The last IPCC report estimates that to limit warming to 2C, humans can only emit at most 1150 GtCO2 (at 67% likelihood) [1].
There are 8.2 billion humans, so about 140tCO2/person left on average. If we assume that we get to net zero by 2050, that means the average person can emit about 5.4tCO2/person/year from today to 2050 (hitting 0tCO2/person/year in 2050). This is what emissions look like currently [2]
Top 5 countries > 10m population
Saudi Arabia 22.1t
United Arab Emirates 21.6t
Australia 14.5t
United States 14.3t
Canada 14.0t
Some others
China 8.4t
Europe 6.7t
World average 4.7t
Lower-middle-income countries of 1.6t
Low-income countries 0.3t
[1] Page 82 https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
> that means the average person can emit about 5.4tCO2/person/year from here on out. This is what emissions look like currently
Using a world average target number and then presenting a list that leads with world outliers is misleading. This is the kind of statistical sleight of hand that climate skeptics seize upon to dismiss arguments.
The world average is currently under the target number:
> World average 4.7t
I think you meant to imply that the CO2 emissions of poor countries were going to catch up to other countries, but I don’t think it’s that simple. The global rollout of solar power, battery storage, and cheap EVs is exceeding expectations, for example.
I don’t want to downplay the severity of the situation, but I don’t think this type of fatalistic doomerism is helping. In my experience with people from different walks of life, it’s this type of doomerism that turns them off of the topic entirely.
I believe the causation runs the other way. The IPCC was founded in 1988, when CO2 emissions were 22 gigatons per year. Nearly four decades later it's 40 gt/y, and continuing to rise.
Doomerism is the reaction to our utter failure to even pretend to try. It did not cause that failure. Nor are people looking at the data and going, "yeah, I ought to do something, but people on Hacker News were gloomy so I'm going to buy a bigger SUV instead." EVs and solar and suchlike are much, much, much too little and much, much, much too late.
Doomerism doesn't help, except in the extremely limited sense of helping someone express their frustration. But it also isn't hurting because we'd be doing exactly the same nothing if they were cheerful.
Global warming will cause suffering, but extreme poverty was worse for billions than any projections from 2.0C above baseline. The global population grow by 3 billion people since 1988 yet extreme poverty is way down.
What nobody talks about is there’s not enough oil and natural gas left to miss 2C by much. At current consumption rates we run out of both in ~50-60 years. Coal isn’t competitive with renewables and as soon as we stop pumping hydrocarbons the associated influx of Methane also stops. So we’re almost guaranteed to miss 2.5C of global warming, and stopping at 2C is likely.
So congratulations humanity, all that money spent on R&D instead of directly cutting emissions without any solid alternatives actually worked!
>What nobody talks about is there’s not enough oil and natural gas left to miss 2C by much.
That was true before recent developments in exploitation and conversion. Canada had proven oil reserves of 5 billion barrels in 2002, but by 2005 it had proven reserves of 180 billion barrels because the Alberta oil sands became viable. South America now has far more oil than the Middle East - it's oil that wasn't considered economically recoverable until about a decade ago. Over recent years, we have discovered far more oil and gas than we've burned. Coal doesn't have much of a future as an energy source for electricity generation, but it might have a future as a feedstock for synthetic liquid fuels.
We're probably going to leave most of those hydrocarbons in the ground, but only because of the huge progress that has been made in renewable energy technologies. If that progress stalls or there are big breakthroughs in hydrocarbon technology, then there's still a real risk of substantially exceeding 2C. We have reason to be optimistic, but not complacent.
> At current consumption rates we run out of both in ~50-60 years
At current prices. As prices go up new sources of fuel become economical and the cycle continues. Not to mention that methane emissions from agriculture are a significant contributor as well (30% from cows) so just removing hydrocarbons doesn’t solve that problem.
It seems like an unrealistic bet that hydrocarbon-based emissions drop to 0 just because you think we’ll run out of fuel in 50 years. Does that mean airplanes stop flying in 50 years? No one is making these bets in the marketplace alongside you for good reason. And remember, consumption grows quite a bit year over year so you’re looking at a much shorter time frame if your prediction were to be true.
Consumption is also heavily tied to prices. Who is going to pay the equivalent of 50$/gallon when they can use an EV?
We use oil because it’s cheap not because it’s the only possible solution. It’s not that we’re going to run out 100% year X, it’s that as economies of scale end priced inherently spike. Gas stations can scale down to 1940’s levels by having most of them close, but giant fuel refineries, pipelines, etc need scale to be worth the maintenance.
Isn't there a reasonable chance aircraft will be electric in 50 years?
Or running on synthetic fuel made with renewable energy
...or flying with fairy wings
We can make anything up. Why not stick to the facts, as we know them, and reasonable projections?
There is no reasonable projection for any fuel other than fossil fuel to maintain the sort of flying we do now.
We weren't talking about warp drives here. Certain types of aircraft are seem to be not that far off. 50 years is a ling time.
Unless you are deeply involved in battery technology, your prediction seems overly pessimistic.
Not suggesting the article below is in any way conclusive but just one of many that turn up on a basic google search.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/passenger-electric-planes-be...
Humans can be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.
Except we actually did do the right thing.
US CO2 emissions in 2007 peaked at 6,016 million metric tons before consistently falling since down to 4,807 in 2023.
Per capita numbers are even better, but everyone assumes its from imports seemingly ignoring the massive reduction in coal use and vastly improved efficiency of just about everything. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1049662/fossil-us-carbon...
Oh, I agree on this. People were never going to accept, nor IMO should they have, a massive reduction in their living standards. New technology is the way to make people's lives better while also reducing global warming.
I just got back from a off-grid island here in New Zealand - 20 years ago, generators were everywhere and as soon as it got dark you'd hear nothing but the buzzing of running them all around you. Now there is solar everywhere and it's completely silent.
You mean batteries, right? Because Hawaii is off grid and has a ton of solar but at night has to switch to fossil generators.
Did we or did we shift manufacturing abroad and that made our numbers better?
Imports as a share of US GDP is basically identical between 2007 and 2023 at ~16%, it’s really not foreign manufacturing that’s relevant. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...
Global warming will do more than cause suffering - it will cause resource starvation, especially water - and that will cause war and mass migration, which will destabilize the world on a scale much greater than poverty has.
It will make much of Siberia habitable and the northern sea route viable. Russia is probably the only country that will benefit from global warming
no civilization existing today will "benefit" .. permafrost melt is a fuse to a bomb, among many too numerous to mention.
> At current consumption rates we run out of both in ~50-60 years.
2050 is only 26 years away, though.
The comically named Inflation Reduction Act included a tremendous amount of money for scaling up clean tech manufacturing in the US, and it’s been getting deployed quickly. The DOE Loan Programs Office got something like $400B in loan authority. Overall, the IRA was probably the largest single bit of climate action the US govt has ever taken. Unfortunately, people mostly hear about that work when it becomes part of political football (Solyndra and Tesla both got money from the DOE LPO to help them scale up, and the political fallout from Solyndra was the first time most people had heard of it). But it’s happening.
> included a tremendous amount of money for scaling up clean tech manufacturing
It included a moderate amount of money as stimulus to commercial companies which manufacture clean(? clean-er?) tech.
The Biden administration has also "balanced" this by allowing for massive amounts of further drilling for fossil fuels.
And even without the "balancing" - this is not remotely like an actual plan to convert the US to near-zero-emission energy production, in the immediate future, which is what's actually necessary.
$400B is moderate? Have there been other bills that have come anywhere close?
Did I say moderate? I should have said small. Remember this is $400B over a 10-year period, i.e. $40B per year. The US federal budget is $6.1T per year, so not even 1% of the annual budget.
It is also small in terms of the extent of expenditure needed for such a conversion of the US energy production system. A cost estimate from 2019 suggested somewhere between $4.5T - $5.7T over the whole period:
* https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/cost-of...
* https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/renewable-us-gr...
so $400B - even if we could assume that all goes directly to achieving the goal, which it does not - is under 10%:
Where'd you get 10 years? I'm seeing "through September 2026" for the deployment of those funds. Also, it's taken them a bit to get back up to speed, since the political fallout around Solyndra basically caused them to go defunct for a decade, they've had to hire a lot of people to get back up to speed to be able to process loans.
Also, you can't look at the entire budget, entitlements like Medicare and Social Security dwarf everything else, you need to look at the discretionary part.
Funny how easy it is to trivialize spending other people’s money
It's only 20% of what Musk thinks he can cut from the government expenses.
This doesn't seem like a terribly relevant metric. See for example this critique:
https://jabberwocking.com/elon-musk-knows-nothing-about-gove...
It is impossible to cut government expenses as much as Musk claims. It was akin to Trump claiming he would replace the ACA with something better or that Mexico would pay for the wall.
"The secret plan I'm hiding behind my back" is not a plan at all.
Considering that since 1988 world population went from a little over 5bln to 8bln, our output per capita rose by around 10%, which is not great, but also not terrible.
Meanwhile the number of infants globally peaked around 2013-2017 and according to revised estimates overall population will peak late this century reaching 10.4bln - largely in countries with a small carbon footprint anyway.
We're going to blow past that 2°C target and millions will die due to extreme weather, but I firmly believe life on Earth and our species will survive, especially now that the "business as usual" scenario is considered highly unlikely due to how differently e.g. China's coal usage changed compared to projections.
> I firmly believe life on Earth and our species will survive
Few people are doubting that. The issue is that
> millions will die due to extreme weather
and due to climate-related wars, and life in general will become less pleasant. Just breathing air with higher CO2 concentration already isn’t that great.
> Just breathing air with higher CO2 concentration already isn’t that great.
Or less O2. I wonder if there any study that does show any impact already or these are still speculations?
There isn't less O2. Even if all plants on earth disappeared (and animals somehow survived that), it would take millions of years before there's any measurable impact on O2 concentrations.
Moreover, there's no physiological impact whatsoever until you drop several percent.
O2 does decrease and is measurable: https://www.oxygenlevels.org/
I think this is a more marketable concern than CO2 as without O2 most know that you can’t live.
We were asleep at the wheel for maybe 20 years too long on renewables, but the pace over the last 10+ years has been mind-boggling, and especially the pace the last 4 years.
Nothing is going to turn that tide meaningfully.
I'd like to know how anyone with an ounce of reality thinks we're going to reduce emissions substantially faster than we already are.
Rome wasn't built in a day.
> I'd like to know how anyone with an ounce of reality thinks we're going to reduce emissions substantially faster than we already are.
Depends on what you mean by "ounce of reality".
In reality, there's little that can be currently done mainly because of political policy. That's unlikely to change.
But, assuming policy could be changed, then there is actually quite a bit that could reduce emissions substantially much faster. Carbon taxes, better policies around railways (perhaps nationalizing and expanding ala india), more subsidies for renewable generation and battery production (perhaps funded by carbon taxes?). Stronger regulations on private vehicles (perhaps ban personal private ownership of large trucks and suvs?). But also trade deals and modernization efforts/investments with lagging countries to help them develop carbon free economies.
Now, I don't think policy change is likely. I do however think there are quiet a few policies that could significantly drive change faster than it is already going.
Well, when even moderate gas price increases lead to either mass protests (e.g. https://apnews.com/article/colombia-protests-fuel-price-hike...) or the election of climate deniers (such as in the US), policy is (unfortunately for the climate) not going to change fast enough.
