I went from voting to electoral campaigns to the kind of activism that gets you arrested to working in climate as an engineer. I landed here because the first three were insufficient. I still support and encourage all of it, but the best you can get from voting is creating a better regulatory and funding environment for the necessary engineering and implementation work.

I don’t know of any candidates (except a few outliers who have my support) who are pledging to reduce the footprint of the largest polluters. All anyone is willing to do is offer “feel-good” initiatives that make life harder for average people, building popular resistance to addressing climate issues, without actually taking the substantial, difficult steps that are needed. Meanwhile they work together on tightening the social control grid that is being rushed to completion before shit finally hits the fan.

> Maybe they're right: the government is stupid, because the people is stupid and elects stupid people, and that's why we're screwed.

Now you’re getting it. But they are stupid for a reason. The people are stupid because they are poorly educated and distracted by entertainment; they are poorly educated and distracted by entertainment because policy makers prefer passive consumers to active citizens; despite the long-term downsides, policy makers choose to create passive consumers because they are easier to control and unable to contest their power.

One of Reagan’s advisors warned that free higher ed was creating a dangerous “educated proletariat”, and he was right! The response to this danger was to end state funding of college tuition, to strip out funding for the humanities, and to gradually turn colleges into job prep centers rather than centers of higher learning. (This process started in earnest with Reagan, but you’ll notice that it was never rolled back.)

People did try to fight this, but we lost. And now here we are.

I think you hit the root causes dead centre there but there's an unfortunate consequence to your argument that you didn't call out.

The only way this changes is if there is real political/government leadership on the issue. That leadership can direct national resources. It can legislate. It can even tax - if necessarily to a very high degree - less useful ways of spending available resources in the private sector to deter waste.

We can't get that kind of leadership in many countries at the moment because too many people will just vote for whichever party they always have or whichever populist nutter has the most convincing sound bites. So before the political problem can be resolved there needs to be much more public education on the realities of the issue.

This is unfortunately a circular argument because the public information campaigns that are needed to fix the education problem are only going to be run by political/government leadership of the required calibre. If anything the populist lightweights will push the other way because dumbing down the voting population helps to sustain their own control and importance.

My hope is that before it's too late there will be enough politicians who are both capable of dealing with the real issues here and capable of taking on the populists convincingly enough to get elected to start moving the needle. Unfortunately I don't really see any other way this gets fixed instead of spiralling downwards.

“ When the people says "the government is stupid", it reflects on the people. Maybe they're right: the government is stupid, because the people is stupid and elects stupid people, and that's why we're screwed.”

Yep, George Carlin said this best when he was still alive. Bad Government is simply garbage in, garbage out, if the people are stupid, they will elect stupid people

> In a democracy, the people is the government.

This is just not true. There are many reasons so-called democratic elections fail to capture the will of the people. One of them is that many decisions are bundled into one, so lower priority decisions get sidelined by high priority ones.

The problem here isn't the people, it's a system that is built to have the appearance of being run by the people, while in reality the people will never be given reins to the system.

This may be a contrarian view here, but a government that would force its citizens to reduce carbon footprint would be authoritarian by the views of most. China keeps backing the concept even though they are the greatest polluters and Putin got Schroeder in Germany to shut down nuclear. Authoritarian government without failure lead to wars. A war will come as a direct consequence of politicians selected because they can force people to do something “for their own good”.

You shouldn’t want political solutions to solve this - you want economic ones. I’ve been driving EVs almost exclusively for almost a decade and happy to see less smoke in the air, because and increasing number around are doing the same. Having solar during massive energy price spikes has been awesome. Tech that converts carbon from the air into bricks or some new type of fuel that generates revenue would quickly make factories want to capture it. Crops that grow in dry areas or tech to capture water and energy locally made affordable will increase local economies in countries that currently have so little that war is the only thing on the docket.

Forcing people to change what they eat or to pay reparations to countries that actually cause the pollution (much climate change action funnels money to China) or to lose jobs and factories will get you into war, because that’s precisely what authoritarians like Putin and China use to subjugate Europe.

Who is claiming that climate change is caused by foreigners?

Yes, current polling basically indicates that the US electorate's overwhelming preference is "cheap gas".

Indeed and don't underestimate the influence you can have by participating in candidate selection (depending on your electoral system). For example in the UK the replacement candidate for a safe seat [i.e. almost guaranteed to be won by the party of the sitting representative] upon retirement of the incumbent may be decided by just a room full of people. Be in that room.

> the government is stupid, because the people is stupid and elects stupid people, and that's why we're screwed.

the government isn't stupid -- it's smartly serving the interests of the wealthy, who are primarily concerned with increased profits in the companies they hold shares in, not the wellbeing of Americans (much less those in other countries)

the US gov for the most part, has always been pro-owners (a small minority), not pro-workers (the vast majority of Americans) -- it's a structural feature, not a bug. and that's why it's so difficult to change unless things get so bad and the threat of social revolution is so great, that the gov is forced to make concessions -- this mostly only happened once, during the Great Depression

> In a democracy, the people is the government

sure, in theory. but in the US you'd have to start by overturning Citizens United so that the people -- not corporations -- are the ones driving elections

What is your reaction to credentialed physical scientists who accept that climate changes and that human greenhouse-gas emissions have an effect, but reject or dispute important parts of the mainstream assessment? They do have a Ph.D. and one of them has a Nobel Prize in Physics so it's difficult to ignore them. This is not to take a position but to point out that they can hardly be idiots; if you think they are, this needs to be made plain.

> 1. Get a little bit informed. It doesn't require a PhD, it could be done instead of a fraction of the time they spend scrolling bullshit on their smartphone.

The problem is that as soon as you start digging into it, you're essentially walking in a guilt trip.

The kind of "eating an hamburger pollutes more than driving an SUV for 50 miles" guilt trip.

And you realize most of the focus should be on materialism, consumerism and how/what you eat, not just cleaner transport.

But who really wants to do so? I myself am aware that me eating a beef steak per week has a gigantic impact on environment and resources. That switching to pork > chicken > eggs in that same meal would be better.

But I just don't want to enter the guilt trip. So I do a bit, but not as much as I could.

