Oceans hit highest temperature on record
bbc.com442 points by tcp_handshaker 8 hours ago
442 points by tcp_handshaker 8 hours ago
BBC did a pretty good deep dive a few days ago on what we're in for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xZCh8eDZFc
DW also, similar stuff, but the guest is quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcl5Mn373Oc
Anton Petrov covered it from a much more science lens a couple months back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRoU3whzX_Q
The eu is stupid for not engaging in active climate engineering right now. They are the most at risk and should take decisive action before they end up living in a glacier.
All the downvotes are just showing why no action is being taken even though right now we are literally terraforming the planet with no plan, and it is going to stop the transatlantic currents that keep Europe from becoming arctic.
But sure, just do nothing until Europe becomes an uninhabitable tundra and it is too late to take action. Great plan.
I suspect that unless there is a consensus or at least a large majority in favor of it, nothing will be done.
Lets say the EU does geoengineering and then there are crop failures in India the next year. Their fault or not, they are going to get blamed for it and actions taken. The EU would become the scapegoat for any kind of weather/climate issues in future.
This is the trolley problem done at a global scale.
>Lets say the EU does geoengineering and then there are crop failures in India the next year.
Who cares? Tell them to go pound sand or stop burning so much coal.
Countries are already water seeding. This kind of worry that someone might complain about the eu trying to save itself is so low on the list of things that matter. Let them complain, and the eu can complain about all the other countries geoengineering by burning fossil fuels.
Alas, that kind of bravado doesn't go far.
Also what if that complaint comes back in the form of a Nuke as they see it as an act of war?
When things become existential, a lot of things that seems unlikely end up on the table as moral corruption sets in. "Either they go or we do!"
Western democracies at this point can't do anything at that even hints at minimally inconveniencing 5% of the population. Any 5% at that. We are stuck in local maximum even if it slowly and surely slides into the shitter
I agree with you. We are actually at huge risk. "Western Civilization" rose out of our stable European climate and that is over now.
However, we need a global consensus for geoengineering. That's just how that works... the Jet Stream. Meanwhile one country believes that global warming is a benefit, aka Russia. They currently appear to have control of the West.. so what in the actual f?
For a far more dire diatribe:
Global consensus would be great, but "reliable mechanism" would be a decent start.
In lieu of that, there's nothing to build consensus around.
>However, we need a global consensus for geoengineering.
Why? Does china or the us need a consensus before taking existential risks like making ai? Or detonating a nuke that had a tiny chance of setting the atmosphere on fire? Or attacking random countries with almost no rationale or plan?
This kind of thinking is why the EU is screwed. No other major power cares that much because they aren't at the same level of risk as the eu.
There’s something odd about the concentration of true believers in ai xrisk and climate change catastrophism. They are both technopessimist in a way that is seen as progressive. Stopping progress in AI would make people’s lives immeasurably worse, while stopping fossil fuel consumption would kill billions of people. But it seems like a particular kind of risk aversion that is blind to upside.
I’m curious why this calculus makes sense to you?
I’ve been friends with eco-activists who are very against anthropocentric ideology. Their perspective was that the deaths of billions of people was worth it. But this brand of conservatism is one that I’d really like to understand better
> Stopping progress in AI would make people’s lives immeasurably worse
I’d really like to hear your reasoning for this.
Were it used to make it practical for people to reduce or stop working while maintaining a comparable standard of living, sure.
It seems far more likely it’s going to wipe out jobs on a massive scale, consolidate wealth, and leave millions or billions struggling to eke out a living.
And it certainly hasn’t made anyone’s life dramatically better. It’s made my job easier, but how much longer will I have it?
> Stopping progress in AI would make people’s lives immeasurably worse
They'd be, like, living in conditions of last decade, deprived of personalised targeted AI-slop? The horror.
Is that immeasurably because it's a change too small to measure, or because it's too vast to comprehend? Maybe you're overstating this just a tad.
Everybody alive today will die. We're mortal, that's just how it goes. So with or without fossil fuels, billions of people will die regardless, that much is baked in. It's a moot point.
As a species, however, we can persist indefinitely so long as our lifestyles are sustainable. If it's not sustainable it's a joke.
Go free solo El Cap or something before telling me you're cool taking those kinds of risks on behalf of all humanity.
> Stopping progress in AI would make people’s lives immeasurably worse
This is such a weaselly statement without your definition of "AI". If you specifically mean LLMs or image generation, you're way out of touch and flat out wrong. If you mean machine learning in general, sure, but progress there was never under any threat or question.
> Why?
Well, let's say we use sulfur. For the sake of argument, let's say it's not the EU, but some private SV-funded org.
So, what is the legal/geopolitical liability for that? What if >99% scientific consensus says that that org's upper atmo sulfur injection led to the most insane monsoon/desertification half-century in 1 billion's people area, in known history? What then?
What if the EU's geoengineering dropped Russian temps by -2C on average? Do you realize the geopolitical b.s. that would start? Forget the fake NATO bullshit, now they have a real argument!
We live on one tiny globe ffs, we need to agree on this shit.
By agree, I mean we need to allow risk to be diversified, like we need a global risk pool for geoengineering, and we better get on that soon!
It sounds like it's a huge problem, doesn't it? Well, one of the benefits of giving all the power to around 3000 billionaire dudes is that this is a far smaller number to get to agree on something.
Instead of multi-billion citizen democracy, and all the issues that involves... we just need to convince 3000 dudes.
Is this actually a potential benefit of wealth & power concentration? It really seems like it is!
> What if >99% scientific consensus says that that org's upper atmo sulfur injection led to to the most insane monsoon/desertification
That's unrealistic. Climate models aren't good enough to predict the regional-level consequences of large-scale interventions (not to mention that scientists are people, and they might be averse to creating an international flashpoint).
Realistically, it will create/exacerbate international tensions. The monsoon/desertification will be linked to geoengineering with or without scientific consensus and whether or not they were really caused by geoengineering.
As the climate models improve by incorporating active intervention data it will be possible to decrease adverse consequences.
It's a risky approach, but, when the consequences of climate change will become undeniably bad, some countries/individuals might try.
But, yeah, I agree with you in the end.
> It's a risky approach, but, when the consequences of climate change will become undeniably bad, some countries might try.