A 50% gas hike isn't moderate.
But I agree, it's something that'd have to be delicately done. Ideally phased in over time.
I also agree, probably wouldn't be fast enough, just faster to significantly faster than what we are currently doing.
Emissions will reduce substantially when the average temperature is 60C/140F across the globe. Life will be very different then.
In my mind the only realistic solution left is to make up the difference with solar radiation management, and I would bet it’s what will end up happening
You won’t be able to stop poor countries from spraying aerosol into the stratosphere if it gets too hot on the ground
Yes, global geoengineering will be probably deployed to buy us some time to get off fossil fuels.
Nope, being a doomer makes you look dumb and people dismiss your whole message when your overblown predictions don’t come true.
Think about the illegal immigration hawks talking about how people will cross the borders and start raping and pillaging everything in their path. When that of course turns out to be false, people dismiss their position entirely rather than look at actual issues.
> When that of course turns out to be false, people dismiss their position entirely rather than look at actual issues.
this flies in the face of a lifetime of experience talking about immigration with family who lives in a southern border state...
We've cut our emissions down massively, our electricity is pure solar, our meat consumption is 30% of what it was and we've flown once in 5 years (and then a fairly short flight). Home heating is still gas but we've halved usage by dropping the temp to 18c (from 21c) and better insulation.
Cars are still petrol but we've gone from 50k km / year to 10k km / year most made in a tiny 1 litre car (the other is a Prius). We don't have enough solar to cover that and the electric mix here is carbon intensive enough that we're better off using the petrol car until it needs replacing before switching to electric.
Hopefully at some point America will start taking their emissions seriously; it's crazy that you guys are so inefficient.
Eh it's not actually you that needs to change all that much but more industrial processes need to be change. E.g. I worked on a exploration drill rig that hunted gold core. We burnt well over 400,000 litres of diesel a year keeping that thing running. Closer to 500,000 after you count all the fuel burnt to keep the operator alive, fed and transported. 1 rig. It looked for gold that mostly didn't end up in electronics.
Arguably it provided bugger all actual physical good for society in return for its consumption. It got some fat cats rich and employed a half dozen humans. It consumed insane amounts of resources.
Your consumption is nothing compared to these ends of industry, they just try and make you think it does. Industrial industries worldwide need drastic changes.
China is currently at the forefront of deploying renewable energy. They install more Solar than rest of the world combined. They are investing 100s of Billions in manufacturing cheaper solar panels and batteries. China now has >50% new cars sold as EVs.
China sees this as an opportunity and delivering on it. Meanwhile majority of Americans voted for Trump, the sentiment is anti climate change and 'drill baby drill!'.
The cheaper Solar and batteries become, the more they get deployed. Like we solved hole in the Ozone, I'm optimistic we'll transition to a net zero energy future but pessimistic that US may get left behind and it'll be too late for many of the industries to compete with China. We are too short term focused.
With upcoming US government it's starting to feel like the Chinese Communist party isn't all that bad in comparison. At least they aren't actively trying to kill future generations simply to protect big oil profits and to oppose democrats.
I wouldn't be surprised if China overtakes the US completely in science and technology with the way things are going.
People believed the same about Germany about a century ago, we know the path ahead did not end so well for anybody. This time around though, many nations possess nuclear weapons.
Give it time. Centrally commanded dictatorships always seem to hum along right to the point of sudden collapse.
No, doomerism discourages people from trying. It also comes from the same place intellectually as the luddite wing of the green movement, which is one major reason we didn't replace coal with nuclear energy decades ago. (The others being that coal is cheap and fossil fuel lobbyists are powerful. But without the luddite greens opposing it we might have gotten somewhere.)
Doomerism leads people to go ahead and buy a ridiculous gas hog SUV they don't need because why not, we're all gonna die. Doomerism means we should cancel all our green and next-generation nuclear development because it doesn't matter. We're all gonna die.
Look up the Moore's law like progress of solar, wind, and batteries. Look up how much renewable energy we're adding, the uptake rate for EVs, etc. We are not doing enough but we are not doing nothing.
The previous poster is right. The global average is below the threshold and the global average is the only number that matters re: physics. Physics doesn't care about politics. The goal now must be to keep chipping away at those higher numbers in developed economies and to make sure the developing world gets renewable and nuclear energy before they decide to industrialize with coal like China did.
Either that or at least make sure we're cutting emissions in mature economies as fast or faster than developing economy emissions are increasing so the average does not exceed the limit.
> But it also isn't hurting because we'd be doing exactly the same nothing if they were cheerful.
Of course it is hurting. If we really want people to change then we need to understand human psychology.
We need to create hope and not fear. Ask Kamala how fearmongering worked for her.
I don't think I am presenting outliers (though I have edited the list to add some context).
US+China+Europe+Australia have cumulatively emitted 70% of all historical emissions. They are still 3x the world average and the estimated target. That's why they are on the list.
China is there because it is a common villain in these discussion. The low-(middle)-income countries are, in my opinion, never going to emit much more than they do now. They will never contribute to the problem but will feel all the effects.
If you follow your argument logically, it says there's nothing to do and we're in a good place.
You said we need to have 5.4tCO2/person/year on average across the world. You then presented a table that shows that we are in fact _under_ this target (4.7t). In your follow-up comment you claim that the lower-income countries are "never going to emit much more than they do now". So by your argument the world average will probably stay below the 5.4t goal and we're on target.
The target of 5.4tCO2/person/year is assuming we take a linear path down from 2023 emissions to zero emissions in 2050. It is the halfway point on that line.
Real world reductions (or increases) won't follow a linear path. Global population is also increasing. The number is just a rough estimate to show which countries are dropping the ball.
You're missing the core of the argument:
"If we assume that we get to net zero by 2050,"...
I think the point is that unless we can make a good case that some people have some sort of natural or divine right to a bigger share of the world's total CO2 emissions budget then other do, we have a lot of countries that are over budget.
It's hard to tell the poorer countries that they should stay poor so as to keep the world under budget, but using fossil fuels for many of them is the only to become not poor in a reasonable timeframe with their existing resources.
Just considering the welfare of their own citizens and their own resources their best path will often be a rapid increase in fossil fuels to get to a reasonable level of wealth and then start emphasizing renewables.
Since it is unlikely that the existing wealthy countries can reduce emissions enough to keep the world under budget as the developing countries follow the aforementioned path, we probably need the wealthy countries to help out the poorer countries to try to speed things up so they go through the fossil fuel phase faster.
Sounds good, but who counts as poor? If you mean countries like Honduras then sure, let's help them out as long as they have effective financial controls to prevent corruption. But China is the largest emitter, and while they still have a huge number of poor people they also have nuclear weapons aimed at us. There's no possible political scenario where US taxpayers agree to subsidize China.
Do you think there’s ever a point where we say “guys, if we don’t do something now, we’re all Dead”?
>it’s this type of doomerism that turns them off of the topic entirely.
In my experience, it’s the prospect of having to give up expected or dreamed about large homes, large vehicles, non seasonal/local fruits and vegetables, cheap electronics, and vacations involving flights.
try suggesting that people should eat more vegetables and less meat - they see red and shout down any chance of reasoning.
One person's individual change is a drop of water in the ocean when compared to the vast amount of emissions and pollution and waste produced at scale by corporations.
Arguing to your neighbor why they should recycle their plastic water bottle can at most make an infinitesimal difference.
Creating a legal responsibility for Coca Cola to clean up the billions of plastic bottles it produces annually, on the other hand, could change the world.
I don’t understand these attempts to wave away personal responsibility, and pin the whole thing on corporations.
It’s both. We need corporations to emit less, and they are the biggest emitters, and they do what they do for two reasons:
1. They are permitted to. Yes, government needs to intervene and prevent some of the things they do.
2. People keep giving them money, rewarding their bad behavior and providing them the means and motive to keep doing it.
We need the populace to want to make change, by voting for legislators that pass laws limiting corporations and by voting with their wallets. These usually go hand in hand.
I know there are people who vote for legislators/laws that limit consumption, who don’t make any effort to limit consumption themselves, but I don’t think there’s that many. People generally don’t want laws that change the way they are living, they want laws that make other people live the way they are living.
We don’t need to shame people for consumption, that isn’t helpful, but writing off personal responsibility is also unhelpful.
This is basically Downs’ paradox. Only systemic change can turn things around, but any given individual’s responsibility for systemic change is generally negligible.
> I know there are people who vote for legislators/laws that limit consumption, who don’t make any effort to limit consumption themselves, but I don’t think there’s that many. People generally don’t want laws that change the way they are living, they want laws that make other people live the way they are living.
There is nothing wrong with this behavior. I will vote today for everyone to curb consumption, but I see no reason to make the sacrifice alone.
I am not coming at it from a moral view, simply a practical one: I don’t think many people can sustain this dissonance. I don’t think people are very motivated to vote for things that would make them change their daily life.
There are examples that would show me wrong, like plastic grocery bag bans. But on the other hand, there haven’t been very many such bans, and banning plastic bags is a relatively minor inconvenience, and does very little to slow climate change.
> I am not coming at it from a moral view, simply a practical one: I don’t think many people can sustain this dissonance.
This is assuming that the dissonance is hurting more than the renunciation. People are already quite good at ignoring dissonances. And the causal effects are so removed from daily experience that often there isn’t that great of a dissonance in the first place.
> This is assuming that the dissonance is hurting more than the renunciation.
It’s not about “the dissonance is painful, so they seek to correct it by not voting for reduced consumption”.
It’s “voting to reduce consumption takes effort, in knowing what to vote for and in actually casting a vote, and people are unlikely to put in that effort if they are not putting in any effort elsewhere”.
“Dissonance” was a poor choice of words for what I was trying to communicate.
I thought you were talking about the dissonance of voting for renunciation while not voluntarily renouncing until forced by the system. I don’t think it’s uncommon.
That seems like a convenient way to not change anything. I guarantee most people would still complain heavily if the price of meat went up because something like a carbon tax were applied to it, even though the effect would be to reduce the meat consumption of the entire population. The politicians who implemented that would be voted out instantly.
> One person's individual change is a drop of water in the ocean when compared to the vast amount of emissions and pollution and waste produced at scale by corporations.
With emphasis on "One".
There's 8 billion of us; our diets have varied environmental impacts; and collectively agriculture is, though not the biggest problem, a big enough problem that we can't solve climate change without also fixing it.
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
Also, the problem with framing it as the fault of corporations, is that the corporations do what they do in response to demand.
And the laws come with costs: this is a perennial issue during elections and "over-regulation" has been the battle cry of UK and US conservatives for as long as I've been paying attention to politics — so sure, if I was world dictator I could make it happen (and build a global power grid for green energy, we don't even need superconductors for that), but that's not the world we live in.
Making a convincing reason for consumers to demand different things, or for business to choose sustainability just because it's cheaper, or shifting the Overton Window so the relevant laws aren't just a political football, that's hard.
> Creating a legal responsibility for Coca Cola to clean up the billions of plastic bottles it produces annually, on the other hand, could change the world.
It would change the world in a sense of Coca Cola either going bankrupt, or shrinking to the point of irrelevance, succumbing to competitive pressure of corporations that aren't forced to do such cleanups.
