We just passed 1.5C, we will almost certainly pass 2C by about 2035 and its going to be catastrophic. Far from decreasing CO2 emissions we are not only continuing to increase but doing so at an increasing rate. We will be extinct a large number of species on the planet at this rate, likely 50% or more and we run the real risk of collapsing civilisation if we don't change urgently.
But we sure did make a great profit on those datacentres so worth it to destroy the planets habitats.
I would bet a very large amount of money that we will not have climate change induced civilizational collapse by 2050. Or 2100, if I'm around to see it.
I too will bet a large amount of anything that will only be valuable if civilization does not collapse that civilization will not collapse, even though my pessimistic nature inclines me to expect civilization's collapse.
Offering to make a bet and put some skin in the game is sometimes a very sincere and persuasive expression of confidence in one’s position. In this case, what you’re offering will be valueless if you lose the bet.
I think you're probably right, but there's an enormous gap between "things start to go really bad for everyone around us" and civilization collapse.
Remember, WW2 didn't bring civilizational collapse. In fact one could argue it even accelerated industrial development. Doesn't mean much to those who perished.
Well, if we lower the bar to "Would something like WW2 happen again?" then I'm not comfortable betting against it. After all, humanity has already managed to do that on its own without any help from the climate!
You can safely bet agains any large scale war like WW2. We no longer have the money or resources for that. We can't build hundreds of thousands of airplanes, tanks, ships, guns, etc. This doesn't include nukes. We have lots of those. But any nuke war will be very very short, over in a day, not like WW2.
Climate crisis and WW2 do not compare. Many people died in WW2, but entire animal and plant species were not wiped out.
We're killing what we eat (and what we eat is nurtured by) at a rapid speed, at scale. This will first show in bearable price increases (as it already does with coffee and cocoa) and only get worse from there, think famine (in regions where this has not happened in a lifetime).
Good luck with keeping a civilization 'stable' when people are hangry at scale.
And the worst part is: While war can be ended, un-extincting is not a solved problem at all.
There are a bunch of confident predictions like yours that I feel ignore higher-order effects. Climate change won't make the earth uninhabitable, but it will cause more frequent droughts and other disasters, driving up food prices and causing a lot more climate migration from poor countries, which is already causing fatal societal autoimmune reactions in much of the first world. Additionally, for a while I thought the stories about people deciding not to have children because of climate change were an exaggeration, but it's now widespread enough that it's clearly a real trend which will probably accelerate as climate change drives CoL up further, which in turn is a huge headwind on civilization.
I think I would take the opposite side of your bet, maybe not at even odds but not at terrible ones either.
Personally I think we could end up like the old SF series Incorporated. 95% of the worlds population living in hellish conditions, 5% living a great life.
Yeah. That was really presicent :-) I especially liked the scene where the main protagonist commuted to work from his nice gated community far out there into downtown, and from the inside it looked all nice and park-like along the highway. Then it zoomed out, like in a video game. Turns out it was all vr-like projection. Slums! Nothing but slums :-)
OTOH why referring to something almost nobody knows, when it's basically the same shit in 'The Expanse" for most of the people on earth? They even have worthless UBI and free meals, and it's an absolute shithole in spite of that.
Civilization collapse for the temperate zones of the Globe, probably not, but civilization collapse for parts of Africa and Central Asia, most likely. Temperatures are getting out of hand right now, with 50+ Celsius happening more and more. The world is not ready to handle hundreds of millions of climate refugees, if these people need to leave their countries in order to be able to survive.
I think at some point everyone must face the fact that they're not on this planet by themselves.
You forget that the people in the areas I mentioned are in the vast majority also poor. Are you going to pay for robot mounted air conditioning for them?
Depends on how you classify the collapse of civilisation.
It seems highly plausible that there will be a large exodus of humans from previously habitable zones as the temperatures increase and access to food and water become highly variable. Some areas will likely still have access to decent agricultural conditions (e.g. greenhouses can help to control the local climate in order to grow food), but there will undoubtedly be increased conflict over dwindling resources.
Hydroponics is probably an answer. Controls for water loss and more importantly - contamination. If people going to jump onto longevity bandwagon like Bryan Johnson we’ll want to minimise heavy metal contamination. And if population stops growing we’ll need to live (and work) far longer to sustain our quality of life.
This is an incredibly short sighted and ignorant view. If you live close to the equator, the climate is visibly changing and is becoming borderline deadly.
> We will be extinct a large number of species on the planet at this rate, likely 50% or more and we run the real risk of collapsing civilisation if we don't change urgently.
