[HN Gopher] The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory
___________________________________________________________________
The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory
Author : Archelaos
Score : 269 points
Date : 2026-02-11 19:25 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cell.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cell.com)
| blueflow wrote:
| Its not a "risk".
|
| Water vapor (clouds) is a stonger greenhouse gas than carbon
| dioxide. We already got measurably higher temperatures, so we
| also have higher water evaporation, and from the last 5 years it
| looks like it happens every year.
|
| So the runaway is already happening, until something stops it
| near hothouse conditions or hopefully earlier than that.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| And that's just one of the many positive feedback loops.
| rkrisztian wrote:
| Thank you for saying this. If you want to know the answer to
| what causes climate problems, you need to go back to the era of
| dinosaurs, where CO2 levels were multiple times higher than
| today. Trees could thrive because they could breathe in a lot
| of CO2. Dinosaurs got so big because there were plenty of food.
| How could dinosaurs happily live with such high CO2 levels? The
| key is that there were plenty of forests. Peter Wohlleben's
| book "The Power of Trees: How Ancient Forests Can Save Us if We
| Let Them" explains how forests naturally circulate water.
| vaylian wrote:
| The climate system in those prehistoric times was in a
| different stable state. The world that we live in has
| different ecosystems that are well-adapted to the current
| stable state and we will likely face a mass-extinction event
| once the ecological scales tip over.
|
| The problem is also the speed in which the CO2 levels are
| rising. Such a massive change in such a short geological time
| is very unusual.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Water vapor (clouds) also reflects sunlight. So it's
| complicated. We know the planet has had higher CO2 and higher
| temperatures in the past, and it did not "run away"
| viraptor wrote:
| It doesn't matter if the top of the curve flattens out, if we
| can't survive outside of the bottom part that looks
| exponential.
| teamonkey wrote:
| It might not run away to infinity, but it may well run away
| in the sense that the rate of change could continue to
| increase even if humans stop contributing to it.
| panarchy wrote:
| We can't say for sure that the current feedback loops will be
| identical to those that did or did not exist in the past.
| Differences in the initial state could result in different
| outcomes.
|
| For example was there as much methane trapped in the arctics
| during the last time CO2 was high?
|
| Does the rate of the increase of CO2 and temperature have an
| effect? Because it's currently getting hotter far faster
| (absurdly so) than any other period we have records for.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| No citations to hand but Antarctica used to be temperate
| rainforest and many of the conditions of present day tropical
| rainforests and savanna could be found much farther from the
| equator.
|
| The paleocene-eocene thermal maximum makes for interesting
| related reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%8
| 0%93Eocene_therm...
| Windchaser wrote:
| > Water vapor (clouds) also reflects sunlight. So it's
| complicated. We know the planet has had higher CO2 and higher
| temperatures in the past, and it did not "run away"
|
| Yes. But stars like ours burn brighter as they move through
| their lifetimes, and the Sun is a bit brighter now than it
| was back when we had higher CO2 levels. That's why a runaway
| GHG didn't happen back then, but is basically guaranteed to
| happen within a billion years.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| So... the sun is hotter now than it was what... since the
| 1950s? The 1850s? The Jurassic period? What scale is do you
| need to make this claim reasonable?
|
| Also, I see a lot of things presented as facts in your
| comment, you seem to have convinced yourself quite
| thoroughly.
| jemmyw wrote:
| 10% every billion years. So negligible on our timescale,
| but it is significant if you talk about ancient climate
| conditions like this thread does.
| eitau_1 wrote:
| True runaway (i.e. oceans boiling / Venus) cannot happen on
| Earth unless you significantly increase _incoming_ radiation
| stream (or alternatively halve the planet 's albedo).
|
| The runaway effect is scary b/c at certain temperature (~400K)
| atmosphere consisting predominantly of water vapor looses its
| ability to radiate out more heat up until 1600K.
|
| [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1892 (see fig. 2b)
| (edit: the figure: https://imgur.com/a/ytoEXzd)
|
| edit #2: I've measured some pixels and the starting runaway
| temp is closer to 315K / 42C, damn
| vaylian wrote:
| This is one of the key sentences:
|
| > Policymakers and the public, however, remain largely unaware of
| the risks posed by such a practically irreversible transition
|
| Most people still underestimate what it means for the earth
| system to change from the current stable state into another
| state, which might need many years to become stable again. And
| that new stable state might be a lot less favourable for us
| humans.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I think most people bet that they'd be dead until that
| transition happens, so the problem won't be theirs to address.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| It's a classic multi-agent coordination problem. Should I
| stop taking jet liners and eating meat, when everyone else is
| anyway?
|
| (Edit: purely illustrative rhetorical question, but I
| appreciate the responses)
| bayindirh wrote:
| For me, it's a hard problem.
|
| For business trips, the choice is between two hours and two
| days, and unfortunately my body goes haywire if I don't eat
| some meat at least a couple of days per week (talking about
| 200g/300g total though. Not kilos of it).
|
| On the other hand, I'd happily take trains as more high
| speed lines open in my country, and reduce meat consumption
| to bare minimum my body can tolerate.
|
| For personal transportation, going fully electric won't be
| possible due to my circumstances, but I'd happily switch to
| a hybrid which would convert 75% of my in-city travel to
| electric (which I'm actively planning to do).
|
| I also work on projects which tries to reduce footprint of
| data centers and computation, so there's that.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > my body goes haywire if I don't eat some meat at least
| a couple of days per week
|
| Isn't this just a nutrient deficiency in whatever you
| were eating instead of meat? Meat is "convenient" because
| it's high in a wide variety of minerals, vitamins,
| essential amino acids, etc. that your body can't make.
| (The animals mostly can't make them either but guess what
| livestock eats.) There are plants that contain each of
| them, but few if any that contain all of them, and then
| if you're missing one you're going to have a bad time. So
| the problem there is almost certainly that you need to
| eat some different plants than that the thing you were
| missing is only found in animals.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Nope. Some aminoacids and compounds are only present in
| meat. These aminoacids and compounds are the ones which
| boosted our brain capacity and allowed us to evolve to
| that point.
|
| I eat (and like to eat) tons of veggies, yet I feel my
| brain capacity declines and I crave esp. meat if I don't
| eat it for a long time (for two weeks or whatnot). As I
| said, I don't need two ribeye steaks per week. My body is
| very good at signaling what it needs, and I prefer to
| listen to it.
|
| What I eat is Mediterranean cuisine 99% of the time, and
| it's pretty well balanced, yet eliminating meat is not
| possible for me. So, my diet is not junk food peppered by
| meat. It's mostly veggies and legumes (beans, lentil,
| whatnot), peppered with meat. Yet, I need it, and this is
| something I tested over and over more than two decades.
|
| On the other hand, my wife is completely opposite of me.
| She can go a month or so without meat. So, not every
| person is the same, and assuming that every human being
| works the same is a big mistake made by modern medicine.
| For example, my brain chemistry is also different and I
| consume B12 much more than a typical human, so I need to
| use B-complex supplements more.
| dbdr wrote:
| > Some aminoacids and compounds are only present in meat.
|
| Which ones specifically?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid
|
| All of those can be found in plants.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Nope. Some aminoacids and compounds are only present in
| meat.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acids_in_pl
| ant...
|
| Notice that many of the plants high in some of these
| aren't that common, e.g. what percentage of people
| regularly eat pumpkin seeds or spirulina?
|
| > So, not every person is the same, and assuming that
| every human being works the same is a big mistake made by
| modern medicine.
|
| It's not that you need the same diet as every other
| person, it's that you have to eat the specific things you
| need, which a random selection of plants may or may not
| contain in the right amounts.
|
| > For example, my brain chemistry is also different and I
| consume B12 much more than a typical human, so I need to
| use B-complex supplements more.
|
| B12 in particular is a pain because it's only produced by
| bacteria (commonly found in soil) so the options are
| _unwashed_ vegetables, meat from animals that eat
| unwashed vegetables, or supplements. And on top of that
| because of the way it 's absorbed, a B12 pill either has
| to be taken multiple times a day several hours apart or
| has to be 100x as much to make up for the absorption rate
| falling off a cliff after a threshold amount which is
| below the RDA.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Might be lack of understanding of essential nutrients and
| associated planning. But also might not be related to
| that at all. The gut microbiome is impacted by your food
| choices, varies from person to person, and can have
| severe impacts on your overall health.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| I can't speak for the OP but it is well-established that
| there are significant genetic adaptations to the amount
| of meat in the diet, or a loss of genetic adaptation for
| metabolizing some plant staples. This is no different
| than the genetics that cause significant variation in the
| ability to metabolize legumes, lactose, alcohol, etc.
| Local optimizations.
|
| There are ethnic populations that have reduced capacity
| to efficiently metabolize some plant-based diets due to
| thousands of years of selection pressure (or lack
| thereof). A diverse plant-based diet won't kill them,
| they simply lack the enzymes to have a good experience
| with it because for thousands of years they had little
| use for those genes.
|
| It is a relatively small population globally, as it tends
| to coincide with regions that weren't conducive to
| supporting large populations thousands of years ago. The
| current distribution has significant overlap with the
| developed world though.
|
| I have to imagine that someone with meat-adapted genetics
| is going to suffer quality of life issues on a purely
| plant-based diet. Everyone has a set of foods like that.
| bamboozled wrote:
| It's hard to convince people not to eat food and take a
| plane when billionaires do whatever they like at 1000x the
| carbon footprint, when millions of people drive to work and
| when base load power is built on fossil fuels. To me eating
| protein and taking a plane seem benign.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I agree.
|
| If the plane doesn't use synthetic fuel that's a
| political problem that I can't realistically solve as an
| individual.
|
| The methane from raising animals exists in an overall
| equilibrium. It isn't extractive and the total magnitude
| of the effects of that chemical system is comparatively
| minor.
| Windchaser wrote:
| To be fair, if we cut beef, lamb, and dairy, we get 80% of
| the GHG benefits of going full vegan. Beef and lamb are
| _really_ GHG intense.
|
| So you can keep your animal proteins: it'll just be eggs,
| fish, poultry, and pork.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| It's not that policymakers are unaware. It's that some of them
| are allergic to true things that they find inconvenient, and
| have made false premises a pillar of their platform. Calling
| that "unaware" is giving them too much credit and
| understanding.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Most policy makers will not live to bear the fruit of their
| labor.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Many may also believe that they and the only parts of their
| con$tituency they care about will be able to avoid the
| consequences. And some may have come to believe the party
| line; if you repeat a falsehood often enough as a loyalty
| test, you may forget that it's a falsehood.
| xgulfie wrote:
| It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when
| his salary (power, class) depends upon his not understanding
| it
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I think it's both. That large shifts on a global scale of
| everyday things that we take for granted as well as
| historical differences on a geological time scale are
| genuinely difficult for non-experts to wrap their heads
| around.
|
| And _also_ as you say that many politicians are
| disincentivized to try in the first place.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| > It's that some of them are allergic to true things that
| they find inconvenient, and have made false premises a pillar
| of their platform.
|
| Sure, if by "some" you mean "virtually all".
