The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable
unric.org236 points by velo_aprx 2 hours ago
236 points by velo_aprx 2 hours ago
I’m 38 years old, and I’ve worked in climate tech for the last 12 years. In my relatively short lifetime, and my relatively short career, I have seen the environment for political action, and funding for climate solutions, fluctuate maybe half a dozen times.
The physics, however, don’t change, and neither does the task in front of us.
I just spent ten months finding a job, the longest and most difficult job search of my career. It was hard because the macro environment is terrible, but also because I insisted on finding a role working on clean energy hardware.
At a time when basically all VC funding, and in many ways the entire productive capacity of the economy, is shifting to AI, it would have been smarter in some respects to just pivot to AI. I sat out the crypto bubble too, in which some of my peers made a lot of money by working on projects that were either useless, or straightforward scams.
We crossed the 1.5 degree threshold because the money can’t help itself. The slow, steady work of transitioning away from fossil fuels is never going to be as profitable, as quickly, as the various forms of gambling and addiction that have driven the tech industry for most of my lifetime.
But you, individually, can make the choice to keep your eye on the ball. You can commit to working on this problem until it’s done, no matter what. You can choose to find the others to organize and prepare, so that the ideas closest at hand when the next crisis comes are yours.
It’s the best solution I’ve come up with so far, and in spite of the challenges, it’s still working.
> You can commit to working on this problem until it’s done, no matter what.
My opinion is that the very first things people should do are:
1. Get a little bit informed. It doesn't require a PhD, it could be done instead of a fraction of the time they spend scrolling bullshit on their smartphone.
2. Accept the situation. Too many are in denial, with variants of "it's not that bad" or "it's because those in power are stupid, I would certainly fix the world" or "it's because of foreigners".
3. Vote accordingly.
It's too easy to say "we don't have any viable candidates" and "I don't understand why they haven't fixed the problem yet, they must be stupid (somehow implying that "in all likelihood I would have solved it by now")".
In relatively-functional democracies, the reason the people doesn't have viable candidates is because the people does not vote for competent people. Either because they vote for competent politicians (with modern politics being about getting elected, not exactly solving big problems) or because they proudly vote for extremists (which is of course even worse).
In a democracy, the people is the government. When the people says "the government is stupid", it reflects on the people. Maybe they're right: the government is stupid, because the people is stupid and elects stupid people, and that's why we're screwed.
I went from voting to electoral campaigns to the kind of activism that gets you arrested to working in climate as an engineer. I landed here because the first three were insufficient. I still support and encourage all of it, but the best you can get from voting is creating a better regulatory and funding environment for the necessary engineering and implementation work.
> I went from voting to electoral campaigns to the kind of activism that gets you arrested
You make it sound like you proved I was wrong... somehow? I never said "0% of the world is informed and votes accordingly". I said that the majority isn't and doesn't.
Sure, once you realise you personally aren't able to change that, you can move to the next thing that makes you feel good (in this case working on "green tech", if I understand correctly). Some people go live in a hut in the woods.
Doesn't change the fact that the people is the government, and can generally vote for change. But they don't, for many reasons, including "they actually spend very little time thinking about those things". I would argue that most people spend vastly more time saying that the government is stupid than actually getting informed on problems and what it would take to solve them.
Indeed and don't underestimate the influence you can have by participating in candidate selection (depending on your electoral system). For example in the UK the replacement candidate for a safe seat [i.e. almost guaranteed to be won by the party of the sitting representative] upon retirement of the incumbent may be decided by just a room full of people. Be in that room.
The problem is that most people do care about the environment but are hopelessly misinformed about what to do about it.
They think that personal acts of minor inconvenience like tolerating soggy paper straws saves the environment while fighting things that actually make a difference, like blocking transit to save a nest of bats; or blocking urban development to provide an extra 3 minutes a day of sunlight on a surface parking lot; or that somehow them flying across the USA to visit a national park and connect with nature or something is offset ecologically by token actions like reducing how many plastic grocery bags they use throughout the year. Most ordinarily people don’t understand the tradeoffs of their choices in the slightest.
And on top of that culture wars and geopolitics is getting in the way of progress - we could be blanketing the world in solar panels and batteries and EVs on the cheap right now, but it’s dominated by enemy #1, China, so we won’t; not to mention that the right in the USA seems to think that renewables are for girly sissies. And the alternatives we have, like nuclear power, are being shut down across EU countries because people have no idea of just how self sabotaging that action is, given that the alternative is going to be fossil fuels coming from Russia and the Middle East. They’d rather die of heat stroke than use energy efficient air conditioning, so the powers of most people’s imagination are shockingly weak.
Popular opinion wants to blame everything on capitalism when the reasons for these problems don’t actually stem from there. Capitalism will be the way out if it’s given the chance, but it’s not popular to say that, so it won’t.
I have been working in Climate Tech for a while but not as long as you.
Unfortunately my conclusion is that Climate Tech companies in general have been delusional thinking the mission is enough and there is no requirement to be a business.
The reason I am saying this is not to discourage from working in Climate Tech. The reason I say this is to please not go in with eyes closed which is all too common.
Climate Tech needs to grow and be sustainable both for the mission as well as a business. And for far too long I feel business smarts have been missing completely in this sector.
>We crossed the 1.5 degree threshold because the money can’t help itself.
Which is why I think we need carbon pricing / tax. If the politicians focused on that then the forces of capitalism and startups would be unleashed to bring down co2. Instead they ban plastic straws while the Chinese burn another million tons of coal.
> clean energy hardware
This sounds interesting. Tell us more?
Clean energy hardware meaning clean electricity generation, energy storage, or energy management and arbitrage hardware that reduces the need for fossil fuel-derived electricity.
Any tips for a senior SWE who would love to move away from coding and into the clean energy space?
So, the devil comes to Davos and says: "You can enjoy cheap energy, but some poor people in the global south will suffer and die" And after a long silence the US president says: "I feel like there is a catch there, but I just can't figure out what it is"
It's difficult for humans to comprehend the scale of what it would take to stop the planet from heating up. There are 100+ years of extraction of massive quantities of sequestered carbon from the Earth's crust and burning it now baked into the system, with an approximate 15-year lag on observed atmospheric and ocean temperature increases i.e. the temperatures we are currently seeing are those caused by emissions up to around 2011. Since then, carbon emissions have increased, not decreased, so we have a minimum of 15 more years of temperature rises to come.
As a though experiment, ask people if it would be possible for humans to prevent the tides coming in and out each day. Mostly you will be laughed at. Yet the same people usually think that preventing the Earth from heating up, which is a problem on a similar scale, can be achieved with a bit of recycling, eating less meat and cycling to work.
This single graph [1] is enough to demonstrate that 'solving' climate change is beyond the scale of human capabilities.
[1] https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2
I don't follow you. You say that the heating up is caused by "100+ years of extraction of massive quantities of sequestered carbon from the Earth's crust and burning it now baked into the system" but at the same time you say humans, who did the extraction and burning for 100+ years, cannot stop doing it? I mean, reverting the temperature to pre-industrial level it's not going to happen soon in any case, but at least stopping increasing it constantly IT IS a human-achievable goal, by definition.
This. I have, lying around unpublished, a few science fiction novels that I wrote where I assumed we actually did everything realistically needed to stop climate change. Like, not the deal "we make some solar panels but keep all the industries," but the real thing: "we take down the industries, we promote degrowth, we embrace and promote a proper demographic collapse, we shame meat eaters, we put youth into environmental enforcement militias, and we change global culture to embrace all of that."
It's a world that has nothing to do with this one. Of course deceiving ourselves with plastic straws is easier.
> Yet the same people usually think that preventing the Earth from heating up, which is a problem on a similar scale, can be achieved with a bit of recycling, eating less meat and cycling to work.