> We will be extinct a large number of species on the planet at this rate, likely 50% or more
99.9% of species are already extinct, the fossil record is huge. I get that people don't like change, but species going extinct doesn't really move the needle much. That is what they do. Every species eventually goes extinct, species going extinct isn't much of a motivator to go around making humans suffer. We can't stop species going extinct but we can make people comfortable.
And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. If we've got cheap energy then pretty much any problem is solveable and most of the cheap energy production is coming out of the country with the most fossil fuel plants.
This is an absolutely unhinged take. We're facing civilizational collapse because we couldn't be arsed to stop burning fossil fuels, not because we didn't have other options. We've known how to do solar, wind, and nuclear for decades, we've known about anthropogenic climate change for decades, we've known the risks, and we've done absolutely nothing about it. This is a problem of will, not capacity.
Edit, because I'm guessing the "civilizational collapse" line's going to catch the response, instead of the "will, not capacity" part:
Pick any one of:
* Sea levels rise by 2-3ft
* The jet stream breaks down
* The north atlantic current breaks down
* Large swaths of the globe between, say, +/-33deg off the equator experience heat waves sufficient to make being outside more than ~30 or so minutes unprotected a life threatening event for normally healthy individuals multiple times per year (note these areas of the planet contain several billion people, and not the rich ones).
* Climates change sufficient to move productive agricultural zones substantially outside of where they've been for roughly the entire industrial area, causing regular crop failures and unpredictable food prices
* Large scale droughts and flooding become a regular event
* Category 5 becomes the low side of what we'd expect a hurricane to hit
And walk through the political, economic, and social ramifications of it, and then realize we're looking at all of them - and we're already seeing the beginnings of them _today_.
It's not clear to me how any of these lead to civilizational collapse. That's equally unhinged doom fetishization. There is an incredible amount of resiliency baked into our society, and resourcefulness baked into our biology. Pick any one of those and explain the steps to, and what exactly is meant by, "collapse."
I'm not arguing against environmentalism. I'm arguing for humanity and against doom prophesies. We are the descendants of the survivors of the last cataclysmic instant-hellfire-and-brimstone extinction event, and we've only gotten more robust since.
Ok, let's say US Agricultural production drops in half - I don't mean prices double, I mean for every two tons of produce we produce today, we produce one ton in this scenario. What do you think that looks like for our country? How do you think we adjust to that? Do you think it looks like the same place that it does today? Note too that this is not an uncorrelated change - there's no "somewhere else" to get food here.
Let's say that India faces the same problem - that's a nuclear armed state. How does that play out?
Remember the power outage in Texas? By and large, that was because Texas didn't have its grid hooked up to the rest of the country - but how many different areas do you think need to be facing the same conditions before we knock out the power across a region we can't laugh at for a substantial amount of time? What happens if we have to deal with that on a regular basis?
People think "civilizational collapse" is "we're now hunter-gatherers" - typically, it means "the existing state apparatus falls apart, the wealth and health of the people diminishes significantly, and what was a previously recognizable culture and lifestyle is no more. Think "Roman Empire circa 450CE" - that's what we're facing. Yes, there will be humans in 100 years - pending that India question, of course - but that's not the victory condition here.
I mean, I was asking you to supply the "what happens then" part. That's my point, most doom prophecies seem to take the form of:
1. Scary event
2. ???
3. Collapse
I think it does just kind of come down to an innate optimism vs. pessimism. Nobody really knows how any given scenario plays out, it's too complex to predict and could hinge on some tiny little detail or singular event. I look at the Texas thing, or Covid, as evidence of, no big deal, we kept on truckin, pretty much business as usual.
What was the cause of the agricultural issues? How do we know there isn't a solution? We do rationing, we curb new births, we find alternate ways to produce, we optimize the system that was lazy when there was excess, we mobilize everything we have to solve the problem. Yeah it becomes kind of a wartime effort, things aren't exactly 100% as they were, but cultural expectations normalize and adapt and go in new directions. Sometimes it just feels like a fear of change, of the unknown, if you ask anyone today yeah they would not choose to give this and that up but when necessity calls for it you adapt pretty quickly. I still don't see how we get from "food is more scarce right now" to "state apparatus falls apart."
And just to be clear, I am all for efforts to prevent these outcomes. I'm not saying fuck it who cares. I'm just saying fear is the mind-killer.
There is no 2. There is: 1. Scary events (plural) 2. Collapse
> What was the cause of the agricultural issues?