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Nope, attempted bothsidesing rejected. By "some" I mean
| "some". Not everyone in politics treats truth as optional.
| Those who don't should be lauded.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Thinking this is "bothsidesing" is you contributing to
| the problem. The Democrats and Republicans have both
| abandoned scientific rigor on this topic. When either
| talks about it, it is almost purely an excuse to smuggle
| in unrelated policy objectives.
|
| A group of politicians can have strong disagreements
| where none has a grasp on reality. That is where we are
| with climate change. It is one of the reasons I stopped
| working on it at a policy level.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I am not suggesting that all politicians on one side are
| good. I am suggesting that ignoring truth and reality as
| a thing that matters is something with very strong
| correlations with political party, and shouldn't be
| generically chalked up to "politicians" in general.
| jacquesm wrote:
| They are most definitely aware. They are willfully ignoring
| this but they are not ignorant.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > might need many years to become stable again
|
| People _really_ fail to grasp the significance of this part.
|
| One of our most common apocalyptic fantasies lays this out
| quite well: nuclear annihilation. The common narrative is about
| the _post_ -apocalyptic world and _rebuilding_. But this
| presumes a _new normal_ has been established.
|
| With climate change we will continue to experience more
| _extreme_ changes at a _faster_ rate over time with no chance
| of a "new normal" in our lives.
|
| It took hundreds of thousands of years for humans to develop
| agriculture. It's no coincidence that this development happened
| during one of the _most stable_ periods of climate the planet
| has ever seen. People love to wax poetic on human adaptability,
| but we were effectively playing on "easy" mode.
|
| While the other side of climate change might be a more hostile
| earth, the transition period will be worse because you _can 't
| adapt_. In our lifetimes we may live to see a period of record
| heat waves in Europe, followed by a transition of Europe to
| that is dramatically colder (and who knows, maybe back again).
|
| The other major problem is as stability decreases so does our
| ability to predict the future. It's hard to even know what we
| might be facing in the coming years, but high variance is
| usually not great for complex life.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > the transition period will be worse because you can't
| adapt.
|
| As far as agriculture goes we can adapt but the cost would be
| exorbitant. Vertical farming is _technically_ doable.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| "need many years to become stable again"
|
| People are selfish. "Life will be much harder, and the problem
| will never be fixable within the rest of your life or your
| childrens' lives"
| aperrien wrote:
| Are there any attempts to start geo-engineering to fix this? I'm
| assuming there will be no attempt to stop dumping carbon into the
| atmosphere, can we at least do something to take it back out? Can
| we use solar or renewables to possibly do that at scale?
| bamboozled wrote:
| Needed to happen 30 years ago.
|
| Now it's drill baby drill time.
| bayindirh wrote:
| There are currently no power efficient and scalable ways to
| remove carbon dioxide from air or water.
|
| Renewables are considered woke technology which mock old and
| masculine fossil fuel tech, which feel threatened by all these
| white spinny things, hence renewable energy projects are being
| actively discouraged or canceled altogether.
|
| You know, we'd be all woke and weird if our cars don't have 8
| cylinders and make wroom sounds. Same for our chimneys and
| power architecture. Woke electrons should be banned. We need
| masculine, fossil based electrons, which are more powerful per
| electron than wind/solar based fluffy/hippie ones.
| exitb wrote:
| The rich don't care which side you're on, as long as you're
| fighting each other.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I don't play that game. I only do what I can do with what I
| have and don't care about losing time with pointless
| fights.
|
| I may not be able to save the whole planet, but at least
| I'll leave my area a bit better as my capacity and time
| allows.
| theossuary wrote:
| Both sides aren't fighting each other, one side has turned
| themselves into a weapon for rich pedophiles to attack the
| other side with.
| exitb wrote:
| Notably, both sides held that exact view in recent times.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Renewables are considered woke technology which mock old
| and masculine fossil fuel tech...
|
| This is mostly a US problem at this point. The rest of the
| world is adopting renewables considerably faster than anyone
| expected (and despite the best efforts of the current
| administration, the adoption curve is accelerating even in
| the US).
|
| That said, it's still apparent that even optimistic estimates
| of renewable energy adoption aren't fast enough to fix the
| climate crisis on their own.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > This is mostly a US problem at this point.
|
| Yeah I know, and I'm not from that side of the ocean. I
| worded my comment like that since most users here are from
| the US.
|
| electricitymaps paints a nice picture, though. We'll be
| using them in a project, so I'll be able to see the nitty
| gritty details soonish.
|
| At least some of us are trying. Maybe we'll fail, but not
| all of us are _that_ ignorant, and that 's better than
| nothing.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| So far all of the carbon capture techniques (apart from growing
| forests and keeping them protected) have been pretty
| unsuccessful, and/or don't scale well.
|
| That leaves us in the realm of solutions that may be very
| likely to disrupt our ecosystem themselves, like genetically-
| engineering algae/phytoplankton to improve ocean carbon
| sequestration
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > apart from growing forests and keeping them protected)
|
| I'm in a loop. I must be.
|
| How are people still basic at this? No. Forests are not
| "carbon capture" devices.
|
| Plant a big forest and "protect" (which means thinning it,
| unless you are California) and in 100 years most trees have
| died, rotted, released their carbon.
|
| There is so much wrong with the alarmism here, so much hand
| waving away of scale when it is inconvenient... that it's
| like people are doing more damage than good when they jump up
| and down over this stuff.
|
| It's almost like if the jumping up and down and alarmism has
| a different purpose, a whole separate game removed from the
| issues at hand.
| krashidov wrote:
| The carbon in our atmosphere is already in the atmosphere
| and it won't go away. So there really is nothing more you
| can do other than take it out of the air and store it
| somewhere for as long as you can. Trees are a good way to
| store it until we have better technology/can handle climate
| change better
| grumbelbart wrote:
| Putting sulfur into the right layers of the atmosphere seems to
| be the currently best viable options. It's not overly
| expensive, either. It acts fast and is reversible.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
| alcover wrote:
| Thank you. This reading lowers my anxiety. I believe we'll
| rationally - and in a hurry - come down to this kind of
| solution. It makes solid sense.
| triceratops wrote:
| Dumb question: would this also lower solar panel yields?
| mapmeld wrote:
| I don't think carbon capture / sequestration is going to do
| enough, but if we continue slipping into this trajectory I
| think there will be more support for changing reflectivity
| (spraying sea water, or putting particles in the stratosphere).
| peterbecich wrote:
| Stratospheric aerosols: the dangers of this seem overblown.
| It is milder than a volcanic eruption. It seems like a
| reasonable thing governments should be attempting.
| OGEnthusiast wrote:
| So maybe the people who aren't having kids due to climate change
| were right after all?
| axus wrote:
| The problem can now only be solved on the supply side. Cut the
| production of oil and gas below the planet's natural carbon
| sequestration.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| s/production/extraction/
|
| Nothing wrong with synthetic.
| grumbelbart wrote:
| The low prices of solar and batteries are a glimmer of hope.
| For many regions it's now the cheapest source of electricity.
| razster wrote:
| You mean cutting into the profit/MONEY of these large
| corporations? How will they survive!?
| htx80nerd wrote:
| Go ask Google about China and the 3rd world contribution to
| global pollution. The West is bending over backwards to 'fight
| climate change' and a huge chunk of the world is just doing
| whatever they want, completely negating all of the west
| efforts.
| triceratops wrote:
| > Go ask Google about China
|
| China's doing better than the US:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292. Please don't
| lie.
| aleda145 wrote:
| Very alarming. I feel like especially the West is regressing on
| climate change with the rise of the far right
| (https://www.politico.eu/article/robert-lambrou-alternative-f...)
|
| I don't know what to do.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Die a horrible death while watching a group of hateful people
| scream that it's all the immigrants fault and that they ate all
| the cats and dogs, I guess ...
| shrubby wrote:
| ... immigrants, LGBT, women, another religion, the ones with
| no religion, communist, liberal,...
|
| But never the zillionaires, they've worked haaaard and
| deserve everything!
| xyzal wrote:
| You work in software, right? Then you can donate some money to
| enviro orgs.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Not an expert in any of that, but I think overall impact may
| be greater if people with sufficient means take a more hands-
| on approach that grants visibility of where money is going. I
| lean environmentalist be the truth is that there's a good
| deal of well-marketed snake oil in the environmental space.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| The issue with quibbling over impact is my experience is
| that people end up doing neither. I recently started a
| Master's in ecology so I don't have a good idea of what's
| cost effective right now but I know the field is pretty
| shockingly underfunded (both for general research and
| conservation projects). I learned the "fun" fact recently
| that bird populations in the US are down ~30% in the last
| 55 years.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| A fair assessment. Doing nothing is not the answer to the
| risk of doing the wrong thing. It's probably worth some
| time spent on due diligence when selecting groups to
| donate to, regardless.
| davidw wrote:
| Work on local things to make your own city better. Plenty of
| stuff that's not too difficult, even if it won't fix
| everything:
|
| * Multifamily housing is much more energy efficient. Is it
| legal to build throughout your city, or does zoning prevent it?
|
| * Is there good bicycle infrastructure so people don't have to
| drive for everything?
|
| * Does your city still have expensive parking mandates that
| lock in car dependency? Get rid of those. They also get in the
| way of places becoming more walkable.
|
| * This one hurts, but: eat less beef.
|
| * Advocate for good transit as another way for people to get
| around without driving a personal vehicle.
|
| * What can be done in your city/region to electrify heating for
| homes and businesses?
|
| * What can your region do to build more renewable energy
| capacity?
|
| Those are all things where even a few voices can sometimes make
| a difference.
| ericd wrote:
| Great list!
|
| For those in the US, I'd add lobbying your congresspeople to
| support the revival of the Energy Permitting Reform Act. It's
| something that didn't make it across the line before the end
| of the last congress, but basically, making it easier to
| bring new generation capacity on the electrical grid
| disproportionately benefits renewables, because they make up
| the vast majority of wattage waiting in the queue. As we've
| seen by the explosion of deployment in less regulated grids
| (Texas, and most of the world), the economics now favor
| solar+storage and wind, we just have to let people build as
| much of it as they want to.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| Individual habits will not be decisive in fighting climate
| change. Telling people to follow this advice will (a)
| inconvenience them in the short term (b) lull them to a false
| sense of security that they are fighting climate change (c)
| set them up for disappointment when climate change happens
| anyway, and (d) worst of all, these suggestions let the real
| perpetrators off the hook.
|
| If you want to see real progress on the climate, a few
| thousand people changing their daily habits is not enough.
| Governments need to take action and hold industry to account.
| That looks to be an increasingly unlikely event, but that
| doesn't justify taking ineffective action instead as a
| placebo.
|
| It reminds me of the '90s when we are all told that recycling
| was necessary for saving the environment. Decades later,
| we'll still spending time sorting our garbage, despite
| evidence that no one wants recyclable waste, it still ends up
| dumped somewhere, and it costs more money to handle. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyMs2xox_hE
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| > these suggestions let the real perpetrators off the hook.
|
| This can't be said enough. It simply cannot be said enough.
| It cuts right to the heart of how we view the world in the
| west: as autonomous, separate individuals, with no communal
| counterweight and certainly no model of power (some
| entities in the world have vastly more power than others)
| We assume that because our constitutions grant us equal
| rights or whatever, we all have equal responsibility and
| equal power.
|
| But polluters, the biggest sources of emissions, have way
| more power and way, way less responsibility. And yet we
| continue to tell ourselves to focus on our own individual
| behaviors to combat global heating. The effects are real,
| but tiny, and our elites continue getting away with our
| annihilation.
| jhrmnn wrote:
| But individual behavior is not about preventing climate
| change, it's about doing what's right. It's wrong to
| pollute the environment, one way or another. A single
| person not stealing won't reduce the crime rate in a
| country yet it is the right thing to do.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| That's not a fair comparison. Everything we do affects
| the environment. The goal is to limit that effect where
| it matters. It's not ethical, it's practical.
| dbdr wrote:
| Apart from eating less beef, every single suggestion in the
| post your are responding to is about infrastructure and
| advocacy, not individual habits.
| davidw wrote:
| And almost all of them have plenty of other benefits too:
|
| Multifamily housing is generally cheaper in high land
| cost areas. It helps solve the housing shortage.
|
| More bikes and transit and fewer cars means cleaner air
| and fewer traffic deaths.
|
| Less fossil fuel usage in general means less pollution.
|
| Cities that use land more efficiently tend to be more
| walkable, pleasant, and don't gobble up things like
| farmland or forests outside the city.
|
| Come to think of it, less beef is probably better for
| your health, too.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > less beef is probably better for your health, too.
|
| Won't matter when it's 120 degrees F every day.
| HPsquared wrote:
| My advice is to install air conditioning, and choose a
| place to live that will be affected as little as
| possible. Avoid the Maldives or New Orleans, perhaps
| choose somewhere a little hilly and cool with good
| connectivity.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| Great suggestions. I will pass your advice on to
| _literally all of humanity_.
| HPsquared wrote:
| That's what will happen, you might as well get ahead of
| the rush.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > Apart from eating less beef, every single suggestion in
| the post your are responding to is about infrastructure
| and advocacy, not individual habits.