Edit: Do better, HN. Explain why you disagree. This argument is a delusional meme, as if people were not the primary consumers of corporations' products. Corporations are reactionary at best and believing there's 0% responsibility on the consumer is a 5 year old child mentality.
If they aren't profitable when taking into account their negative externalities than the owners are stealing from the rest of the world and they should go bankrupt. They'd probably figure out a better way to do business instead though
The incoming government in America loves the idea of tariffs; why not frame it as part of a trade war in a theoretical government set on ending climate change? Place heavy tariffs on any goods that do not have the same cleanup obligations.
After reading this comment I wonder how much making Ozempic free for all would affect global CO2 emissions.
My guess would be 3%:
1) I have no reason to think the carbon intensity per calorie would change
2) it doesn't take much overeating per day to build up, so I'd assume semaglutide based weight reduction reduces calorie intake by about 25% per day unless someone gives me a study (can't find myself as search results biased to news not science)
and 3) all agriculture combined is about 12% of emissions
multiply together and that would be about 3% of global emissions, which is a start, but not sufficient — we need to target 99.9% for long term sustainability
Unless they're a vegetarian presumably? I guess 'people' here means North Americans?
well quite. I'm in the UK myself.
75% of the US is overweight or obese. You’re trying to make a partisan issue out of a not-partisan issue. Please stop.
I would suggest that you are the one who just made it partisan. I'm in the UK personally, but I can immediately tell which side of the political spectrum you are, given the reflexive defence.
I voted for Harris. I don’t like trump.
Similar thing happens when you suggest about living in cages and not single family houses... Or banning cars altogether...
> Similar thing happens when you suggest about living in cages
Cages?
Who is even suggesting that?
Exactly. “It’s bad and you should feel bad and it can’t be fixed”
Well… ok I guess I won’t stress about it too much since I can’t change it? I was already powerless but now effort is futile.
I’d like a real straw I guess
>This is what emissions look like currently [2]
So, the world average is currently below the ration, and thus as long as we're actually headed for that net zero we're going to be in reasonably good shape?
>Guess what's going to happen and who is going to suffer, despite not doing anything.
Oh, this is actually about calling people bad because of what country they live in, never mind where the innovation is going to come from that would actually make net zero possible (assuming it actually is).
Carry on, then, I guess.
Russia is not far behind that top 5 list, at 12.5t/person/year, by the way.
2 degrees C is not a good outcome for the world, it’s just a moderately aggressive target that we might be able to hit. The world will still be changed significantly if we do manage to hit the 2C target (which isn’t a given). Working to reduce our output more before then would certainly be better.
I mean "good" in the sense of long-term achievement of reasonably high quality of life for humanity, without a collapse in human population. (My understanding is that if there are no catastrophes, the current trajectory is expected to level out somewhere around 11 billion. Of course, if we also happen as a species to make radical progress on life extension, that will also have to weigh in to long-term changes in reproductive behaviour, etc.)
Of course we should all do what we can. (I eat less meat than I used to, and don't drive.)
> as long as we're actually headed for that net zero we're going to be in reasonably good shape?
Only as long as we actually reach net zero by 2050, is my understanding.
This. Also because it's not like low income countries are going to stay low emission forever.
If you think about it, that's disrespectful towards people living there; they are not noble savages.
They are people just like you and me who are just a little bit behind in the development curve and they will surely want to have all the goodies that we have and emit all the greenhouse gasses associated with that lifestyle.
Countries who are currently high emitters but also applying active measures to curb it must be praised instead of pointing fingers. The political will to improve things is fragile and people can easily vote for populists that will easily exploit resistance towards guilt shaming.
>If you think about it, that's disrespectful towards people living there; they are not noble savages.... they will surely want to have all the goodies that we have and emit all the greenhouse gasses associated with that lifestyle.
The hope is that whatever the developed world has settled on by 2050 to achieve net zero, lower-income countries will be able to switch to directly instead of going through a phase of fossil fuel consumption. China was too early; India for example might see a much healthier trajectory. The association of greenhouse gasses with the lifestyle of the richest countries is hoped to be only incidental.
> United Arab Emirates 25.8 t
> Saudi Arabia 18.2 t
> Australia 15.0 t
These are all pretty low population though so net CO2 from these countries is not the largest.
In terms of per capita, what drives this? These places are hot, is it the 24/7 Air conditioning running?
It could make more sense to bucket these three together if you're looking for what they have in common.
Australia 14.5t
United States 14.3t
Canada 14.0t
In the US, we also have large numbers of homes that have not been brought up to modern efficiency standards and cheap/outdated, grossly inefficient heating/cooling contributing. That number could probably be brought down quite significantly without negatively impacting quality of life by “simply” (I’m aware it’s a huge undertaking) properly insulating homes and in urban/suburban areas banning heating/cooling solutions below a certain efficiency threshold.
I'm Canadian most of our emissions this past year was because of forrest fires.
AC is pretty efficient and the temperature differential it needs to overcome is smaller than winter heating in most places. For these places specifically it seems to obviously be the production of oil for the first two and coal for the third. The availability of fossil fuels tends to make them cheaper and consequently a lot more is used.
That is balanced by not having to heat.
The more likely explanation for the first two is that plenty of fossil fuels are available so they are used inefficiently.
Probably mining and refining natural gas and oil?
I generated this list a few months ago. I picked a threshold population (I think 10 million) and listed the top 5 and then some other groups. I think I would also guess that resource rich countries spend a lot on cars and AC.
FYI, I edited list with latest numbers after your comment.
The next target should not be 2.0C but rather 1.6. Understand that everything we’re adding is going to cost us going forward. 2.0 is when the cost become inconceivably high.
I wonder if there should be some scaling for extreme hot/cold countries. Most of our output here in Canada must be related to heating during our 6 months of cold climate.
Electricity and heat is indeed the largest sector by emissions in Canada (about a quarter) [1]. Though depends on where you are. In BC all electricity is hydropower, and if you have electric heating, your emissions are close to zero.
Transport is also about a quarter. So Canada can indeed cut emissions in half with present day tech by fixing these two sectors. Still a long way to go.
Also note that Estonia is at 7.3t, Finland 5.6t, Sweden 3.5t (Sweden was 8.6t in 1980). So climate is not really an excuse. It is just politics.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...
> Guess what's going to happen and who is going to suffer
Well according to your own data which shows the average comfortably below the target number, nothing will happen and nobody will suffer?
Are those figures per capita for consumers or producers? Is Saudi Arabia scoring high because of the oil industry?
> Guess what's going to happen and who is going to suffer, despite not doing anything.
Low income countries also don’t have good tracking or data. I’ve seen lots of practices in developing countries that are really damaging environmentally (GHGs and other things) that probably don’t get reported or tracked anywhere, because they’re so local (things like illegal refineries, manufacturing operations with no waste disposal, stubble burning, etc). But they exist. In part those damaging practices are here because of globalism (economic pressure) and changing lifestyles, so it’s not their fault. But my point is we probably just need a global reduction in luxury and quality of life ultimately.
These are consumption based numbers. So any oil that Saudi Arabia exports that is then burned elsewhere is counted in the other country's number.
Yes, there are uncertainties in these numbers, and it is quite unfortunate that OWID does not state them. However, I don't think the uncertainties are that high. Emissions from fossil fuel burning or agriculture are most of global emissions (>90%) and are quite easy to track in bulk.
The Earth is a complex system.
Warming is one aspect of climate change, but we'll likely see cascading effects in the system.
---
For example, as global temperatures rise we are seeing that AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation), and as a result the Gulf Stream, are "slowing down". [1]
This could result in EU cooling down.
The clathrate gun hypothesis suggests that large releases of methane could cause abrupt climate shifts due to methane’s strong greenhouse effect. [2]
---
Its likely developing nations and their citizens will increase CO2 usage as they move towards a more western lifestyle.
That means there will be an increasing amount of energy production and usage.
Ideally we generate more with solar and nuclear.
Decreasing energy production and consumption is not a real solution.
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"Decreasing energy production and consumption is not a real solution."
Why not?
A 5 passenger vehicle can be 1200kg or 3000kg but both offer almost the same utility. A diet of mostly-plants can be just as delicious as one with a lot of beef. Building a house closer to work can be just as useful as building one a long ways away (more, actually).
> A 5 passenger vehicle can be 1200kg or 3000kg but both offer almost the same utility.
Let's be honest here, a lot of these 5 passenger vehicles carry only the driver 90% of the times. For that use specifically it can be replaced with a 30 kg e-bike or scooter.
I can technically carry five small people on my cargo bike (urban arrow with extra front bench and rear mounted child seat) but people already think I’m extreme for some reason.
I use much less energy here in the Netherlands than I did in California and my quality of life is much higher.
>Decreasing energy production and consumption is not a real solution.
To actually solve the problem we need to:
* Decrease carbon emissions to zero
* Get the excess carbon out of the atmosphere
* Do so while maintaining people alive and not in a state of revolt or starvation
With no energy we collapse. Merely decreasing carbon use by diminishing energy doesn't solve the problem. It just makes it get worse less quickly. It's like not having a job and budgeting more carefully while drawing down your savings. Sensible to be sure but the real solution is enabling us to have abundant energy from non carbon sources and putting atmospheric carbon back into the ground.
> A diet of mostly-plants can be just as delicious as one with a lot of beef.
I strongly disagree – as a person who's eaten vegan for over a year, tried all the fancy meat alternatives, and has gone back because a good grass-fed steak is just 10x more delicious.
Sure, but I said mostly plants, not all plants. I’m not trying to take away Thanksgiving turkey. But most of the meat we eat we do thoughtlessly and it’s not especially good anyway.
... and if you would compare it with those meat alternatives most probably healthier too.
If folks go vegan, go full vegan and accept permanent change in your life, not some desperate half-assed attempts to change as little as possible, which don't seem to work. That's valid for any diet, or any other change in life.
Ie I eat beef steaks maybe once a year. I can really appreciate them, but its just not something that I feel should be part of my frequent diet, can prepare tons of other tasty stuff that are lighter on meat. Control a bit your emotions and understand where they come from, and you can be happy as a clam with any diet.
He probably means politically, as in "politically it won't be possible to bring this down much." The people don't want the economic inconvenience and politicians are even more unwilling.
You're asking for global human behavior changes. Does that seem realistic?
> You're asking for global human behavior changes. Does that seem realistic?
https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/tobacco....
Long term, smoking rates have fallen 73% among adults, from 42.6% in 1965 to 11.6% in 2022.
Over the last five years, smoking rates have fallen 17% among adults, from 14.0% in 2017.Sure, we effected major changes by making it illegal to build homes next to jobs so re-legalising that should make a big difference.
With sufficient education, awareness, and incentives. I don't see why not.
There's already a massive shift in the hospitality industry with paper straws and bio-decompositable cutlery, saving the world from a tremendous amount of plastic.
I would think that education and awareness could work for another generation, though them being bombarded with a popular social media image of life it may be hard. Incentives work to some extent (the biggest being a cost of doing the good thing being lower enough than doing the bad thing), but if you will make costs of doing bad things artificially bigger (I know, it is about things the society currently thinks as free) you risk populists getting to power.
Remote working is the best green thing you can do :)
Probably not working is even better...
Since this is the most important and urgent topic humanity should be working on: why isn’t this the case? Idiocracy is here. Don’t look up.
