet has had higher CO2 and higher temperatures in the past, and it did not "run away"
No citations to hand but Antarctica used to be temperate rainforest and many of the conditions of present day tropical rainforests and savanna could be found much farther from the equator.
We can't say for sure that the current feedback loops will be identical to those that did or did not exist in the past. Differences in the initial state could result in different outcomes.
For example was there as much methane trapped in the arctics during the last time CO2 was high?
Does the rate of the increase of CO2 and temperature have an effect? Because it's currently getting hotter far faster (absurdly so) than any other period we have records for.
It might not run away to infinity, but it may well run away in the sense that the rate of change could continue to increase even if humans stop contributing to it.
> Water vapor (clouds) also reflects sunlight. So it's complicated. We know the planet has had higher CO2 and higher temperatures in the past, and it did not "run away"
Yes. But stars like ours burn brighter as they move through their lifetimes, and the Sun is a bit brighter now than it was back when we had higher CO2 levels. That's why a runaway GHG didn't happen back then, but is basically guaranteed to happen within a billion years.
True runaway (i.e. oceans boiling / Venus) cannot happen on Earth unless you significantly increase incoming radiation stream (or alternatively halve the planet's albedo).
The runaway effect is scary b/c at certain temperature (~400K) atmosphere consisting predominantly of water vapor looses its ability to radiate out more heat up until 1600K.
What is generally not understood is that our current icehouse phase is rare.
'A "greenhouse Earth" is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history.
'Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously... Earth's current icehouse state is known as the Quaternary Ice Age and began approximately 2.58 million years ago.'
> Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history.
And during those periods there were no human beings. And no agriculture, or unstable globalised economiies, or dense urban societies vulnerable to disruption.
It is, of course, interesting that our planet has this long, varied existence that pre-dates us. But it is of little use in understanding how to get us out of the hole we're in. And it is arguably dangerous, because it misleads people into thinking that we have the capacity to adapt to such conditions, when we manifestly don't.
To put a different shade on the meaning, this climate period is rare, easily disturbed, and difficult to restore even with vastly more powerful technology.
The more common greenhouse state is unlikely to lead to a Venus runaway, but it will be hostile to us.
We might very well require the rare climate, and perish in the common.
The CO2 graph over decades is painfully clear.[1] From 321ppm in 1970 to 428ppm in mid-2005, measured in Hawaii atop Mauna Loa, far from any major CO2 sources. Everything else is noisy and statistical, but the CO2 measurement increases very steadily.
Go ask Google about China and the 3rd world contribution to global pollution. The West is bending over backwards to 'fight climate change' and a huge chunk of the world is just doing whatever they want, completely negating all of the west efforts.
We can't cut emissions fast enough politically, but we can race towards economically viable fusion power which would solve the problem from the supply side and would make industrial scale carbon sequestration not insane, for a century or so, until waste heat itself can't be radiated fast enough even in 250 ppm CO2 atmosphere - but that's a problem for the XXII century.
Economically viable fusion power uses the fusion reactor in the sky beaming energy to us for free that we can collect with relatively cheap, simple, decentralized, solid state, and extremely long lasting (decades) power transmission recievers.
At least considering only temperature, it seems changes are never going to be irreversible since both stratospheric aerosol injection and intentional nuclear winter should always be able to cool down global temperatures
>Despite decades of research and sophisticated computational climate modeling, the magnitude and pace of these events have surprised scientists, raising questions about how well current climate projections capture risk.
"Yet again, worse than we predicted."
When this always-revise-in-one-direction phenomenon happened with the electron charge, it was considered a priori "proof" that scientists were fudging their data to match expectations. The Millikan Oil Drop Experiment is still studied in fundamentals of science class.[0]
If climate scientists are constantly revising their predictions upward, then this is equally "proof" that climate scientists are under pressure to revise their estimates downward. Far from being "alarmist," such terms are actually cudgels used to discourage climate scientists from making their data look too bad.
The result is the predictable fudging of climate data to look better than it really is.
Precisely, it's just selection effect. There's always uncertainty, and scientists are heavily incentivized to "prune" models that show large effect sizes. The result is the observed systematic underestimations, punctuated by (suspiciously monotonic) upward revisions any time the new data arrives.
> During the mid-to-late Pleistocene (∼1.2 million to 11,700 years before present) ... with temperatures ranging roughly between −6°C and +2°C relative to the pre-industrial mean of ∼14°C
Does this mean during mid-to-late Pleistocene it used to be -6C to +2C, or does it mean it used to be 8C to 16C?
(If the former, then how did early humanoids, and many other animals, survive such cold?)
I really think the key to addressing climate change should have started 20 years ago in a lot of primary schools, whereby the curriculum includes subjects that are more tailored to solving problems with capturing or converting C02 (eg sciences) so that these students are thinking about these problems when graduating and starting businesses to solve the challenges (hopefully with gov incentives at same time).
We have had the technology to decarbonise the grid since the 1950s and we have known about the problem since the 1970s. Politics however has driven the use of CO2 instead of nuclear energy and required the drastic development of high end wind and solar. Even that wasn't enough, it also had to get considerably cheaper than CO2 producing energy sources and the entire time the entire worlds population has been subjected to massive amounts of propaganda to keep burning oil, gas and coal. This transition was possible 55 years ago when the problem was first surfaced, the political will just wasn't there so it didn't happen.
Its not an education issue, it has always been governments getting in the way and refusing to change the power source. its why I think Solar will win out, it can be deployed on an individual house level unlike everything else and that changes things enormously.
20 years ago was when Al Gore’s influential documentary An Inconvenient Truth first appeared. Almost everyone I knew discussed it, including primary school pupils. Guess what, we do have better tools today than 20 years ago to fight climate change, such as practical and useful electric vehicles to replace CO2-emitting conventional vehicles.
Are there any attempts to start geo-engineering to fix this? I'm assuming there will be no attempt to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere, can we at least do something to take it back out? Can we use solar or renewables to possibly do that at scale?
Putting sulfur into the right layers of the atmosphere seems to be the currently best viable options. It's not overly expensive, either. It acts fast and is reversible.
So far all of the carbon capture techniques (apart from growing forests and keeping them protected) have been pretty unsuccessful, and/or don't scale well.
That leaves us in the realm of solutions that may be very likely to disrupt our ecosystem themselves, like genetically-engineering algae/phytoplankton to improve ocean carbon sequestration
> apart from growing forests and keeping them protected)
I’m in a loop. I must be.
How are people still basic at this? No. Forests are not “carbon capture” devices.
Plant a big forest and “protect” (which means thinning it, unless you are California) and in 100 years most trees have died, rotted, released their carbon.
There is so much wrong with the alarmism here, so much hand waving away of scale when it is inconvenient… that it’s like people are doing more damage than good when they jump up and down over this stuff.
It’s almost like if the jumping up and down and alarmism has a different purpose, a whole separate game removed from the issues at hand.
I don't think carbon capture / sequestration is going to do enough, but if we continue slipping into this trajectory I think there will be more support for changing reflectivity (spraying sea water, or putting particles in the stratosphere).
There are currently no power efficient and scalable ways to remove carbon dioxide from air or water.
Renewables are considered woke technology which mock old and masculine fossil fuel tech, which feel threatened by all these white spinny things, hence renewable energy projects are being actively discouraged or canceled altogether.
You know, we'd be all woke and weird if our cars don't have 8 cylinders and make wroom sounds. Same for our chimneys and power architecture. Woke electrons should be banned. We need masculine, fossil based electrons, which are more powerful per electron than wind/solar based fluffy/hippie ones.
> Renewables are considered woke technology which mock old and masculine fossil fuel tech...
This is mostly a US problem at this point. The rest of the world is adopting renewables considerably faster than anyone expected (and despite the best efforts of the current administration, the adoption curve is accelerating even in the US).
That said, it's still apparent that even optimistic estimates of renewable energy adoption aren't fast enough to fix the climate crisis on their own.
If only there was a clean, nearly limitless source of energy, where the waste for hundreds of years of energy could be stored in less than a square kilometer.
If such a thing existed, we could be sure that environmentalists and leftists would have openly embraced it, rather than nip it at the bud 50 years ago. Because they are Good People™. And we should definitely listen to them now because they Follow The Science™.
> If such a thing existed, we could be sure that environmentalists and leftists would have openly embraced it, rather than nip it at the bud 50 years ago. Because they are Good People™. And we should definitely listen to them now because they Follow The Science™.
The issue with current politics wrt environment is environmentalists and leftists? This feels like a smoker blaming their smoking habit on anti-drug associations not being good enough rather than big tobacco.
People may be downvoting you because they think you're not speaking in good faith. But I think this touches on an important issue which is the credibility of politicians when it comes to bringing the science hammer down (in the form of policy). Stuff like the junk science behind those old CA plastic straw policies, the seesawing on Covid prevention and lab-leak denialism, the energy efficient dryers that don't work (this last one is more hearsay to me, and issue of CBA rather than scientific fact perhaps.) I think if politicians can get their shit straight on communicating mature science thoroughly and accurately it could go a long way to getting people to work together.
But that source of power is a high-modernist invention that is unnatural and especially dangerous because of a few high-profile accidents. We have to shut it all down!
Surely nothing has ever done wrong with this limitless source of clean energy to give people pause? There's no uninhabitable areas of the Earth due to this?
i'm not sure there are, from a science point of view... From political point of view there are probably only 2 locations in one country... vs a gigantic energy output on planetary scale...
Unless the fake reality starts to crack with the Epstein and other current events and humanity's coming of age will happen. Even if a hundred years later than Bonhoeffer though it would.
What's fascinating and dismaying to me is that it's obvious that there exists sufficient capital and capability in the west to fix this.
I always wondered if we just lacked the ability to mobilize to solve big problems anymore but now I look at this 7% US GDP being allocated to AI datacentres and I realize that it isn't a lack of ability, it's a lack of desire.
Imagine if we had ram shortages because all the silicon was being diverted towards making solar panels. Imagine if we had copper shortages because it was going to the windings on wind mills. Imagine if all these economic disruptions were just temporary and for a better cause or eliminating carbon emissions and eventually moving to sequestration of carbon.
Instead we get chatbots. And funny picture makers.
Not the same silicon. Wafer fabs make pure crystals. Photovoltaics use polysilicon.
Obviously you mean purified silicon, but, remember silicon is what the Earth has in abundance (yeah I know it’s energy intensive, and there exist such profession as sand prospector.)
And yet, the only reasonable action to take is to flag this topic and move along with the "humanity has always found a way out, technology will save us. Remember, we were supposed to drown in horse manure!"
Why? Because candidly looking at those risks as a society means deep collective existential dread, which automatically means an immediate civilizational collapse.
So I'm guessing some of our elite is actually ignorant and the other part is willfully shutting the hell up on this subject to let our civilization run on fumes a few more years.