|
| Exactly. That's why it's ineffective to evangelize this
| as individual effort. If you want to live in a
| multifamily home, they have to be zoned, funded, and
| built. That requires lobbying the government, moral
| rectitude.
| davidw wrote:
| I did not write 'individual habits' - you did. Things
| like zoning are not individual choices at all. But they
| are something that you and a few friends might be able to
| influence at city hall.
| davidw wrote:
| None of this "lulls" involved people, nor lets anyone off
| the hook.
|
| These are things that ordinary people without a lot of
| money or power can work on _today_ in a country like, say,
| the US, where the federal government is in the hands of
| evil people and is not going to be doing much in terms of
| climate change in the near future.
|
| The federal government may be a lost cause for the moment,
| but your city or state might provide an avenue to get some
| things done. Those things won't fix the whole problem, but
| they're still progress, and the connections you make while
| doing those things will be useful in future, bigger fights.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > These are things that ordinary people without a lot of
| money or power can work on toda
|
| I agree: people _can_ work on this individually. And it
| won 't make a lick of difference.
|
| How many items on this list require government action?
| How many require corporations' cooperation. What am I
| going to do, build the bike lanes myself as a hobby?
| davidw wrote:
| The work is _getting your local or state government to do
| the things_. I thought that was quite obvious.
| kawera wrote:
| I would add:
|
| * Plant more trees
| rienbdj wrote:
| Significant emissions are from ground transportation. Advocate
| for walkable neighbourhoods, bike infrastructure and public
| transit.
| timmg wrote:
| > I feel like especially the West is regressing on climate
| change with the rise of the far right
|
| Is it the "far right"? Or is it that technology and fertility
| have actually lowered the risks substantially?
|
| Solar plus batteries, right now, seems to be the cheapest form
| of new energy. Given that, you would expect most of new energy
| to be "green". (And if you look at the stats, that seems to be
| coming true.)
|
| Electrification of transportation is happening quickly. China
| is cranking out cheap electric cars that are generally better
| than ICE cars of yesterday. And the world seems to be
| transitioning.
|
| And fertility rates are dropping everywhere. So the amount of
| people we will need to support in the future continues to
| decline.
|
| I've mostly stopped worrying about climate change. Not because
| I don't think it is real. But because I think we are clearly on
| the path to mitigating the worse scenarios.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| > Is it the "far right"?
|
| Yes, it is. They're committed to "Every molecule of
| hydrocarbon will come out". [0]. They keep saying this to us,
| and we don't seem to believe them. I like your optimism, and
| I'm not denying a lot of what you're saying -- renewables
| fast becoming the cheapest energy. But that's not deterring
| people: the far right here in the US are about to dismantle
| the government's legal rationale for regulating emissions.
| They're _laughing_ at us right now, doing victory laps. They
| 're telling polluters to take the gloves off.
|
| These people are terrorists, extremists, and they're in
| charge of the world's single most powerful economy and
| military. They're obsessed with domination, with doing
| violence to the weak and the poor and to nature. It's pure
| Freudian _thanatos_.
|
| It's just hard to take your position.
|
| [0] https://theecologist.org/2023/dec/05/every-molecule-
| hydrocar...
| akramachamarei wrote:
| I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the "far-right", but
| you seem to be implying this 'every molecule' quote (or
| more charitably, the goal) is of the "far-right" in the
| U.S. In reality the quote is from Saudi energy minister
| Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman. I mean, I wouldn't be terribly
| surprised if Saudi Arabia is considered far-right governed
| but I doubt your wording is giving the correct impression
| to readers.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| Yes, I know it's a Saudi quote. They're also far right.
| They're bosom buddies with the same right-wing
| (Democratic) and far-right (Republican) US economic and
| governmental elites for decades. I don't think anyone
| would dispute this. In fact, it's so humdrum a set of
| facts that I think the burden would be on someone else to
| show that "no, actually, US elites are _not_ into the
| whole 'every molecule of hydrocarbon' thing". But their
| behavior doesn't indicate that they disagree.
|
| It's thus, yes, the correct impression for readers.
| clumsysmurf wrote:
| Yep, its the far right.
|
| The Heritage Foundation (Project 2025, far-right, anti-
| climate) is working with the Heartland Institute (spreading
| climate science denial across UK / EU) / Alliance for
| Responsible Citizenship (ARC, Jordan Peterson)
|
| They do not like EU rules that hold US firms accountable to
| climate laws.
|
| https://www.desmog.com/2026/02/10/donald-trump-uk-eu-maga-
| sl...
| timmg wrote:
| Sorry, I'm not saying the far-right isn't (whatever) anti-
| climate change.
|
| I just meant that I don't think the lack of concern is
| necessarily _due to them_. I think it may have more to do
| with the reality that we are already on a good path.
|
| Bill Gates famously wrote a "note" about it last year:
| https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/accelerate-energy-
| innovation...
| hackingonempty wrote:
| > I think we are clearly on the path to mitigating the worse
| scenarios.
|
| This evidence based article published in one of the worlds
| top scientific journals comes to the opposite conclusion.
| TheOsiris wrote:
| the west is regressing on climate because, quite frankly,
| almost anything we do is pointless. we're not the ones who need
| to do anything to have an impact on the world. the entities
| that must do something don't want to
| panarchy wrote:
| I think there's someone that wrote about what is to be done,
| but I can't remember who. /s
| netsharc wrote:
| Fear and egoism is probably causing the rise of the far-right,
| fear of not having enough, and egoism of "Why do I have to
| share?" (and being dumb enough to believe "make it great again"
| lies). And then the idiotic "center" who doesn't want to lose
| voters start moving to the right. With the decaying planet less
| capable of producing food, there'll be less, and there'll be
| more of that scarcity mindset (although do we even have
| scarcity, maybe it's just the uneven distribution, with
| billionaires eating cows that's been fed grass that's grown
| with the purest glacier water flown by helicopter from the
| Swiss alps...).
|
| In one aspect, the autocratic rule of Xi Jinping has a
| positive: "We're going to cover the whole mountain with solar
| panels, and force electrification of cars." and there's no
| busybodies protesting and threatening to vote his party out of
| office.
| akramachamarei wrote:
| Ever admitting the positives of autocrats for their apparent
| efficiency disqualifies surrounding suppositions. And that's
| not an ad hominen, that's just Bayesian.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| > I don't know what to do.
|
| As a 52 year old who never believed we would take climate
| change seriously (and who is more convinced than ever I was
| correct as society actually regresses on this issue) I did what
| I had to do -- I purposefully didn't have children.
|
| Good luck to those of you who did.
|
| This ain't my problem. I'll be dead (or close enough) when the
| shit fully hits the fan and won't have doomed any offspring to
| the upcoming migration/resources wars
| foolfoolz wrote:
| this is like a tiktok rage bait way of thinking. western
| nations have largely peaked on carbon emissions. china is
| slowing down and will peak soon. there are a lot of countries
| that still are growing in emissions, sure, but you are not
| looking at this scientifically.
| goatlover wrote:
| Scientifically according to the article, the world is on an
| emissions path to 2.8degC warming, not accounting for the
| extra rate of warming we've seen in recent years. And this
| puts us at greater risk of hitting tipping points into an
| even warmer planet. So the status quo isn't cutting it.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| China is nowhere near peaking, nor is the world.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/china
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-
| co2-emissi... https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
|
| It's true that the West did peak in 2007 (as did South
| America, India, and Africa), but Asia's emissions are so
| massive that they more than make up for all of the reductions
| of the rest of the world. That last link I posted makes clear
| how big the problem with China is.
| yongjik wrote:
| If you are a US citizen, voting Trump out might be unironically
| the most significant decision your country could make for the
| next 100 years of mankind.
|
| Not because the alternative is so great, but because Trump is
| so horrible that it's not even a question. We really don't need
| someone who doesn't even acknowledge climate change in charge
| of the world's biggest economy.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| Trump is ineligible to run for a third term. The time to vote
| him out was 15 months ago.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| There are actions you can cheer on, like China's quick adoption
| of renewable energy. You can't make it happen yourself but you
| can bring peoples' attention to good things, encourage those
| within your circle of influence, and vote for representation
| that shares your views.
|
| As for what "we" collectively can do... let's assume you are
| speaking of areas of research. We may need to focus on
| researching adaptation techniques for the areas that are going
| to be the hardest hit, or that have the fewest resources to
| cope. It's a sad topic but it may be needed. Assume the worst,
| hope for the best, and plan for what you can.
| 13415 wrote:
| The answer to that question is always the same. Join a party
| and become politically active. Or, if you really can't find any
| party that represents your views, join an NGO and become active
| in it. If you're too lazy for that, consider paying an NGO that
| does spectacular actions that have a public impact. And never
| vote for any parties that don't do anything for better climate
| control, of course.
| danny_codes wrote:
| Seems China is cooking atm. If solar power and battery tech
| continues at this speed and their nuclear ambitions pan out,
| fossil fuels will be economically non-competitive (if they
| aren't already). China EV momentum is incredible.
|
| So still some hope I think! And it's possible the populist
| "dumb dumb bricks" crew will decline in popularity when the
| inevitable lack of tangible improvements continues. Though
| since we are dealing with dumb dumb it may take a while
| smartmic wrote:
| It is important to keep reminding ourselves that climate change
| is a real problem for humanity and that each and every one of us
| contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our
| decisions. It is a problem that requires solutions, but
| implementing these solutions involves so much inertia that it can
| sometimes be painful.
|
| And let's contrast that with the AI hype. It's more the opposite,
| a kind of solution to problems we didn't really have, but are now
| being persuaded we do. It would be sensible to invest an equal
| share of the resources currently being pumped into AI with
| uncertain outcomes into the complex issue of climate change. And,
| no, AI won't solve it; unfortunately, it only makes it worse.
| Carrok wrote:
| I've started composting. I'm sure that'll outweigh the average
| Vegas visitor's emissions. /s
|
| I'm being a bit facetious obviously, but it does feel a bit
| like tilting against windmills. We need policy and systemic
| changes, if we're relying on individuals to all collectively
| start doing the "right thing", we're sunk.
| smartmic wrote:
| I agree. But at least in a democratic system, the "each and
| everyone of us" are politicians that each and everyone
| elects. So it starts from the basis, IMHO.
| adolph wrote:
| Sorry to be a debbie-downer but
|
| _the composting process is also a source of greenhouse gas
| and air pollutant emissions._
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9933540/
| Carrok wrote:
| From your source:
|
| > Effective pile management and aeration are key to
| minimizing CH4 emissions.
|
| So it sounds like a correctly managed pile is not a
| problem.
|
| Also, I have a hard time believing my composting in my
| backyard is in any way worse than my sending the same food
| scraps to a landfill.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| So are humans (we breathe out CO2 constantly!). A process
| emitting greenhouse gases is not an inherent reason to
| eschew it, so long as the entire end-to-end process isn't
| net-positive.
|
| Use that compost to fertilise a tree, and you are still net
| negative on carbon, versus sending those food scraps to the
| local trash incinerator.
| Lerc wrote:
| It's all a cycle, They put carbon in, they release carbon
| out. At least the average American is doing a commendable
| job in increasing their personal carbon sequestration.
| reactordev wrote:
| You laugh but if everyone changed just some of their
| behavior, we would be in a much better place.
|
| We used to reuse glass jars, now it's plastic. We used to can
| goods, now it's plastic. We used to use refillable bottles,
| now it's plastic. We used to have car doors that went "thunk"
| when you slammed them shut, now it's plastic.
|
| If we each are mindful of the amount of trash/litter/waste we
| produce and take an active step towards _minimizing_ it, we
| would all be in a better place.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| the great thing about these sorts of personal choices is
| that you can make them for yourself without having to be
| afraid of any of the consequences that would come from
| actually confronting power.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| We used to live lifestyles that didn't require driving
| every day and flying eight times a year...
