I'm mostly stopped feeling autistic since adolescence, but climate change is one of those times. It's obviously real, and it's also obvious that shuffling chairs in developing countries is rounding to zero effect. We're converting to cleaner energy anyways because of pollution and better economics, so the push for decarbonization in itself is... what do you call a rounding error when it's already rounding to zero?
And it's FAR from hopeless. Again, global warming is obviously happening. But the amount of adapting and reacting to it is virtually nil. Installing AC. Tree cover in every city. Start serious discussions on what level of risk we want with geoengineering.
Because yes, there absolutely is an acceptable risk level with geoengineering. Planting trees is that. Carbon capture is also that. And better and more effective tech will definitely be available.
But we're in a social climate where I don't even dare write down examples of what those more effective methods would be, because if you're not luddite enough you're the enemy.
Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative.
The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect.
This only stops it.
Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.
The technology-will-save-us mentality is part of the reason we are here. We live in a society that doesn't do anything unless it makes money for some set of decrepit old men.
We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition) but people made money doing the opposite. And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US.
No it isn't, the idea that strict vegan diets would have stoped climate change is just nonsense. Run the numbers. "Strict vegan diets" is the attitude of US activists telling the developing world that they need to change their behavior before the US activist is willing to accept driving less or adopting dense urban infill housing.
"Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.
People who refused to acknowledge the reality of human society, refused to acknowledge that the profit system exists whether they want it to or not, are responsible for focusing action on ineffective means of change.
Also while developed countries are affected , developing countries like Bangladesh, India are disproportionately affected, mostly a function of geography and a lot of history (very high population etc.). Honestly once AI becomes powerful enough most of these people will literally be leftovers with nothing left to contribute to the world with civil war precursors you see in other forms today essentially the same symptom of fight for limited resources.
The developed countries have so much land, water, resources that they will adapt although inequality within will be an issue and tbh at this point there is never any thought given to the wider world, which if one things about honestly never was.
> People who refused to acknowledge the reality of human society, refused to acknowledge that the profit system exists whether they want it to or not, are responsible for focusing action on ineffective means of change.
Thank you for writing that, because I think it is the key point. It's very easy to blame "decrepit old men" because that makes it someone else's fault - and I get it, as I think that there are a bunch of decrepit old men that deserve a lot of blame.
But democratic societies (and even authoritarian ones that are still somewhat subject to mass unrest) were never going to accept large negative impacts for a consequence that was not immediate and in your face. Like you put it, just go around and ask your average Joe or Jane if they would vote for any candidate who demanded strict vegan diets (or heck, even a lot of the other things on GP's list). You're fooling yourself if you think it's only decrepit old men who don't want that stuff.
And regarding GP's comment that "And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US." Yes, there are some people trying to sabotage this to make money for themselves, but it will not take them too long to fail miserably precisely because the economics are not in their favor. Just look at Texas - not exactly a place known for its love of vegan diets, among other things - and solar, wind and now batteries are now a huge portion of the energy mix and growing fast precisely because it's economical.
The person I'm responding to is the one who brought it up.
I live in a very leftist place, and there were always those at climate events demanding "strict vegan diets" however I didn't see these people out in the general world outside of my little leftist bubble, trying to actually get their idea out there.
I agree with Michael Mann that what most of the public only encounters this idea of "strict vegan diets is a required climate solutions" by hearing it from climate denialists poisoning the well of climate action. But I also see this idea online, and in meat space in very isolated areas.
So the idea of "strict vegan diets" is a real idea on the fringe, but its overall effect on climate action has been to turn people against climate action in the US.
> "Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.
This personal belief is grounded on an assumption that all mankind follows a neoliberal or even libertarian economic model.
Back to reality, west Europe is firmly a social democracy where states impose behavior through law, regulation, and policy, which is topped by a federal system that coordinates policies. Countries such as China are totalitarian with a centrally managed economy that's guided by N-year strategic plans.
My supposed "personal belief" is not normative it is descriptive.
Misconstruing this as normative, and attributing it to a political belief, is your cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile where actual climate action is coming from.
We must understand the world as it is, if we are to effectively change it to a better state.
> This personal belief is grounded on an assumption that all mankind follows a neoliberal or even libertarian economic model.