It's unfortunate because a rapid civilizational collapse could give humanity as a species a better chance of survival.
Meanwhile all these other AI threads everybody’s worried about losing their jobs
Not realizing we’re gonna go extinct here in the next thousand years unless something solves it
Since humans are incapable of doing this there’s only one possible option: To create something smarter than us and give it the power to solve it because we cannot
Omg people its - the bullshit mascaraing as science these days is exhausting. Earth is on a hot house trajectory regardless of climate. The sun expands and gets hotter - so do we. Its literally then simplest game structure there is - get to the next hop before you die. The next hop is Mars. I don’t understand why this isn’t inherently obvious.
It is important to keep reminding ourselves that climate change is a real problem for humanity and that each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions. It is a problem that requires solutions, but implementing these solutions involves so much inertia that it can sometimes be painful.
And let's contrast that with the AI hype. It's more the opposite, a kind of solution to problems we didn't really have, but are now being persuaded we do. It would be sensible to invest an equal share of the resources currently being pumped into AI with uncertain outcomes into the complex issue of climate change. And, no, AI won't solve it; unfortunately, it only makes it worse.
> each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.
I have to disagree here.
This idea of a consumer-level personal responsibility for the fossil energy industry's externalized costs is a lot like the plastic producers shifting blame for waste by saying that it's the consumers' fault for not recycling. It's transparent blame-shifting.
The fossil energy industry pulls the carbon out of the ground and distributes it globally. Then it buys and sells politicians and, through mass media, votes, to ensure they maintain the industry's hegemony.
You only have to look at the full-blown slide of the US into a despotic petrostate to understand the causes of the climate crisis.
Hank Green did a good short video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvAznN_MPWQ
TL;DW: It is important that individuals show that there is a real problem and that they perform actions that address the problem. This demonstrative behaviour leads to social dynamics where more people feel encouraged to perform actions and to drive larger change.
You need to start somewhere.
While true we did that years ago and the other side is simply ignoring it.
Worse, the people we sold the idea too are stuck on it: they're convinced the solution must and totally be the performance, not the result.
I agree with you that consumer-level personal responsibility is absolutely not the way to go. To a certain extent I try to non-dogmatically "do the right thing", but I know it's simply a cute hobby.
The only solution is systemic. The incentives need to be in order for businesses and consumers to do the right thing not because it is the right thing, but because it's cheaper or more convenient. That can only be implemented via legislation and investment of public resources, hence from the political level.
And what determines whether the politicians in charge are ones who will implement the changes needed to mitigate the problem, rather than ones who will keep alive the system which is intensifying it? Well, we're back to square one: each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.
Moving from fossil is less convenient, not more. So, we're stuck.
And yet, we're not completely stuck. It is absolutely clear that not enough has been done to reduce our carbon emissions, and we're on a bad path on track to ~2.5°C warming in the next century. However, something has been done, and if nothing had been done we could easily be on track to >4°C global warming. That would be much worse.
So, how did we achieve what little we have? Well, because many people have cared, and have made the right decisions. Not enough people, or maybe not good-enough decisions, but some people, and somewhat good decisions.
So, what were the decisions which brought us down from an apocalyptic +4°C to a very bad 2.5°C path? Was it enough consumers making environmentally conscious choices, even if they were less convenient or more expensive. No. It was enough voters wanting their leaders to do something, even if it wasn't quite enough, but it was something. And something isn't nothing.
We will never have enough people voting with their wallet to fight climate change, because our rational understanding of the big-picture cannot overpower our intuitive day-to-day choices. However, we may have enough people voting with their ballot to fight climate change, because the rational big-picture can, sometimes, decide whom we vote for.
are you sure we aren't on the >4°C path?
AI could very well put us back on it.
For how long though? Solar and wind are very competitive now, electric cars have been good enough to transition to for over a decade, other industries can be decarbonized with the right incentives and enough investment. It's not like there aren't any ideas for how to farm or produce steel cleanly. And nuclear reactors can be made safer and cheaper now.
Seems more like a lack of political will with powerful lobbying interests opposing it and misleading the public. Fossil fuel companies could have listened to their scientists in the 1970s and changed their business models for a transition to cleaner tech a lot sooner.
For a long time to come. The energy density of fossil fuels is very high (about 50x higher than that of lithium ion batteries), there's a ton of infrastructure for handling and transporting them and a ton of infrastructure for using them.
They get turned into plastics and energy, two things which civilization feeds on voraciously.
It's not just inertia that keeps them going.
> The energy density of fossil fuels is very high (about 50x higher than that of lithium ion batteries)
That doesn't make sense. Batteries are an energy container, they're not energy itself. How can it be compared to a fuel? The direct counterpart to oil or coal is wind or solar radiation itself, batteries are used to amortize the supply and store an excess for emergency use, but otherwise those types of energy just immediately go into powering the grid.
The economic case for renewable power is actually extremely good, because unlike fossil fuels, they're effectively infinite and don't need complex infrastructure to extract. They're free. You only need a power plant that directly converts them into power. If we were just able to shift fossil fuel demand towards producing goods like plastics, this would already be massive. However, a lot of powerful people are deeply invested into fossil fuels and will do anything to tip the scales into their favor, despite gradually losing in the energy sector.
It's an immense uphill struggle if you tried to get people to adjust to where transport is less available, and encourage living or working at closer ranges or conversely long range shipping/travel/vacations seen as more of a luxury. Just thinking about it I'm reminded of the outrage that was fabricated/stirred up over "15 minute cities" in the UK where the idea that you'd be able to get to most things you need day-to-day in a 15 minute walk was warped into a scare of state checkpoints, fines and surveillance. Or the retreat from working from home.
It's a huge adjustment from how the past few decades have established expectations, and it'll take a big force to change quickly, similar to covid even though that was short term in hindsight.
Really? Wind and solar are cheaper. Electric cars and motorcycles are more fun to drive.
Fossil fuels are profitable for a small group of powerful people, and they spend vast amounts of money to spread falsehoods.
Its a case of prisoner's dilemma. Individuals making the proposed lifestyle changes in order to make a genuine dent in AGW amount to jumping on the tracks in order to stop a freight train.
This is the one issue where I feel some sympathy with the right. I hate "Virtue signaling" about as much as they do. I'm sorry, but if you are going to snap at people over eating beef, while you fly/drive all over the country/world unnecessarily, you are absolute full of shyte.
I am not a vegan. My social world in D.C./NYC has many secular, left-wing, vegans. Many of them are friends or loved ones. They demonstrably speak their mind in front of me on countless issues on which we disagree.
I have dined with them countless times at restaurants where they order vegan and I don't. I have never once been "snapped at" about my dietary decisions. Some of these people have dedicated years of their life to non-human animal rights activism.
So I am very skeptical that this shaming occurs at any appreciable scale. I suspect it is mostly psychological projection: one doubts the morality of one's decisions, judges oneself harshly, but experiences this as the judgement of others.
Thank you for articulating this so succinctly.
Don't forget buying mountains worth of crap that gets used for a month or less and trashed.
Right to Repair and some type of incentives that actually rewarded it would probably do more globally than most other consumer level solutions.
Prisoner's dilemma is a bad reference here.
Prisoner's dilemma is about situation when optimal outcome requires cooperation from all participants.
In the situation with climate change, personal decisions of 99% of Earth population do not really matter.
You are correct that this is not a prisoner's dilemma, it is a tragedy of the commons[0]. However, if a wizard could magically control the "personal decisions of 99% of Earth population" and make them optimal for reducing CO2 emissions then, believe me, climate change could be trivially solved.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
It is a classic cooperation problem. Perhaps not prisoners dilemma. Perhaps not at individual scale. Probably tragedy of the commons.
Cooperation is not consuming fossil fuels. Defection is consuming fossil fuels.
If you cooperate and other defects you suffer climate impact and expensive energy (expensive everything, worse economic growth than others).
If you defect and other cooperates you suffer climate impact but at least you get cheap energy (cheap everything, more economic growth than others).
People, nations, corporations, etc don’t stop using fossil fuels because they incur a penalty against their competitors if they volunteer to and their competitors don’t.
The assumption here is that fossil fuels are actually cheaper. But an electric car pays back the higher upfront cost in fuel savings in significantly fewer miles than most cars will have put on them. Solar generates power at a lower cost per kWh than coal.
The fossil fuel industry has to be actively sustained through subsidies and government regulation hostile to alternatives. Maybe that wasn't true 50 years ago before the alternatives got viable and cheap, but if it's not true now then why did we stop subsidizing electric cars while we still subsidize oil companies?
WDYM personal decisions don't matter? Industrial and agricultural sectors, which both in sum contribute 50% of total greenhouse gas emissions, produce what is in demand from consumers. Another 15% of emissions is from personal vehicles. Changing personal habits is the only way we can ever reach some utopian climate targets. Utopian because old habits die hard.
I never understood this. The companies sold you fossil fuel, you burnt it and got benefits out of it: transportation, energy, heating, constructions, fertilizers and food, etc. You want them to pay for the negative consequences of your fossil fuel consumption while you keep all the generated benefits?
> You want them to pay for the negative consequences of your fossil fuel consumption
No I want them to pay for the negative consequences of the lies they spread. I paid them for fuel, and I got fuel. I did not think I was paying for lies and I never wanted them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...
Where does the chain end? I burn diesel in my tractor to harvest corn. Should the feedlot that buys my corn pay for the tractor’s emissions? Should the slaughterhouse that processes the cattle pay? Should the supermarket that stocks the beef pay? Should the family who grills the steak on Sunday pay? Or just the one who eats the largest portion?
You either tax the fuel and pass the cost down to the consumers, or decide as a society to share the cost of the externalities and use general taxation for that.
So… it’s like you completely understand the issue :)
And obviously, you tax the fuel at the source, right when it comes out of the ground. Higher prices get passed down, changing behavior because the products externalities are priced correctly from the start.
You can. Everything- including basic things like food, transportation, construction, healthcare- will become more expensive, of course. My objection was to ask fossil fuel companies to pay after you already bought and burned your fuel cheap.
Here, in the first scenario it directly punishes consumers for consuming more. In the second, it punishes everyone equally on everyone's consumption, which is unlikely to lead to behavior change. So yes, we should tax fossil fuels much more.
However, the first scenario will pass the increased cost of fuel down to the consumers affecting poorer people disproportionately. Example: some good that is produced with fossil fuels (including food) will become too expensive for low-income people, while richer (and more polluting) people will not feel the difference that much.
If you go for general taxation, you distribute the cost proportionally to income, making rich people pay more. Probably the ideal is a mix of both.
Why should all of society pay for these externalities? If some people manage to improve their energy supply and don't require dirty fuels, why should they be forced to subsidize those who won't?
Taxing the carbon at the source is simply correctly pricing it, and because it makes it impossible to shift the externalities away from the producer it fixes the accounting problem that falsely makes fossil fuels appear cheap.
