There could indeed be self-reinforcing feedbacks and tipping dynamics that make the problem worse.
There could presumably also be self-dampening, stabilising dynamics that come into play at certain levels.
Is there any science on why the former is more likely than the latter?
* Australia's renewables generation increased from 13.7% in 2015 to 42.9% in 2025 [1]
* EIA: 99%+ of new US capacity in 2026 will be solar, wind + storage [2]
* Wind and solar overtake fossil power in the EU for the first time in 2025 [3]
1. https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=all...
2. https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/eia-99-of-new-us-capacity-in-...
3. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricit...
Canada has 14 tonnes carbon footprint per person. Canada is a cold country.
France has 8 tonnes carbon footprint per person. Climate is way warmer.
We can't continue adding population and the wondering what is going on.
Unless the fake reality starts to crack with the Epstein and other current events and humanity's coming of age will happen. Even if a hundred years later than Bonhoeffer though it would.
And let's contrast that with the AI hype. It's more the opposite, a kind of solution to problems we didn't really have, but are now being persuaded we do. It would be sensible to invest an equal share of the resources currently being pumped into AI with uncertain outcomes into the complex issue of climate change. And, no, AI won't solve it; unfortunately, it only makes it worse.
I don't know what to do.
> Policymakers and the public, however, remain largely unaware of the risks posed by such a practically irreversible transition
Most people still underestimate what it means for the earth system to change from the current stable state into another state, which might need many years to become stable again. And that new stable state might be a lot less favourable for us humans.
'A "greenhouse Earth" is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history.
'Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously... Earth's current icehouse state is known as the Quaternary Ice Age and began approximately 2.58 million years ago.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earthh...
Water vapor (clouds) is a stonger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. We already got measurably higher temperatures, so we also have higher water evaporation, and from the last 5 years it looks like it happens every year.
So the runaway is already happening, until something stops it near hothouse conditions or hopefully earlier than that.
We can't cut emissions fast enough politically, but we can race towards economically viable fusion power which would solve the problem from the supply side and would make industrial scale carbon sequestration not insane, for a century or so, until waste heat itself can't be radiated fast enough even in 250 ppm CO2 atmosphere - but that's a problem for the XXII century.
Does this mean during mid-to-late Pleistocene it used to be -6C to +2C, or does it mean it used to be 8C to 16C?
(If the former, then how did early humanoids, and many other animals, survive such cold?)
AGI is here
>Despite decades of research and sophisticated computational climate modeling, the magnitude and pace of these events have surprised scientists, raising questions about how well current climate projections capture risk.
When this always-revise-in-one-direction phenomenon happened with the electron charge, it was considered a priori "proof" that scientists were fudging their data to match expectations. The Millikan Oil Drop Experiment is still studied in fundamentals of science class.[0]
If climate scientists are constantly revising their predictions upward, then this is equally "proof" that climate scientists are under pressure to revise their estimates downward. Far from being "alarmist," such terms are actually cudgels used to discourage climate scientists from making their data look too bad.
The result is the predictable fudging of climate data to look better than it really is.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...
If such a thing existed, we could be sure that environmentalists and leftists would have openly embraced it, rather than nip it at the bud 50 years ago. Because they are Good People™. And we should definitely listen to them now because they Follow The Science™.
I always wondered if we just lacked the ability to mobilize to solve big problems anymore but now I look at this 7% US GDP being allocated to AI datacentres and I realize that it isn't a lack of ability, it's a lack of desire.
Imagine if we had ram shortages because all the silicon was being diverted towards making solar panels. Imagine if we had copper shortages because it was going to the windings on wind mills. Imagine if all these economic disruptions were just temporary and for a better cause or eliminating carbon emissions and eventually moving to sequestration of carbon.
Instead we get chatbots. And funny picture makers.
Why? Because candidly looking at those risks as a society means deep collective existential dread, which automatically means an immediate civilizational collapse.
So I'm guessing some of our elite is actually ignorant and the other part is willfully shutting the hell up on this subject to let our civilization run on fumes a few more years.
It's unfortunate because a rapid civilizational collapse could give humanity as a species a better chance of survival.
The super danger zone is ~1000 PPM CO2 - where ocean chemistry changes. In worst case scenarios in 50-60 years, we could get there - but there's a lot of reason to believe we won't, and we DEFINITELY aren't getting there by 2050.
The graph the main source shows is cherry-picked. Look at this: https://co2coalition.org/facts/for-most-of-earths-history-it...
Saying we're on a "hothouse" trajectory plays into the Apocalypse / Earth Becomes Venus trope, which is so ridiculous for our lifetime even under the absolute worst case realistic scenarios.
