Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative.
The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect.
This only stops it.
Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.
The technology-will-save-us mentality is part of the reason we are here. We live in a society that doesn't do anything unless it makes money for some set of decrepit old men.
We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition) but people made money doing the opposite. And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US.
No it isn't, the idea that strict vegan diets would have stoped climate change is just nonsense. Run the numbers. "Strict vegan diets" is the attitude of US activists telling the developing world that they need to change their behavior before the US activist is willing to accept driving less or adopting dense urban infill housing.
"Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.
People who refused to acknowledge the reality of human society, refused to acknowledge that the profit system exists whether they want it to or not, are responsible for focusing action on ineffective means of change.
It’s one piece of many. They never said it was the only piece. You’re straw-manning this comment.
And vegan diets would make a big dent, look up agricultural sector emissions, look up beef emissions and methane from their burps. It’s a major factor after transport and electricity.
Yes, but there is zero shot at doing this versus energy and transportation.
The major limiter of veganism is cultural. People love eating meat. It’s a major source of protein and calories, especially in developing countries. Americans are not going vegan, so it’s kind of silly, in my opinion, to focus on it as a solution.
Compare to building nuclear energy or solar / wind + batteries. China, the US, Europe, and India are all well-positioned to do this. The limitation is political will, which is more difficult than it should be, but definitely easier than convincing a critical mass of Americans to go vegan.
Culture can be changed - we changed the attitude toward and prevalence of cigarette smoking in 2-3 generations, we could change other practices as well. Success doesn't need to mean 100% adoption - material changes in attitude toward meat consumption (luxury/celebration vs everyday) would make a material difference in the overall impact. And yes, some/many ranchers, butchers, etc would need to turn to some other industry for income. Solar farms should do pretty well on ranchland. Full disclosure - I'm NOT a vegetarian and love a nice steak. My doctor has recommended I incorporate more plant protein in my diet. But I'm not really trying to convince anyone that they should do the same. I'm mostly reacting to the opinion that it's impossible/silly. My 2 pack a day smoker dad thought the same thing back in the 1960s. By the time he was in his 70s, he was a firm non-smoker. Things can change.
Edit: I'm also not trying to equate eating meat with smoking - one is obviously more harmful to society than the other. I'm just thinking about the cultural change that happened. Culture is malleable. Laws aren't a great way to affect culture, but social pressure is really effective.
I think the difference is that smoking is also horrible for the smoker, and many want to quit, but can’t very easily. People don’t want to stop eating meat, driving their SUVs, buying cheap shit on Amazon, and flying to cool vacations. Stopping doing those things doesn’t benefit them unless everyone else stops too, and unlike smoking, we’ve made little progress in the last few decades (other than the progress unlocked by technology that means it’s immediately beneficial to the one making the change, like solar), so I can’t blame anyone for thinking that giving up meat to save the planet is stupid since their entire lifetime of lived experience tells them that the vast majority of their fellow humans are not going to do the same.
Culture can be changed indeed, as can be seen in religion where branches has happened and whole demographics has gone and switched to different religions.
The reason for the decrease in smoking is still being researched and debate, but the main arguments that I have seen is the main role of smoking as social stress relief and as such it has been replaced by other addictions like opium use (mobile phone use, social media, and games has also been argued).
If we consider food culture to be malleable, we definitely should move to aquaculture as a main source of nutrients. Farms on land compete with forests and human activity, and land based farms uses artificial fertilizers (derived from natural gas) and massive amount of fresh water. Shellfish, invertebrates, and seaweed can provide both protein and calories, and has the lowest environmental impact of anything we eat today and can even have a positive environmental impact if farmed correctly. Changing farming from doing harm to doing good would have massive impact, and all it takes is a cultural change.
Energy policy is set by governments, which makes it a part of the political sphere
Veganism is an individual choice, and individual choices are generally pushed by culture
Of course culture and politics influence each other in a myriad of ways, but when people start to try and push individual choices like being vegan into the political space it is never very popular
I personally would fight tooth and nail to prevent veganism from becoming a law in my country. Failing that I would immediately make plans to move somewhere else.
It's tied to their identity for a lot of people. The same kinds that will drive a huge SUV to compensate for the hole in their lives where meaning and connection is supposed to be.
I don’t think that is a majority behavior. Few people consume to own the libs. At least far fewer people than those who just like meat more than they care about their marginal contributions to climate change.
I think that’sa harmful oversimplification. You should avoid arguing against a boogeyman version of your political opponents. People vote for crazy candidates for a multitude of reasons. Most people have fairly average opinions on the majority of topics but can only vote for candidates that partially represent their preferences. I for example have fairly radical preferences when it comes to environmental policy but agree more with conservative opinions on other topics. There are no parties in my country that promise to make me completely happy.
Stop being so fucking patronizing. I was raised by these people. Most of my family are still these people. I’ve experienced their bullshit for over 40 years. Your high minded nonsense in no way applies. I see what they cheer for.
And here you are playing their fucking game. They wouldn't be such degenerate shitheads if people weren't mean to them. As if there isn't a strong line of cruelty throughout all of conservative history in this country. Your argument is she wouldn't have been raped if she hasn't been wearing what she was wearing. That black boy wouldn't have been lynched if he hadn't cat-called a white woman. Regardless of whether or not he actually did. It puts the fault of the worst of our society on the normal folks just trying to live their lives. Conservatives are shit people because are incapable of empathy for the out-group. Not because liberals were mean to them online.
Democracy breaks down when you demonize people with different opinions instead of figuring out on why they believe what they’re believing and on which topics you can find consensus. When you assume to know everything about a person by where they put a cross in an election you give up on trying to convince them of your convictions. You can’t have a functioning society if you let the identity politics propaganda win. If you believe that roughly half of your country is a raping, lynching mob beyond reason you might as well stop elections and proceed to civil war.
> instead of figuring out on why they believe what they’re believing and on which topics you can find consensus.
They already told us. They hate anybody who isn't a cis white christian male. There's not a lot to find consensus on when one side wants healthcare for everyone and the other wants some people to cease to exist within the country.
Going vegan 1 day a week is trivially easy - if everyone does this, the emission reduction is not trivial. We need not have to go full militant vegan to make a dent. And I totally agree with energy/transit/real estate planning being the sectors where a government can twist knobs a bit easier with greater effect. But I strongly believe that we need holistic approaches- reducing emissions on an individual level will move the needle en masse.
If I stopped eating all meat and dairy it would reduce the world's annual emissions by 0.0000000026%, assuming we can ignore animal quantization and market effects which could easily actually reduce the reduction to 0.
It only makes a difference if a whole lot of other people do that. If I decide individually to do it for the climate even though I will be less happy on a vegan diet and it is not also done by a whole lot of other people I've made myself worse off for no benefit.
To get enough people to do it will require government incentives. It's hard to see how incentives specifically for this could be designed to be both effective and not so unpopular as to get the government replaced at the next election.
If it ever comes about it is far more likely to be as the result of something more general such as a revenue neutral carbon tax. That might raise the input costs for meat production shifting some people to non-meat diets. (They will still mostly prefer meat, but this way they might not blame the government as much).
Compare to other things individuals can do, like switch to EVs. For the vast majority of people with good home charging an EV will generally be as good as or better than an ICE car except that it is several thousand dollars more expensive than a similar ICE car.
That's something governments can incentivize. Subsidize the cost difference and subsidize home charging equipment purchase and installation, and you will get people switching. Not because they want to help the climate and are sacrificing something for that, but because it is an improvement to their current driving setup and it helps the climate.
The biggest wins though are in the things individuals don't directly deal with. Replace fossil fuel power plants with renewables backed with storage that just use gas occasionally for example, and to the user it is all just electricity. You don't have to convince individual they need to change their lifestyle to so this kind of change.
The straw man is claiming that "strict vegan diets" are necessary. People bring up "strict vegan diets" to sabotage climate action. It's a hindrance to achieving the very possible change we need.
> People bring up "strict vegan diets" to sabotage climate action.
They also tend to use polarizing identity politics that vilify all men, or all old people, or all white people, etc, even though most of those groups are suffering with everybody else.
how fast do you expect vegan diets to be distributed through society? What is the relation between the expectation of how fast they can be distributed through society and the requirement for speed of distribution to have the desired effect?
Obviously the requirement would have to be significantly quicker than current spread of veganism which would, as you noted, lead to a big dent in the agriculture sector.
How are your calculations taking into account the need to kill off, en masse, cattle and other animals as veganism spreads because they no longer can be considered economically sustaining for the farmer to support them?
I ask because I've never seen any calculation about this! Everybody always seems to think that veganism spreads and the cattle fairy will blink them out of existence.