The amount of fossil fuels that a working class individual burns are a rounding error compared to what big companies burn. How many private jets are in the air right now? Even if you drive the most energy inefficient truck ever produced, run your home HVAC at max, and buy gasoline just to burn in your back yard, you will never measure up. It's like saying we need to dry the oceans, so you should stop peeing in it.
And who are the customers of big companies driving the demand? Regular people or other companies who also produce for those people.
> if you drive the most energy inefficient truck ever produced
Sorry, but how was that truck produced? Where did the energy to make it come from? How was your home built, where did the energy come from? Where did the materials come from? How did the workers come to the job? What did they eat, and what do you eat? Do you go to an office? How was it built? How do you and your colleagues get there? Do your children go to school? Do you go to hospitals when you're sick? Etc.
No, what we wanted for decades is for cars to shift to the free market of electric energy, just like every one of our other appliances have for decades. Electricity is a free market - can be generated by hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, even nuclear. If tomorrow they invent clean fusion power then electric cars would be able to benefit.
The cars being locked into fossil fuels is the result of fossil fuel subsidies from the government. Otherwise, OPEC raising prices would have long ago led to improvements in battery technology and electric cars. But the federal government shields the fossil fuels companies to make sure the “price at the pump” is small.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRnUY6V2Knk
We should be raising pigovian taxes on fossil fuels at the point of extraction, and redistribute it to all our citizens as a UBI. Alaska has been doing this for decades and they have almost the lowest GINI index of all states year after year.
Just like we want bottling and clothing companies to shift from plastics to bidegradeable materials. But you like to keep individuals distracted and blame them for using a straw and a bag, as if THAT is the main cause of pollution. And plastic recycling was a total scam designed to keep people distracted from forcing change on corporations pollution and unsustainable practices upstream.
Pretty sure those poor multi billion companies also got huge subsidies.
Neat, I’ve never seen a fossil fuel company exec on hacker news before. Welcome!
I'm an environmentalist and I agree with this framing. The solution is going to be painful and must increase prices on products and services that fossil fuels are currently the cheapest solution for. If you're not willing to personally sacrifice anything to reduce fossil fuel consumption you can see why carbon taxes are not popular, right? France's protests against them, for example, are a good example of a populist reaction against attempts to regulate the economy to have less emissions.
While arguments can be made at the futility of individual action against a system action, it’s not like companies are making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash. There are consumers of what is being produced!
Society’s choices and lifestyles are the cause of fossil fuel consumption, at a very high level. The plastic bag exists because it has users.
There are quantitative arguments against many silly consumer-focused initiatives. In aggregate tho companies aren’t burning fossil fuels for fun. Burning fossil fuels costs money, and a lot of people would rather not spend that money!!
> it’s not like companies are making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash
Sure they do. You even mention one in the venerable plastic bag. Is it the best bag? No, of course not. Is it a good bag? Absolutely not. Is it the cheapest bag to produce? You betcha.
Consumers are often presented the least expensive option with the worst outcomes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
The plastic bag is sold to businesses! If every supermarket in the world decided to never buy another plastic bag then they would no longer be produced!
There can be a futility to it all in that the “ideal option” simply isn’t produced of course.
I find boots theory is often a bit too convenient in this topic though. There is unlikely to be magic structural solutions that allow every part of your life to remain as convenient. At one point our lives will have to change in structure.
EDIT: to be extra clear, I think systemic coordinated changes is needed. I just think the “it’s the corporations doing this!” narrative to obscure the needs for reorganization of daily life on top of systemic change
I remember when that switch at grocers from paper to plastic was taking hold, and you could choose. "Paper or plastic?" was the question asked. Some comedian (probably) had a good one liner: "That'll be 42.39. Kill a tree or choke a fish?"
It's mostly a good example of why comedians aren't a source of information.
Plantation lumber is a very sustainable industry, and plastic's environmental impact is highly context dependent.
> Is it the best bag? No, of course not. Is it a good bag? Absolutely not
Plastic is absolutely the best packaging material ever created, it's so good, it feels like magic. It's light, it's cheap, it's waterproof, it's durable and doesn't just decompose, it comes in a miriad shapes and forms and so on. There is a reason it's everywhere
> it's cheap, it's waterproof, it's durable
One of those adjectives describes the plastic bag I'm familiar with. Sometimes it lasts long enough to get the food in the house without spilling through a hole which spontaneously appeared in the bag.
Why don't you pay for a more expensive bag and bring it to the store?
Why do you assume I don't? Opinionated defaults matter, as that's what most users will end up using.
Would you be ok if stores offered the option between a cheap plastic bag and a more expensive non-plastic one? (All the stores here already do it, btw).
I think the externalities of plastic recycling must be internalized economically by requiring all manufacturers of items to pre-pay for the recycling of said items up front, as part of the manufacturing cost. Similar to how bottle returns are managed, which has been very successful. Items which are provably biodegradable or designed to facilitate repair may be exempt.
Plastic bags are already taxed where I live. Consumers pay that tax, obviously. Other costs imposed on producers of plastic items will just be passed down to consumers.
That's lovely, but it's not what I described. Bottles aren't just taxed. They have a refundable deposit. This ensures they don't end up in a landfill.
> Society’s choices and lifestyles are the cause of fossil fuel consumption, at a very high level. The plastic bag exists because it has users.
Society's choices and lifestyles don't exist in some rational-individualistic vacuum. Companies advertise products while hiding known risks and side effects of what they're pushing. Cigarettes. Oil. PFOA/PFAS.
They all knew, and they did and continue to do it anyway. Regulatory capture solved all their problems by removing accountability.
This presupposes that consumers have infinite capacity to ingest the minute details of every single product they come into contact with.
Yes, the plastic bag has users. Do you really expect every single shopper to investigate how the bag at <grocery co> was made and if the plastic is recycled? What if they also have to do the same for every single thing they interact with every single day?
It's much easier to ask the people that work with the minutia of plastic bags every day, namely the people who make them, to maybe fix this problem.
It is still everyone's responsibility, just not to equal extent. That petrolstate also rose to power through democratic elections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni... it also influenced those elections.
Mainly because petrolstate's money was considered free speech and allowed to speak louder than citizens when it comes to influencing representatives.
Problem is that we if we all stand in a circle and point fingers at the next guy who is to blame, that doesn't really move us toward any sort of solutions.
In fact the reason it's so easy to find others to blame is that the responsibility is a shared one. Holding consumers responsible doesn't absolve producers, or governments for their participation. All have to be held responsible for their actions. That's the only way forward.
> Problem is that we if we all stand in a circle and point fingers at the next guy who is to blame, that doesn't really move us toward any sort of solutions.
Because of the power of lobbyists and their war chests full of cash, even if we made that circle surrounding our congress critter so everyone was pointing at them, we'd still have no effect. Our shame circle would only be uncomfortable for a short time which would quickly be assuaged by the soothing feeling of another large donation from a lobbyist.
> consumer-level personal responsibility
Indeed, the biggest personal responsibility is to make this a top political priority when deciding who to elect. Nothing will change until we consistenly fire leaders who refuse to act decisively on this.
If you drive a fossil fuel vehicle, you have chosen to buy into this. If you drive it 3 blocks when you could walk, you've chosen to go the way the fuel company wants you to. That's you.
Plastic is a bit different, you didn't choose the packaging. And you probably don't have the option to recycle anyway. Putting in a special bin doesn't change the fact that it's probably going to a landfill anyway.
Some of it's consumer level. Do what you can. Don't whatabout it.
Plastic is a fantastic material, that's why it's chosen for the packaging. I also don't see the problem sending it to a landfill as long as it stays there.
There is nothing g to “disagree” about. Of course systemic changes are required. But if the individual improve their actions it will have a meaningful impact too
Without systemic change the impact of individuals wont be meaningful. Maybe on a spiritual level but they won’t contribute meaningfully to the climate change (or non-change)
It won’t and believing it will is part of ensuring nothing changes. All energy you spend on personally changing should be instead spent lobbying, organizing, and otherwise working politically to effect systemic change. There is no value in individual change. It’s worse than doing nothing.
Americans use a lot of power. Buying big houses means they have higher heating and cooling costs. All this makes a big difference.
It’s actually a lot more systematic than you think: https://magarshak.com/blog/government-and-industry-distract-...
Andrew Forrest, a well connected billionaire, puts the blame on a group of 1000 "captains of industry".
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/inside-and...
The 2 biggest contributors to climate change are ...
- US Military
- Cargo Ships
You fix those 2 things and like 60% of pollution goes away.
If everyone chose to eat veggie burgers and seitan steaks instead of using beef, the climate's trajectory would immediately improve. For all the responsibility of industry, many individual world citizens could, and many have, changed their lifestyle due to the moral issue of climate-changing emissions.
> that each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions
I‘ve travelled quite a bit and I find it hard to convince myself that I as a city dweller contribute any meaningful amount to pollution or waste. I‘ve seen rivers of trash flow directly into the ocean. The rich and wealthy pollute disproportionally in such a way that I don‘t think offloading the responsibility to the general public is fair.
The concern about climate is well placed. Ripple et al. lay out a serious case that we may be closer to tipping cascades than models predict, with the Greenland Ice Sheet potentially vulnerable to tipping below 2°C warming, well before 2050.
But "invest an equal share of the resources currently being pumped into AI into climate" misidentifies the bottleneck. Marine cloud brightening could produce meaningful planetary cooling for roughly $5 billion per year at scale (NAS estimate). That's like what? 1% of what was spent on AI infrastructure last year?
The money exists. What doesn't exist is the political coordination to spend it.
The goddamn Alameda city council shut down a University of Washington MCB field test in 2024 because nobody told them it was happening on their property. Go look it up.
This's the actual bottleneck: governance, coordination, and political will, not capital.
When someone says "we should invest resources in X instead of Y," it's worth asking who "we" is and what mechanism they're proposing. AI investment is private capital chasing returns. You can't redirect it to climate by wishing. The implicit model, that Society has a budget and we're choosing wrong, assumes a resource allocation authority that doesn't exist. If you want to argue for creating one, that's a real position, but it should be stated openly rather than hidden inside "it would be sensible."
Also ... "AI won't solve it; it only makes it worse" is doing a ton of work! The energy consumption concern has real merit. But materials science, grid optimization, and climate modeling are direct climate contributions happening now. Google has saved energy in its datacenters ... using AI!
Blanket dismissal of an entire domain of capability isn't seriousness, it's pattern matching. (Ironically, there's a phrase for systems that produce plausible-sounding output by matching patterns without engaging with underlying structure. We're told to be worried about them.)
> not capital
Capital, and by relation the system that centers the idea of Capital as a method for moving around resources is at the very center of this.
Since Capital follows near-term incentive, if the "pollute the world" path has a greater near-term incentive, that's where the market will follow. If a single member of the system goes for long-term incentive(not cooking the earth), other near-term incentive chasers will eat their lunch and remove a player.
