I feel like we aren't actually unique in this respect, except in the sense that we are able to see our own doom but still not able to act on it.

In essence, our extinction (if it were to happen) would be because we were unable to solve the collective action problem... each individual choosing their own best course dooms the entire species.

When looked at it this way, lots of species go extinct for this reason; resource exhaustion due to uncapped expansion.

The difference is that we don't expect animals to be able to reason through the situation and realize that individuals would need to sacrifice for the greater good of the species.

> subsidizing fossil fuels to 7 trillion a year globally

This is misleading. See https://www.slowboring.com/i/145942190/the-case-of-the-myste...

> The vast majority of the “subsidies” are “implicit subsidies,” which include “undercharging for environmental costs.” In other words, they are characterizing governments’ failure to impose a carbon tax as a “subsidy” for fossil fuel use.

  >  we are the only species that will become extinct because survival wasn't profitable enough

If some other species had a comparable concept used to organize themselves, I doubt humans would even be aware of that nuance.

Other species don't call it profit because they don't have language, but if you broaden this to "We are the only species that will become extinct because short-term individualistic concerns trump ecological stability" ... it isn't true. Predator/prey dynamics and ecosystem collapse are common to a lot of ecosystems; I remember studying them in calculus at the same time as exponential growth and logistic curves. Locusts are a very familiar example where they act like common grasshoppers when food is abundant, but then start a swarming behavior that destroys whole ecosystems and kills off the vast majority of locusts once they detect that there isn't enough food to go around.

I'm reading "The Unthinkable". It's a great book about diaster response at the personal and policy level.

One thing that stands out is that well intentioned policies often cause diaster if they don't simply trust the ability of humans (and by extension communities) to adapt and incorporate new information as it comes.

I believe that these subsidies are a prime example. They intend to help by alleviating the shock of world events, and it's only through an increase in trust/courage at all levels that we can overcome this tendency.

The internet you use to transmit this message wouldn't exist without fossil fuels - and I am not talking about energy, but computer and networking materials.

Ditto the fertilizer and many other things that keep you alive to type on here too.

It's very hard to maintain modern civilization without oil/gas products. Unless you want to be Amish.

> stop subsidizing fossil fuels to 7 trillion a year globally

We need to stop bandying about this $7T figure. 80% of it is "implicit subsidies", meaning made-up numbers based on carbon pricing and environmental impacts and whatnot. It's like saying we implicitly subsidize solar power by not accounting for the environmental impacts of covering up square miles of land under panels, or of the pollution from the production of panels. If you go back far enough, it's like telling the caveman not to light sticks on fire to keep himself warm, because of the carbon emissions that aren't being priced in.

Fossil fuels are, with present-day technology, the best source of energy for humanity to develop and maintain high living standards. It's easy to stop using them if we're OK with dialing back our living standards two hundred years. It will be easy to stop using them at some point in the future when we have abundant, clean, cheap energy from a proliferation of nuclear power, or some battery technology breakthrough that will let us economically harness wind and solar energy. However, currently, it's not easy. Oil and gas is profitable because it makes us all richer, let's not forget that.

A reasonable libertarian however would require that all externalities be paid for (under the principle of doing no harm). If the price per unit of oil includes the cost of all the negative externalities (e.g. selling that unit comes with a requirement to remove the air pollutants and CO2) then it isn't really a problem (at least for the purpose of this discussion) if CEOs have to seek profit for shareholders.

I'd say you are right that solar is at your stage 4.. for countries with particular geographical features. If you have a large land mass to distribute solar utility sites over, the power curve becomes predictable since weather that impacts solar production is also geographically distributed (its highly unlikely to be cloudy everywhere in a large country). With this predictability comes the ability to use the least amount of storage (cheaper) for continual, reliable power. And China being responsible for the continual price drops of production of panels, and storage, it makes sense they will be the first to achieve this, despite other countries (Australia for example) having a more favorable irradiance, and larger land mass.

Countries without a large land mass can't do this, a good example being Singapore. And even then, solar is being a potential large reliable power source by getting Australia to literally cable power thousands of kilometers.[0]

Solar has won IMO, it will just take a while for it to reach stage 4 everywhere.

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/21/australia-greenligh...

They also added 1 billion tons of coal. Not all of for energy of course, but still

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-has-more-than-...

Based on some back of the envelope math, if the US met 100% of its electricity needs with solar, it'd take about 1.6% as much area as the US currently has farmland (22k sqmi vs 1.4mm sqmi). Considering some solar is on non-arable land, and how much excess corn the US grows (enough that some is turned back into fuel), and that 1.6% ballpark, the idea that it's problematic that we're turning some farmland into solar doesn't pass the sniff test. Do you have any more info about that being a problem?

https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Stat...

2 - The vast majority is being burned. If they want to increase production, it's not because of the other uses.

This is an unpopular question, where people assume things about me, but by what mechanism would the human species be ruined? It seems that would require that all innovation towards climate mitigations stops, when it hasn't really even started yet. Reversing climate change probably isn't going to happen, but mitigation is still on the table, from routing fresh water from wetter northern climates to desalinization plants [1] to sun shading [2].

[1] Desalinization, where 300 million are currently services: https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...

[2] Block 2% to reduce warming by 1.5C. https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-six-ideas-to-limit-glo...

Does, but also does seem to me that a lot of parties were in for potential to disrupt top of the food chain of car industry, and now that it became clear that it does the opposite of that, they're not interested in it anymore.

I think EVs are the 80% solution. They're great in cities and in suburbs. If you regularly make longer trips, they're a massive pain in the ass, primarily due to the poor-quality charging infrastructure. There are vast swaths of America where someone is already trucking gasoline and diesel to fuel stations but there's no reliable expectation of charging infrastructure of any kind, much less high-quality charging. It's really frustrating to run into, for instance, trying to drive from Bozeman to Seattle. It's currently fashionable to ignore this problem, but it's one we're going to have to solve.

I'm not trying to blame this on "Elon" but that guy basically kicked off the revolution and is kind of destroying it. His cult following, toxic views and enthusiasm for conspiracies are starting to make EV ownership something for "weirdos" at a time when owning an EV was already contentious. At least in the US.

There was a time when I dreamed of owning a Tesla, there is absolutely no way I'd drive one now.

I think China is going to steam ahead towards Solar, Nuclear and EVs, so maybe there is hope there!

> Does it not seem like electric vehicles will eventually swallow the world?

I don't believe so. As I understand it, there are not enough rare metals available, with the known battery technologies. I don't think will ever be the production capacity to construct and maintain (replace) electric-based equivalents to the solutions fossil fuels fit. Fossil fuels came to dominance because of a number of maximal equations. eg The energy demand to move goods, on the scale of trains, is impractical. Operating electronics in extreme temperatures, is impractical.

These are called effluent taxes and should be part of the talk around climate change and government.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-alman...

Soon I hope there will be a Github-for-law that we can all at least contribute requests to, with the proper structure, formatting, review process, and validation.