This personal belief is usually coupled to people who have become wealthy following this belief. So it tracks that they would declare any solution that doesn't allow them to continue their plundering impossible.
You're assuming that we keep the same system and that no sacrificing can be made. Technology is seen as the only solution because of the primary assumption that we need to keep growth and late stage capitalism. Degrowth, relocalisation, lower consumption are all solutions that would work better than technology (there are very serious people out there who demonstrated that technology won't replace the energy we need, Jancovici to name just one).
Technology is the only option in constant system, but with nothing happening, the system won't remain constant for long, and sacrifices will have to be made, not by choice.
Jancovici said a lot of stupid things also, although it seems that he recently acknowledged that renewables could make an impact (and not just "l'épaisseur du trait" as he always said).
I'm not sure what you mean by "degrowth, relocalisation, lower consumption are all solutions that would work better than technology".
People in general do no want to consume less, or buy more expensive stuff created locally, so I think it's easier to create new technologies than to change people mindset, although we probably should try to do both (which we are).
> You're assuming that we keep the same system and that no sacrificing can be made.
No. I am not.
I'm saying that unless the incentive system is aligned with our goals, then it's not actually climate action.
Technologists succeeded at doing that.
People who decided to use non-policy driven political action failed utterly at this. The degrowthers are particularly bad at this, but then all their thinking was muddled and riddled with errors about the reality of the science.
Technology makes the system non-constant. Technology is one of the biggest sources of social change.
Significant amounts of the third world are already eating de-facto vegetarian or vegan diets. Many for religious reasons (i.e. in India where the vast majority of people either eat no meat or only chicken/fish), and many others for financial reasons.
Strict vegan diets would objectively massively help reduce climate change.
> The consumption of meat is more common among lower-income groups. Nearly nine out of ten people belonging to the poorest 20% of India's population eat meat, compared to about seven out of ten among the wealthiest 20%.[4]
> Religion also plays a role in dietary habits. Nearly all of the Muslim (99%), Christian (99%) and Buddhists/neo-Buddhist (97%) populations eat meat. Among Hindus, a little over three-quarters consume meat, while Jains and Sikhs have the highest share of vegetarians. Only one-quarter of Jains and half of Sikhs have ever eaten meat.
They consume far less meat and the specific types are the uniquely least polluting types
Chicken/Fish produce an order of magnitude or in some cases two orders of magnitude less pollution than cows do.
Trying to gaslight me on this topic even though I'm right on the part that matters. the "or" stands in for the context of the fact that Chicken/fish are an order of magnitude healthier for the planet, and frankly, for individuals.
I've been vegetarian for 7-8 years and think it'd be great if everyone stopped eating meat, but expecting even a single person to stop who hasn't already expressed interest in it is pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. We should not base our strategies for fighting climate change on hoping all of humanity will take a sudden 180° turn on their natural instincts to eat meat.
I think that vegan diets never took off primarily because the vast majority of people do not want to follow vegan diets. Money factors such as subsidies are secondary. There are also potential health impacts. I followed a vegetarian diet for a few years when I was younger because of ethical concerns, and I felt healthier once I started eating meat again. This is just anecdotal evidence of course, and many people argue that you can be as healthy or even more healthy vegetarian as you can be omnivorous. But it's a potential psychological factor arguing against the likelihood of mass adoption of veganism.
Mass transit and dense development are potentially doable, but at this point the suburban sprawl + car model has been popular in the US for decades and it would feel like a downgrade for many people to live in smaller places in more heavily urbanized environments. I think that many Americans don't even have a clear idea of what it would look like to raise kids in a multi-story residential building in a city without it seeming like poverty.
Also, in some parts of the US, mass transit and dense urban living run into the problem of anti-social behavior including street violence. Many of the people in the US who care the most about stopping climate change also oppose the kind of intensive policing that would be required to keep crazy dangerous people off buses and clean up troubled neighborhoods enough that the average person would feel safe living there. Violent crime rates have largely been going down since the early 90s, but are still much higher than in Europe. One of the reasons for the high rates, through definitely not the only reason, is the availability of guns, but getting US right-wingers to accept gun restrictions is probably even less probable than getting US left-wingers to accept major crackdowns on street crime.