The system itself is a tight feedback loop searching for local maxima, and the local max is often the most destructive. With chasing the local maxima, also comes profit and capital that influence the political system.
What you've done here is called a fully-general counterargument. You should be suspicious of these!
If capital inevitably follows destructive local maxima and defectors get eaten, then no coordination problem has ever been solved, right?
But we banned CFCs! We got lead out of gasoline! The Montreal Protocol exists and worked.
What you're describing is the default behavior of uncoordinated markets, not a physical law. The entire history of regulation and international treaties consists of mechanisms that override local incentive gradients. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes they work.
"The system itself is a tight feedback loop" treats the system as fixed rather than something humans have repeatedly modified. The question is whether we'll add the right feedback loops fast enough, not whether adding them is metaphysically impossible.
My original point stands: the bottleneck on MCB isn't that capital won't fund it. It's that the Alameda city council didn't know a field test was happening on their waterfront and NIMBY ... people ... made noise. Governance failure, not capitalism failure.
It's also worth distinguishing uncoordinated markets from ungoverned markets. Markets exhibit vast and sophisticated organic coordination without state prodding. I don't just mean to pick at this word "uncoordinated" but more deeply at the particular issue of near- or far-sightedness. Has it actually been established that organic economic coordination does worse at protecting "the future" than some particular alternatives?
> But we banned CFCs! We got lead out of gasoline! The Montreal Protocol exists and worked.
None of these were done via capitalism, they were done in opposition to it.
And I know you weren't claiming they were, but the problem is all the power centers behind global capitalism have captured government (at least in the US) completely and are doing everything in their power to strip existing regulations and make sure the only new ones aren't in the name of the common good, but only to build moats for themselves.
It is great that we solved these problems in the past, but we are increasingly not doing that sort of thing at all anymore.
The government is failing to control the problem because it got bought out by the capitalists who run the companies that continue to cause the damage. The law in the US explicitly allows this, though it's "decent" enough to hide it in a paper bag.
It's certainly a governance failure, but I'm not sure what the fix for it is, and I don't see how capitalism gets off scot-free.
People will have to vote for non-captured candidates (good luck finding them) or protest in large enough numbers that the system will change. Those people will also have to be critical thinkers to a degree that they can consciously push back against the wall of marketing and propaganda pumped out by those in power with money. And they will have to self educate since governments generally don't teach people these skills while they have them in school for 12 or more years. From my point of view the future looks pretty grim but I'm certainly hoping to be surprised or corrected!
> Marine cloud brightening could produce meaningful planetary cooling for roughly $5 billion per year at scale (NAS estimate).
Eh. Cloud brightening is a temporary hack, stops working as soon as you stop actively doing it, and isn't an alternative to switching away from fossil fuels. It's probably worth doing to push back the "ice melts and releases more carbon" thing but let's not confuse it with the extent of what needs to be done. You can't actually solve the problem for $5B/year.
> AI investment is private capital chasing returns.
Getting private capital to work for you is a good way to solve the problem. The real problem is politics.
The EV tax credits and the subsidies oil companies get were costing about the same amount of money, but we only got rid of one of them. Nuclear should cost less than fossil fuels, but we're told that fission is scary and Deepwater Horizon is nothing but spilled milk so the one with the much better environmental record has to be asymmetrically regulated into uncompetitiveness.
If we actually wanted to solve it we'd do the "carbon tax but 100% of the money gets sent back to the people as checks" thing, since then you're not screwing everyone because on average the check and the tax cancel out and corporations pay the tax too but only people get the check. Then everyone, but especially the heaviest users, would have the incentive to switch to alternative energy and more efficient vehicles etc., because everybody gets the same check but the people putting thousands of miles on non-hybrid panzers pay more in tax.
The "problem" is that it would actually work, which is highly objectionable to the oil industry and countries like Russia since it would cause their income to go away, hence politics.
Cooling the planet is neither a technical nor financial problem. The problem is that environmentalists want this to be a moral issue. They already decided on the solution. If the solution is not environmental communism with them in power, they will not have it.
>Cooling the planet is neither a technical nor financial problem
Yes it is. All solutions have trade offs.
Unfortunately, more people seems to care about getting AI to play SimCity than the environment.
Renewable energy technology is ready, right now today, to replace fossil fuels. All we have to do is start doing it, but the Oil lobby is just too strong apparently. There is no political will. I wish I was wrong, but I just don't see humanity pulling together to solve this one.
> Renewable energy technology is ready, right now today, to replace fossil fuels. All we have to do is start doing it, but the Oil lobby is just too strong apparently. There is no political will. I wish I was wrong, but I just don't see humanity pulling together to solve this one.
Sorry, but its really not. Perhaps in some sectors such as ground transportation, but definitely not in air and sea transport and fertilizer production, and many industrial processes. At least not at scale, where would have to make massive lifestyle sacrifices which are not politically acceptable outside of extreme authoritarian states who have no reason to do this anyway.
Solar is so cheap and getting cheaper than we can power those sectors with air-to-fuel plants. A carbon tax would go a long way towards leveling the playing field with carbon neutral or carbon negative alternatives to fossil fuels.
We are a planet of 8 billion people, interest will vary widely. Expecting everyone to swarm on the same issue at the same time is simply not how humanity has worked in the past. Innovation often happens because many people go different directions, testing what works and what doesn't. Getting AI to play SimCity may be a stepping stone to real life urban planning, or it may be nothing, who knows?
> Getting AI to play SimCity may be a stepping stone to real life urban planning
Urban planning of the SimCity sort isn't particularly difficult. The associated politics are the issue.
Hence the "or it may be nothing"...
Humanity in the past has acted to eradicate Polio through global vaccinations, fix the Y2K computer bug, allow the Ozone hole to repair by banning CFCs, form a United Nations to prevent WW3 among other things.
We are actively making noise about pulling out of groups like the UN/NATO.
We are actively undoing regulations to reduce pollutants while promoting "clean" coal.
We are actively undoing vaccinations policy.
We does not necessarily equal humanity at this time, but it sure feels like it if you are under the We administration.
If you're looking to experience a "climate change" simulator, kind of, the game Oxygen Not Included is an interesting chemistry sandbox where you need to balance things like O2, heat, food, etc in a "terrarium" of sorts. The parallels to climate change are similar to real life--most of the game ending problems you encounter are from short sighted thinking earlier on/kicking the can down the road.
If you're near Lake Powell, you could also visit it right now and compare it to what you remember. Not a simulator, just a pretty scary real thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCEJDU9_p4Q
Gotta love the cycle 200 heat death
I found Half-Earth Socialism: The Game[1] to be fun for quite a few playthroughs.
1. https://play.half.earth/
> And, no, AI won't solve it; unfortunately, it only makes it worse.
A conclusive argument for this still seems out of reach. AI does solve some problems, and it's not exactly clear which problems AI "only makes worse". It's not clear how much energy all of our AI systems will use, and while it's tempting to outright believe they'll simply use more and more, even that's not yet clear based on arguments presented.
> It's not clear how much energy all of our AI systems will use, and while it's tempting to outright believe they'll simply use more and more, even that's not yet clear based on arguments presented.
For the last 20 years, power consumption of HPC is increased per cubic inch as systems are miniaturized and density increased. The computing capacity increased more than the power use, but this doesn't mean we didn't invent more inefficient ways to undo significant part of that improvement.
It's same for AI. Cards like Groq and inference oriented hardware doesn't consume as power as training oriented cards, but this doesn't mean total power use will reduce. On the contrary. It'll increase exponentially. Considering AI companies doesn't care about efficiency yet means we're wasting tons of energy, too.
I'll not enter into the water consumption debacle, because open-loop systems waste enormous amounts of water.
All in all, we're wasting a lot of water and energy which would sustain large cities and large number of people.
with regards from your friendly HPC admin.
> It's not clear how much energy all of our AI systems will use
Is it superior to zero?
Does AI replace existing, more costly energy use patterns to the extent that its own energy use is offset?
Outside AI independently uncovering some energy breakthrough there is nothing it can do to help, only hurt. We already have a source of clean, cheap, unlimited energy, we aren't rolling it out the way we could and should because some rich people would rather have us on a subscription plan where we literally light our source of energy on fire so we have to keep coming back for more.
AI has already pushed fusion research forward.
We could certainly do better but switching isn't as simple as you imply. You also conveniently left out the part where activists historically blocked nuclear buildout.
Perhaps someday. For now, it amount of energy used to produce and run these models is astronomical. It may be the case AI is a net positive for the environment at some point, but as it stands that is nothing but speculation. The reality is it is making the situation worse.
I agree to an extent that each of us contributes in a manner, but the manner that we contribute is not certain. A person who puts more effort into reducing their own personal climate impact could be doing worse than using the same effort to enact systemic change. It could be bailing water on a sinking ship instead of fixing the leak. The problem is you might not appear to be doing anything in isolation. Just spending that extra effort at work and sending the money earned to the ship patching people so they can get what they need would fix the problem better. If you choose bailing are you not just choosing something visible but ineffective over achieving the desired outcome but just being a boring taxpayer.
As for AI, to characterise it as a "solution to problems we didn't really have" is placing your opinion over others. They may be right or wrong about it but many AI proponents firmly believe that AI can provide solutions to real world problems that we definitely have. You may disagree about their potential effectiveness, and that's ok, but at least tolerate that people might have different ideas about how to make the world better.
The difference is emblematic of the difficulty in getting attention for climate mitigation. AI succeeds because you can sell a service to an individual human which will give them advantages over other humans. Climate change mitigation fails because you are trying to sell a service to humanity which will result in a better end state over some other hypothetical imagined future. Humans make decisions, not humanity, and many of them are pretty bad with both hypotheticals and imagination. It's no wonder that a product designed to make them do better at what they do, right now is more successful than one designed to make everybody do better than what would otherwise have resulted, 50-100 years in the future when they'll likely be dead.
Any kind of workable solution to large, societal-level problems needs to deal with the principal agent issue. Society doesn't actually exist; humanity doesn't actually exist. These are abstractions we use to label the behavior of individual people. You need to operate on the level of individual people to get any sort of outcome.
(FWIW, this is a major reason why concepts like markets, capitalism, democracy, rule of law, and federalism have been successful. They work by aligning incentives so that when one person takes an action that is good for themselves, they more-or-less end up benefitting the people around them too.)
I think if the hope is that the whole world comes together to reduce emissions to a meaningful level, there is little to no chance of that. Even in the face of clear evidence, many leaders either do not believe it or do not think it will affect them in their lifetime. Capitalism and globalization march to a different drum.
The hope becomes that we can innovate our way out of the problem with technology, that is the race to the finish. AI will likely help us get there faster, but 2nd place will not be an option.
