You can live in a well-insulated fully electric home powered by renewable energy and have most things you need within a walk, bike, or public transport ride away, _OR_ use an electric car for the things that aren't. If you combine that with a mostly-plant based diet (or at _least_ swapping chicken for most of your beef and lamb) and have 2 kids or fewer you're... basically there.
The main reason most people can't do this is because of political choices, not technological limitations.
Granted this doesn't include luxuries like jetting halfway around the world for a 1 week holiday or living in a 4000 square foot house in the desert and driving a studio apartment an hour to work every day, but really, is that a better life?
Have you travelled? This doesn't describe most of the world. Most of the world would need to increase carbon emissions to live the way you're describing.
You aren't describing a zero carbon lifestyle, you're describing a lower carbon lifestyle. And we still use carbon in building the things in your scenario: the building, the car, etc.
Lower carbon lifestyles can slow the speed of the increase in global warming, but as long as we're emitting any carbon we're increasing global energy forcing.
By all means choose lower carbon lifestyles, but fundamentally we need nuclear or renewables + battery or all of the above such that we don't face a tradeoff between energy use and getting stuff people want.
Energy is extremely useful.
The AMOC shutdown isn't merely "possible" and due "this century" either. The math of the dynamics of complex systems shows the current behavior to be signs of a phase transition in the process of happening. The speed of that shutdown isn't "decades" either, it's more likely just years.
The voices of "experts" telling you it was all some incomprehensible conundrum should deeply worry you. They're either not being honest or they're no experts.
You two might agree if we consider that when you say "rich" you might describe the average individual on this website (if we consider all people alive).
I do believe that 90% of the people would not want to actually destroy the planet the way it seems to be happening, but I also believe that 90% of the people can't refrain themselves from bad health habits either. So, to fix the root cause I would discuss more about people's bad emotional/impulse control, otherwise we will just change one issue (climate) to any of the others (violence, unhappiness, etc.)
The impact an individual has on carbon emissions is directly correlated with their wealth. The distribution of which is extremely uneven: as of 2024, the top 1% worldwide possessed as much as the lower 95% combined, 57 trillion US$. That has gotten only worse in the last two years.
It's not about "bad habits", impulse control or whatever, at all.
This is at odds with lots of other relevant topics that go beyond just "consumption".
2 or fewer is below the replacement rate of 2.1 This _has_ already happened, but there are a lot of voices voicing a lot of reasons why they believe that that might actually be not the best situation.
If we need unbounded growth to jeep our economic system to function, its the economic system that is wrong, not nature.
Economies can exist in many different ways. At its core it is just a way to describe how we move resources between ourselves and that can be done in many, many ways.
On an individual state-level: no.
This might actually be a yes if you believe in the potential impact of automation and AI.
The funny part is that it should terrify you whether there are 10 humans or 10 billion. At the current rates, it's over in about 12-13 generations regardless of the number you start with. That's how it works... no matter how big the starting number, it's how many generations you have left.
Think of it this way? You know the dumb story they taught us in school, about the guy whose payment from the king for doing something clever was to have one grain of rice on the first chess square, and 2 on the second, 4 on the third, and so on... and how it bankrupted the king long before the 64th square? That's the same math with fertility rate of 1.0! (The Chinese have a fertility rate of 1.0, famously.) Each generation will be half the size of the previous. But how long before that is effectively zero? Will it be 1 million years, 250,000 years? No, about 300ish. 300 years. But long before you reach that point, your civilization has fallen apart. Those last 4 or 5 generations live life without electricity, anything but muscle power, or metallurgy.
And China's fertility rate isn't even the lowest! South Korea's rate just dropped to around 0.5! That's where each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.
The best part of all is that these rates haven't even bottomed out. We will almost certainly see rates right around 0 long before the century ends.
>but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.
At least math illiteracy ought to console you guys towards the end.