When I was working for Greenpeace all the holier than thou vegans were all talking about how immoral it was to kill animals for food, not taking into account that once you no longer user those animals for food you need to kill off a lot of them. This taking into account of things always caused me to have a sneaking suspicion that they wanted the animals not to be killed, as if the farmers would be oh well we can't sell you for meat so let's just keep you on in retirement and feed you, but not have you breed, until you die of old age.
Given the influx of sudden and wide spread veganism and the collapse of the meat as food industry, what are the plans for getting rid of the bodies of lots of dead cows? I know what the plans are now with meat as food, cows are butchered, cut up, refrigerated and transported all over the world, but without meet as food none of that will happen because there would not be profit at the end to support it, so please, what is your plan?
Frankly, the whole wide-spread veganism is part of the solution seems to have the weakness of having many problematic moving pieces that are not at all planned for in any meaningful way - that I have ever seen that is.
I think current livestock usage is driven by demand? I don’t think everyone needs to become strictly vegan. If every ate meat just two days a week that would have a big impact. Perfect being the enemy of the good and all that. For example if meat usage was rationed by the government WW2-style that would likely effect demand too.
You might argue that’s a ridiculous suggestion which is fair. The western world did mobilize for something that’s likely to end less of life that if we continue on our current trajectory.
> "Making money" is the incentive system of society.
Then explain voluntary work or all the people risking their lives for other people they don’t even know.
Human society existed before money.
And nobody said that a vegan diet would have stopped climates change, they said strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition.
Just picking one and say that would help is a nasty tactic.
It’s like saying you need water, food and sleep to live and you say, nope, water alone doesn’t keep you alive.
The reality is, consuming and producing less works but it’s harder then keep going and hope for a technical solution.
Same with being overweight, more sports, less food works but doesn’t make fun.
I push back heartily on anybody bringing up "strict vegan diets" because it is itself a massive straw man, one that mostly promotes inaction and idleness. Michael Mann's 2021 book, and all the interviews around that time, are probably far more effective than I could be at explaining why it's such a bad idea to bring up "strict vegan diets"
Making money is not the only incentive system in society, but it is overwhelmingly the one that controls emissions. Another key one is regulations around housing, which require lots of driving, that's been built deep into our entire land use, and can not be changed on the time scale necessary for climate action.
Moreover, "making money" is the incentive system in all the world's big carbon emitting economies that controls decisions, from China to the US. Sometimes those incentive systems are based on the costs of technology, sometimes they are based on rules that governments make (e.g. China setting the price for energy capacity markets too high, resulting in buliding lots of coal electricity plants that sit mostly idle...)
As somebody who spends almost all of my political effort trying to get ground based mass transit and dense development, I often advocate for them on climate grounds, but only because climate grounds are convincing politically here. They are rounding errors on climate action, in practice, because new development over the course of the next two decades, the crucial two decades of climate cation, will only be a tiny fraction of our built environment.
There's only one true method for climate action: stop extracting fossil fuels to run soceity, and change all industrial processes that emit carbon to neutral methods, and make agriculture carbon neutral or ideally carbon negative. Strict vegan diets helps with deforestation in Brazil, for those that get meat from Brazil, for example. But the plains of the US used to be covered with bison, before they were slaughtered and replaced with cattle. We need to look at the overall ecosystem, where everything is going.
Talking about "strict vegan diets" when they are not needed is merely a recipe for keeping people from adopting far easier, far more effective, and far more necessary action.
Society doesn't require money, but it does seem to require mechanisms for coordinating resources and obligations. Money is one particularly powerful solution to that problem, especially once societies become large enough that most economic interactions occur between people who don't personally know one another.
> And nobody said that a vegan diet would have stopped climates change, they said strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition.
That just makes it less possible.
Consuming and producing less is just not going to happen because there are at least four billion people who don't live the western lifestyle, but want to and there's not much that can stop them.
> the idea that strict vegan diets would have stoped climate change is just nonsense
Yeah, where did you get it from? They said "strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition" Would you also have said "the idea that energy transition and ground based mass transit would have stopped climate change is just nonsense", too?
Only to then go on to talk about "the reality of human society", as so often with these top response to the top comment. It's the sophistry two-step.
Significant amounts of the third world are already eating de-facto vegetarian or vegan diets. Many for religious reasons (i.e. in India where the vast majority of people either eat no meat or only chicken/fish), and many others for financial reasons.
Strict vegan diets would objectively massively help reduce climate change.
> The consumption of meat is more common among lower-income groups. Nearly nine out of ten people belonging to the poorest 20% of India's population eat meat, compared to about seven out of ten among the wealthiest 20%.[4]
> Religion also plays a role in dietary habits. Nearly all of the Muslim (99%), Christian (99%) and Buddhists/neo-Buddhist (97%) populations eat meat. Among Hindus, a little over three-quarters consume meat, while Jains and Sikhs have the highest share of vegetarians. Only one-quarter of Jains and half of Sikhs have ever eaten meat.
And lentils do taste very good yes. In Spain they make a really nice lentil broth. Though the traditional version has meat in it, it can easily do without. It's just that in Spain meat goes into everything:)
Because the incentive is what drives change. You're not going to convince America or Western Europe to live strict vegan lifestyles if they are adverse to it. Further, as the poor people grow wealthier, they begin to eat more meat unless they have a religious reason (I.e. an incentive) to do so.
Converting to a vegan diet alone won't stop human driven climate change. Therefore, the prospect of climate change won't be enough to convince people to give up meat en masse. That drum has been banged on enough for long enough for that to be obvious.
It's not even just America or Western Europe. As soon as I saw the OP about switching to total veganism, my first thought was about e.g. the Arabian Peninsula where meat is central to every meal, and indeed going without meat is seen as the behavior of adherents of foreign religions. Anyone familiar with that part of the world knows that any fad of societal veganism would take decades to arise, longer than the time we have to tackle climate change.
Punjab and Rajasthan have the highest proportion of vegetarians and also rank on the top of male/female height charts.
Admittedly it's not fully vegan but still.
Indians have long recognized the virtues of a vegetarian diet: both the moral imperative & it's health benefits. That's something everyone should be able to admire.
They consume far less meat and the specific types are the uniquely least polluting types
Chicken/Fish produce an order of magnitude or in some cases two orders of magnitude less pollution than cows do.
Trying to gaslight me on this topic even though I'm right on the part that matters. the "or" stands in for the context of the fact that Chicken/fish are an order of magnitude healthier for the planet, and frankly, for individuals.
The person I'm responding to is the one who brought it up.
I live in a very leftist place, and there were always those at climate events demanding "strict vegan diets" however I didn't see these people out in the general world outside of my little leftist bubble, trying to actually get their idea out there.
I agree with Michael Mann that what most of the public only encounters this idea of "strict vegan diets is a required climate solutions" by hearing it from climate denialists poisoning the well of climate action. But I also see this idea online, and in meat space in very isolated areas.
So the idea of "strict vegan diets" is a real idea on the fringe, but its overall effect on climate action has been to turn people against climate action in the US.
I‘m pretty sure they mention a strict vegan diet as only a part of the solution.
And it’s a fact that meat needs more resources and produces more CO2 and methane then plant based food.
It would already help to consume less meat.
It seems to me you focus on vegan diet to use the annoying vegan stereotype for your purposes.
> People who refused to acknowledge the reality of human society, refused to acknowledge that the profit system exists whether they want it to or not, are responsible for focusing action on ineffective means of change.
Thank you for writing that, because I think it is the key point. It's very easy to blame "decrepit old men" because that makes it someone else's fault - and I get it, as I think that there are a bunch of decrepit old men that deserve a lot of blame.
But democratic societies (and even authoritarian ones that are still somewhat subject to mass unrest) were never going to accept large negative impacts for a consequence that was not immediate and in your face. Like you put it, just go around and ask your average Joe or Jane if they would vote for any candidate who demanded strict vegan diets (or heck, even a lot of the other things on GP's list). You're fooling yourself if you think it's only decrepit old men who don't want that stuff.
And regarding GP's comment that "And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US." Yes, there are some people trying to sabotage this to make money for themselves, but it will not take them too long to fail miserably precisely because the economics are not in their favor. Just look at Texas - not exactly a place known for its love of vegan diets, among other things - and solar, wind and now batteries are now a huge portion of the energy mix and growing fast precisely because it's economical.
That's simply not true.
Politicians have always known how to convince young men to go to war and die for them. Nothing is more selfless.
So politicians could also convince people to change their lifestyles for the worse to prevent catastrophe.