We have to throw everything into the race. But how to do this with the current inner workings of our societies? How to overcome greed? What about the power of (social) media? Why do we have Netflix and so on? How can we make people spend their time solving climate crisis, saving our planet earth?
Saving the planet doesn't make the stock prices go up, so no one will care.
Private companies are now getting their own nuclear power stations to power AI. We can't get new nuclear power for public use, but private for profit initiatives? Absolutely.
> Saving the planet doesn't make the stock prices go up, so no one will care.
I mean, it _could_, if you set up a market structure to incentivize it. CAISO (California) has done this, and now solar and storage costs are plummeting and associated industries are booming as the solar+storage solution starts outcompeting other forms of energy production.
Heck, solar+storage is even booming in ERCOT (Texas), which has no specific market incentives for it. Their spot market swings so wildly that storage makes money on power arbitrage and transmission easing.
Any nuclear power plants being built decreases the marginal cost of building another. If private companies are willing to front the cost of building the first one in recent times, it may help.
It's classic game theory. The benefits are public and delayed, and the losses are private and immediate. This dramatically incentivizes defection.
Few people are going to give up their modern convinces so their great grandchildren will have better lives. This behavior is everywhere. Few people give up, say, their excess capital to reduce suffering in developing countries, or eating meat for the benefits of the animals that suffer to produce it.
I've gone to enough city council meetings in the last two decades advocating for exactly the things that would incentivize GHG reductions while increasing some quality of life (everything from urbanism, to walkability, to dutch-style cycle infrastructure, to expanded train systems, to general electrification). The number of people who won't even try an induction range because they view a gas range as important to their identity is astounding. Most people are against repurposing any public streets for transportation alternatives, even in the most left-wing cities, much less the absurdity of actually proposing anyone should actually give up their car.
It's also a coordination problem. You won't help your children (the timeline is not that long) by personally giving up your "modern [conveniences]". You need a substantial portion of the population to do that to have any hope of moving the needle. So the choice is between getting the benefits or not, your children will suffer anyway.
Since certain political parties seem to feel it justified to throw their antediluvian morals about life in my face, I am responding in kind. I believe global warming is the central moral issue of our time. I hold each person who has voted for a political party that supports the continued carbon pollution personally responsible for the lives and welfare of my children and my childen's children. They are morally bankrupt and care nothing for the Earth and Humanity at large. As a technically-minded person, I believe we can definitely science our way out of this. But hope is not a plan. Most of these deluded voters have no clue how to solve this, they are hoping that we technophiles will pull a rabbit our of our collective hats and save them. But clearly there are no simple answers here, no miracle feats of engineering or unobtanium that will save us, just legal and regulatory changes necessary to hold capitalism and greed accountable for the changes it has wrought on the pale blue dot we all depend upon. We have done little to none of the tasks necessary to stop this train. I am angry and filled with sadness for my children, as the greedy few and ignorant many are destroying the little hope we have left.
No, humanity doesn't need to work on it at all, instead, humanity should be working on a peaceful painless extinction, because that will happen anyway, but not necessarily in a painless way.
Looking into the numbers a couple if months ago I was surprised how little it costs to stop climate change.
On the order of 100-200 trillion USD. Which is roughly 100-200% of global yearly GDP. Or 2-5% of yearly GDP until 2050. This could well be provided by printing money at all the federal reserve banks.
This investment will likely bring in a positive return on investment because it reduces the negative climate impacts.
Without such investments the downstream costs in climate change adaptation will be very expensive
Only 1% of GDP is agriculture, yet 100% of society relies on agriculture for survival. Because we don't have food shortages right now, GDP is heavily slanted towards things that don't really matter. You can't take that sort of monopoly money and try to influence the real world, if it were that easy then governments would be changing gas prices to win elections a lot more effectively.
Not disagreeing that there should be a lot more funding of climate change reducing endeavors, I just don't think that GDP should/could be an anchor to base that on.
There's no immediate bottleneck for reducing fossil fuel consumption. More money will translate into more effect, at most delayed by some half of a decade for any foreseeable effort.
At some point we will find a series of bottlenecks. But up to a 30% reduction (with ~100% clean electricity) it's obviously clear, and it looks doable up to ~90% (electricity, transportation, heating, and some industry converted).
Yeah that sounds right, I'm just wondering where the materials and the labor come from. We don't just have 5% of GDP worth of those laying around, they're currently allocated to other things. Not saying it's impossible, but it's hard to estimate the repercussions.
Oh, certainly, if we are to make a serious effort, it requires dealocating a bit of resources from other areas.
Energy investments are some 3% of the GDP, diverting those is an almost complete non-brainier. But we'd need to get about as much from other places.
> materials and the labor come from. We don't just have 5% of GDP worth of those laying around
You have to make up your mind, if you are concerned about real resources or fictional ones.
If we want to optimise for real resources we would round up all the people who’s job is to destroy real resources, like casino pit bosses and the managers of Prada and fast fashion that destroy clothing to create artificial scarcity.
And we would kick them out in the rain to do tree planting.
Climate change threatens a lot more than 5% of real reseouces - in fact what happens when the Middle East and American Midwest runs out of underground water reserves?
"Let them eat Credit Default Swaps."
> investment will likely bring in a positive return on investment because it reduces the negative climate impacts
There is a demographic conflict of interest between those who will be alive in 2050 and those who will not. The long-term gains are difficult to deny. The short-term costs, however, will be massive.
2% of the GDP is technically massive, but really, fuck anybody that wants to throw the future generations under the bus to save that.
And no, I won't be around by 2050.
The price of renewables has plunged to be cheaper than fossil fuels, battery tech is improving while prices are dropping, new jobs are created, etc, etc.
Making these changes are investments with real payoff in the near term.
The real impediment is that fossil fuels have made some people incredibly rich, and they are actively fighting these changes to protect their income.
Most of those not alive in 2050 will have children and grandchildren whom they expect to be alive by then.
There's a plutocratic incentive to blame plutocratic problems on demographics. It fits neatly into their divide and conquer strategy.
That's why mass media is so keen to blame everything on your mom ("boomers"), along with immigrants, robots, woke mind viruses, etc.
> I was surprised how little it costs to stop climate change.
If you read Drawdown, you'll see that it doesn't cost money to stop climate change, it saves money.
I don’t like that we’re even talking about money in this context. Money is almost fake, it’s right there in the ‘fiat’ name, yet that’s all most people care about.
Money isn't fake, it's a useful abstraction for describing the allocation of goods and services. We could describe the cost of transitioning from fossil fuels in terms of labor hours spent, miles not traveled in an ICE vehicle, tons of lithium mined, etc. But money lets us collapse all of that down into one number that we can get our heads around and which is useful for figuring out things like how much we need to raise taxes
In this context money is just a unit of measurement. If we say that we need more of a particular kind of infrastructure and reduce a particular kind of activity, etc, then the discussion requires being able to say how much of those (many!) things and we can quantify all of those in terms of dollars.
Just because it is not solid, does not mean it is not real.
As long as it has value to people - it is real.
Meaning, as long as you can use it to buy things. And that is what people care about.
That stops the moment, people don't believe in the currency anymore. Then they will either use a different currency they do trust - or go back to trade little pieces of gold.
It's a strawman to say that money is fake because no serious economist argues that money is "real". Of course it is fake. We use money because it's a useful way to organize society
My point is you need a society to use it and climate change will cause events which will make people question whether we still have one - which is enough for money to stop being useful. People in the west take a lot for granted.
Even in disaster scenarios like hurricanes, where everyone is going to do nearly everything they can regardless of cost to survive, money is still used in practice and in discussions, evaluations, planning. In a practical sense money is real not fake, because what money is used for, limited resources, is real not fake.
Of course stopping climate change will save in the long run. The critical question is who should spend the money now to save money later. That is the crux of the free rider problem.
Standard of living and human development index is a better metric to measure how well a society is doing than money.
Printing money wouldn't work - you just make all of the existing money less valuable.
That doesn't mean the new money doesn't have value, just has a small percentage less value. It's a wealth transfer from people who currently have money to the new money. It works out well for people who have a negative net worth, as well!
It is a wealth transfer from people who currently have cash and earn cash (workers, since increases in pay lag the rate at which currency loses purchasing power) to people who have assets and COLA adjusted annuities (wealthy people and old people).
Yeah, the salaried folk who find out in hindsight will be really happy as well. /s
You are essentially forced borrowing from the cash holders of the printed currency. So yeah it would work. Wouldn’t necessarily be fair or popular; but it would work. Just have to account for the new money also being worth less because of the increase in the denominator of this equation.
It actually would even if it made existing money less valuable. Econ 101
It wouldn't work linearly, but it still works. If you print 10% of your GDP in a year, you'll be sitting on only 1/11th of the GDP in cash at the end of the process.
Ever heard of quantitative easing?
Look at Covid fiscal response causing permanent 30% inflation in the last 4 years. The climate+demographic response money printing operation will be way bigger than that.
Most of the inflation from the last 4 years is attributable to Russia invading Ukraine. You can't have the largest natural gas exporter and second largest oil exporter invade one of the largest grain exporters without causing basically everything in a supermarket or restaurant to be more expensive.
Also shipping interruptions and lockdowns. Giving people money to not work is goin to have a much larger inflationary effect than giving people money to build things we want.
> Most of the inflation from the last 4 years is attributable to Russia invading Ukraine
Source? Other than media articles repeating "due to the war in Ukraine"
Assuming you are talking about the USA, supposedly the USA is a net /exporter/ of grains [0]
[0] Not loading for me but https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic... . Copilot said "The United States is a net grain exporter. According to the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS), the U.S. typically exports more agricultural goods, including grains, than it imports1. In fiscal year 2023, the value of U.S. agricultural exports was $178.7 billion, despite a decline from the previous year. Grains and feeds are among the leading U.S. agricultural exports"
Source? America is a natural gas exporter.
"...2-5% of yearly GDP until 2050"
Estimate is COVID in 2020 cost 3.4% of GDP (source: https://www.statista.com/topics/6139/covid-19-impact-on-the-...)
We are talking about one new COVID (2020 style), every single year for 25 years. That is significant enough to not spontaneously do it.
There's a big difference between printing money to trick people into continuing to buy stuff while production is halted during a pandemic and massive investments in new energy sources and technology development and deployment.
Any large expenditure is going to cause inflation since it competes with the rest of market for materials, labor, or any other limited resource. It doesn't mean we shouldn't do it but we can't just ignore the consequences.
Worst part is 10x this money in real terms will be printed anyway and spent for exactly this purpose in the future, just way too late.
I fear you're an optimist.
I would be if I said it’ll work… at that point there won’t be anything to lose so might as well print.
If you're referring to he economist one, I've read it too, and I think it would be much cheaper.
But anyway, I don't believe half the numbers out there.
To cut emissions, we need to kill materialism, consumption economy and most importantly tell people that they should choose between what's good for them (eating a burger to make them happy) or the planet (not bringing the equivalent pollution of driving an SUV 50 miles+ by eating something much less polluting than beef).
Governments will keep chasing the kind of changes that can only make more money, not less.
> To cut emissions, we need to kill materialism, consumption economy
That’s a moral statement not a factual one. To cut emissions, we need to do exactly that. Pricing in externalities (yes it means less beef but that’s not the same thing as an end to the world as we know it) and investing in cleaner means of production is enough. Most of the people pushing for large societal changes are doing it because it was their goal from the start and they are using climate change as a mean to an end.