Our population absolutely exploded over the last 100 years. This can easily just be a reversion to the mean. There really is no reason to be worrying about human extinction right now. In fact, the ‘extinction’ rhetoric is harmful and dangerous since so many ‘solutions’ to fertility rates are less education and less freedom. I have no trouble believing a handmaids tail like faction emerging because they believe they are saving the species.
The opposite, actually. Your assumption is that the rates bounce up and down, mostly because you don't want to believe there's a problem.
The rates are transmissible, older generations to the younger. No one growing up in a world where people have few or just one child will say to themselves "hey, you know what, I want 10 kids when I'm an adult!"... but that's what would have to happen. You and everyone else on HN whines "the reason people aren't having kids is the economy is awful and we can't afford them"... but in a world with a shrinking, aging population the economy just gets worse.
You're the one making the very stupid assumption, and you can't even say why. I can, it's because you haven't thought about it. Perhaps it's uncomfortable to think that you're driving your species to extinction.
>Our population absolutely exploded over the last 100 years.
More nonsense. Our population isn't exploding, it's just big. And it will shrink rapidly. I already laid out the math... how long before 8 billion becomes 1000 when you're splitting it in half every generation (a generation is commonly held to be 20-25 years)? Can you do that math puzzle for us? There are only about 5 generations living on Earth at any given time. Just do the math already. None of this is pretty.
>There really is no reason to be worrying about human extinction right now.
Yes, there is. People are only generally capable of reproduction from the ages of 16 to 36... just 20 years. Every moment you waste "not worrying about it now" is the problem compounding with interest. You've already waited too long to worry about it.
>In fact, the ‘extinction’ rhetoric is harmful and dangerous since so many ‘solutions’ to fertility rates are less education and less freedom.
Well at least when our species dies out, the last few people will have masters degrees. That's the important part, right?
>I have no trouble believing a handmaids tail like faction emerging
It'd be because you and those like you forced the issue. Go ahead, stick your head in the sand some more. We all know that willful obliviousness to reality can change the rules of the universe themselves, right? Wish it all away!
And yet this exact thing happened, in reverse, everywhere in the world as certain social conditions were met. So it's not just not impossible, it's by far the likeliest scenario.
> Our population isn't exploding, it's just big. And it will shrink rapidly.
The whole population of the world slowly rose from some 10-50 million before 1 CE to some 100 million by 1000 CE, to maybe some 2-300 million by 1700 CE. And then it suddenly reached 1B in 1800, 2B in 1920, 4B in 1974, 8B in 2022. This is a massive population explosion, with the doubling rate increasing rapidly, especially before the 2000s.
> People are only generally capable of reproduction from the ages of 16 to 36... just 20 years.
This is wildly wrong. Children of 16 years should NEVER reproduce, it's an awful thing that this happened for so long of human history, a shameful reality that will hopefully never happen again. And as health has increased, women have become able to reproduce (with some medical aid) well into their 40s (note that the record is currently 74), while men can and often do reproduce well into their 60s+.
Now, is it better if people who want to have children have them when they're younger, probably in their late 20s? Absolutely - mostly to keep generational gaps manageable, to benefit from grandparents' help, etc. But it's not in any way a strict biological necessity, and as fertility science advances, we have every reason to believe this will continue to improve.
> Well at least when our species dies out, the last few people will have masters degrees. That's the important part, right?
This is absurd hyperbole for the exact reasons above.
Here is the key disagreement. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see any compelling evidence why rates would not bounce up and down as society and environment change. Hell, in the next 100 years we could all be nuked back to the stone age and birth rates go back to pre-industrial levels. I am fully aware of the concept of compounding interest, but rates in organic systems change all the time.
> No one growing up in a world where people have few or just one child will say to themselves "hey, you know what, I want 10 kids when I'm an adult!"
This is just patently false. I can believe in a correlation, but I know personally plenty of people who come from small families go on to want big families.
> Well at least when our species dies out, the last few people will have masters degrees. That's the important part, right?
Well, no. I think the important part is the freedom aspect of my comment. I would actually rather humanity die out, than have my nieces and future daughter used as breeding chattel.