That will be far too late. I mean, nearly the entire EU has reached record temps this year... if not now, then when? Wait until AMOC stops? Does anyone have any idea the havoc that this will create? We will be a dry arctic climate. Ireland and UK first, the rest of us next.
We need multiple Manhattan Project-level projects in the EU, for insulation + renewables + batteries. When we let Northvolt die, I almost cried. Fuck the German bankers who are somehow beholden to Moscow, and we cannot pray for Norwegian money. We need to take care of this shit.
We are more exposed to climate change and economically to China-focused manufacturing than any large group on the planet.
However, we are larger than the USA, we can do this. We have to do this.
Meanwhile, we have to get the entire planet on-board, especially by getting Moscow out of the 19th Century, and their insane imperialist ambitions.
No big deal. At the rate of Reform/AfD/KO/Rassemblement National election projections, we in Europe are entirely fucked.
What the fuck? Forget "EU regulations," is anyone actually paying attention to what actually matters?
The EU is not "most at risk" compared to eg south Asia, the middle east, parts of Africa, etc; and this idea that AMOC collapse will turn Europe into a glacier is a blatant exaggeration that does not root itself in reality.
As someone in Central EU farm land, who is currently experiencing desertification...
We are actually in the worst place, given realtive population density. My well is drying up. The Danube and many other rivers are drying up.
Then, when the AMOC stops, and we join Canadian weather with English-level insulation... we are all truly fucked in winter. At scale in the mid-term, only Sri Lanka is going to get as screwed as EU citizens, but the EU will get fucked even sooner.
Given population numbers, it appears that the EU is totally screwed when it comes to climate change. Our geopolitical enemies are well aware of this fact.
There are still things we can do, like insulation, and using our fierce financial pressures to change the world. We just need to wake tf up.
Of the major powers the eu is probably the most at risk. No one else is going to save them and they should be acting to save themselves right now.
I don't think that's the popular reasoning those downvoting have taken to. Can you think of reasons other than they think doing nothing sounds like a great plan people might be downvoting about? If not, I could share a few concerns with the approach that come to my mind (if it helps). It would have been nice if more of those people just commented directly instead of downvoting and moving on.
> It would have been nice if more of those people just commented directly instead of downvoting and moving on.
I'll comment directly; Has anyone considered that this is a literal global problem, and that just maybe it might require some global cooperation? Any one nation "most at risk" from a global problem is only "most at risk" temporarily. This is absolutely 1000% a problem that will affect everyone everywhere on this planet soon enough (already is IMHO), no matter the current situation. The longer we continue these childish "but they aren't doing their part" arguments, the worse it's gonna be in the end for everyone involved. We're letting petulant toddlers in grown adult bodies decide for everyone that death and destruction is the future we want. This is absolutely not a situation we can solve on a place-to-place basis. The one place we have to worry about now is the entire planet FFS! And it's not a magical switch we can just "turn off" once we think our "enemies" are appropriately fucked over. The changes happening to our ecosystems will take literal decades or even centuries to recover from, even if we were to stop adding to the problem right this very instant. Not to mention the whole worry about "tipping points" (many of which we've already blown right past as if it's "no big deal").
That BBC documentary shows or exposes very shallow thinking skills at this timestamp 6m42s:
https://youtu.be/_xZCh8eDZFc?si=AHyDPgoDucsCRllS&t=402
They claim the panama canal is continuously fed by freshwater for the canal locks (which segment the canal into sections with different water levels, and which enable ships to be raised or lowered to the next water level during travel along the canal).
It's 2026, why are humans dumping freshwater into the oceans? This can perfectly be done without wasting freshwater.
Archimedes screws can essentially be operated quasistatically at extremely high efficiencies. The energy released when lowering can be stored either in gravitational energy of a mass, or be used to power a second parallel lock operated in counter phase (so while one lock is lowering ships say eastwards, the energy is used to raise ships traveling westwards, and afterwards their roles reverse). To speed up a second gravitational potential energy store (and optional flywheel) can be used to accelerate and decelerate the pumping. Apart from some frictional losses (minimal compared to the potential energies involved) this doesn't cost energy, and is easily covered by a small number of solar panels.
Is this misreporting by the BBC, or is it mismanagement by the Panama Canal operators?
Keep the freshwater, use it for irrigation etc, make Central America more attractive to South American refugees and the migration burden on Mexico and US lowers.
The operation as currently described is so inefficient, even for the 1960's!
> The operation as currently described is so inefficient, even for the 1960's!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal
Construction began: 1 January 1881
Date completed: 15 August 1914
> The energy released when lowering can be stored either in gravitational energy of a mass, or be used to power a second parallel lock operated in counter phase (so while one lock is lowering ships say eastwards, the energy is used to raise ships traveling westwards, and afterwards their roles reverse). To speed up a second gravitational potential energy store (and optional flywheel) can be used to accelerate and decelerate the pumping.
if the canal didn't exist, and we were designing it as a greenfield project in 2026, that would definitely be a design worth considering.
could it be retrofitted onto the existing canal? sure, in theory.
in practice, they currently handle 36 ships per day, and lowering that limit by just 2-4 per day is significant enough that it makes international news [0]
so whatever retrofitting you have in mind, the construction would need to be done completely non-invasively, without disrupting the daily operation of the locks. it's nowhere near as simple as you're making it out to be.
0: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/08/21/panama-...
Its not that difficult to do it while in use, you just construct a parallel lock next to the existing ones that can remain in use.
It's even possible to upgrade a lock while in use, you just add new inlets and outlets for the new archimedes screw system, an unused archimedes screw or inlet/outlet is just a differently shaped boundary wall...
Even in 1881 all the necessary physics was already known, but I'm less surprised less informed people could rise to the top that easily back then.
I'm more surprised by the post-war 60's when physics and engineering became a lot more democratized, less elite...
So putting the technical critique aside, are you blaming the BBC for accurately reporting how the canal functions?
I think they were saying "That BBC documentary shows or exposes very shallow thinking skills <of those involved with designing the canal> at this timestamp". not "<of those making the documentary for not correcting the design of the canal>"
That said, I can't quite understand the complaint. It's either take the freshwater out of the lake and into the ocean or take the ocean water into the lake (or invest build the entire length without using natural bodies). The former seems to make a lot more sense and is effectively what's supposed to happen with water eventually anyways.