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > You laugh but if everyone changed just some of their
| behavior, we would be in a much better place.
|
| Please be more specific about "some" and "much" because I
| don't think that's true.
|
| As far as climate goes, turning oil into single use plastic
| has very little effect. We could cut plastic use 90% and
| nothing would really change.
| Fwirt wrote:
| The problem is that a single consumer can't throw
| themselves into the gears of the industrial machine to slow
| its progress. If you stop buying food in plastic
| containers, the food will still be produced, and it will
| still be purchased by the large multinational corporations
| that have supply contracts with the food industry, it will
| just go straight into a landfill when its expiration date
| passes instead of being purchased. Unsold subsidized
| produce, which took petroleum based fertilizers to grow,
| and petroleum powered equipment to cultivate and
| distribute, will rot in a landfill. Farmers won't stop
| growing it if you stop buying it. The damage has already
| been done by the time you make the choice to purchase it or
| not, and it takes more than a handful of people making a
| conscientious decision to reduce waste to stop the waste
| from happening in the first place. And that's if you even
| have a choice in the first place. The only way to eliminate
| carbon emissions is to return to manual labor and
| subsistence farming, and since all the arable acreage is
| owned by land barons and the price is so high, even that is
| out of reach of the average consumer. We are trapped.
|
| If you buy an electric car, consider the amount of
| petroleum it took to forge the steel, power the aluminum
| smelters, and ship the components around the world on
| titanic ships. How long does it take to pay off the carbon
| debt that was incurred by getting rid of that old polluting
| car? How much petroleum would it take to relocate to a
| locality with clean-energy powered public transit? What
| other externalities are incurred by such a choice, and are
| they greater than simply maintaining the status quo? Is it
| even within the means of the majority to make such a
| choice?
|
| Consider that aviation is a much larger contributor to
| emissions. Airlines will consistently fly _completely empty
| planes_ just so they can maintain a parking spot at a given
| airport. Or compare the carbon emissions of the military to
| the rest of society. Or the quantity of flare gas that gets
| uselessly burned off by oil rigs. All market forces which a
| single consumer or group of consumers is powerless to stop.
| And all of which are backed by investors with more clout to
| sway the powers that be than you or I will ever have.
|
| As a sibling commenter said, it's a fun hobby and makes us
| feel a little better about ourselves, but it's a drop in
| the bucket. A depressing state of affairs to be sure.
| reactordev wrote:
| I get what you're saying. I lived on a sailboat with
| solar so I understand... The sailboat I lived on was made
| with fiberglass, a petrochemical product. We would still
| be in a better place though even if the inevitable demise
| will still occur. It would just occur later.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| I make lots of compost for my own use. Composting is at best
| delaying carbon release. As soon as you stop recycling
| materials the carbon will be released to the atmosphere. In
| permaculture circles the goal is to close open loops of
| waste/resources. If you want to permanently lock carbon in
| your soil, and improve fertility, make biochar. Throwing
| charcoal in your compost is the easiest way to make it into
| biochar. It really works and is a permanent amendment.
|
| If you wanted you could even weigh the raw charcoal to
| quantify the carbon you have sequestered.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| None of the loops are open in the sense that it's all
| within the earth system as a whole. The issue is extracting
| carbon from geological deposits. Stuff about farming and
| methane is temporary and short term.
|
| I don't mean to suggest we shouldn't compost or recycle
| things. Just that such measures are only indirectly related
| to carbon emissions.
|
| We either stop extracting hydrocarbons from deep within the
| crust or else the problem will persist. (I guess
| _technically_ we could industrially sequester the
| equivalent but that would almost certainly defeat the cost-
| benefit of extraction.)
| candiddevmike wrote:
| If you're looking to experience a "climate change" simulator,
| kind of, the game Oxygen Not Included is an interesting
| chemistry sandbox where you need to balance things like O2,
| heat, food, etc in a "terrarium" of sorts. The parallels to
| climate change are similar to real life--most of the game
| ending problems you encounter are from short sighted thinking
| earlier on/kicking the can down the road.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Gotta love the cycle 200 heat death
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I found Half-Earth Socialism: The Game[1] to be fun for quite
| a few playthroughs.
|
| 1. https://play.half.earth/
| filoeleven wrote:
| If you're near Lake Powell, you could also visit it right now
| and compare it to what you remember. Not a simulator, just a
| pretty scary real thing.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCEJDU9_p4Q
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Unfortunately, more people seems to care about getting AI to
| play SimCity than the environment.
|
| Renewable energy technology is ready, right now today, to
| replace fossil fuels. All we have to do is start doing it, but
| the Oil lobby is just too strong apparently. There is no
| political will. I wish I was wrong, but I just don't see
| humanity pulling together to solve this one.
| mym1990 wrote:
| We are a planet of 8 billion people, interest will vary
| widely. Expecting everyone to swarm on the same issue at the
| same time is simply not how humanity has worked in the past.
| Innovation often happens because many people go different
| directions, testing what works and what doesn't. Getting AI
| to play SimCity may be a stepping stone to real life urban
| planning, or it may be nothing, who knows?
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > Getting AI to play SimCity may be a stepping stone to
| real life urban planning
|
| Urban planning of the SimCity sort isn't particularly
| difficult. The associated politics are the issue.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Hence the "or it may be nothing"...
| goatlover wrote:
| Humanity in the past has acted to eradicate Polio through
| global vaccinations, fix the Y2K computer bug, allow the
| Ozone hole to repair by banning CFCs, form a United Nations
| to prevent WW3 among other things.
| dylan604 wrote:
| We are actively making noise about pulling out of groups
| like the UN/NATO.
|
| We are actively undoing regulations to reduce pollutants
| while promoting "clean" coal.
|
| We are actively undoing vaccinations policy.
|
| We does not necessarily equal humanity at this time, but
| it sure feels like it if you are under the We
| administration.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| > Renewable energy technology is ready, right now today, to
| replace fossil fuels. All we have to do is start doing it,
| but the Oil lobby is just too strong apparently. There is no
| political will. I wish I was wrong, but I just don't see
| humanity pulling together to solve this one.
|
| Sorry, but its really not. Perhaps in some sectors such as
| ground transportation, but definitely not in air and sea
| transport and fertilizer production, and many industrial
| processes. At least not at scale, where would have to make
| massive lifestyle sacrifices which are not politically
| acceptable outside of extreme authoritarian states who have
| no reason to do this anyway.
| wffurr wrote:
| Solar is so cheap and getting cheaper than we can power
| those sectors with air-to-fuel plants. A carbon tax would
| go a long way towards leveling the playing field with
| carbon neutral or carbon negative alternatives to fossil
| fuels.
| beanshadow wrote:
| > And, no, AI won't solve it; unfortunately, it only makes it
| worse.
|
| A conclusive argument for this still seems out of reach. AI
| does solve some problems, and it's not exactly clear which
| problems AI "only makes worse". It's not clear how much energy
| all of our AI systems will use, and while it's tempting to
| outright believe they'll simply use more and more, even that's
| not yet clear based on arguments presented.
| pyrale wrote:
| > It's not clear how much energy all of our AI systems will
| use
|
| Is it superior to zero?
|
| Does AI replace existing, more costly energy use patterns to
| the extent that its own energy use is offset?
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Perhaps someday. For now, it amount of energy used to produce
| and run these models is astronomical. It may be the case AI
| is a net positive for the environment at some point, but as
| it stands that is nothing but speculation. The reality is it
| is making the situation worse.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Outside AI independently uncovering some energy breakthrough
| there is nothing it can do to help, only hurt. We already
| have a source of clean, cheap, unlimited energy, we aren't
| rolling it out the way we could and should because some rich
| people would rather have us on a subscription plan where we
| _literally light our source of energy on fire_ so we have to
| keep coming back for more.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| AI has already pushed fusion research forward.
|
| We could certainly do better but switching isn't as simple
| as you imply. You also conveniently left out the part where
| activists historically blocked nuclear buildout.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > It's not clear how much energy all of our AI systems will
| use, and while it's tempting to outright believe they'll
| simply use more and more, even that's not yet clear based on
| arguments presented.
|
| For the last 20 years, power consumption of HPC is increased
| per cubic inch as systems are miniaturized and density
| increased. The computing capacity increased more than the
| power use, but this doesn't mean we didn't invent more
| inefficient ways to undo significant part of that
| improvement.
|
| It's same for AI. Cards like Groq and inference oriented
| hardware doesn't consume as power as training oriented cards,
| but this doesn't mean total power use will reduce. On the
| contrary. It'll increase exponentially. Considering AI
| companies doesn't care about efficiency yet means we're
| wasting tons of energy, too.
|
| I'll not enter into the water consumption debacle, because
| open-loop systems waste enormous amounts of water.
|
| All in all, we're wasting a lot of water and energy which
| would sustain large cities and large number of people.
|
| with regards from your friendly HPC admin.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I think if the hope is that the whole world comes together to
| reduce emissions to a meaningful level, there is little to no
| chance of that. Even in the face of clear evidence, many
| leaders either do not believe it or do not think it will affect
| them in their lifetime. Capitalism and globalization march to a
| different drum.
|
| The hope becomes that we can innovate our way out of the
| problem with technology, that is the race to the finish. AI
| will likely help us get there faster, but 2nd place will not be
| an option.
|
| You could say industrialization was a solution to a problem we
| didn't have...but efficiency and profit is always the pursuit
| of business, and unfortunately that is a lot of the world we
| live in.
|
| And I say this as someone who loves the idea of energy that
| doesn't come from burning things.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > each and every one of us contributes to its intensification
| or mitigation through our decisions.
|
| I have to disagree here.
|
| This idea of a consumer-level personal responsibility for the
| fossil energy industry's externalized costs is a lot like the
| plastic producers shifting blame for waste by saying that it's
| the consumers' fault for not recycling. It's transparent blame-
| shifting.
|
| The fossil energy industry pulls the carbon out of the ground
| and distributes it globally. Then it buys and sells politicians
| and, through mass media, votes, to ensure they maintain the
| industry's hegemony.
|
| You only have to look at the full-blown slide of the US into a
| despotic petrostate to understand the causes of the climate
| crisis.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Its a case of prisoner's dilemma. Individuals making the
| proposed lifestyle changes in order to make a genuine dent in
| AGW amount to jumping on the tracks in order to stop a
| freight train.
|
| This is the one issue where I feel some sympathy with the
| right. I hate "Virtue signaling" about as much as they do.
| I'm sorry, but if you are going to snap at people over eating
| beef, while you fly/drive all over the country/world
| unnecessarily, you are absolute full of shyte.
| iinnPP wrote:
| Don't forget buying mountains worth of crap that gets used
| for a month or less and trashed.
| brightball wrote:
| Right to Repair and some type of incentives that actually
| rewarded it would probably do more globally than most
| other consumer level solutions.
| Simbio wrote:
| Prisoner's dilemma is a bad reference here.
|
| Prisoner's dilemma is about situation when optimal outcome
| requires cooperation from all participants.
|
| In the situation with climate change, personal decisions of
| 99% of Earth population do not really matter.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| You are correct that this is not a prisoner's dilemma, it
| is a tragedy of the commons[0]. However, if a wizard
| could magically control the _" personal decisions of 99%
| of Earth population"_ and make them optimal for reducing
| CO2 emissions then, believe me, climate change could be
| trivially solved.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
| smadge wrote:
| It is a classic cooperation problem. Perhaps not
| prisoners dilemma. Perhaps not at individual scale.
| Probably tragedy of the commons.
|
| Cooperation is not consuming fossil fuels. Defection is
| consuming fossil fuels.
|
| If you cooperate and other defects you suffer climate
| impact and expensive energy (expensive everything, worse
| economic growth than others).
|
| If you defect and other cooperates you suffer climate
| impact but at least you get cheap energy (cheap
| everything, more economic growth than others).
|
| People, nations, corporations, etc don't stop using
| fossil fuels because they incur a penalty against their
| competitors if they volunteer to and their competitors
| don't.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The assumption here is that fossil fuels are actually
| cheaper. But an electric car pays back the higher upfront
| cost in fuel savings in significantly fewer miles than
| most cars will have put on them. Solar generates power at
| a lower cost per kWh than coal.
|
| The fossil fuel industry has to be actively sustained
| through subsidies and government regulation hostile to
| alternatives. Maybe that wasn't true 50 years ago before
| the alternatives got viable and cheap, but if it's not
| true now then why did we stop subsidizing electric cars
| while we still subsidize oil companies?