You obviously have strong opinions about this and I'm not going to change your mind so I'll just leave the conversation here. Good luck with the existential dread.
* Some humans will likely survive, but modern civilisation won't.
For this to be the most effective it really needs to be deployed somewhere like India. How are they coming along with that?
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india
USA is at 80%, which isn't much better, but at least trending down:
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states
China is also at 80%, but trending down far steeper:
Household electricity self-sufficiency obscures the vast requirements to support it and extend this self-sufficiency to billions of other people.
India still has a long way to go, but China is doing the right things. Same can't be said about USA under current administration.
The reason half the population won't take climate alarmists seriously are statements like this.
Saying the West, generally, or the US, specifically "aren't doing anything" is ridiculous.
That doesn’t fit my understanding at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...
I've seen people on social media seriously claiming that coal plants are cleaner than wind energy or solar energy. It's aggravating. Never mind that it's easy to show that for the same amount of energy output, you get a similar amount of tons of coal ash yearly to the amount of materials it went into building a wind or solar plant...
I go back and forth if they are bots, or somehow people who are just really susceptible to this kind of garbage shill clickbait.
The AMOC shutdown isn't merely "possible" and due "this century". The math of the dynamics of complex systems shows the current behavior to be signs of a phase transition in the process of happening. The speed of that shutdown isn't "decades" either, it's more likely just years.
The voices of "experts" telling you it was all some incomprehensible conundrum should deeply worry you. They're either not being honest or they're no experts.
Government mandates for e.g. large nuclear construction, geo-engineering, BEV adoption, or other similar proposals would have had an impact. These all exposed the real tradeoffs which would need to be accepted of cost, hardship, or whatever the opposition to nuclear was.
The environmental movements of the last 60 years focused on impossible goals which were easy to rally behind.
Is this true? Americans elect leaders who won't even acknowledge the issue is real. We have at times managed to gather some momentum towards using government to address the issues through incentives and regulation - even as recent as the Biden administration - then reactionaries gain power and dismantle the efforts.
The "environmental movement" was not focused on the personal responsibility angle, it's just that the American political system rejected proposals to do any meaningful government interventions because long term thinking is never rewarded.
The only way forward is developing as much solar, wind and nuclear as possible, driving down energy prices. Obviously stuff like carbon tax can help accelerate the process, but mostly it's happening because renewables have become the cheapest way of generating energy in most parts of the world.
superficial and incorrect
Sure, some of that is "dollars and cents" and not the movement directly, but most of that (technological improvement) had nonzero influence on the technologists who built the impromevents.
What are you talking about? The united states is currently ~-30% off peak carbon emissions.
For example, more people buying EVs can meaningfully reduce CO2 consumption, but you can easily find millions of people ideologically opposed to that.
Or just look at how reliably people reject any policy that vaguely looks like a carbon tax scheme. "Fix the earth somehow, now, but I'm not paying a cent, because that wasn't my fault!" is everyone's rallying cry.
The entire issue of incentives to consume being a reason to blame consumers, is obviated when there are entire industries that have spent significant amounts of money and capital to ensure that voters cannot come to a consensus.
The science on global warming was clear eons ago. The true revolution has been in scientists learning how weak facts are when going up against media machines.
Individual choice is actually a small part of this wheel, almost negligible.
The vast majority of polluting is done by industry, and they also do the most not to make things better and actively often try to make things worse.
For instance, consumers want fast and high speed rail and light rail in cities, yet the federal government is still subsidizing hundreds of billions of dollars to car centric projects rather than allowing municipalities and state governments to have control over those funds they come with strings attached that force them to choose car centric options.
Affordable housing is another example. Consumers want reliable cheap homes but every single attempt to unseat obtuse regulations and policies that make home bulldog a nightmare across metropolitan areas all over the Us entrenched home owners fight in as many ways possible to keep new homes from being built. This pushes more people into farther out suburbs that makes an existing issue even worse.
So no, it’s not all consumer choices, not even “pretty much”.
The false dichotomy that it’s simply choice is not a good faith argument.
