Humans have caused 1.5 °C of long-term global warming according to new estimates

Doomerism is the reaction to our utter failure to even pretend to try. It did not cause that failure. Nor are people looking at the data and going, "yeah, I ought to do something, but people on Hacker News were gloomy so I'm going to buy a bigger SUV instead." EVs and solar and suchlike are much, much, much too little and much, much, much too late.

Doomerism doesn't help, except in the extremely limited sense of helping someone express their frustration. But it also isn't hurting because we'd be doing exactly the same nothing if they were cheerful.

Nothing is going to turn that tide meaningfully.

I'd like to know how anyone with an ounce of reality thinks we're going to reduce emissions substantially faster than we already are.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

China sees this as an opportunity and delivering on it. Meanwhile majority of Americans voted for Trump, the sentiment is anti climate change and 'drill baby drill!'.

The cheaper Solar and batteries become, the more they get deployed. Like we solved hole in the Ozone, I'm optimistic we'll transition to a net zero energy future but pessimistic that US may get left behind and it'll be too late for many of the industries to compete with China. We are too short term focused.

Depends on what you mean by "ounce of reality".

In reality, there's little that can be currently done mainly because of political policy. That's unlikely to change.

But, assuming policy could be changed, then there is actually quite a bit that could reduce emissions substantially much faster. Carbon taxes, better policies around railways (perhaps nationalizing and expanding ala india), more subsidies for renewable generation and battery production (perhaps funded by carbon taxes?). Stronger regulations on private vehicles (perhaps ban personal private ownership of large trucks and suvs?). But also trade deals and modernization efforts/investments with lagging countries to help them develop carbon free economies.

Now, I don't think policy change is likely. I do however think there are quiet a few policies that could significantly drive change faster than it is already going.

Doomerism leads people to go ahead and buy a ridiculous gas hog SUV they don't need because why not, we're all gonna die. Doomerism means we should cancel all our green and next-generation nuclear development because it doesn't matter. We're all gonna die.

Look up the Moore's law like progress of solar, wind, and batteries. Look up how much renewable energy we're adding, the uptake rate for EVs, etc. We are not doing enough but we are not doing nothing.

The previous poster is right. The global average is below the threshold and the global average is the only number that matters re: physics. Physics doesn't care about politics. The goal now must be to keep chipping away at those higher numbers in developed economies and to make sure the developing world gets renewable and nuclear energy before they decide to industrialize with coal like China did.

Either that or at least make sure we're cutting emissions in mature economies as fast or faster than developing economy emissions are increasing so the average does not exceed the limit.

I wouldn't be surprised if China overtakes the US completely in science and technology with the way things are going.

What nobody talks about is there’s not enough oil and natural gas left to miss 2C by much. At current consumption rates we run out of both in ~50-60 years. Coal isn’t competitive with renewables and as soon as we stop pumping hydrocarbons the associated influx of Methane also stops. So we’re almost guaranteed to miss 2.5C of global warming, and stopping at 2C is likely.

So congratulations humanity, all that money spent on R&D instead of directly cutting emissions without any solid alternatives actually worked!

Cars are still petrol but we've gone from 50k km / year to 10k km / year most made in a tiny 1 litre car (the other is a Prius). We don't have enough solar to cover that and the electric mix here is carbon intensive enough that we're better off using the petrol car until it needs replacing before switching to electric.

Hopefully at some point America will start taking their emissions seriously; it's crazy that you guys are so inefficient.

Of course it is hurting. If we really want people to change then we need to understand human psychology.

We need to create hope and not fear. Ask Kamala how fearmongering worked for her.

It included a moderate amount of money as stimulus to commercial companies which manufacture clean(? clean-er?) tech.

The Biden administration has also "balanced" this by allowing for massive amounts of further drilling for fossil fuels.

And even without the "balancing" - this is not remotely like an actual plan to convert the US to near-zero-emission energy production, in the immediate future, which is what's actually necessary.

Meanwhile the number of infants globally peaked around 2013-2017 and according to revised estimates overall population will peak late this century reaching 10.4bln - largely in countries with a small carbon footprint anyway.

We're going to blow past that 2°C target and millions will die due to extreme weather, but I firmly believe life on Earth and our species will survive, especially now that the "business as usual" scenario is considered highly unlikely due to how differently e.g. China's coal usage changed compared to projections.