As for AI, to characterise it as a "solution to problems we didn't really have" is placing your opinion over others. They may be right or wrong about it but many AI proponents firmly believe that AI can provide solutions to real world problems that we definitely have. You may disagree about their potential effectiveness, and that's ok, but at least tolerate that people might have different ideas about how to make the world better.
Any kind of workable solution to large, societal-level problems needs to deal with the principal agent issue. Society doesn't actually exist; humanity doesn't actually exist. These are abstractions we use to label the behavior of individual people. You need to operate on the level of individual people to get any sort of outcome.
(FWIW, this is a major reason why concepts like markets, capitalism, democracy, rule of law, and federalism have been successful. They work by aligning incentives so that when one person takes an action that is good for themselves, they more-or-less end up benefitting the people around them too.)
As a 52 year old who never believed we would take climate change seriously (and who is more convinced than ever I was correct as society actually regresses on this issue) I did what I had to do -- I purposefully didn't have children.
Good luck to those of you who did.
This ain't my problem. I'll be dead (or close enough) when the shit fully hits the fan and won't have doomed any offspring to the upcoming migration/resources wars
Its not an education issue, it has always been governments getting in the way and refusing to change the power source. its why I think Solar will win out, it can be deployed on an individual house level unlike everything else and that changes things enormously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
That leaves us in the realm of solutions that may be very likely to disrupt our ecosystem themselves, like genetically-engineering algae/phytoplankton to improve ocean carbon sequestration
Renewables are considered woke technology which mock old and masculine fossil fuel tech, which feel threatened by all these white spinny things, hence renewable energy projects are being actively discouraged or canceled altogether.
You know, we'd be all woke and weird if our cars don't have 8 cylinders and make wroom sounds. Same for our chimneys and power architecture. Woke electrons should be banned. We need masculine, fossil based electrons, which are more powerful per electron than wind/solar based fluffy/hippie ones.
Now it’s drill baby drill time.
The issue with current politics wrt environment is environmentalists and leftists? This feels like a smoker blaming their smoking habit on anti-drug associations not being good enough rather than big tobacco.
We're in deep s*t
Not realizing we’re gonna go extinct here in the next thousand years unless something solves it
Since humans are incapable of doing this there’s only one possible option: To create something smarter than us and give it the power to solve it because we cannot
I have to disagree here.
This idea of a consumer-level personal responsibility for the fossil energy industry's externalized costs is a lot like the plastic producers shifting blame for waste by saying that it's the consumers' fault for not recycling. It's transparent blame-shifting.
The fossil energy industry pulls the carbon out of the ground and distributes it globally. Then it buys and sells politicians and, through mass media, votes, to ensure they maintain the industry's hegemony.
You only have to look at the full-blown slide of the US into a despotic petrostate to understand the causes of the climate crisis.
But "invest an equal share of the resources currently being pumped into AI into climate" misidentifies the bottleneck. Marine cloud brightening could produce meaningful planetary cooling for roughly $5 billion per year at scale (NAS estimate). That's like what? 1% of what was spent on AI infrastructure last year?
The money exists. What doesn't exist is the political coordination to spend it.
The goddamn Alameda city council shut down a University of Washington MCB field test in 2024 because nobody told them it was happening on their property. Go look it up.
This's the actual bottleneck: governance, coordination, and political will, not capital.
When someone says "we should invest resources in X instead of Y," it's worth asking who "we" is and what mechanism they're proposing. AI investment is private capital chasing returns. You can't redirect it to climate by wishing. The implicit model, that Society has a budget and we're choosing wrong, assumes a resource allocation authority that doesn't exist. If you want to argue for creating one, that's a real position, but it should be stated openly rather than hidden inside "it would be sensible."
Also ... "AI won't solve it; it only makes it worse" is doing a ton of work! The energy consumption concern has real merit. But materials science, grid optimization, and climate modeling are direct climate contributions happening now. Google has saved energy in its datacenters ... using AI!
Blanket dismissal of an entire domain of capability isn't seriousness, it's pattern matching. (Ironically, there's a phrase for systems that produce plausible-sounding output by matching patterns without engaging with underlying structure. We're told to be worried about them.)
Renewable energy technology is ready, right now today, to replace fossil fuels. All we have to do is start doing it, but the Oil lobby is just too strong apparently. There is no political will. I wish I was wrong, but I just don't see humanity pulling together to solve this one.
A conclusive argument for this still seems out of reach. AI does solve some problems, and it's not exactly clear which problems AI "only makes worse". It's not clear how much energy all of our AI systems will use, and while it's tempting to outright believe they'll simply use more and more, even that's not yet clear based on arguments presented.
I‘ve travelled quite a bit and I find it hard to convince myself that I as a city dweller contribute any meaningful amount to pollution or waste. I‘ve seen rivers of trash flow directly into the ocean. The rich and wealthy pollute disproportionally in such a way that I don‘t think offloading the responsibility to the general public is fair.