The other flip of the coin is this: people can consume in ecologically smart and sustainable ways, and often given the choice they do but lack of choice exists across most sectors that don’t allow them to or are knowingly priced higher than the alternative options due to poor regulation or lack of proper subsidy on the scale of the dirty alternative.
And we subsidize a lot when it comes to oil, natural gas and coal, let alone other industrial polluting industries.
The areas to be rendered “uninhabitable” in our lifetimes are all poor. Hence the disconnect.
The geography isn't as constrained, but what holds is that to rich first world countries, climate change is -0.5% GDP. A meaningful impact, but non-catastrophic and diffuse. To poor countries, it might mean death and suffering at scale.
The rich will move away, and the people left behind will be the ones who don’t have the capacity to make any other choice.
There will always be outliers who don't believe something. But even for the people who do believe climate change is real, there is a huge variance of how we should address it. Most people have more immediate problems. Many take the same type of argument as the infinite population growth is good crowd - future tech will save us.
1) We know that the Earth was much warmer in the past, including the Medieval Warming Period. We know that the Alps were warm enough so that the Iceman could pass through them without protection from the cold, and yet he was found encased in ice.
2) We know that the Earth is cooler now than in the past. And it's also hotter than it was in the past.
3) We know that previous historical temperatures had nothing to do with human-produced CO2.
Until someone can reconcile these facts, and they can say distinctively that the rise in temperature we see right now isn't the same reason as before, I'm going to believe that temperature will moderate and cool, just like it did in the past.
I live in California, where we were experienced a ~10 year drought. These same scientists claimed this was the "new normal" and everyone was in a panic. Then we had 2 years of rain and everything was back to normal for the last 4 years. In fact, it's better than normal. We are almost in summer, and there isn't a single area of California that is in drought conditions.
More importantly, no one is mentioning the "new normal" anymore. No one declared "we were wrong, sorry!" instead everyone is acting as if it never happened or that it's going to go back to drought conditions. The reaction is not scientific. It appears that climate science is driven by science fiction and ideology rather than actual science. And I'm quite sure there will be many people who comment "Just you wait and see!" but that's driven by ideology and not science. I prefer to follow actual science, and science to me suggests that climate will always continue to oscillate, on geological timeframes.
Would you indulge me and see if this one chart might change your mind?
- the warming in the Medieval Warming Period is modest compared to projected modern warming
- The Alps are currently "warm enough" to be crossed without special gear much of the year. Otzi was found wearing multiple layers of hides and furs that would have provided good protection against the elements and is supposed to have been killed in late spring/early summer, not the depths of winter. Glaciers are active things and where he was found could be some distance from where he died.
- Yes the earth has been warmer and colder in the past, climate scientists are aware of these facts, it can also be true that climate is changing quickly in ways that may be very inconvenient for many modern humans.
- Regarding California climate, I don't know who "these same scientists" were, and popular press about climate change is often misleading and superficial. I have lived here for ~35 years and we have had a handful of very wet years but most of that period has been classified as "drought". Yes at the moment we are not but this was a very poor water year and we've benefited from carryover storage from last year. As far as I know, the scientific consensus is still that California is getting warmer and drier on average, and the large year to year fluctuations do not nullify that trend.
Have you considered that one of the reasons it's not the same as before is because it's rising at a faster rate than before? It's not just that the temperature is changing but how fast it changes. If it happens slowly enough everything has time to adapt. If the rate of temperature increase happens faster than everything has time to adapt, there's problems.
> 1) We know that the Earth was much warmer in the past, including the Medieval Warming Period. We know that the Alps were warm enough so that the Iceman could pass through them without protection from the cold, and yet he was found encased in ice.
While true that the Alps were much warmer during the Medieval Warming Period, that was a regional weather change, not a global event, the change we're seeing now is global, and sustained, not just in one regional area.