US CO2 emissions in 2007 peaked at 6,016 million metric tons before consistently falling since down to 4,807 in 2023.

Per capita numbers are even better, but everyone assumes its from imports seemingly ignoring the massive reduction in coal use and vastly improved efficiency of just about everything. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1049662/fossil-us-carbon...

At current prices. As prices go up new sources of fuel become economical and the cycle continues. Not to mention that methane emissions from agriculture are a significant contributor as well (30% from cows) so just removing hydrocarbons doesn’t solve that problem.

It seems like an unrealistic bet that hydrocarbon-based emissions drop to 0 just because you think we’ll run out of fuel in 50 years. Does that mean airplanes stop flying in 50 years? No one is making these bets in the marketplace alongside you for good reason. And remember, consumption grows quite a bit year over year so you’re looking at a much shorter time frame if your prediction were to be true.

Few people are doubting that. The issue is that

> millions will die due to extreme weather

and due to climate-related wars, and life in general will become less pleasant. Just breathing air with higher CO2 concentration already isn’t that great.

2050 is only 26 years away, though.

Most people I know who voted for Biden stayed at home this time. Fear causes paralysis, hope drives action.

I just got back from a off-grid island here in New Zealand - 20 years ago, generators were everywhere and as soon as it got dark you'd hear nothing but the buzzing of running them all around you. Now there is solar everywhere and it's completely silent.

Or less O2. I wonder if there any study that does show any impact already or these are still speculations?

Arguably it provided bugger all actual physical good for society in return for its consumption. It got some fat cats rich and employed a half dozen humans. It consumed insane amounts of resources.

Your consumption is nothing compared to these ends of industry, they just try and make you think it does. Industrial industries worldwide need drastic changes.

It is also small in terms of the extent of expenditure needed for such a conversion of the US energy production system. A cost estimate from 2019 suggested somewhere between $4.5T - $5.7T over the whole period:

* https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/cost-of...

* https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/renewable-us-gr...

so $400B - even if we could assume that all goes directly to achieving the goal, which it does not - is under 10%:

We use oil because it’s cheap not because it’s the only possible solution. It’s not that we’re going to run out 100% year X, it’s that as economies of scale end priced inherently spike. Gas stations can scale down to 1940’s levels by having most of them close, but giant fuel refineries, pipelines, etc need scale to be worth the maintenance.

Moreover, there's no physiological impact whatsoever until you drop several percent.

Also, you can't look at the entire budget, entitlements like Medicare and Social Security dwarf everything else, you need to look at the discretionary part.

That was true before recent developments in exploitation and conversion. Canada had proven oil reserves of 5 billion barrels in 2002, but by 2005 it had proven reserves of 180 billion barrels because the Alberta oil sands became viable. South America now has far more oil than the Middle East - it's oil that wasn't considered economically recoverable until about a decade ago. Over recent years, we have discovered far more oil and gas than we've burned. Coal doesn't have much of a future as an energy source for electricity generation, but it might have a future as a feedstock for synthetic liquid fuels.

We're probably going to leave most of those hydrocarbons in the ground, but only because of the huge progress that has been made in renewable energy technologies. If that progress stalls or there are big breakthroughs in hydrocarbon technology, then there's still a real risk of substantially exceeding 2C. We have reason to be optimistic, but not complacent.

Think about the illegal immigration hawks talking about how people will cross the borders and start raping and pillaging everything in their path. When that of course turns out to be false, people dismiss their position entirely rather than look at actual issues.

I think this is a more marketable concern than CO2 as without O2 most know that you can’t live.

But I agree, it's something that'd have to be delicately done. Ideally phased in over time.

I also agree, probably wouldn't be fast enough, just faster to significantly faster than what we are currently doing.

https://jabberwocking.com/elon-musk-knows-nothing-about-gove...

It is impossible to cut government expenses as much as Musk claims. It was akin to Trump claiming he would replace the ACA with something better or that Mexico would pay for the wall.

"The secret plan I'm hiding behind my back" is not a plan at all.

this flies in the face of a lifetime of experience talking about immigration with family who lives in a southern border state...

We can make anything up. Why not stick to the facts, as we know them, and reasonable projections?

There is no reasonable projection for any fuel other than fossil fuel to maintain the sort of flying we do now.

Unless you are deeply involved in battery technology, your prediction seems overly pessimistic.

Not suggesting the article below is in any way conclusive but just one of many that turn up on a basic google search.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/passenger-electric-planes-be...