Weather. Possibly weather + water.
> How do we know there isn't a solution?
There is, we can't afford it: Hurricane-proof greenhouses for all crops everywhere.
> We do rationing, we curb new births,
How? Like managing COVID, only for food and sex this time? OMG! You'll have civil war in every city, town and village, which will cripple production even further => faster collapse.
> we find alternate ways to produce
Yeah, it's called subsistence agriculture [1] after 99% of the population dies of famine and crime (killed for their food).
> we optimize the system [...]
What system? There is no system anymore.
> we mobilize everything we have to solve the problem
Guns, we mobilize lots of guns. Those damned farmers won't work hard enough! We'll make them work!
Let me paint a more clear picture:
Adverse weather events => lots of crops destroyed => news inflated scary, as they usually are => huge price increase even before harvest time (of what remains) => hoarding => less food to buy, even higher prices => more news => desperate hoarding => even less food to buy => crime for food from warehouses/stores => even less food to buy => crime for hoarded food => people killed => more scary news (for real this time) => cities run out of food => mass migration from cities to farm country => pillaging of remaining crops, harvest by non-farmers in destructive/wasteful ways => even less food => even more desperate crime for food => mass death
Somewhere in that chain, the army intervenes, which hoard food for themselves first, are unable to manage efficient distribution of food to everyone, kill and get killed by hungry mobs => more death and news.
There is, we can't afford it: Hurricane-proof greenhouses for all crops everywhere.
We can definitely afford it. We can cut out the livestock trophic level for a huge reduction in need. We're eating a lot of basic hardy crops. Are we talking about a scenario where this happened suddenly? If it's just climate change we will have so much time, we're not just going to wake up and be in an inferno. Will we be underprepared, will there be unfortunate decisions and conflicts, yes, but I think Covid was evidence that a lot of people are willing to come together for humanity and that was't ever an existential threat, deaths were low and largely already immunocompromised people. We proactively manufactured a crisis to avoid the real crisis.
How? Like managing COVID, only for food and sex this time? OMG! You'll have civil war in every city, town and village, which will cripple production even further => faster collapse.
This is where it's like...I can't prove you wrong, but what evidence is there of that? The evidence we have from Covid and previous epidemics and wars, is that people didn't descend into chaos. You can point to brutal savagery in all cases but by and large society pitches in for society and manages to triumph over bad actors. "What happens if it's worse," sure, but there's just not a lot of basis to assume this asymptotic anomaly that doesn't have any true priors (have parts of civilization broken down or gone backwards or gone through tragic periods? 100%).
I don't belive that government reserves anywhere in the world are enough for a really bad year if it ever happens globally. It doesn't have to be a global hurricane or meteor hit. It's enough for floods in some places, drought someplace else, plant pathogen somwhere else, etc. A combination of factors, just all in the same year.
Sure, some people come together in a crisis, but new generations are more "me first" than older people. I belive that somewhere there is threshold where people forget their altruism, the snowball starts rolling and then nothing can stop it.
99% of the population dies of famine and crime (killed for their food).
This is just irrational. What precedent or basis is there for this? There have been any number of disastrous crop seasons from ancient Egypt to the US Atlantic. Why didn't any of them result in 99% of the population dying?
Today our knowledge and capabilities around food production are astronomically better. Honestly any kind of major food shortage seems farfetched. As soon as there is any serious trouble, we'll be spinning up whatever we need to, wherever we need to. Our capacity for food production far outstrips our needs, even with our wasteful and luxurious ways. Early settlers in the US were just straight freezing and starving and dying en masse because they did not have the capacity to produce more food, and they managed to keep going and not kill each other.
Why didn't law and order meaningfully start breaking down during Covid? There were incidents of bad behavior here and there. But the vast majority of people took a stance no worse than "let's just get through this." The runaway chain reaction of violence is not supported.
> I mean for every two tons of produce we produce today, we produce one ton in this scenario. What do you think that looks like for our country?
Well, the ~33% of food that gets wasted in the US would probably need to be handled a lot more carefully. Probably the obese people would need to eat less. And the strategy of growing the population every year through migration might need to be rethought if more farmland can't be found. Plus maybe there'd need to be more fertiliser produced. That involves fossil fuels.
The US has an explicit strategy of growing the population every year. That is a strategy that eventually leads to famine. Pointing out that global warning might lead to famine is less scary than pointing out that business as usual certainly leads to one - the poulation of the US doubled since 1950 and that is equivalent to halving the food production per person. In fact, letting natural population decline take hold would solve both problems and let the smaller population enjoy higher living standards.