Also, I'd recommend doing some additional research on Ötzi, the Iceman you're likely talking about. First, he died much earlier than the Medieval Warming Period, so they aren't even related. Also, I don't think very many people would describe him as found without protection from the cold, considering he was found with many different animal skin coats to protect him from the cold. And the fact that he died, frozen and encased in ice, further shows how it was indeed actually cold enough to be very dangerous.
> I live in California, where we were experienced a ~10 year drought. These same scientists claimed this was the "new normal" and everyone was in a panic. Then we had 2 years of rain and everything was back to normal for the last 4 years. In fact, it's better than normal. We are almost in summer, and there isn't a single area of California that is in drought conditions.
It totally is annoying how the drought conditions have been communicated to the public, for sure! However, California having a drought for 10 years and then being fine for 4 years is exactly the kind of weather whiplash and volatility that is intensifying due to climate change.
It's the difference between Chinese planning philosophy versus the West's.
This is true about the instantaneous state of the governments of the US and China rather than some intrinsic permanent cultural quality.
No king wants to rule over a failed state.
We also know very accurately that we're between two ice ages. Shall we manage to both not cook ourselves in the next few hundred years and master climate before the next ice age comes.
For only about 12 000 years ago you did not want to be anywhere in the northern hemisphere when, in a few decades, it cooled dramatically (may I add: not due to human activity):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
Shall we be able to delay the next ice age? Should we just focus on the next 200 years or should be begin to think what we'll be able to do to prevent us from freezing to death in 10 000 years?
Also... We've got those AIs now (if I read HN correctly on a daily basis): how comes climate is not all solved already due to all the perfect apps and models AI generates for us?
Climate scientists could help convince skeptics by correctly predicting future events. Skeptics could vet the predictions immediately to avoid late refutations. They’d look foolish if they tried to downplay the events if they didn’t raise concerns at the time they were predicted.
Looking fairly at things, predictions along the lines of ‘An inconvenient truth’ did not help. ( A UK high court ruling found at least 9 errors or exaggerations in the film. )
Demonstrating predictability should increase acceptance.
These are already out there. Extreme weather events are happening with all increasing frequency. But as with the slow boiled frog, when is it a crisis? The denier just claims we have always had extreme weather events, and they are correct (and this sidesteps the argument).
We should define climate skepticism, to avoid indicting a strawman. I'd start with my definition, as someone with unorthodox views on climate that often place me at odds with progressives.
It may be easier to start with the elements we agree on. Is the climate changing? Yes, obviously, visibly, measurably. Do human activities, including burning of coal and hydrocarbons, likely have a causal, contributory impact? Absolutely. Is the adoption of cleaner sources of energy: solar, hydro, geothermal, wind, nuclear, as well as investment in transmission and storage upgrades, a good thing? Unquestionably. Is climate change causing a growth in a class of threat to human life and prosperity (e.g. heat deaths, coastal flooding, extreme weather events, etc.)? Of course.
As for the areas where I diverge from progressives: Do I expect any amount of reduction in human activity, including reduction of coal and hydrocarbon combustion, reduction of overall energy usage, reduction of living standards and growth targets, to make any difference in the magnitude of the coming climate change at all in the long run? No.
The earth has both heated and cooled by orders of magnitude more than worst-case projections before humans started burning hydrocarbons.
Earth's climate is changing, yes, but historically, over the last 500 million years, the global average temperature has been as low as ~11° C at times; as high as ~34°C at others. You're reading that correctly: strictly natural processes that predate humanity itself have repeatedly changed the global averge temperature by as much as ~23°C. Ice ages occurred with zero human impact, just as the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum and global atmospheric CO2 levels exceeding 1000ppm occurred with zero human impact.
If you were to measure the full range of earth's climate variation over the history of the earth, and attempt to assign and attribute causality to all sources of that climate variation, you'd find that both the presence of all of humanity and the sum impact of all of human activity is an insignificant footnote. If this duration were a football field, humanity itself would be the last centimeter of grass in the distance of that football field; the period in which we've been measuring the climate is a thin slice of a single blade of grass.
The potential and capacity of natural processes to raise global average temperatures by 23° C has always been present, and nothing we can do will eliminate that potential and capacity.