No this is propaganda that fossil fuel companies have successfully imposed on us, that it's the consumers' fault when a large part of the pollution comes from the industrial side. But consumers have leverage in regards to industries - if they stop buying meat, the polluting meat industry would decrease and help solve this problem.
Also what do you suggest? It seems that you are implying that because we can't stop it now, we don't need to focus on the problem and can let it grow even higher?
It’s really not, lots of people have been doing this work for a long time, if you want to understand what it’s going to take you can start here: https://drawdown.org/
We have much more than 15 more years of temperature rises to come. It's not like we reached net zero in 2026 or have a plausible plan to reach that anytime soon. Net zero is probably another few decades away.
The point is that even if we did get to net zero today heating would continue to rise for another 15 years. That's what the lag is. Whenever we get there, add 15 years.
True, but not much of an issue I think. I'd assume we reach net zero very gradually and fifteen years before net zero will be pretty close to zero already. But oh well, first we need a clear downward trend of global emission.
I would not say people have given up. The problem is that this search for saving the planet and humanity all together is hard to understand for the common folk, much in the same way other banners that have been imposed on people in the past 2 decades.
Common people want to go to work and know that they have a working transport system, that they can walk in between a few streets and feel safe, that they can have enough money for a mortgage and to feed themselves and their families.
None of these things are exactly addressed by putting solar panels, and wind farms all around, especially when the cost of fuel keep rising. When the security of the grid on a once thought-of super-power like UK is constantly put in question.
The common people doesnt care much about these topics and explanations because they don’t have time for it, because they do still need to get on with life. It’s generally youth and retirees the ones gluing themselves to the pavement, have you noticed? whats in common in these two groups is they can both still afford to be idealists.
Then you turn on the TV and see how much damage is being done to the environment in other regions, and so, why do I need to suck it up in my jumper all winter then? Why am I the one using paper straws that break before I finish my drink?
This whole thing was always a tough sale, but it’s gotten even harder in the current political climate.
> None of these things are exactly addressed by putting solar panels, and wind farms all around, especially when the cost of fuel keep rising.
Don't want to nitpick but this touches on a topic I think worth discussing. I feel that for many people, investments in green energy are a needless sacrifice we do for the sake of the environment (and a naive sacrifice at that since other countries can just keep on emitting their greenhouse gases anyway). It follows, since we invest in green this must have its costs elsewhere like in higher gas prices and obviously then people ask -- why should we keep doing this when we are hit with economic downturn?
But really green energy is all about the unaccounted for future costs. We can burn fossil fuels now but we are going to be in a whole lot of trouble when they become more expensive and dealing with their side effects (climate change) will become expensive as well. Green energy is a solution - you don't need to care about high fuel prices and what happens in Middle East if you can get all energy from the sun and wind.
Yes, totally correct in all points, but people just don't care about the future. I fear it's easy as that.
The argument is, why would the common folk care about the future? Why should they be the ones making the sacrifices if hardly ever they any benefit? None of this concerns the type of person that can easily just move on to green technology, of course not, I am not talking about your average HN user, I am talking about the people that has become ever more invisible, poor and disenfranchised.
For these people, what does the future has to offer anyway? Why do think people are not having babies anymore?
If you live day by day, and that is all you can afford, what kind of future you think people going to try and cultivate?
It’s also about energy security - why expose your energy markets to insane fluctuations in international fossil-fuel markets if you don’t have to? Surely the last few years have shown that energy independence is a critical social and defence policy now?
For many/most countries, investing in renewables is the best, cheapest and fastest way to move in that direction.
Rising cost of fuel must be a very good reason to invest in renewable sources, like solar and wind.
The red herring, paper straws, why mention that? It is just some shit that is created to keep ”common people” distracted from the real problem.
There is no amount of paper straws that will offset anything the rich deciders do. It's a ploy for time for no reason whatsoever.
It's not even that. If you take a look at videos of India etc you will see rivers full of plastic, plastic rubbish being burned, etc. It's just normal way of life for them.
But we are told that plastic straws are the issue, and switching to paper straws (that you need to use twice as many of when they inevitably dissolve) will solve the problems. Meanwhile, the H&M polyester dress that you wear 3 times before throwing it away takes as much energy as 2000x paper straws to manufacturer.
Chinas expansion of Coal power plants(1), India's behaviour with dirty rivers and pollution, Middle East burning rubber(2) so it is visible from space, etc, are all examples of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory on a global scale.
1. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-coal-power-ri...
If you see a neighbour with an untidy lawn does it make you want to give up keeping your lawn clean?
If the neighbor is on the other side of the globe, hardly makes a difference to most people.
My actual neighbor, gets a talk then a call to the local enforcement agency if it doesn't improve.
>My actual neighbor, gets a talk then a call to the local enforcement agency if it doesn't improve.
Is there a local enforcement agency for... tidy lawns where you live?
But according to his post it makes a difference? "Why should I care because they are polluting on the other side of the planet?"
It's unfortunate we can't call a local agency to fix their attitude, but at least we can do our part. What it's worth if you don't even try?
You do understand that they are suffering because of choices made for them, by the west? Its our plastic that flows through their rivers.
It's not, it's their plastic, and their choices.
Well, color me surprised, but you’re right: in contrast to china, Malaysia, and other SE Asia states, India’s plastic trash is mostly (97%) self-made, with the largest contributor being single use packaging for consumers.
What is this nonsense about straws? The reason plastic straws are banned is because they were one of the top 10 things littering European beaches. Indian plastic straws have fuck all to do with littering _our_ beaches.
Were paper straws ever about climate change? This feels like a red herring. Pollution has many aspects to it, and you can work on several problems simultaneously.
No, they are about cleaning up European beaches. Anyone using plastic straws as an argument against combating climate change is acting in bad faith.
I would not say people have give up.
On the contrary in fact, I think a lot of people have decided to do something that will have a tremendously positive impact on the climate in the future: they've chosen not to have children. There will be downsides to that decision, but as far as climate goes it's by far the most impactful thing anyone can do.
This is the kind of take that causes more traditional (including right wing, but also people from non western countries) look at climate activists as crazy fanatics. You are technically right, but I think advocating for childlessness causes people to disregard the whole movement as insane.
They could off themselves as well. That would help too. 4 billions of years of evolution end with me! What an absurd take. I'd understand one child, fewer than desired, etc.. but no children as a conscious effort to help the climate is something I don't buy that ever happened. Other reasons are at play for that. Nothing to do with the climate.
but no children as a conscious effort to help the climate is something I don't buy that ever happened
That's not what I said. People are choosing not to have children for lots of reasons. One of the benefits is that they end up having much less impact on the climate; that's not saying it's the reason they're doing it.
Until recently I was strictly against having kids because of the world climate, both weather and political. But then my partner wanted them and I couldn't stand the notion of losing her, so I was able to compromise on my ideals.
But yeah without her, definitely.
an important factor, I believe, is that a lot of "common people" are childless. about half of Western millennials are, and that was the last generation that didn't grow up in the clown world we live in now. zoomers and forth will be even more so.
I don't know why should a childless person give a damn about the future beyond their own lifespan. I think most of them don't, in their heart of hearts, and that's the only logical stance.
It’s an equally valid (i.e., not valid) observation that most of the people with children obviously don’t give a damn, or we wouldn’t be here.
Doubly frustrating when you consider that Americans would actually have needed to backslide on creature comforts for 1.5 to have ever been viable, at a time when people overwhelmingly want them.
This problem starts and ends with corporations and government regulations. It’s barely worth it to talk to people about it right now. Maybe in 10 years when things are a bit more on fire and people are more willing to listen.
The problem is: when things will be on fire, it will be much more difficult or impossible to get them back to an acceptable level.
I highly recommend this graphic to everyone:
https://globaia.org/_astro/GA_1750-2024_DARK2.CKx3duw8_ZQd9m...