Pricing in externalities is probably the only way we can solve carbon emissions, and would still be very difficult. We would need global participation, otherwise carbon emissions can just be outsourced to other countries. Also, we need to decide the price of emitting carbon. Perhaps survey economists from every country and aggregate the answers somehow.
Lucky the Earth is infinite and so perpetual growth will work. /s
Growth doesn’t have to depend on finite resources. Growth is simply more value being exchanged. You can have sustainable growth.
Plus the human population will soon be drastically contracting anyway.
Abandoning the only system since the birth of humanity to bring prosperity to billions in favour of one which has repeatedly be an utter failure, systematically lead to totalitarianism and is responsible for millions of death might not be the wisest choice especially when it’s pushed by people who think they should be amongst the rulers due to their moral superiority.
About half of CO2 emissions are electricity, heating and transport. Not beef.
And for those we have viable solutions that either do not lower subjective quality of living or even improve it, but they are not sufficiently implemented by enough people.
Telling folks to stop eating beef now is compounding the problem by making people just give up.
We should first address the things that we have viable solutions for instead of loosing public support by insisting on reducing emissions in areas where there are no good solutions yet and some sort of asceticism seems to be in order.
> About half of CO2 emissions are electricity, heating and transport. Not beef.
Methane is between 30 and 200 times more dangerous than CO2 and a single cow produces 200 pounds of it per year.
Another fun fact: the mass of all cattle on the planet is higher than all other animals combined. All of them from cats to rhinos and wild horses.
> Telling folks to stop eating beef now is compounding the problem by making people just give up.
That's exactly my point: the real issues aren't related to government policies related to just focusing on CO2 emissions from energy but how much and what we consume.
What we eat, by far, is the element that most impacts the planet. By far. The others, besides using more public transport are very small.
But nobody wants to hear or face it because it implies how we live and eat.
Hell a single cotton shirt requires 2000 liters of fresh water, a scarce resource, I don't see as much arguments about how we consume but plenty of neverending EV and electricity gaslighting.
It's much simpler to point at vague problems
> Hell a single cotton shirt requires 2000 liters of fresh water
That‘s a surprisingly small amount of water. Just a typical shower uses 150 liters and all it does is keeping you clean for a day. On the other hand a cotton shirt can last many years.
Are you saying the water is lost or destroyed or permanently polluted? This is, of course, not the case either.
> What we eat, by far, is the element that most impacts the planet. By far.
No it isn‘t.
I understand your point and I have also long held the point of view, but have recently learned that this isn't the right framing. You - as a citizen - don't need to reduce your consumption, but we as a society must manage that all activities are priced properly.
One example is air traffic. If you don't consume an available flight, then you don't actually help the climate, because somebody else will buy the seat at a lower price. This is just market economics. To reduce flying the society already has put Carbon credits out there for airlines to buy if they want to fly from A to B. These credits reflect the cost which society puts on flying currently.
> You - as a citizen - don't need to reduce your consumption, but we as a society must manage that all activities are priced properly.
Oh, I agree, I'm not against eliminating anything, but a pollution sort of tax I would be perfectly fine with.
Like eggs taxed more than tomatoes, poultry more than eggs, pig more than poultry, etc, etc.
But it has to be taxed enough to make some dent in it.
Most people in the world do not eat that much beef. Some countries are outliers.
> Looking into the numbers a couple if months ago I was surprised how little it costs to stop climate change.
Do you account for unpredictable, but climate changing, events like solar flare activity and volcanic activity, which also can contribute?
I recall the numbers are about reducing the man-made emissions to net-zero by 2050. I believe this must include some measures which counteract emissions which can't be reduced.
There is also a good case to be made that the prices being bandied around are actually much too high [1]
TL;DR is three major factors:
1. The agencies that are doing the estimates are _very_ bad at exponential development curves (cough cough IEA estimating solar [2])
2. Unfortunately much of the developing world's economy is not growing as fast as we previously thought it would (similar thing happening with birthrates)
3. Many costs are absolute and _not_ marginal, which is just wrong IMO. We are going to need the energy either way, we should be talking about the "green premium" (as far as it exists), not how much it'll cost to generate XX TWH of energy
[1]: https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2024/11/14/th...
[2]: https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2024/11/14/th...
> Many costs are absolute and _not_ marginal
If you turn off your gas generator and replace it with solar + batteries, you will spend the entire cost of solar + batteries plus the decommissioning cost of gas (that may be negative if you can sell some parts) to go back to exactly the same point you were before.
So, no the cost is only marginal if you accept you will follow the depreciation curve of you infrastructure. And that's way too slow to reach the goal.
>So, no the cost is only marginal if you accept you will follow the depreciation curve of you infrastructure. And that's way too slow to reach the goal.
The linked article also mentions a way less aggressive timeline, which means there's less of "tear out existing equipment and replace with renewable" going on, which raises costs. Moreover, the argument isn't that there's no such costs, only that they're being overestimated.
We have some crazy incentives to install new gas boilers in MA. I very specifically wanted to switch from gas to an air source heat pump and found there was only one company in the area who was willing to quote it (alongside their own, much cheaper, quote for a gas combi boiler) and their quote was outrageously non-competitive with local fossil fuel burning (in large part because our electricity is around $0.30/kWh, but also because they were the only supplier and even they didn't really want to do the work).
Even if the ASHP lasted forever, required no maintenance ever, and you had to buy a new gas boiler every 10 years, it would literally never make economic sense even if there weren't $2500 incentives on the gas boiler, but the movement on electric rates is definitely in the wrong direction if one wishes to displace natural gas with electricity (even at 400% efficiency).
Every year that things stay like this is pushing back the likely time to next re-evaluation for that property by another 20 years.
how do you spend it?
This is about spending to replace CO2 emitting technologies in electricity production, transport and housing to net-zero sources.
I recall the report mentioned that societies already spend more in GDP per year to adapt to climate change (e.g. building more AC units) than it would cost to mitigate climate change.
Replacing CO₂-emitting technologies is already happening. To argue for this plan would require proving at least the following:
1. Spending Wisely: Invest in technologies that work and also do not introduce more problems.
2. Trusting Who Spends: Governments or others must use funds on solving the issue (not just giving money to cronies).
3. Global Cooperation: Countries working together (does Russia who sees warming as helpful comply).
4. Dealing With Inflation: The plan should address the inflation it causes, as it will raise living costs for people already struggling.
5. Better Use of Funds: Proving this use of funds is better than spending on other global issues.
Although a useful metric about the size of economy, I dont think this gives any metric of the level of liquidity, or size of investment, or austerity measure necessary to change it
It doesnt give any indication about the level of debasement of currency to accomplish it to that scale, to pay for what? to whom?
and even if you identified some answers to those questions, this is where the disagreements are, ranging from cordial disagreement to outright denial of a problem
but most of it comes down to who is paying, for what, why are we paying, will it change anything, and how do we make a return on it
This is a fantasy.
Trump just won an election in a very large part because -- and I quote -- "Prices are high!"
People were talking about gas prices, food prices, etc...
Any politician that would raise prices deliberately for any reason will be immediately voted out and replaced by literally anybody that doesn't do so, even someone like Trump.
The evidence for this should be fresh in your collective minds right now.
"Prices are high!" came with both a lack of counter narrative from the Democratic candidate AND a scapegoated narrative that blames the government and migrants for the prices. If you give the masses a narrative they'll buy in. All you need to do is provide a meaningful narrative that accurately describes the situation and builds solidarity/class consciousness.
>and builds solidarity/class consciousness.
Likely Trump voters are about the least likely to be receptive to terms like "solidarity/class consciousness", and implying that they're rubes that can't think for themselves is the exact sort of rhetoric that caused the Democrats to lose the election.
And the question is, then, what if you spend all those trillions (which we don't have, BTW), and it doesn't "stop". Who's going to be responsible, and in what way?
Then we'll only have just eliminated air pollution that kills millions of people per year and established independent energy security
Right, fossil fuels cause around 8 million deaths a year from air pollution [1], so regardless of climate change it'd be worth making a dent in those numbers.
And no, air pollution isn't just a problem in places like India and China, it kills over 100,000 Americans a year and costs society $886 billion. [2]
The evidence of anthropogenic global warming existing is extraordinarily strong [3] [4], but you're right, even if somehow 97% of climate scientists with studies published on the matter from 1991 to 2011 and 99% of them from 2012 to 2020 were wrong (in addition to NASA, The European Space Agency, NOAA, the World Meteorological Organization, and the national academy of science (or equivalent organization) of basically every country that has one), it'd still be worth avoiding millions of deaths a year and having established independent energy security.
1. https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj-2023-077784
2. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1816102116
Would spending 100 trillion dollars that we don't have cause more deaths than it prevents, due to increased poverty and rising cost of living? That's all I'm really asking here. Has anyone bothered to run the numbers?
Subsidies for oil, coal and natural gas currently cost us about 7.1% of global GDP. [1]
I imagine if we were willing to spend 2 to 5% of global GDP on fighting climate change, we'd also be cutting those subsidies. So in that scenario we'd be reducing government deficits and reducing the rate at which we print money, not increasing it.
1. https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...
Air pollution and CO2 emissions are different things. One causes cancer and heart issues, the other causes global warming.
Large amounts of particulate in the air (for example from a volcano) would probably cause global cooling since it blocks out the sun.
What you're saying is correct, but I can't think of many scenarios where it's relevant to human actions in the present, with the exception of freight ships' sulfur emissions. [1]
For the most part, burning fossil fuels is leading to both air pollution and GHG emissions. Sometimes you can in theory choose an option that leads to less global warming than the status quo but is worse for human health (e.g. burning biomass for energy instead of natural gas, or using diesel instead of gasoline engines), but usually there's an another option where you can reduce both undesirable outcomes (wind, solar, hydro or nuclear energy, electric vehicles, etc.)
Even from an economic standpoint I can't think of too many scenarios where clean energy isn't the better option long-term. An EV will have a higher up-front cost but definitely will be cheaper than a diesel vehicle across it's lifetime, and most areas I imagine solar or wind would be cheaper than biomass. Freight ships are the only thing in 2024 where I think we don't have an option that's better in both regards and cheaper -- there we do have to choose between more global warming or more particulate matter harmful for human health. But I think that's the exception more than the rule for human activities.
1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cleaned-up-shippi...
The CO2 concentrations we’re approaching also cause cognitive impairment
Those studies are... questionable, considering that US submarines have an order of magnitude higher concentration and the sailors on board don't turn into drooling idiots.
ah the ever popular call to inaction as though inaction isn't a very dangerous course of action
what is this reasoning? an invading army is coming, i won't try to stop it, let's just lie down and die. this focus on personal convenience combined with a lack of a will to live isn't just deadly, it's pathetic.
even if you fail, resisting against the darkness is one big part of what dignifies humanity.
Did you miss the part where the OP was proposing to basically rob the poor by inflating the currency? The poor and lower middle class already barely make ends meet even in the US, let alone the rest of the world. Plus, nobody can guarantee that the warming will stop. There have been periods in Earth's past when it was almost twice as hot as it is today. There have been periods when greenhouse gases (CO2 specifically, Ordovician period, 500M years ago) were _six times_ what they are today. Earth is still not Venus-like. Explain that one to me. Perhaps there are parts to this that we do not understand, and it might be premature to sacrifice the world economy and the livelihoods of the bottom 90% by income on this altar?