* Multifamily housing is much more energy efficient. Is it legal to build throughout your city, or does zoning prevent it?
* Is there good bicycle infrastructure so people don't have to drive for everything?
* Does your city still have expensive parking mandates that lock in car dependency? Get rid of those. They also get in the way of places becoming more walkable.
* This one hurts, but: eat less beef.
* Advocate for good transit as another way for people to get around without driving a personal vehicle.
* What can be done in your city/region to electrify heating for homes and businesses?
* What can your region do to build more renewable energy capacity?
Those are all things where even a few voices can sometimes make a difference.
don't worry
AI will cause both losing your job AND climate change
Indeed, the biggest personal responsibility is to make this a top political priority when deciding who to elect. Nothing will change until we consistenly fire leaders who refuse to act decisively on this.
So still some hope I think! And it’s possible the populist “dumb dumb bricks” crew will decline in popularity when the inevitable lack of tangible improvements continues. Though since we are dealing with dumb dumb it may take a while
As for what "we" collectively can do... let's assume you are speaking of areas of research. We may need to focus on researching adaptation techniques for the areas that are going to be the hardest hit, or that have the fewest resources to cope. It's a sad topic but it may be needed. Assume the worst, hope for the best, and plan for what you can.
People are selfish. "Life will be much harder, and the problem will never be fixable within the rest of your life or your childrens' lives"
The runaway effect is scary b/c at certain temperature (~400K) atmosphere consisting predominantly of water vapor looses its ability to radiate out more heat up until 1600K.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1892 (see fig. 2b) (edit: the figure: https://imgur.com/a/ytoEXzd)
edit #2: I've measured some pixels and the starting runaway temp is closer to 315K / 42C, damn
Nothing wrong with synthetic.
China's doing better than the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292. Please don't lie.
I’m in a loop. I must be.
How are people still basic at this? No. Forests are not “carbon capture” devices.
Plant a big forest and “protect” (which means thinning it, unless you are California) and in 100 years most trees have died, rotted, released their carbon.
There is so much wrong with the alarmism here, so much hand waving away of scale when it is inconvenient… that it’s like people are doing more damage than good when they jump up and down over this stuff.
It’s almost like if the jumping up and down and alarmism has a different purpose, a whole separate game removed from the issues at hand.
This is mostly a US problem at this point. The rest of the world is adopting renewables considerably faster than anyone expected (and despite the best efforts of the current administration, the adoption curve is accelerating even in the US).
That said, it's still apparent that even optimistic estimates of renewable energy adoption aren't fast enough to fix the climate crisis on their own.
The only solution is systemic. The incentives need to be in order for businesses and consumers to do the right thing not because it is the right thing, but because it's cheaper or more convenient. That can only be implemented via legislation and investment of public resources, hence from the political level.
And what determines whether the politicians in charge are ones who will implement the changes needed to mitigate the problem, rather than ones who will keep alive the system which is intensifying it? Well, we're back to square one: each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.
TL;DW: It is important that individuals show that there is a real problem and that they perform actions that address the problem. This demonstrative behaviour leads to social dynamics where more people feel encouraged to perform actions and to drive larger change.
You need to start somewhere.
This is the one issue where I feel some sympathy with the right. I hate "Virtue signaling" about as much as they do. I'm sorry, but if you are going to snap at people over eating beef, while you fly/drive all over the country/world unnecessarily, you are absolute full of shyte.
Society’s choices and lifestyles are the cause of fossil fuel consumption, at a very high level. The plastic bag exists because it has users.
There are quantitative arguments against many silly consumer-focused initiatives. In aggregate tho companies aren’t burning fossil fuels for fun. Burning fossil fuels costs money, and a lot of people would rather not spend that money!!
In fact the reason it's so easy to find others to blame is that the responsibility is a shared one. Holding consumers responsible doesn't absolve producers, or governments for their participation. All have to be held responsible for their actions. That's the only way forward.
Plastic is a bit different, you didn't choose the packaging. And you probably don't have the option to recycle anyway. Putting in a special bin doesn't change the fact that it's probably going to a landfill anyway.
Some of it's consumer level. Do what you can. Don't whatabout it.
Capital, and by relation the system that centers the idea of Capital as a method for moving around resources is at the very center of this.
Since Capital follows near-term incentive, if the "pollute the world" path has a greater near-term incentive, that's where the market will follow. If a single member of the system goes for long-term incentive(not cooking the earth), other near-term incentive chasers will eat their lunch and remove a player.
The system itself is a tight feedback loop searching for local maxima, and the local max is often the most destructive. With chasing the local maxima, also comes profit and capital that influence the political system.