You could say industrialization was a solution to a problem we didn't have...but efficiency and profit is always the pursuit of business, and unfortunately that is a lot of the world we live in.
And I say this as someone who loves the idea of energy that doesn't come from burning things.
Maybe we could ask AI!
https://chatgpt.com/share/698ce97b-4d54-8000-aecb-542ceecb00...
But https://chatgpt.com/share/698cee2c-b8c4-800f-b3cb-fa8869f874...
Unfortunately it won't happen, as humanity rather nuke ourselves generating memes, while driving beverage from paper straws.
Imagine if we had laws that required all LLM compute to come from solar, or other sustainable power sources. We could have used the market's thirst for AI as a backchannel way to force creation of new sustainable energy.
In contrast to Elon/XAI's illegal methane fuled datacenter in memphis
Imagine if we had people that actually listened to scientists, reduced their carbon footprint and changed their habits.
As a human living on this planet, with roughly another 50 years left, I say we allow our actions to continue. We are unable to stop those in power and with high influence from doing anything; we deserve what is coming. Earth will be fine without us. Good luck everyone!
every year (month?) that passes people are saying the end of the world is right around the corner due to climate change. then 10 yrs passes, nothing happens, and they keep saying the same stuff.
the system warning you the world is in big trouble dont remind you 'their side' has been saying the sky is falling for ~40+ yrs.
I've started composting. I'm sure that'll outweigh the average Vegas visitor's emissions. /s
I'm being a bit facetious obviously, but it does feel a bit like tilting against windmills. We need policy and systemic changes, if we're relying on individuals to all collectively start doing the "right thing", we're sunk.
I agree. But at least in a democratic system, the "each and everyone of us" are politicians that each and everyone elects. So it starts from the basis, IMHO.
You laugh but if everyone changed just some of their behavior, we would be in a much better place.
We used to reuse glass jars, now it’s plastic. We used to can goods, now it’s plastic. We used to use refillable bottles, now it’s plastic. We used to have car doors that went “thunk” when you slammed them shut, now it’s plastic.
If we each are mindful of the amount of trash/litter/waste we produce and take an active step towards minimizing it, we would all be in a better place.
> You laugh but if everyone changed just some of their behavior, we would be in a much better place.
Please be more specific about "some" and "much" because I don't think that's true.
As far as climate goes, turning oil into single use plastic has very little effect. We could cut plastic use 90% and nothing would really change.
The problem is that a single consumer can't throw themselves into the gears of the industrial machine to slow its progress. If you stop buying food in plastic containers, the food will still be produced, and it will still be purchased by the large multinational corporations that have supply contracts with the food industry, it will just go straight into a landfill when its expiration date passes instead of being purchased. Unsold subsidized produce, which took petroleum based fertilizers to grow, and petroleum powered equipment to cultivate and distribute, will rot in a landfill. Farmers won't stop growing it if you stop buying it. The damage has already been done by the time you make the choice to purchase it or not, and it takes more than a handful of people making a conscientious decision to reduce waste to stop the waste from happening in the first place. And that's if you even have a choice in the first place. The only way to eliminate carbon emissions is to return to manual labor and subsistence farming, and since all the arable acreage is owned by land barons and the price is so high, even that is out of reach of the average consumer. We are trapped.
If you buy an electric car, consider the amount of petroleum it took to forge the steel, power the aluminum smelters, and ship the components around the world on titanic ships. How long does it take to pay off the carbon debt that was incurred by getting rid of that old polluting car? How much petroleum would it take to relocate to a locality with clean-energy powered public transit? What other externalities are incurred by such a choice, and are they greater than simply maintaining the status quo? Is it even within the means of the majority to make such a choice?
Consider that aviation is a much larger contributor to emissions. Airlines will consistently fly completely empty planes just so they can maintain a parking spot at a given airport. Or compare the carbon emissions of the military to the rest of society. Or the quantity of flare gas that gets uselessly burned off by oil rigs. All market forces which a single consumer or group of consumers is powerless to stop. And all of which are backed by investors with more clout to sway the powers that be than you or I will ever have.
As a sibling commenter said, it's a fun hobby and makes us feel a little better about ourselves, but it's a drop in the bucket. A depressing state of affairs to be sure.
I get what you're saying. I lived on a sailboat with solar so I understand... The sailboat I lived on was made with fiberglass, a petrochemical product. We would still be in a better place though even if the inevitable demise will still occur. It would just occur later.
We used to live lifestyles that didn't require driving every day and flying eight times a year...
the great thing about these sorts of personal choices is that you can make them for yourself without having to be afraid of any of the consequences that would come from actually confronting power.
I make lots of compost for my own use. Composting is at best delaying carbon release. As soon as you stop recycling materials the carbon will be released to the atmosphere. In permaculture circles the goal is to close open loops of waste/resources. If you want to permanently lock carbon in your soil, and improve fertility, make biochar. Throwing charcoal in your compost is the easiest way to make it into biochar. It really works and is a permanent amendment.
If you wanted you could even weigh the raw charcoal to quantify the carbon you have sequestered.
None of the loops are open in the sense that it's all within the earth system as a whole. The issue is extracting carbon from geological deposits. Stuff about farming and methane is temporary and short term.
I don't mean to suggest we shouldn't compost or recycle things. Just that such measures are only indirectly related to carbon emissions.
We either stop extracting hydrocarbons from deep within the crust or else the problem will persist. (I guess technically we could industrially sequester the equivalent but that would almost certainly defeat the cost-benefit of extraction.)
Sorry to be a debbie-downer but
the composting process is also a source of greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9933540/
From your source:
> Effective pile management and aeration are key to minimizing CH4 emissions.
So it sounds like a correctly managed pile is not a problem.
Also, I have a hard time believing my composting in my backyard is in any way worse than my sending the same food scraps to a landfill.
So are humans (we breathe out CO2 constantly!). A process emitting greenhouse gases is not an inherent reason to eschew it, so long as the entire end-to-end process isn't net-positive.
Use that compost to fertilise a tree, and you are still net negative on carbon, versus sending those food scraps to the local trash incinerator.
It's all a cycle, They put carbon in, they release carbon out. At least the average American is doing a commendable job in increasing their personal carbon sequestration.
There simply is no solution to this problem. We would all need to stop driving, flying, and eating meat. Most families (in the US, anyway) would suffer unemployment and starvation if they couldnt drive to work.
Humans will continue to do whatever is needed to survive,, and that currently involves driving, flying, and eating meat. They will only stop when those behaviours are either not possible, or hinder survival.
Miss the days where YC put emphasis on climate tech too:
- https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/rfs-climatetech
- http://carbon.ycombinator.com/
Very alarming. I feel like especially the West is regressing on climate change with the rise of the far right (https://www.politico.eu/article/robert-lambrou-alternative-f...)
I don't know what to do.
Work on local things to make your own city better. Plenty of stuff that's not too difficult, even if it won't fix everything:
* Multifamily housing is much more energy efficient. Is it legal to build throughout your city, or does zoning prevent it?
* Is there good bicycle infrastructure so people don't have to drive for everything?
* Does your city still have expensive parking mandates that lock in car dependency? Get rid of those. They also get in the way of places becoming more walkable.
* This one hurts, but: eat less beef.
* Advocate for good transit as another way for people to get around without driving a personal vehicle.
* What can be done in your city/region to electrify heating for homes and businesses?
* What can your region do to build more renewable energy capacity?
Those are all things where even a few voices can sometimes make a difference.
Individual habits will not be decisive in fighting climate change. Telling people to follow this advice will (a) inconvenience them in the short term (b) lull them to a false sense of security that they are fighting climate change (c) set them up for disappointment when climate change happens anyway, and (d) worst of all, these suggestions let the real perpetrators off the hook.
If you want to see real progress on the climate, a few thousand people changing their daily habits is not enough. Governments need to take action and hold industry to account. That looks to be an increasingly unlikely event, but that doesn't justify taking ineffective action instead as a placebo.
It reminds me of the '90s when we are all told that recycling was necessary for saving the environment. Decades later, we'll still spending time sorting our garbage, despite evidence that no one wants recyclable waste, it still ends up dumped somewhere, and it costs more money to handle. [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyMs2xox_hE
But individual behavior is not about preventing climate change, it’s about doing what’s right. It’s wrong to pollute the environment, one way or another. A single person not stealing won’t reduce the crime rate in a country yet it is the right thing to do.
That's not a fair comparison. Everything we do affects the environment. The goal is to limit that effect where it matters. It's not ethical, it's practical.
Maybe, but it does handle individual moral culpability.
Each kg of ghg is some number of deaths. The goal should be to lower it as much as possible.
I’m lucky enough that I can afford to live somewhere that I don’t need a car, and electricity is generated from renewables. I know it’s not possible for everyone, but if you can make it happen where you live, then the number of deaths you will be responsible for will greatly decrease.
Apart from eating less beef, every single suggestion in the post your are responding to is about infrastructure and advocacy, not individual habits.
And almost all of them have plenty of other benefits too:
Multifamily housing is generally cheaper in high land cost areas. It helps solve the housing shortage.
More bikes and transit and fewer cars means cleaner air and fewer traffic deaths.
Less fossil fuel usage in general means less pollution.
Cities that use land more efficiently tend to be more walkable, pleasant, and don't gobble up things like farmland or forests outside the city.
Come to think of it, less beef is probably better for your health, too.
> less beef is probably better for your health, too.
Won't matter when it's 120 degrees F every day.
My advice is to install air conditioning, and choose a place to live that will be affected as little as possible. Avoid the Maldives or New Orleans, perhaps choose somewhere a little hilly and cool with good connectivity.
Great suggestions. I will pass your advice on to literally all of humanity.
That's what will happen, you might as well get ahead of the rush.
> Apart from eating less beef, every single suggestion in the post your are responding to is about infrastructure and advocacy, not individual habits.
Exactly. That's why it's ineffective to evangelize this as individual effort. If you want to live in a multifamily home, they have to be zoned, funded, and built. That requires lobbying the government, moral rectitude.
I did not write 'individual habits' - you did. Things like zoning are not individual choices at all. But they are something that you and a few friends might be able to influence at city hall.
None of this "lulls" involved people, nor lets anyone off the hook.
These are things that ordinary people without a lot of money or power can work on today in a country like, say, the US, where the federal government is in the hands of evil people and is not going to be doing much in terms of climate change in the near future.
The federal government may be a lost cause for the moment, but your city or state might provide an avenue to get some things done. Those things won't fix the whole problem, but they're still progress, and the connections you make while doing those things will be useful in future, bigger fights.
> These are things that ordinary people without a lot of money or power can work on toda
I agree: people can work on this individually. And it won't make a lick of difference.
How many items on this list require government action? How many require corporations' cooperation. What am I going to do, build the bike lanes myself as a hobby?
The work is getting your local or state government to do the things. I thought that was quite obvious.
> these suggestions let the real perpetrators off the hook.