A carbon tax should help there. Make it so me eating a steak is not incentivized. But then good luck with farmers, the easiest like and empathy grabbing category of workers on the planet.

Extremists, as in lumping trump together left wing folks who want a green new deal and to actually do something about the problem?

No socialist/lefty has been elected in the US despite their ideas being super popular. Don't act like voting for a centrist dem like Biden would do anything but ever so slightly slow the climate change scenario we're in. We absolutely need and FDR new deal scope of attack on this problem.

>1. Get a little bit informed

These viewpoints are exhausting.

A little informed about what? That we are destroying the planet slowly? Yeah, we know.

What is your actual solution? That we tell people they can't have plastic straws? That we need to install solar and wind farms (which is already happening at mass scale in the West, by the way. That includes the US)?

What are you actually proposing? That we "vote"? Do you want to de-industrialize your corner of the world, like Europe is doing, while the rest of the world plows ahead unabated?

Until you're ready to go to war for this, it's unrealistic. And good luck trying to force any country to do anything you want without a well equipped war-machine. You think Russia, India or China care what Europe thinks about their climate policies?

So, yeah, go ahead and vote in your green parties.

I doubt that even younger folks in developed countries will be affected as drastically as "livability" perhaps implies.

I get the feeling that many are confused and fear the literal destruction of our planet by accelerating warming.

The reality is that the underlying physics fundamentally work in the opposite way, with warming slowing down rather than accelerating. I understand that for warming below 2C, the confidence is high that it is roughly a linear relation to additional CO2 emitted.

I'm optimistic about most things in life, perhaps it's a flaw of mine.

I do think we have decades, if not centuries, to develop solutions to climate change. Our planet will remain livable.

That said, I understand some ecological damage that may occur with global warming could be irreversible, and it makes sense to reduce emissions as soon as possible.

I just don't fully agree anymore.

I always cared. But I care more as I age. Why? Because I know (vaguely) the danger and I have ____KIDS____.

Older people usually have kids too. For anyone, ANYONE who accepts/knows the dangers we face to just shrug, knowing it's their own kids and grand kids that will suffer (wars, political upheaval, riots, deaths, migration) - no. I don't buy it.

Principally, it's the ignorance of the people to the things that matters most. Maybe they are partially sticking their heads in the sand a bit. But if it truly was properly reported on prime-time news and so on, they would know, and they would care.

I'm middle aged and have no kids so I probably fall into your category, in the sense that as long as it doesn't bite hard before I go it's in my top 5 political priorities but not at #1.

However my friends who have kids and grandkids care a great deal about climate change and generally do what they can politically (i.e. vote for Greens and so on) within the constraints of life (i.e. they're not out there throwing soup at paintings or whatever).

Maybe that's what it will take. I expect ecoterrorism to become a serious thing in the next decade or two. Who knew the Amish were right all along?

> That is a fundamental problem that you will not solve by asking youger folks, who are actually affected and have all reason to agree and comply, to make a change.

Younger folks tend to be more enthusiastic about "making a change" by direct action means, so you shouldn't count them out!

> approaching 50% voters above age of 50).

IIRC,this is already true for some?

I'm not sure your age cut off is quite right, I'm 50 in a few months and my wife and our friends are all quite "pro climate" (just to easily sum it up), most people I know from the younger end of GenX are... the problem lies just a few years beyond that with the older GenX and up into the Boomers, which is where all the money is.

It's hysterical seeing the younger generations being asked to forego plastic straws while leaders in their parents and grandparents generations wage selfish wars. I'm sure saving on those straws will catch up to all those oil tankers that were burned in the last few months.

Democracies in general are suffering the fallout of losing its information economy.

From the death of local newspapers, the end of classifieds and the pressures on ad revenues, journalism had no real options but to shrink and consolidate.

The more content we create, the more the market focuses on creating content that could garner attention.

People are going to vote based on the information they have. If they are part of a captive market, then they are going to pick between the choices they are presented or decline to participate.

It’s some sort of irony, that as a society we developed ways to neutralize free speech and expression by flooding the zone with more content, not by controlling content.

> and are the worst offenders regarding CO2 production

Unless you're doing those strange mental gymnastics of entities like oil companies are the emitters and not the consumers, that's not true. Old people who have gained large amounts of wealth have also lost large amounts of mobility and tend to not produce much co2 because they don't do much in life anymore, comparatively speaking. The data is clear that peak carbon emitters are in their 30s-40s, and they're still the ones most often seen crying about not being able to afford a home.

Do the voters matter?

A third of CO₂ emissions come from a country that is not a democracy.

I applaud you for considering a change. However, you’re talking about making two career pivots at once, and I would suggest doing one at a time - i.e. either keep coding in clean energy, or do something other than coding, but not both. It’s hard to pivot.

If you want to be a senior SWE in clean energy, the Climatebase rec is good, or https://www.terra.do/, or subscribe to a newsletter like https://www.ctvc.co/tag/newsletter/ that announces when climate tech companies raise money (at the bottom of each newsletter), and apply to open roles at those companies when they start looking to spend their new money, usually ~1-3 months later.

https://climatebase.org

There are loads of uses for improved software in clean energy. You don't necessarily need to move away.

Why not keep coding in the clean energy space? https://github.com/pogopaule/awesome-sustainability-jobs

If in the US, never vote for GOP canadites plus vote for progressive democrats.

But we all know the top 1% will make sure the US will never change so everyone needs to make sure they vote.

Clean energy hardware meaning clean electricity generation, energy storage, or energy management and arbitrage hardware that reduces the need for fossil fuel-derived electricity.

I agree with this advice.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are several “climate tech” companies that abandoned the mission as soon as they raise a Series B

Normal people don't care about climate, and 1.5C is meaningless to them.

Pollution in the air they breathe, the water they drink and the soil their food comes from? That's something normal people care about and understand.

Climate change is a branding and communications failure. Fight pollution (bad thing) not "climate" or "change".

Why doesn't anyone understand this and rebrand?

Yes, it happens, but its cultural not an immutable human characteristic.

People make things that are a matter of opinion (politics, religion, whatever) a matter of identity.