| 2III7 wrote:
| WDYM personal decisions don't matter? Industrial and
| agricultural sectors, which both in sum contribute 50% of
| total greenhouse gas emissions, produce what is in demand
| from consumers. Another 15% of emissions is from personal
| vehicles. Changing personal habits is the only way we can
| ever reach some utopian climate targets. Utopian because
| old habits die hard.
| bwestergard wrote:
| I am not a vegan. My social world in D.C./NYC has many
| secular, left-wing, vegans. Many of them are friends or
| loved ones. They demonstrably speak their mind in front of
| me on countless issues on which we disagree.
|
| I have dined with them countless times at restaurants where
| they order vegan and I don't. I have never once been
| "snapped at" about my dietary decisions. Some of these
| people have dedicated years of their life to non-human
| animal rights activism.
|
| So I am very skeptical that this shaming occurs at any
| appreciable scale. I suspect it is mostly psychological
| projection: one doubts the morality of one's decisions,
| judges oneself harshly, but experiences this as the
| judgement of others.
| jounker wrote:
| Thank you for articulating this so succinctly.
| Gud wrote:
| There is nothing g to "disagree" about. Of course systemic
| changes are required. But if the individual improve their
| actions it will have a meaningful impact too
| pousada wrote:
| Without systemic change the impact of individuals wont be
| meaningful. Maybe on a spiritual level but they won't
| contribute meaningfully to the climate change (or non-
| change)
| ggggffggggg wrote:
| It won't and believing it will is part of ensuring nothing
| changes. _All_ energy you spend on personally changing
| should be instead spent lobbying, organizing, and otherwise
| working politically to effect systemic change. There is no
| value in individual change. It's worse than doing nothing.
| rapnie wrote:
| It is still everyone's responsibility, just not to equal
| extent. That petrolstate also rose to power through
| democratic elections.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Mainly because petrolstate's money was considered free
| speech and allowed to speak louder than citizens when it
| comes to influencing representatives.
| triceratops wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_den
| i... it also influenced those elections.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Americans use a lot of power. Buying big houses means they
| have higher heating and cooling costs. All this makes a big
| difference.
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| If everyone chose to eat veggie burgers and seitan steaks
| instead of using beef, the climate's trajectory would
| immediately improve. For all the responsibility of industry,
| many individual world citizens could, and many have, changed
| their lifestyle due to the moral issue of climate-changing
| emissions.
| rtpg wrote:
| While arguments can be made at the futility of individual
| action against a system action, it's not like companies are
| making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash.
| There are consumers of what is being produced!
|
| Society's choices and lifestyles are the cause of fossil fuel
| consumption, at a very high level. The plastic bag exists
| because it has users.
|
| There are quantitative arguments against many silly consumer-
| focused initiatives. In aggregate tho companies aren't
| burning fossil fuels for fun. Burning fossil fuels costs
| money, and a lot of people would rather not spend that
| money!!
| delusional wrote:
| This presupposes that consumers have infinite capacity to
| ingest the minute details of every single product they come
| into contact with.
|
| Yes, the plastic bag has users. Do you really expect every
| single shopper to investigate how the bag at <grocery co>
| was made and if the plastic is recycled? What if they also
| have to do the same for every single thing they interact
| with every single day?
|
| It's much easier to ask the people that work with the
| minutia of plastic bags every day, namely the people who
| make them, to maybe fix this problem.
| timschmidt wrote:
| > it's not like companies are making a bunch of product
| just to throw them in the trash
|
| Sure they do. You even mention one in the venerable plastic
| bag. Is it the best bag? No, of course not. Is it a good
| bag? Absolutely not. Is it the cheapest bag to produce? You
| betcha.
|
| Consumers are often presented the least expensive option
| with the worst outcomes. See:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
| filoeleven wrote:
| I remember when that switch at grocers from paper to
| plastic was taking hold, and you could choose. "Paper or
| plastic?" was the question asked. Some comedian
| (probably) had a good one liner: "That'll be 42.39. Kill
| a tree or choke a fish?"
| XorNot wrote:
| It's mostly a good example of why comedians aren't a
| source of information.
|
| Plantation lumber is a very sustainable industry, and
| plastic's environmental impact is highly context
| dependent.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Why don't you pay for a more expensive bag and bring it
| to the store?
| timschmidt wrote:
| Why do you assume I don't? Opinionated defaults matter,
| as that's what most users will end up using.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Would you be ok if stores offered the option between a
| cheap plastic bag and a more expensive non-plastic one?
| (All the stores here already do it, btw).
| timschmidt wrote:
| I think the externalities of plastic recycling must be
| internalized economically by requiring all manufacturers
| of items to pre-pay for the recycling of said items up
| front, as part of the manufacturing cost. Similar to how
| bottle returns are managed, which has been very
| successful. Items which are provably biodegradable or
| designed to facilitate repair may be exempt.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Plastic bags are already taxed where I live. Consumers
| pay that tax, obviously. Other costs imposed on producers
| of plastic items will just be passed down to consumers.
| timschmidt wrote:
| That's lovely, but it's not what I described. Bottles
| aren't just taxed. They have a refundable deposit. This
| ensures they don't end up in a landfill.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Exactly. The point of this sort of tax should not be to
| collect revenue, it should be to ensure that non-
| biodegradable bags are being disposed of correctly. To
| the extent that this is not happening, any bag tax is
| malfunctioning. Such a tax is either insufficient or
| poorly-designed. (Our city just banned chain stores from
| giving out plastic bags under 4 mils thick, and stores
| now give out paper and sell re-usable bags.)
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Many cities have banned plastic bags, and the results
| have been miraculous for waterways and wetlands. It turns
| out that shore animals don't benefit as much from "hope a
| few customers choose the better thing, but otherwise let
| them take home single-use crap that immediately blows off
| into natural settings."
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/climate/plastic-bag-
| bans-...
| rtpg wrote:
| The plastic bag is sold to businesses! If every
| supermarket in the world decided to never buy another
| plastic bag then they would no longer be produced!
|
| There can be a futility to it all in that the "ideal
| option" simply isn't produced of course.
|
| I find boots theory is often a bit too convenient in this
| topic though. There is unlikely to be magic structural
| solutions that allow every part of your life to remain as
| convenient. At one point our lives will have to change in
| structure.
|
| EDIT: to be extra clear, I think systemic coordinated
| changes is needed. I just think the "it's the
| corporations doing this!" narrative to obscure the needs
| for reorganization of daily life on top of systemic
| change
| usrnm wrote:
| > Is it the best bag? No, of course not. Is it a good
| bag? Absolutely not
|
| Plastic is absolutely the best packaging material ever
| created, it's so good, it feels like magic. It's light,
| it's cheap, it's waterproof, it's durable and doesn't
| just decompose, it comes in a miriad shapes and forms and
| so on. There is a reason it's everywhere
| timschmidt wrote:
| > it's cheap, it's waterproof, it's durable
|
| One of those adjectives describes the plastic bag I'm
| familiar with. Sometimes it lasts long enough to get the
| food in the house without spilling through a hole which
| spontaneously appeared in the bag.
| filoeleven wrote:
| > Society's choices and lifestyles are the cause of fossil
| fuel consumption, at a very high level. The plastic bag
| exists because it has users.
|
| Society's choices and lifestyles don't exist in some
| rational-individualistic vacuum. Companies advertise
| products while hiding known risks and side effects of what
| they're pushing. Cigarettes. Oil. PFOA/PFAS.
|
| They all knew, and they did and continue to do it anyway.
| Regulatory capture solved all their problems by removing
| accountability.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Let us not pretend that the billions and billions spent on
| advertising by corporations leveraging deep knowledge of
| human behavior means the lion's share of blame goes to the
| victims of said advertising behmoth.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| I agree with you that consumer-level personal responsibility
| is absolutely _not_ the way to go. To a certain extent I try
| to non-dogmatically "do the right thing", but I know it's
| simply a cute hobby.
|
| The only solution is systemic. The incentives need to be in
| order for businesses and consumers to do the right thing not
| because it is the right thing, but because it's cheaper or
| more convenient. That can only be implemented via legislation
| and investment of public resources, hence from the political
| level.
|
| And what determines whether the politicians in charge are
| ones who will implement the changes needed to mitigate the
| problem, rather than ones who will keep alive the system
| which is intensifying it? Well, we're back to square one:
| each and every one of us contributes to its intensification
| or mitigation through our decisions.
| quantified wrote:
| Moving from fossil is less convenient, not more. So, we're
| stuck.
| goatlover wrote:
| For how long though? Solar and wind are very competitive
| now, electric cars have been good enough to transition to
| for over a decade, other industries can be decarbonized
| with the right incentives and enough investment. It's not
| like there aren't any ideas for how to farm or produce
| steel cleanly. And nuclear reactors can be made safer and
| cheaper now.
|
| Seems more like a lack of political will with powerful
| lobbying interests opposing it and misleading the public.
| Fossil fuel companies could have listened to their
| scientists in the 1970s and changed their business models
| for a transition to cleaner tech a lot sooner.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| For a long time to come. The energy density of fossil
| fuels is very high (about 50x higher than that of lithium
| ion batteries), there's a ton of infrastructure for
| handling and transporting them and a ton of
| infrastructure for using them.
|
| They get turned into plastics and energy, two things
| which civilization feeds on voraciously.
|
| It's not just inertia that keeps them going.
| keyringlight wrote:
| It's an immense uphill struggle if you tried to get
| people to adjust to where transport is less available,
| and encourage living or working at closer ranges or
| conversely long range shipping/travel/vacations seen as
| more of a luxury. Just thinking about it I'm reminded of
| the outrage that was fabricated/stirred up over "15
| minute cities" in the UK where the idea that you'd be
| able to get to most things you need day-to-day in a 15
| minute walk was warped into a scare of state checkpoints,
| fines and surveillance. Or the retreat from working from
| home.
|
| It's a huge adjustment from how the past few decades have
| established expectations, and it'll take a big force to
| change quickly, similar to covid even though that was
| short term in hindsight.
| tavavex wrote:
| > The energy density of fossil fuels is very high (about
| 50x higher than that of lithium ion batteries)
|
| That doesn't make sense. Batteries are an energy
| container, they're not energy itself. How can it be
| compared to a fuel? The direct counterpart to oil or coal
| is wind or solar radiation itself, batteries are used to
| amortize the supply and store an excess for emergency
| use, but otherwise those types of energy just immediately
| go into powering the grid.
|
| The economic case for renewable power is actually
| extremely good, because unlike fossil fuels, they're
| effectively infinite and don't need complex
| infrastructure to extract. They're free. You only need a
| power plant that directly converts them into power. If we
| were just able to shift fossil fuel demand towards
| producing goods like plastics, this would already be
| massive. However, a lot of powerful people are deeply
| invested into fossil fuels and will do anything to tip
| the scales into their favor, despite gradually losing in
| the energy sector.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It makes perfect sense to look at energy + container
| subsystems.
| aydyn wrote:
| It doesn't make sense to look at that in a vacuum. Energy
| transport over wire via electricity is much "denser" than
| transport via liquid or gas.
|
| "It depends" is the correct answer, but the equation is
| shifting quickly towards solar + electricity.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You're the one looking at it in a vacuum. Engineering is
| all about looking at it in context and the main context
| where density of energy is important is in vehicles of
| all shapes and sizes. That's where the rubber quite
| literally meets the road. You can then theorize about
| what the 'weight' of the electrical energy is but it is
| pointless: the weight of container dwarfs the weight of
| the energy carriers (effectively the electrons)
| themselves. In the case of fossil fuels the ratio is more
| balanced, the container will weigh a couple of kilos and
| the fuel will way a bit more (say 10:1 or 20:1). So to
| compare the one with the other we weigh the batteries and
| ignore the electrons and we then compare that with the
| fuel because _that is the dominant factor_.
|
| Solar + electricity are not directly suitable for
| powering electric vehicles, that's where the batteries
| come in.
