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Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative. The only hope now is exponential growth of
by multiplegeorges 14d ago
Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative.
The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect.
This only stops it.
Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.
- WarmWash 14d ago>Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative. And individual action has switched to just holding governments and industry responsible. Which basically amounts to giving up. "Welp, just gonna buy this truck, enjoy my burgers, set the AC at 68 and fly on all vacations this year because it's nothing compared to Big Oil."
- jkahrs595 14d agoDon’t forget eating meat, the easiest thing to stop doing (people needs cars and trucks for work, they don’t need cheeseburgers). People can’t be bothered to make any changes, it’s always someone else’s problem. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/27/meat-gas-emissions-reporting https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/27/meat-gas...
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- benfortuna 14d agoEven cutting back on meat can have an impact. Halving quantities in cooking etc. really is hardly noticeable.
- tyre 14d agoYeah I think this is a much better path. If you mix chicken with jackfruit 50/50 in tacos, for example, it’s barely noticeable. We’re not going to convince Americans to give up meat, but if we can reduce consumption when they do eat it, we can make incremental change.
- WarmWash 14d agoYeah, good catch, thanks.
- jezzamon 14d agoPeople need cars... But not trucks for work :)
- sagarm 14d agoPeople need cars because we designed our environments to require them. It was a choice, not an inevitability.
- drfloyd51 14d agoAnd here we are. Needing cars. Unless you want to spend the big money of rebuilding cities.
- chrisnight 14d agoTo be clear, the money is already being spent, it’s just a question of what we make the priority. Even just keeping the current roads useable costs billions of dollars, let alone the amount of money spent on highway expansion (which, due to induced demand, causes even more traffic). In 30 years, every road that exists currently will have been replaced. The question is if it should be replaced with another road, or should some of them have larger sidewalks, bike lanes, bus lanes. Amsterdam has been doing this for decades and it’s going very well. They spent money that would’ve been spent rebuilding a road on making it a better general transportation option.
- Smoofer 14d agoUhh a lot of people need trucks for their work
- b40d-48b2-979e 14d agoYeah? We need millions of personal, individual trucks? For work, of course, ignore all those white collar job parking lots full of extended cab pickups that get 10mpg.
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- guy200 14d agoEven mildly advocating for veganism as a vegan would be infuriating if it wasn’t so comedic. The mental contortions that even intelligent people will put themselves into in order to either avoid the topic or keep their head in the sand are truly something to behold. And ultimately it often feels like arguing with a past version of yourself, who perhaps held some of the same views.
- hallole 14d agoI just don't advocate, at least not without prompting; it's too maddening. That I'm vegan often becomes known naturally, and once it's established, people in the know tend to start bringing it up on their own. I hardly ever go into advocacy unprompted. I think this is more effective. Just by being present, you might spark the thoughts that lead someone to changing their mind... :)
- guy200 14d agoYeah, I have noticed this too. and I’m much the same now, over time my “advocacy” is mostly stating my reasons when asked. And sometimes bringing it up in online spaces. it can be difficult, at least for me, to politely model in the face of what I see as a great injustice. But as you say, it can be maddening to do otherwise and still see no change. So I do understand and support those who participate in a less passive advocacy as that can be effective for a different group. And keeps “our” voice in the mainstream, even if it is often vilified by popular culture.
- dopa42365 14d agoMore specifically, beef and lamb. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local Replacing those with basically any other meat (pig, chicken, fish) would make a huge difference already. And it's far more realistic than no meat. Indirect demand destruction (from cost increase) through carbon credits or something like that in the future?
- ddalex 12d agoWhy should I stop eating meat, just so that Taylor Swift can fly everywhere with two jets !? Fuck that, we're on this boat together, and we'll all go to the bottom together.
- jkahrs595 12d agoWow great thanks for the intelligent reply
- zhann_dc 14d agoWell, truth be told.. It _is_ nothing compared to Big Oil.
