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

There are 8.2 billion humans, so about 140tCO2/person left on average. If we assume that we get to net zero by 2050, that means the average person can emit about 5.4tCO2/person/year from today to 2050 (hitting 0tCO2/person/year in 2050). This is what emissions look like currently [2]

    Top 5 countries > 10m population
    Saudi Arabia  22.1t 
    United Arab Emirates 21.6t  
    Australia            14.5t 
    United States  14.3t
    Canada          14.0t
    Some others
    China           8.4t
    Europe 6.7t
    World average 4.7t
    Lower-middle-income countries of 1.6t
    Low-income countries 0.3t

[1] Page 82 https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-metrics

Using a world average target number and then presenting a list that leads with world outliers is misleading. This is the kind of statistical sleight of hand that climate skeptics seize upon to dismiss arguments.

The world average is currently under the target number:

> World average 4.7t

I think you meant to imply that the CO2 emissions of poor countries were going to catch up to other countries, but I don’t think it’s that simple. The global rollout of solar power, battery storage, and cheap EVs is exceeding expectations, for example.

I don’t want to downplay the severity of the situation, but I don’t think this type of fatalistic doomerism is helping. In my experience with people from different walks of life, it’s this type of doomerism that turns them off of the topic entirely.

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.

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!

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.