Is it the "far right"? Or is it that technology and fertility have actually lowered the risks substantially?
Solar plus batteries, right now, seems to be the cheapest form of new energy. Given that, you would expect most of new energy to be "green". (And if you look at the stats, that seems to be coming true.)
Electrification of transportation is happening quickly. China is cranking out cheap electric cars that are generally better than ICE cars of yesterday. And the world seems to be transitioning.
And fertility rates are dropping everywhere. So the amount of people we will need to support in the future continues to decline.
I've mostly stopped worrying about climate change. Not because I don't think it is real. But because I think we are clearly on the path to mitigating the worse scenarios.
Not because the alternative is so great, but because Trump is so horrible that it's not even a question. We really don't need someone who doesn't even acknowledge climate change in charge of the world's biggest economy.
People really fail to grasp the significance of this part.
One of our most common apocalyptic fantasies lays this out quite well: nuclear annihilation. The common narrative is about the post-apocalyptic world and rebuilding. But this presumes a new normal has been established.
With climate change we will continue to experience more extreme changes at a faster rate over time with no chance of a "new normal" in our lives.
It took hundreds of thousands of years for humans to develop agriculture. It's no coincidence that this development happened during one of the most stable periods of climate the planet has ever seen. People love to wax poetic on human adaptability, but we were effectively playing on "easy" mode.
While the other side of climate change might be a more hostile earth, the transition period will be worse because you can't adapt. In our lifetimes we may live to see a period of record heat waves in Europe, followed by a transition of Europe to that is dramatically colder (and who knows, maybe back again).
The other major problem is as stability decreases so does our ability to predict the future. It's hard to even know what we might be facing in the coming years, but high variance is usually not great for complex life.
And during those periods there were no human beings. And no agriculture, or unstable globalised economiies, or dense urban societies vulnerable to disruption.
It is, of course, interesting that our planet has this long, varied existence that pre-dates us. But it is of little use in understanding how to get us out of the hole we're in. And it is arguably dangerous, because it misleads people into thinking that we have the capacity to adapt to such conditions, when we manifestly don't.
Obviously you mean purified silicon, but, remember silicon is what the Earth has in abundance (yeah I know it’s energy intensive, and there exist such profession as sand prospector.)
Yes, in approx 4 billion years.
I agree that is a concern but I think we should also pay some attention to some of the problems we will be facing in a timescale somewhat shorter than billions of years.
Worse, the people we sold the idea too are stuck on it: they're convinced the solution must and totally be the performance, not the result.
Society's choices and lifestyles don't exist in some rational-individualistic vacuum. Companies advertise products while hiding known risks and side effects of what they're pushing. Cigarettes. Oil. PFOA/PFAS.
They all knew, and they did and continue to do it anyway. Regulatory capture solved all their problems by removing accountability.
Yes, the plastic bag has users. Do you really expect every single shopper to investigate how the bag at <grocery co> was made and if the plastic is recycled? What if they also have to do the same for every single thing they interact with every single day?
It's much easier to ask the people that work with the minutia of plastic bags every day, namely the people who make them, to maybe fix this problem.
No I want them to pay for the negative consequences of the lies they spread. I paid them for fuel, and I got fuel. I did not think I was paying for lies and I never wanted them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...
Because of the power of lobbyists and their war chests full of cash, even if we made that circle surrounding our congress critter so everyone was pointing at them, we'd still have no effect. Our shame circle would only be uncomfortable for a short time which would quickly be assuaged by the soothing feeling of another large donation from a lobbyist.
Obviously in such a system there wouldn’t be any fossil fuel companies so it’s a moot point.
But this isn’t purely economic. Fossil fuel companies are paying top dollar to ensure we destroy the climate. Just look at all the batshit propaganda around climate change. People genuinely believe it’s not a problem. It’s wild how effective the fossil fuel industry has been in convincing people the sky isn’t falling
The cars being locked into fossil fuels is the result of fossil fuel subsidies from the government. Otherwise, OPEC raising prices would have long ago led to improvements in battery technology and electric cars. But the federal government shields the fossil fuels companies to make sure the “price at the pump” is small.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRnUY6V2Knk
We should be raising pigovian taxes on fossil fuels at the point of extraction, and redistribute it to all our citizens as a UBI. Alaska has been doing this for decades and they have almost the lowest GINI index of all states year after year.
Just like we want bottling and clothing companies to shift from plastics to bidegradeable materials. But you like to keep individuals distracted and blame them for using a straw and a bag, as if THAT is the main cause of pollution. And plastic recycling was a total scam designed to keep people distracted from forcing change on corporations pollution and unsustainable practices upstream.
Eh. Cloud brightening is a temporary hack, stops working as soon as you stop actively doing it, and isn't an alternative to switching away from fossil fuels. It's probably worth doing to push back the "ice melts and releases more carbon" thing but let's not confuse it with the extent of what needs to be done. You can't actually solve the problem for $5B/year.