|
| Comparing apples (transport of electricity via wires)
| with oranges (transport of energy via liquid or gas)
| misses the elephant in the room: you are not going to be
| able to use those electrons without a suitable temporary
| storage medium unless you plan on carrying a very long
| and impractical extension cord behind your now very light
| EV.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| And yet, we're not _completely_ stuck. It is absolutely
| clear that not enough has been done to reduce our carbon
| emissions, and we 're on a bad path on track to ~2.5degC
| warming in the next century. However, something _has_
| been done, and if nothing had been done we could easily
| be on track to >4degC global warming. That would be much
| worse.
|
| So, how did we achieve what little we have? Well, because
| many people _have_ cared, and _have_ made the right
| decisions. Not enough people, or maybe not good-enough
| decisions, but some people, and somewhat good decisions.
|
| So, what were the decisions which brought us down from an
| apocalyptic +4degC to a very bad 2.5degC path? Was it
| enough consumers making environmentally conscious
| choices, even if they were less convenient or more
| expensive. No. It was enough voters wanting their leaders
| to do something, even if it wasn't quite enough, but it
| was something. And something isn't nothing.
|
| We will never have enough people voting with their wallet
| to fight climate change, because our rational
| understanding of the big-picture cannot overpower our
| intuitive day-to-day choices. However, we _may_ have
| enough people voting with their ballot to fight climate
| change, because the rational big-picture can, _sometimes_
| , decide whom we vote for.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| are you sure we aren't on the >4degC path?
|
| AI could very well put us back on it.
| jounker wrote:
| Really? Wind and solar are cheaper. Electric cars and
| motorcycles are more fun to drive.
|
| Fossil fuels are profitable for a small group of powerful
| people, and they spend vast amounts of money to spread
| falsehoods.
| femto wrote:
| Andrew Forrest, a well connected billionaire, puts the blame
| on a group of 1000 "captains of industry".
|
| https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/inside-
| and...
| quantified wrote:
| If you drive a fossil fuel vehicle, you have chosen to buy
| into this. If you drive it 3 blocks when you could walk,
| you've chosen to go the way the fuel company wants you to.
| That's you.
|
| Plastic is a bit different, you didn't choose the packaging.
| And you probably don't have the option to recycle anyway.
| Putting in a special bin doesn't change the fact that it's
| probably going to a landfill anyway.
|
| Some of it's consumer level. Do what you can. Don't whatabout
| it.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Plastic is a fantastic material, that's why it's chosen for
| the packaging. I also don't see the problem sending it to a
| landfill as long as it stays there.
| j2kun wrote:
| > consumer-level personal responsibility
|
| Indeed, the biggest personal responsibility is to make this a
| top political priority when deciding who to elect. Nothing
| will change until we consistenly fire leaders who refuse to
| act decisively on this.
| DonnyV wrote:
| The 2 biggest contributors to climate change are ...
|
| - US Military
|
| - Cargo Ships
|
| You fix those 2 things and like 60% of pollution goes away.
| vaylian wrote:
| Hank Green did a good short video on this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvAznN_MPWQ
|
| TL;DW: It is important that individuals show that there is a
| real problem and that they perform actions that address the
| problem. This demonstrative behaviour leads to social
| dynamics where more people feel encouraged to perform actions
| and to drive larger change.
|
| You need to start somewhere.
| XorNot wrote:
| While true we did that years ago and the other side is
| simply ignoring it.
|
| Worse, the people we sold the idea too are stuck on it:
| they're convinced the solution must and totally be the
| performance, not the result.
| throw310822 wrote:
| I never understood this. The companies sold you fossil fuel,
| you burnt it and got benefits out of it: transportation,
| energy, heating, constructions, fertilizers and food, etc.
| You want them to pay for the negative consequences of your
| fossil fuel consumption while you keep all the generated
| benefits?
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Neat, I've never seen a fossil fuel company exec on hacker
| news before. Welcome!
| aoeusnth1 wrote:
| I'm an environmentalist and I agree with this framing.
| The solution is going to be painful and must increase
| prices on products and services that fossil fuels are
| currently the cheapest solution for. If you're not
| willing to personally sacrifice anything to reduce fossil
| fuel consumption you can see why carbon taxes are not
| popular, right? France's protests against them, for
| example, are a good example of a populist reaction
| against attempts to regulate the economy to have less
| emissions.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| The amount of fossil fuels that a working class individual
| burns are a rounding error compared to what big companies
| burn. How many private jets are in the air right now? Even
| if you drive the most energy inefficient truck ever
| produced, run your home HVAC at max, and buy gasoline just
| to burn in your back yard, you will never measure up. It's
| like saying we need to dry the oceans, so you should stop
| peeing in it.
| throw310822 wrote:
| > if you drive the most energy inefficient truck ever
| produced
|
| Sorry, but how was that truck produced? Where did the
| energy to make it come from? How was your home built,
| where did the energy come from? Where did the materials
| come from? How did the workers come to the job? What did
| they eat, and what do you eat? Do you go to an office?
| How was it built? How do you and your colleagues get
| there? Do your children go to school? Do you go to
| hospitals when you're sick? Etc.
| 2III7 wrote:
| And who are the customers of big companies driving the
| demand? Regular people or other companies who also
| produce for those people.
| EGreg wrote:
| No, what we wanted for decades is for cars to shift to the
| free market of electric energy, just like every one of our
| other appliances have for decades. Electricity is a free
| market - can be generated by hydro, solar, wind,
| geothermal, even nuclear. If tomorrow they invent clean
| fusion power then electric cars would be able to benefit.
|
| The cars being locked into fossil fuels is the result of
| fossil fuel subsidies from the government. Otherwise, OPEC
| raising prices would have long ago led to improvements in
| battery technology and electric cars. But the federal
| government shields the fossil fuels companies to make sure
| the "price at the pump" is small.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRnUY6V2Knk
|
| We should be raising pigovian taxes on fossil fuels at the
| point of extraction, and redistribute it to all our
| citizens as a UBI. Alaska has been doing this for decades
| and they have almost the lowest GINI index of all states
| year after year.
|
| Just like we want bottling and clothing companies to shift
| from plastics to bidegradeable materials. But you like to
| keep individuals distracted and blame them for using a
| straw and a bag, as if THAT is the main cause of pollution.
| And plastic recycling was a total scam designed to keep
| people distracted from forcing change on corporations
| pollution and unsustainable practices upstream.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Where does the chain end? I burn diesel in my tractor to
| harvest corn. Should the feedlot that buys my corn pay for
| the tractor's emissions? Should the slaughterhouse that
| processes the cattle pay? Should the supermarket that
| stocks the beef pay? Should the family who grills the steak
| on Sunday pay? Or just the one who eats the largest
| portion?
| throw310822 wrote:
| You either tax the fuel and pass the cost down to the
| consumers, or decide as a society to share the cost of
| the externalities and use general taxation for that.
| pants2 wrote:
| Here, in the first scenario it directly punishes
| consumers for consuming more. In the second, it punishes
| everyone equally on everyone's consumption, which is
| unlikely to lead to behavior change. So yes, we should
| tax fossil fuels much more.
| throw310822 wrote:
| However, the first scenario will pass the increased cost
| of fuel down to the consumers affecting poorer people
| disproportionately. Example: some good that is produced
| with fossil fuels (including food) will become too
| expensive for low-income people, while richer (and more
| polluting) people will not feel the difference that much.
|
| If you go for general taxation, you distribute the cost
| proportionally to income, making rich people pay more.
| Probably the ideal is a mix of both.
| pants2 wrote:
| Ideally in the first scenario where we have well-
| functioning government, necessities like food and low-
| income housing would be well subsidized. Other things
| like random junk from Temu and large gas-guzzling trucks
| will be less accessible to poorer people by design.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Why should all of society pay for these externalities? If
| some people manage to improve their energy supply and
| don't require dirty fuels, why should they be forced to
| subsidize those who won't?
|
| Taxing the carbon at the source is simply correctly
| pricing it, and because it makes it impossible to shift
| the externalities away from the producer it fixes the
| accounting problem that falsely makes fossil fuels appear
| cheap.
| _alternator_ wrote:
| So... it's like you completely understand the issue :)
|
| And obviously, you tax the fuel at the source, right when
| it comes out of the ground. Higher prices get passed
| down, changing behavior because the products
| externalities are priced correctly from the start.
| throw310822 wrote:
| You can. Everything- including basic things like food,
| transportation, construction, healthcare- will become
| more expensive, of course. My objection was to ask fossil
| fuel companies to pay _after_ you already bought and
| burned your fuel cheap.
| derektank wrote:
| To be clear, the source would still be the consumer.
| Hydrocarbons can be used for non-CO2 emitting purposes
| such as chemical feedstock for pharmaceuticals, solvents,
| etc. We should only be levying a tax upon uses that emit
| CO2 into the atmosphere, i.e. burning them in your ICE
| vehicle. It's not the fracking company that's emitting
| the CO2 (unless they're gas flaring or similarly emitting
| carbon during extraction but this is a rounding error on
| total emissions).
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Pretty sure those poor multi billion companies also got
| huge subsidies.
| triceratops wrote:
| > You want them to pay for the negative consequences of
| your fossil fuel consumption
|
| No I want them to pay for the negative consequences of the
| lies they spread. I paid them for fuel, and I got fuel. I
| did not think I was paying for lies and I never wanted
| them.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_den
| i...
| danny_codes wrote:
| I want the emitter to be taxed however much it would cost
| the market to put the carbon back.
|
| Obviously in such a system there wouldn't be any fossil
| fuel companies so it's a moot point.
|
| But this isn't purely economic. Fossil fuel companies are
| paying top dollar to ensure we destroy the climate. Just
| look at all the batshit propaganda around climate change.
| People genuinely believe it's not a problem. It's wild how
| effective the fossil fuel industry has been in convincing
| people the sky isn't falling
| EGreg wrote:
| It's actually a lot more systematic than you think:
| https://magarshak.com/blog/government-and-industry-
| distract-...
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Problem is that we if we all stand in a circle and point
| fingers at the next guy who is to blame, that doesn't really
| move us toward any sort of solutions.
|
| In fact the reason it's so easy to find others to blame is
| that the responsibility is a shared one. Holding consumers
| responsible doesn't absolve producers, or governments for
| their participation. All have to be held responsible for
| their actions. That's the only way forward.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Problem is that we if we all stand in a circle and point
| fingers at the next guy who is to blame, that doesn't
| really move us toward any sort of solutions.
|
| Because of the power of lobbyists and their war chests full
| of cash, even if we made that circle surrounding our
| congress critter so everyone was pointing at them, we'd
| still have no effect. Our shame circle would only be
| uncomfortable for a short time which would quickly be
| assuaged by the soothing feeling of another large donation
| from a lobbyist.
| ctoth wrote:
| The concern about climate is well placed. Ripple et al. lay out
| a serious case that we may be closer to tipping cascades than
| models predict, with the Greenland Ice Sheet potentially
| vulnerable to tipping below 2degC warming, well before 2050.
|
| But "invest an equal share of the resources currently being
| pumped into AI into climate" misidentifies the bottleneck.
| Marine cloud brightening could produce meaningful planetary
| cooling for roughly $5 billion per year at scale (NAS
| estimate). That's like what? 1% of what was spent on AI
| infrastructure last year?
|
| The money exists. What doesn't exist is the political
| coordination to spend it.
|
| The goddamn Alameda city council shut down a University of
| Washington MCB field test in 2024 because nobody told them it
| was happening on their property. Go look it up.
|
| This's the actual bottleneck: governance, coordination, and
| political will, not capital.
|
| When someone says "we should invest resources in X instead of
| Y," it's worth asking who "we" is and what mechanism they're
| proposing. AI investment is private capital chasing returns.
| You can't redirect it to climate by wishing. The implicit
| model, that Society has a budget and we're choosing wrong,
| assumes a resource allocation authority that doesn't exist. If
| you want to argue for creating one, that's a real position, but
| it should be stated openly rather than hidden inside "it would
| be sensible."
|
| Also ... "AI won't solve it; it only makes it worse" is doing a
| ton of work! The energy consumption concern has real merit. But
| materials science, grid optimization, and climate modeling are
| direct climate contributions happening now. Google has saved
| energy in its datacenters ... using AI!
|
| Blanket dismissal of an entire domain of capability isn't
| seriousness, it's pattern matching. (Ironically, there's a
| phrase for systems that produce plausible-sounding output by
| matching patterns without engaging with underlying structure.
| We're told to be worried about them.)