This is worse in the US than in most places, but its become a lot worse in the UK, which I attribute to create American cultural influence, especially as it has come at the same time as specific American ideologies.

There is obviously a deep desire for personal penance and absolution that manifests itself in the environmental space. (see: paper straws, plastic bags, formerly compact fluorescent lightbulbs, low-flow toilets, etc.) I'm not sure I agree that this fundamentally is about people being misinformed; it seems possible that people would want this even if they were fully clear that these penances were trivial -- even in aggregate -- in the big picture.

I think that people do care about "the environment," but what they mean by "the environment" is much more "my personal connection with spaces that feel unspoiled" than "atmospheric CO2 levels."

> I do care about the climate, but it's clearly irrational to make sacrifices, when other people are unwilling to do that

We do irrational things daily in order to live harmoniously in groups. Heck, the entire field of behavioural economics was stood on its ear when they figured out that humans don’t behave rationally in all circumstances. Moral choices are individual. I limit my QOL in many “irrational” ways because it helps me live with myself. Is it enough? Of course not. But we are too outnumbered by the greedy and the defeatists.

> Why should the average person reduce his/her life quality in order to save the climate

Read what you quoted again. That's not what it says.

> Having a higher quality of life is more valuable to me than the tap on the shoulder I can give myself

It'll only be higher until things reach a tipping point. That point is only getting closer and very possibly within your lifetime.

That's an easy option.

But if more an more people changed their attitude, stopped envying jet-setters and instead shamed them for their environmentally reckless attitude, maybe you would see a lot less plane travel, a lot less gas guzzlers, a lot less conspicuous consumption.

Shame works on the vast majority of people. We may lack inherent ethics, but we seldom like to swim against the stream.

How do you arrive at that figure?

> but it's clearly irrational to make sacrifices, when other people are unwilling to do that.

You realize that if everyone has that attitude then nothing will ever change, right? "You take the first step!" "No, you take the first step!"

> Why should the average person reduce his/her life quality in order to save the climate, when the average billionaire

I understand (and share) the sentiment, but there are not that many billionaires. Even if they all suddenly became vegans who never travel and live in a small house, that would not solve the problem. What the masses do is what has to change. How they travel, what they eat and buy and consume, their housing.

> Instead they ban plastic straws while the Chinese burn another million tons of coal.

I know it's easier to blame China than look at what we've done, but:

- The US generates more co2 per capita than China does.

- A lot of what China makes is products that we buy from them.

- The US has about twice as many CUMULATIVE co2 emissions than China does (remember, the co2 stays trapped in the atmosphere)

- The feds have gleefully killed as many clean energy initiatives as possible. Meanwhile, China leads the world on clean energy, has driven down renewable and EV batteries by 90% since 2010, is the world's largest renewable energy producer and investor, and is on track to generate half of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.

plastic straws have been banned for a different reason than fighting climate change: they were the vast majority of trash showing up on shorelines.

I am with you with wanting carbon taxes, but it's not like there's a single issue that can ever be tackled at a time.

Isn't the core issue that energy use and economic growth are deeply connected? If America uses a little less thanks to a carbon tax, it will just be cheaper for india and china, and their prosperity will grow more while americas begins to lag?

> Which is why I think we need carbon pricing / tax.

That only works if its global. Otherwise people just shift activities to somewher with a lower tax.

>Instead they ban plastic straws while the Chinese burn another million tons of coal.

The chinese quite literally have greener energy than germany at the moment and are building the shit that you buy off of amazon. China is the only reason the current solar push is as successful as it is. Tame your sinophobia.

That's a lot of words to say white people deserve to emit more co2 because they're white.

No, all CO2 emission must stop so everybody is gotta put on work anyway.

Also, if what you had in mind with "focusing on" is some sort of military solution, you are listing the wrong thing; what you need is a list of top fossil fuel exporters which looks different from the "top emitters" list.

without hyperbole, literally tens of millions of people are working on decarbonizing these countries. the solar energy industry in just China alone is 4.2 million people

It’s hard to find any really good site for these numbers because it is highly politicized. Looking at this, assuming it’s correct, paints a different picture:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-where-emissions-are-...

“Over the past decade, the fastest growth has come from rapidly industrializing economies.”

It seems that countries have to evolve through this stage before things get better.

“Meanwhile, several advanced economies have moved in the opposite direction. Countries like the UK, Germany, and Japan have significantly reduced their carbon output, largely by phasing out coal and expanding renewable energy.”

> We are so fucking greedy, status-driven, and prone to violence.

I have good news for you, so is all life. And even our closest relatives, the great apes.

We have succeeded overall despite (because?) of these traits.

> I have honestly given up on humanity

No you haven’t

speaking of meat it isn’t really the subsidies imo.

it’s a political thing. most people are dumb and politics is made for the lowest common denominators.

you’re called slurs if you reject factory farmed meat.

i personally eat a mostly plant based diet and only eat sustainably wild caught fish a few times a week.

meat is like 5x more expensive than tofu. beans and lentils are cheap. i get about 130g of protein a day and my health results are in the 99pct.

we live in a world surrounded by absolute dumb fucks.

the only solution is to make hella money (billions+) so we can control incentives.

What is your approach to changing the global economic system that doesn't involve trying harder? That sounds very hard.

Most people I worked with in tech cared about things like climate change, but they were making good money and the problem felt so far removed and difficult. What could they do to make a difference? It's always easier to focus on the next sprint, the next title, etc.

I mostly blame greedy billionaires, citizens united, and cowardly politicians, but I have a hard time respecting people making six figures who aren't doing something to improve our broken country, even if it's volunteering at homeless services.

This is precisely why I'm what I guess one could describe as "Eco-Socialist".

The problem is the incentive structures inherent to Capitalism. Until we fix that, we are only putting on small band aids and alleviating our conscience at best.

The key difference is that it is easier to control and extract profits for a narrow set of people from fossil fuel.

If anything, Trump fucking around in Iran is helping the switch more than anything, such irony.

I think the difference is that the renewable infrastructure requires new capital investment, whereas the fossil fuel infrastructure is already in place and amortized, even for importing countries (distribution networks, electricity generation plants, etc.) And so you've got to get someone to pay for the up-front costs which on the short term are greater than the long term costs.