- WarmWash 14d agoSpoiler: It's individuals who are driving that demand. The impact of the decisions of big oil are nothing compared to the collective decisions of individuals. Big oil isn't going to kick down your door when you buy an EV and switch to solar. There is no rancher in the grocery aisle slipping steaks in your cart.
- collingreen 14d agoSpoiler, the oil and other energy industries have done a world changing amount of lobbying and regulatory capture in order to drive decisions that cause more and more fossil fuel use. This includes everything from subsidies to industry stagnating regulations to reduced enforcement to suburban sprawl. Look at how the current US administration shills for big coal. Pretending they haven't shaped the world around the consumers is either naive or bad faith. Yes, consumers have to stop funding these companies and behaviors. Also, the governments that operate on behalf of those consumers have to drop their corruption and start protecting those people they represent. Both virtuous and nonvirtuous conservatives know neither of these are going to happen, which is why they see massive terraforming technology as the only way out - if someone with power can't get rich(er) fixing it then it won't get fixed.
- tekla 14d agoSpoiler, you exist in incredible luxury because YOU benefited from paying for goods and services made extremely cheap from oil. You also have the oil on your hands, and its not washing off easily.
- WarmWash 13d ago>The impact of the decisions of big oil are nothing compared to the collective decisions of individuals.
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- dreamworld 14d agoActing politically for what matters is not giving up :) Though, as always, we can and really should do both.
- nkohari 14d agoGovernments and industry are responsible. Personal consumption/waste is not the primary driver of climate change, no matter how much corporations tell us that using paper straws is the solution. It's tough to expect average people to take major action when corporations are essentially given carte blanche.
- WarmWash 14d agoAnd who is buying all that stuff from corporations? Who is actually the one consuming? We can quibble about edge effects like "induced demand", but by and large, people just love cheap energy, cheap calories, and can shift the moral burden by playing "not my responsibility" games.
- myaccountonhn 13d agoFrom the IPCC report, 2/3rds of all global emissions are directly tied to consumption.
- nkohari 13d agoWell, yeah. Corporations aren't just nefarious evil entities, dumping carbon into the atmosphere for no reason. They're doing it to sell goods. The problem is that a lot of the environmental costs for the manufacture and transport of those goods are externalized and go unpaid. It's difficult to put the blame for that on the consumer, who has no visibility into manufacturing or logistics, and who has vanishingly-small options for not participating. Buying domestic goods is very difficult or impossible, and goods which are manufactured in more environmentally-safe ways are significantly more expensive (because the costs I mentioned earlier weren't externalized). If a consumer is presented with two options, one that costs $X and has unknown environmental costs, and one that costs $2X and is marketed as being environmentally safe, the majority will choose the first. This is especially true as economic forces continue to squeeze average people. Consumers absolutely participate in the problem, but the only process by which it could be corrected is regulation, and the only entity capable of that is the government. (Democracy being what it is, you can however place more blame at the feet of voters.)
- sagarm 14d agoGovernment is the means by which the electorate acts collectively. Pushing for policy changes is not giving up.
- jmclnx 14d agoIf the Gov stopped Oil Subsidizes, incentivize the move to renewals and nuclear instead of promoting Oil say 20 years ago, we could keep our A/Cs and 60 degrees (~16C) if we wanted to. The sames goes to flying and beef, make it expensive. So yes, Governments share by far most of the blame for this. A specific individual is not going to change their life stye unless forced to, that is human nature. Instead we have had governments in the US being too afraid to do the right thing. The only possible US President that was willing to make big changes climate wise had his election stolen by the Supreme Court in the year 2000. So here we are still with no politician willing to really force changes on people's life style in the "first world". All they are doing is trying to keep the price of oil low. One final thing, in the US, if you try to use electricity from all renewals, the price is much higher. And in some cases electricity you receive is still generated from fossil fuels.
- ThrowawayIP 14d agoThe technology-will-save-us mentality is part of the reason we are here. We live in a society that doesn't do anything unless it makes money for some set of decrepit old men. We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition) but people made money doing the opposite. And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US. So we get to watch the world burn down around us.