It lists 24 socio-ecological KPI across the planet since industrialisation beginning - as you can see:
There is not a single KPI where the curve shows even the slightest sign of recovery - and you can expect other graphs of adjacent KPI to show similar development.
In one sentence: There is no chance that humanity will ever come back to any pre-industry levels within the next 500 years. And by overusing our environment, our civilisation wont last 500 years. (sure, some hotspots will survive, but they wont have ASML Twin:Exe machines or cheap flight travel anymore etc.)
The world population graph is misleading. Looking at it one could be lead to believe that in 2100 there will be 13bln people.
In reality by 2100 the world's population will be around 10.2bln and declining from 10.3bln in 2084 or so.
And that also assumes the UN won't revise its projections once again, as every time they did, they had to lower their estimates.
I agree on the "we're on the wrong path" though I don't share your conclusion's gravity, but some of these indicators feel very weird to be included imho. Total FDI and transistor per processor makes very little point on the matter.
The vast majority of countries in the world are aging. "Transistors per microprocessor" and "Phone subscriptions" are weird ones. As if the goal was to have sharp graphs...
We could all try and do a bit with our daily choices:
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/best-source-protein-tofu
"Tofu has been crowned the prince of protein by a scientific scoring system that measured human health, sustainability and affordability.
...
To assess the environmental impact of each food, MacDonald compared the greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, land use and water use involved in producing 100g (3.5oz) of protein from each food.
Tofu was judged the best in this category, followed by chia seeds, quinoa, beans and sunflower seeds. Meanwhile, pork, beef and cheddar cheese came last."Let's be honest. People aren't eating tofu because it's fundamentally not that nice. There's plenty of ways you can improve it, but it just doesn't taste good without effort like most meats do.
Realistically the only thing we'd be able to convince people to do is to eat less beef, but you're never going to be able to convince the population to switch over to tofu
If you don’t want to give up meat right away, at least consider stopping beef. One pound of beef is roughly equal to 8 pounds of pork, 10 pounds of chicken, and 20 pounds of tofu in CO₂ emissions.
- Beef (1 lb): 0.45 kg (454 g)
- Pork (8 lbs): 3.63 kg (3,629 g)
- Chicken (10 lbs): 4.54 kg (4,536 g)
- Tofu (20 lbs): 9.07 kg (9,072 g)
It's unfortunate it's a ranking... there could be huge or tiny gaps between the entries.
The original source https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-system... links betterproteininstitute.com which then links https://www.betterproteininstitute.com/_files/ugd/7be592_a59...
The emissions for lamb/pork/beef are terrible, beef looks an order of magnitude worse than the rest. The top 10 or so are fairly similar in comparison. Chicken isn't bad comparatively, but tofu still looks a decent bit better.
Key figure missing in this article is "by how much"?
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221214-what-is-the-lowe...
Compared to chicken breast it's about 2.87x less impactful, but the real offender is beef, which has 25x the footprint of tofu.
Overall we really just need to get rid of beef. On an annual basis the carbon footprint of the respective protein sources is:
-tofu - less than 500kg
-chicken - less than 1250kg
-beef - over 10 tonnes
Mix one part peas with two parts chicken and you're around a tonne - a reasonable amount without having to even touch tofu.
Tofu lose soundly in human preference category (well for some people) which they neglected to take in account.
Have you ever tasted good tofu recipes?
Have you ever enjoyed a reverse seared marbled ribeye?
I don't know as I'm not a native speaker, probably not, but I ate meat for 22 years and that included good fine dishes as well. Yet I have been able to find good vegetarian recipes that bring me as much joy as the meat did, but in different ways of course.
Source? Or did you just came up with that category based on your own personal experience?
The world population grows by 200,000 extra people, every day. Keep in mind any adaptations have to compensate for this growth in population, continually, for at least the next couple of decades.
I didn’t think it was growing that fast but it is: https://www.hurtyourbrain.com/p/how-many-people-are-added-to...
Energy consumption per person also has a lot of room to grow. For every barrel of oil eschewed by a relatively rich person in the developed world, there are probably 3 or 4 ready to pickup the slack and increase their quality of life in the rest of the much poorer world.
> there are probably 3 or 4 ready to pickup the slack and increase their quality of life in the rest of the much poorer world.
Don't forget that the developed world is falling over itself to bring in never-ending waves of people who normally would have far smaller carbon footprints if they just stayed where they were. It's hard for me to take serious any climate proposal that doesn't at least acknowledge this basic fact.
"But we need them, what about population decline in developed countries?" Yes, what about it? That also lowers carbon emissions.
This is like assuming people in africa need telephone lines strewn to every home in order to have telecommunications. The developing world doesn't need oil. It needs solar panels and ever cheaper batteries.
The growth of energy use is mostly in countries that are industrializing/developing. Places like India/Indonesia/Vietnam/... are where most energy will be added and they'll all add coal.
That would be dumb of them to add one of the most expensive forms of energy
It depends on how you do it.
Supermarket tofu is around 3 kg of CO₂e per kg. If you fatten pigs in your backyard and butcher them on site you can get pork down to around 4 or 5. I do realize McDonald's isn't doing it that way though.
What's the point of this? You would need to take care of the pigs and have all the infra for that (fixed costs), and tofu still wins?
Because pork tastes better than tofu. It's the whole reason that tofu isn't more popular
For one thing, many people can't afford to feed their family tofu at supermarket prices.
Also, infra? Poor people just call it their yard.
Not many poor people have a yard
My point was that pork can compete with tofu under the right conditions.
Heck, unless you're riding your bike to buy groceries, you will spend more than the extra 1-2 extra kg in gas getting to the supermarket (3-4 miles per kg CO₂e)
In rural areas I’d guess having access to at least a little land is more common. Not that it necessarily makes the original idea practical.
>What's the point of this?
an internet's worth of bacon jokes imply the answer.
I'm surprised that chicken breast is that low in (water) pollution, beating lentils in the latter. Seems like the big takeaway here is really how awful beef is in comparison to basically anything else lol
It's a fun metric the author carefully crafted to justify his vegan/animal rights ideology. Personally, I value food that can provide the necessary micronutrients and macronutrients (including fat, which apparently the author thinks is inherently bad), so I'll continue eating meat and cheese.
There's no need to 'carefully craft a fun metric', if you're honest to yourself you'll notice that plant-based nutrition is the only sustainable way to feed billions of humans on this planet. But I'm curious, which micro- & macronutrients do you think are only available from meat and cheese?
Meat isn't a health food. Most Americans eat an unhealthy amount of meat. Especially red meat. You could probably eat half as much meat and not be in any danger of not getting enough macro nutrients.
Which macronutrients and micronutrients are those?
Calcium, iron, zinc, et al. To avoid deficiencies on a plant-based diet, you have to carefully manage your diet around them.
Anecdotally, my sister in law has been vegetarian for over a decade and just recently been diagnosed with anemia.
Perfect choice! Just try to keep beef at minimum, if you can, because it is the most damaging one for the enviroment.
you can have a look at all the underlying impact assessments for food here: https://brightway.eaternity.ch/
> We could all try and do a bit with our daily choices:
Another thing to do would be to not vote more and more for extremists. "It's not working right now, it cannot be worse so I will vote for the most extreme person that says I am doing everything right and foreigners are the problem" is easy, but counter-productive and wrong.
I still don't know what to answer to someone who says "anyway the government is completely incompetent" while being incompetent themselves at the very first opportunity they have to contribute: voting.
Not saying that it is going well right now (it's not). But saying "because it's not going well means that it cannot be worse and therefore I can vote for whoever" is... just idiotic.
This goes for competence, and also for morals: it seems in many countries we now vote in politicians that are massively and overtly corrupt with the reasoning that it won't get worse because previous politicians were somewhat corrupt and tried to hide it).
Unfortunately the party that claims government can't solve problems can point to the failures they create when they get power to prove their thesis.