> AI investment is private capital chasing returns.
Getting private capital to work for you is a good way to solve the problem. The real problem is politics.
The EV tax credits and the subsidies oil companies get were costing about the same amount of money, but we only got rid of one of them. Nuclear should cost less than fossil fuels, but we're told that fission is scary and Deepwater Horizon is nothing but spilled milk so the one with the much better environmental record has to be asymmetrically regulated into uncompetitiveness.
If we actually wanted to solve it we'd do the "carbon tax but 100% of the money gets sent back to the people as checks" thing, since then you're not screwing everyone because on average the check and the tax cancel out and corporations pay the tax too but only people get the check. Then everyone, but especially the heaviest users, would have the incentive to switch to alternative energy and more efficient vehicles etc., because everybody gets the same check but the people putting thousands of miles on non-hybrid panzers pay more in tax.
The "problem" is that it would actually work, which is highly objectionable to the oil industry and countries like Russia since it would cause their income to go away, hence politics.
For the last 20 years, power consumption of HPC is increased per cubic inch as systems are miniaturized and density increased. The computing capacity increased more than the power use, but this doesn't mean we didn't invent more inefficient ways to undo significant part of that improvement.
It's same for AI. Cards like Groq and inference oriented hardware doesn't consume as power as training oriented cards, but this doesn't mean total power use will reduce. On the contrary. It'll increase exponentially. Considering AI companies doesn't care about efficiency yet means we're wasting tons of energy, too.
I'll not enter into the water consumption debacle, because open-loop systems waste enormous amounts of water.
All in all, we're wasting a lot of water and energy which would sustain large cities and large number of people.
with regards from your friendly HPC admin.
Is it superior to zero?
Does AI replace existing, more costly energy use patterns to the extent that its own energy use is offset?
For those in the US, I'd add lobbying your congresspeople to support the revival of the Energy Permitting Reform Act. It's something that didn't make it across the line before the end of the last congress, but basically, making it easier to bring new generation capacity on the electrical grid disproportionately benefits renewables, because they make up the vast majority of wattage waiting in the queue. As we've seen by the explosion of deployment in less regulated grids (Texas, and most of the world), the economics now favor solar+storage and wind, we just have to let people build as much of it as they want to.
* Plant more trees
This evidence based article published in one of the worlds top scientific journals comes to the opposite conclusion.
Yes, it is. They're committed to "Every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out". [0]. They keep saying this to us, and we don't seem to believe them. I like your optimism, and I'm not denying a lot of what you're saying -- renewables fast becoming the cheapest energy. But that's not deterring people: the far right here in the US are about to dismantle the government's legal rationale for regulating emissions. They're laughing at us right now, doing victory laps. They're telling polluters to take the gloves off.
These people are terrorists, extremists, and they're in charge of the world's single most powerful economy and military. They're obsessed with domination, with doing violence to the weak and the poor and to nature. It's pure Freudian thanatos.
It's just hard to take your position.
[0] https://theecologist.org/2023/dec/05/every-molecule-hydrocar...
The Heritage Foundation (Project 2025, far-right, anti-climate) is working with the Heartland Institute (spreading climate science denial across UK / EU) / Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC, Jordan Peterson)
They do not like EU rules that hold US firms accountable to climate laws.
https://www.desmog.com/2026/02/10/donald-trump-uk-eu-maga-sl...
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/china https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi... https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
It's true that the West did peak in 2007 (as did South America, India, and Africa), but Asia's emissions are so massive that they more than make up for all of the reductions of the rest of the world. That last link I posted makes clear how big the problem with China is.
As far as agriculture goes we can adapt but the cost would be exorbitant. Vertical farming is technically doable.
(Edit: purely illustrative rhetorical question, but I appreciate the responses)
And also as you say that many politicians are disincentivized to try in the first place.
Sure, if by "some" you mean "virtually all".
The more common greenhouse state is unlikely to lead to a Venus runaway, but it will be hostile to us.
We might very well require the rare climate, and perish in the common.
The problem is also the speed in which the CO2 levels are rising. Such a massive change in such a short geological time is very unusual.
The paleocene–eocene thermal maximum makes for interesting related reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_therm...
For example was there as much methane trapped in the arctics during the last time CO2 was high?
Does the rate of the increase of CO2 and temperature have an effect? Because it's currently getting hotter far faster (absurdly so) than any other period we have records for.
Yes. But stars like ours burn brighter as they move through their lifetimes, and the Sun is a bit brighter now than it was back when we had higher CO2 levels. That's why a runaway GHG didn't happen back then, but is basically guaranteed to happen within a billion years.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/12mo/monthly
It literally has been done.