This can't be said enough. It simply cannot be said enough. It cuts right to the heart of how we view the world in the west: as autonomous, separate individuals, with no communal counterweight and certainly no model of power (some entities in the world have vastly more power than others) We assume that because our constitutions grant us equal rights or whatever, we all have equal responsibility and equal power.
But polluters, the biggest sources of emissions, have way more power and way, way less responsibility. And yet we continue to tell ourselves to focus on our own individual behaviors to combat global heating. The effects are real, but tiny, and our elites continue getting away with our annihilation.
Great list!
For those in the US, I'd add lobbying your congresspeople to support the revival of the Energy Permitting Reform Act. It's something that didn't make it across the line before the end of the last congress, but basically, making it easier to bring new generation capacity on the electrical grid disproportionately benefits renewables, because they make up the vast majority of wattage waiting in the queue. As we've seen by the explosion of deployment in less regulated grids (Texas, and most of the world), the economics now favor solar+storage and wind, we just have to let people build as much of it as they want to.
I would add:
* Plant more trees
> I feel like especially the West is regressing on climate change with the rise of the far right
Is it the "far right"? Or is it that technology and fertility have actually lowered the risks substantially?
Solar plus batteries, right now, seems to be the cheapest form of new energy. Given that, you would expect most of new energy to be "green". (And if you look at the stats, that seems to be coming true.)
Electrification of transportation is happening quickly. China is cranking out cheap electric cars that are generally better than ICE cars of yesterday. And the world seems to be transitioning.
And fertility rates are dropping everywhere. So the amount of people we will need to support in the future continues to decline.
I've mostly stopped worrying about climate change. Not because I don't think it is real. But because I think we are clearly on the path to mitigating the worse scenarios.
> Is it the "far right"?
Yes, it is. They're committed to "Every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out". [0]. They keep saying this to us, and we don't seem to believe them. I like your optimism, and I'm not denying a lot of what you're saying -- renewables fast becoming the cheapest energy. But that's not deterring people: the far right here in the US are about to dismantle the government's legal rationale for regulating emissions. They're laughing at us right now, doing victory laps. They're telling polluters to take the gloves off.
These people are terrorists, extremists, and they're in charge of the world's single most powerful economy and military. They're obsessed with domination, with doing violence to the weak and the poor and to nature. It's pure Freudian thanatos.
It's just hard to take your position.
[0] https://theecologist.org/2023/dec/05/every-molecule-hydrocar...
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the "far-right", but you seem to be implying this 'every molecule' quote (or more charitably, the goal) is of the "far-right" in the U.S. In reality the quote is from Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman. I mean, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Saudi Arabia is considered far-right governed but I doubt your wording is giving the correct impression to readers.
Yes, I know it's a Saudi quote. They're also far right. They're bosom buddies with the same right-wing (Democratic) and far-right (Republican) US economic and governmental elites for decades. I don't think anyone would dispute this. In fact, it's so humdrum a set of facts that I think the burden would be on someone else to show that "no, actually, US elites are not into the whole 'every molecule of hydrocarbon' thing". But their behavior doesn't indicate that they disagree.
It's thus, yes, the correct impression for readers.
Yep, its the far right.
The Heritage Foundation (Project 2025, far-right, anti-climate) is working with the Heartland Institute (spreading climate science denial across UK / EU) / Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC, Jordan Peterson)
They do not like EU rules that hold US firms accountable to climate laws.
https://www.desmog.com/2026/02/10/donald-trump-uk-eu-maga-sl...
Sorry, I'm not saying the far-right isn't (whatever) anti-climate change.
I just meant that I don't think the lack of concern is necessarily due to them. I think it may have more to do with the reality that we are already on a good path.
Bill Gates famously wrote a "note" about it last year: https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/accelerate-energy-innovation...
There are actions you can cheer on, like China's quick adoption of renewable energy. You can't make it happen yourself but you can bring peoples' attention to good things, encourage those within your circle of influence, and vote for representation that shares your views.
As for what "we" collectively can do... let's assume you are speaking of areas of research. We may need to focus on researching adaptation techniques for the areas that are going to be the hardest hit, or that have the fewest resources to cope. It's a sad topic but it may be needed. Assume the worst, hope for the best, and plan for what you can.
The answer to that question is always the same. Join a party and become politically active. Or, if you really can't find any party that represents your views, join an NGO and become active in it. If you're too lazy for that, consider paying an NGO that does spectacular actions that have a public impact. And never vote for any parties that don't do anything for climate control, of course.
Significant emissions are from ground transportation. Advocate for walkable neighbourhoods, bike infrastructure and public transit.
this is like a tiktok rage bait way of thinking. western nations have largely peaked on carbon emissions. china is slowing down and will peak soon. there are a lot of countries that still are growing in emissions, sure, but you are not looking at this scientifically.
Scientifically according to the article, the world is on an emissions path to 2.8°C warming, not accounting for the extra rate of warming we've seen in recent years. And this puts us at greater risk of hitting tipping points into an even warmer planet. So the status quo isn't cutting it.
If you are a US citizen, voting Trump out might be unironically the most significant decision your country could make for the next 100 years of mankind.
Not because the alternative is so great, but because Trump is so horrible that it's not even a question. We really don't need someone who doesn't even acknowledge climate change in charge of the world's biggest economy.
Trump is ineligible to run for a third term. The time to vote him out was 15 months ago.
> I don't know what to do.
As a 52 year old who never believed we would take climate change seriously (and who is more convinced than ever I was correct as society actually regresses on this issue) I did what I had to do -- I purposefully didn't have children.
Good luck to those of you who did.
This ain't my problem. I'll be dead (or close enough) when the shit fully hits the fan and won't have doomed any offspring to the upcoming migration/resources wars
You work in software, right? Then you can donate some money to enviro orgs.
Not an expert in any of that, but I think overall impact may be greater if people with sufficient means take a more hands-on approach that grants visibility of where money is going. I lean environmentalist be the truth is that there’s a good deal of well-marketed snake oil in the environmental space.
The issue with quibbling over impact is my experience is that people end up doing neither. I recently started a Master's in ecology so I don't have a good idea of what's cost effective right now but I know the field is pretty shockingly underfunded (both for general research and conservation projects). I learned the "fun" fact recently that bird populations in the US are down ~30% in the last 55 years.
A fair assessment. Doing nothing is not the answer to the risk of doing the wrong thing. It's probably worth some time spent on due diligence when selecting groups to donate to, regardless.
Die a horrible death while watching a group of hateful people scream that it’s all the immigrants fault and that they ate all the cats and dogs, I guess …
... immigrants, LGBT, women, another religion, the ones with no religion, communist, liberal,...
But never the zillionaires, they've worked haaaard and deserve everything!
Fear and egoism is probably causing the rise of the far-right, fear of not having enough, and egoism of "Why do I have to share?" (and being dumb enough to believe "make it great again" lies). And then the idiotic "center" who doesn't want to lose voters start moving to the right. With the decaying planet less capable of producing food, there'll be less, and there'll be more of that scarcity mindset (although do we even have scarcity, maybe it's just the uneven distribution, with billionaires eating cows that's been fed grass that's grown with the purest glacier water flown by helicopter from the Swiss alps...).
In one aspect, the autocratic rule of Xi Jinping has a positive: "We're going to cover the whole mountain with solar panels, and force electrification of cars." and there's no busybodies protesting and threatening to vote his party out of office.
Ever admitting the positives of autocrats for their apparent efficiency disqualifies surrounding suppositions. And that's not an ad hominen, that's just Bayesian.
I think there's someone that wrote about what is to be done, but I can't remember who. /s
the west is regressing on climate because, quite frankly, almost anything we do is pointless. we're not the ones who need to do anything to have an impact on the world. the entities that must do something don't want to
This is one of the key sentences:
> Policymakers and the public, however, remain largely unaware of the risks posed by such a practically irreversible transition
Most people still underestimate what it means for the earth system to change from the current stable state into another state, which might need many years to become stable again. And that new stable state might be a lot less favourable for us humans.
> might need many years to become stable again
People really fail to grasp the significance of this part.
One of our most common apocalyptic fantasies lays this out quite well: nuclear annihilation. The common narrative is about the post-apocalyptic world and rebuilding. But this presumes a new normal has been established.
With climate change we will continue to experience more extreme changes at a faster rate over time with no chance of a "new normal" in our lives.
It took hundreds of thousands of years for humans to develop agriculture. It's no coincidence that this development happened during one of the most stable periods of climate the planet has ever seen. People love to wax poetic on human adaptability, but we were effectively playing on "easy" mode.
While the other side of climate change might be a more hostile earth, the transition period will be worse because you can't adapt. In our lifetimes we may live to see a period of record heat waves in Europe, followed by a transition of Europe to that is dramatically colder (and who knows, maybe back again).
The other major problem is as stability decreases so does our ability to predict the future. It's hard to even know what we might be facing in the coming years, but high variance is usually not great for complex life.
> the transition period will be worse because you can't adapt.
As far as agriculture goes we can adapt but the cost would be exorbitant. Vertical farming is technically doable.
It's not that policymakers are unaware. It's that some of them are allergic to true things that they find inconvenient, and have made false premises a pillar of their platform. Calling that "unaware" is giving them too much credit and understanding.
I think it's both. That large shifts on a global scale of everyday things that we take for granted as well as historical differences on a geological time scale are genuinely difficult for non-experts to wrap their heads around.
And also as you say that many politicians are disincentivized to try in the first place.
> It's that some of them are allergic to true things that they find inconvenient, and have made false premises a pillar of their platform.
Sure, if by "some" you mean "virtually all".
Nope, attempted bothsidesing rejected. By "some" I mean "some". Not everyone in politics treats truth as optional. Those who don't should be lauded.
Thinking this is "bothsidesing" is you contributing to the problem. The Democrats and Republicans have both abandoned scientific rigor on this topic. When either talks about it, it is almost purely an excuse to smuggle in unrelated policy objectives.
A group of politicians can have strong disagreements where none has a grasp on reality. That is where we are with climate change. It is one of the reasons I stopped working on it at a policy level.
Most policy makers will not live to bear the fruit of their labor.
Many may also believe that they and the only parts of their con$tituency they care about will be able to avoid the consequences. And some may have come to believe the party line; if you repeat a falsehood often enough as a loyalty test, you may forget that it's a falsehood.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary (power, class) depends upon his not understanding it
They are most definitely aware. They are willfully ignoring this but they are not ignorant.
I think most people bet that they'd be dead until that transition happens, so the problem won't be theirs to address.
It's a classic multi-agent coordination problem. Should I stop taking jet liners and eating meat, when everyone else is anyway?
(Edit: purely illustrative rhetorical question, but I appreciate the responses)
To be fair, if we cut beef, lamb, and dairy, we get 80% of the GHG benefits of going full vegan. Beef and lamb are really GHG intense.