To be fair, often that convincing happened at gunpoint. I would want to live in a society that enforced climate action with weapons. But of course politicians could do a lot more to motivate climate action before guns would be needed.
1) renewable energy is only a part of climate action, it's not sufficient - renewable energy being cheap alone doesn't help a bit if you don't keep fossil fuel in the ground
2) not technology aligned societies incentive systems, but politics which a) incentivized producing electricity by renewable methods and punishing electricity produced by fossil fuels, which again encouraged research which in return made renewables mostly cheaper than fossil fuels - and we are lucky that the physics aligned with that.
Renewable energy and replacing carbon emitting industrial chemistry with carbon neutral processes are the sum entirely of climate action.
There might be a tiny bit of nuclear built, but we don't have the capability to build enough to make a dent in the time scale we need to, and nuclear is far more expensive than solar plus batteries, so the profit motive means solar wind and batteries will win.
The people that built the technology aligned industrial policy and government incentives to allow them to create the technology, true. But it was technology action that is solving climate change.
There are two groups of people opposed to clean energy, one right wing and one left wing, and they were both extremely wrong about the technology, and the path of technology has been crystal clear for decades.
It was obvious in the 2000s, based on learning rates, that batteries solar and wind were improving at rates that would solve our climate crisis. The only question I had was if nuclear could play a part, and Vogtle, Summer, Olkiluoto, Flamanville, and Hinkley proved decisively that nuclear would not be a big player.
We don't need carbon taxes, those turned out to misalign incentives in weird ways (not all industries are equally sensitive to carbon prices, so applying equal taxes is far less than economically ideal for motivationchanges). Tax credits and guaranteed small purchases turned out to be extremely effective and efficient.
Solar and batteries are great for any region where solar production align with electricity consumption and where the battery solves the issue of night time.
Wind is great to reduce fossil consumption to around 50% in regions where the conditions of solar is not great. After 50% the cost increase significantly as overproduction competes with existing investments and prices drops below zero (see Denmark as an example). Batteries is also prohibitively expensive to cover months of poor production, which is why regions that heavily invest into wind also construct thermal power plants for equal capacity that burn carbon rich fuel for electricity and heat (see all of central/northern Europe). Regions with colder climates also has inverse consumption behavior than warmer climates, which mean that solar produce the least when consumption is highest. This is where nuclear can be economical viable, but only if we discontinue building more thermal power plants that burn cheap fuel. EU voting to have natural gas defined as "green" demonstrate this perfectly well, as well as the complete lack of any political party advocating to building battery as the solution for low wind production.
> But it was technology action that is solving climate change.
what even is this?
> We don't need carbon taxes,
yes we need them, otherwise we will keep emitting CO2 as always
> We don't need carbon taxes, those turned out to misalign incentives in weird ways (not all industries are equally sensitive to carbon prices, so applying equal taxes is far less than economically ideal for motivationchanges).
so? the ones which are most sensitive (usually the ones with the highest footprint) will transition first, others will follow later with increasing cost of emitting co2 - not including difficulty which will rebalance the equation
> Tax credits and guaranteed small purchases turned out to be extremely effective and efficient.
what tax credits and what guaranteed small purchases? and how do they prevent greenhouse gas emissions? and why do we want them if technology already provides the incentives (your claim)?
> "Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.
This personal belief is grounded on an assumption that all mankind follows a neoliberal or even libertarian economic model.
Back to reality, west Europe is firmly a social democracy where states impose behavior through law, regulation, and policy, which is topped by a federal system that coordinates policies. Countries such as China are totalitarian with a centrally managed economy that's guided by N-year strategic plans.
My supposed "personal belief" is not normative it is descriptive.
Misconstruing this as normative, and attributing it to a political belief, is your cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile where actual climate action is coming from.
We must understand the world as it is, if we are to effectively change it to a better state.
> My supposed "personal belief" is not normative it is descriptive.
No, it is a expression of your personal and unsupported beliefs. Asserting that the whole world enforces a libertarian economical system is simply out of touch with reality. I mean, China alone is a totalitarian regimes that still manages it's economy through central planning.
> Back to reality, west Europe is firmly a social democracy where states impose behavior through law, regulation, and policy, which is topped by a federal system that coordinates policies.
And yet, air travel continues to grow (after a small hiatus due to COVID) and state and EU money will be dumped into a new airport near me, to support more than doubling current capacity, much further away from the city (adding tens of millions of car trips to and from the airport).
I'm simply the looney for not taking the kids on low cost European city escapes.
It starts from the “bottom”: people will talk about it, but will pretty much continue to do whatever the fuck they can afford to do. And Europeans, like Americans, can simply afford to much, while harping about what will happen to the world once the BRICS can afford the same.
Seriously, we have the US threatening to sanction (and has) politicians and judges that want to regulate US technology companies. The idea that neoliberalism doesn't have a massive influence on the world is straight up delusional.
Did we forget that EU took an austerity approach following 2008 and all that did was immiserate their population enough where they are voting for fascist/nationalist political parties?
Yes, although I wouldn’t blame the US solely, London also carries a fair amount of responsibility for it. Perhaps not as much as the US, but Thatcherism was certainly the Trojan horse for European entry of neoliberalism in the 1980s.
> This personal belief is grounded on an assumption that all mankind follows a neoliberal or even libertarian economic model.
This personal belief is usually coupled to people who have become wealthy following this belief. So it tracks that they would declare any solution that doesn't allow them to continue their plundering impossible.
You're assuming that we keep the same system and that no sacrificing can be made. Technology is seen as the only solution because of the primary assumption that we need to keep growth and late stage capitalism. Degrowth, relocalisation, lower consumption are all solutions that would work better than technology (there are very serious people out there who demonstrated that technology won't replace the energy we need, Jancovici to name just one).
Technology is the only option in constant system, but with nothing happening, the system won't remain constant for long, and sacrifices will have to be made, not by choice.
Jancovici said a lot of stupid things also, although it seems that he recently acknowledged that renewables could make an impact (and not just "l'épaisseur du trait" as he always said).
I'm not sure what you mean by "degrowth, relocalisation, lower consumption are all solutions that would work better than technology".
People in general do no want to consume less, or buy more expensive stuff created locally, so I think it's easier to create new technologies than to change people mindset, although we probably should try to do both (which we are).
He does says (said) a lot of stupid things, but also has a good analysis in some domains. He’s very influenced by meadows/ world3/ club de Rome and while it’s a toy model it certainly a good thing to have a global view.
> You're assuming that we keep the same system and that no sacrificing can be made.
No. I am not.
I'm saying that unless the incentive system is aligned with our goals, then it's not actually climate action.
Technologists succeeded at doing that.
People who decided to use non-policy driven political action failed utterly at this. The degrowthers are particularly bad at this, but then all their thinking was muddled and riddled with errors about the reality of the science.
Technology makes the system non-constant. Technology is one of the biggest sources of social change.
Technology did that. With lots of government subsidies, and in particular with Germany kick starting a ton of solar industrial development.
Even in the US, with concerted anti-renewable sentiment at all levels of decision makers in both electric utility leadership and government leadership, new electricity is overwhelmingly carbon-free, because the technologists made it the cheapest:
Technologists caused massive social change, by changing the technology. Far more than the people that focused only on culture and changing society through those means.
Sure. That's good, I fully agree with you on that. But is this the solution, or just treating the symptom rather than the root cause?
Technology by itself has never been the problem, the problem is the scaling up of it. Fossil fuels are harmless at a small scale, it's only once you exploit enough of them that you start to see harmful effects. But renewables are no different: we're drawing from the Earth's natural energy allocation, but that's the same energy that heats the planet in the first place -- so as we scale up renewables, we will also end up wrecking the planet. We'd need to scale it up so much it feels preposterous, but it seems obvious to me that if we can, we will. There is no upper limit to energy demand.
And that's what I'm worried about in the long term, I suppose: that surprised Pikachu moment where human ingenuity (and AI, I guess) worked so hard on extracting every bit of solar energy that the rest of the planet, not receiving any of it anymore, predictably turned into an ice ball. This kind of nonsense could never happen if we could properly look and plan ahead as a society, but neither would climate change, so.
Don't get me wrong, it's great that renewables are booming, but we could also have built a sustainable utopia on the back of fossil fuels if we had properly budgeted their use. We need to switch ASAP and start budgeting, because the problems we currently have aren't the only problems we will ever have, and the size of them, unfortunately, tends to scale with energy.
>Livestock production accounts for 14-18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, including 32 percent of methane gas emissions worldwide.