> Let's say that India faces the same problem - that's a nuclear armed state. How does that play out?
They're switching over to industrial farming as far as I'm aware, they're probably going to be fine. Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_India looks like a 50% reduction in farmland would knock them back to 90s levels of production efficiency, and they were mostly ok in the 90s. That is value not calories though, doing a precise estimate is probably more than I can manage for a comment.
> Remember the power outage in Texas?
Civilisation in Texas didn't get anywhere near to a collapse. I'm no expert on 450CE Rome, but from what I do know it looked nothing like modern Texas. I wish I could trade for problems like that and enjoy Texan electricity prices. I don't mind having to be ready for an emergency, that is already something that I need to do. Texas got a good deal on that one.
---
I want to stress here that I'm on board with the idea that these are all catastrophic risks that could end badly. But that is business as usual for humanity, we ignore a lot of catastrophic risks on an average day. These are all things we've faced before and faced anyway without the climate changing at all. Cheap energy is the best bet to manage those risks and turning away from it is madness.
The biggest impact to consider is the disruption to food production.
Predictable climate is key to keeping everyone fed. Random droughts, freezes, and unlivable temps will have pretty notable impacts on our ability to produce food.
Will we continue to be able to produce enough food for the world? Who knows. But that's the thing that has me most concerned. If there's a doomsday related to climate it will be that.
Disruption to food production makes it more expensive. We use ~all the land to produce food not because we need to, but because that's the cheapest way.
Greenhouses can produce several orders of magnitude more food per acre than dryland mechanized farming does. (Greenhouses are just one example, there are lots of other ways to produce food more expensively). If we lose ~half of US food production capacity due to climate change we don't halve food production, we switch to more expensive production methods.
Increased food prices might collapse poor societies, but you're going to need a lot more than that to collapse rich societies.
And how long does it take to do that? What do our reserves look like? Where are those new greenhouses? Who pays for the food? How do we adjust our food system around that? How long does _that_ take? How many restaurants, shops, farmers go out of business? What happens to them? How does the economy shift around this? We already have people starving today, how many more do we add in this scenario?
I might ask you to tweak your model as well..."collapse of civilization" is such an extreme, dramatic, far-reaching term, people are always going to latch onto that. It's sensationalism. I would describe what you're talking about as "widespread suffering and hardship" more akin to a world war.
What do you define as “civilization”? Is it culture, norms, practices, a lifestyle, an economy, basic assumptions about the availability of goods and services and health care and medicine, basic assumptions about government, and norms and standards thereof? Is it literally every part of your life that you live every day?
It's more about the definition of collapse. By your definition civilization collapsed during World War 2.
Generally a large structure that has collapsed is hopelessly, irreparably broken - capable of performing near 0% of its function. It can't recover, it's not limping along in some form, it is "totaled" and you have to clean up the pieces and start completely over.
> Greenhouses can produce several orders of magnitude more food per acre than dryland mechanized farming does.
If we climate control them and light them. Then yes. It also depends on the crop being grown. That takes electricity.
There are many crops that simply aren't well suited to greenhouses. Primarily because they are nutrient thin. Those are popular crops that people and livestock eat.
And, importantly, we don't have those greenhouses built yet. Not even a fraction of a percentage of our food comes from them today. It's possible that we can make the switchover, but that will take decades of build out.
The other thing to consider is we won't really have much warning before we need these greenhouses. About the only thing that will trigger action here with the way society is structured is famine. Importantly, capitalism will work against wanting to produce these greenhouses as famine will kick up prices and traditional farming will remain the cheapest way to produce food. Plenty of large corporate farmers will be happy to just continue raising prices rather than build out.
Greenhouse is the extreme. There are many intermediate options farmers have to increase yields that they currently don't use because they are too expensive.
Using greenhouses to prevent famine is a nice idea in theory, but in practise the world has had many famines since the introduction of greenhouses.
Realistically, it's a problem with food distribution whereby the richest countries can attempt to purchase food from alternate supplies and the poorest countries simply starve.
2-3 seasons instead of one, less losses to pests and diseases. All while it’s far cleaner from heavy metals, uses less water, less fertiliser, doesn’t pollute environment.
Crazy we don’t do this already. It’s a bit of like ICE vs EV.
Even during the worst collapses, massive species extinctions took centuries or milleniums. Doing it in a couple of decades instead is unprecedented.