The focus of human climate concern, accordingly, should be preservation of human life and wealth through adaptation to a changing climate, not futile efforts to prevent change itself, or an irrational alarmism that seeks to instill a widespread sense of anxiety over a process that cannot (and never could be) stopped, and for which the sum of humanity is not responsible for.
Build AC in Seattle. Set up better floodgates in New York City. Winterize the grid in Texas. Fix building codes to make houses more safe from hurricanes in Florida, and develop better solutions to stop the destruction of homes from wildfires in Colorado.
And yeah, do invest in alternative sources and production of energy. Energy is good. Energy is prosperity - it's causally linked to GDP, it's a direct requirement for quality of life / comfort / happiness. We need renewable energy. We need dispatchable energy. We need zero-emissions energy. We need energy that works at night, when it's cloudy, when we run out of oil, and when the wind's not blowing. We need better storage, better transmission. More energy, more sources, and lower costs for all of humanity.
We can't stop the world from changing, and trying to is foolish; we should accept that it is changing whether we try to prevent that or not, and focus on protecting and improving quality of life for all of humanity in the face of this always-changing environment on this little blue dot instead.
That said, another section I've largely left out above is that it's effectively impossible to coordinate global action to meaningfully reduce human emissions from current levels. Europe and the US have actually already had declining emissions levels for decades now. This isn't a philosophy problem that you can talk your way to a solution on, it's a human psychology and game theory problem.
Trying to voluntarily convince global south nations to not adopt carbon-positive energy sources that solve real problems in the third world, and instead telling them to exclusively adopt your preferred alternatives (which do come with tradeoffs, be them in cost, complexity, availability/reliability) to appease what people facing food scarcity due to a lack of refrigeration due to a lack of electricity would consider "first world concerns" is an exercise in futility, and has some thematic emotional rhymes with colonial pasts where wealthy westerners demanded sacrifice from the global poor for the comfort of the wealthy westerners. It's a very tone-deaf plea.
The one hope is that renewables and batteries continue to reduce in cost, and grids everywhere develop around that paradigm. Economically, it’s inevitable, but there’s a lot of (to be stranded) money, social, and political will against it.
However, a global reparation fund would make a difference. Not entirely unheard of for richer nations to fund these things for poorer ones
We have the answer to this on the front page of our news sites.
We try to impose a population cap. We recruit gangs of unidentifiable thugs to beat, imprison and deport them and we have race riots.
I mean you have two separate points here, one is "adapt" and the other is "nothing can be done", which itself can be picked apart into different specific things that can't be done, such as on the one hand getting everybody to behave themselves conscientiously with one mind, and on the other hand unilateral geoengineering.
The average global temperature raising by even 2°C has catastrophic and devastating impacts to humanity, to say nothing of it raising by 20°.
We can't stop or prevent global average temperatures from rising, even if we do cut emissions to zero.
What we can prevent is the widespread loss of life (human, plants, and animals) and prosperity. Preventing loss of life and prosperity is good, and it's an achievable goal, so we should pursue that goal.
Also, is there a way to move heat into space that doesn't require adding more heat into the atmosphere than is removed from the expulsion? Or do you just mean this as a hypothetical example?
Heat into space: I was thinking of "PDRC":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_daytime_radiative_cool...
> If only 1%–2% of the Earth’s surface were instead made to radiate at [~100 W/m2] rather than its current average value, the total heat fluxes into and away from the entire Earth would be balanced and warming would cease.
Which is, you know, a nice fantasy and theoretically works. Like a solar shield, but terrestrial.
Edit for those thinking that even 1% is an unfeasibly large area: yes. It's about 5 million km², which is about one-fifth of North America. Maybe scatter the panels around the ocean?
This right here, it should be a Manhattan Project level of urgency, but at global "Hail Mary" level of cooperation and effort.
And the best part is that it's not like that investment is wasted -- it's foundational and will allow us to do incredible things with it.