I’m guessing the things you listed are the sacrifices /you/ are willing to make but omit the ones you are not willing to make. Do you travel by plane? Do you use AI? Do you have kids? Do you own a car? Etc etc.
This right here, the absolutely preposterous idea that giving up kids is somehow climate action, is exactly the nonsense that a climate activist should never tolerate.
You think climate action is everybody stopping having children?! You think extinction of the human race is the only option?!
"Of course not!" You say, so clearly we must have some children. But how many? If we drastically reduce our population, we will continue with the same broken systems, same energy systems, etc.
Only by keeping society running do we have the energy to switch our society's engine to zero carbon energy sources.
It's insulting to tell people not to have children, it's not realistic, but worst of all, it's not a climate solution to not have children.
"Don't have kids" is just Malthusian nonsense from a prior environmental era, uncritical thinking, pure slop.
And it greatly harms actual climate action when this extremely stupid idea gets associated with the climate movement. Stop. Just stop.
Just like it isn’t possible to get politicians to stop spending other people’s money, it isn’t possible to stop enterprises from making as much money as possible while spending as little as possible on a global scale (it may work locally!)
Thus, technology-will-save-us is the rational choice. Drill all the oil, build the biggest datacenters and speedrun to fusion before the collapse so we can sequester the carbon back into the ground and still have energy left to run Haber-Bosch, ideally with hydrolysis instead of natgas.
Disclaimer: I used to be heavily in the sustainability camp in my younger years
We’re so far past this, technology is 100% the only hope and always was. Getting stuck in the mentality that we can shame our way out of this for a decade was (and continues to be) a colossal waste of time.
The issue with the global warming advocates is that they seem to believe that in order to solve global warming we need to make everyone's life worse. That was already a non-starter. It's just terrible marketing.
You say it's for the benefit of "decrepit old men," but the fact is that more and more of the globe is being lifted out of poverty and living more comfortably than ever before. The unfortunate fact is that global warming is an unstoppable force now, humans would have to go extinct for it to waiver.
I'm not saying we should do nothing, but I am saying that your framing is exactly why no one listens to global warming advocacy. We are powerless against it, not because of governments, but because people are living better and no one is going to sacrifice that; and even if they did the math doesn't add up to reverse course. The people that say we should all be sacrificing are often the richest among us that don't even know what sacrifice entails, contrary to your point.
Your framing, that no collective action can ever include reduction or sacrifice, implies this is an inevitable and fatal path we cannot come back from.
I hope you are wrong that nothing requiring sacrifice can ever be accomplished.
It's not ignoring that at all, but I challenge you to go back to the person in China or India that suddenly has amenities and tell him they all have to go away, and everything they worked for over 20 years is gone for "the greater good." You're probably only viewing this from a Western view (already wealthy.)
Sorry but this just isn't true. Of course you need more energy to produce a cow and then eat it than you need to sustain yourself by just eating the cows food.
I think it really depends by what you mean when you say vegan.
If you’re eating vegan cheeses and whatnot you’re probably not doing so hot. Or impossible burgers. Or any other manner of “invented” food that is not essentially basic agrarian or hunter-gatherer.
Conversely, wildlife play important ecological purposes and can be hunted sustainably.
Wild life can also be useful in processing things we cannot eat and grows in abundance (grass) into things we can eat (cows).
"strict vegan diet" AKA supporting industrial byproducts made into ultraprocessed food made on the other side of the globe rather than consuming vegetables, fish & meat produced locally and ecologically.
Don’t forget eating meat, the easiest thing to stop doing (people needs cars and trucks for work, they don’t need cheeseburgers). People can’t be bothered to make any changes, it’s always someone else’s problem.
Yeah? We need millions of personal, individual trucks? For work, of course, ignore all those white collar job parking lots full of extended cab pickups that get 10mpg.
Spoiler: It's individuals who are driving that demand. The impact of the decisions of big oil are nothing compared to the collective decisions of individuals.
Big oil isn't going to kick down your door when you buy an EV and switch to solar. There is no rancher in the grocery aisle slipping steaks in your cart.