Species extinctions are insignificant if evolution and migration can allow other species to fill niches left behind. This is the first time extinctions are happening faster than evolution. And while migration is significantly disrupted by infrastructure.
As to your second comment, solar is the cheapest energy.
Yes, and some dinosaurs are still alive today. We call them birds. The environment of the earth was still radically altered in an instant, and our ancestors were the winners.
Phew, you made me feel more optimistic about the world. Our current extinction event is comparable to one where a literal huge asteroid hit the planet :-)))
I mean, I do actually find solace in the fact that extinction events in general can create new conditions for new forms of life, and that one in particular paved the way for mammals.
But, my comment was only responding to the assertion that "This is the first time extinctions are happening faster than evolution."
Billions of people have died in the past, but it would obviously be a catastrophic tragedy if billions of people died this year.
Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place. The current rate of extinction is hundreds of times higher than that, and leads to ecosystem collapse.
> Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place.
That is just a mathematical truism. If all species died tomorrow and only humans were left we'd still hit an equilibrium where species were going extinct at the same rate new ones were appearing. The system moves quickly to an equilibrium where usually extinctions = new species.
In practice ecosystems collapse fairly regularly. This stuff isn't planned and nature is messy. Every time something changes ecosystems might collapse.
> Billions of people have died in the past, but it would obviously be a catastrophic tragedy if billions of people died this year.
Sure. Most people would make a show of moral objection to that. But if we look at what the humans actually do - they typically kill everything in sight that is larger than dog, concrete over what is left and poison any insects that made it through the slaughter. I dunno if anyone is tracking how many species we've wiped out on the road to apex predator, but there are going to be quite a few already. Cities are great for humans and not much else. In fact, we purposefully cause ecosystem collapses because it suits us.
That argument is only going to get pushback from very argumentative people but it is actually unpersuasive in practice. A billion human deaths is a tragedy but extinct species seems like it would be acceptable for bettering the material comfort of humans. Humans have generally accepted that trade in the past and we're still purposefully trying to ... I dunno, specie-cide a few that we don't like.
No it isn’t. Diversity rates have risen and fallen over the history of life, and it can take many millions of years for life to re-diversify after a mass extinction event (like the one we are causing now). Evolution by natural selection is not rapid when it comes to larger organisms.
During that time the number of new species will be approximately equal to the number dying out though. Otherwise the re-population would be rapid. The reason it takes millions of years in that case is because the two rates generally pretty similar. It is quite hard to get the two rates to stay far apart for any length of time. It is a truism that they match and they're going to return to matching whatever humans do. And them matching doesn't mean that the number of species isn't drifting radically over time.
I get that thejohnconway probably didn't literally mean it when he said "Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place" in the sense of it always being true no matter how many species there are - but one of the major issues with the global warming debate is it is actually pretty hard to articulate what the problem is with a lot of species going extinct if people don't use vague language like that which sounds bad but doesn't actually have much of a point to it. People will generally not notice. Nobody notices all the things that have already gone extinct. The world will just be what they are used to for most people. Most species are threats, nuisances or domesticated and as safe as humans are.
Species is a concept that isn't particularly well defined, and certainly not in palaeontology. One can see, however, diverging body plans (disparity), distinct lineages (diversity). If we take our extinction further, it will probably be tens of millions of years before we see the kind of diversity and disparity we had until the last couple of centuries. Its the period of imbalance that causes the problem.
Anyway, congrats on not caring about nature. It's must feel very free.
The average person lives in a city where they don't interact with nature, aren't near nature and aren't particularly affected by nature. People aren't argumentative about it but their choices suggest that on balance, the normal response is not to care. There are more important things to worry about like the well-being of humans.
If all species besides humans went extinct tomorrow, humans would also quickly go extinct. The equilibrium would be 0 extinctions and 0 new species.
Maybe millions or billions of years years later that would increase to >0, but i think its fair to call that a total collapse of all life on Earth for those interim years.
Anchoring against the cumulative number of species that have ever existed is a strange baseline, that's a metric that will emphasise "hey, life on earth is old" but makes it very hard to say if there's anything unusual or not about the current period.
The more common baseline I've come across is comparing the estimated rate of species extinction from the last century or so versus the baseline historical extinction rate.
To pick an arbitrary article about extinction rates with citations to published research:
> But this estimated [background extinction] rate is highly uncertain, ranging between 0.1 and 2.0 extinctions per million species-years. Whether we are now indeed in a sixth mass extinction depends to some extent on the true value of this rate. Otherwise, it’s difficult to compare Earth’s situation today with the past.