14-18% seems like a fairly significant chunk, no? and what if we just started with not eating beef, all of us, especially the USA? that'd cut down the emissions by quite a large bit
not to mention the abandonment by state energy companies like Georgia Power of their solar/renewable goals and full buy-in to building yet more gas turbines in order to attract hyperscale data centers. I was part of some organizing against this in my city: https://atlpresscollective.com/2025/12/18/public-service-com...
just look at the funding for renewable R&D in the past few years - the reason we have the market we do now is that huge spike (thanks, Obama) in 2009 that drove down the cost of manufacturing and drove up conversion efficiency. that much investment into the renewables sector hasn't been the same since, especially now: https://www.theinvadingsea.com/2025/11/05/fossil-fuels-oil-c...
Also while developed countries are affected , developing countries like Bangladesh, India are disproportionately affected, mostly a function of geography and a lot of history (very high population etc.). Honestly once AI becomes powerful enough most of these people will literally be leftovers with nothing left to contribute to the world with civil war precursors you see in other forms today essentially the same symptom of fight for limited resources.
The developed countries have so much land, water, resources that they will adapt although inequality within will be an issue and tbh at this point there is never any thought given to the wider world, which if one things about honestly never was.
Renewable energy will power places like Bangladesh towards far greater wealth and prosperity. Aside from the distastefulness of using the term "leftovers" on any group of people, I think its clear that India will become massively more powerful due to their education system, once its further enabled by cheap clean energy and AI.
The US is falling into civil war over stupid culture issues as India is rising. The US is dismantling its education system, its research system, to spend it on wasted defense spending (just in the past few days huge amounts of research money from the National Institutes of Health have been funneled over to DoD. Or DoW, whatever).
Additionally the US's terrible culture war is resulting in slow adoption of cheap energy, which will further lower the US's global position.
There will always be limited resources. If not one, the other. But cheap renewable energy is a great leveler and the US will be leveled far more for its refusal to lead the way with it. India will be hugely ascendant as a massive nation with coordinated, highly educated human resources. Even in the era of AI, perhaps more so, human resources are the ultimate limit on human happiness.
There is a no "culture war" outside of the media and the institutions that are freaking out. Their international arbitrage labor play from the 70s until now is showing itself for the greedy, venal, self-serving system it is. There is a realization about how inequality is created and spreads and that is what is fueling and division here in the US.
Once we rip the institutions that are breeding this inequality out by their roots and replace it with better social safety nets, free medical care, reformed education systems resulting in lower inequality. Then we can tackle planting more trees, bulking out solar, onshoring manufacturing, etc. The "war" is the people who have abused the system so long that they are multi-generational "social elites" complaining that they being called out on it.
I've been vegetarian for 7-8 years and think it'd be great if everyone stopped eating meat, but expecting even a single person to stop who hasn't already expressed interest in it is pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. We should not base our strategies for fighting climate change on hoping all of humanity will take a sudden 180° turn on their natural instincts to eat meat.
I watched a woman break down crying in a grocery store, the guy behind her put 40 lbs of ground beef on the conveyor. She started off as angry “how can you bear the thought of eating all that dead animal?” “Oh it’s not even for me, it’s for my dogs.”
I admire anyone and everyone who wants to be a vegetarian/vegan. Expecting the rest of the world to follow suit is a fools errand.
In medicine there’s this well known axiom that if an intervention regime would technically work, but is something that the patients tend to not follow through, then the intervention regime doesn’t work.
The everyone-should-try-harder mentality doesn't work either unfortunately. It would be great if everyone rode bikes and went vegan but that's never going to happen so we have to stop making people feel bad for buying gas cars and eating cheeseburgers because it just causes division which ultimately hurts progress.
It was oil companies that created the notion of a "carbon footprint" as a way of deflecting blame from them to individuals and now you're falling right into their propaganda with "strict vegan diets" etc. And regardless, we have no alternative but technology to solve the issue because, are you just going to maintain the CO2 status quo in the atmosphere?
Would it work as well, though? The basic idea of "degrowth", to me, is to slow down the car until the braking distance is smaller than the viewing distance, so we're safe no matter what. Whereas technology is more like swerving constantly to avoid obstacles. The latter is just intrinsically more likely to get us into a crash.
I'm not saying degrowth is feasible, mind you. I agree that it probably isn't. But the fact we can't do something doesn't mean the alternatives must be good. It might just mean we're cooked.
No country will ever vote for degrowth so it either has to be done secretively which will cause a populist backlash like in the UK or at gun point. Degrowthers are IMO all basically eco fascists.
The reality of the situation is if you don’t embrace degrowth principles, the planet will probably do it for you. Think mega-wildfores that cause so much devastation that hundreds of thousands of people die from air pollution, or collapse of entire crops and food supply chains due to drought, or mega-heatwaves that wipe out millions.
Degrowth is coming. And you don’t have a say in the matter.
Most of these large wildfires are started by people and a result of bad land management in the form of stopping small fires in fire adapted landscapes. Moreover meddling in insurance markets and NIMBYism causes people to build in burn zones.
There just aren’t mega heatwaves causing famines and there won’t be at 1.5c of warming either.
None of that changes that we now have substantially larger and less controllable fires than we used to. Are you really denying that extreme weather and droughts don’t play a part in dramatically increasing combustibility?
> There just aren’t mega heatwaves causing famines and there won’t be at 1.5c of warming either.
Clearly heat and droughts are an issue and contributing factor, but land use is easily controllable relative to atmospheric CO2.
> Oh we’re going way past 1.5C.
Are we? The IPCC projects that no change in public policy or tecchnological advancement globally has us on track fro 2.6C rise by 2100, but there's a straightforward path to 1.8C. Experts no longer think the old worst case scenarios are plausible. Yes, 2.6C is nothing to scoff at, but it's in the realm of adaptable.
The issue with the global warming advocates is that they seem to believe that in order to solve global warming we need to make everyone's life worse. That was already a non-starter. It's just terrible marketing.
You say it's for the benefit of "decrepit old men," but the fact is that more and more of the globe is being lifted out of poverty and living more comfortably than ever before. The unfortunate fact is that global warming is an unstoppable force now, humans would have to go extinct for it to waiver.
I'm not saying we should do nothing, but I am saying that your framing is exactly why no one listens to global warming advocacy. We are powerless against it, not because of governments, but because people are living better and no one is going to sacrifice that; and even if they did the math doesn't add up to reverse course. The people that say we should all be sacrificing are often the richest among us that don't even know what sacrifice entails, contrary to your point.
Your framing, that no collective action can ever include reduction or sacrifice, implies this is an inevitable and fatal path we cannot come back from.
I hope you are wrong that nothing requiring sacrifice can ever be accomplished.
The only time I can think of that democratic populations have made large and sweeping sacrifices have been when they’re actively engaged in total war. And even then, it usually has to be mandated and enforced pretty ruthlessly by the government.
We simply did not evolve as a species to make large personal individual sacrifices today in order to benefit billions of strangers decades in the future. Never going to happen.
The options here are technology saving us, or eco-totalitarian governments controlling a huge portion of the world’s population. Nothing else will work.
Western activists are ok with this because (a) they don’t imagine that they will be greatly affected and will live a solarpunk luxury lifestyle and (b) they glorify third world poverty and consume media that presents it as a desirable, more authentic way of life, when the truth is that most of those people are desperately trying to claw their way into affluence.
None of the above implies that everyone can achieve a current day Western lifestyle or that current Western lifestyles are sustainable. But average people are going to continue seeking it out, it’s just human nature. Activists who expect people to “just” give up that search are not being realistic.
I don't want to put millions into deeper poverty or poverty at all and I believe pushing that claim so hard is an intentional false dichotomy intended to excuse inaction.
I know you want to paint me as selfish or, like the next commenter, a mislead/naive armchair activist and I understand why that perspective makes things feel simple and either under control or full down-with-the-ship fatalistic. Both of those sound soul soothing in their own way.
Collectively we are in a pickle and I think inaction and poor stewardship is probably not the best we can do to get out of it. If you want to throw your hands in the air and give up because "rich people gonna rich" or you want to let it all happen because you think we should be grateful for the easy life this road has given us even though we stepped on everyone along the way then I understand and that's what you have to do. However, I'd rather we don't give up and instead all figure out how to work together and make things better since we're all in the same boat even if not everyone wants to be.
It would be easier if we all worked together. Humans aren't like that at all so that will never happen but that's not a good enough reason to convince me to shirk the responsibility of trying anyway.
It's not ignoring that at all, but I challenge you to go back to the person in China or India that suddenly has amenities and tell him they all have to go away, and everything they worked for over 20 years is gone for "the greater good." You're probably only viewing this from a Western view (already wealthy.)
At least we've discovered that trying to get people to behave differently at scale without the presence of an *immediate* emergency is a failed endeavour... So maybe now we can stop that nonsense and focus all of our energy on technological solutions?