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| > not capital
|
| Capital, and by relation the system that centers the idea of
| Capital as a method for moving around resources is at the
| very center of this.
|
| Since Capital follows near-term incentive, if the "pollute
| the world" path has a greater near-term incentive, that's
| where the market will follow. If a single member of the
| system goes for long-term incentive(not cooking the earth),
| other near-term incentive chasers will eat their lunch and
| remove a player.
|
| The system itself is a tight feedback loop searching for
| local maxima, and the local max is often the most
| destructive. With chasing the local maxima, also comes profit
| and capital that influence the political system.
| ctoth wrote:
| What you've done here is called a fully-general
| counterargument. You should be suspicious of these!
|
| If capital inevitably follows destructive local maxima and
| defectors get eaten, then no coordination problem has ever
| been solved, right?
|
| But we banned CFCs! We got lead out of gasoline! The
| Montreal Protocol exists and worked.
|
| What you're describing is the default behavior of
| uncoordinated markets, not a physical law. The entire
| history of regulation and international treaties consists
| of mechanisms that override local incentive gradients.
| Sometimes they fail. Sometimes they work.
|
| "The system itself is a tight feedback loop" treats the
| system as fixed rather than something humans have
| repeatedly modified. The question is whether we'll add the
| right feedback loops fast enough, not whether adding them
| is metaphysically impossible.
|
| My original point stands: the bottleneck on MCB isn't that
| capital won't fund it. It's that the Alameda city council
| didn't know a field test was happening on their waterfront
| and NIMBY ... people ... made noise. Governance failure,
| not capitalism failure.
| akramachamarei wrote:
| It's also worth distinguishing uncoordinated markets from
| ungoverned markets. Markets exhibit vast and
| sophisticated organic coordination without state
| prodding. I don't just mean to pick at this word
| "uncoordinated" but more deeply at the particular issue
| of near- or far-sightedness. Has it actually been
| established that organic economic coordination does worse
| at protecting "the future" than some particular
| alternatives?
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| > But we banned CFCs! We got lead out of gasoline! The
| Montreal Protocol exists and worked.
|
| None of these were done via capitalism, they were done in
| opposition to it.
|
| And I know you weren't claiming they were, but the
| problem is all the power centers behind global capitalism
| have captured government (at least in the US) completely
| and are doing everything in their power to strip existing
| regulations and make sure the only new ones aren't in the
| name of the common good, but only to build moats for
| themselves.
|
| It is great that we solved these problems in the past,
| but we are increasingly not doing that sort of thing at
| all anymore.
| filoeleven wrote:
| The government is failing to control the problem because
| it got bought out by the capitalists who run the
| companies that continue to cause the damage. The law in
| the US explicitly allows this, though it's "decent"
| enough to hide it in a paper bag.
|
| It's certainly a governance failure, but I'm not sure
| what the fix for it is, and I don't see how capitalism
| gets off scot-free.
| globalnode wrote:
| People will have to vote for non-captured candidates
| (good luck finding them) or protest in large enough
| numbers that the system will change. Those people will
| also have to be critical thinkers to a degree that they
| can consciously push back against the wall of marketing
| and propaganda pumped out by those in power with money.
| And they will have to self educate since governments
| generally don't teach people these skills while they have
| them in school for 12 or more years. From my point of
| view the future looks pretty grim but I'm certainly
| hoping to be surprised or corrected!
| pendenthistory wrote:
| Cooling the planet is neither a technical nor financial
| problem. The problem is that environmentalists want this to
| be a moral issue. They already decided on the solution. If
| the solution is not environmental communism with them in
| power, they will not have it.
| javascriptfan69 wrote:
| >Cooling the planet is neither a technical nor financial
| problem
|
| Yes it is. All solutions have trade offs.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Marine cloud brightening could produce meaningful planetary
| cooling for roughly $5 billion per year at scale (NAS
| estimate).
|
| Eh. Cloud brightening is a temporary hack, stops working as
| soon as you stop actively doing it, and isn't an alternative
| to switching away from fossil fuels. It's probably worth
| doing to push back the "ice melts and releases more carbon"
| thing but let's not confuse it with the extent of what needs
| to be done. You can't actually solve the problem for
| $5B/year.
|
| > AI investment is private capital chasing returns.
|
| Getting private capital to work for you _is_ a good way to
| solve the problem. The _real_ problem is politics.
|
| The EV tax credits and the subsidies oil companies get were
| costing about the same amount of money, but we only got rid
| of one of them. Nuclear _should_ cost less than fossil fuels,
| but we 're told that fission is scary and Deepwater Horizon
| is nothing but spilled milk so the one with the much _better_
| environmental record has to be asymmetrically regulated into
| uncompetitiveness.
|
| If we actually wanted to solve it we'd do the "carbon tax but
| 100% of the money gets sent back to the people as checks"
| thing, since then you're not screwing everyone because on
| average the check and the tax cancel out and corporations pay
| the tax too but only people get the check. Then everyone, but
| especially the heaviest users, would have the incentive to
| switch to alternative energy and more efficient vehicles
| etc., because everybody gets the same check but the people
| putting thousands of miles on non-hybrid panzers pay more in
| tax.
|
| The "problem" is that it would actually work, which is highly
| objectionable to the oil industry and countries like Russia
| since it would cause their income to go away, hence politics.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Maybe we could ask AI!
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/698ce97b-4d54-8000-aecb-542ceecb00...
| Lerc wrote:
| But https://chatgpt.com/share/698cee2c-b8c4-800f-b3cb-
| fa8869f874...
| razster wrote:
| As a human living on this planet, with roughly another 50 years
| left, I say we allow our actions to continue. We are unable to
| stop those in power and with high influence from doing
| anything; we deserve what is coming. Earth will be fine without
| us. Good luck everyone!
| pjmlp wrote:
| Unfortunately it won't happen, as humanity rather nuke
| ourselves generating memes, while driving beverage from paper
| straws.
| nostrademons wrote:
| The difference is emblematic of the difficulty in getting
| attention for climate mitigation. AI succeeds because you can
| sell a service _to an individual human_ which will give them
| advantages _over other humans_. Climate change mitigation fails
| because you are trying to sell a service _to humanity_ which
| will result in a better end state _over some other hypothetical
| imagined future_. Humans make decisions, not humanity, and many
| of them are pretty bad with both hypotheticals and imagination.
| It 's no wonder that a product designed to make them _do better
| at what they do, right now_ is more successful than one
| designed to make _everybody_ do better than what would
| otherwise have resulted, 50-100 years in the future when they
| 'll likely be dead.
|
| Any kind of workable solution to large, societal-level problems
| needs to deal with the principal agent issue. Society doesn't
| actually exist; humanity doesn't actually exist. These are
| abstractions we use to label the behavior of _individual
| people_. You need to operate on the level of individual people
| to get any sort of outcome.
|
| (FWIW, this is a major reason why concepts like markets,
| capitalism, democracy, rule of law, and federalism have been
| successful. They work by aligning incentives so that when one
| person takes an action that is good for themselves, they more-
| or-less end up benefitting the people around them too.)
| cons0le wrote:
| Imagine if we had laws that required all LLM compute to come
| from solar, or other sustainable power sources. We could have
| used the market's thirst for AI as a backchannel way to force
| creation of new sustainable energy.
|
| In contrast to Elon/XAI's illegal methane fuled datacenter in
| memphis
| 2III7 wrote:
| Imagine if we had people that actually listened to
| scientists, reduced their carbon footprint and changed their
| habits.
| Lerc wrote:
| I agree to an extent that each of us contributes in a manner,
| but the manner that we contribute is not certain. A person who
| puts more effort into reducing their own personal climate
| impact could be doing worse than using the same effort to enact
| systemic change. It could be bailing water on a sinking ship
| instead of fixing the leak. The problem is you might not appear
| to be doing anything in isolation. Just spending that extra
| effort at work and sending the money earned to the ship
| patching people so they can get what they need would fix the
| problem better. If you choose bailing are you not just choosing
| something visible but ineffective over achieving the desired
| outcome but just being a boring taxpayer.
|
| As for AI, to characterise it as a "solution to problems we
| didn't really have" is placing your opinion over others. They
| may be right or wrong about it but many AI proponents firmly
| believe that AI can provide solutions to real world problems
| that we definitely have. You may disagree about their potential
| effectiveness, and that's ok, but at least tolerate that people
| might have different ideas about how to make the world better.
| frogperson wrote:
| There simply is no solution to this problem. We would all need
| to stop driving, flying, and eating meat. Most families (in the
| US, anyway) would suffer unemployment and starvation if they
| couldnt drive to work.
|
| Humans will continue to do whatever is needed to survive,, and
| that currently involves driving, flying, and eating meat. They
| will only stop when those behaviours are either not possible,
| or hinder survival.
| htx80nerd wrote:
| every year (month?) that passes people are saying the end of
| the world is right around the corner due to climate change.
| then 10 yrs passes, nothing happens, and they keep saying the
| same stuff.
|
| the system warning you the world is in big trouble dont remind
| you 'their side' has been saying the sky is falling for ~40+
| yrs.
| j-krieger wrote:
| > that each and every one of us contributes to its
| intensification or mitigation through our decisions
|
| I've travelled quite a bit and I find it hard to convince
| myself that I as a city dweller contribute any meaningful
| amount to pollution or waste. I've seen _rivers_ of trash flow
| directly into the ocean. The rich and wealthy pollute
| disproportionally in such a way that I don't think offloading
| the responsibility to the general public is fair.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The simple counterargument is that there many more of us than
| there are of them, so even if on an individual level we have
| less effect collectively we have much more.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| We contribute to it 1% by the actions we take as individuals,
| and 99% by the leaders we select.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| It's important to remember that in REALISTIC worse case
| emissions projections, by 2050 - we will have CO2 higher than
| levels seen in the last 10 million years - but there was a 500
| million year period where CO2 levels were an order of magnitude
| higher than that - and there's NO WAY we're getting there
| without destroying civilization first, so there's no chance on
| current trajectories that we turn the planet into Venus.
|
| The super danger zone is ~1000 PPM CO2 - where ocean chemistry
| changes. In worst case scenarios in 50-60 years, we _could_ get
| there - but there 's a lot of reason to believe we won't, and
| we DEFINITELY aren't getting there by 2050.
|
| The graph the main source shows is cherry-picked. Look at this:
| https://co2coalition.org/facts/for-most-of-earths-history-it...
|
| Saying we're on a "hothouse" trajectory plays into the
| Apocalypse / Earth Becomes Venus trope, which is so ridiculous
| for our lifetime even under the absolute worst case realistic
| scenarios.
| shrubby wrote:
| Ehm, we're royally fuxed.
|
| Unless the fake reality starts to crack with the Epstein and
| other current events and humanity's coming of age will happen.
| Even if a hundred years later than Bonhoeffer though it would.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Vote Giant Meteor 2028. Thick Dust or Bust.
| baq wrote:
| Nothing new under the sun.
|
| We can't cut emissions fast enough politically, but we _can_ race
| towards economically viable fusion power which would solve the
| problem from the supply side and would make industrial scale
| carbon sequestration not insane, for a century or so, until waste
| heat itself can 't be radiated fast enough even in 250 ppm CO2
| atmosphere - but that's a problem for the XXII century.
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| How about economically viable fission power, right now.
| baq wrote:
| That's the thing, can't be done
| sien wrote:
| France, Sweden and Ontario exist.
|
| https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/12mo/monthly
|
| It literally has been done.
| logicprog wrote:
| Economically viable fusion power uses the fusion reactor in the
| sky beaming energy to us for free that we can collect with
| relatively cheap, simple, decentralized, solid state, and
| extremely long lasting (decades) power transmission recievers.
| baq wrote:
| No disagreement, but nights and clouds are inconvenient and
| remedies are also expensive-ish. We need both.
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| I really think the key to addressing climate change should have
| started 20 years ago in a lot of primary schools, whereby the
| curriculum includes subjects that are more tailored to solving
| problems with capturing or converting C02 (eg sciences) so that
| these students are thinking about these problems when graduating
| and starting businesses to solve the challenges (hopefully with
| gov incentives at same time).