From the report:
"Under current policies, only six G20 members (China, India, Indonesia, Russian Federation, South Africa and Türkiye) are assessed as likely to achieve their unconditional 2030 targets, while the assessment of the European Union is inconclusive. Overall, this suggests limited progress in narrowing implementation gaps across the G20."
"All G20 members except Argentina, Saudi Arabia and the United States of America have new NDCs with mitigation targets for 2035."
It is very important to add that not all targets were created equal in the agreement, that was a major part of the negotiation. Not saying anything else, just that a simple reading of that statement might make you come to an underlying conclusion that isn't correct.
Correct. For instance, still today China burns more coal than every other country combined. They are starting from a place that is so bad that even small improvements will look like huge gains.
Also, I read a few years back an explainer about China internal issues in the scope of energy generation. We westerners think that China is monolithic monarchy of sorts and everything "happens in China" is representative of the country average. Well, apparently it's not. According to that analyst, every province is semi-autonomous and reluctant to cede power to the central govt. or neighbors. So all the new fancy solar installations are logically in the low population western provinces, and connected to the grid there. And in the east there are still a lot of local coal generation. And eastern provinces are simultaneously way more populated, way richer and have way bigger modern crisis threats (housing, inflation, unemployment, job and study application saturation and over competitiveness etc.). So now the provincial govt. is facing a threat of losing both local power generation, profits from running a coal plant business, and the most important yet another job loss prospect from shutting down plants and all the related infrastructure - shipping, storage, management, distribution etc. Bear all costs and get zero gains.
So I suspect that there will be two mostly independent trends in China (and other industrial places like that) - solar installation will grow, but coal use won't be meaningfully cut without huge HUGE help from central and foreign powers at once.
The propaganda spilled since the 1970s by large cooperations and politicians had two effects. People understand the problem is huge, and worse, they feel they cannot do anything about this issue themselves.
What we tend to forget is that large changes in society tend to start with us. Try eating less meat, eat healthy food, reduce car and plane usage when possible, buy less stuff (especially online), these are things anyone can do (rich or poor). When you start, family members and friends might follow.
From there, more people will try to change their consumption, and when enough people do that, politicians that are willing to tackle these issues will be elected. And when politicians are elected at some point your government will take the right step. From there we go to countries and eventually a large part of the world will do what must be done to survive.
You want a better world? Start by improving your own life and health.
>You want a better world? Start by improving your own life and health.
Not trying to have a gotcha win here, but I don't agree with the sentiment that it falls on the individual. Here's why
"From 2016 to 2022, 80% of global carbon dioxide emissions were produced by just 57 companies"
https://climatecontroljournal.com/compared-to-individuals-ho...
This is feel-good bullshit. The thing that will actually make people stop burning so much fossil fuels is if gas costed $50 a gallon and everyone who drives a car for any reason is thinking about this number before they use their car. Which is absolutely the sort of state of affairs that large numbers of people - and not just in the rich world - would legitimately riot about.
Unfortunately, even if we exceed and then bring temperature back to 1.5 degree over preindustrial, the damage has already been done. Many ecosystem and species will be lost, and many of the feedbacks (for example arctic sea ice) have hysteresis in them which will not get us to the same state even though nominally our temperature will be lower again. And because of hysteresis, larger reduction in CO2 might be required to get us back to 1.5 degrees.
That's why all this CO2 capture and drawdown using some kind of unspecified, new technology, is such a distraction. Ideally we shouldn't release the carbon in the first place.
> the damage has already been done
"I lost a finger, the damage has already been done. No need saving my arm, you can go ahead and cut it".
Unless you meant "Damage has already been done, there is a lot we won't get back. And that's exactly why we should now fight to preserve what we can"?
CO2 capture is obvious greenwashing, just like electric personal cars. They're here to save industries, not the planet, I don't think anyone half serious believes anything other than that
Maybe, but cement manufacturing by itself is responsible for a staggering 8% of global co2 emissions. And we really don't have a viable option for replacing cement, and probably won't for a long time. Capturing and removing that co2 has a meaningful impact. Even if CCS were limited to just that one industry.
You could apply it to existing power plants for example. I could see a use there.
But don't use it as a justification for a new coal plant saying it's zero carbon now....
with fusion you would have enough energy to do it?
It always puzzles me when people think fusion is just infinite free energy. You're not just gonna have one fusion plant producing a billion zetawatts of electricity. Each fusion plant will likely produce roughly the same as a large nuclear plant. So we would need to build hundreds/thousands of them, it would take many decades to build them. Fusion reactors are extremely complicated machines.
And even if we did this, we would also need tens of thousands of carbon capture facilities, and the infrastructure to actually store the CO2 somewhere.
Carbon capture (from air) is just completely infeasible. It's not even remotely realistic. There is absolutely no way it will ever make a significant difference.
It’s pretty easy to see how electric personal cars make a difference even if the initial vehicle manufacturing process is indeed dirtier, and plenty of serious people consider them a part of the solution. CO2 capture also isn’t greenwashing, it’s just handwaving away problems with the idea that tech will somehow save us, which is also true for like… every single solution to this problem we’ve considered.
Both perpetuate the idea that we can just continue business as usual and that we'll find a magic solution later.
2 to 3 tonnes of metal and batteries to transport 75kg of meat and sit uselessly 98% of the time is not the optimal way to transport people, no matter how you look at it
"the damage has already been done" is dangerous wording, because it implies that we won't cause more damage. However, we will cause way more damage than has already been done!
CO2 emissions trading is greenwash. CO2 capture not necessarily so. It could be a useful tool, so long as it's not used as an excuse to launder other emissions.
Carbon offsets are greenwash. Emissions trading mostly works, because it's just about the government setting a quota and then letting people figure out who gets to use it.
CO2 emissions trade for about 50$/t. CO2 capture costs 500$/t. So, both are useless - it costs 10 times more to get the carbon out, why are we selling them so cheap, it costs 10 times more to get the carbon out compared to not emitting it, it will never be economical.
A while ago (years ago?) I read something about how carbon capture is so energy intensive that it doesn’t really help much. Is that still true?
I guess if you powered it with green energy, that’d be a net positive?
Yes, but in an indirect way. Direct carbon capture (DAC) is so energy intensive that it's only viable in places with 100% clean electricity, like Iceland. It's a non-starter in most countries.
However, places that have 100% clean electricity are often isolated. You need to ship in all equipment, which is made elsewhere, and fly in all personnel. This quickly adds up:
https://heimildin.is/grein/24581/climeworks-capture-fails-to...
Capturing carbon from the source, like a coal power plant, is much easier. But the capture rate is only 50% on average, so a coal power plant with carbon capture is still horrible while also ridiculously expensive, so it doesn't really make sense.
> That's why all this CO2 capture and drawdown using some kind of unspecified, new technology, is such a distraction. Ideally we shouldn't release the carbon in the first place.
But imagine your oil and gas...
One way to keep your expertise be valuable is to offer the solution to the externalities you produce. By proposing to store that externality using your drilling/rig assets. It's a win win, for the company, a loss loss for everyone else.
It was still worth it on the metrics most people care about: life expectancy, child mortality, poverty, food security. Cutting off cheap fossil energy decades earlier would have been far worse for humanity than the slight warming we're getting now.
On average, maybe yes. But in the rich world we also used a huge chunk of fossil fuel for relatively small marginal gains in quality of life (adding a fifth weekend shopping trip per year, buying a superyacht), and sometimes worsening life expectancy (driving too much, eating too much beef).
Why should I believe your assessment that a huge chunk of fossil fuel use by the rich world went to "relatively small marginal gains in quality of life"? I think they went to massive quality of life gains for huge numbers of people, and that suddenly removing fossil fuels as an energy source would be catastrophically bad for huge numbers of people, and not obviously worse than the effects of global warming over a comparable timeframe.
We could have just built nuclear power plants. Invested into the technology, built breeder reactors and all that. We wouldn't have had to sacrifice anything, except of course for the astronomical profits of oil and gas companies.