Spoiler, the oil and other energy industries have done a world changing amount of lobbying and regulatory capture in order to drive decisions that cause more and more fossil fuel use. This includes everything from subsidies to industry stagnating regulations to reduced enforcement to suburban sprawl. Look at how the current US administration shills for big coal. Pretending they haven't shaped the world around the consumers is either naive or bad faith.
Yes, consumers have to stop funding these companies and behaviors. Also, the governments that operate on behalf of those consumers have to drop their corruption and start protecting those people they represent. Both virtuous and nonvirtuous conservatives know neither of these are going to happen, which is why they see massive terraforming technology as the only way out - if someone with power can't get rich(er) fixing it then it won't get fixed.
Who do you think benefits from the use of oil? Everyone. We’re all guilty, it’s not just oil companies. Goods are transported on ships, railroads, planes, and trucks. Virtually none of these are electrified because of energy density constraints. They all use oil. Anyone that consumes is an oil consumer.
Governments and industry are responsible. Personal consumption/waste is not the primary driver of climate change, no matter how much corporations tell us that using paper straws is the solution. It's tough to expect average people to take major action when corporations are essentially given carte blanche.
And who is buying all that stuff from corporations? Who is actually the one consuming?
We can quibble about edge effects like "induced demand", but by and large, people just love cheap energy, cheap calories, and can shift the moral burden by playing "not my responsibility" games.
I have been wondering: more solar means we are making Earth less reflective. Solar energy that might have been reflected back to space is now absorbed by the PV to make electricity. But that delta has to go somewhere? Where does it go in terms of Earth’s temperature. Same with more nuclear… we’d be pumping more energy into the system.
Don’t take this as an argument against these technologies. It’s a huge win to not be increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
It is quite ironic that capitalism and the profit motive are now the best hope for staving off climate change, all thanks to the technologists and entrepreneurs that have mad renewables and storage so cheap.
The 2020s climate action movement in the US (and the UK) was disastrous in their strategy, action, and outcomes. I was there, I followed along because it seemed like the best way to get climate action, but things like Sunrise and XR at their very best did nothing. They focused on all the wrong people, focused on all the wrong levers. They turned allies into enemies, by "protesting" tech companies that were at the forefront of real action. They refused to acknowledge the massive effects of technology change, and the need for quick adoption, and the huge money saving nature of the solution.
I have zero patience for those attitudes now, the difference between a degrowther and a climate change denying politician are minimal in effect, and the effects are all that matter now.
What about energystar? That had significant impact. Remember how we fixed the ozone hole? It’s entirely possible to drive change through policy or community. We just choose not to do it because the Epstein class wants culture war not class war.
Yes, policy does change things!! You give examples where a community got together, changed policy, affecting all of society.
This is precisely the opposite of the disastrous 2020s action, which had no concrete policy demands, which leaned into the culture war. They ceded the ground to the right wing, who does that sort of culture war much better, as they have focused their efforts on it for so long.
With culture war, no policy changes. The fight takes place in vibes.
We need policy, execution in concrete changes of physical things in the real world. That's where Sunrise and XR failed.
>Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.
Removing CO2 from seawater would be more efficient because some of the work is already done for you, and you'd be de-acidifying the ocean long term.
Supposing all anthropogenic emissions went to zero today, we'd still keep warming almost as far as three degrees with all of the disasters and famines that entails, because there's a lag time between existing emissions and their effects.
We need massive bounty programs that pay out irrespective of nationality for every possible kind of improvement and gain to carbon capture technology if we want to prevent 90% of all land on Earth between 30°N and 30°S from slowly turning into copies of the uninhabitable stretches of the Middle East.
Geophysically, there are 3 pillars to climate stabilization:
1. Emitting fewer greenhouse gasses. Need to do that more than ever, but we are now in overshoot so…
2. Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started.
3. Shade Earth. Not regions, The whole globe. There are two ways to do that:
a. Stratospheric aerosols
b. Planetary sunshades in space, at Sun-Earth L1.
That’s the whole solution space, conceptually. As long as we continue to fail within that space, we will suffer compounding effects of unmitigated climate change.
It’s way easy to preach vegan diets, solar/wind installations, etc. from the comfy chairs by the citizens of first world countries. But for someone living in a dirt poor country, climate change is the last thing in their mind even though they might be the hardest hit population. For them it’s about survival and meeting basic human needs.