> In contrast to the the Big Five [mass extinction events], today’s species losses are driven by a mix of direct and indirect human activities, such as the destruction and fragmentation of habitats, direct exploitation like fishing and hunting, chemical pollution, invasive species, and human-caused global warming.
> If we use the same approach to estimate today’s extinctions per million species-years, we come up with a rate that is between ten and 10,000 times higher than the background rate.
This is an interesting analysis, but it does feel a bit apples-to-oranges. It is good to seek perspective on the impact we are having, but in terms of "are we in an extinction event" it feels woefully premature to me, perhaps even comically futile.
1. For all of the others, we are piecing together bits of evidence spanning eons. Can we really compare estimated background extinction rates over hundreds of millions of years to the by-comparison hyper-detailed and extensive data we have from the last 100?
2. This time it's different. Humans are categorically different from past drivers of extinction. I don't think there is a whole lot to extrapolate from. We can selectively preserve species we care about. We can run roughshod over others without even noticing. The impacts of our actions on the global ecosystem, from construction to medicine to pollution to deforestation, are unique. We could hold in a relative stasis where biodiversity continues declining but at too slow of a rate to really be considered a mass extinction. Or we could blow it all up tomorrow. Or we could unlock bioengineering and see an explosion unlike any before. By the criteria in the article it could be millions of years before we can say anything conclusively.
Upon some further reading, particularly this[1] page, I'm going to revise this stance and say that the evidence and consensus is pretty substantial. I do still think "it's different" but even starting from the late Pleistocene it's pretty clear that we're highly disruptive.
> civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. If we've got cheap energy then pretty much any problem is solveable and most of the cheap energy production is coming out of the country with the most fossil fuel plants.
Article says they're using coal to power the data centres. I've not yet heard of anyone going with coal for ideological reasons. Maybe we've entered an exciting new age for that, but the solar people have a long history of basically lying about the cost/benefit ratio so I'm going to go with coal being the better option here.
It is cheaper in this case because it's not a comparison of new solar versus new coal.
They're spinning back up dirty old coal plants that they previously shut down because alternatives were cheaper/better. This means the upfront cost is lower for the power company but the long term costs to the environment and health of the public are compromised to allow them to put off building new infrastructure that would provide cleaner AND cheaper power in the long term.
They're socializing the costs and privatizing the profits again.
> solar people have a long history of basically lying about the cost/benefit ratio
Are you sure that's the case and it's not that you are being lied to by the Republicans who take huge donations from the energy sector? Can you cite a study that isnt more than a decade old and hasn't been retracted?
There have been numerous studies to the contrary and having priced home solar myself recently I can tell you firsthand that costs have only gone down significantly every single year for the last decade. The cost for new solar has never been lower and for new construction it's been beating coal for at least years already. Coal is expensive, despite what the coal industry tells you.
If you read the linked article you'll note that even new solar and existing coal are competitive, despite it being an unfair comparison. If you add in storage costs it can leave renewables at a slight disadvantage, but in exchange people get to have healthy lungs and land that hasn't been permanently rendered unusable by strip mining and toxic runoff.
It baffles me that Republicans would rather keep power costs high AND making the environment worse than use the free and inexhaustible power the sun provides. Hell, it's red states that would benefit the most from upgrading the grid. I saw one estimate that installing solar would generate nearly a trillion dollars in jobs for red states over the next decade.
> And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels
I don't understand the reasoning behind that. Obtaining fossil fuels, refining and delivering them to where they are needed all requires a substantial number of systems working together. Disruption to e.g. refineries will stop people from being able to use fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, alternate sources such as solar and wind are cheaper and require far less civilisation to make workable (e.g. setup your own solar cell and plug it into your isolated supply).
The record shows that civilizations collapse when they deplete their resources or otherwise live out of balance with their environment. Which civilizations collapsed because they did not use enough resources?
> And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels.
There's a limited amount of fossil fuels on Earth. We definitely are going to stop using them as a major energy source at some point because of that, the question is if we get to get a choice as to how we reduce and stop using them or let the production curve peak and the economy collapse once that happens if nothing was anticipated. With additional climate change to deal with by that point.
This particular argument is a complete non-issue if we just do “nothing” and let the price mechanism work in the energy markets. There might be a long-term and permanent contraction that reflects the physical reality of energy becoming less available, but there will not be a proper collapse unless some well-meaning central planner tries to avoid it.