- baq 14d agoJust like it isn’t possible to get politicians to stop spending other people’s money, it isn’t possible to stop enterprises from making as much money as possible while spending as little as possible on a global scale (it may work locally!) Thus, technology-will-save-us is the rational choice. Drill all the oil, build the biggest datacenters and speedrun to fusion before the collapse so we can sequester the carbon back into the ground and still have energy left to run Haber-Bosch, ideally with hydrolysis instead of natgas. Disclaimer: I used to be heavily in the sustainability camp in my younger years
- panta 14d agoNeoliberism is not the only possible system, it is very well possible to change the boundaries of what enterprises can do. Technology-will-save-us is a quasi-religious belief, not supported by evidence. Also if it was true that we can't convince politicians and enterprises to change their course now, why should they do later when costs will be much higher? Relying mostly on technology that doesn't yet exist seems absurd to me. We have an incredibly hard problem to solve and maybe a narrow window of action, we should use all the tools we have at our disposal: rapid deployment of available solutions, sustained research into better ones, adoption of more frugal lifestyles, development of alternative sociological, political and economical frameworks.
- fullshark 14d agoTechnology is more feasible than politically driven "degrowth" or any of the other proposals.
- epistasis 14d agoIt is quite ironic that capitalism and the profit motive are now the best hope for staving off climate change, all thanks to the technologists and entrepreneurs that have mad renewables and storage so cheap. The 2020s climate action movement in the US (and the UK) was disastrous in their strategy, action, and outcomes. I was there, I followed along because it seemed like the best way to get climate action, but things like Sunrise and XR at their very best did nothing. They focused on all the wrong people, focused on all the wrong levers. They turned allies into enemies, by "protesting" tech companies that were at the forefront of real action. They refused to acknowledge the massive effects of technology change, and the need for quick adoption, and the huge money saving nature of the solution. I have zero patience for those attitudes now, the difference between a degrowther and a climate change denying politician are minimal in effect, and the effects are all that matter now.
- woodgala 14d agoWhat about energystar? That had significant impact. Remember how we fixed the ozone hole? It’s entirely possible to drive change through policy or community. We just choose not to do it because the Epstein class wants culture war not class war.
- epistasis 14d agoYes, policy does change things!! You give examples where a community got together, changed policy, affecting all of society. This is precisely the opposite of the disastrous 2020s action, which had no concrete policy demands, which leaned into the culture war. They ceded the ground to the right wing, who does that sort of culture war much better, as they have focused their efforts on it for so long. With culture war, no policy changes. The fight takes place in vibes. We need policy, execution in concrete changes of physical things in the real world. That's where Sunrise and XR failed.
- woodgala 14d agoI see. Thanks!
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- hypefi 14d agothe best CO2 capture are trees
- ben_w 14d agoProbably algae. Land only slightly beats the ocean, like a 53-47 split or something, and trees are only part of the primary production on land: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_production This is also why you sometimes see startups pumping green goo through plastic pipes for home-scale solar biofuel systems.
- xnx 14d agoThey are good at capture, but not sequestration.
- xnx 14d agoPopulation decrease will have the biggest impact.
- anonzzzies 14d agoYes, but you cannot say that. We need more people, for money.
- smallerfish 14d agoYeah and there's two ways to get there - planned and unplanned. It'll happen one way or the other.
- lukeify 14d agoThe unpopular answers are usually the correct ones.
- brabel 14d agoGood news then: most of the world already has a decreasing population or about to start decreasing. Only exception being Africa.
- adrianN 13d agoDecades too late unless you suggest we start killing people.
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- psadri 14d agoI have been wondering: more solar means we are making Earth less reflective. Solar energy that might have been reflected back to space is now absorbed by the PV to make electricity. But that delta has to go somewhere? Where does it go in terms of Earth’s temperature. Same with more nuclear… we’d be pumping more energy into the system. Don’t take this as an argument against these technologies. It’s a huge win to not be increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
- philipkglass 14d agoYes, this does happen. Solar farms have an albedo modification effect. The good news is that compared to fossil powered generation, the albedo modification is "paid back" in less than a year due to lower GHG emissions: "Small reduction in land surface albedo due to solar panel expansion worldwide" https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01619-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01619-w If you download the supplementary information PDF, figure 19 shows a plot of GHG payback times by site. The most common time is about 1 month. The greatest time they found was about 9 months. These times go down as solar panel efficiencies continue to creep upward, because solar panels in 2026 don't have lower albedo than in 2024, but they do have better light-to-electricity conversion efficiency.