Plus ironically all of the batteries and solar panels for the West's climate mission will be made in China who didn't deindustrialize, has far lower energy prices, and less aggressive local rules around things like air pollution that let them be manufactured at all.

Meanwhile they are also rapidly going green by adopting this tech domestically since it's highly price competitive due to their manufacturing investments. They also invested heavily in Nuclear (which the government there openly welcomed).

> you can't just have some countries deindustrializing and reducing CO2 while others go full bore on scale manufacturing with any form of cheap energy including coal being used.

Well... that's what we did in the Industrial Revolution too. Only the countries were reversed.

Agreed! If we can’t try and save the Earth perfectly, we shouldn’t try at all.

Yes you can. China has barely emitted half the lifetimes emissions of the US because it didn't go through decades of inefficent and polluting technologies. The ozone hole wasn't caused by China.

Same thing applies to those up and coming countries: they immediately have more efficient technologies.

I don't see why not. It's obviously not as good as getting all countries working together, but it's certainly not practical to wait until all countries are united before starting.

Be a tech maximalist- use tech and will power to pull ahead with green energy. Go hard on batteries and energy storage. I do not even care that I may sound delusional - the contrary doomer viewpoint is deluded in a far worse manner. The things we need either are or are not within our abilities- you will never know unless you try. Resigning with *it’s too hard* ensures we will know that we cannot.

Well the rich western nations need to sacrifice.

Well the solution is just that green energy is already cost competitive with fossil fuels, so we just need to let the market do its thing and have people buy the cheap thing, which is increasingly green energy.

Yes, totally correct in all points, but people just don't care about the future. I fear it's easy as that.

It’s also about energy security - why expose your energy markets to insane fluctuations in international fossil-fuel markets if you don’t have to? Surely the last few years have shown that energy independence is a critical social and defence policy now?

For many/most countries, investing in renewables is the best, cheapest and fastest way to move in that direction.

I was thinking about this a while back whilst I watched someone struggle with their shopping across the supermarket carpark without a plastic bag only to get in a Range Rover. I guess it's a form of moral self licensing[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing

I think the plastic straw ban was such a self-own that I find it hard to believe it wasn't astroturfed to undermine climate change (it wasn't). While I don't give a shit about straws myself (since I'm not an infant[0]) it was just such empty gesture politics that became a key culture war issue.

As you say it's not really about climate change as such, the problem is climate change becomes an omni-cause grouping pollution, waste management, biodiversity loss, etc. We end up being tarred with the same brush. A reasonable person should feel free to disavow the straw ban since it doesn't achieve its aims and is a distraction from real problems.

The campaign was started by a 9 year old[1] using an estimate that was roughly 2-3 times too high and fed by an unsourced claim[2] around the amount of plastic straws on beaches. As you say it becomes a cultural signifier of effort while achieving basically nothing. And this takes away so much energy around the broader issue of single-use plastics and ocean plastic pollution. Both of these are better served by advocating for domestic landfills rather than the current practice of dumping the plastic waste on 3rd countries.

[0]: yes some disabled people need to use straws as adults

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/22/631254978/one-childs-outsized...

[2]: https://apnews.com/article/c1b6f8666138441d9af6054d8c096086

Plastic recycling was about one thing: getting people to use more plastic.

Less than like 7% of plastics get recycled and basically all of that comes from industrial sources, not our homes.

The best thing you can do with plastic is use less of it and throw it in the trash. This tells you it is garbage and not going off to some magical facility to get recycled.

Also, keeping plastic in the environment by using it in building materials/fake grasses is a microplastics nightmare. We need to be removing plastic from the environment, not putting more out there.

Plastic is fine for recycling as long as the process is simple and cheap. Pressing plastic into panels using a sheet press, for use in construction, signage, or art/crafting, is actually fairly efficient versus trying to recreate “virgin” plastic through melting and mixing. It can also be done on a smaller scale. See https://www.onearmy.earth/news/sheetpress

But I agree that typical plastic recycling is inefficient.

Counterpoint: China

Is China going woke and then broke on recycling? Or like renewables and EVs did they put engineers in charge and not Libertarians who irrationally hate all government programs?

https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/articles/chinas-cir...

It's hard to find a coherent perspective where that makes sense. Most parents have had kids when future conditions looked far worse than they do now. The situation actually looks rosy in 50 years given the promising moves the Chinese are making in nuclear and renewable technology.

It is more likely that children are inconvenient to the lifestyles people want to lead. That is more consistent with how bad people are at long-term planning.

This is the kind of take that causes more traditional (including right wing, but also people from non western countries) look at climate activists as crazy fanatics. You are technically right, but I think advocating for childlessness causes people to disregard the whole movement as insane.

They could off themselves as well. That would help too. 4 billions of years of evolution end with me! What an absurd take. I'd understand one child, fewer than desired, etc.. but no children as a conscious effort to help the climate is something I don't buy that ever happened. Other reasons are at play for that. Nothing to do with the climate.

It's not even that. If you take a look at videos of India etc you will see rivers full of plastic, plastic rubbish being burned, etc. It's just normal way of life for them.

But we are told that plastic straws are the issue, and switching to paper straws (that you need to use twice as many of when they inevitably dissolve) will solve the problems. Meanwhile, the H&M polyester dress that you wear 3 times before throwing it away takes as much energy as 2000x paper straws to manufacturer.

Were paper straws ever about climate change? This feels like a red herring. Pollution has many aspects to it, and you can work on several problems simultaneously.

I never hear environmentalists talking about plastic straws, only people with an anti-environmentalist agenda.

Did you have many "corporations" in the third world country that you're from? No?

It’s an equally valid (i.e., not valid) observation that most of the people with children obviously don’t give a damn, or we wouldn’t be here.

>I don't know why should a childless person give a damn about the future beyond their own lifespan.

Pretty wild thing to say. I assure you that almost every childless person cares about someone or something, and would like to protect it.

Also, what "most people" think is largely irrelevant when it comes to policy.

Do you not do any good deeds unless they directly benefit you?

The problem is: when things will be on fire, it will be much more difficult or impossible to get them back to an acceptable level.