No connection to a lake is necessary, imagine 2 locks in parallel both connected to the same low water level canal section "on the left" and both connected to the same high water level canal to the right (its not necessary to have 2 locks in parallel, its just easier to demonstrate the scheme doesn't require significant energy consumption):
Imagine one lock is currently filled to the high level, while the other is currently filled to the low level. The locks have been closed. As you let water from the high lock flow into the low lock through Archimedes screws, those screws can lift a weight, until they have equilibrated at the midpoint of the high and low water levels. But you have raised the weight and can now use that to power the draining of the lock that has only halfway sunk in level, by pumping its water to the lock that has only halfway risen. Apart from friction there is no energy consumption. Slow quasistatic transfer drives the friction energy consumption to 0. In practice you want to use an "extra" weight to attain higher pump speeds, and then recover the kinetic energy. That will consume more friction energy, but a small number of solar panels suffice, the energy is not used to lift water, but to overcome friction (haste makes waste).
I don't have the resources / time / interest to verify if:
A) the BBC retardedly misreports how the Panama Canal is operated today, or if
B) they correctly report how the Panama Canal is operated retardedly
which is why I phrased it that way...
I am only interested in the physics, not the politics...
> Keep the freshwater, use it for irrigation etc.
In this scenario, haven't you poured a bunch of ocean water into the lake? I don't see how to can fill the locks with ocean water and not have it pour into the lake.
Wow, guy on internet solves problem within seconds. And you didn't even have to visit the site. Incredible.
If you have studied physics, its easy to see water locks can be operated with near zero energy consumption.
What site? I was commenting on a youtube video.
If you misattribute my comment as replying to something else, thats your superficial attitude not mine...
Meanwhile governments are electing to either do nothing or actively make the problem worse (particularly in the case of the US — expanding fossil fuel extraction, pushing data center build out and attacking renewables like wind).
Solar energy is the fastest growing source of energy in the US. That's because it's also the cheapest source of energy. So markets are working.
https://abcnews.com/US/solar-generates-energy-coal-us-1st-ti...
"Solar and storage provided 90% of all new power added in the U.S." is mind blowing. How about we give the US credit for this?
Fossil fuel extraction is not the problem. The problem is fossil fuel usage. Given the world consumes fossil fuel I prefer they use American fossil fuel vs. Russian or Saudi fossil fuels. I don't understand why we are dwelling on the wrong metric here. Also consider the US has just removed a sh~tload of fossil fuels from the world economy. How about some extra credits there?
Similarly data centers are going to get built somewhere. If they're already built I'd rather they are built in places like the US.
Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem. This is already happening with solar. Where I would be critical about US policy is that I think they are introducing more tariffs on imported solar panels. This might fit into governments make things worse and hopefully everyone regardless of their political affiliation can push back on this specific item.
The world all going to act together stronger than the markets is not going to happen. You can argue that is unfortunate but it's also where we are.
I'm in the US and _I_ don't want us to get credit. Even the worst of people do something good every now and then. But if you reward that, they won't change.
The self-flagellation has gotten too extreme. Photovoltaics were invented in the US, and the US helped subsidize it to the point where they were an economically viable source of energy.
> Even the worst of people do something good every now and then. But if you reward that, they won't change.
Scratching my head on that one.
I mean... is something not better than nothing? Or do you only get rewarded if it's 100% perfect? If so then by that metric nobody should be rewarded here. There's nobody in the world who has done enough, certainly none of the major economic powers.
Yes, none of the major economies get rewarded because fossil fuel usage needs to be zero now, already, to avoid catastrophic warming by the end of the century.
Do you reward a bull after wrecking a China shop because it decided to at least leave the employees in alive with near fatal wounds?
So what have you done to avoid using fossil fuel in your own life? fossil fuel, like almost all things sold, is a demand driven market. You want it to stop, stop doing things that use it.
Goodhart's Law. We want to incentivize right intent in addition to right action. This has nothing to do with degree of perfection and plays a part in why mental state factors significantly into culpability assessment in the law. We want to avoid inadvertently incentivizing reward hacking behavior, especially when the individual rewards are high, overall transparency is low, and the consequences far-reaching.
Because it’s different entities. The market creates more solar power despite the actions of the government
I would have agreed with you on giving credit but we did an about face in the last 2 years and now are spending billions of dollars to pay off companies that were already building renewables because we failed when trying to just illegally cancel them[1]
We’re not letting the market handle it and we’re going in a backwards direction. Can’t really crow about our accomplishments given that.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/06/rwe-deal-win...
Cancelling those contracts *IS* letting the market decide
The RWE paid 1.26 billion to acquire the lease on offshore wind. Payment is a refund.
Further, offshore wind is expensive in terms of maintenance. Stopping the project now is protecting billions in expenses in the future.
> The RWE paid 1.26 billion to acquire the lease on offshore wind. Payment is a refund.
The Trump administration told them it could continue to make the process drag out for more years as it has been or they could spend the money on fossil fuels. It was not any kind of market decision.
> Cancelling those contracts IS letting the market decide
They didnt cancel the contracts, they paid the companies to stop doing work that those companies(i.e. the market) wanted to do
> Further, offshore wind is expensive in terms of maintenance. Stopping the project now is protecting billions in expenses in the future.
Source yourself that this is worth it as per the market if you are going to claim this is a market decision
Completely false and epic revisionism. 96.6% of all new energy sources in the US from 2024 to 2026 were green.
Nuclear, batteries, solar, wind, hydro.
You know people can just look this stuff up right?
But the government is still paying billions of dollars to end renewable projects because they dont like said contracts, right?
> Also consider the US has just removed a sh~tload of fossil fuels from the world economy.
Do you mean the war with Iran that released in the initial weeks over 5 million metric tons of CO₂?
Markets are fundamentally unable to take into account externalities, but yes, let's "focus on markets and let them take care of the problem". Conveniently ignore the fact that the only reason solar is the cheapest power is because a country put in their political will and power into making it so.
Your sacred market has been killing us all and will continue to keep killing us all if it makes a few pennies.