There hasn't been a question about this in a decade or more. There was no path, even theoretically, to stopping our CO2 emissions without dramatically lowering quality of life for maybe a couple billion people.
We won't slow climate change. We can build resilience to the effects, and we have good incentives to do so. But we'll keep burning fossil fuels for a very long time.
There was an obvious path that the environmentalists mostly opposed. A decade is plenty of time for massive scale buildout of nuclear power. If we'd started that a decade ago we'd be in a good position now.
Indeed. At this point I’d say that the “green movement” has done more damage to the planet than the fossil fuel industry.
The entire Western world (with the exception of France) pretty much stopped building nuclear power plants 40 years ago, because of a single accident that by its most pessimistic estimates killed fewer people in total than coal emissions kill every 3 days. It’s madness.
Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny it and convince most of us that it was our fault and that nothing could be done and that we should just buy their anti-environment-collapse products to protect ourselves.
> Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny
It is, and they are. We keep hitting record X Y and Z temperatures, cyclones, etc, and they're on the brig shouting "it ain't global warming you morons"
This is mostly the UN’s own fault. Nation governments refrain from getting “hardcore” on this because the better options are expensive and they don’t want to be undercut by another country. The UN is supposed to somehow use its deep diplomatic negotiating and deal-making skill to find and enforce agreement between these states so we all adopt the changes together… and penalise the hold-outs (we all know who) together.
Interestingly, financial markets are a good place to see the “price” of some environmental issues. As made up example: “Should I buy bonds that are backed by electricity sales from a yet-to-be-built hydroelectric dam? Will there be enough rainfall to fill the reservoir reliably? I’ll have to receive a higher interest payment to offset that risk.”
We already know we need to pump the breaks on AI for a host of safety issues. However, perhaps the biggest concern is the sheer scale of electricity generation they require. One hyperscale data centre can require electricity equivalent to a fair sized city. Many data centre builders are keen to claim they'll use renewable energy sources... eventually. They'll just suck power off the grid "temporarily" or rely on "clean" natural gas for a few years. There are a decent number of states, provinces, etc. whose total emissions will double in a matter of months. Could the timing possibly be worse?
From a warming perspective, it's utter madness to let this build-out proceed unimpeded. New data centres should be required to be net-zero at power-up. Unfortunately, it's a race and the U.S. side of it has an administration that is actively rolling back policies that fight climate change.
>Climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, said that "although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we've dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there's a way out."
I need to say WTF, the way out is to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. That means stop using fossil fuels. How many times does this need to be said ? Already it probably has been said millions of times.
It’s surreal how quickly this went from being the most important problem in the world to barely being on anyone’s mind, all in less than a decade. I had plenty of problems with the fear-mongering and doomed-by-2030 predictions, but the current situation, where we seem basically fine with doing nothing, is genuinely scary. Technology has its limits, billions of people still aspire to a European standard of living, and global population isn’t expected to peak until near the end of this century.
I just hate this post-Trump, post-Covid, post-Russia-Ukraine-war world. I don’t know what the trigger was, but there must have been a point where things just went to shit. And here we are: an increasingly ultra-capitalistic dystopia where wealth seems to be the only thing that matters.
How could this happen? I've faithfully sorted all of my recyclables into their respective bins to maximize profit for my city's garbage collection just like they asked
And it's FAR from hopeless. Again, global warming is obviously happening. But the amount of adapting and reacting to it is virtually nil. Installing AC. Tree cover in every city. Start serious discussions on what level of risk we want with geoengineering.
Because yes, there absolutely is an acceptable risk level with geoengineering. Planting trees is that. Carbon capture is also that. And better and more effective tech will definitely be available.
But we're in a social climate where I don't even dare write down examples of what those more effective methods would be, because if you're not luddite enough you're the enemy.
The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect.
This only stops it.
Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.
We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition) but people made money doing the opposite. And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US.
So we get to watch the world burn down around us.
"Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.
People who refused to acknowledge the reality of human society, refused to acknowledge that the profit system exists whether they want it to or not, are responsible for focusing action on ineffective means of change.