>This problem starts and ends with corporations and government regulations.

That's what we have been relying on for the last forty years and we still have an issue.

Corporations respond to demand. If someone is willing to buy a barrel of oil to burn then you can be sure you will find someone else to pull it out of the ground for them.

We could all stand to drive less and wear sweaters inside during the winter.

True! Maybe its just a slowdown or the first clear signs of incoming collapse of these ressources? Though, domestic land is already accelerating again over the last year, so it will be on par again with its previous high.

And this ensemble is only a collection of some KPI, there are additional ones I guess which will show similar upwards-trend.

> As if the goal was to have sharp graphs

Welcome to capitalism! Task #1: Figure out a couple of numbers. Task #2: Figure out if it's good when these numbers go up or bad. Task #3: Optimize everything against these numbers, never consider anything else but these numbers, they are your life now.

There is too much uncertainty in predictions like this.

E.g. if we are lucky, and AI works well for biology, we may be able to extend lifespan significantly and end up with 20bln people instead.

I think they are about to revise their projections again, the population is continuing to decline much faster than estimated.

Some of the planet is already much nicer than it was 100 years ago. At least in the European countries that industrialized the first or had high population density even before that.

No, you use logarithms when you expect the data to follow an exponential curve, but there's no reason to believe that e.g. shrimp aquaculture should follow an exponential trend. Using a logarithm there would be rather misleading.

I've heard this argument for the last ~40 years.

"Technology will take care of this" and then crickets.

The solution is to curb our excess, which nobody wants to do. We are all living like kings and queens.

Humanity will be around for a few more millennia at least.

How many humans, living what lifestyle, what eco-footprint, Star Trek style tech or back to cavemen after a nuclear winter, those are some of the questions.

As for other species... fewer of them for sure.

You are replying to a climate activist. They are not glass half empty people; they are glass half filled with poisonous air people (ignoring the water). They have no dreams, no positivity in life, and think humanity is evil. Many of them even consider humans as cancer on earth. They are pessimistic and have no hope in their lives. It is a pity.

Despite these people, humanity as a whole is amazingly resilient and we will persevere. Our progression rate will not slow down anytime soon. We will conquer the climate. And it won't even take 500 years. Our drill will pierce the heaven.

> we really just need to get rid of beef

you don't even have to get rid of it, even consuming less beef has significant impacts.

Does it account for diary, eggs, leather?

- Beef (1 lb): 0.45 kg (454 g)

- Pork (8 lbs): 3.63 kg (3,629 g)

- Chicken (10 lbs): 4.54 kg (4,536 g)

- Tofu (20 lbs): 9.07 kg (9,072 g)

I wonder how much of that is because of the impact of methane farts alone.

Maybe we ought to try out what the Australians did and collect cow farts in bags.

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1ic99ql/...

And then there's Brazil cutting down the Amazon forest to make beef cattle ranches. Have these been taken into account?

There it is. Give up meat, eat grass. Next you'll say people should not use AC, live in caves etc.

I'm gonna cook some beef for dinner tonight :)

There's no need to 'carefully craft a fun metric', if you're honest to yourself you'll notice that plant-based nutrition is the only sustainable way to feed billions of humans on this planet. But I'm curious, which micro- & macronutrients do you think are only available from meat and cheese?

Meat isn't a health food. Most Americans eat an unhealthy amount of meat. Especially red meat. You could probably eat half as much meat and not be in any danger of not getting enough macro nutrients.

Which macronutrients and micronutrients are those?

Perfect choice! Just try to keep beef at minimum, if you can, because it is the most damaging one for the enviroment.

Have you ever tasted good tofu recipes?

Source? Or did you just came up with that category based on your own personal experience?

What's the point of this? You would need to take care of the pigs and have all the infra for that (fixed costs), and tofu still wins?

Anything could help.

I know people that do like 4 transatlantic trips per year and eat meat for every single dish.

Convincing them to reduce their impact would have waaaay more effect than lecturing someone that already travels by bike/train and eats vegetarian diet.

So an annual return trip is two steaks per week.

I didn’t think it was growing that fast but it is: https://www.hurtyourbrain.com/p/how-many-people-are-added-to...

Energy consumption per person also has a lot of room to grow. For every barrel of oil eschewed by a relatively rich person in the developed world, there are probably 3 or 4 ready to pickup the slack and increase their quality of life in the rest of the much poorer world.

This goes for competence, and also for morals: it seems in many countries we now vote in politicians that are massively and overtly corrupt with the reasoning that it won't get worse because previous politicians were somewhat corrupt and tried to hide it).

Unfortunately the party that claims government can't solve problems can point to the failures they create when they get power to prove their thesis.

I think it's just a matter of adapting, I was a meat eater for 22 years of my life and nowadays can't stand the taste of meat. Tofu tastes awesome when done well.

Buuuut people are different, and I could be an outlier. I just think there's more propaganda to it than people realize, especially currently with fitness influencers boosting meat consumption.

I think it's largely what you are used to. I make an effort to prepare tofu for my kids. I find it "ok" generally, but my kids? They _love_ tofu. It's their favourite food.

This is a very western centric view, tofu is entirely unrelated to meat, and billions of people love tofu. Nobody needs to switch, it's just its own thing. It's like saying beef is tastier than kidney beans. Ok? Theyre not related at all.

Have you tried eating meat or chicken without preparation? It's pretty disgusting. My mother used to leave chicken marinating in lemon overnight just so it would be edible. With tofu I can just throw some ginger and paprika on it, put it in the air fryer and it tastes awesome.

I agree in principal, but what is it with the plastic straws thing?

That was never about climate change that I am aware of. It was about pollution, same with plastic bags.

Plastic is a curse on the environment, especially the single use plastic that goes directly in the bin and into landfill or the oceans. Eventually it ends up in the food chain as microplatics.

Do we not want to reduce plastic pollution now? OK, maybe straws are fraction of the plastic pollution created, but surely every little bit helps?

People moan because it is a regular minor incovience to their life. If society can't get over something so trivial we are fucked.

The solution you suggest is necessary sounds absolutely horrible and very anti human.

I hope the evil genius that came up with the idea of making young republican-voting libertarians so angry about plastic straws got a bonus.