What a weird, rose-tinted view of the US you have. Just because the markets are working and the US bungled its way into another war over oil doesn’t mean we should ignore the absolutely braindead political opposition to energy modernization.
I'm weird. Just to be fair I'll acknowledge that certain political actors in the US deny there's any man made climate change and fight renewable energy because it conflicts with some narrow business or political interests. I'm not denying that.
But...
The political criticism in the US (and in Canada where I'm from) against fossil fuel extraction makes no sense. We should want that fossil fuels are extracted here. Not overseas. It's true some element of the "right" are ideologically driven here in the wrong direction but many in the "right" are also pragmatic. Instead of fighting we need to get to common ground and the way to get there is by market forces. Most would prefer the get solar energy if it's cheaper vs. more expensive fossil fuels. And certainly if all else was equal (panels made in the US, American jobs, whatnot). So you can take the adversarial route or you can take the pragmatic route and make real progress.
The other stupid political battle here is boycotting Tesla. How does that make sense? We "punish" Elon by using more fossil fuels.
I don't understand. Are you making the argument that extracting fossil fuel here is better than extracting it elsewhere? Or, perhaps more to the point, you do see that the issue is the use of fossil fuels and that extracting _more_ is just contributing to it?
About the (unrelated) boycott question, I would invite you to consider the reasons motivating people to boycott Tesla. If think everyone do that to "hurt" or "punish" Musk, perhaps that's why it doesn't make sense to you.
Yes. I am making the argument that if we extract a barrel of oil in Canada that is all in all better than in Russia or Saudi. We have more environmental standards and we put that money towards better things.
Canada was able to give me a rebate on my EV purchase. Where do you think that money comes from? I drive a Tesla because at the time it was (and maybe still is) the best EV. I benefit from the network of superchargers. It is one, if not the, of the most efficient EVs in terms of energy/km. Batteries last a very long time due to battery management. It has been very reliable for me. My decision (way back) was really strictly on what is the best EV with no political considerations (and that was before a lot of the more recent political issues).
But the US government allowed drilling in nature reserves, that is definitely not better than oil from already existing drills in Saudi Arabia.
Silly argument. You obviously want to be the very last nation on the planet to run out of fossil fuels.
Fair enough. I'll expand.
> The political criticism in the US (and in Canada where I'm from) against fossil fuel extraction makes no sense.
If you _must_ extract fossil fuel, you can arguably say that it's better to do it somewhere with higher environmental standards (of course, here I'm disregarding people disdain to see wilderness areas they know and have an emotional attachment with transformed into oil fields). But what about _stop_ fossil fuel usage? Sure, it would cost a lot of money. So is AI currently, for doubtful returns. Sure, it would require people changing habits. So has the Internet, and we went through it.
It's like hearing an alcoholic telling you that sure, he still drinks 3 bottles a day but hey, it's Canada-made alcohol, "all in all better than alcohol coming from Russia", right? Yes, I guess it's better for the Canadian economy, but what about just stop drinking?
About your Tesla, deciding to buy without any political consideration is your choice, which you are entitled to. But why would it be impossible to understand someone actually considering the political/social side of things? All your acts and conscious decisions are strictly driven by objective, scientific criteria, never taking into account anything else?
I try to be pragmatic and not religious/ideology driven and I try to take in the complete picture. I think we could all use more of that. A lot of my climate thinking is influenced by someone I know who is also very pragmatic and knows a lot more about this. I am more or less echoing some of those thoughts because I think they're important and I agree with them.
We are not all going to "just stop" using fossil fuels. That is not a realistic goal. If it was possible then I'd entertain it. Being religious about this doesn't help make progress because it alienates people. I am all for pragmatic measures that reduce fossil fuel usage globally. Tanking Canada's economy to make zero or negative global impact is how I evaluate some of the proposed aggressive policies. What is happening is that we are funding Russia's war on Ukraine indirectly due to our lack of ability to replace that supply in Europe. That to me feels like obviously bad policy.
I made changes in my life to reduce fossil fuel usage and am considering more. I also try and influence others where I can to make similar changes. I am not optimizing for $'s here, I can afford to spend more and use less fossil fuels. This isn't really to boast or anything, just to say that this approach works for me and can work for others.
My wife boycotts Nestle for political considerations. I sort of get it but also not get it. That's not to say I would never consider something like that but I also am not a believer in the efficiency of that driving change and I don't have time to research everything in enough depth to come to a conclusion about everything I buy. Not buying Tesla for politics X is a very one dimensional decision. I don't understand how to make that decision and so I don't bother.
> But what about _stop_ fossil fuel usage?
And how do you propose we do that if we’re not the ones selling the fossils?
Fossil fuel usage is for the most part, a transaction between willing participants at a fair market price. Will you ban that? How will you enforce it? I hate to be presumptuous, but I assume you’re not a fan of colonialism or wars in the Middle East.
While oil is as valuable as it is for heating, industry, transport, war, and gestures widely at our modern lifestyle. There are two realistic ways to stop it: replace it with something cheaper and better, or genocide.
Neither of these are likely to happen at the scale and timeline required to solve our predicament. But regardless, pretending we can just stop people far poorer than us from striving to meet our standing of living by… asking nicely? It doesn’t help, if your goal is indeed to solve the problem.
The higher environmental standards that allow drilling in nature reserves?
Sorry that sounds like, if you get murdered than better here because the knives are cleaner.
Why does it matter where on the planet the fossil fuels are extracted in terms of dealing with global climate change?
The US and Canada combined are responsible for 28% and 31% of the global oil and natural gas extraction respectively. If this share were eliminated, then it would force global demand down via the supply/demand price curve especially as there are competitive clean alternatives to burning fossil fuels for energy these days.
We're approaching a global crisis point - and every country needs to reign in fossil fuel extraction and consumption. It's morally indefensible to continue profiting from the sale of products that are f*cking up the planet. Just because there are others that are immoral, doesn't give you an excuse to act without morals. Or claim it's better that you act immorally than someone else.
It doesn't work like that. If the US and Canada stopped extraction of oil and gas for the most part that shortage would be made up in other places. As we remove our supply from the markets prices would rocket up and countries like Russia and Saudi would make immense profits while making up for most of the losses and not moving the demand needle as far as you think it will move for the environment. There will also be a move back to coal where that's an option (some power stations).