The developed countries have so much land, water, resources that they will adapt although inequality within will be an issue and tbh at this point there is never any thought given to the wider world, which if one things about honestly never was.
A lot of people from bangladesh and india are working in Russia. China and Russia are also investing, and building factories there.
Thank you for writing that, because I think it is the key point. It's very easy to blame "decrepit old men" because that makes it someone else's fault - and I get it, as I think that there are a bunch of decrepit old men that deserve a lot of blame.
But democratic societies (and even authoritarian ones that are still somewhat subject to mass unrest) were never going to accept large negative impacts for a consequence that was not immediate and in your face. Like you put it, just go around and ask your average Joe or Jane if they would vote for any candidate who demanded strict vegan diets (or heck, even a lot of the other things on GP's list). You're fooling yourself if you think it's only decrepit old men who don't want that stuff.
And regarding GP's comment that "And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US." Yes, there are some people trying to sabotage this to make money for themselves, but it will not take them too long to fail miserably precisely because the economics are not in their favor. Just look at Texas - not exactly a place known for its love of vegan diets, among other things - and solar, wind and now batteries are now a huge portion of the energy mix and growing fast precisely because it's economical.
I live in a very leftist place, and there were always those at climate events demanding "strict vegan diets" however I didn't see these people out in the general world outside of my little leftist bubble, trying to actually get their idea out there.
I agree with Michael Mann that what most of the public only encounters this idea of "strict vegan diets is a required climate solutions" by hearing it from climate denialists poisoning the well of climate action. But I also see this idea online, and in meat space in very isolated areas.
So the idea of "strict vegan diets" is a real idea on the fringe, but its overall effect on climate action has been to turn people against climate action in the US.
an odd place to be a hotbed of vegan advocacy.
This personal belief is grounded on an assumption that all mankind follows a neoliberal or even libertarian economic model.
Back to reality, west Europe is firmly a social democracy where states impose behavior through law, regulation, and policy, which is topped by a federal system that coordinates policies. Countries such as China are totalitarian with a centrally managed economy that's guided by N-year strategic plans.
Misconstruing this as normative, and attributing it to a political belief, is your cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile where actual climate action is coming from.
We must understand the world as it is, if we are to effectively change it to a better state.
This personal belief is usually coupled to people who have become wealthy following this belief. So it tracks that they would declare any solution that doesn't allow them to continue their plundering impossible.
Technology is the only option in constant system, but with nothing happening, the system won't remain constant for long, and sacrifices will have to be made, not by choice.
No. I am not.
I'm saying that unless the incentive system is aligned with our goals, then it's not actually climate action.
Technologists succeeded at doing that.
People who decided to use non-policy driven political action failed utterly at this. The degrowthers are particularly bad at this, but then all their thinking was muddled and riddled with errors about the reality of the science.
Technology makes the system non-constant. Technology is one of the biggest sources of social change.
Strict vegan diets would objectively massively help reduce climate change.
Not exactly selling the idea of “strict vegan diet” to a bunch of people with enough cash for meat and incisors in their jaws.
You got any examples of cultures en mass with “strict vegan diets” because lentils taste delicious?
> Religion also plays a role in dietary habits. Nearly all of the Muslim (99%), Christian (99%) and Buddhists/neo-Buddhist (97%) populations eat meat. Among Hindus, a little over three-quarters consume meat, while Jains and Sikhs have the highest share of vegetarians. Only one-quarter of Jains and half of Sikhs have ever eaten meat.
https://www.dataforindia.com/meat-consumption/
That is such a misleading comment. ~80% of people in India consume meat. That "or" is doing some incredibly amounts of borderline lying.
https://www.dataforindia.com/meat-consumption/
Chicken/Fish produce an order of magnitude or in some cases two orders of magnitude less pollution than cows do.
Trying to gaslight me on this topic even though I'm right on the part that matters. the "or" stands in for the context of the fact that Chicken/fish are an order of magnitude healthier for the planet, and frankly, for individuals.
Cows are not for eating, they are holy animals in India, more like pets. I hope you are not advocating eating dogs in west!