Yeah I know, and I'm not from that side of the ocean. I worded my comment like that since most users here are from the US.
electricitymaps paints a nice picture, though. We'll be using them in a project, so I'll be able to see the nitty gritty details soonish.
At least some of us are trying. Maybe we'll fail, but not all of us are that ignorant, and that's better than nothing.
I may not be able to save the whole planet, but at least I'll leave my area a bit better as my capacity and time allows.
How's that?
I have dined with them countless times at restaurants where they order vegan and I don't. I have never once been "snapped at" about my dietary decisions. Some of these people have dedicated years of their life to non-human animal rights activism.
So I am very skeptical that this shaming occurs at any appreciable scale. I suspect it is mostly psychological projection: one doubts the morality of one's decisions, judges oneself harshly, but experiences this as the judgement of others.
Prisoner's dilemma is about situation when optimal outcome requires cooperation from all participants.
In the situation with climate change, personal decisions of 99% of Earth population do not really matter.
Sure they do. You even mention one in the venerable plastic bag. Is it the best bag? No, of course not. Is it a good bag? Absolutely not. Is it the cheapest bag to produce? You betcha.
Consumers are often presented the least expensive option with the worst outcomes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
Sorry, but its really not. Perhaps in some sectors such as ground transportation, but definitely not in air and sea transport and fertilizer production, and many industrial processes. At least not at scale, where would have to make massive lifestyle sacrifices which are not politically acceptable outside of extreme authoritarian states who have no reason to do this anyway.
If you want to see real progress on the climate, a few thousand people changing their daily habits is not enough. Governments need to take action and hold industry to account. That looks to be an increasingly unlikely event, but that doesn't justify taking ineffective action instead as a placebo.
It reminds me of the '90s when we are all told that recycling was necessary for saving the environment. Decades later, we'll still spending time sorting our garbage, despite evidence that no one wants recyclable waste, it still ends up dumped somewhere, and it costs more money to handle. [1]
Fossil fuels are profitable for a small group of powerful people, and they spend vast amounts of money to spread falsehoods.
There can be a futility to it all in that the “ideal option” simply isn’t produced of course.
I find boots theory is often a bit too convenient in this topic though. There is unlikely to be magic structural solutions that allow every part of your life to remain as convenient. At one point our lives will have to change in structure.
EDIT: to be extra clear, I think systemic coordinated changes is needed. I just think the “it’s the corporations doing this!” narrative to obscure the needs for reorganization of daily life on top of systemic change
Sorry, but how was that truck produced? Where did the energy to make it come from? How was your home built, where did the energy come from? Where did the materials come from? How did the workers come to the job? What did they eat, and what do you eat? Do you go to an office? How was it built? How do you and your colleagues get there? Do your children go to school? Do you go to hospitals when you're sick? Etc.
Yes it is. All solutions have trade offs.
Urban planning of the SimCity sort isn't particularly difficult. The associated politics are the issue.
We could certainly do better but switching isn't as simple as you imply. You also conveniently left out the part where activists historically blocked nuclear buildout.
These are things that ordinary people without a lot of money or power can work on today in a country like, say, the US, where the federal government is in the hands of evil people and is not going to be doing much in terms of climate change in the near future.
The federal government may be a lost cause for the moment, but your city or state might provide an avenue to get some things done. Those things won't fix the whole problem, but they're still progress, and the connections you make while doing those things will be useful in future, bigger fights.
This can't be said enough. It simply cannot be said enough. It cuts right to the heart of how we view the world in the west: as autonomous, separate individuals, with no communal counterweight and certainly no model of power (some entities in the world have vastly more power than others) We assume that because our constitutions grant us equal rights or whatever, we all have equal responsibility and equal power.
But polluters, the biggest sources of emissions, have way more power and way, way less responsibility. And yet we continue to tell ourselves to focus on our own individual behaviors to combat global heating. The effects are real, but tiny, and our elites continue getting away with our annihilation.
I just meant that I don't think the lack of concern is necessarily due to them. I think it may have more to do with the reality that we are already on a good path.
Bill Gates famously wrote a "note" about it last year: https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/accelerate-energy-innovation...
So you can keep your animal proteins: it'll just be eggs, fish, poultry, and pork.
For business trips, the choice is between two hours and two days, and unfortunately my body goes haywire if I don't eat some meat at least a couple of days per week (talking about 200g/300g total though. Not kilos of it).
On the other hand, I'd happily take trains as more high speed lines open in my country, and reduce meat consumption to bare minimum my body can tolerate.
For personal transportation, going fully electric won't be possible due to my circumstances, but I'd happily switch to a hybrid which would convert 75% of my in-city travel to electric (which I'm actively planning to do).