It's not working, so it's fairy tale. Is there evidence that it's really an effective plan to save lives and money caused by climate change?

> People were never going to accept, nor IMO should they have, a massive reduction in their living standards.

The first is just a claim - people accept hardship all the time for one purpose or another (such as wars). Also, what is so sacrosanct about their living standards?

Also, the liability of climate change is already on the balance sheet - and the massive reduction is coming, due to climate change. Just think of all the dead people, all the people who lose their property, all the poverty.

It's like saying, 'I won't suffer a massive reduction in my spending in order to pay my mortgage.' You already have the liability; that sentence doesn't mean anything.

The question is, given that reality, what will you do? Make up fairy tales about fairy godparents giving you magic wands to solve you problem?

We only have a day.

> I'd like to know how anyone with an ounce of reality thinks we're going to reduce emissions substantially faster than we already are.

The problem is political. The idea that politics is fixed, unchangeable, is obviously false. For example, look at the radical changes since 2015.

I don't even think a massive reduction is necessary, though. Just stop driving, and your carbon footprint shrinks massively. I bike everywhere, and I don't consider it a sacrifice at all. Obviously, there still needs to be commensurate increases in funding for public transit to match the decrease in driving, but most people would still save money by not having to buy gas anymore. Really, I think that living an eco-friendly life would mean improving life, not worsening it.

Batteries are fine for ocean shipping on a ~50 year timescale, and that basically covers burning fossil fuels. Using it as a feedstock for plastics etc is a non issue for climate change.

Anyway, I would say that "La propriete, c'est le vol" [1], so not much sentiment for the taxed. It _is_ a problem that US tax burden lies mostly on workers and very little of it on the rich and the larger corporations.

[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_propriété,_c'est_le_vol_!

Anyway, to your earlier point, I’m very much in favor of more resources into fighting climate change than what has been put into it, but I don’t think that what is needed is anywhere near what is considered acceptable by most, and given that, I’m quite happy with what this administration was able to put forth. Of course it’s a compromise.

"People farming" aren't expending fuel for personal use (save that which they are consuming for personal use) they're expending fuel on behalf of some {X} number of people who consume the produce.

We have farmers here (I kid you not) who live in a rural town centre and ride electric bikes to their work place, 4 thousand acre farms, upon which they operate giant machines for turning, seeding, and harvesting (and others for fire control, etc).

Personal fossil fuel usage should be reduced, it's just wasteful and counter productive, production fossil fuel usage needs to be made moe and more efficient an replaced to whatever degree possible (Agbots are a booming field).

Oil in place comes to a much larger number, but we’re past the point where this oil is a net positive from an energy perspective. It’s a carbon intensive battery not a fuel source.

It's viable to live on a farm and rarely leave it, many do and many enjoy that lifestyle.

It's viable to have shopping and personal items shipped in with larger supply deliveries and fold that personal usage into the neccessary usage for production.

FWiW I grew up on a cattle station in one of the more remote parts of the planet, no proper roads, TV, shops, etc and somehow still managed to get a good education and write a few million SLOC of mapping, geophysics, and asset managent code in the 80's and 90's.

So yes - I do think its viable ( QED ).

The construction of "renewables" requires massive amounts of emissions. "Renewables" do not move us towards 'net zero', because the critical part of the NET is the removal and storage of tens of billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, every year. Forever. At least that's my non-technical understanding of what "net zero" means.

> I'd like to know how anyone with an ounce of reality thinks we're going to reduce emissions substantially faster than we already are.

For anyone with "an ounce of reality"' we aren't reducing emissions. We haven't reduced our emissions at all. It's the opposite, they've gone up every year, I believe around 50-60 % since 1990 when we agreed to reduce them.

Look we’ve got larger form factor EV’s, but suggesting electric bikes as a viable alternative when it’s clearly a niche case for rural commuters is pointless.

Well duh, that's an edge case. Obviously I don't expect literally every single person to give up driving, but most people who use this website are white collar workers, or at least people who don't need to haul things on a regular basis.

> when it’s clearly a niche case

The entire oh but rural people is your niche case that you bought up.

For more than a decade now countries such as the US, Australia, etc have been more urban than rural. The overwhelming vast bulk of people live within urban areas.

And still some twit will counter a comment suggesting more people should walk, use lighter more efficient vehicles, etc. with a niche but what about farmers type parry.