Judging by these threads he's pretty much singlehandedly destroyed any attempt to move humanity to cheaper, cleaner, safer, inexhaustible energy supplies.

The point is that even if we did get to net zero today heating would continue to rise for another 15 years. That's what the lag is. Whenever we get there, add 15 years.

Centralized motivated groups have more political power than their "percentage" would suggest, that's why we have kosher/gluten/halal labels everywhere.

By 2011 hardly mattered anyway. Nuclear was doomed when Western countries stopped developing and building new plants in the 80s and 90s.

Merkel needed to ally. It was either the Greens, the communists, or the AfD. Of course the Greens came with closing the power plants.

During that fantastic decision making, Schroder and Merkel moved Germany onto Russia gas. (Of those 2, Schroder now holds management positions in Russian Gazprom, and Russian-German NordStream, the company that owns the pipeline). Brilliant decision making all around.

Their other decisions were to count on America for defense, refusing any investment into defense or defense tech (despite America objecting), and to use China as an export market.

Each of those decisions now, as it turns out, costs every German citizen 3000-6000 euros per year, on a large average, and EU citizens about 5000 euros per year.

Brilliant politician. One would almost think that, since a broken clock is right twice daily, these people weren't at all "wrong" (and certainly Schroder wasn't)

This is such a common story across different conservation domains that I no longer trust the green movement. I think many of them are motivated by a sense of moral superiority rather than by actual concern for the environment.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...

> In 1997, the National Wildlife Institute, in co-operation with the University of Turin, produced an action plan to eradicate the American grey squirrel from Italy, as this introduced species replaces the native red squirrel through competitive exclusion and damages trees through de-barking. The first step, a trial eradication of a small population of grey squirrels at Racconigi (Turin) to evaluate the efficiency of the removal techniques, started in May 1997. Preliminary results showed that eradication was feasible, but the project was opposed by radical animal rights groups which took the National Wildlife Institute to court in June 1997. This legal action caused a suspension of the project and led to a lengthy judicial enquiry that ended in July 2000 with the acquittal of the Institute. Nevertheless, the 3-year suspension of all actions led to a significant expansion of the grey squirrel's range and thus eradication is no longer considered practical.

Well point is that Germany's CO2 emissions could be the same as in France had they not stopped building nuclear plants in the 80s and 90s. Obviously the psychosis amongst environmentalists who were hellbent on maximizing CO2 emissions (in addition to Germans electing a Russian agent to lead their country in 1998) was just one of the factors.

> The temporary transition to coal was studied long time ago and identified

When and by whom? The "phase-out" in 2002 was enacted by a government led by a person who later turned out to be a paid Russian agent. How did that work out? Germany did almost nothing for 10-15 while it increased it's dependency on fossil fuel imports from Russia...

There was no need to temporarily transition to coal except this: 1. The raw power of nuclear would make renewables not that attractive; so deployment will be slow. 2. Removing nuclear from scene will create demand for renewables.

The 1.5 step that climate activists ignored (because why not? Humans are cancers. Industrialization is a mistake) is the crashing of economy. Germany is will paying for that mistake and will never recover.

why would you have such a phase? why turn off nuclear before you have your renewables in place?

What about the savings, I thought nuclear was the cheapest form of energy

> Sure, nuclear is a good tool that we should leverage. But the reality is that the situation is such that we need to change a bit of everything everywhere, and the first step to do that is to realise it, accept it and vote for it. What do people instead? Say "it's because of those other people, I am better, and I will now vote for an extremist because my lack of common sense tells me it cannot be worse".

It might be worth voting for an extremist if that extremist being in a position of power keeps people out of power who would otherwise work against nuclear power plants; even if the extremist himself doesn't care about nuclear power one way or the other.

History shows that very smart people and even groups of very smart people can do remarkably stupid things, pointing out their obvious errors is not a statement of intellectual superiority.

> What's tragic to me is that everybody is very keen on telling how everybody else is stupid

And yet your comment repeatedly tells this person how stupid they are, even going as far as calling them a moron. Take a step back.

That's not what I am saying at all, I am just pointing out that venturing to 2 degrees (or more) and back to 1.5 degrees incurs the cost. Maybe it's well-known at this point, and I am just stating the obvious; but it's not my general impression.

Yes on CO2 capture, but electric personal cars are substantially lower emissions than internal combustion cars. Anyone saying something different is pushing fossil propaganda - that is just not a fact-based argument.

Yes, getting everyone onto electrified public transport + scooters is better - but EVs do provide meaningful emissions reduction.

Maybe, but cement manufacturing by itself is responsible for a staggering 8% of global co2 emissions. And we really don't have a viable option for replacing cement, and probably won't for a long time. Capturing and removing that co2 has a meaningful impact. Even if CCS were limited to just that one industry.

You could apply it to existing power plants for example. I could see a use there.

But don't use it as a justification for a new coal plant saying it's zero carbon now....

with fusion you would have enough energy to do it?

It’s pretty easy to see how electric personal cars make a difference even if the initial vehicle manufacturing process is indeed dirtier, and plenty of serious people consider them a part of the solution. CO2 capture also isn’t greenwashing, it’s just handwaving away problems with the idea that tech will somehow save us, which is also true for like… every single solution to this problem we’ve considered.

To be fair switching to nuclear was an option in the 70s-90s. Obviously it would have a been a bit more expensive but it would have slowed down climate change by 10-20 years.

On average, maybe yes. But in the rich world we also used a huge chunk of fossil fuel for relatively small marginal gains in quality of life (adding a fifth weekend shopping trip per year, buying a superyacht), and sometimes worsening life expectancy (driving too much, eating too much beef).

We could have just built nuclear power plants. Invested into the technology, built breeder reactors and all that. We wouldn't have had to sacrifice anything, except of course for the astronomical profits of oil and gas companies.

And sure this wouldn't have solved the entire problem, electricity generation only accounts for like 40-50% of CO2 emissions or so? But it would have made a huge difference, and allowed us to focus entirely on the other half of the problem.