I also work on projects which tries to reduce footprint of data centers and computation, so there's that.
Also, I see a lot of things presented as facts in your comment, you seem to have convinced yourself quite thoroughly.
So, how did we achieve what little we have? Well, because many people have cared, and have made the right decisions. Not enough people, or maybe not good-enough decisions, but some people, and somewhat good decisions.
So, what were the decisions which brought us down from an apocalyptic +4°C to a very bad 2.5°C path? Was it enough consumers making environmentally conscious choices, even if they were less convenient or more expensive. No. It was enough voters wanting their leaders to do something, even if it wasn't quite enough, but it was something. And something isn't nothing.
We will never have enough people voting with their wallet to fight climate change, because our rational understanding of the big-picture cannot overpower our intuitive day-to-day choices. However, we may have enough people voting with their ballot to fight climate change, because the rational big-picture can, sometimes, decide whom we vote for.
Seems more like a lack of political will with powerful lobbying interests opposing it and misleading the public. Fossil fuel companies could have listened to their scientists in the 1970s and changed their business models for a transition to cleaner tech a lot sooner.
Plastic is absolutely the best packaging material ever created, it's so good, it feels like magic. It's light, it's cheap, it's waterproof, it's durable and doesn't just decompose, it comes in a miriad shapes and forms and so on. There is a reason it's everywhere
Cooperation is not consuming fossil fuels. Defection is consuming fossil fuels.
If you cooperate and other defects you suffer climate impact and expensive energy (expensive everything, worse economic growth than others).
If you defect and other cooperates you suffer climate impact but at least you get cheap energy (cheap everything, more economic growth than others).
People, nations, corporations, etc don’t stop using fossil fuels because they incur a penalty against their competitors if they volunteer to and their competitors don’t.
If capital inevitably follows destructive local maxima and defectors get eaten, then no coordination problem has ever been solved, right?
But we banned CFCs! We got lead out of gasoline! The Montreal Protocol exists and worked.
What you're describing is the default behavior of uncoordinated markets, not a physical law. The entire history of regulation and international treaties consists of mechanisms that override local incentive gradients. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes they work.
"The system itself is a tight feedback loop" treats the system as fixed rather than something humans have repeatedly modified. The question is whether we'll add the right feedback loops fast enough, not whether adding them is metaphysically impossible.
My original point stands: the bottleneck on MCB isn't that capital won't fund it. It's that the Alameda city council didn't know a field test was happening on their waterfront and NIMBY ... people ... made noise. Governance failure, not capitalism failure.
AI could very well put us back on it.
One of those adjectives describes the plastic bag I'm familiar with. Sometimes it lasts long enough to get the food in the house without spilling through a hole which spontaneously appeared in the bag.
Plantation lumber is a very sustainable industry, and plastic's environmental impact is highly context dependent.
The fossil fuel industry has to be actively sustained through subsidies and government regulation hostile to alternatives. Maybe that wasn't true 50 years ago before the alternatives got viable and cheap, but if it's not true now then why did we stop subsidizing electric cars while we still subsidize oil companies?
Taxing the carbon at the source is simply correctly pricing it, and because it makes it impossible to shift the externalities away from the producer it fixes the accounting problem that falsely makes fossil fuels appear cheap.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/climate/plastic-bag-bans-...
None of these were done via capitalism, they were done in opposition to it.
And I know you weren't claiming they were, but the problem is all the power centers behind global capitalism have captured government (at least in the US) completely and are doing everything in their power to strip existing regulations and make sure the only new ones aren't in the name of the common good, but only to build moats for themselves.
It is great that we solved these problems in the past, but we are increasingly not doing that sort of thing at all anymore.
It's certainly a governance failure, but I'm not sure what the fix for it is, and I don't see how capitalism gets off scot-free.
We are actively undoing regulations to reduce pollutants while promoting "clean" coal.
We are actively undoing vaccinations policy.
We does not necessarily equal humanity at this time, but it sure feels like it if you are under the We administration.
I agree: people can work on this individually. And it won't make a lick of difference.
How many items on this list require government action? How many require corporations' cooperation. What am I going to do, build the bike lanes myself as a hobby?
Multifamily housing is generally cheaper in high land cost areas. It helps solve the housing shortage.
More bikes and transit and fewer cars means cleaner air and fewer traffic deaths.
Less fossil fuel usage in general means less pollution.
Cities that use land more efficiently tend to be more walkable, pleasant, and don't gobble up things like farmland or forests outside the city.
Come to think of it, less beef is probably better for your health, too.
Exactly. That's why it's ineffective to evangelize this as individual effort. If you want to live in a multifamily home, they have to be zoned, funded, and built. That requires lobbying the government, moral rectitude.
It's thus, yes, the correct impression for readers.