Except that by letting the market burn all available fossil fuels we'll get the worst possible case of climate change. And markets aren't known for thinking long-term; by the time we're going to be lacking fuels it will be a bit late to massively build nuclear power plants that takes years to build, massively install renewable and build / install massive storage, or adjust the entire world to less predictable electricity generation if using renewables without massive storage.
France has been doing well with electricity, thanks to central planning that pushed for nuclear. The problem is bad planning, regardless of whether it's public sector or private sector.
> 99.9% of species are already extinct, the fossil record is huge. I get that people don't like change, but species going extinct doesn't really move the needle much. That is what they do.
Ehhhhh this argument is hopeful at best. The problem is we're changing the temp faster than base keystone species' evolution can adapt.
Without them it's super super unpredictable what'll actually happen.
The worry being mass extinction because we lost plankton or similar. Huge amounts of oxygen production and co2 capacity disappears rapidly with that.
> Far from decreasing CO2 emissions we are not only continuing to increase but doing so at an increasing rate.
Objectively untrue. Globally, though the rise over the last couple of decades is disturbing, emissions are most likely leveling off again; they may have broken past the mid 2010s levels and appear to be rapidly rising in the last few years, but this is just a slight "over-recovery" from the impressive ~5.7% drop in 2020 (mainly from COVID restrictions of course). US emissions peaked in 2005 and were ~18.6% lower in 2023 (the last year of Our World in Data figures). And, you know, China is pivoting.
You're looking at total atmospheric CO2, which is increasing at an increasing rate. The OP's claim was about CO2 emissions, however, which are increasing at a decreasing rate.
That data lags because it's noisy and because it's measuring the air, which lags production of the CO2. The rate of increase has been increasing as India and especially China have been undergoing economic revolution, but China is also now known to be pivoting on their energy policy. That's already underway, not just planned (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45545644).
Reminder that we have enough nuclear fuel to power all of humanity with zero emissions for hundreds of years. Anyone who’s talking about this issue and not pushing nuclear is likely trying to use it as a political tool instead of actually trying to solve the problem.
Most people pushing nuclear are trying to sell fossil fuels for another 50 or so years and delay implementation of cheaper solutions. If we committed to building out nuclear today, we'd get our first one online in about 20 years. We need about 1000 of them in the US, which would take a lot longer than 20 years.
>If we committed to building out nuclear today, we'd get our first one online in about 20 years.
Only true because of the regulatory burden imposed by the government on their construction, there's nothing about the design or construction of the plants which takes that long.
Look at China, it takes them about 6 years to build a nuclear power plant. Politicians have been using climate change as a political tool for decades, if they had started pushing the construction of these plants back when they first started talking about the issue we could have been bringing enough power plants online by now to already have solved the problem.
In Sweden when the green party met the conservatives in a debate over replacing existing oil power plant with a nuclear power plant, the green leader said something like this:
"The oil burning power plant is a natural part of the reserve energy plan, and replacing it with nuclear would be way too expensive."
After that debate, the green party (in combination with their other coalition parties) has now green lit the construction of a new natural gas power plant, as part of the strategy of using wind and solar during optimal weather conditions and fossil fuels in poor weather conditions. This strategy goes under the long-term plan of using green hydrogen in the future. Currently there exist a experiment of using green hydrogen for steel production, which has yet to become economical viable, and experts in the field of green hydrogen is predicting around ~50 years until green hydrogen may become economical viable for electricity production. Until then the plan is to continue expanding the fleet of fossil fuel burning power plants.
To me its very obvious who is trying to sell fossil fuels for another 50 or so years. It is those that fund, approve and build new ones. The people responsible for those decisions are responsible for the fossil fuels that will get burned, and in turn delaying implementation of non-fossil fueled solutions.
> Most people pushing nuclear are trying to sell fossil fuels for another 50 or so years and delay implementation of cheaper solutions.
This claim explains a lot about our previous interactions. It's also the polar opposite of my experience.
I have never heard a single advocate of nuclear advocating for fossil fuels, and I certainly don't do it myself. I've also never heard them speak against solar (and again I also don't do this). It's purely about defending nuclear from fear-mongering and trying to make it possible faster, rather than being crushed under ridiculous and unjustified regulations.
I'm all for nuclear, specifically nuclear fusion, specifically the great big fusion reactor in the sky that bathes the Earth in more free energy in a day than we as a planet use in a year.
Eh. Not really anymore. Except at extreme latitudes, solar + battery now beats Nuclear on year round cost and especially on time to installation. It's only going to get more stark as time passes.