And it's not "slight warming". 20,000 years ago the global average temperature was about 3 degrees celsius lower than the reference point. That was the last ice age. Today we are 1.5 degrees above the reference point, 4,5 above the ice age. In a few decades we'll be at 3 degrees above reference, 6 degrees above ice age.

The transition from ice age (-3) to the temperate climate that allowed humanity to thrive, took place over about 12,000 years. The transition from reference to +3 is taking place over about a century. And we won't stop at +3, it'll keep going. Already at 1.5 it's having huge profound effects.

Look at this chart, this should help you understand the severity of the situation. https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...

This is literally the end of the world as we know it. It's already well on its way. We are already seeing widespread crop failures, water scarcity, blistering heat waves, extreme weather etc. It will get much worse, this is just the beginning.

Carbon offsets are greenwash. Emissions trading mostly works, because it's just about the government setting a quota and then letting people figure out who gets to use it.

CO2 emissions trade for about 50$/t. CO2 capture costs 500$/t. So, both are useless - it costs 10 times more to get the carbon out, why are we selling them so cheap, it costs 10 times more to get the carbon out compared to not emitting it, it will never be economical.

A while ago (years ago?) I read something about how carbon capture is so energy intensive that it doesn’t really help much. Is that still true?

I guess if you powered it with green energy, that’d be a net positive?

Fully agreed. We're not gonna get out of this without something a bit crazy, and CO2 capture at least has an actionable theory: "what if power was 10x cheaper". That's imaginable at least, much more so than "what if we committed a few genocides" as was proposed elsewhere in this thread.

The bonkers crazy stance is yours. Carbon capture cannot work. We would need to build at the very least tens of thousands of carbon capture plants, way more than we currently have power plants.

So to me, the bonkers crazy stance is "let's just continue destroying the world, and hope magic future tech will save it". Especially when the tech you're talking about it just completely obviously entirely infeasible. Add to that the fact that we are destroying the world now. The ship is currently sinking. A solution in 50 years is a solution 100 years too late.

The actual solution that we do have is nuclear power. We could have replaced all fossil fueled power production decades ago if we wanted to. That would have reduced our emissions by nearly 50% and we would have been able to put all our efforts into solving the remaining half of the problem.

As it stands right now I fully expect the world to end quite soon. Maybe within my lifetime. Unless I die early I'll definitely see +3C in like 20 years or so, and probably +4 and +5 as well if not even more than that. I'm not having children because I don't want to put someone into this world just to suffer through the end of it. I have absolutely no faith in our ability to solve climate change. I believe we could have, if the world wasn't full of corrupt rich people and stupid people voting for them. But it is what it is. We've doomed ourselves and we're watching the end unfold before our eyes while everyones like that meme with the dog in the burning house saying "this is fine".

I think its more they don't have to reduce their pollution output. They can just pump it all out as much as possible, to make as much profit as possible, and "hope" a magical reversal tech arrives at some point in the future.

It's basically no regulation, to only focus on profit.

It's the fossil fuel industry who is pushing for carbon capture (because they know it isn't viable). The fossil fuel industry is just running the tobacco company playbook.

Correct. For instance, still today China burns more coal than every other country combined. They are starting from a place that is so bad that even small improvements will look like huge gains.

A century is a pretty amazing amount of time considering the alternative, no?

It just feels like climate change activism is about telling us we're all going to suffer anyway, so turn off your AC and start to pay more in building costs and taxes. Don't we want practical solutions?

You know we can breed centuries of fuel if we used u-238 to pu-239 cycles right?

The politicians driving the world to the ground are 99% men. Are you really trying to pin global climate on women?

Besides, the survey you mention used just 1000 phone calls in the US and doesn't disclose education level, it doesn't depict global population properly.

Well, but the companies exist because people buy their products, right? If I buy pork from a farm, CO2 was technically produced by that farm, but it's on me.

Ultimately those 50-cent companies are making things that we buy. Even if they're selling to another business, that other business is selling to you. The chain might be long and hard to figure out, but it all comes down to you.

Fortunately we don't need $50 gas because these days we have $1 gas in the form of electric cars. Of course the price of electric varies very much from place to place. For some people electric cars are not competitive with gas but for other people electric is a lot cheaper and has been for a long time and now electric cars are practical.

The other thing you can do is start demanding better transit. Most people live in a city dense enough that transit could replace nearly all their transportation needs. Sure, we would still have to have trucks to get freight around, but that's a small minority of the energy used.

Also developing countries are adopting solar panels and batteries at a surprisingly fast pace, since they just buy them for cheap from China rather than waiting for a dysfunctional government to build out a proper grid to rural villages.

That logic seems a bit weak, because it is saying we're already living in a world where the worst-case is happening, and we're just talking about the odds of any individual experiencing it are going up a little.

Compare it to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-person-vs-... where there is strong evidence that using more energy directly leads to more prosperity. We've got much better chances to do well if we stick to using the cheapest available energy. Then people can just build over the top of any disasters that strike.

If the human part of climate change wasn’t true and the fossil fuel industry’s wasn’t the culprit it would’ve been proven by now. It is very unlikely that the fossil fuel industry that is so rich and powerful wouldn’t have proven it by now.

The planet is greener, I guess that you are pointing to; Nature Climate Change, 2016, Zhu et. al. where the authors of the study have warned that erroneous conclusions would be taken from the study.

I can't tell if this is sarcastic, or you're just lying?

> The planet is greener, even the Sahara is shrinking

The UK was baked brown in the heat and it was so bad it was visible by satellite, we had uncharacteristic wildfires all summer. Google has literally no idea what you're talking about by claiming the Sahara is shrinking, the best I can find is "maybe the expansion is slowing?"

> The Great Coral Reef has just had its best 5 years ever.

Apparently it had its most devastating coral bleaching event just 2 years ago, so I'm not sure this is true?

> On average, crops produce more due to higher CO2 levels.

I mean, yeah if you are into the average crop? People tend to like stuff like corn and coffee which are threatened by raised heat levels. With current heat levels we're projected to lose upwards of 1/5th the corn harvest by 2030.

> Pacific islands failed to sink.

I mean some of them did, like a decade ago, just none of the ones you care about.