I’m guessing the things you listed are the sacrifices /you/ are willing to make but omit the ones you are not willing to make. Do you travel by plane? Do you use AI? Do you have kids? Do you own a car? Etc etc.
This right here, the absolutely preposterous idea that giving up kids is somehow climate action, is exactly the nonsense that a climate activist should never tolerate.
You think climate action is everybody stopping having children?! You think extinction of the human race is the only option?!
"Of course not!" You say, so clearly we must have some children. But how many? If we drastically reduce our population, we will continue with the same broken systems, same energy systems, etc.
Only by keeping society running do we have the energy to switch our society's engine to zero carbon energy sources.
It's insulting to tell people not to have children, it's not realistic, but worst of all, it's not a climate solution to not have children.
"Don't have kids" is just Malthusian nonsense from a prior environmental era, uncritical thinking, pure slop.
And it greatly harms actual climate action when this extremely stupid idea gets associated with the climate movement. Stop. Just stop.
It's also completely self defeating. Children tend to end up adopting the values of their parents over time. If climate people just remove themselves from the gene pool, their impact on the climate is going to be negligibly small, but there being that many fewer voices of similar values in the future, will have a much more significant impact.
Imagine you're a hyper-partisan and you learn that 'the other side' is spreading messaging amongst themselves encouraging each other to not have children. You're going to be doing backflips, because it's just the collective suicide of an ideology.
> Children tend to end up adopting the values of their parents over time
No, they don't. If that was true, we'd have prehistoric values. (It would mean you could turn matters of culture into genetic arguments, which is fun, I see the temptation, but it's just not true.)
Consider evolution because it's something similar on an even more gradual scale. Species tend to be very much like the things they came from, yet we have obviously a wide array of species over time because small differences can accumulate on their own 'branch' and eventually diverge to the point of creating entirely new species. But if a species chose to just stop having children, it's not going to have anywhere near the numbers it once did, anytime soon. In extreme cases, it just goes extinct.
It's similar with most views and values. Your children will mostly share all of them with you once they reach a certain age. It's something I can even feel happening with my own parents as I age, rather to my distaste. hahah. Anyhow, yeah - there's about a zillion studies on this topic and you can find that parents values are most predictive of those of their children.
And of course with values and other characteristics, even if parental views/values are highly predictive, there's going to be some variance. But you still end up with the fact that if a bunch of people remove themselves from the gene pool, any definingly common characteristics of those individuals are also going to be disproportionately removed from society as well.
This isn't generally the sort of thing that calls for citations since you're presumably a human, and you presumably know plenty of other humans. And once you compare people to their parents, well - the apple doesn't fall far from the tree on average. There are of course plenty of exceptions, but it's also completely fair to call them exceptions.
In looking up some literature on it, it turns out that some studies have even studied and found what I alluded to of people trending ever more towards their parents values as they age. [1] They call it 'delayed activation'. But anyhow, yeah they found the exact same thing where our values become even more alike as we age. Pretty interesting stuff! And I think it makes the age aspect quite critical. I assumed I was one of those exceptions referenced above, yet reality had other plans in mind, in spite of my protestations.
Reducing population will not do anything to help with climate change.
Look at the time scales of action. Look at what needs to done. Advocating population reduction has nothing at all to do with climate action. Please stop.
You're just taking some idea that sounds vaguely "environmental" and extreme, and attributing it to somehow being climate action. It won't reduce emissions to stop climate change.
A) I’m not a millennial. B) I have kids. C) I used that as one of several sacrifices that can be made to reduce carbon footprint. I would say it is more valid than “being vegan” since that alone may or may not help. Everyone is very ready to wag their finger about the sacrifices they are willing to make but excuse or ignore the ones they are not.
A) I didn't say you're a millenial. B) Having kids is not an excuse for saying "don't have kids for the sake of the environment!" it's an awful, anti-environmental thing to say no matter what. C) Not having kids is not climate action, it doesn't stop climate change, it's at best a half-measure.
Most of all, when people say "don't have kids for the environment" it actually really hurts environmental action. Pretending that self-sacrifice is inherently environmental action, that we will save the world through sacrifice, is just one of those weird ways that Christian religion has worked its way into people's every day life.
We save the climate by stopping ALL emissions, and then also in the later half of the century actually sequestering CO2 at a pretty consistent rate. We don't get to that by halving the population, that's not a solution in any way. It's not going to be easier to get to zero emissions with half the population, if anything it's going to be harder. And we definitiely won't be sequestering CO2 in the later half of the century if we're dealing with all the challenges of reducing the population by any significant amount.
I'm willing to wag my finger at you, not about sacrifices, but falsely equating climate action with sacrifices. Climate action is one thing and one thing only: reducing emissions and eventually reversing some of them. It is not sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice.
If you look back at this thread, I’m not suggesting anyone should do anything, I’m pointing out the piousness of people suggesting we aren’t doing enough when they themselves have more they could do. Also, having fewer children absolutely would have a positive impact on climate if you subscribe to the ideas that climate change is human caused. I have two kids, I personally, for myself, think it would be irresponsible to have more but I wouldn’t push that on anyone.
I think your own values are coming through pretty clearly. Understandably, telling a parent they shouldnt have had kids is bound to strike a nerve. Having kids is great. Having kids is also the worst single thing you can do for the environment. Both can be true, and having kids definitely doesn't make someone bad.
However putting kids on a pedestal is silly. If we push our civilization above earths sustainable carrying capacity, we are fucked. In isolation having them is beautiful, in the aggregate it can be bad.
> Having kids is also the worst single thing you can do for the environment.
No, just no. You can't show that. You don't understand environmentalism. You're just a Malthusian. It's an assertion that human existence is incompatible with the environment, and that's a completely unacceptable proposition, because it defines "environmentalism" as "extinction."
Reducing the population by half will, at best, reduce emissions by half. That's not going to stop climate change. That's not climate action. That's not anything at all.
I really wish people with your attitude would study ecology, would study biology, would study the world. Life, human and not, all affects the ecosystem. All life depends on other life. We all interact, we all change the world. Life has fundamentally changed the geology of Earth in absolutely drastic ways! Life is impact. Defining environmental purity as the absence is an ideology bereft of life, and the nature of life.
Given you’re using big words without explaining them and decorating your argument with patronizing language like “no, just no”, perhaps I should just yield. Even if you turn out to make a convincing argument later, if you really care about convincing people I implore you to think about how condescending your style is…
But if I may explain my thinking essentially from a responsibility perspective your choice is downstream to a whole life of pollution, and of their kids etc. Depending on how many kids the average person has how polluting the average person is, that seems like a significant contribution.
Despite that you attribute to me some sort of strange degrowth philosophy where I am advocating for extinction, all I am saying is that there is a huge impact to overpopulation if we don’t change our habits. If it is sustainable to have more humans later on due to improvements in conduct, by all means I think thats great.
Is it possible that cutting emissions in half would stop climate change (after some time)? There is a tolerable level of emissions. I vaguely remember that it's half what we're at.
The options are technology-will-save-us or everyone-spontaneously-does-the-right-thing-despite-not-wanting-to-do-it-and-in-many-cases-having-perverse-incentives. If the second one worked, everyone would be vegan, there would be world peace, no hunger, etc. We have one non-fantasy option and it's technology.
Did you read the link? Spending 1 million bucks to fix all the methane leaks in the world is such an insane bang-for-buck win that I can’t even fathom spending one billion bucks for a tenth of the gain.
The means to do it would be things like uranium steel mills and concrete plants (via hydrogen production) or any of the huge number of industrial uses of heat. The amount of coal and oil burnt to produce industrial heat is mind-boggling.
People are meat eaters. If I was to run a campaign to keep the green movement unpopular, I’d promote enforced veganism as one of its core ideas.
No that's not how the world works. Most of climate change happens not because some decrepit old man lives on his yacht but poor people in third world countries get their first air conditioners. As they should.
The only way is through. Most of are not going to be living the suffocating life you think we should. We will grow, innovate and accelerate out of this.
> Most of climate change happens not because some decrepit old man lives on his yacht but poor people in third world countries get their first air conditioners.
You're confusing acceleration with velocity. Poor people are far from the greatest per capita contributors.
I didn’t ask for the world to have 8 billion people in it, and I sure as hell won’t be stopping enjoying fairly basic luxuries like consuming protein just because others tell me to do so.
If we need to make such drastic changes to human consumption, have people considered if we have a overpopulation problem?
The demographic collapse was a forgine conclusion in the 80s. There is no global overpopulation problem over the next century. There will be food shortages due to a lack of labor and dessicated farmland. It will be rough for the average human.