Meanwhile the President of the United States is actively cancelling such work and doubling down on coal. Wheee!
Disclaimer: For myself, I do believe in personal changes, e.g. consuming less (red meat, flights, gas etc). Not because it makes a big impact but because that's just my personal morality and it makes me feel better to do it. On a societal level it's tougher because most/many people's brains don't work like that (I think).
...so the answer is to accelerate the burning, but not for the sake of burning more, but to focus on getting to true clean energy sources which will allow us to economically unwind the mess before the whole house of cards collapses, i.e. fusion + global scale solar (maybe even space solar and microwave beam down) + boatloads of batteries.
Nuclear should not be off the table. It’s safe, it’s well understood, it’s reliable and is a very cheap way to create base load capacity that renewables like solos and wind can build out on top of
The challenge still remains decarbonizing the rest/electrification
A challenge that can be more easily addressed if it can scale first to handle induced demand only rather than base load. It’s a smaller problem that way.
Of course, given the seeming inability of the US to do any kind of large projects any more, small and decentralized is probably the only thing that will work.
It’s always cheap and easy when mentioned here.
I live in New Zealand where we have lots of wind, rain and sun and people occasionally suggest it for here too.
I wouldn’t mind shortening e.g. the Iran war by a couple of days and redirecting the funding from that to fusion research and battery buildout.
- solar/wind/batteries have a fundamental economic advantage already, and there is further runway for gains in efficiency, yield, and cost reductions. All its competitors are, generally speaking, tapped out in terms of economic costs and efficiencies
- population declines are currently an inevitability of urbanization and techno-capitalism, less people, less pollution
- contrary to #2, it is likely that life extension will start to come into play for the billionaire class, and that will mean the rich elites DO need to think about the future
However, I agree, those are glimmers of hope in the grand scheme of the current system
It was 48 C this week in some cities. The power grid was not ready for the amount of AC power needed, and it turned into blackouts. You're sitting in a dark cube that has been cooking for 12 hours, hoping something might happen. A healthy 25 year old would die in 6 hours.
Even if you do not want to accept climate change is a thing, you can accept the current state of the world is affecting people.
https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/north-india-heatwave... for anyone curious, and that was almost a month ago. Pakistan is also very vulnerable.
Ignoring the current state of the world is basically a sport for American Republicans, unfortunately. There's an entire political party, a news network, social media sites, and the worlds first trillionaire all aligned around the idea that the current state of the world isn't their problem and the ideal of "fuck those other people".
Pouring resources into pretending climate change doesn't exist has been a central goal of their movement.
Or you could choose option three: do neither and go on Twitter to do some political point scoring: "The Democrat Party is going to use this three day Indian heatwave (they have one every summer) and their climate hoax to open our borders back up to illegal immigration! We must stop them! Vote against the Demonrats this November! MAGA!"
No point in letting a good crisis go to waste.
The Internet was a mistake because it expected every person to become a paradigm of rationality, yet we are at the end of the day stupid hairless monkeys that can be easily swayed for the promise of a banana.
I thought that already when I was a kid and saw that people do not care at all if their beliefs are correct, and because of that don't care about learning any critical thinking skills, but I wasn't convinced and thought maybe adults just know something I don't, but today it is clear the same problem is even worse and the most important factor to why we are so screwed up as a species
Journalism has been decimated with advertising dollars moving to Google and Meta. This creates 2 camps of journalists, one who attempt to report as if the old standards hold, and others who are the media wings of political parties.
Educating people is always Good. However, no education will empower individuals enough to be competitive with people whose job it is to keep them ignorant.
But I'm not even sure if it was possible - lots of people seem hellbent on believing what they want, I've thought that probably comes from evolution from time when we didn't really have ways to study reality that well, and group cohesion was more important than individual thinking. But we should have at least tried. It was quite clear people would get corrupted when they're sent out of school with a bag of knowledge but no real ways (or will) to really judge any future information
Now, looking at the image in the article, there is a massive cold blob right there where the Labrador Current joins the Atlantic, but no mention of the theories that I've read about years ago, just that it is mysterious
However, I do think we have time to prepare for the worst case scenarios, and individual countries and states can do that efficiently on their own.
