Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

One point curious in its omission is whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget. Presumably that’s the critical metric in all of this.

[Edit: I ran this question through ChatGPT and the initial (unvalidated) response wasn’t so exciting. This obviously put a dampener on my mood. And I wondered why people like McKibben only talk about the upside. It can sometimes feel a bit like Kayfabe, playing with the the reader’s emotions. And like my old man says: if someone tells you about pros and cons, they’re an advisor. If someone tells you only about pros, they’re a salesman.]

I'm not sure I understand. There's no carbon budget, any carbon that we emit is carbon we'll have to re-capture somehow and the longer it stays in the atmosphere the longer it will have a heating effect.

I think renewable have accelerated to the point of matching the electricity growth worldwide: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...

We've also passed the peak of CO2 per capita, but since the population is still growing we are still increasing carbon emitions worldwide. It's going to be a while before we stop emitting anything, and then longer before we start re-absorbing it...

Even very rich nations have a handful of prototype plants for CO2 capture right now at best, and the budget for things like this is the first thing that gets slashed by Doge et al.

If we were on track for lots of CO2 capture by 2050, we would see the beginnings already (massive investments, quickly scaling numbers of capture sites, rapid tech iteration).

Fully agree with the rest of your point though. I consider CO2 emissions as basically "raising the difficulty level" for current and future humans (in a very unethical way, disproportionately affecting poor/arid/coastal nations).

I'm also highly confident that human extinction from climate change is completely off the table (and I think a lot of people delude themselves into believing that scenario for no reason).

It's just kind of infeasible to pull the entire atmosphere through these plants. The largest one we have is called mammoth, claimed to remove 36000 tons of CO2 per year, meanwhile our emissions are measured in billions of tons per year. Like over 30 billion.

We would need about 30 mammoths to get to a million tons per year, and 30,000 mammoths to get to a billion. Then multiply by another 30 and in total we would need almost a million mommoth plants just to undo what we are doing right now at the same rate. Carbon capture is like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket.

How are you so confident that extinction is off the table? I've stopped following this stuff because it's depressing but last time I checked we were in dire straits and I haven't heard any good news on this front. I'm just seeing ice caps disappearing, ocean currents changing, weather changing, pretty much everything that's been predicted is now happening and it's not going to slow down any time soon.

Because even the worst-case scenarios (=> think RCP8.5) are just not enough to get rid of us.

I can totally see populous breadbasket states turning into unliveable deserts, billions of deaths from famines and heatwaves, iconic coastal cities being lost to the sea and a giant loss of biodiversity-- but I simply don't see this eradicating our species.

Humans are too adaptable, and warming is invariably gonna leave too many survivable holdout regions.

I think that an all-out global nuclear war would be much more threatening to humanity, and even that I'm very confident we would survive as species.