> There is no global overpopulation problem over the next century
Sure there is. If the mere act of eating a staple food item causes so many carbon emissions it contributes to planetary-scale climate change, you have an overpopulation problem.
> If the mere act of eating a staple food item causes so many carbon emissions it contributes to planetary-scale climate change, you have an overpopulation problem.
That is incorrect. If there is one person who produces the same amount of carbon emissions, it's the same problem which is independent of population count. All resources to sustain life are going to dwindle and secondary effects will continue to amplify, regardless of humans exist at all, over a long enough period of time.
"Overpopulation" is used to define the set of problems (logistics of practical food/water production) that make climate change a secondary concern. Ofc, you can define it how you like to talk past other people.
Overpopulation is the condition through which a population exceeds the sustainable resource carrying capacity of an environment.
If that population consumes a resource at a rate which is not sustainable—which as people upthread are arguing re: emissions and agriculture—then it is an example of overpopulation.
I think that vegan diets never took off primarily because the vast majority of people do not want to follow vegan diets. Money factors such as subsidies are secondary. There are also potential health impacts. I followed a vegetarian diet for a few years when I was younger because of ethical concerns, and I felt healthier once I started eating meat again. This is just anecdotal evidence of course, and many people argue that you can be as healthy or even more healthy vegetarian as you can be omnivorous. But it's a potential psychological factor arguing against the likelihood of mass adoption of veganism.
Mass transit and dense development are potentially doable, but at this point the suburban sprawl + car model has been popular in the US for decades and it would feel like a downgrade for many people to live in smaller places in more heavily urbanized environments. I think that many Americans don't even have a clear idea of what it would look like to raise kids in a multi-story residential building in a city without it seeming like poverty.
Also, in some parts of the US, mass transit and dense urban living run into the problem of anti-social behavior including street violence. Many of the people in the US who care the most about stopping climate change also oppose the kind of intensive policing that would be required to keep crazy dangerous people off buses and clean up troubled neighborhoods enough that the average person would feel safe living there. Violent crime rates have largely been going down since the early 90s, but are still much higher than in Europe. One of the reasons for the high rates, through definitely not the only reason, is the availability of guns, but getting US right-wingers to accept gun restrictions is probably even less probable than getting US left-wingers to accept major crackdowns on street crime.
Just like it isn’t possible to get politicians to stop spending other people’s money, it isn’t possible to stop enterprises from making as much money as possible while spending as little as possible on a global scale (it may work locally!)
Thus, technology-will-save-us is the rational choice. Drill all the oil, build the biggest datacenters and speedrun to fusion before the collapse so we can sequester the carbon back into the ground and still have energy left to run Haber-Bosch, ideally with hydrolysis instead of natgas.
Disclaimer: I used to be heavily in the sustainability camp in my younger years
Neoliberism is not the only possible system, it is very well possible to change the boundaries of what enterprises can do.
Technology-will-save-us is a quasi-religious belief, not supported by evidence.
Also if it was true that we can't convince politicians and enterprises to change their course now, why should they do later when costs will be much higher?
Relying mostly on technology that doesn't yet exist seems absurd to me.
We have an incredibly hard problem to solve and maybe a narrow window of action, we should use all the tools we have at our disposal: rapid deployment of available solutions, sustained research into better ones, adoption of more frugal lifestyles, development of alternative sociological, political and economical frameworks.
>We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development
In other words, live a privileged person's life in an expensive city, risk malnutrition with a complicated diet, and don't ever leave the country (on a plane).
As if the sources of climate change are you and me, and not industry in any way. It feels more like a way to say, live like me or almost literally burn in Hell.
"strict vegan diet" AKA supporting industrial byproducts made into ultraprocessed food made on the other side of the globe rather than consuming vegetables, fish & meat produced locally and ecologically.
We’re so far past this, technology is 100% the only hope and always was. Getting stuck in the mentality that we can shame our way out of this for a decade was (and continues to be) a colossal waste of time.
I mean, nearly all of my produce, meat, and dairy from a handful of small, local farms. They're all organic, focus on "happy animals", all that. I'll shift to a strict vegan diet once everyone else abandons their giant mega-agriculture lifestyle.
Have you not done enough damage? Human societies are not stable without surplus bribery, the recent authoritarian regressions are a direct product of net 0 policies. Trump is your utopias creature..
Sorry but this just isn't true. Of course you need more energy to produce a cow and then eat it than you need to sustain yourself by just eating the cows food.
I think it really depends by what you mean when you say vegan.
If you’re eating vegan cheeses and whatnot you’re probably not doing so hot. Or impossible burgers. Or any other manner of “invented” food that is not essentially basic agrarian or hunter-gatherer.
Conversely, wildlife play important ecological purposes and can be hunted sustainably.
Wild life can also be useful in processing things we cannot eat and grows in abundance (grass) into things we can eat (cows).
Don’t forget eating meat, the easiest thing to stop doing (people needs cars and trucks for work, they don’t need cheeseburgers). People can’t be bothered to make any changes, it’s always someone else’s problem.
Replacing those with basically any other meat (pig, chicken, fish) would make a huge difference already. And it's far more realistic than no meat. Indirect demand destruction (from cost increase) through carbon credits or something like that in the future?
Even mildly advocating for veganism as a vegan would be infuriating if it wasn’t so comedic. The mental contortions that even intelligent people will put themselves into in order to either avoid the topic or keep their head in the sand are truly something to behold. And ultimately it often feels like arguing with a past version of yourself, who perhaps held some of the same views.
I just don't advocate, at least not without prompting; it's too maddening. That I'm vegan often becomes known naturally, and once it's established, people in the know tend to start bringing it up on their own. I hardly ever go into advocacy unprompted. I think this is more effective. Just by being present, you might spark the thoughts that lead someone to changing their mind... :)
Yeah, I have noticed this too. and I’m much the same now, over time my “advocacy” is mostly stating my reasons when asked. And sometimes bringing it up in online spaces.
it can be difficult, at least for me, to politely model in the face of what I see as a great injustice. But as you say, it can be maddening to do otherwise and still see no change.
So I do understand and support those who participate in a less passive advocacy as that can be effective for a different group. And keeps “our” voice in the mainstream, even if it is often vilified by popular culture.
To be clear, the money is already being spent, it’s just a question of what we make the priority.
Even just keeping the current roads useable costs billions of dollars, let alone the amount of money spent on highway expansion (which, due to induced demand, causes even more traffic).
In 30 years, every road that exists currently will have been replaced. The question is if it should be replaced with another road, or should some of them have larger sidewalks, bike lanes, bus lanes.
Amsterdam has been doing this for decades and it’s going very well. They spent money that would’ve been spent rebuilding a road on making it a better general transportation option.
Yeah? We need millions of personal, individual trucks? For work, of course, ignore all those white collar job parking lots full of extended cab pickups that get 10mpg.
Have you considered that sometimes people buy automobiles that can accommodate multiple use cases? Just because you don't need to haul hundreds of pounds of supplies every single day doesn't mean that you don't need to do it a couple times a month, or sometimes every day for short bursts of time.
With vehicles being as expensive as they are, some people prioritize the one vehicle that can suit their regular _as well as_ occasional needs.
To put it into terms this crowd might understand better, to a lot of regular people the wildly expensive and overpowered computing hardware we own seems like a ridiculous waste. And certainly, we don't need all that horsepower every minute of the day. But we need it from time to time.
I can see what you're about to say though: those people who buy trucks should just drive some crappy little three cylinder for day-to-day use and rent a truck when they need it. To which I'd ask, how would you react if someone who knew absolutely nothing about what you do on a daily basis told you that you should just buy a dinky little Chromebook and spin up a beefy EC2 instance every time you need some horsepower?
Maybe you don't understand people's needs and motivations as much as you think you do. And this is frankly where a lot of resentment to the climate action stuff comes from. A lot of know-it-alls lecturing people on how their lifestyle is completely idiotic based on very little understanding of how those people might actually be living their lives.
"I see a pickup truck with nothing in the back, therefore in my expert opinion you don't need it."
Hauling "hundreds of pounds of supplies every single day" is a fringe use case, essentialy nobody does this, it's not relevant.
"Maybe you don't understand people's needs and motivations as much as you think you do."
It's the opposite. You're confusing "needs" with "wants" and extrapolating the needs of the very, very few people who genuinely need a truck onto the entire population.
The vast majority of people use their cars to transport only themselves to work each day, then maybe pick/drop off one more person, then maybe go buy groceries.
I don't think you quite understand just how ridiculously niche valid use cases for trucks are. It's literally just towing, or some very specific off-road hauling. Everything else is going to be handled way better by something else, starting with a regular car, ending with a van.