So you can keep your animal proteins: it'll just be eggs, fish, poultry, and pork.
https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food
For me, it's a hard problem.
For business trips, the choice is between two hours and two days, and unfortunately my body goes haywire if I don't eat some meat at least a couple of days per week (talking about 200g/300g total though. Not kilos of it).
On the other hand, I'd happily take trains as more high speed lines open in my country, and reduce meat consumption to bare minimum my body can tolerate.
For personal transportation, going fully electric won't be possible due to my circumstances, but I'd happily switch to a hybrid which would convert 75% of my in-city travel to electric (which I'm actively planning to do).
I also work on projects which tries to reduce footprint of data centers and computation, so there's that.
> my body goes haywire if I don't eat some meat at least a couple of days per week
Isn't this just a nutrient deficiency in whatever you were eating instead of meat? Meat is "convenient" because it's high in a wide variety of minerals, vitamins, essential amino acids, etc. that your body can't make. (The animals mostly can't make them either but guess what livestock eats.) There are plants that contain each of them, but few if any that contain all of them, and then if you're missing one you're going to have a bad time. So the problem there is almost certainly that you need to eat some different plants than that the thing you were missing is only found in animals.
I can't speak for the OP but it is well-established that there are significant genetic adaptations to the amount of meat in the diet, or a loss of genetic adaptation for metabolizing some plant staples. This is no different than the genetics that cause significant variation in the ability to metabolize legumes, lactose, alcohol, etc. Local optimizations.
There are ethnic populations that have reduced capacity to efficiently metabolize some plant-based diets due to thousands of years of selection pressure (or lack thereof). A diverse plant-based diet won't kill them, they simply lack the enzymes to have a good experience with it because for thousands of years they had little use for those genes.
It is a relatively small population globally, as it tends to coincide with regions that weren't conducive to supporting large populations thousands of years ago. The current distribution has significant overlap with the developed world though.
I have to imagine that someone with meat-adapted genetics is going to suffer quality of life issues on a purely plant-based diet. Everyone has a set of foods like that.
Might be lack of understanding of essential nutrients and associated planning. But also might not be related to that at all. The gut microbiome is impacted by your food choices, varies from person to person, and can have severe impacts on your overall health.
Nope. Some aminoacids and compounds are only present in meat. These aminoacids and compounds are the ones which boosted our brain capacity and allowed us to evolve to that point.
I eat (and like to eat) tons of veggies, yet I feel my brain capacity declines and I crave esp. meat if I don't eat it for a long time (for two weeks or whatnot). As I said, I don't need two ribeye steaks per week. My body is very good at signaling what it needs, and I prefer to listen to it.
What I eat is Mediterranean cuisine 99% of the time, and it's pretty well balanced, yet eliminating meat is not possible for me. So, my diet is not junk food peppered by meat. It's mostly veggies and legumes (beans, lentil, whatnot), peppered with meat. Yet, I need it, and this is something I tested over and over more than two decades.
On the other hand, my wife is completely opposite of me. She can go a month or so without meat. So, not every person is the same, and assuming that every human being works the same is a big mistake made by modern medicine. For example, my brain chemistry is also different and I consume B12 much more than a typical human, so I need to use B-complex supplements more.
> Some aminoacids and compounds are only present in meat.
Which ones specifically?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid
All of those can be found in plants.
> Nope. Some aminoacids and compounds are only present in meat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acids_in_plant...
Notice that many of the plants high in some of these aren't that common, e.g. what percentage of people regularly eat pumpkin seeds or spirulina?
> So, not every person is the same, and assuming that every human being works the same is a big mistake made by modern medicine.
It's not that you need the same diet as every other person, it's that you have to eat the specific things you need, which a random selection of plants may or may not contain in the right amounts.
> For example, my brain chemistry is also different and I consume B12 much more than a typical human, so I need to use B-complex supplements more.
B12 in particular is a pain because it's only produced by bacteria (commonly found in soil) so the options are unwashed vegetables, meat from animals that eat unwashed vegetables, or supplements. And on top of that because of the way it's absorbed, a B12 pill either has to be taken multiple times a day several hours apart or has to be 100x as much to make up for the absorption rate falling off a cliff after a threshold amount which is below the RDA.
It’s hard to convince people not to eat food and take a plane when billionaires do whatever they like at 1000x the carbon footprint, when millions of people drive to work and when base load power is built on fossil fuels. To me eating protein and taking a plane seem benign.
I agree.
If the plane doesn't use synthetic fuel that's a political problem that I can't realistically solve as an individual.
The methane from raising animals exists in an overall equilibrium. It isn't extractive and the total magnitude of the effects of that chemical system is comparatively minor.
Its not a "risk".
Water vapor (clouds) is a stonger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. We already got measurably higher temperatures, so we also have higher water evaporation, and from the last 5 years it looks like it happens every year.
So the runaway is already happening, until something stops it near hothouse conditions or hopefully earlier than that.
Thank you for saying this. If you want to know the answer to what causes climate problems, you need to go back to the era of dinosaurs, where CO2 levels were multiple times higher than today. Trees could thrive because they could breathe in a lot of CO2. Dinosaurs got so big because there were plenty of food. How could dinosaurs happily live with such high CO2 levels? The key is that there were plenty of forests. Peter Wohlleben's book "The Power of Trees: How Ancient Forests Can Save Us if We Let Them" explains how forests naturally circulate water.
The climate system in those prehistoric times was in a different stable state. The world that we live in has different ecosystems that are well-adapted to the current stable state and we will likely face a mass-extinction event once the ecological scales tip over.
The problem is also the speed in which the CO2 levels are rising. Such a massive change in such a short geological time is very unusual.
Water vapor (clouds) also reflects sunlight. So it's complicated. We know the planet has had higher CO2 and higher temperatures in the past, and it did not "run away"
No citations to hand but Antarctica used to be temperate rainforest and many of the conditions of present day tropical rainforests and savanna could be found much farther from the equator.
The paleocene–eocene thermal maximum makes for interesting related reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_therm...
We can't say for sure that the current feedback loops will be identical to those that did or did not exist in the past. Differences in the initial state could result in different outcomes.
For example was there as much methane trapped in the arctics during the last time CO2 was high?
Does the rate of the increase of CO2 and temperature have an effect? Because it's currently getting hotter far faster (absurdly so) than any other period we have records for.
It might not run away to infinity, but it may well run away in the sense that the rate of change could continue to increase even if humans stop contributing to it.
It doesn't matter if the top of the curve flattens out, if we can't survive outside of the bottom part that looks exponential.
> Water vapor (clouds) also reflects sunlight. So it's complicated. We know the planet has had higher CO2 and higher temperatures in the past, and it did not "run away"
Yes. But stars like ours burn brighter as they move through their lifetimes, and the Sun is a bit brighter now than it was back when we had higher CO2 levels. That's why a runaway GHG didn't happen back then, but is basically guaranteed to happen within a billion years.
So… the sun is hotter now than it was what… since the 1950s? The 1850s? The Jurassic period? What scale is do you need to make this claim reasonable?
Also, I see a lot of things presented as facts in your comment, you seem to have convinced yourself quite thoroughly.
10% every billion years. So negligible on our timescale, but it is significant if you talk about ancient climate conditions like this thread does.
True runaway (i.e. oceans boiling / Venus) cannot happen on Earth unless you significantly increase incoming radiation stream (or alternatively halve the planet's albedo).
The runaway effect is scary b/c at certain temperature (~400K) atmosphere consisting predominantly of water vapor looses its ability to radiate out more heat up until 1600K.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1892 (see fig. 2b) (edit: the figure: https://imgur.com/a/ytoEXzd)
edit #2: I've measured some pixels and the starting runaway temp is closer to 315K / 42C, damn
And that's just one of the many positive feedback loops.
What is generally not understood is that our current icehouse phase is rare.
'A "greenhouse Earth" is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history.
'Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously... Earth's current icehouse state is known as the Quaternary Ice Age and began approximately 2.58 million years ago.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earthh...
The _state_ isn't alarming, it's the rate of change. The transition is happening on a scale of human lifetimes instead of geological time.
Precisely. Humans can adapt to almost anything but we can not do it fast enough with 8 billion+ people.
Yeah. The XKCD "Timeline of Earth's Average Temperature" is, I'm pretty certain, the most frightening chart I have ever seen.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
> Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history.
And during those periods there were no human beings. And no agriculture, or unstable globalised economiies, or dense urban societies vulnerable to disruption.
It is, of course, interesting that our planet has this long, varied existence that pre-dates us. But it is of little use in understanding how to get us out of the hole we're in. And it is arguably dangerous, because it misleads people into thinking that we have the capacity to adapt to such conditions, when we manifestly don't.
To put a different shade on the meaning, this climate period is rare, easily disturbed, and difficult to restore even with vastly more powerful technology.
The more common greenhouse state is unlikely to lead to a Venus runaway, but it will be hostile to us.
We might very well require the rare climate, and perish in the common.
The CO2 graph over decades is painfully clear.[1] From 321ppm in 1970 to 428ppm in mid-2005, measured in Hawaii atop Mauna Loa, far from any major CO2 sources. Everything else is noisy and statistical, but the CO2 measurement increases very steadily.
[1] https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
The bull case is solar and batteries are only going to get cheaper so the speed of the transition will increase.
* Australia's renewables generation increased from 13.7% in 2015 to 42.9% in 2025 [1]
* EIA: 99%+ of new US capacity in 2026 will be solar, wind + storage [2]
* Wind and solar overtake fossil power in the EU for the first time in 2025 [3]
1. https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=all...
2. https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/eia-99-of-new-us-capacity-in-...
3. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricit...
So maybe the people who aren’t having kids due to climate change were right after all?
The problem can now only be solved on the supply side. Cut the production of oil and gas below the planet's natural carbon sequestration.
The low prices of solar and batteries are a glimmer of hope. For many regions it's now the cheapest source of electricity.
You mean cutting into the profit/MONEY of these large corporations? How will they survive!?
s/production/extraction/
Nothing wrong with synthetic.
Go ask Google about China and the 3rd world contribution to global pollution. The West is bending over backwards to 'fight climate change' and a huge chunk of the world is just doing whatever they want, completely negating all of the west efforts.
> Go ask Google about China
China's doing better than the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292. Please don't lie.
When I want to motivate myself I look at this https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-scariest-climate-plot-...
One of the solutions is to stop the ai hype, as the excessive electrical needs it creates are obviously not helping with the climate.
Nothing new under the sun.
We can't cut emissions fast enough politically, but we can race towards economically viable fusion power which would solve the problem from the supply side and would make industrial scale carbon sequestration not insane, for a century or so, until waste heat itself can't be radiated fast enough even in 250 ppm CO2 atmosphere - but that's a problem for the XXII century.