Improve evacuation routines in floodable areas, build greenhouses to deal with cold snaps, ensure there are air conditioned buildings to deal with heatwaves, have distributed local production of electricity, keep strategic food reserves stocked, and so on.
Edit: Not saying that such efforts are the solution by any means, but they will help.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/climate/emissions-worst-c...
Still work to be done, and also plenty of reasons for optimism. Batteries, motors, and carbon free generation only get better.
But. The level of international coordination with vaccine rollouts and agreements between countries was way more than I had initially expected. Of course this feeling depends on what your own baseline expectations are.
My takeaway was that if the conditions arise that we all decide to do something about climate change (because of political conditions or because of actual effects) we (humanity) are willing to make big sudden changes
Global warming is much trickier though. Covid had hundreds dying daily, it was very direct and undeniable, and the cure was cheap and efficient once it was developed.
Global warming has no clear signal (oh look, another heatwave) and no clear cure at all, let alone a cheap and efficient one.
The comparison with Covid is also striking because the only reason a global "don't travel too much" solution couldn't work is due to the nature of capitalism. It's not like we couldn't feed everyone. It's just that some people with too much wouldn't gain as much for a little bit. Which is the same root cause of why solving climate change is impossible without radical change.
Unfortunately, I don't know the answer. I'm quite certain it's not to maintain the status quo, though.
PSA: the is (as well as pp) parameter is for tracking. If possible try to trim it.
I'm joking, but apparently there are influential people who really believe it's a good idea (see: governor or Utah and his statements on AI data centers recently)
And for some perspective, this is only one of many other huge changes that huge populations will react violently to in the next 20-50 years. Good luck to us all.
It is also a truthful argument.
we're jumping to a catastrophe when it might just ring, and whatever the environmentalists who prioritize it qant to do about it might change something that doesnt need changing, and result in actual catastrophe when the ringing stops
On engaging with deniers, he realized that denial was the only rational choice those people had. Climate change meant that their way of life, their livelihoods, history, homes, family and more, was gone.
Disbelief was a way to have control over the impossible.
But just because it’s also their fault doesn’t hinder them to blame the government.
Who do you think will MAGA blame for the consequences of climate change?
They'll blame the people measuring the temperature, just like the did with covid when they blamed the testing for the rise in infection. They are, as a whole, very stupid people who really don't have the mental flexibility required to handle nuance.
So they'll do what small-minded people always do - they'll shoot the messenger, then when that doesn't work they'll start blaming everyone who looks, lives, or believes differently from themselves.
Nobody should ever adopt sustainable practices from which you only benefit when everybody else does, in which case a minority of people who didn't adopt sustainable practices also benefit. That's just bad economics.
And then there's all the wealthy hypocrites who criticize the middle class while they make weekly flights with private jets. And dont forget the coal powered data centers, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some hypocrisy there from the epstein class too.
Unlikely. The government will be the only one who can bail them out.
If the true costs were accounted for, Capitalism would work great. The problem is a lot of the costs are left for someone else to eat.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/13/politics/judge-ruling-nationa...
> At South Carolina’s Fort Sumter National Monument, a sign that included details on the looming impacts of climate change, including information on how “rising seas could inundate most of the fort’s walls and flood the historic parade ground” was removed in its entirety.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/03/climate/ocean-monitoring-...
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/contour/global_small.cf.g...
Don't mistake "I don't understand the science" for "the science behind climate change is weak". Go out, learn some coupled atmospheric modeling PDEs, and build a climate model yourself (Claude can help). It'll only take a few days. You'll learn a lot about what's known and the sources of uncertainty.
The reason why Putin or Kim Jong Un is not dead a long time ago is that enough of the ruling upper middle class has been made dependent on their leaders and will work to ensure the safety of said leader.
”Your honour, but the girl didn’t resist very much, so she must bear part of the blame for what I did to her”.