Your claim was that 3rd world countries like India "are already eating de-facto vegetarian or vegan diets" which is incorrect. Moving goalposts
> Chicken/Fish produce an order of magnitude or in some cases two orders of magnitude less pollution than cows do.
Cool, irrelevant because the vast majority in India are neither vegetarian or vegan.
> Trying to gaslight me on this topic even though I'm right on the part that matters
This is called "being incorrect but trying to move goalposts"
Mass transit and dense development are potentially doable, but at this point the suburban sprawl + car model has been popular in the US for decades and it would feel like a downgrade for many people to live in smaller places in more heavily urbanized environments. I think that many Americans don't even have a clear idea of what it would look like to raise kids in a multi-story residential building in a city without it seeming like poverty.
Also, in some parts of the US, mass transit and dense urban living run into the problem of anti-social behavior including street violence. Many of the people in the US who care the most about stopping climate change also oppose the kind of intensive policing that would be required to keep crazy dangerous people off buses and clean up troubled neighborhoods enough that the average person would feel safe living there. Violent crime rates have largely been going down since the early 90s, but are still much higher than in Europe. One of the reasons for the high rates, through definitely not the only reason, is the availability of guns, but getting US right-wingers to accept gun restrictions is probably even less probable than getting US left-wingers to accept major crackdowns on street crime.
This right here, the absolutely preposterous idea that giving up kids is somehow climate action, is exactly the nonsense that a climate activist should never tolerate.
You think climate action is everybody stopping having children?! You think extinction of the human race is the only option?!
"Of course not!" You say, so clearly we must have some children. But how many? If we drastically reduce our population, we will continue with the same broken systems, same energy systems, etc.
Only by keeping society running do we have the energy to switch our society's engine to zero carbon energy sources.
It's insulting to tell people not to have children, it's not realistic, but worst of all, it's not a climate solution to not have children.
"Don't have kids" is just Malthusian nonsense from a prior environmental era, uncritical thinking, pure slop.
And it greatly harms actual climate action when this extremely stupid idea gets associated with the climate movement. Stop. Just stop.
Thus, technology-will-save-us is the rational choice. Drill all the oil, build the biggest datacenters and speedrun to fusion before the collapse so we can sequester the carbon back into the ground and still have energy left to run Haber-Bosch, ideally with hydrolysis instead of natgas.
Disclaimer: I used to be heavily in the sustainability camp in my younger years
You say it's for the benefit of "decrepit old men," but the fact is that more and more of the globe is being lifted out of poverty and living more comfortably than ever before. The unfortunate fact is that global warming is an unstoppable force now, humans would have to go extinct for it to waiver.
I'm not saying we should do nothing, but I am saying that your framing is exactly why no one listens to global warming advocacy. We are powerless against it, not because of governments, but because people are living better and no one is going to sacrifice that; and even if they did the math doesn't add up to reverse course. The people that say we should all be sacrificing are often the richest among us that don't even know what sacrifice entails, contrary to your point.
I hope you are wrong that nothing requiring sacrifice can ever be accomplished.
This is ignoring that _not_ solving global warming will make everyone's life worse regardless.
If you’re eating vegan cheeses and whatnot you’re probably not doing so hot. Or impossible burgers. Or any other manner of “invented” food that is not essentially basic agrarian or hunter-gatherer.
Conversely, wildlife play important ecological purposes and can be hunted sustainably.
Wild life can also be useful in processing things we cannot eat and grows in abundance (grass) into things we can eat (cows).
Everything in moderation…
The economies of scale work differently for billions of mouths vs one mouth.
Wildlife hunting has zero emmisions! Even lower emmisions than agricultural products! If you are serious about lowering emmisions, lets push that!!!
And individual action has switched to just holding governments and industry responsible. Which basically amounts to giving up.
"Welp, just gonna buy this truck, enjoy my burgers, set the AC at 68 and fly on all vacations this year because it's nothing compared to Big Oil."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/27/meat-gas...
Your mileage, ironic phrase noted, may vary.
Though, as always, we can and really should do both.
Big oil isn't going to kick down your door when you buy an EV and switch to solar. There is no rancher in the grocery aisle slipping steaks in your cart.