And that's ignoring the consequences of that on e.g. people in cold climates that rely on gas for heating or people that rely on gasoline for getting to work. The correct approach is to reduce the usage of fossil fuels which will lead to reduced extraction naturally.
You're not 100% wrong but the impact is marginal. Partly because some energy markets are a cartel. The prices aren't strictly governed by supply and demand but rather supplies are throttled to drive prices.
This is why that's the wrong thing to focus on. If we (e.g. Canada and the US) have strong economies that allows us to do more. Both internally and by influencing others. For example I can afford to drive an EV and use a heat pump because the Canadian economy does well, despite those not being economical options. Many early adopters of solar and EVs and other environmental approaches were only possible because we have strong economies, and those drive down prices for everyone.
Prices would increase making the alternatives more attractive.
Oil and gas production is relatively in elastic taking years to expand.
The extra installed solar and wind generation - as a reaction to increased fossil fuel costs and supply disruption - permanently displaces fossil fuel consumption. No matter what fossil fuel prices do subsequently. Like the massive growth in nuclear generation immediately after the 1970s oil crisis.
Championing the continuing extraction of fossil fuels to be sold for combustion given what we know they do to the planet is not balanced in terms of morality by you driving an EV sorry. We have to abandon fossil fuels for energy asap and we practically can - the tech is available and affordable. The current reliance on fossil fuels - outside of some niches - is a political choice backed by inertia and established and powerful financial interests.
By your own market argument, increasing oil supply depresses prices and boosts usage. And NA oil isn't particularly clean or environmentally-friendly - the benefits of local production are primarily political, with a side of cheaper gas, which again, is not fighting climate change with market forces.
And Tesla is not the only game in town for electrification, and it's been like that for years already. Tesla's EU sales plummeted while overall EV share rose quickly during the peak of the 2025 "boycott". Someone who was going to buy a Tesla but got turned off by the Musk-Trump coalition just bought an electric/hybrid from someone else - there is no movement to buy gas cars just to spite Musk (unlike, say, the "roll coal" crowd).
Pragmatism is better than adversarialism, sure, but when it comes to the environment the locus of adversarialism is more lopsided than you're trying to make out.
> The other stupid political battle here is boycotting Tesla. How does that make sense? We "punish" Elon by using more fossil fuels.
There are other EV manufacturers. Boycotting Tesla != buying ICE vehicles. That’s a bad faith framing.
> What a weird, rose-tinted view of the US you have
Someone pointing out that the US is adding large amounts of solar with minimal government effort isn't "rose-tinted", it's just factual.
> absolutely braindead political opposition to energy modernization
The good thing is that in the US some people having strong political feelings about something doesn't really stop us from doing things. So not only have we added lots of new solar, we did so with a "braindead" government. That means there's a lot of people in the US who understand the changing needs we face and that having a moron in the White House doesn't really affect that.
> Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem.
The problem is politics and banana republic levels of corruption (aka lobbying) preventing chinese evs to enter the market. If you opened the automotive market to competition ie:
> focus on markets and let them take care of the problem.
then the need for fossil fuels would decline.
> How about we give the US credit for this?
If it weren't for the huge efforts put into it by china to make solar and batteries so cheap and capable we wouldn't be nearly as far along in the solar transition as we are. Solar is growing in spite of US policy, not because of it.
I was poking people a little with that statement. Can't help myself.
But really, there is growth under the policies, so saying "despite" doesn't work. You could try to argue that the policy makers tried to kill solar but achieved the opposite result. But at the end of the day the current policy environment led to a positive result. Correlation isn't causation but if I was writing a policy and I wanted to guarantee the opposite outcome I'll bet ya I could.
I happen to know some Americans who have worked really hard to advance renewable energies and have made an impact. To just view the US with one lens is not right is maybe the point I am making, without poking.
China makes cheap solar panels because there's a market for them. Panels aren't the only component in a solar system either. A lot of the technology comes from the US and American companies as well. Germany apparently gets some credit as does Australia. The Chinese did what they do best- low cost manufacturing. We got there together.
A car on which you slam on the accelerator and the brakes, and which comes to a stop, is in fact stopping despite your pressing on the accelerator.
> So markets are working.
> Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem.
Blind faith in the markets is what got us in this mess.
> Fossil fuel extraction is not the problem. The problem is fossil fuel usage.
Yes, and usage is not decreasing. As solar is growing, it's only adding capacity, not replacing fossil fuels. 2025 was the record year for global emissions and fossil fuel consumption.
But sure, let's let "the markets" dictate our ecological policy. Maybe they'll mercifully let us stop burning oil sometimes in the 2150s.
> Also consider the US has just removed a sh~tload of fossil fuels from the world economy. How about some extra credits there?
Huh? Americans very consistently rank among the biggest emitters, basically only surpassed by citizens of petrostates.
I'll just put this here: as long as burning fossil fuel is profitable, "the markets" won't help at all, quite the contrary. And oil being unprofitable isn't happening anytime soon. Our societies are already suffering from Climate Change immensely, and it will only get worse as the years go by. We should have stopped emissions yesterday, we can't let "the markets" take away our agency on the matter and decide our fate.
> Yes, and usage is not decreasing. As solar is growing, it's only adding capacity, not replacing fossil fuels.
This is the key point. While yes, it is brilliant that we are adding loads of solar, wind and whatever - it is the final emissions that really matter. Regardless of how well meaning we are intended with our build outs, the emissions is really the only metric that counts when we are focusing on climate blow back.
We can't even decrease the /rate/ at which we pump the shit into the air when we need to decrease the total amount of it in.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
Still a ways to go but trending down for some time now. India and China are trending up and might cross us by 2030-2035 unless they reverse direction.
> Americans very consistently show the most emissions per Capita.
Even beyond that, it is simply a false statement. Among the most, yes but consistently "the most", no
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
That's per capita. Total keeps increasing: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
Per capita decreasing is not nothing, but unfortunately the climate doesn't care about that particular metric.
[flagged]
Foreign state actors?
We have government agents frequenting this website to sew anti-US sentiment? Really?
Could you identify some of them? Or at least one or two of the obvious ones?