Hell, for most people even a car is way overkill, a bike works perfectly fine to go to work each day, I assure you. So does public transport. You don't need 2 tons of steel just to to move your 100 kg body around.
To your analogy, I can use my dinky little chromebook 99% of the time and only boot up my PC when I actually need the power.
The current potus was directly elected because “know-it-alls” kept trying to jam ideologies down peoples throats. I have this awful feeling we’re going to swing back that way, and the escalation on “both sides” will be an absolute disaster.
If the Gov stopped Oil Subsidizes, incentivize the move to renewals and nuclear instead of promoting Oil say 20 years ago, we could keep our A/Cs and 60 degrees (~16C) if we wanted to. The sames goes to flying and beef, make it expensive.
So yes, Governments share by far most of the blame for this. A specific individual is not going to change their life stye unless forced to, that is human nature.
Instead we have had governments in the US being too afraid to do the right thing. The only possible US President that was willing to make big changes climate wise had his election stolen by the Supreme Court in the year 2000.
So here we are still with no politician willing to really force changes on people's life style in the "first world". All they are doing is trying to keep the price of oil low.
One final thing, in the US, if you try to use electricity from all renewals, the price is much higher. And in some cases electricity you receive is still generated from fossil fuels.
Spoiler: It's individuals who are driving that demand. The impact of the decisions of big oil are nothing compared to the collective decisions of individuals.
Big oil isn't going to kick down your door when you buy an EV and switch to solar. There is no rancher in the grocery aisle slipping steaks in your cart.
Spoiler, the oil and other energy industries have done a world changing amount of lobbying and regulatory capture in order to drive decisions that cause more and more fossil fuel use. This includes everything from subsidies to industry stagnating regulations to reduced enforcement to suburban sprawl. Look at how the current US administration shills for big coal. Pretending they haven't shaped the world around the consumers is either naive or bad faith.
Yes, consumers have to stop funding these companies and behaviors. Also, the governments that operate on behalf of those consumers have to drop their corruption and start protecting those people they represent. Both virtuous and nonvirtuous conservatives know neither of these are going to happen, which is why they see massive terraforming technology as the only way out - if someone with power can't get rich(er) fixing it then it won't get fixed.
Using corporate externalities to trivialize individual contribution is utter nonsense, though. Coke does not make plastic bottles because they think it's fun. Big oil executives don't just fill big Scrooge McDuck swimming pools of the black stuff.
Individuals purchase products from companies, driving that demand. Then are absolutely unwilling to make even the tiniest, temporary sacrifices to demand those companies reduce those externalities.
Hell, half of these individuals don't even both to vote. That's straight-up the bare minimum participation trophy level of effort.
Who do you think benefits from the use of oil? Everyone. We’re all guilty, it’s not just oil companies. Goods are transported on ships, railroads, planes, and trucks. Virtually none of these are electrified because of energy density constraints. They all use oil. Anyone that consumes is an oil consumer.
This chain of blaming random persons is both useless and distraction. It failed in the past. And it is not even a good faith argument.
Guilting people for existing in society wont fix anything. Actually regulating largest contributors to the issue can fix things. And individual behavioral changes will logically follow once rules and laws change.
Governments and industry are responsible. Personal consumption/waste is not the primary driver of climate change, no matter how much corporations tell us that using paper straws is the solution. It's tough to expect average people to take major action when corporations are essentially given carte blanche.
And who is buying all that stuff from corporations? Who is actually the one consuming?
We can quibble about edge effects like "induced demand", but by and large, people just love cheap energy, cheap calories, and can shift the moral burden by playing "not my responsibility" games.
Well, yeah. Corporations aren't just nefarious evil entities, dumping carbon into the atmosphere for no reason. They're doing it to sell goods. The problem is that a lot of the environmental costs for the manufacture and transport of those goods are externalized and go unpaid.
It's difficult to put the blame for that on the consumer, who has no visibility into manufacturing or logistics, and who has vanishingly-small options for not participating. Buying domestic goods is very difficult or impossible, and goods which are manufactured in more environmentally-safe ways are significantly more expensive (because the costs I mentioned earlier weren't externalized).
If a consumer is presented with two options, one that costs $X and has unknown environmental costs, and one that costs $2X and is marketed as being environmentally safe, the majority will choose the first. This is especially true as economic forces continue to squeeze average people.
Consumers absolutely participate in the problem, but the only process by which it could be corrected is regulation, and the only entity capable of that is the government. (Democracy being what it is, you can however place more blame at the feet of voters.)
I think pinning the blame on them is the wrong way to look at it. Its more a very complex system where each actor's behaviour affect the behavior of other actors. So politicians doing more is super important, consumers doing more is important, companies doing more is important. Everyone's collective effort pushes the flywheel in a different direction.
I have been wondering: more solar means we are making Earth less reflective. Solar energy that might have been reflected back to space is now absorbed by the PV to make electricity. But that delta has to go somewhere? Where does it go in terms of Earth’s temperature. Same with more nuclear… we’d be pumping more energy into the system.
Don’t take this as an argument against these technologies. It’s a huge win to not be increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
Yes, this does happen. Solar farms have an albedo modification effect. The good news is that compared to fossil powered generation, the albedo modification is "paid back" in less than a year due to lower GHG emissions:
"Small reduction in land surface albedo due to solar panel expansion worldwide"
If you download the supplementary information PDF, figure 19 shows a plot of GHG payback times by site. The most common time is about 1 month. The greatest time they found was about 9 months. These times go down as solar panel efficiencies continue to creep upward, because solar panels in 2026 don't have lower albedo than in 2024, but they do have better light-to-electricity conversion efficiency.
We're actually heating the earth in two ways... one is by increasing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The other is simply by using energy; any use of energy means moving something to higher entropy and thus producing heat, even if that energy comes from 100% clean or renewable sources. However, nobody talks about this second way of heating the earth because it's about two orders of magnitude behind the first, i.e. for now pretty insignificant.
As for making the earth less reflective with PV panels... yes, you are right and most of that absorbed solar energy directly contributes to heating the earth because PV panels aren't anywhere near 100% efficient in converting it to electricity, but even the part that is converted to electricity will become heat again in the end, like when it powers AI data centers. (If PV was 100% efficient, then the lack of reflection wouldn't directly do any heating, the heating would all happen when the electricity is used.)
For now that isn't a big concern because the greenhouse gases our civilization is releasing into the atmosphere do so much more heating than all our use of energy, but if we do become 100% renewable and survive that particular danger, then by Jevons' paradox we'll soon be using 10x to 100x more "clean" energy and be heating the earth all the same again.
A solar array makes the earth less reflective by a fixed amount, for as long as the array exists.
Every unit of fossil fuel we burn makes the earth permanently less reflective (or at least something on the order of 100 years). You could compare a 1GW solar array (for its lifetime) to a 1GW coal plant running for x days, though I don't have the value of x.
Current levels of solar panel coverage on Earth are approximately 0%. If we ran the entire Earth on Solar power we’d need ~ half a million square kilometres, around 0.1 percent of the Earth’s surface.
>Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.
Removing CO2 from seawater would be more efficient because some of the work is already done for you, and you'd be de-acidifying the ocean long term.
> Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.
Which should probably be nuclear powered, at the required scale. So we could have taken the direct route, instead of solar, bess, wind, water, geothermal...(c.f. Alien, Aliens, 'Atmospheric Processor'...)
Anybody remembering the trash which was sold as 'lightbulbs' for about 15 years, before LED got somewhat acceptable colors? And prices? And longevity?
Mehw, lightbulb baad, eats too much waatt! So lets miniaturize CFLs to be able to screw them in lightbulb sockets! So they get warm because they are so small, the sockets have no airflow, and their own electronics go with a premature blow! Yay!
Because all the stuff required to do that does not grow on trees. Which means it has its own externalities regarding mass flows, EROI, emissions. At present time it just means the externalities have been made into other peoples problems. Regarding mining, tailings, transport, production, and so on.
Serious questions here ... I'm also curious about your actual experience in heavy mineral and energy industry, largest plant you've worked at, scale of operation, etc.
(FWiW in fairness, I've worked a few decades in and around > half a billion tonne per annum mining and worked globally in geophysical mineral and energy exploration)
> I'm also curious about your actual experience in heavy mineral and energy industry, largest plant you've worked at, scale of operation, etc.
None actually, except from the financial side making that happen, lately. Very indirect, at that. And I'm uncomfortable disclosing more, because I don't want to be doxxed. Its all so cozy right now :-)
From longer times ago, very intensive personal studies about stuff like that, at least 'knowing' what a Sankey-diagram or its variations for 'Gesamtstoffmengenkreisläufe'/mass-flows is.