- mr_toad 14d agoCurrent levels of solar panel coverage on Earth are approximately 0%. If we ran the entire Earth on Solar power we’d need ~ half a million square kilometres, around 0.1 percent of the Earth’s surface.
- p1mrx 14d agoA solar array makes the earth less reflective by a fixed amount, for as long as the array exists. Every unit of fossil fuel we burn makes the earth permanently less reflective (or at least something on the order of 100 years). You could compare a 1GW solar array (for its lifetime) to a 1GW coal plant running for x days, though I don't have the value of x.
- jbotz 14d agoWe're actually heating the earth in two ways... one is by increasing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The other is simply by using energy; any use of energy means moving something to higher entropy and thus producing heat, even if that energy comes from 100% clean or renewable sources. However, nobody talks about this second way of heating the earth because it's about two orders of magnitude behind the first, i.e. for now pretty insignificant. As for making the earth less reflective with PV panels... yes, you are right and most of that absorbed solar energy directly contributes to heating the earth because PV panels aren't anywhere near 100% efficient in converting it to electricity, but even the part that is converted to electricity will become heat again in the end, like when it powers AI data centers. (If PV was 100% efficient, then the lack of reflection wouldn't directly do any heating, the heating would all happen when the electricity is used.) For now that isn't a big concern because the greenhouse gases our civilization is releasing into the atmosphere do so much more heating than all our use of energy, but if we do become 100% renewable and survive that particular danger, then by Jevons' paradox we'll soon be using 10x to 100x more "clean" energy and be heating the earth all the same again.
- kogasa240p 14d ago>Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm. Removing CO2 from seawater would be more efficient because some of the work is already done for you, and you'd be de-acidifying the ocean long term.
- fifilura 14d ago> Government action has been anemic at best. I am not very surprised, since the people voted for the "drill baby drill" president? I wouldn't classify that as anemic.
- jandrewrogers 14d agoDirect Air Capture at any meaningful scale is predicated on mining billions of tons of refined minerals. The environmental impact of that would be so enormous that it will never be allowed to happen, never mind the severe resource crunch.
- irthomasthomas 13d ago[flagged]
- LargoLasskhyfv 13d ago> Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm. Which should probably be nuclear powered, at the required scale. So we could have taken the direct route, instead of solar, bess, wind, water, geothermal...(c.f. Alien, Aliens, 'Atmospheric Processor'...) Anybody remembering the trash which was sold as 'lightbulbs' for about 15 years, before LED got somewhat acceptable colors? And prices? And longevity? Mehw, lightbulb baad, eats too much waatt! So lets miniaturize CFLs to be able to screw them in lightbulb sockets! So they get warm because they are so small, the sockets have no airflow, and their own electronics go with a premature blow! Yay!
- defrost 13d ago> Which should probably be nuclear powered, at the required scale. Why? Why not capture CO2, pump carbonated water into the Yilgarn Craton, recover the created hydrogen to both provide power and water to carbonate?
- LargoLasskhyfv 13d agoBecause all the stuff required to do that does not grow on trees. Which means it has its own externalities regarding mass flows, EROI, emissions. At present time it just means the externalities have been made into other peoples problems. Regarding mining, tailings, transport, production, and so on.
- defrost 13d agoWhat tailings, what transport? Serious questions here ... I'm also curious about your actual experience in heavy mineral and energy industry, largest plant you've worked at, scale of operation, etc. (FWiW in fairness, I've worked a few decades in and around > half a billion tonne per annum mining and worked globally in geophysical mineral and energy exploration)
- LargoLasskhyfv 13d ago