Yes, I could.
But to be serious, there's endless evidence that it's going on, and if you don't believe it I'm not the one with my head in the sand. (That's a common English idiom meaning "not paying attention," for the foreign state actors out there.)
> (That's a common English idiom meaning "not paying attention," for the foreign state actors out there.)
It's even worse than "not paying attention". It's knowing the truth of the situation and actively avoiding acknowledging it to yourself or anyone else. Hiding your head in the sand and shouting "It's not really happening, it's not really happening!" despite knowing that it is indeed happening.
Data centers use no more than 1.5% of electricity globally[1], and a long LLM query uses only a little more than 5 minutes of general laptop use ~3x the energy of running an LED light for 5 minutes.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...
So you’re saying we could significantly cut energy use globally by limiting data center build outs?
1.5% is a //huge// amount. If it was a “drop” in your bucket, it would only hold 67 more of those drops.
No, I'm not saying that and I don't think 1.5% is particularly large. Moreover many of these projects are built out with on site 0 carbon generation so they're in some ways a net benefit.
The largest projects, like Box Elder County Utah and Pecos County Texas, are using fossil fuels.
In fact, I'm unaware of any new AI data center also being built with 0 carbon generation. Do you have a source?
Can I have 1.5% of your net worth?
Ohhh, carbon neutral energy generation, if only we could use that to replace the non-neutral energy sources, instead of using it to power virtual X-Ray goggles so MAGA incels can goon at "naked Taylor Swift". Or to answer "please do my work for me" of lazy fucks planet-wide. You know, to stay relevant to the comment thread of "Oceans hit highest temperature on record"...
This is wildly out of touch with reality. Have you never seen a construction site? A 0 carbon generation site doesn't exist.
That figure likely doesn't include crypto mining, either. That's another 0.5% or so.
0.5% is about the entire energy consumption of two Swedens or half a Thailand.
Only if you hold the view that AI will not lead to use using energy more efficiently.
> we could significantly cut energy use globally by limiting data center build outs?
No, we couldn't, because degrowth solutions aren't really an option.
I call degrowth "abstinence based" environmental policy in allegory to abstinence based sex education. The latter is the "we don't need condoms or birth control, just teach people not to have sex" thing, which doesn't work either.
You really think you're going to convince people to become poorer? Not possible in a democracy. It'd require some kind of ecofascist totalitarian thing where you take peoples' energy and resource use away and fire tear gas and rubber bullets at them when they protest.
Or we could build non-carbon-based energy sources. Cause we have those, and they work. You can also have safe sex if you put a rubber thing on your wing-wong.
And right now the fuel for fascism seems to be coming from the newly minted billionaires who own or profit off of the data centers.
1.5% of electricity. That's a significant difference. Only about 1/7th of all our energy usage is electricity
1.5% of global energy use would be a shocking amount. Aviation is at about 3%. 1.5% of global electricity is about 0.2% of global energy use, a much more manageable figure
Laptop use and LED light use (and most other uses of electricity) are not increasing so rapidly that they can not be accommodated by the normal expansion in electric system capacity that has been part of long term planning for quite a while.
Instead much of it is being handled by bringing new fossil power plants on line that would not have been built if not for all the new data centers.
The other things that are causing significant increases in electricity use, like more people getting heat pumps and EVs, are all very spread out and so are much less likely to force new fossil fuel power plants.
Wow, even with that being electricity rather than energy, that's orders of magnitude more than I would have guessed. That's a tremendous amount of electricity.
> ~3x the energy of running an LED light for 5 minutes.
Why would this not be the energy of running an LED light for 15 minutes?
It's an unspoken rule in the data center debate that every metric is completely batshit.
Doesn't matter what side you're on, it's always "enough water to irrigate 27 soccer fields" or "as much energy as 1/5th of the average hamburger"
It comes from Our World in Data, highly reputable, and I included the source link.
I'm sure that figure is accurate. And the other person in this thread who commented "the entire energy consumption of two Swedens or half a Thailand" is probably also accurate.
It's not about accuracy, it's about the units people choose when having these discussions
Ah yes, "just" 485 TWh, equal to all electricity consumption of Germany. Drop in the bucket
When all is said and done, data centers are going to be complimentary to green energy. They can spin up and down to buffer non-linear power nodes.
They also represent investment in economic growth that doesn't come from resource extraction or travel or manufacturing.
While yes they can spin up and down, there is the deeper question of what it is all for.
This is why so many AI proponents always talk about future gains rather than what is happening today. It a lot of what it claimed to be coming doesn't happen then it will all look very silly.
Time will tell and depending on were you sit, either we will be there shortly or it will never happen.
Building data centers relies on immense manufacturing. The GPUs, systems, cooling, batteries, etc don't come from no where. They have strict replacement schedules too.
The voters bear much of the blame too. The oil, gas and coal producing countries that still have democracies need to stop voting for short term profits and star voting for rapid rampdown of fossils production.
The US isn't expanding fossil fuel extraction, its quite the opposite. They're funding the modernization of existing plants in order to take older plants offline:
June 2026: New coal-fired plants in Anchorage, Alaska, and Mt. Storm, West Virginia, would total 2.85 GW. They would be the first new U.S. coal plants to come online since 2013.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doe-announces-850m-moderniz...
Meanwhile in China (from 2023):
China permitted more coal power plants last year than any time in the last seven years, according to a new report released this week. It's the equivalent of about two new coal power plants per week. The report by energy data organizations Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air finds the country quadrupled the amount of new coal power approvals in 2022 compared to 2021.
"Everybody else is moving away from coal and China seems to be stepping on the gas," she says. "We saw that China has six times as much plants starting construction as the rest of the world combined."
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
Meanwhile in India (2026):
India plans to increase its coal production by nearly 100m tonnes to 1.15bn tonnes in the 2025-26 fiscal year to help meet the country’s rising demand for electricity to support economic growth and contend with heatwaves, which have become more severe and more frequent because of the climate crisis.
The planned increases come despite signs that the world is beginning to turn its back on coal in favour of renewable electricity, Global Energy Monitor said.
The US could switch every ICE vehicle to EV's and install solar and wind turbines in every inch of the country and it won't combat what's going on in China, India and other developing countries that rely on coal for cheap energy.