That's weak.

Efficient solutions for the future should pay attention to distributions of people, trips, resources, etc.

Sad weak counters focus on "but some are different from the many therefore .."

One size doesn't fit all and there will be exceptions.

Activities such as tilling of fields, planting of crops, and shipment of products cause carbon dioxide emissions. Agriculture-related emissions of carbon dioxide account for around 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

That is a fantasy

The cost of doing that at a scle approaching what we use now rules it out except for niche uses

> One size doesn't fit all and there will be exceptions.

There’s ”some” and then there’s 1 in 1,000 people, no that’s an edge case not a solution.

Hell, actually living on a farm is even more efficient, which is why it’s what the overwhelming majority of farmers do. You only brought it up because you found it interesting not because it was actually relevant to the discussion.

PS: Also, at least in the US if someone is living in a town that’s considered an urban area. The threshold for town is higher than the qualifications for urban area.

Okay? Last I checked, it's not 1988 anymore.

Seems to me the answer is a global plan that will actually control emissions in a cost effective way - say taxes on carbon, free trade in solar/batteries/evs and trade tariffs for countries that try to ignore that. I'd vote for that.

Failing that, me cancelling the trip to Thailand is not going to make a noticable difference, so whatever.

In the UK we mostly do dumb stuff to make our electricity almost the costliest in the world, kill industry and make no global dent in CO2. Stuff like that is why emissions have gone from 22 to 40 gt/y.

It’s an inherent tradeoff, where significant emissions was required to lift them out of extreme poverty. It’s one thing to suggest developing economies shouldn’t have industrialized, but it’s unconscionable to accept the suffering that would have resulted.

Yes, China has many problems by their rise is exemplary. Especially in being the world's factory and having such a large export surplus. Their foray into dominating steel, high speed rail, solar panels, batteries, electronics e.t.c

They seem to be making good bets on the future, while US is holding on their bets from the last century.

> Who is going to pay the equivalent of 50$/gallon when they can use an EV?

If we're going to be arguing for peak oil, let's argue for peak lithium then too. EVs are going to get more and more expensive too as we have to extract from more expensive lithium stores.

> We use oil because it’s cheap not because it’s the only possible solution

For some things sure. Aviation fuel and ship fuel notably don't have any real replacements on the horizon.

From your sibling comment:

> The cost premium of biofuels for air travel aren’t that high and the scale can meet demand for long distance flights. Fertilizer from nitrogen in the atmosphere is again cost competitive relative to that kind of increase. Batteries are fine for ocean shipping on a ~50 year timescale, and that basically covers burning fossil fuels. Using it as a feedstock for plastics etc is a non issue for climate change.

I think you're mistaken here. Biofuels for air travel are much more complex than just pricing. You've got regulatory approvals, cost of retrofitting existing engines / figuring out how to make them drop-in without needing petroleum, etc. If you're thinking that batteries are fine for ocean shipping, I'd like a sample of what you're taking because the energy demands of massive ship containers dwarf the capabilities of batteries. That's why they're talking hydrogen fuel cells and nuclear.

> It’s not that we’re going to run out 100% year X, it’s that as economies of scale end priced inherently spike. Gas stations can scale down to 1940’s levels by having most of them close, but giant fuel refineries, pipelines, etc need scale to be worth the maintenance.

Conversely, there's a huge incentive to have oil be competitively priced and avoid a total collapse of that segment. That's why you see huge resistance politically - there's no real plan put forward for how we transition to a clean energy economy for the people currently participating in the oil economy.

500 miles is nothing. The median flight distance for a commercial flight is ~2000 miles. And this is a concept plane. Certification of a plane is ~5-9 years so let's assume on the longer side since electric planes aren't really a thing. So 20% of your time budget has been spent building a replacement for a puddle jumper. There's a lot of them but the real fuel consumption happens by the large commercial jets.

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1. The fact you cited is weird to me, since the top tax brackets in the US are pretty close together, and overall, rather low:

https://www.irs.gov/filing/federal-income-tax-rates-and-brac...

but - I guess I should have accounted for the skewed distribution of income in the US... for the top 10% to pay 75% of income tax, let's do some cocktail-napkin math to see how bad this is.

So, if we have a flat tax rate, this situation would mean that the top 10% make 3x more in total than the bottom 90%, or, 27x more per capita.