Note that I'm not saying that we shouldn't reduce polution, or build more green energy. Nuclear, solar, wind - all of the above, please. Let's just not turn this into a religion about which you can't ask any questions for fear of being burned at the stake, and to which any sacrifice is worthwhile and you're a heretic if you suggest otherwise. Science must be questioned, otherwise it's not science.
That is not how money and "work" functions. There is no way to "spend money" without spending energy and emitting CO2.
Assuming there is validity to the numbers (and no new source of energy), it means you need to reduce GDP by 2-5% yearly until 2050. But GDP and money is a "sliding" scale so it might mean something different by next year.
The CO2 intensity of any activity can be vastly different. Net-Zero goals require that you transition to activities which produce less CO2. This can be negative CO2 emmissions (e.g. planting trees/felling them/storing the wood).
Replacing high CO2 intensity activities (burning coal) with lesser intensive tasks (e.g. burning gas or renewables) is the key.
Solar and other renewables counteract their Co2 expenditure after 1-2 years.
The amount of CO2 yet to be released depends on the amount of fossil fuel yet to be extracted. Current oil discoveries, wells, and coal mines will all be exploited as long as they are profitable.
It will be necessary to lower demand for fossil fuel enough that new prospecting becomes unprofitable. This will happen eventually due to the physics of oil drilling.
If you consider the amount of energy contributed to the world economy from fossil fuels, there is no clear path how to market alternatives in quantities that can make fossil fuels obsolete.
A more realistic scenario for around 2050 is that coal-power increases while oil for personal transportation is replaced by batteries due to high oil price.
What are you talking about? If you take 2.5% to spend it on better infrastructure and existing technologies (that are more environmentally friendly) and develop new technologies, you are not reducing GDP. GDP just measures the ammount of money a country spends.
Of course you need to spend money and energy (specially energy, everything in the universe is energy), but the solution is not to stop moving. We need to use energy and resources in order to switch to better technologies.
A new energy source is not like a new technology that can be developed. It needs to be discovered - as in a scientific break-through. A plan can not assume that break-throughs occur.
GDP measures the total production of an economy. That is mostly equivalent to energy_consumption * p_efficiency.
Investing in new technologies that increase efficiency has always been a good decision. Maybe you can improve solar panels by a further 5% and batteries by 10%?
Realistically, energy_consumption will need to decrease, but that isn't actually that terrible.
> I was surprised how little it costs to stop climate change.
Is that the cost for the duct tape needed to plug the airvents of data centers all over the world? The whole AI hype is driving energy consumption through the roof and when you see the companies behind the hype eye having their own nuclear power plants you know they are going to outscale cities housing millions in waste heat production.
While people are excited about AI and datacenter use, it's still tiny in comparison to global energy consumption (1-2%) though that excludes all the crypto folks who are another 100 TWh per year or so:
> Estimated global data centre electricity consumption in 2022 was 240-340 TWh1, or around 1-1.3% of global final electricity demand. This excludes energy used for cryptocurrency mining, which was estimated to be around 110 TWh in 2022, accounting for 0.4% of annual global electricity demand.
You're hearing about the potential for a Gigwatt site, but a Gigwatt full out is less than 10 TWh per year (8960 hours/year). These things make the news, but they're pretty efficient electrically. The question is whether they have utility.
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and...
I remember about 20 years ago I was pretty entrenched in circles of thought that were not quite "denialist" so much as they were "it's not gonna be as bad as they say it is-ist". I remember a prevailing line of thought was that climate "alarmists" only chose the most extreme predictions of the various models in order to sell the urgency of acting quickly to stop it. There were those that said that the most extreme predictions came from models that emphasized positive feedback loops (like arctic permafrost thawing), and ignored or de-emphasized negative feedback loops (like increasing vegetation growth rates). And above all, I remember one particular number standing out as where they thought we would plateau. It was at 1C of warming arriving around 2030.
Whoops. Maybe the scientific consensus should be listened to more often, and the fringe less often.
Doesn't seem like there is any foreseeable future where climate change can be addressed. It's not just the leadership of the u.s, but the citizens themselves reject climate change as a real issue. Hopefully I'm just being pessemsitic.
Oh a lot of those citizens care - it’s that they travel to Japan for vacation anyway.
Let's not pretend that the family vacation is the real driver to climate change. Most Americans aren't jet-setting on a regular basis.
Air travel is only 11% of all transport emissions, so it's not all that significant, especially given that it's often the only real option for covering vast distances.
But Americans do drive everywhere, and that's 48% of all transport emissions (just cars, not even counting trucks, with that it's more like 73% for all road transport). So yeah. Nobody gives a fuck.
Bizarre choice of example
There was a famous case of german climate activists, those who glue themself on the road to block the cars to make a statement - they did not showed up to ther appointment in court, because they were enjoying their activism vacation in Bali.
Fun anecdote but I don't see how a handful of individuals being alleged hypocrites is relevant
No, I 100% blame politicians and the media. If this climate thing is such an issue as the "doomsayers" say it is, then we should be outright and immediately banning/dismantling and destroying infrastructure that causes it. But instead, we faff about with "carbon credits" and "media campaigns", and cause all sorts of divisive misinformation and "cover" for the worst offenders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Annual_C...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/Annual_C...
In democratic societies we get the politicians we vote for.
By people that aren't aware of the problem or their ability to collectively change it, sadly. Everyone I know wants to do right by them and theirs; climate change having a meaningful impact on those doesn't seem to be on most voter's radar somehow
I do kinda feel like a responsible leader, that should be elected anyway for reasons other than intended climate policy, should also have the guts to put a topic on the table that means scary change for a massive decrease in worldsuck on a timescale we're comfortable estimating the broad effects for
Four wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner
Are you presuming the existence of some hypothetical political system that would prevent the wolves from eating the sheep?
Can you be more specific?
Try that a look who people vote.
People prefer the doctor who says smoking, drinking and no sports is ok over the ones who say you should stop smoldering and drinking and do more exercise.
Climate change denialism is not a natural state of mind, it was deliberately manufactured by people who stand to keep the status quo[1].
I think just blaming the oil corporations is too easy. I mean they do deserve their blame and they do deserve to pay up, but I allmost would say
"Climate change denialism is a natural state of mind"
We as apelike animals just did not optimize for thinking globally. We optimized for the local here and now and the immediate future.
"Fire burns, fire warm, fire good. More firewood we need!".
On the contrary, climate change denialism is completely intuitive, regardless of the reality. The problem could be much worse than it actually is and it would still make perfect sense to expect many people not to agree that there is a problem. This is a natural consequence of the human condition.
First, we're talking about trend lines on the order of less than +1C per human lifetime. Recently, there was some buzz here in Toronto about some day or other having been the hottest that-calendar-day in a very long time, and near the record since measurements started 200 years ago. But if you look at that scatter plot, what you see is that yes, the trend line goes up by perhaps 2C over that period, but the year-to-year variation is on the order of 20C. And the difference between the average daily highs in the hottest and coldest months here is about 27C, to which you can add about another 8C for intra-day variation from high to low. Month by month, the recorded extremes of heat range 12-20C above the averages, and record lows plunge 13-27C below averages for daily minimums. All in all, a temperature range of over 73C has been observed here.
Regardless of the consequences scientists expect as a result, a couple of degrees of warming since the Industrial Revolution (with some more effectively priced in for the future) is mere noise against that backdrop. Humans are simply not sensitive to that rate of change; nor can they be expected to realize the effects intuitively given that they're adapted to dealing with such great natural variation in temperature. So they have to know the science to get there. The result is not intuitive. If it were, there would have been no need to do the science in the first place.
Almost no humans are equipped to replicate the science themselves - there are huge barriers in every category: awareness, willingness, time, resources and knowledge (of scientific methods, of research methods, perhaps even of how to use more sophisticated equipment than just thermometers). So they have to trust the authorities that present the science to them.
Trust in authority is not natural for humans - it has to be socialized into them. This is especially the case for humans born and raised in a democracy, and especially when the authority in question is implying a need for lifestyle changes that seem like they would cause lower overall quality of life. If that trust were natural, North American schools could actually focus on education.
Climate change is a coordination problem. In a coordination problem, treating non-cooperators as opponents - especially by implying that they've been brainwashed by some other party, thus denying them agency - is an incredibly shortsighted and counterproductive move. Especially when it comes with such openly tribalistic framing (i.e. citing as evidence some partisan bias in lobbying by specific businesses).
In short: people don't believe you because you don't show them things they can see for themselves, and you frame yourself as someone who wants them to sacrifice themselves for a greater good that you don't make legible to them. Warning about the threat of impending doom is not presenting a legible "greater good". If that worked, everyone who lives in Christian-majority countries would be an evangelical.
I don't agree with this take but I don't think the quiet part, that we should strive for the highest quality life right now and let nature sort out the consequences (if any) later, is necessarily invalid.
And I think why we're having such a hard time with "climate denialism" is because we're not really presenting arguments against the underlying argument.
We've known human caused climate change has been a thing for over a hundred years. You can disagree with a take but it's a fact that this has happened.
Oh I know, but let's say you didn't want to do anything about climate change and you knew that the kind of people who do:
* Value moral superiority and "being right" over results.
* Broadly think that people who categorically disagree with them are stupid and just need to be educated about the truth.
* Believe that the mere existence of climate change implies that we have to do everything they say to combat it.
* As a group are largely incapable of knowing when they're being put on and baited.
So say hypothetically you "deny climate change." But of course you don't outright deny it, you say that there's no evidence. The discussion shifts away from what the proper response to climate change is to whether it even exists. In public discussions you can dismiss any argument with "well it doesn't even exist." They will then proceed to spinlock boiling the oceans with the energy expenditure trying to prove it exists— "surely this next piece of evidence will be undeniable and I'll have them cornered!"
But that couldn't possibly work, right?
It feels like we're getting much more than 1.5 degrees. Here in NYC it used to snow several times a month, we've had one tiny storm the last two years. Just 20 years ago I rarely used AC in the summer, now its on nearly every day from May to September. Its not just that the temperatures are more variable, and the rainfall patterns are much more random it really feels like we're at +4 degrees already.
1.5 C is a global average. Feels like is anecdotal.
Some areas will see higher averages than 1.5 C. Some areas, even if only seeing an average increase of 1.5 C or thereabouts, will see more extreme temperatures exceeding past record highs and lows by several degrees Celsius.
That's partly because the warming experienced over land can be ~50-100% larger than the globally-averaged warming, with the temperatures over the oceans increasing more slowly to make up the difference.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-does-land-warm-up...
You're probably feeling the urban heat island effect.
How does that explain the change in long term weather when the city is already heavily developed.
With USA going full climate denial in next 4 yrs and SCOTUS packed with O&G friendly judges. It’s going to get worsw
Even if USA reversed 180 degrees, the rest of the world is going to continue fossil fuel usage.
Developing nations will continue to increase individual CO2 usage as their economies improve.
People want to live a modern western lifestyle, and that requires more energy.
Realistically the world is going to generate far more energy, not reduce energy usage/production.
Moving to solar and nuclear is the only likely solution that will result in reduced CO2 volume.
What has the US administration done in the past 4 years to make a significant impact on the global warming issue?