> Hurricanes failed to become more frequent

Same frequency but wind force increases by water temperature, so a cat 1 hurricane like Rafael ends up a cat 3 hurricane due to climate change. I am seeing a pattern with your selective presentation of the facts.

> Fewer people died due to cold temperatures

Is that not because a large share of the world's old were taken out by COVID within the last 6 years? That is the group most likely to die to cold.

So how high should we drive temperature in your opinion? Sounds like you do think it's rising, just that the effects are largely positive

Utter nonsense.

See also:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/27/what-caused-th...

Yep, no consequences. Europeans didn't have heat waves this summer and they certainly didn't think of buying aircons this year.

Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine. :)

Nuclear is not an option, esp most countries with nuclear do import their uranium primarily from one country...

Mass solar + wind + hydro and geothermal, with nuclear as a grid stabilizer for when solar and wind aren't working and the batteries are empty.

Are you being sarcastic? Your first paragraph is very much Effective Altruism but for European cultural superiority. "European culture is the best, so, by protecting that culture's economic base, it's actually better for the rest of the world because we can export our Lovely Eco Friendly Culture more, the more we power it with coal and oil and gas."

We both know that China's coal production is not the reason the tariffs are in place

This is the energy commissioner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_J%C3%B8rgensen

But if it is a real emergency, surely we would just want any EVs we can get, to encourage building out the infrastructure for them.

I both agree and disagree. The EU isn't worse than others. For example, it's basically the only place that's willing to replace coal with imported gas, which is a major economical sacrifice.

On the other hand, with the money the EU spends on climate measures, the results leave a lot to be desired. The EU has prioritized things like hydrogen, biofuels and carbon capture, which all have very little to show for.

If Europe had spent all that money on EVs and heat pumps, emissions would have decreased drastically while prices woundn't even go up. But that's not possible if you want to preserve old jobs. Then you have to do those stupid things that aren't viable, like e-fuels for cars.

I'm also not sure if replacing coal with gas did actually decrease emissions on the whole. The gas lobby is a large reason why electrification has stalled in Europe, while China's coal lobby helped electric trucks to reach 50% share last month.

The paradigm was:

Renewables will be that fast in roll-out and much cheaper and then other countries will follow the path.

(which is funny, since China installed more solar in 2024/2025 than US+EU combined - so for them its working, in the beginning they were adptors, now they became shapers; same for africa: now a real option to get cheap energy, the only region where solar is more expensive than it should be, is actually EU + US)

I agree, countries that do not adhere to CO2 targets should be heavily sanctioned. They are killing us, after all.

That's what I was missing yeah. I always took the bleaching of corals in media as a visible 'canary in the mine' situation, never knew they were so central to marine life.

Baby kitty and 1bn people competing for your dinner.

Well, European sleeper is an operator -- their ability to improve the technology/interior is limited, it's a huge task just to keep running.

We are not an operator, so we will work with operators, basically adding our railcars to their trains.

Beds as opposed to seats mean fewer passengers per train carriage, so the fixed cost of operating the train is shared among fewer tickets.

You can make one trip per day with a night-train, whereas a seated train runs 16-20hrs per day. So again, fixed cost of the train existing is shared between far fewer ticket sales.

Then you need to store the train during the day, and you need to securely park the train when it arrives at its destination at night (a normal train yard isn't secure enough if you have a hotel full of people, and a train station usually needs all of its platforms).

Hundreds of kilometres of good quality electric railway infra is expensive to maintain. And by good quality I mean capable of relatively decent speeds like say 120-160 km/h. With airports you need to maintain lot less.

I think last time I looked it was that jet fuel is exempt from taxes in the EU? but trains aren't so flights are artificially cheap

Jet fuel is barely taxed and most touristic places subsidies the tickets to bring in the consumer cash cows.

Pretty much yeah.

The last couple of nightjets in the order from Siemens were converted back to day trains (rail jets), presumably because the trainsets are not economical enough (too few beds).

I think the point is that - tragically and infuriatingly - it seems we'll answer that question when it happens.

Personally, I think it's time for some metaphorical guillotines to change our current directon.

>Note that in GIEC report, nuclear (fission or fusion) was not identified as a major solution to climate change (only contribute 10% of the whole). The main contributors were green energies.

Probably because they were making assumptions based on LWRs and using LCOE to asses the costs, instead of something sensible like EROEI

> Initiatives will come if people care.

yeah sure keep caring if you want. keep living in denial about the fact that people cared already, and shit still hit the fan.

you do you, i guess.

> As for the rest, my government says its the way to go, then I go.

lol

Its the other way around. Climate is going to be least important of your problems if you cant put food on the table.

> complete destruction of the global economy. This is not hyperbole. If nothing changes that's a completely realistic outcome within 50 - 100 years

Saying the global economy will be completely destroyed within 100 years does indeed sound hyperbolic, uninformed, alarmist, FWIW.

Your examples are examples of cuts on the demand side. They satisfy current transport/electricity demand with a means that costs much less carbon, so fossil demand goes down.

(By contrast, a supply cut is 'not developing new fossil resource cuz someone else will buy it and burn it', which is obviously a dead end).

"simply ban combustion engines and gas boilers" - there's nothing simple about this

> If Europe would simply have banned combustion engines and gas boilers, emissions would have decreased drastically while prices would also decrease. Alas, Europe prioritized bad stuff instead.

I will remove the gas boiler when you give me £15,000 to put solar panels on my roof with a storage battery and to remove all the gas stuff out my house. I don't have a large house either (2 Bedroom).

Let us put the Servers with the Blockchain into Space, so we can be sure the net worth status is stored really really save? :-D

I honestly hoped the end would be the White Walkers just coming and killing everyone because they were too distracted and petty to mount a united defense. It would've made for a much stronger metaphor and fit in much better with the dark vibe and unexpected killing off of audience favorites that made the show a success in the first place.

I feel like the Disneyfied ending we got instead really ruined the show for me.

Its the only corner where one can try to talk some sense into some of the people directly involved in this process.

The self-professed unideological technical minds that pride themselves on first-principle thinking.

The walking contradictions that fail to recognize that it is in fact their ideology that is pushing us to this outcome, based on said first principles (thermodynamics ffs!) they do not actually take into account.