Economically viable fusion power uses the fusion reactor in the sky beaming energy to us for free that we can collect with relatively cheap, simple, decentralized, solid state, and extremely long lasting (decades) power transmission recievers.
No disagreement, but nights and clouds are inconvenient and remedies are also expensive-ish. We need both.
How about economically viable fission power, right now.
That's the thing, can't be done
France, Sweden and Ontario exist.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/12mo/monthly
It literally has been done.
Just price in the externalities and it probably solves itself
Vote Giant Meteor 2028. Thick Dust or Bust.
At least considering only temperature, it seems changes are never going to be irreversible since both stratospheric aerosol injection and intentional nuclear winter should always be able to cool down global temperatures
When this always-revise-in-one-direction phenomenon happened with the electron charge, it was considered a priori "proof" that scientists were fudging their data to match expectations. The Millikan Oil Drop Experiment is still studied in fundamentals of science class.[0]
If climate scientists are constantly revising their predictions upward, then this is equally "proof" that climate scientists are under pressure to revise their estimates downward. Far from being "alarmist," such terms are actually cudgels used to discourage climate scientists from making their data look too bad.
The result is the predictable fudging of climate data to look better than it really is.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...
What about the possibility that the models so far have always been wrong and if they wrong in the wrong direction you would never hear about them?
Precisely, it's just selection effect. There's always uncertainty, and scientists are heavily incentivized to "prune" models that show large effect sizes. The result is the observed systematic underestimations, punctuated by (suspiciously monotonic) upward revisions any time the new data arrives.
Let's compare two countries at the same level of development.
Canada has 14 tonnes carbon footprint per person. Canada is a cold country.
France has 8 tonnes carbon footprint per person. Climate is way warmer.
We can't continue adding population and the wondering what is going on.
> During the mid-to-late Pleistocene (∼1.2 million to 11,700 years before present) ... with temperatures ranging roughly between −6°C and +2°C relative to the pre-industrial mean of ∼14°C
Does this mean during mid-to-late Pleistocene it used to be -6C to +2C, or does it mean it used to be 8C to 16C?
(If the former, then how did early humanoids, and many other animals, survive such cold?)
The latter. I suggest reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology#Reconstructin...
The later, "−6°C and +2°C relative to" is relative to the mean of 14.
No worries ladies and gentleman, AI will solve it, insert coin, or better throw another trillion at it and all will be solved.
AGI is here
Carbon tax. Stop subsidizing fossil fuels.
I really think the key to addressing climate change should have started 20 years ago in a lot of primary schools, whereby the curriculum includes subjects that are more tailored to solving problems with capturing or converting C02 (eg sciences) so that these students are thinking about these problems when graduating and starting businesses to solve the challenges (hopefully with gov incentives at same time).
We have had the technology to decarbonise the grid since the 1950s and we have known about the problem since the 1970s. Politics however has driven the use of CO2 instead of nuclear energy and required the drastic development of high end wind and solar. Even that wasn't enough, it also had to get considerably cheaper than CO2 producing energy sources and the entire time the entire worlds population has been subjected to massive amounts of propaganda to keep burning oil, gas and coal. This transition was possible 55 years ago when the problem was first surfaced, the political will just wasn't there so it didn't happen.
Its not an education issue, it has always been governments getting in the way and refusing to change the power source. its why I think Solar will win out, it can be deployed on an individual house level unlike everything else and that changes things enormously.
eh... imagine a planet scale messmer plan... too bad petro-dollar is a thing
20 years ago was when Al Gore’s influential documentary An Inconvenient Truth first appeared. Almost everyone I knew discussed it, including primary school pupils. Guess what, we do have better tools today than 20 years ago to fight climate change, such as practical and useful electric vehicles to replace CO2-emitting conventional vehicles.
Are there any attempts to start geo-engineering to fix this? I'm assuming there will be no attempt to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere, can we at least do something to take it back out? Can we use solar or renewables to possibly do that at scale?
Putting sulfur into the right layers of the atmosphere seems to be the currently best viable options. It's not overly expensive, either. It acts fast and is reversible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
Dumb question: would this also lower solar panel yields?
Thank you. This reading lowers my anxiety. I believe we'll rationally - and in a hurry - come down to this kind of solution. It makes solid sense.
So far all of the carbon capture techniques (apart from growing forests and keeping them protected) have been pretty unsuccessful, and/or don't scale well.
That leaves us in the realm of solutions that may be very likely to disrupt our ecosystem themselves, like genetically-engineering algae/phytoplankton to improve ocean carbon sequestration
> apart from growing forests and keeping them protected)
I’m in a loop. I must be.
How are people still basic at this? No. Forests are not “carbon capture” devices.
Plant a big forest and “protect” (which means thinning it, unless you are California) and in 100 years most trees have died, rotted, released their carbon.
There is so much wrong with the alarmism here, so much hand waving away of scale when it is inconvenient… that it’s like people are doing more damage than good when they jump up and down over this stuff.
It’s almost like if the jumping up and down and alarmism has a different purpose, a whole separate game removed from the issues at hand.
I don't think carbon capture / sequestration is going to do enough, but if we continue slipping into this trajectory I think there will be more support for changing reflectivity (spraying sea water, or putting particles in the stratosphere).
There are currently no power efficient and scalable ways to remove carbon dioxide from air or water.
Renewables are considered woke technology which mock old and masculine fossil fuel tech, which feel threatened by all these white spinny things, hence renewable energy projects are being actively discouraged or canceled altogether.
You know, we'd be all woke and weird if our cars don't have 8 cylinders and make wroom sounds. Same for our chimneys and power architecture. Woke electrons should be banned. We need masculine, fossil based electrons, which are more powerful per electron than wind/solar based fluffy/hippie ones.
The rich don’t care which side you’re on, as long as you’re fighting each other.
I don't play that game. I only do what I can do with what I have and don't care about losing time with pointless fights.
I may not be able to save the whole planet, but at least I'll leave my area a bit better as my capacity and time allows.
Both sides aren't fighting each other, one side has turned themselves into a weapon for rich pedophiles to attack the other side with.
Notably, both sides held that exact view in recent times.
> Renewables are considered woke technology which mock old and masculine fossil fuel tech...
This is mostly a US problem at this point. The rest of the world is adopting renewables considerably faster than anyone expected (and despite the best efforts of the current administration, the adoption curve is accelerating even in the US).
That said, it's still apparent that even optimistic estimates of renewable energy adoption aren't fast enough to fix the climate crisis on their own.
> This is mostly a US problem at this point.
Yeah I know, and I'm not from that side of the ocean. I worded my comment like that since most users here are from the US.
electricitymaps paints a nice picture, though. We'll be using them in a project, so I'll be able to see the nitty gritty details soonish.
At least some of us are trying. Maybe we'll fail, but not all of us are that ignorant, and that's better than nothing.
Needed to happen 30 years ago.
Now it’s drill baby drill time.
If only there was a clean, nearly limitless source of energy, where the waste for hundreds of years of energy could be stored in less than a square kilometer.
If such a thing existed, we could be sure that environmentalists and leftists would have openly embraced it, rather than nip it at the bud 50 years ago. Because they are Good People™. And we should definitely listen to them now because they Follow The Science™.
> If such a thing existed, we could be sure that environmentalists and leftists would have openly embraced it, rather than nip it at the bud 50 years ago. Because they are Good People™. And we should definitely listen to them now because they Follow The Science™.
The issue with current politics wrt environment is environmentalists and leftists? This feels like a smoker blaming their smoking habit on anti-drug associations not being good enough rather than big tobacco.
CO2 seems very threatening but loss of biodiversity is also a problem, and it has nothing to do with energy...
We're in deep s*t
People may be downvoting you because they think you're not speaking in good faith. But I think this touches on an important issue which is the credibility of politicians when it comes to bringing the science hammer down (in the form of policy). Stuff like the junk science behind those old CA plastic straw policies, the seesawing on Covid prevention and lab-leak denialism, the energy efficient dryers that don't work (this last one is more hearsay to me, and issue of CBA rather than scientific fact perhaps.) I think if politicians can get their shit straight on communicating mature science thoroughly and accurately it could go a long way to getting people to work together.
But that source of power is a high-modernist invention that is unnatural and especially dangerous because of a few high-profile accidents. We have to shut it all down!
Surely nothing has ever done wrong with this limitless source of clean energy to give people pause? There's no uninhabitable areas of the Earth due to this?
i'm not sure there are, from a science point of view... From political point of view there are probably only 2 locations in one country... vs a gigantic energy output on planetary scale...
We can stop saying "risk" at this point. Just "the hothouse Earth's trajectory" is fine
Ehm, we're royally fuxed.
Unless the fake reality starts to crack with the Epstein and other current events and humanity's coming of age will happen. Even if a hundred years later than Bonhoeffer though it would.
What's fascinating and dismaying to me is that it's obvious that there exists sufficient capital and capability in the west to fix this.
I always wondered if we just lacked the ability to mobilize to solve big problems anymore but now I look at this 7% US GDP being allocated to AI datacentres and I realize that it isn't a lack of ability, it's a lack of desire.
Imagine if we had ram shortages because all the silicon was being diverted towards making solar panels. Imagine if we had copper shortages because it was going to the windings on wind mills. Imagine if all these economic disruptions were just temporary and for a better cause or eliminating carbon emissions and eventually moving to sequestration of carbon.
Instead we get chatbots. And funny picture makers.
Not the same silicon. Wafer fabs make pure crystals. Photovoltaics use polysilicon.
Obviously you mean purified silicon, but, remember silicon is what the Earth has in abundance (yeah I know it’s energy intensive, and there exist such profession as sand prospector.)
And yet, the only reasonable action to take is to flag this topic and move along with the "humanity has always found a way out, technology will save us. Remember, we were supposed to drown in horse manure!"
Why? Because candidly looking at those risks as a society means deep collective existential dread, which automatically means an immediate civilizational collapse.
So I'm guessing some of our elite is actually ignorant and the other part is willfully shutting the hell up on this subject to let our civilization run on fumes a few more years.
It's unfortunate because a rapid civilizational collapse could give humanity as a species a better chance of survival.
> It's unfortunate because a rapid civilizational collapse could give humanity as a species a better chance of survival.
How's that?
An effective way to cut carbon emissions before feedback loops are triggered
Meanwhile all these other AI threads everybody’s worried about losing their jobs
Not realizing we’re gonna go extinct here in the next thousand years unless something solves it
Since humans are incapable of doing this there’s only one possible option: To create something smarter than us and give it the power to solve it because we cannot
> Meanwhile all these other AI threads everybody’s worried about losing their jobs
don't worry
AI will cause both losing your job AND climate change
Omg people its - the bullshit mascaraing as science these days is exhausting. Earth is on a hot house trajectory regardless of climate. The sun expands and gets hotter - so do we. Its literally then simplest game structure there is - get to the next hop before you die. The next hop is Mars. I don’t understand why this isn’t inherently obvious.