You are looking at the acceleration but without looking at the initial state.
A more fair metric would be Co2 emissions/person and I’m getting
USA 14.3 t, China 8.8 t, EU 5.5 t, India 2.2 t
The only relevant metric is ppm in the atmosphere. Every single other, especially per capita ones are distructioo
That is both completely right and completely wrong.
It is right because all the planet cares about is the amount in the atmosphere.
It is completely wrong because whatever total amount X of CO2 emissions we decide we need to limit humanity to, we have to somehow allocate that CO2 emission budget to people.
Unless you can make a good case that some people have some sort of natural or divine right to a bigger share than others the only way to do it is for every person to have the same share. (Maybe on top of that there can be some system of trading, so that people whose emissions go toward things that the world finds more useful can trade for a bigger share, but it would still have to start from everyone is equal).
Since it is countries that would be the ones actually enforcing whatever the limit is, the country effectively ends up as the entity in charge of the shares of all its population, making the allocation at the country level equal on a per capita basis between countries.
Another way to see that anything other than per capita is nonsense is that anything else would allow groups of people to manipulate their allocation by splitting the country into multiple countries or merging multiple countries into one.
> A more fair metric would be Co2 emissions/person and I’m getting
We don't care about that notion of "fair": the cold hart truth is that China has 1.4 billon people.
Another way to put it: China has one billion more people than there are in the US.
Or another way to put it: 4.1x more people.
Which means China is emitting nearly 3x more Co2 than the US.
Our only hope is that China is using coal and fossil fuels only has a mean to sustain its insane growth while they transition to solar and nuclear (which they also do, at an amazing speed).
Hillbillies and redneck with their gigantic pick-up trucks in the US are really the least of worries.
Solution to save the environment: China should separate out Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia as separate independent countries. Hong Kong and Macao too. And then split north-south so that Shanghai and Beijing become their own capitals. Continue this process and eventually the population and emissions of each individual country will be low enough that they can be ignored, thus solving the problem once and for all.
That is the opposite of what GP said. The point is only the total emissions matter, the climate does not care about "fair" allocations over either people or nation-states.
That's a pointless point, because any system to actually control emissions requires allocating them to nation-states, because it is nation-states that actually enforce things on people.
The EU has more people than the USA but emits 1/3 of the USA's, what's the exceptionalist excuse for that?
well, yes we're overfed and over-commercialized. But we also vastly out build, grow and produce Europe. (and you have more people)
> what's the exceptionalist excuse for that?
What is Europe's excuse for having such low wages and output despite having more people?
> The US isn't expanding fossil fuel extraction, its quite the opposite.
Not according to the federal government's data. BTUs from fossil fuel production set a record last year and is on a faster pace this year. Your bringing up a few coal plants is only tangentially relevant.
https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec1_3.pdf
> The US could switch every ICE vehicle to EV's and install solar and wind turbines in every inch of the country and it won't combat what's going on in China, India and other developing countries that rely on coal for cheap energy.
Are you familiar with the concept of necessary but not sufficient?
In any event the war with Iran is speeding up the future that was coming anyway. China's EV and solar exports are surging throughout the world. Both China and India have said for many years that their emissions would rise and then fall.
> The US could switch every ICE vehicle to EV's and install solar and wind turbines in every inch of the country and it won't combat what's going on in China, India and other developing countries that rely on coal for cheap energy.
"Today the US government announced CO2 tariffs against polluting nations - products sold in the USA need to be produced in carbon-neutral manner or face punishing taxes.".
Pipe dream, of course, because the populace will vote for the guy offering cheap instead of sustainable...
The quote you pulled for China is conveniently 3 years old and missing the global context that it was in response to supply issues with other fossil fuels, not a reflection in meeting demand.
These charts address your points:
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india
India is a bit more concerning for a number of reasons (lower per capita income means they are lower on per-capita emissions currently and hence have more room to grow, and they don't have the resources that China does to build out renewables) but criticizing China from a renewables perspective (there are a whole lot of other valid reasons to criticize them) is insane.
There are several problems with this.
First, you are ignoring gas. The US stopped building coal plants because of the fracking boom. That gave the US huge sources of natural gas which was cheaper than coal.
China has little natural gas but abundant coal, so when they need fossil fuel for something they cannot yet do with renewables they use coal whereas the US uses gas.
Second, you are looking at number of plants, but not looking at capacity factor (which is a measure of how much they are actually used). The new Chinese coal plants have lower capacity factors. They are being built as backups and peakers rather than baseload, designed (or retrofitted in the case of existing plants being upgraded) to be able to cycle up and down to balance wind and solar.
Many are idle so much that their owners have financial difficulty keeping them open, and the government has had to start paying them for their idle time so they won't go under.
Many are also built to replace existing plants that cannot not yet be replaced with renewables, so are at worst neutral on coal usage and are usually actually more efficient than the old plants so there is a reduction.
Their use will continue to decline because China is massively deploying renewables. They also are adding massive amounts of grid battery storage and UHV transmission lines (60000 km so far spanning the country with another 12000 km under construction or permitted--the US is a bit behind that at 0 km), which means the can move electricity from where renewables are strongest to places with high needs but fewer renewables much easier that most other countries can which is further going to reduce the amount of time those new coal plants run.
Third, for India, even if we compare by country rather than by the correct per capita measure (see other comments below for explanation of why per capita is the correct measure when comparing energy policies of different countries), India's current emissions are only 68% of US emissions even though the have 4.3x as many people. That 10% increase you cite that they plan for coal in 2025-2026 still leaves them doing WAY better than the US.
India is also expanding renewables rapidly. They have around 10 nuclear reactors under construction, and are adding lots of solar and wind. They are currently up to 136 GW of solar capacity (64% of US and 11% of China), and last year added around 38 GW (the US added 34 GW). They added 6.3 GW of wind compared to 6.2 GW in the US.
They are almost certainly not going to get anywhere close to the US total emissions. (And per capita where they emit 1/6th what the US does they are definitely not going to even remotely near the US).
Could China and India get more electricity by investing the same amount in new solar production instead of coal?
China installed more solar capacity in 6 months than the US has installed in its entire existence [1]
To say they’re winning the race implies there even is a race.