If the plane doesn't use synthetic fuel that's a political problem that I can't realistically solve as an individual.
The methane from raising animals exists in an overall equilibrium. It isn't extractive and the total magnitude of the effects of that chemical system is comparatively minor.
Isn't this just a nutrient deficiency in whatever you were eating instead of meat? Meat is "convenient" because it's high in a wide variety of minerals, vitamins, essential amino acids, etc. that your body can't make. (The animals mostly can't make them either but guess what livestock eats.) There are plants that contain each of them, but few if any that contain all of them, and then if you're missing one you're going to have a bad time. So the problem there is almost certainly that you need to eat some different plants than that the thing you were missing is only found in animals.
A group of politicians can have strong disagreements where none has a grasp on reality. That is where we are with climate change. It is one of the reasons I stopped working on it at a policy level.
They get turned into plastics and energy, two things which civilization feeds on voraciously.
It's not just inertia that keeps them going.
And obviously, you tax the fuel at the source, right when it comes out of the ground. Higher prices get passed down, changing behavior because the products externalities are priced correctly from the start.
It's a huge adjustment from how the past few decades have established expectations, and it'll take a big force to change quickly, similar to covid even though that was short term in hindsight.
Won't matter when it's 120 degrees F every day.
There are ethnic populations that have reduced capacity to efficiently metabolize some plant-based diets due to thousands of years of selection pressure (or lack thereof). A diverse plant-based diet won't kill them, they simply lack the enzymes to have a good experience with it because for thousands of years they had little use for those genes.
It is a relatively small population globally, as it tends to coincide with regions that weren't conducive to supporting large populations thousands of years ago. The current distribution has significant overlap with the developed world though.
I have to imagine that someone with meat-adapted genetics is going to suffer quality of life issues on a purely plant-based diet. Everyone has a set of foods like that.
I eat (and like to eat) tons of veggies, yet I feel my brain capacity declines and I crave esp. meat if I don't eat it for a long time (for two weeks or whatnot). As I said, I don't need two ribeye steaks per week. My body is very good at signaling what it needs, and I prefer to listen to it.
What I eat is Mediterranean cuisine 99% of the time, and it's pretty well balanced, yet eliminating meat is not possible for me. So, my diet is not junk food peppered by meat. It's mostly veggies and legumes (beans, lentil, whatnot), peppered with meat. Yet, I need it, and this is something I tested over and over more than two decades.
On the other hand, my wife is completely opposite of me. She can go a month or so without meat. So, not every person is the same, and assuming that every human being works the same is a big mistake made by modern medicine. For example, my brain chemistry is also different and I consume B12 much more than a typical human, so I need to use B-complex supplements more.
If you go for general taxation, you distribute the cost proportionally to income, making rich people pay more. Probably the ideal is a mix of both.
That doesn't make sense. Batteries are an energy container, they're not energy itself. How can it be compared to a fuel? The direct counterpart to oil or coal is wind or solar radiation itself, batteries are used to amortize the supply and store an excess for emergency use, but otherwise those types of energy just immediately go into powering the grid.
The economic case for renewable power is actually extremely good, because unlike fossil fuels, they're effectively infinite and don't need complex infrastructure to extract. They're free. You only need a power plant that directly converts them into power. If we were just able to shift fossil fuel demand towards producing goods like plastics, this would already be massive. However, a lot of powerful people are deeply invested into fossil fuels and will do anything to tip the scales into their favor, despite gradually losing in the energy sector.
Which ones specifically?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid
All of those can be found in plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acids_in_plant...
Notice that many of the plants high in some of these aren't that common, e.g. what percentage of people regularly eat pumpkin seeds or spirulina?
> So, not every person is the same, and assuming that every human being works the same is a big mistake made by modern medicine.
It's not that you need the same diet as every other person, it's that you have to eat the specific things you need, which a random selection of plants may or may not contain in the right amounts.
> For example, my brain chemistry is also different and I consume B12 much more than a typical human, so I need to use B-complex supplements more.
B12 in particular is a pain because it's only produced by bacteria (commonly found in soil) so the options are unwashed vegetables, meat from animals that eat unwashed vegetables, or supplements. And on top of that because of the way it's absorbed, a B12 pill either has to be taken multiple times a day several hours apart or has to be 100x as much to make up for the absorption rate falling off a cliff after a threshold amount which is below the RDA.
"It depends" is the correct answer, but the equation is shifting quickly towards solar + electricity.
Solar + electricity are not directly suitable for powering electric vehicles, that's where the batteries come in.
Comparing apples (transport of electricity via wires) with oranges (transport of energy via liquid or gas) misses the elephant in the room: you are not going to be able to use those electrons without a suitable temporary storage medium unless you plan on carrying a very long and impractical extension cord behind your now very light EV.