I know you can't be serious, but are you also trying to imply that the incoming administration, staffed from top to bottom with oil industry insiders, won't affect our trajectory?
I think it was a serious question that was relevant to the conversation.
Yep, our grandchildren will have to pay a very dear price to clean up our mess of Glory days.
I don't think cleaning up is an option once you get a runaway atmospheric hot-house. Human population will fall due to global disasters and food-chain collapse, then wars, then the party is pretty much over.
On the bright side for a brief moment in time we created lots of shareholder value.
Aka the big grift
Although the dear price is away off, The bill is starting come due today; see news stories about fires and hurricanes.
It's funny seeing people groan and moan about climate change on HN when the average neolib here most likely voted Trump lmao, especially based on the comments in the winner announcement thread. You are preaching to people who wouldn't blink twice to burn an actual mountain of coal if it got them YC funding.
At the scale we've hit, I fail to see how anyone except billionaires, mega corps and investment funds can solve this problem. The economic incentives aren't there yet without pumping billions of dollars into the problem without a financial return.
Governments have clearly failed, and several corporations have won their plays to become more rich and influential anyway in many countries.
I don't doubt that humans will continue to survive on this planet if all the worst predictions come true. Many other species won't be so lucky, which is a shame. We have all the technology and power to be caretakers for our home but we just trash it anyway.
The simple reality is that humanity is unable to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without an alternative that is superior.
For every ton of CO2 that the west has reduced in the past decade China has produced three tons of CO2.[1]
We need another breakthrough on the scale of the Haber process.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?country=OWID_WRL~Hi...
Why present an opinion as a fact ("simple reality that we're unable")?
I agree if you opine that the high income countries won't adequately do it, and the low/middle income countries have bigger problems, but it is a choice (and mainly our choice, if I'm not mistaken about HN's predominant NA+EU demographic)
I'm not sure most high-income people (globally speaking, so like the richest ~billion) are consciously making that choice, or at minimum aren't aware of the cost-benefit situation. Pretending there is no choice doesn't seem like the right way to go about this, considering that every euro spent on prevention significantly outweighs adaptation options
It's not the high income countries choice.
If you reduce your consumption the cost of oil will fall towards the cost of production and middle/low income countries would consume it.
The only way someone in a high income country can prevent this is to buy oil and permanently bury it.
>The only way someone in a high income country can prevent this is to buy oil and permanently bury it.
This is needlessly roundabout (especially considering that the oil starts buried). One could simply scale down production (by regulation).
Cost of fuel is not the whole picture if they don't have the infrastructure to consume it
Maybe they'll do decades-long investments to set up new oil infrastructure after we've moved away from it, but even then: it isn't a 1:1 exchange. What we reduce doesn't simply pop back up elsewhere because, evidenced by our moving away in this scenario, there's economical alternatives. Even if it came back 100% in another country a few decades later, buying time really does help us here because we can take more and more preventative and adaptative measures. It won't prevent any and all issues, but a +3°C world in 2200 is still vastly better (and more predictable) than a +5°C world from accelerated oil use
Rather than buying and re-burying oil, you're probably getting a higher ROI (lower climate change adaptation costs) by spending those euros (that you'd otherwise spend on burying oil) on helping everyone (including oneself) not produce greenhouse gasses
Because we shifted our production to other countries.
Lots of their CO2 is because of us.
The effect of the shifting is minor. China's exports (to all countries, not just the US) make only a small difference to their emissions growth.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption...
I think that's the sane opinion, we haven't reduced emissions, we don't have the ability to reasonably reduce emissions at this time. But we can look at available solutions and make what incremental progress we can and cheer on and celebrate the progress that has been made while encouraging more.
But I don't think societies elites (the highest educated portion of the population) has taken the same perspective. I think they've instead chosen to approach humanity (themselves excepted of course) as evil, greedy stupid and belligerent and have taken a hostile attitude to most human and human endeavours (especially commercial ones)
Wanting to do something about climate change is great. Salivating over human suffering or insulting or looking down on people outside of your elite circle for not doing or caring more...
Whatever it is I think it's an even bigger problem than climate change. The rhetoric of the climate movement is disturbing. We can't progress as a species when a large portion of a our species hates us, looks down on us, and wants thd worst for us
When did the climate change movement become the anti human movement? is this just a politically correct way of attacking poor and less educated people
> every ton of CO2 that the west has reduced in the past decade China has produced three tons of CO2.
This is a really bad statement.
Reason 3:
This year China installed more renewables than the rest of the world combined [1]. In China, 50% of new cars are electric. Their per/person emissions is much less than USA. Meanwhile, we are putting up tariffs on Chinese EVs, etc.
Instead of blaming them, realise that they are taking climate change seriously and we are not.
Reason 2:
Look at your graph, ‘we’ have like 15% reduction in CO2. You could divide by any growing economy and the result is the same, because we suck at ‘our job’.
Reason 1;
Lastly, we outsourced our emissions by moving production to China and then importing the products. That’s not much of achievement.
[1] https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/china-continues-to-le...
>> Instead of blaming them, realise that they are taking climate change seriously and we are not.
China's annual CO2 emmissions have been exponentially increasing for the last 50 years and are currently nearly three times as high as the US's and continuing to exponentially increase. There has been zero decrease in emissions over the last 50 years, only increase.
The US's annual CO2 emissions have been linearly decreasing every year for the last 20 years and is now a third of China's.
How is your conclusion to this that China is taking it seriously and the US isn't? https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-metrics
An average American produces 14 tons of CO2 and an average Chinese person produces 9. Of those 9, he produces 3 at work, building TVs that are then bought by US consumers.
US/Canada/Australia have the worlds highest emissions per capita, except oil states like Kuwait. They have no moral high ground to lecture anyone about climate change.
If you disagree that we should consider population size when we compare emissions, I am open to that idea.
In that case we can make similarly absurd comparisons, between USA and Slovakia.
It is only thanks to China that we have affordable batteries and solar panels at all. And without China there would be no hope of green energy transition whatsoever
The data you linked to shows per capita emissions in the US are 70% higher than in China.
Two words — nuclear energy.
Technology is not going to get us out of this mess.
I was of the same opinion till last year actually still am as I think the world has passed the point of no return when it comes to global warming.
But the tech is there just not the political will or finances as it hurts economies and people's chances of winning elections.
China is likely to hit it's peak oil because of ev's and peak coal in the next 2-3 years because of renewables and batteries. Although China is mostly going electric for economic and energy security reasons it will be interesting to see what happens when it is no longer using carbon based energy for it's growth.
Money is fake so we can print as much of it as we want. The problem is that innovation can't be bought with money. Newton did not invent calculus because he wanted to get rich, he invented calculus to understand the universe. Money is not the issue.
Probably nothing will get us out of this mess, but technology is really the only thing that can help. Solar power, wind power, electric cars, heat pumps. All technology. All helping.
What is? Depopulation?
In time
Is there enough left?
Seems like we could deflect 1% of sunlight with existing technology. I don't get why we aren't doing this.
We are already terraforming the globe, so we might as well do it intentionally.
The perceived risk of dramatic unexpected effects is too great for people to consider this before things start getting really bad.
We’ll see how people feel in 50 years.
I disagree. If anything, a YC-funded company will get us out of this mess.
Step 1: Figure out how to monetize reversing climate change.
Make it a SAAS and put it in the Cloud.
Just write react app and scale it to as many servers as possible. After seeds funding ofc.
If you truly believe that then the options for what happens are universally bad.
The history of life is a history of extinctions and I don't think humanity is an exception to that rule.
I honestly think that we are. The reduction might be extreme say 90 to 99%. But that still leaves 80 to 800 million humans living some sort of existence. Might not be same as now, but I am almost certain humans won't go extinct.
I guess that's why everyone is in a rush to develop AI, artificial wombs, genetic engineering, and robots but given the scale of the ecological damage I'm not sure what exactly the survivors are going to do with the entire mess.
No, we have caused AT LEAST 1.5°C long-term global warming.
Long-term should be defined. We can cool the planet the same amount long-term. Why is it taken as a given that any warming is irreversible when we have historical natural patterns showing global cooling (ice age)?
The damage to ecosystems, flora and fauna populations, etc etc, isn't reversible like that. Extinct species don't just bounce back, sadly.
Of course it can be reversed, it’s just vastly more expensive to do so. If your house is on fire and you don’t have insurance you don’t say “eh I can just build a new one”, you put the fire out.
I agree that warming is an important issue to address. I don’t agree that we know that it will be more expensive to cool. Space is cold and technology allowing heat to vent into space may be less expensive than we think.
Previous warming periods moved much slower. We are currently seeing the fastest rise in temperatur ever observed. We are already in a new extinction era as most species can not adapt fast enough to the changing climate.
Governments won’t act. The best you can do to help with the climate crisis is to have one less kid than what you wanted to have.
That's likely not a real solution either.
Encouraging a small minority of HN users to not have an additional child won't move the needle.
It'll likely just remove a person capable of some level of critical thinking from the population pool.
I agree, but at least we can discourage people from saying things like, "Russia is doomed because of demographic collapse," when we are just guessing about the effects of a slow down of the birth rate on the economy of a country long term.
Korean and Japanese birth rates are very low.
The West is following suit.
We'll likely see a global population decline.
Critical thinking capable people are more likely to work for an ad-corporation whose only side effect is to increase consumption and therefore increase emissions.
Okay, but having 255 kids sounds like a problem?
This article spends a lot of time worrying about which baseline to use as that determines how much global warming has occurred. Which is important because the 1.5 C limit was raised in the Paris accords. But wouldn't the measurement be absolute. The 1.5 increase is just because that was the baseline they used then.
Does the IPCC account for asphalt expansion (added heat) around all the airport sensors as cities expand? What data source do they use to track and compensate for this growth?
>asphalt expansion (added heat) around all the airport sensors as cities expand
Why would this be relevant? The airport itself represents quite a bit of land area (thus, a significant distance to any heat sources that could be considered "the rest of the city"), and much of that was already paved the entire time.
Genuine question to experts: what could be the positive contribution of agriculture on this and exactly how?
Sure, but let's keep voting based on culture wars and the new satanic panic.
Our response to a global pandemic was a disaster other than getting the vaccines made. The most recent large scale collective effort to defeat an existential threat prior to that was probably WWII. We’ve gotten pretty good at waging war but I fear that’s probably where our evolution in the matter of dealing with existential threats will probably remain.
I would argue that numerous initiative to ban highly dangerous substances such as the Montreal Protocol banning ozone layer damaging refrigerant gasses have been successful in this period. Instead it appears to me that global collaboration actually stalled after the fall the Soviet Union and the end of great power competition.
Remember "acid rain"? Remember "the ozone hole"? We have solved, or greatly mitigated, environmental problems before.
> Our response to a global pandemic was a disaster other than getting the vaccines made
What would you have liked to have seen?
And out of curiosity, what should be the response to the 700k heart disease, 600k cancer, 227k accidental, 165k stroke, 147k respiratory and 101k diabetes deaths each year in the USA? (N.B. COVID sits at 186k in 2023)
Wasn't it just a week ago we discovered that widely used models were significantly underestimating CO2 absorption by plants?
The models may be perfect or imperfect, either way the temperature is still going up.