It’s a super car vs a snail.
The US has the second most and has 1/4th the population. We're barely behind them in solar watt per capita.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country#Global_...
Many countries on that list dwarf China in a solar watts per capita, so are they winning this hypothetical race then?
But sure, them adding that alongside all of their new coal plants is nice. Also, they waste the most solar energy of any country.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-leads-wave-cle...
China is at a higher installed capacity by 6x from overall and 30% by per capita capacity. They're growing installed capacity from your source at 45% y/y as compared to 20% in the US.
Sure, there might be more transmission constraints or whatever, but those will certainly be solved in time (transmission capacity is more distributed so I'm not surprised it's lagging capacity).
I know.
I just don’t understand why they are diversifying between solar and coal, instead of just putting all new investment into solar or other renewables.
Wind produced 10% of China's electricity last year, and its share is growing at 1% per year while coal's share shrinks. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/business/china-wind-turbi...
You said "modernization of existing plants" but quoted "New coal-fired plants."
China's 2025 five year plan targets peak coal before 2030 and might have already reached it in 2026. https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-tre...
We are doing a lot. Almost 90% of electricity capacity added last year was renewables. Nearly 1 in 3 cars sold are now EVs. The world is spending over $2 trillion every year on low‑carbon energy investment. Solar and wind have already avoided more than 2 gigatons of CO2 being added to the atmosphere. In the US, the IRA will drop emissions 40% to below 2005 levels.
What do you mean we are doing nothing?
The federal government is paying energy companies to cancel plans to build wind farms:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e1vg0gjl5o
Yes we're still building renewable energy, but goddamn is our government making it hard.
We are still building renewable energy even with a stupid government because it's now cheaper than fossil fuels in many markets.
We are doing loads, I just fear we cannot outrun Jevon's paradox. Until we start actively reducing emissions, we are just adding to the scale of consumption with no end in sight.
That we are still adding any fossil fuel based system today is something I would have figured would have stopped by now. I figured we would still have some legacy stuff, but overall would be decommissioning more than we would add. Instead, we just add to everything.
That's added capacity. Fossil fuel use is at an all times high. Everything else is meaningless.
China is the biggest problem. US Carbon emissions are going down, China's are exploding.
This was one of the big fears. That countries that had far more people than the western world would end up trying to chase that middle class lifestyle. And yet here we are.
I suspect we are going to be like the aphids on a rosebush that will suck it dry just trying to live and most of us go with it.
If we were to live closer to what many philosophers and religions of modesty, we probably would have never gone down this path. Yes, we wouldn't have most of the great stuff we have today but we also wouldn't be looking at a system that can lurch over and crash. There is no winning move in the universe just dances and responses.
Huh? That's not true.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
This is the very definition of the Tragedy of the Commons. Without everyone committing to common limits, it is folly for anyone to.
And FWIW, I don't buy the "but the countries that bred like rabbits for the past few decades are owed their due reserved quota". Having a massive population isn't something you need to be rewarded for, not to mention that the math doesn't even make sense. For China and India to get their "per quota" backlog, we're basically so firmly in self destruction territory that it makes no sense for anyone else to even bother.
Calling China a country that "bred like rabbits" over the past few decades is first of all offensive and second of all stupid for a country that has one of the biggest problems with their coming population pyramid and limited couples to a single child for most of the last 40 years.
Bizarre comment. I think the best is when you declare it "stupid" because China got its population explosion under control...at 1.4 BILLION PEOPLE. And the problem is that today everyone always waves away China bringing enormous greenhouse gas burning capacity online by saying "oh well...per capita...", and it's incredibly weird.
If China and India are going to "make up" for their historic per capita greenhouse gas emissions -- after both breeding continent-sized populations -- the worst case scenario is 100% guaranteed and everyone else might as well go wild as well. 3 billion people cannot continue the mistakes of the past, but a lot of very foolish people seriously make that argument.
Per capita is the only metric that matters as it attributes equal worth to each human life.
If China was split up into 20 countries would that be better because the emissions were divided by 20 for each individual country? I honestly don't know how so many people fail understand this very basic point.
Also talking about breeding continent sized populations, the USA is third with 340+ million and rapidly expanding at millions a year. The median country size is around a population of 9 million so the USA having 340+ million is clearly deeply irresponsible.
> China bringing enormous greenhouse gas burning capacity online
Your knowledge is out of date, Chinas total CO2 emissions have likely already peaked back in 2024: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
> If China and India are going to "make up" for their historic per capita greenhouse gas emissions.
Except China likely peaked their emissions at a much lower per capita rate than even the USA does now. India will probably be the same.
> the worst case scenario is 100% guaranteed and everyone else might as well go wild as well.
It can always be worse.
> 3 billion people cannot continue the mistakes of the past, but a lot of very foolish people seriously make that argument.
Sure and a country of 340 million cannot continue to burn as much as it is doing but continues to do so.
Also how much money is the USA going to send to developing countries to help them develop without burning fossil fuels? Oh yeah they cancelled it and they continue to be the worlds second largest emitter.
Why does it matter how many people exist within a specific arbitrary line on a map?
If China or India split into 5 different political systems each, suddenly the calculus changes?
Talk about foolish.
This has been aided by the fact that energy has been heavily politicized. Fossil fuels are 'murican and renewables are woke. It's horrifying.
Does your hypothesis predict that Texas would be one of the most renewable-energy-heavy states in the U.S.?
That’s just economics. That doesn’t excuse what the current admin has done in terms of prioritization.
That "just" is really doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Economics is what makes this country work. If converting to renewables makes more money, that's what will happen and the people making the money will find a way to justify it politically.
Economics only make the country work when societal costs are not externalised by those that cause them. Which they have been, always, by fossil fuel companies.
Most of the benefits of cheap energy are also externalized. Why do we focus on one but not the other?
Because cheap fossil fuels's benefits will dissipate in two decades if we can move to green energy while the downsides project into whatever time remains of organized human civilization.
The benefits of fossil fuels will also be felt for centuries as well. It's what moved us into the comfortable lives we all enjoy today and lifted billions out of poverty.
The point isn't that they're wonderful, it's that they're treated as this thing that only a few have benefited from, when it's exactly the opposite.