Changing my young and naive opinions in the light of understanding that, and what it means!
Which is less emissions over all sectors for nuclear, vs. everything else. With the exception of big geothermal, maybe. But we didn't do that big so far, and where we have tried, it produced unintended side-effects.
Which leaves the question of where to put that stuff, after it burned out and has been contaminated with afterglowing hotness for a while.
Why not in the Yilgan Craton?
How big do you think the required atmospheric CO2 extractors need to be? Which mass- and energy flows will they have to have? At which count? A few dozen, hundreds, thousands? Maybe more like a grid with about 200 miles distance between them? Including at sea?
I'd guess about 5000 of these 'Atmospheric Processors' would suffice. And the only sufficient fuel we have for that scale is nukkular.
Direct Air Capture at any meaningful scale is predicated on mining billions of tons of refined minerals. The environmental impact of that would be so enormous that it will never be allowed to happen, never mind the severe resource crunch.
It is quite ironic that capitalism and the profit motive are now the best hope for staving off climate change, all thanks to the technologists and entrepreneurs that have mad renewables and storage so cheap.
The 2020s climate action movement in the US (and the UK) was disastrous in their strategy, action, and outcomes. I was there, I followed along because it seemed like the best way to get climate action, but things like Sunrise and XR at their very best did nothing. They focused on all the wrong people, focused on all the wrong levers. They turned allies into enemies, by "protesting" tech companies that were at the forefront of real action. They refused to acknowledge the massive effects of technology change, and the need for quick adoption, and the huge money saving nature of the solution.
I have zero patience for those attitudes now, the difference between a degrowther and a climate change denying politician are minimal in effect, and the effects are all that matter now.
What about energystar? That had significant impact. Remember how we fixed the ozone hole? It’s entirely possible to drive change through policy or community. We just choose not to do it because the Epstein class wants culture war not class war.
Yes, policy does change things!! You give examples where a community got together, changed policy, affecting all of society.
This is precisely the opposite of the disastrous 2020s action, which had no concrete policy demands, which leaned into the culture war. They ceded the ground to the right wing, who does that sort of culture war much better, as they have focused their efforts on it for so long.
With culture war, no policy changes. The fight takes place in vibes.
We need policy, execution in concrete changes of physical things in the real world. That's where Sunrise and XR failed.
I was very specific in the failings of Sunrise and XR and they contrast greatly with efforts like energy star or the Paris accords, and their members would say they same thing in that they tried something very different.
My comments have been very specific, but you can't manage more than a sentence. Further, you have not even engaged with a single one of my words or statements.
> San Francisco schools decided a couple of years ago that they would no longer teach Algebra in 8th grade.
This has nothing to do with this at all. We're talking about 4th grader literacy nationwide and you're talking about algebra in a single area in a different grade!?
The second point where there aren't enough teachers nationwide (10% missing workforce) is probably because teachers are terribly paid, disrespected, and subject to bad working conditions.
Maybe that's why people aren't clamoring to be teachers and the quality of work is low?
Using my phone in grayscale convinced me of the power of shiny colours. It is shocking how boring my phone feels in grayscale.
This really does help break any feeling of attachment to the device and the solutions in this post really do make it more practical. It does kind of suck using the camera in grayscale.
No need to get specific. Look at any retail packaging. Look at any advertisement. Bright and shiny always gets the attention. You've never read anyone reply "ooh, grayscale". It's always "Ooooh, shiny"
> blocking a referendum because they didn't consult indigenous groups
The requirement to do so is in our constitution, the Charter. It's not optional and not absurd to anyone with proper historical understanding of Canadian history.
There's something to be said about first impressions and the GnuCash website's first impression does not give confidence in its ability to handle finances.
Ironically for this thread, I think an AI redesigned website would do wonders here.
Isn't it bad now that Sam Altman and the others are backpedaling on this and going "jobs are going to still exist you just can't imagine them!" because the PR problem was getting so big? [1]
Like don't we want people running these companies to be honest to the public rather than misdirection?
> "jobs are going to still exist you just can't imagine them!"
Ironically, this makes even less sense.
If (ostensibly) the goal of developing LLMs was so we can all create more while working less, but he also assures us there will be just as much work in the future, then what was the point of this tech in the first place?
I am by no means defending Sam Altman here, but it's roughly the same value proposition as every productivity enhancing technology. Creating more even if you don't end up working less means at the end of the day we all still have more. There are certainly potential problems when it comes to how that "more" is distributed, among other issues, but things that increase human productivity tend to go along with increases in quality of life even if it doesn't mean you get a bunch more free time to sit on the beach drinking Mai Tais.
And truthfully those productivity enhancements mean that you probably could indeed work less, as long as you're willing to also forgo the standard of living improvements that go along with them. The idea of the digital nomad living in some incredibly cheap but less than advanced country is based on exactly this concept. But a lot of people aren't willing to do that, nor should they feel compelled to. Working the same 40 hours a week while making more stuff seems perfectly reasonable.
> This is a good instinct: one of the virtues of democracy is the way that it gives people a feeling of control over their own lives. People who believe that they can rein in AI companies through votes and laws and regulations will be much less likely to turn to violence.
I like how this is entirely put in terms of "feelings" and "beliefs" with the ultimate goal being to keep people from resorting to violence. It doesn't seem to play any role how much control people actually have.
I think before he thought OpenAI was going to make him a trillionaire he was more honest about X Risk and job displacement since he didn't have the incentive to lie. Most early AI thinkers saw AI as more dangerous than nukes.
> We founded Anthropic because we believe the impact of AI might be comparable to that of the industrial and scientific revolutions, but we aren’t confident it will go well. [1]
How exactly is OpenAI going to make him a trillionaire? He doesn’t own any equity. I’m sure he owns some indirectly via funds he’s an investor in, but nowhere near enough to make him a trillionaire.
So where did this idea that Altman is aiming for a financial payoff come from? He could easily have taken equity, and didn’t. Why? What part of the evil master plan is that?
That is very high. Not sure who they are using for processing, but I know Stripe will give registered charities a (very small) cut on their fees, I'm not sure about non-profits. But even with market rates, the average fees through Stripe would be well below 10%, IME.
If Thunderbird required users to sign up for an annual subscription, then that specific problem -- not being able to tell what good one's payment would do -- would go away. There would be a very specific reason to pay the money.
(In practice, they presumably couldn't do that, at least not effectively, because the code is open source and someone else could fork it. But let's imagine that somehow they could require all Thunderbird users to pay them.)
That doesn't, of course, mean that it would be better overall. Thunderbird users would go from getting Thunderbird for free and maybe having reason to donate some money, to having to pay some money just to keep the ability to use Thunderbird: obviously worse for them. There'd probably be more money available for Thunderbird development, which would be good. The overall result might be either good or bad. But it would, indeed, no longer be unclear whether and why a Thunderbird user might choose to pay money to the Thunderbird project.
> Instead, people act like they're buying in to a 50% share with their $5 and then act like they cofounded the project forever after the donation.
You've twisted the timing. My comment is about
"Give me money." "Okay, tell me why I should give you money."
not
"I gave you money. Tell me what you did with it." It's a big difference. It's easy for me to just not give them money if I don't know what I'm donating to.
Those two examples map to the first and second parts of my claim.
Though I'm making a general reflection rather than trying to antagonize any individual here. I was already thinking about this when clicking into TFA to see that yes, it's another donation beg.
The answer to the person I replied to is basically: yes.
There's a nit in human psychology between mutual transactions (even lopsided against our favor) and voluntary unilateral ones (like donations) where the latter results in disproportionate scrutiny and entitlement compared to the former.
I once started accepting donations on my forum. I noticed people acted like they were about to make the grandest gesture in the world, would I be so lucky to deserve it after answering their questions despite having built a forum they spend four hours a day on. (They gave me $5)
And once they donated, they saw themselves as a boardmember-like persona with veto power and a disproportionate say on what I do, often pointing out that they're a donor. (They gave me $5)
I'm exaggerating a bit to paint a picture of what I mean. I think it's all unintentional, and they might be embarrassed if I'd told them this.
But I ended up refunding everyone after a while.
Yet when I charged $5 to let users expand their PM inbox size or max avatar resolution, nobody ever brought it up. They understood the transaction ended there. What is the $5 used for? -- What do you mean? It doubled my PM inbox size.
It's a funny quirk of our brain. I think a license purchase aligns expectations much more than groveling for donations, and it creates a natural freemium model for open source (or source-available rather?) projects.
The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect.
This only stops it.
Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.