Assuming the average tax rate on the bottom 90% is, say, 12%, and on the top 10% is 36%, that would mean the average income in the top decile is 9x higher than in the average in the other 9 deciles. According to this:

https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

the average and median for the bottom 90% should be about similar, meaning that the average (not median) top-decile person makes 9 x $45,000/annum = $405,000/annum. The median top-decile person makes $201,000/annum, or about 4.5x than the median person on the bottom 90%. If we were to compare with the median person over the entire population - the median top-decile person makes 4x as much as the median person overall. Ouch.

2. I was naively interpreting this:

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...

i.e. that individual income tax accounts for 51% of US federal income, while corporate income/earnings tax accounts for 4%. I mistakenly assumed that the vast majority of workers pay the majority of taxes.

I wonder, though, how that chart accounts for Capital Gains tax.

Oil is consumed, lithium isn’t. There’s plenty of lithium to electrify the world multiple times, but it’s just an element so you can literally recycle it for billions of years.

> You've got regulatory approvals, cost of retrofitting existing engines / figuring out how to make them drop-in without needing petroleum, etc

0.2% of global aviation fuel is already biofuels, the regulatory processes is already involved and we’re talking a 50+ year timeframe here there’s plenty of options without retrofitting existing aircraft.

As to boats, weight and volume are a non issue so they scale just fine into the 24,000 TEU behemoths. Upfront costs are prohibitively expensive though operating costs are presumably. That said, there’s many options, ships are one of the few cases where hydrogen is a realistic possibility.

Classic, “fuck the middle class carrying the societal tax burden, hur hur”.

The people that pollute are not the ones stuck with the tax burden. Your incentives are completely misaligned here which means costs bloat and problems don’t get solved.

Recycling lithium is typically more expensive than extracting it through mining. Recycling companies claim a recovery rate of 95-98% so certainly lithium is lost and that's ignoring that smaller batteries often don't even end up in the recycling stream. But the important bit is the cost - if it's more expensive than mining then the recovery isn't economical then either there's a government subsidy or the lithium ends up diluted in the trash stream. You'd have a point about nickle or cobalt because they're particularly valuable but lithium is not so it is effectively being consumed.

> 0.2% of global aviation fuel is already biofuels

But it's not even clear that biofuels reduce CO2 due to production, processing & transport as well as land clearing for scaling it up. [1] suggests that biofuels can actually end up emitting more CO2 than the fossil fuels they replace (for example here's an earlier study [2]). And that's ignoring the substantial scaling challenges that SAF faces on the production side. I hope it works out but the lesson with huge risky bets is that many don't pan out and all we have now is large risky bets left which makes me pessimistic we'll succeed just because we run out of oil (assuming we even do which again seems highly unlikely to me because that's not how economics works).

[1] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-should-we-measure-co2-em...

[2] https://theconversation.com/biofuels-turn-out-to-be-a-climat...

As to lithium being consumed, we’re talking hundreds to thousands of years from now before mining becomes an issue, current economic issues are largely meaningless. Unlike oil, these are the early days of the lithium economy. Making a big battery pile somewhere is perfectly reasonable form of recycling.

The incentives for a government subsidies for lithium recycling are strategic. Reducing dependence on foreign imports is inherently useful, but a stockpile and battery pile serves the same basic need.

I need to cut meat (and food) consumption and cut reductions from our heating. Also as I do want to travel in ways which are not workable without flying (too much of the world to see).

But yeah, specialist doctors and white shoe lawyers can pull down 10-20x that median, so they're paying a lot of income tax. The standard deduction really dings the effective tax rate of that median earner, not so much for the doctor.

As noted in the MIT article:

> Since most natural ecosystems absorb and store carbon, while farmland in active use tends to produce it, this land use change can create more climate-warming pollution

Basically the land is changed from a carbon store to a carbon producer for biomass meaning you're no longer sequestering the carbon which is where you get extra carbon in the ecosystem even if you're not having any carbon in the transportation & production.

There’s a few forests that have stayed that way for millions of years. Go to Daintree in Australia, dig down a deep as roots go, count up the carbon in a given acre, and divide by a 180 million and you get essentially 0/year as the long term sequestration rate.

Transitions between forests and farmland basically store or release a fixed quantity per acre though it’s a slow process for deep root systems. In that context sure you can look at farming as releasing carbon because of the recent expansion of farming, but the numbers aren’t a fixed constant.