Doubt this will happen. Coal production in the US has plummeted, coal mines and infrastructure is not coming back. At best they would import cheap coal (but maybe not with tarrifs?) but even that would require sizable capex in ports… its just not gonna happen.
A developer in the Bay Area just spent 10 years litigating for the right to build a coal terminal at the Port of Oakland, and having won the suit now intends to go ahead and build it, aiming to go into operation by 2028. So clearly some people with sizable capex at their disposal disagree with you.
When all the carbon frozen in the permafrost of Siberia is released back into the ecosystem, the Earth with once again look like a tropical paradise it once was, being able to sustain giant cold-blooded reptiles.
(Well, not sure they actually were reptiles, but most likely cold-blooded.)
That's on chapter 9, "The Conquest of Land and the Radiation of Amphibians". Caution, this is a book from 1988, the Carboniferous era may have changed a lot since then.
(Carboniferous = Mississippian + Pennsylvanian.)
An image search for "Paleozoic and Mesozoic amphibians and reptiles" may also be gratifying. I'm fond of Moschops ("calf face"), though that's after the Carboniferous rainforest collapse.
How does self hosting change the power consumption? Don't you still need to power those devices? If you're running fully on renewable, sure you have a point. But if everyone self hosts, the power companies still have to fill the energy gap, right?
We started seeing the "smoke" when Reagan became President after Carter put Solar Panels on the White House. Each President (& Congress) since then kowtowed to the Fossil Fuel industry to varying degrees.
The GOP was the leader but the Democrats added to it but pretended they cared. At least the GOP told the truth that they were out to destroy the Climate.
We had almost 50 years to work on it, but people who could lead decided they wanted to keep their jobs and bribes instead of doing good for the US and the World.
These were initiated by Nixon, removed late in the Reagan era when the roof was replaced, then new panels installed by Bush 2, followed by more under Obama.
Less bizarre when you consider we’ve effectively made corruption legal, and created a system where a wealthy incumbent has a lot more pull than a new player.
being realistic given the current administration, the best avenue for those that care about climate change would be to lobby their representatives for nuclear and specially coal to nuclear transitions (https://www.energy.gov/ne/coal-nuclear-transitions) and lobby for more government funding directed to accelerate this. This would be palatable to the current administration while also supporting the goal of less c02 and other emissions.
Heck this also takes away any incentive to restart the coal plants by private companies if they are being financially supported and already in the process of converting them to nuclear, and it takes away an incentive to build more long-term because each nuclear plant provides a lot more power on average. Another thing to lobby for would be for more SMRs funding and less regulation overall in nuclear (it's insane how overly regulated nuclear is based on one soviet fuck up of a crappy underfunded/flawed powerplant (chernobyl). Fukushima plants (commissioned in 1971!) were hit with a once in a lifetime 9.5 magnitude earthquake and tsunami on top despite being less than 100 miles from the epicenter even with regulatory lapses and no direct deaths.
What do you suppose this administration dislikes about solar that wouldn't be equally unpalatable about nuclear? Keeping fossil fuels propped up is the only reason I can see solar not being an easy sell to Trump. Domestic solar panel production could be the space race of our time, and fit right into the tariff narrative, with the right prompting.
Eh. This is less of a US political party problem. We aren't the only consumers and emitters. Even if we were, I don't think this _really_ is democrat vs republican. Silicon Valley types vote left. Also pushed gaming, cryptocurrency, AI, internet marketing, and everything else that helps us consume more dumbshit.
So that's 35 Microsoft employees. Rank and file employees are probably all over the political spectrum. But two things have become clear over the past decade: 1) people who identify as conservative and/or libertarian tend to keep it to themselves except around other people that they believe identify the same way, and 2) the people in the tech industry who actually have power and money are either long-standing right wing authoritarians, right wing libertarians, or sycophants who just support whatever the people in power seem to prefer.
China cut fossil fuel use 2% in H1 2025 (compared to H1 2024). It cut coal use 2% in H1 2025 (compared to H1 2024) [1]. The majority of new energy production is wind and solar, not nuclear, and certainly not coal.
As of past 1.5 years, the use of fossil fuels for electricity generation in China seems to have reached a plateau. They are building new coal plants, more new plants than they are retiring old plants. But even with new coal plants, they have not been burning more coal.
They are barely building any nuclear plants, so far zero finished in 2025.
In terms of coal its usage has started to decrease in actual terms since the start of 2025. All demand growth and more is solved by new built renewables and storage.
But we sure did make a great profit on those datacentres so worth it to destroy the planets habitats.