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| We have had the technology to decarbonise the grid since the
| 1950s and we have known about the problem since the 1970s.
| Politics however has driven the use of CO2 instead of nuclear
| energy and required the drastic development of high end wind
| and solar. Even that wasn't enough, it also had to get
| considerably cheaper than CO2 producing energy sources and the
| entire time the entire worlds population has been subjected to
| massive amounts of propaganda to keep burning oil, gas and
| coal. This transition was possible 55 years ago when the
| problem was first surfaced, the political will just wasn't
| there so it didn't happen.
|
| Its not an education issue, it has always been governments
| getting in the way and refusing to change the power source. its
| why I think Solar will win out, it can be deployed on an
| individual house level unlike everything else and that changes
| things enormously.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| eh... imagine a planet scale messmer plan... too bad petro-
| dollar is a thing
| kccqzy wrote:
| 20 years ago was when Al Gore's influential documentary _An
| Inconvenient Truth_ first appeared. Almost everyone I knew
| discussed it, including primary school pupils. Guess what, we
| do have better tools today than 20 years ago to fight climate
| change, such as practical and useful electric vehicles to
| replace CO2-emitting conventional vehicles.
| chasil wrote:
| What is generally not understood is that our current icehouse
| phase is rare.
|
| 'A "greenhouse Earth" is a period during which no continental
| glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a
| greenhouse state for about 85% of its history.
|
| 'Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in
| both poles simultaneously... Earth's current icehouse state is
| known as the Quaternary Ice Age and began approximately 2.58
| million years ago.'
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earthh...
| bhickey wrote:
| The _state_ isn't alarming, it's the rate of change. The
| transition is happening on a scale of human lifetimes instead
| of geological time.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Precisely. Humans can adapt to almost anything but we can not
| do it fast enough with 8 billion+ people.
| filoeleven wrote:
| Yeah. The XKCD "Timeline of Earth's Average Temperature" is,
| I'm pretty certain, the most frightening chart I have ever
| seen.
|
| https://xkcd.com/1732/
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its
| history.
|
| And during those periods there were no human beings. And no
| agriculture, or unstable globalised economiies, or dense urban
| societies vulnerable to disruption.
|
| It is, of course, interesting that our planet has this long,
| varied existence that pre-dates us. But it is of little use in
| understanding how to get us out of the hole we're in. And it is
| arguably dangerous, because it misleads people into thinking
| that we have the capacity to adapt to such conditions, when we
| manifestly don't.
| chasil wrote:
| To put a different shade on the meaning, this climate period
| is rare, easily disturbed, and difficult to restore even with
| vastly more powerful technology.
|
| The more common greenhouse state is unlikely to lead to a
| Venus runaway, but it will be hostile to us.
|
| We might very well require the rare climate, and perish in
| the common.
| vdupras wrote:
| And yet, the only reasonable action to take is to flag this topic
| and move along with the "humanity has always found a way out,
| technology will save us. Remember, we were supposed to drown in
| horse manure!"
|
| Why? Because candidly looking at those risks as a society means
| deep collective existential dread, which automatically means an
| immediate civilizational collapse.
|
| So I'm guessing some of our elite is actually ignorant and the
| other part is willfully shutting the hell up on this subject to
| let our civilization run on fumes a few more years.
|
| It's unfortunate because a rapid civilizational collapse could
| give humanity as a species a better chance of survival.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| > It's unfortunate because a rapid civilizational collapse
| could give humanity as a species a better chance of survival.
|
| How's that?
| vdupras wrote:
| An effective way to cut carbon emissions before feedback
| loops are triggered
| Aeveus wrote:
| Miss the days where YC put emphasis on climate tech too:
|
| - https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/rfs-climatetech
|
| - http://carbon.ycombinator.com/
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| YC has always been about cashing in on the latest grift, and
| nothing more.
| j0ba wrote:
| If only there was a clean, nearly limitless source of energy,
| where the waste for hundreds of years of energy could be stored
| in less than a square kilometer.
|
| If such a thing existed, we could be sure that environmentalists
| and leftists would have openly embraced it, rather than nip it at
| the bud 50 years ago. Because they are Good People(tm). And we
| should definitely listen to them now because they Follow The
| Science(tm).
| wiz21c wrote:
| CO2 seems very threatening but loss of biodiversity is also a
| problem, and it has nothing to do with energy...
|
| We're in deep s*t
| pyrale wrote:
| > If such a thing existed, we could be sure that
| environmentalists and leftists would have openly embraced it,
| rather than nip it at the bud 50 years ago. Because they are
| Good People(tm). And we should definitely listen to them now
| because they Follow The Science(tm).
|
| The issue with current politics wrt environment is
| environmentalists and leftists? This feels like a smoker
| blaming their smoking habit on anti-drug associations not being
| good enough rather than big tobacco.
| irishloop wrote:
| Surely nothing has ever done wrong with this limitless source
| of clean energy to give people pause? There's no uninhabitable
| areas of the Earth due to this?
| Moldoteck wrote:
| i'm not sure there are, from a science point of view... From
| political point of view there are probably only 2 locations
| in one country... vs a gigantic energy output on planetary
| scale...
| logicprog wrote:
| But that source of power is a high-modernist invention that is
| unnatural and especially dangerous because of a few high-
| profile accidents. We have to shut it all down!
| akramachamarei wrote:
| People may be downvoting you because they think you're not
| speaking in good faith. But I think this touches on an
| important issue which is the credibility of politicians when it
| comes to bringing the science hammer down (in the form of
| policy). Stuff like the junk science behind those old CA
| plastic straw policies, the seesawing on Covid prevention and
| lab-leak denialism, the energy efficient dryers that don't work
| (this last one is more hearsay to me, and issue of CBA rather
| than scientific fact perhaps.) I think if politicians can get
| their shit straight on communicating _mature_ science
| thoroughly and accurately it could go a long way to getting
| people to work together.
| Teever wrote:
| What's fascinating and dismaying to me is that it's obvious that
| there exists sufficient capital and capability in the west to fix
| this.
|
| I always wondered if we just lacked the ability to mobilize to
| solve big problems anymore but now I look at this 7% US GDP being
| allocated to AI datacentres and I realize that it isn't a lack of
| ability, it's a lack of desire.
|
| Imagine if we had ram shortages because all the silicon was being
| diverted towards making solar panels. Imagine if we had copper
| shortages because it was going to the windings on wind mills.
| Imagine if all these economic disruptions were just temporary and
| for a better cause or eliminating carbon emissions and eventually
| moving to sequestration of carbon.
|
| Instead we get chatbots. And funny picture makers.
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| Not the same silicon. Wafer fabs make pure crystals.
| Photovoltaics use polysilicon.
|
| Obviously you mean purified silicon, but, remember silicon is
| what the Earth has in abundance (yeah I know it's energy
| intensive, and there exist such profession as sand prospector.)
| trilogic wrote:
| No worries ladies and gentleman, AI will solve it, insert coin,
| or better throw another trillion at it and all will be solved.
|
| AGI is here
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Meanwhile all these other AI threads everybody's worried about
| losing their jobs
|
| Not realizing we're gonna go extinct here in the next thousand
| years unless something solves it
|
| Since humans are incapable of doing this there's only one
| possible option: To create something smarter than us and give it
| the power to solve it because we cannot
| blibble wrote:
| > Meanwhile all these other AI threads everybody's worried
| about losing their jobs
|
| don't worry
|
| AI will cause both losing your job AND climate change
| schiffern wrote:
| >Despite decades of research and sophisticated computational
| climate modeling, the magnitude and pace of these events have
| surprised scientists, raising questions about how well current
| climate projections capture risk.
|
| "Yet again, worse than we predicted."
|
| When this always-revise-in-one-direction phenomenon happened with
| the electron charge, it was considered _a priori_ "proof" that
| scientists were fudging their data to match expectations. The
| Millikan Oil Drop Experiment is still studied in fundamentals of
| science class.[0]
|
| If climate scientists are constantly revising their predictions
| upward, then this is equally "proof" that climate scientists are
| under pressure to revise their estimates downward. Far from being
| "alarmist," such terms are actually cudgels used to discourage
| climate scientists from making their data look too bad.
|
| The result is the predictable fudging of climate data to look
| better than it really is.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| What about the possibility that the models so far have always
| been wrong and if they wrong in the wrong direction you would
| never hear about them?
| schiffern wrote:
| Precisely, it's just a selection effect. There's always
| uncertainty, and scientists are heavily incentivized to
| "prune" models that show large effect sizes. The result is
| the observed systematic underestimations, punctuated by
| (suspiciously monotonic) upward revisions any time the new
| data comes out.
| lifis wrote:
| At least considering only temperature, it seems changes are never
| going to be irreversible since both stratospheric aerosol
| injection and intentional nuclear winter should always be able to
| cool down global temperatures
| 1attice wrote:
| We can stop saying "risk" at this point. Just "the hothouse
| Earth's trajectory" is fine
| kunley wrote:
| One of the solutions is to stop the ai hype, as the excessive
| electrical needs it creates are obviously not helping with the
| climate.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Carbon tax. Stop subsidizing fossil fuels.
| daverol wrote:
| When I want to motivate myself I look at this
| https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-scariest-climate-plot-...
| profsummergig wrote:
| > During the mid-to-late Pleistocene (~1.2 million to 11,700
| years before present) ... with temperatures ranging roughly
| between -6degC and +2degC relative to the pre-industrial mean of
| ~14degC
|
| Does this mean during mid-to-late Pleistocene it used to be -6C
| to +2C, or does it mean it used to be 8C to 16C?
|
| (If the former, then how did early humanoids, and many other
| animals, survive such cold?)
| Ensorceled wrote:
| The later, "-6degC and +2degC relative to" is relative to the
| mean of 14.
| david-gpu wrote:
| The latter. I suggest reading
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology#Reconstructin...
| jdmoreira wrote:
| Just price in the externalities and it probably solves itself
| an-allen wrote:
| Omg people its - the bullshit mascaraing as science these days is
| exhausting. Earth is on a hot house trajectory regardless of
| climate. The sun expands and gets hotter - so do we. Its
| literally then simplest game structure there is - get to the next
| hop before you die. The next hop is Mars. I don't understand why
| this isn't inherently obvious.
| codeulike wrote:
| _The sun expands and gets hotter_
|
| Yes, in approx 4 billion years.
|
| I agree that is a concern but I think we should also pay some
| attention to some of the problems we will be facing in a
| timescale somewhat shorter than billions of years.
| betaby wrote:
| Let's compare two countries at the same level of development.
|
| Canada has 14 tonnes carbon footprint per person. Canada is a
| cold country.
|
| France has 8 tonnes carbon footprint per person. Climate is way
| warmer.
|
| We can't continue adding population and the wondering what is
| going on.
| kieranmaine wrote:
| The bull case is solar and batteries are only going to get
| cheaper so the speed of the transition will increase.
|
| * Australia's renewables generation increased from 13.7% in 2015
| to 42.9% in 2025 [1]
|
| * EIA: 99%+ of new US capacity in 2026 will be solar, wind +
| storage [2]
|
| * Wind and solar overtake fossil power in the EU for the first
| time in 2025 [3]
|
| 1.
| https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=all...
|
| 2. https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/eia-99-of-new-us-capacity-
| in-...
|
| 3. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-
| electricit...
| Animats wrote:
| The CO2 graph over decades is painfully clear.[1] From 321ppm in
| 1970 to 428ppm in mid-2005, measured in Hawaii atop Mauna Loa,
| far from any major CO2 sources. Everything else is noisy and
| statistical, but the CO2 measurement increases very steadily.
|
| [1] https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
| krashidov wrote:
| Yes, and the scary thing is that soon the atmospheric carbon
| PPM will be high enough to start affecting how we think, act,
| and feel on a day to day basis.
| codeulike wrote:
| Serious question:
|
| There could indeed be self-reinforcing feedbacks and tipping
| dynamics that make the problem worse.
|
| There could presumably also be self-dampening, stabilising
| dynamics that come into play at certain levels.
|
| Is there any science on why the former is more likely than the
| latter?
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