Title:
> Humans have caused 1.5 °C of long-term global warming according to new estimates
First sentence of the article:
> humans may have already caused 1.5 °C of global warming
I guess that can be consistent actually, since the title says "according to new estimates". So the new estimates say humans have caused the warming, and the new estimates may be true
Call me pessimistic but I don't think anything is going to change and a lot of people are going to die due to climate-forced migration.
That being said, it's a difficult topic to discuss rationally. Part of the issue is deciding on what your baseline is. Looking at the last 200 years tells a pretty limited view. Consider around 100,000 years ago when global temperatures were similar [1].
That raises some questions about what caused that spike but, more importantly, what caused it to lower. You can say "an ice age" but what really triggers an ice age?
My point here is that doomsday predictions of Venus-like runaway inflation I think are both unrealistic and unhelpful in actually motivating people about an otherwise very real problem. We really have no idea of the mechanics in place.
But like I say, we're going to do absolutely nothing about it anyway.
[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/analysis-is-it-actually...
The rate of temperature change happening currently is much greater than anything in the geologic record.
What use it is to ponder about what has triggered an ice age in the past, when that mechanism can’t possibly counteract what’s happening now?
It’s like thinking about starting blood pressure medication when you’re having a heart attack right now.
I don't think ice-core measurements give year-by-year resolution good enough to determine this, but it would be interesting to know if someone proved it.
That's not true [1]:
> There are twenty-five of these distinct warming-cooling oscillations (Dansgaard 1984) which are now commonly referred to as Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles, or D-O cycles. One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C (Huber et al. 2006). Furthermore, the cooling occurred much more gradually, giving these events a saw-tooth shape in climate records from most of the Northern Hemisphere (Figure 1).
The last time I brought this up, someone said (paraphrased) "that's only over Greenland". Yeah, the place they did measurements. Do you really think a change in air temperature of 8-15C over decades is repeatedly localized in just one place?
[1]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...
Well, the link you cite puts forward 2 hypotheses that could explain localized temperature change in Greenland, and does not mention "maybe this was global temperature change."
It’ll take a couple of mass casualty wet bulb events to shift the discourse from ‘it’s too expensive, just drill more’ to ‘oh shit whatever it takes’
Sadly, I'm skeptical about that. Covid killed a million Americans and half of America thinks the real enemy was the government telling people to stay home and wear masks. Drive down I-5 of CA's central valley, and you'll see signs saying "Congress created dust bowl."
In coming decades, I fully expect to see people blaming renewable energy and carbon tax for whatever new climate disaster we end up with. Hopefully we could ignore them, in the same way adults stop entertaining toddlers when shit happens.
We’ll be lucky if people blame technology, instead of other groups of people that they are then motivated to take vengeance on. That is what I fear.
It would happen in poor countries and won't result into much "discourse". It has already happened actually. Moreover, even if it happens in the rich countries, are companies & countries ready to ban crypto or AI training of LLMs ? Would we be okay to increase airline prices (by putting a tax) so that people fly less ? Will countries be willing to reduce thermal energy by prioritising solar, wind and nuclear energy ? Can all countries decide to reduce petroleum usage by putting a 100% tax on gas ? Or will be ready to go vegetarian and vegan for reducing cattle farming ? Will be okay to put fines on food wastage ? If not, then there won't be any "whatever it takes"
Economically taxation would be the solution.
But the Carbon Tax credits/handling shows that we aren’t grown up enough to handle taxes properly.
Indeed, any and all rebuttals seem to reduce to:
>Nice argument. Unfortunately I have coined the phrase "Axe the tax" and shall depict you as the soy wojak.
Nah the oil and gas companies will just say these web bulb events are acts of God and there's nothing we can do about them. And plenty of people would believe them.
The first few are probably going to occur in south Asia and the most you'll see from Americans is some casual victim blaming. It's their poor infrastructure. It's their overpopulation. etc.
I envy your optimism but I see no evidence that this will be the case. People want to believe all sorts of things and they'll reject all evidence that contradicts their world view. Just look at:
- Millions who died in Covid
- Vaccines in general
- "The election was stolen"
- Wind turbines are killing the whales [1];
- "There's a migrant crime wave"
And so on.
As long as the cost of climate change can be shifted to the Global South, by force when necessary, it will continue. It's sobering how cruel people can be, particularly in groups, if they feel like their way of life is threatened, or even when they might theoretically be slightly inconvenienced, as demonstrated by the recent protests in Kayesville, UT over providing warming centers for people in need when the weather gets too cold [2].
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66928305
[2]: https://ksltv.com/705578/kaysville-homeowners-show-up-in-lar...
I think we'll blow through these limits. Humanity has never ceased to disappoint me.
That seems… very low?
Yes, seems that way, but the impact will be huge.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/impacts-climate-change-o...
See also:
https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/d...
- 70 to 90% of coral reefs dying, devastation of maritime ecosystems
- potential collapse of maritime currents that lead to relatively mild climates in Britain
- triggering of multiple irreversible climate tipping points (arctic ice sheet)
- more common and much more devastating extreme weather events (warmer air can carry more water)
- the aforementioned weather results in infrastructure damage and lack of food within big parts of the world. Waves of migration
- median sea level rise of more than a meter means extremes will be much higher, a big part of the human population lives next to the sea
And much more — this was the absolute minimum and we surpassed it faster than expected.
It might sound low, but consider that this number is a distillation of many changes into one proxy which roughly covers a variety of different effects that aren’t strictly related to just temperature.
For example, consider ocean acidification.
Also consider the number of tipping points and positive feedback loops that exist. How close are we to those?
1.5 degrees celsius is 10% of the global average temperature. That is, to put it mildly, a shit ton of a difference
If doesn't make sense to take the percentage of a quantity in units with an arbitrary reference point. In Kelvin it would be about 0.5%.
Celsius is not an absolute scale. You need to use Kelvin for that meaning that a 1.5C increase is close to a 0.5% increase in global average temperature.
Depends on context. for example 1C for all water on earth is still on 1C+ but one would need a lot of energy for that.
from open ai: The power required to raise the temperature of all the Earth's water by 1°C in one second would be 5.57 × 10¹⁸ megawatts.
Enjoy the warmer weather.
Unfortunately it is not that simple. The average goes up, but in many places it does so by having both more hot days and more cold days, with the increase in the number of intensity of hot days being a little more than the increase in the number and intensity of cold days.
*Enjoy the windier, wetter, stormier, warmer weather
The Spanish are just /loving/ the wetter weather right now. And so did the Bangladeshis in August.
/s
All the people who usually make a big deal out of this usually oppose density and reducing car dependence. Degrowthers always seem to assume that the only job worthwhile is “guy writing meta-analysis paper” and “coffee shop”. They ally with groups that protect golf courses and oppose geothermal energy and nuclear energy.
So it’s fine. We’ll tech our way out of this without them. If we don’t, we die. So be it.
Europe and China are currently leading the transition to renewables so that is an American problem
Yeah I have hope for the guys who can build. While America is complaining about Chinese energy sources, China will add sufficient nuclear and renewable to outpace us in decades. People never really look at the delta. They always look at the y.
We are on the natural rise after a natural ice period. Just check long term temperature curves and stop looking short term, making it look like there has ever been the same average temperature on earth.
The temperature increase rate since the industrial revolution doesn't look very natural and doesn't seem like a coincidence.
We've got satellites that can measure the inflow and outflow of radiation and see an imbalance.
We've got spectrographs that can look at that radiation to see which radiation is not balanced. We can see that what is happening is radiation coming in at wavelengths that the atmosphere doesn't block heat things which reradiate much of that energy as infrared which the atmosphere blocks.
Thanks to spectroscopy we know that it is CO₂ in the atmosphere that is largely responsible for this blocking.
We know that the increase in CO₂ levels over the last couple of hundred years is largely from fossil fuels rather than things like decaying vegetation, forest fires, animal respiration and flatulence, or volcanic gases because of isotope ratios because of isotope ratios in atmospheric CO₂.
CO₂ from living things or recently living things contains ¹⁴C. CO₂ from fossil fuels and volcanoes does not contain ¹⁴C. CO₂ from volcanoes contains a higher ratio of ¹³C to ¹²C than the ratio in atmospheric CO₂. CO₂ from fossil fuels contains a lower ratio of ¹³C to ¹²C than the ratio in atmospheric CO₂.
That allows scientists to look at the isotope ratios in the atmosphere and figure out how much of the CO₂ there came from fossil fuels and how much came from volcanoes. The result is that most of the increase is from fossil fuels.
As a sanity check that result also matches well with the amount of CO₂ that we'd expect to have been released based on the amount of known fossil fuel use.
So no, it is not a natural rise.
"A continuous record of the past 66 million years shows natural climate variability due to changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun is much smaller than projected future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions."
“Now that we have succeeded in capturing the natural climate variability, we can see that the projected anthropogenic warming will be much greater than that.”
"For the past 3 million years, Earth’s climate has been in an Icehouse state characterized by alternating glacial and interglacial periods. Modern humans evolved during this time, but greenhouse gas emissions and other human activities are now driving the planet toward the Warmhouse and Hothouse climate states not seen since the Eocene epoch, which ended about 34 million years ago."
Please read the article you're linking. Unless this is an awkwardly executed joke that I'm missing?
Read: “projected” not “actual” future (!) warming.
It wouldn’t be the first time these climate “scientists” were wrong.
The article you posted says:
"Now that we have succeeded in capturing the natural climate variability, we can see that the projected anthropogenic warming will be much greater than that.”
That does not seem to support your claim of "natural rise".
Read: “projected” not “actual” future (!) warming.
It wouldn’t be the first time these climate “scientists” were wrong.
I'm not sure if this link is intended to contradict or reinforce the image from the previous link. The text of that link indicates that the research concluded that the Earth is currently much warmer than it ought to be given known natural processes.
The research concluded in a hypothesis, not a factual proof.
Simply wrong. Intuitive visualization: https://xkcd.com/1732/.
It’s you who’s simply wrong.
You have to look before the ice period, that’s what OP refers to as long term.
https://scitechdaily.com/66-million-years-of-earths-climate-...
And we all know how well adapted humans were for that period, right.
That is to say what?
Asking sincerely because I'm not well-versed on this topic - do we have actual proof that humans are causing global warming?
My understanding is that the climate will change independently of human activity. For example, we know that there was an Ice Age and it was not ended by human activity but rather natural processes. So the climate has been known to change historically without human involvement.
So here is where I'm looking for clarification: I thought the "controversy" over climate change was the degree to which human activity is accelerating a natural process of warming?
Said differently, the planet is warming by itself, but humans pumping hydrocarbons and other things into the atmosphere is speeding up that process. But the cause is not solely because of human activity.
Thanks in advance for thoughtful responses, I'm really just trying to learn here.
> do we have actual proof that humans are causing global warming?
Yes. See this comment [1] for an explanation of how we know that humans are largely responsible.
How hard are you really trying if you're asking early 2000s climate change questions on a VC forum.
The rate of change in climate (due greenhouse gas inputs from human activity) is much faster than it has occurred naturally in the past. If you are genuinely curious, the US EPA's climate change indicators report would be a good place to start. https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
Before your comment (and mine) gets flagged to death, I wish to provide this information that might be of interest:
https://actualfreedom.com.au/sundry/factsandgroupthink/globa...
Yea, the climate change narrative is highly overblown, but it will take a few more years before the overtone window shifts for larger swaths of people in power to accept it.