And sure this wouldn't have solved the entire problem, electricity generation only accounts for like 40-50% of CO2 emissions or so? But it would have made a huge difference, and allowed us to focus entirely on the other half of the problem.
And it's not "slight warming". 20,000 years ago the global average temperature was about 3 degrees celsius lower than the reference point. That was the last ice age. Today we are 1.5 degrees above the reference point, 4,5 above the ice age. In a few decades we'll be at 3 degrees above reference, 6 degrees above ice age.
The transition from ice age (-3) to the temperate climate that allowed humanity to thrive, took place over about 12,000 years. The transition from reference to +3 is taking place over about a century. And we won't stop at +3, it'll keep going. Already at 1.5 it's having huge profound effects.
Look at this chart, this should help you understand the severity of the situation. https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...
This is literally the end of the world as we know it. It's already well on its way. We are already seeing widespread crop failures, water scarcity, blistering heat waves, extreme weather etc. It will get much worse, this is just the beginning.
> That's why all this CO2 capture and drawdown using some kind of unspecified, new technology, is such a distraction. Ideally we shouldn't release the carbon in the first place.
This is in my amateur opinion, an absolutely bonkers and crazy stance. I can't understand why any pro-green person would affirm this.
There are two facts, (again, imo) one - all our emission reducing efforts would maybe slow their acceleration or in other way to frame it, maybe we collectively would cut tens percents of annual emissions. We, humanity, will a always emit a lot of CO2 from the sources we can't reduce without going full stone age. Fact two - there is a lot of CO2 and other GH gas in the atmosphere now and even more would be there tomorrow. We MUST remove it somehow. Like, there are literally two components - either we remove the insulator (CO2&Co) or we remove the energy (sun rays). We can't do either of course, yet.
The more greenwashing and muddying happens, with overfocus on cutting emissions while deliberately skipping RnD on the CO2 capture or sun shield tech, the more humans will be fucked in future.
Or to provide a different analogy. We are in a completely closed system here, an oven. Turning the regulator from III to II helps of course, but the meat will eventually cook either way, unless either the power is disconnected or the insulating door is opened.
I agree with the second paragraph. It seems as if some among the industry see a simple cash grab here.
I think its more they don't have to reduce their pollution output. They can just pump it all out as much as possible, to make as much profit as possible, and "hope" a magical reversal tech arrives at some point in the future.
It's basically no regulation, to only focus on profit.
It's the fossil fuel industry who is pushing for carbon capture (because they know it isn't viable). The fossil fuel industry is just running the tobacco company playbook.
The number #1 best thing we in the west can do to mitigate climate change is having fewer to no children.
Source:https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541
The problem is that having no children means having no skin in the game. Which defeats the whole purpose.
The climate change advocates have lost all their credibility by lobbying against nuclear. Because of their religious fanaticism Germany closed their nuclear plants and is compensating for it by burning coal. If this wasn't so tragic it would be hell of a comedy.
100%, we had a solution to the biggest source of emissions decades ago. The greens across Europe have done more damage to the environment than good.
Another issue is they’ve lost their credibility going all in on geopolitics (Palestine) and being anti development which makes it impossible to create green energy and denser energy efficient cities
There is strong opposition to nuclear energy in Germany, which I disagree with, but I don't think "climate change advocates" (whatever the heck they are) have anything to do with it.
> Because of their religious fanaticism Germany closed their nuclear plants
Must have missed when Merkel left the CDU and joined the Greens...
Centralized motivated groups have more political power than their "percentage" would suggest, that's why we have kosher/gluten/halal labels everywhere.
This kind of reasoning is exactly the reason why we're screwed. "I am smarter, it's because of them". "Look how good I am at criticising people without any nuance".
> The climate change advocates have lost all their credibility
If you think there is a need for "climate change advocates" at this point, you're a moron. Climate change is a scientific fact, it doesn't need advocates. It would be like criticising "gravity advocates".
> by lobbying against nuclear
Again that's a completely stupid take. A subset of the people you criticise lobbied against nuclear. And by the way nuclear energy does not magically solve all problems.
> If this wasn't so tragic it would be hell of a comedy.
What's tragic to me is that everybody is very keen on telling how everybody else is stupid, usually taking big stupid shortcuts showing that they are actually not better.
Sure, nuclear is a good tool that we should leverage. But the reality is that the situation is such that we need to change a bit of everything everywhere, and the first step to do that is to realise it, accept it and vote for it. What do people instead? Say "it's because of those other people, I am better, and I will now vote for an extremist because my lack of common sense tells me it cannot be worse".
> Sure, nuclear is a good tool that we should leverage. But the reality is that the situation is such that we need to change a bit of everything everywhere, and the first step to do that is to realise it, accept it and vote for it. What do people instead? Say "it's because of those other people, I am better, and I will now vote for an extremist because my lack of common sense tells me it cannot be worse".
It might be worth voting for an extremist if that extremist being in a position of power keeps people out of power who would otherwise work against nuclear power plants; even if the extremist himself doesn't care about nuclear power one way or the other.
History shows that very smart people and even groups of very smart people can do remarkably stupid things, pointing out their obvious errors is not a statement of intellectual superiority.
> What's tragic to me is that everybody is very keen on telling how everybody else is stupid
And yet your comment repeatedly tells this person how stupid they are, even going as far as calling them a moron. Take a step back.
This comment shows how much disinformed you are on that question.
The temporary transition to coal was studied long time ago and identified as the best solution even though it would increase CO2 for a small time. But in compensation it would allow to transition faster to green energy thanks to savings done on nuclear, hence overall reducing faster CO2 emission.
why would you have such a phase? why turn off nuclear before you have your renewables in place?
What about the savings, I thought nuclear was the cheapest form of energy
People are still talking about 1.5C at 2100 as if it's not some high fantasy? :) Wake up, it was greenwashing all this time. The question is rather are we lucky to have 3C by the end of the century, or the hot models are correct and we'll get 4-5C. That's the question. 1.5C... Phah! Fun joke :)
the thing with the climate goal is just an arbitrary number to the person on the street.
for us that come from poor countries - it fuels degrowth. you want us to shut down coal plants & yet you don't want us to trade with china.
even in rich countries such as Germany - cost of energy has been a factor in slowing down growth because bureaucrats said so. while private planes keep flying, good keep getting shipped from overseas.
china has enabled cheap solar - which in turn has enabled cheap access to electricity. china has enabled cheap electric vehicles. for a bunch of people in 'poor' or 3rd world countries - in the next few years their first cars will be chinese EVs not Japanese 2nd hands or other 2nd hands from western countries.
On my last vacation I came across a similar message on reddit[0] and it totally spooked me. I have been telling my wife I want to move as my area (at some point) will be flooded. I live in the Netherlands and when the icecaps have melted (WHEN not IF) I live in the wrong part.
[0] https://reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/1vejkf4/i_am_a_...
"Après moi, le déluge"
The problem is that people today do not have skin in the game for what happens generations down the line. No real consequences, little desire for actual change.
> The emissions gap is now a leadership gap. And the world is running out of time and excuses to close it.
The leadership of some countries, including the former "leader of the free world", fixed that by declaring global warming to be a hoax, so they don't need any excuses anymore and can just continue catering to their fossil fuel donors.
Can anyone provide a list of bad things that have happened because of climate change, genuinely curious and I want to learn from the experts here!
This is a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change
One difficulty you will encounter when looking into the effects of climate change is that you can't generally attribute individual events to it (or very rarely at least). Its effects are only really visible in more general (abstract) statistical measures (Just like me losing a coin flip doesn't mean the coin is weighted, but when i lose 8 out of 10 flips i will start getting suspicious)
Global average temperature has risen about a degree over the last century. That's a truly terrifying amount of energy. Habitats are shifting, forests are burning away in places where their current composition has become unsustainable, regions are becoming arid, permafrost is becoming less permanent.