Yes, consumers have to stop funding these companies and behaviors. Also, the governments that operate on behalf of those consumers have to drop their corruption and start protecting those people they represent. Both virtuous and nonvirtuous conservatives know neither of these are going to happen, which is why they see massive terraforming technology as the only way out - if someone with power can't get rich(er) fixing it then it won't get fixed.
You also have the oil on your hands, and its not washing off easily.
We can quibble about edge effects like "induced demand", but by and large, people just love cheap energy, cheap calories, and can shift the moral burden by playing "not my responsibility" games.
Don’t take this as an argument against these technologies. It’s a huge win to not be increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
The 2020s climate action movement in the US (and the UK) was disastrous in their strategy, action, and outcomes. I was there, I followed along because it seemed like the best way to get climate action, but things like Sunrise and XR at their very best did nothing. They focused on all the wrong people, focused on all the wrong levers. They turned allies into enemies, by "protesting" tech companies that were at the forefront of real action. They refused to acknowledge the massive effects of technology change, and the need for quick adoption, and the huge money saving nature of the solution.
I have zero patience for those attitudes now, the difference between a degrowther and a climate change denying politician are minimal in effect, and the effects are all that matter now.
This is precisely the opposite of the disastrous 2020s action, which had no concrete policy demands, which leaned into the culture war. They ceded the ground to the right wing, who does that sort of culture war much better, as they have focused their efforts on it for so long.
With culture war, no policy changes. The fight takes place in vibes.
We need policy, execution in concrete changes of physical things in the real world. That's where Sunrise and XR failed.
Removing CO2 from seawater would be more efficient because some of the work is already done for you, and you'd be de-acidifying the ocean long term.
Land only slightly beats the ocean, like a 53-47 split or something, and trees are only part of the primary production on land: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_production
This is also why you sometimes see startups pumping green goo through plastic pipes for home-scale solar biofuel systems.
We need massive bounty programs that pay out irrespective of nationality for every possible kind of improvement and gain to carbon capture technology if we want to prevent 90% of all land on Earth between 30°N and 30°S from slowly turning into copies of the uninhabitable stretches of the Middle East.
1. Emitting fewer greenhouse gasses. Need to do that more than ever, but we are now in overshoot so…
2. Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started.
3. Shade Earth. Not regions, The whole globe. There are two ways to do that:
a. Stratospheric aerosols b. Planetary sunshades in space, at Sun-Earth L1.
That’s the whole solution space, conceptually. As long as we continue to fail within that space, we will suffer compounding effects of unmitigated climate change.
We won't slow climate change. We can build resilience to the effects, and we have good incentives to do so. But we'll keep burning fossil fuels for a very long time.
The entire Western world (with the exception of France) pretty much stopped building nuclear power plants 40 years ago, because of a single accident that by its most pessimistic estimates killed fewer people in total than coal emissions kill every 3 days. It’s madness.
Oh yeah, would love to see the resilience that would have prevented the Nepalese disaster
It is, and they are. We keep hitting record X Y and Z temperatures, cyclones, etc, and they're on the brig shouting "it ain't global warming you morons"
From a warming perspective, it's utter madness to let this build-out proceed unimpeded. New data centres should be required to be net-zero at power-up. Unfortunately, it's a race and the U.S. side of it has an administration that is actively rolling back policies that fight climate change.
I need to say WTF, the way out is to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. That means stop using fossil fuels. How many times does this need to be said ? Already it probably has been said millions of times.
I just hate this post-Trump, post-Covid, post-Russia-Ukraine-war world. I don’t know what the trigger was, but there must have been a point where things just went to shit. And here we are: an increasingly ultra-capitalistic dystopia where wealth seems to be the only thing that matters.
- Electricity + heat production ~40–42%
- Industry + manufacturing ~20–22%
- Road transport ~12–13%
- Deforestation & land-use change ~10%
- Direct fuel use in buildings ~5–6%
- Aviation ~2–3%
- Shipping ~2–3%
- Rail, pipelines & other transport ~1%
- Flaring / other energy & industrial sources ~2–4%
I'm guessing the private jets is what you're hinting at? Aviation above includes all flights, not just private jets.
The Industrial party of the last 2 centuries is over. We should love the trees, the animals, the land and leave ASAP from the cities.
Unfortunately, the plutocracy has different plans.