Climate Change Tracker

While I’m sympathetic to the idea of degrowth, people will not go along with it. Instead I think we should advocate for living in dense areas, eating a lot less meat, reducing waste, etc.

And that's far from being enough.

> While I’m sympathetic to the idea of degrowth

I think it's the first step. At some point you will realize that it is just not a choice. We will degrow anyway, because fossil fuels are not unlimited, and we can't reasonably replace them.

I am not in favour of degrowth because I find it romantic. I am in favour of degrowth because that's how we can control the fall. I'd rather have a hard landing than a complete crash.

Based on what? We already have optimistic signs in developed countries where emissions per capita have declined.

As others have said, no idea how you impose degrowth short of dictatorship

Based on the consensus on how much we need to cut our CO2 emissions, and on checking orders of magnitudes on "what we can do before degrowth" (which generally implies replacing fossil fuels with something else, which generally implies extrapolating numbers or hoping for non-existing technology).

> We already have optimistic signs in developed countries

It's too late to be optimistic unfortunately. We don't need to slightly reduce emissions per capita, we need to drastically cut them.

> As others have said, no idea how you impose degrowth short of dictatorship

Oh I agree with that (especially in the US). I think we are going towards global world instability, wars and famines (even in developed countries) in our lifetime. Doesn't mean I cannot wish we got reasonable for our own sake.

The only thing that can save us is controlled degrowth. Which is a very challenging problem. Yet too many are hoping for CO2 capture and miracle technology. Society will probably collapse, but that sucks.

We need to use less energy (because energy is CO2 emissions, and because we will have less abundant energy in the future), and therefore we need to rethink society to work without abundant cheap energy.

Some parts of economy will benefit from that (e.g. building bikes should work well), and many will not (typically the airspace industry will be reduced dramatically, probably the whole modern software has to go back quite a bit and stop wasting resources all over the board, etc).

Your idea of "doing less" seems to entail something more, can you give some examples.

Yep, that's on track with degrowth. The whole question then is: how much do we need to remove? Realistically, given how much we need to cut our CO2 emissions in the next couple of decades for hoping to keep the climate in a "bearable" state (as per our climate models which more and more appear to be optimistic themselves), we will have to remove a lot of stuff.

> Your idea of "doing less" seems to entail something more, can you give some examples.

Aviation has to mostly go away. Most meat, most fishing too. Individual cars in cities need to completely go away (at least in countries that can possibly do it, e.g. all of Europe) and public transportation has to be dramatically increased everywhere. In the countryside, people will probably still need small electric cars to compensate for the lack of public transportation.

We need to electrify trucks (because they bring food into cities), that's much more important than cars (not that it's easy to remove cars, but if we remove trucks, cities starve).

Cities should not be too big, they need to stop growing (same thing, it takes energy to bring food there). All buildings need to be properly isolated (for heat/cold).

IT needs to change. We don't need 5G to watch TikTok on our brand new smartphone in the bus. We don't need clouds for everything, not everything has to always be connected/tracked/serving ads, we don't need AI for everything, we don't need every single commit to run a CI on the cloud on 50 machines, etc. To me, this all says "we need to make good IT that makes sense", and as a developer I would like that. Since I started programming, I feel like IT has become a big joke of for-profit bullshit.

Because of the reduction of fossil fuels, importations will go down. We need to deal with that. Produce what's most important locally.

Globally it means degrowth, GDP will go down. But that does not mean going back to Middle Age. We can find a new number to optimize other than GDP, try to teach people that ultra-consumerism is not making them happier (it's actually killing us all), and there is a lot to do (typically the bike industry should go up, there will be job there, etc).

First, I don't think we need to go that far. Second, I don't see how you will ever achieve this without a brutal dictatorship on a global level. It's a complete non starter as far as I can tell unless you have a new idea for how to achieve it.

You don't think we need to, or you hope we don't need to? And based on what? On my end it's pretty simple: fossil fuels have to pretty much disappear (and if we don't do it on purpose, they will anyway because they are not unlimited) and we don't have anything that remotely replaces them. Look around: all the ideas to replace them right now are wishful thinking. Given the timeline, we are almost certainly too late.

> Second, I don't see how you will ever achieve this without a brutal dictatorship on a global level.

Yeah that's a completely different problem. I personally think we're doomed. We won't manage to save what remains to be saved, so we will suffer the consequences (which will most likely destroy democracy globally, because we are talking mass immigration and famines at a level never seen before).

Still the only chance we have now is to start accepting that we should do that. Then we could start trying to do it.

I'm researching this to have some concrete data, but I doubt I'll have it together soon enough to share in this thread. Will definitely share on HN when this topic comes back around with what I find.

> Look around: all the ideas to replace them right now are wishful thinking.

I don't think this is true at all. Solar is improving at a rapid pace and is already cheaper. We need a large scale rollout, but that's a will issue, not a tech issue. Nuclear is always an option as well. You can see this in many places, here's a graph of solar production in the US, that rise looks amazing!

https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T...

Solar is indeed improving at a rapid pace, but in a world full of cheap and abundant fossil energy. What will be its price in a world without fossil fuels?

Also it's obviously much easier to quickly go from "almost no solar" to "a little bit more solar", but it is not linear: the more solar you make, the harder it is to double the production.

It is most definitely a tech issue. Take absolutely whatever you want and try to get it to a whole different scale, and it will become a tech issue. And next to that, you can't control solar (if there is no sun, there is no electricity), and we don't have a convincing technical solution for that today.

> Nuclear is always an option as well.

Every year that we spend doing nothing, it becomes less and less of an option. It's pretty clear that fusion is way too late for the party. Now for fission plants, it takes decades to build, so we don't have a whole lot of time to start. Still you will get the scale problems again: you can't replace fossils entirely with fission.

Don't get me wrong: we absolutely need fission and nuclear and all the renewables. But we have to realize that they won't completely replace oil, and therefore we won't have enough energy to keep doing everything we are doing the way we are doing it today. Therefore we will have to choose what we prioritize, and that is called "degrowth".

> Now, you can choose to be a techno-pessimist about all this if you want. You can assume, if you like, [... adds an incomplete list of stuff that could prevent technology from solving the problem ...]. Yes, with enough mental effort, you can ignore a technological revolution in progress. > > But ignoring a technological revolution in progress will accomplish nothing.

Let's be real: this article does not prove that solar can replace fossil fuels. It has faith that it can, and believes that "anyway if that doesn't work, we're screwed, so we have to believe in it".

It merely extrapolates from the growth of solar in the last few years. That is not enough.

My turn to suggest a different view: https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-End-Blain-Christophe-eb...