Technically most of everything else is weather, not climate, do you want a list of bad weather events?
Billions of dollars have been spent undermining science and electing corrupt fascists because people with control of fossil fuel wealth didn't want to deal with reality and laws and democracy.
That may well kill more people than climate change. Hard to tell as both have the potential to spiral out into a variety of intertwining tragedies.
There are none. The planet is greener, even the Sahara is shrinking. The Great Coral Reef has just had its best 5 years ever. On average, crops produce more due to higher CO2 levels.
Pacific islands failed to sink. Hurricanes failed to become more frequent. Fewer people died due to cold temperatures (which kill far more people than hot temperatures).
So how high should we drive temperature in your opinion? Sounds like you do think it's rising, just that the effects are largely positive
This is a genuinely interesting question - if humanity had the technological capacity to set the global temperature at any value, what value should that be? Is there any reason to think that the temperature in place from the beginning of the Holocene to the beginning of widespread fossil fuel usage by humans is the best one?
I can't tell if this is sarcastic, or you're just lying?
> The planet is greener, even the Sahara is shrinking
The UK was baked brown in the heat and it was so bad it was visible by satellite, we had uncharacteristic wildfires all summer. Google has literally no idea what you're talking about by claiming the Sahara is shrinking, the best I can find is "maybe the expansion is slowing?"
> The Great Coral Reef has just had its best 5 years ever.
Apparently it had its most devastating coral bleaching event just 2 years ago, so I'm not sure this is true?
> On average, crops produce more due to higher CO2 levels.
I mean, yeah if you are into the average crop? People tend to like stuff like corn and coffee which are threatened by raised heat levels. With current heat levels we're projected to lose upwards of 1/5th the corn harvest by 2030.
> Pacific islands failed to sink.
I mean some of them did, like a decade ago, just none of the ones you care about.
> Hurricanes failed to become more frequent
Same frequency but wind force increases by water temperature, so a cat 1 hurricane like Rafael ends up a cat 3 hurricane due to climate change. I am seeing a pattern with your selective presentation of the facts.
> Fewer people died due to cold temperatures
Is that not because a large share of the world's old were taken out by COVID within the last 6 years? That is the group most likely to die to cold.
Yep, no consequences. Europeans didn't have heat waves this summer and they certainly didn't think of buying aircons this year.
For those who want the Emissions Gap Report the article is based on, here's the Executive Summary: https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/api/core/bitstreams/80aaab0e-2a...
And full report: https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/api/core/bitstreams/8819b586-8d...
I recommend putting the full report in your favorite LLM and asking questions as a start!
It's hilarious that the EU is busy putting tariffs on electric vehicles and blocking nuclear power... but they still call it an "emergency".
Nah, that is actually logical and helpful for ecology. Just in a roundabout way. EU is for now a spearhead in all things pro-green so to say, at least on paper. By protecting local economies via tariffs (foreign EVs, foreign uranium fuel rods etc.), EU will continue being a power block and continue influencing other countries to be more green too.
What is bad, is a the lack of a coherent and realistic green programs and climate forecasts in EU as a whole. There are no incentive programs to switch to expensive one time EV purchases and charger installations (I tried to research what what would it cost to install a personal charger in my freshly constructed 2024 apartment building parking in a big city, the AI app called me a fool, well almost(1)). There are no coherent plans to expand charging networks at a state or union levels.
There solar panels, V2G, B2G, multizone electricity meters, dynamic tariffs, incentives, all are either non-existent or very spotty and organized at local levels.
There are no union wide help to transition from coal, oil, gas to relatively greener energy.
No re-foresation incentives and little to no marine protection.
No preparation for a real 3C temperature hike by the year 2100, instead the fantasy 1.5C or 2C numbers are reiterated and the populace is lulled into thinking all will be well for their kids.
I can continue the list, but the picture is of incompetence and apathy really. A few token and inconsequential efforts are done, just enough for re-elections, and that's it.
1: "This is the classic "pioneer dilemma" discussed on Polish forums. If you pay the 3,000 PLN because you are the first, and next year Neighbor B and Neighbor C get EVs, it is deeply unfair for you to keep subsidizing the overall risk profile. To protect yourself, you must not sign a contract that binds you to a flat fee indefinitely." (c) generated by AI
The tariffs are on Chinese EVs only - that's right, EVs built in place that burns more coal each year than every other country combined.
We both know that China's coal production is not the reason the tariffs are in place
How is the EU blocking nuclear power? Also the tariffs are on Chinese EVs, not those built in the EU.
This is the energy commissioner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_J%C3%B8rgensen
But if it is a real emergency, surely we would just want any EVs we can get, to encourage building out the infrastructure for them.
> It's hilarious that the EU is busy
Hilarious compared to what exactly lmao? The US? China? Russia? TYhE GlObAl SoUtH? OPEC?
The world is a giant school playground where the bullies in charge are competing for #1 position on the goober eating contest while the school is burning
I both agree and disagree. The EU isn't worse than others. For example, it's basically the only place that's willing to replace coal with imported gas, which is a major economical sacrifice.
On the other hand, with the money the EU spends on climate measures, the results leave a lot to be desired. The EU has prioritized things like hydrogen, biofuels and carbon capture, which all have very little to show for.
If Europe had spent all that money on EVs and heat pumps, emissions would have decreased drastically while prices woundn't even go up. But that's not possible if you want to preserve old jobs. Then you have to do those stupid things that aren't viable, like e-fuels for cars.
I'm also not sure if replacing coal with gas did actually decrease emissions on the whole. The gas lobby is a large reason why electrification has stalled in Europe, while China's coal lobby helped electric trucks to reach 50% share last month.
This might shock you because it happens outside your social bubble, but there is an insane amount of people (double-digit percentages for sure) that is simply unwilling to make even the smallest sacrifice in order to mitigate climate change, and they vote accordingly.
That does not make climate change any less of an emergency, but it limits politically feasible countermeasures a lot.
When AGI is here we just have to ask how to fix it :)
42 yeah. But we already know what to do, why would AGI suddenly make us do that:D
Skynet won't have to bother launching a nuclear war. It will just sit and munch digital popcorn, waiting for humanity to fix the humanity 'problem'. A tiny speck of time in the fullness of things.
Darken the sky.
Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine. :)
I remember 10 years ago when there greentech was a thing and "carbon neutral" (by carbon credit shams or not) was a goal. I was a bit proud then. That has passed.
Now it's just about heating data centers as much as possible. Apparently climate is a solved problem. The tech CEO's children and grandchildren are safe again, and we can go back to focus on profits. /s
Tired of the complete inability of the human race to take in the Pale Blue Dot [1], and what it means. No one is coming to rescue your grandchildren. And it would be much easier for us to do something today, than them in 50 years. Actions compound over time: perhaps those actions should then be long-term positive.
Don't need AGI, we know how to fix it (nuclear), and have chosen not to, because nobody gave a fuck about the climate, it was never about global warming.
Nuclear is not an option, esp most countries with nuclear do import their uranium primarily from one country...
> The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable
Good. Now, let's drop that goal and go on.
At least in Europe, higher priority should be saving human lives by providing air conditioning and a climate-friendly environment instead of putting more money into climate money washing machines.
I'm sure temperature ceiling will just work like debt ceiling.
I would build some thousands of datacenters and ask AI how can we solve this problem, I'm sure this will fix the problem.
Just a reminder that the worse climate change gets, the larger the difference is that a single 0.1 degrees makes. 1.0->1.1 degree difference in global warming is barely noticeable, but 2.9->3.0 makes a huge difference.
So, paradoxically, the worse the situation gets, the larger our incentive should become to avoid yet another increase in global warming.
Wanting to control the temperature is the worst kind of thing we want.
why? We know that we influence it, but the direction is unfavourable. why its bad to want to control it in the right direction?
The question is... Was it ever viable?
I remember, around 2016, a european climate scientist saying that he had to fill up more forms and prove every experiment in the most strict way. The justification was that their conclusions could have economical repercussions. The results of their experiments were always a few years late because of that.
Welcome to the "absence of economical repercussions" world.
Yes, a simple carbon tax could have been phased in over time. We already had nuclear and trains and insulation etc. and we now know from our present (their future) that solar, wind, heat pumps, EVs are cost effective.
Turns out the whole problem was politics, not science or technology or economics.
This is the same question I've asked myself. One country sacrifices its entire energy production in favor of green alternatives, while the rest of the world doesn't. It doesn't even move the needle. It's just a pitiful way to fail.
The paradigm was:
Renewables will be that fast in roll-out and much cheaper and then other countries will follow the path.
(which is funny, since China installed more solar in 2024/2025 than US+EU combined - so for them its working, in the beginning they were adptors, now they became shapers; same for africa: now a real option to get cheap energy, the only region where solar is more expensive than it should be, is actually EU + US)
I've seen the consequences of the shift to renewables here in Spain: entire ecosystems destroyed, drought everywhere, wildlife displaced, and native plant species disappearing because of wind turbines and solar farms.
I'm in favor of renewables, but at the individual level (your own home). Meanwhile, the Spanish government has made several moves to ban personal electric vehicles like EUCs and electric scooters, which only pushes people back toward gas-powered vehicles.
Everything is being done wrong.
do you know of any politician in charge who is doing anything/whatever-at-least-one-thing right?
I agree, countries that do not adhere to CO2 targets should be heavily sanctioned. They are killing us, after all.
There was a book on the overshoot nonsense a few years ago (literally called Overshoot) that talks about the make believe story of carbon capture and how during the negotiations for CAP in the 2000s and 2010s those were included as otherwise the US would have agreed to no plan at all. And even if something like removing carbon at scale through forestry, burning, and co2 capture was ever so viable who would pay for that. That only works with emissions trading (which every other month gets watered down because muh energy bills, muh aviation cost, etc) or some “energy costs nothing” mythological tech. We are fucked and while there are many who care the vast majority of people oscillates between too dumb, too selfish, and too manipulated to ever be willing to give up today’s comforts for a happier tomorrow.
If anyone cared about the Paris Agreement nuclear adoption would have been significantly more rapid, but the fact is, it was never about climate.
We will continue extracting absolutely everything we can from Earth, at whatever the cost ... with the hope that technology will one day save us from our weakness.
And, yes, technologyy may "save us", but there are many different definitions of what that will look that ... some may be horrendous for the majority, but none of them will inconvenience those making the most significant decisions.
2 degree global warming means 5-6 degree more in new york (as the average mean temperature is meassured also above oceans/mountaints etc.) - and you can now ask yourself if you still want to live in NY when its 5-6 degree warmer than today?
Since Covid no one seems to care that much any more.
Even the Greens party in Australia is more interested in social issues than environment.
"New goal: not exceed 2°C, then bring the temperature back down to 1.5°C"
It kind of feels people have given up. I'm working on a startup that aims to replaces aviation (the most difficult emissions to avoid) with night trains in Europe (currently economically uncompetitive). It's an obvious impact story, but impact appears to be "out".
Nice concept. I caught European Sleeper last week, my first time on a night train. It was ok but I'd like something better if I was using it regularly.
It's a tough time to do something about climate change. Short-termism is very attractive right now.
Well, European sleeper is an operator -- their ability to improve the technology/interior is limited, it's a huge task just to keep running.
We are not an operator, so we will work with operators, basically adding our railcars to their trains.
The problem is the people you would need to convince. You'd be selling to people who largely won't care and don't want to be inconvenienced.
I agree. I was looking at a night train from Milan to Lecce. It costed waaay more than flights+ the extra night in the hotel. Crazy if you think about it
IIRC night trains are kinda making a comeback - they are quite convenient that you can travel over night & wake up in your destination. Otherwise you would spend a day traveling & would need 1-2 days of accommodation on top of that.
Yeah, why _are_ night trains uncompetitive? Is it just so simple as "air travel doesn't have externalities priced in"?
Beds as opposed to seats mean fewer passengers per train carriage, so the fixed cost of operating the train is shared among fewer tickets.
You can make one trip per day with a night-train, whereas a seated train runs 16-20hrs per day. So again, fixed cost of the train existing is shared between far fewer ticket sales.
Then you need to store the train during the day, and you need to securely park the train when it arrives at its destination at night (a normal train yard isn't secure enough if you have a hotel full of people, and a train station usually needs all of its platforms).
The capacity really is the main issue, in terms of cost.
The second is lack of privacy, in terms of attractiveness. 6-people-per-cabin couchette cars have sufficient capacity, but the market isn't quite there anymore.
We basically want to get as many cabins as possible in railcar (to reduce cost), but they're are comfortable and private (to increase attractiveness). With these levers, you can change the operating margin from -15%..-10% to around 10%.
Hundreds of kilometres of good quality electric railway infra is expensive to maintain. And by good quality I mean capable of relatively decent speeds like say 120-160 km/h. With airports you need to maintain lot less.
I think last time I looked it was that jet fuel is exempt from taxes in the EU? but trains aren't so flights are artificially cheap
Jet fuel is barely taxed and most touristic places subsidies the tickets to bring in the consumer cash cows.
Yes but the discussion is about places in Europe that a night train can reach, are these price-subsidizing tourist places among them?
Exactly. Outcompeting this is hard when you basically don't pay taxes for fuel.
> night trains in Europe
That company from austria seems quite successfull, IIRC?
>“Every additional fraction of a degree and additional year of warming above 1.5°C raises the risk of irreversible changes including in ice sheets, permafrost carbon, ocean circulation and coral systems, along with devastating human impacts,” the report states.
The mention to coral systems, from an ignorant perspective, seems weirdly specific to me. Kinda like "civilization will collapse and the price of sweaters will go up".
Does their disappearance have indirect consequences I'm not aware of?
Sometimes called rainforests of the sea, shallow coral reefs form some of Earth's most diverse ecosystems. They occupy less than 0.1% of the world's ocean area, about half the area of France. Yet, they provide a home for at least 25% of all marine species ...
Aside from being home to a lot of seafood they also play a not fully understood part in the breeding of a good number of other seafood in ways not yet fully understood.
ie. Lose the reefs .. and then we find out how our supply of seafood is impacted.
> Coral reefs are some of the most diverse and valuable ecosystems on Earth. Home to over 4,000 species of fish, corals, and other marine life, coral reefs cover only 1% of the world’s oceans, but provide habitat for at least 25% of the world’s marine life, with many reef species still to be discovered.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_corals/cora...
> Coral reefs have an estimated global value of £6 trillion each year, due in part to their contribution to fishing and tourism industries and the coastal protection they provide.
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/quick-questions/why-are-coral...
Not sure what consequences you are aware of but the key point with corals is loss of biodiversity. It's (I believe) the tipping point that goes at the lowest temperature rise.
It’s the marine equivalent of “forests die worldwide.” You might not know why you need them, but you’ll probably miss them when they’re gone
People really like coral reefs. "Civilization will collapse and this baby kitty will die."
Coral systems are a major part of aquatic life, so you'd lose a ton fish, a major food source.
You'd also lose erosion protection on coasts, plant systems like Mangroves (e.g. CO2 sinks).
Additionally, the biodiversity in coral systems has been a rich source of biochemicals, think Alzheimer treatments, cancer and arthritis research.
replace "corals" with "temperate forests" to realize the scale of affected animal populations/species
corals are along the coasts all around the tropics and they are food chain, from plants to herbivores to predators
We are burning the only planet we have in a contest to be king of the ashes.
Who gives a fuck whether the US or China win the AI race if they both burn tons of hydrocarbon to get there? Either way, the race itself will fuck the planet up worse than either victor would.
Same about all the dumb wars of conquest, Ukraine, Iran. Who gives a fuck over those lines on a map if the map itself is on fire? All the burning of oil depots, all the explosives used are all an assault on humanity itself, not just on whatever state construct.
I have a growing suspicion that this is the Great Filter. Dumb, self-important squabbles that destroy the material basis for a species' survival in an attempt to gain control instead of cooperation.
Maybe we'll manage to launch some datacenters, then at least there'll be a backup of the database of how much each person's net worth is, floating above the dead planet...
And if we have several of them in space, they'll use blockchain, of course.
Let us put the Servers with the Blockchain into Space, so we can be sure the net worth status is stored really really save? :-D
Never saw Game of Thrones? Which maybe should have ended with everyone dying?
I honestly hoped the end would be the White Walkers just coming and killing everyone because they were too distracted and petty to mount a united defense. It would've made for a much stronger metaphor and fit in much better with the dark vibe and unexpected killing off of audience favorites that made the show a success in the first place.
I feel like the Disneyfied ending we got instead really ruined the show for me.
You're right but you're on the wrong corner of the internet for such take
Its the only corner where one can try to talk some sense into some of the people directly involved in this process.
The self-professed unideological technical minds that pride themselves on first-principle thinking.
The walking contradictions that fail to recognize that it is in fact their ideology that is pushing us to this outcome, based on said first principles (thermodynamics ffs!) they do not actually take into account.
Sense isn't common.
Even in this forum you won't find consensus on what to do, it's all complaining and grandstanding.
I don't have a solution, but what I do know is that any idea here that doesn't involve human psychology and motivation will never suceed.
Yes lets do it by continuing to outsource the pollution to China and deindustrialize Europe.
Cut the nuclear, add the imported solarpanels and experience the joy of 10x electricity prices.
Blame the consumer for not turning the kettle off during peak hours and make sure you give tax breaks to Google and BiGData to open a couple more datacenters that use more power than a average city.
Oh, ban combustion engines, fuck up every batteryfactory by thinking its enough to buy the Make-Your-Own-Battery-Kit on Aliexpress.
Wow such strategy.
Europe's strategy has indeed been stupid, but not for the reasons you write.
Some parts of the energy transition are profitable, like EVs and heat pumps. This is where Europe dropped the ball.
Other parts are unprofitable, like hydrogen. This is what Europe has prioritized, without anything to show for it.
Then there are the ugly parts, like most carbon capture or importing virgin palm oil mislabelled as used cooking oil. Those things don't even decrease emissions. Again, Europe has focused too much on this.
If Europe would simply have banned combustion engines and gas boilers, emissions would have decreased drastically while prices would also decrease. Alas, Europe prioritized bad stuff instead.
"simply ban combustion engines and gas boilers" - there's nothing simple about this
I know i’ll be downvoted, but at this point whatever.
I largely stopped caring about these announcements and also about this initiatives.
The reason is that we see these pushes but at the same time we see no real initiative, with all the burden left on individuals with little to no power to make meaningful changes.
Some examples:
1. Travel: I’m constantly told that travel by airplane is bad and should be avoided and to prefer travel by train. Yet my last trip (milan <-> munich) was 1h for ~75€ each way via airplane BUT 8h and ~200€ each way via train. And this before even pulling in the “rich people private planes” talking point.
2. I still see essentially zero push towards widespread nuclear energy for proper electrification
3. Cars keep getting fucking larger and larger. It’s crazy to see how many SUVs i see everyday burning gas with just one person on board. Electric cars don’t really solve this issue because electricity generation is not yer 100% clean.
4. I still don’t see a general push towards unified public transportation. I don’t even want it to be completely free but FUCK i don’t want to deal with three different providers if i ever dare to get out of my city while staying within the region. God forbid i decide to go to another region somewhere outside a main city.
5. I still don’t see a general push towards work from home. I live in a city large enough to have public transportation but I know very well this is the exception and not the rule. Most people burn gas and emit co2 to unwillingly go to the office to do the same things they’d do from home while also bringing their company laptop from home. This is beyond moronic.
And don’t star blaming capitalism or whatever: i don’t see any meaningful push in the right direction from either side of the political tribune.
So whatever, shit is fucked up and stuff, we’re getting extinct, such is life i guess.
Stop caring because not seeing initiatives is like inverting responsibilities.
Initiatives will come if people care.
Never in history the solution to major crisis came from politicians or alike.
Even if your contributions is small, it doesn't prevent you to do them. By which extent is a personal choice, but personally I chose to be consistent with myself and my values, and I don't care about the choices of others.
Regarding airplane, I much prefer an 8h+5min trip in train than a 1h+2h trip in plane because comfort is way better and you are not dealt with like cattle. Of course I wish the price advantage would be different than nowadays.
Electric cars are not yet the perfect solution, but they are already way better than fuel cars. As for the rest, my government says its the way to go, then I go.
Note that in GIEC report, nuclear (fission or fusion) was not identified as a major solution to climate change (only contribute 10% of the whole). The main contributors were green energies.
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To be fair: setting it as a temperature range was very stupid from the get go. Also, to not consider the economic impact, was also stupid, and the CO2-tax is also beyond idiotic since it creates a fake-economy where people buy the right to pollute. That runs counter to the idea of green energy.
I think one should abandon the Paris Agreement and label it as the failure as it was. However had that does not mean that green energy should be abandoned. There need to be more incentives towards green energy (see how Putin uses gas as means to amplify his genocidal activity against Ukrainians). Meaning, companies that verifiably transition towards more renewable, need to get positive incentives to go towards that and maintain it at all times. The CO2 tax should also be eliminated without compensation. And there also has to be more realism - it makes no sense to cut down an economy, producing more unemployment in the process. It has to be a cohesive unit.
Not sure which economic impact you mean when the ultimate economic impact of climate catastrophe will be the complete destruction of the global economy.
This is not hyperbole. If nothing changes that's a completely realistic outcome within 50 - 100 years.
> complete destruction of the global economy. This is not hyperbole. If nothing changes that's a completely realistic outcome within 50 - 100 years
Saying the global economy will be completely destrued in 50 - 100 years does indeed sound hyperbolic, FWIW.
Abandon the Paris agreement and then what? International politics won't allow for anything better to be put in its place for the foreseeable future.
> Also, to not consider the economic impact
It's going to be the least of your problem
Its the other way around. Climate is going to be least important of your problems if you cant put food on the table.
Climate catastrophe will be the reason there's no food on the table.
This is already happening to crops like cocoa and coffee, and crops like maize and wheat are next.
If we're too stupid as a species to understand this, we can just let Darwin clean this up and give the planet another chance with different species in a few million years or so.
> Climate is going to be least important of your problems if you cant put food on the table.
??? We're already having record low crop yields CAUSED by climate change right now my dude. You won't have food on your plate BECAUSE of climate change
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We could always make more war in the Middle East (and Europe) and then 1,5°C would be totally viable. /s
Seriously now: Attempts to cut fossil fuel supply are worthless unless done en masse and in big scale - any single country doing it will just spur investment in another country. Since the world will not come to a truly binding agreement, the only thing that can be truly regulated is demand which can be regulated locally without necessarily increasing demand elsewhere.
The big new ticket is data centers, which strongly tend to use fossils due to SLAs and regulations. This can be fixed by new regulations, but only if people act now before the new approvals and builds are done.
Well cutting is happening right now and very large scale. USA is kinda laggard here but eg new electric car sales is up 70% in Europe or new Solar installations are up 50% in Africa.
Your examples are examples of cuts on the demand side. They satisfy current transport/electricity demand with a means that costs much less carbon, so fossil demand goes down.
(By contrast, a supply cut is 'not developing new fossil resource cuz someone else will buy it and burn it', which is obviously a dead end).
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You mean more datacenters wasn't a move in the right direction?