Not true. El Nino (increases CO2) and Albedo (long term - it's decreasing) are problematic issues in this area. If it's settled science why bother to even consider other factors? Doubtful if humanity would survive the catastrophe resulting from a global interdiction of the kind you suggest and we're not dense for understanding that. Greening of the planet (plants need carbon to grow) which has contributed $trillions to world productivity would also taper off. Moreover the related sulfate emissions actually mask warming - reductions in these emissions is related to some of the recent temperature increases. So you could likely get a temporary spike in warming. All that said, there are sensible routes to reducing human influence on the planet.
I’m a capitalist, but the only conclusion I can arrive at is that neo liberal capitalism makes it impossible to « do the right thing ». What we have is the logical result of the incentives at play
You're not going to do anything at all without money as a fungible exchange mechanism (a sometime measure of 'value'). Capitalists see value in things and try to generate that value. Yes, politicians and the rest of us have the job of regulating that process and sometime fail to do a good job. Do you know the right thing to do? I doubt it. You seriously do not see this as an immensely complicated issue? Finally please give chapter and verse for the 'dying'. Maybe compare the world of 2026 with that of 1900 and the quality of life for people in general and our concern for the life on this planet. Concern isn't action but it's a necessary prerequisite for it.
It would've helped a ton but it's not like electricity generation is the only source of emissions. You can't run a car or a plane on nuclear power. You can technically run a cargo ship on nuclear power but that's also not gonna happen. Yet transport is the second largest source of emissions.
Batteries have only recently-ish gotten energy dense and cheap enough for electric cars to be competitive, completely different solutions are needed for long distance shipping by sea or air.
It's the same situation across many other sectors like agriculture, construction and waste management. Lots of things causing emissions that's not electricity generation.
As Romanians will tell you in August 2026, you can't run nuclear power stations without a cooling mechanism. In this case, it's Danube which is failing to offer that. Fusion is almost nowhere to be seen.
There's way more to climate change than fossil fuels: consuming less and changing diet.
A single cow alone requires lots of crop, water, and produces tons of methane (which is 200 times more dangerous than carbon dioxide).
Fishing is another earth destroying endeavor. A single boat, a single one, practicing bottom trawling is more dangerous to the environment than the emissions of tens of thousands of gasses.
Seriously, stop believing the fossil fuels gaslighting. They are indeed a problem, but the cause for climate change is all of our toxic habits and our incapacity to say "enough", take the bus or eath healthier (for us and the planet).
China is the only country that is seriously doing anything about anything. They've single handedly built more renewable energy capacity than every other country combined, they've pulled millions of diesel and gasoline cars off roads, reforested one of the world's biggest deserts, this year they've finally reduced coal usage, and next year the long awaited Tokamak is set to fire for the first time.
The US is busy sending warships across the planet to blow up oil refineries which will be rebuilt. It's not bad enough we are busy grinding sand, but we are actively making things worse.
Temporarily, all of the middle east oil infrastructure will be rebuilt because their biggest customer still has no real tangible plan to wean itself off.
You can't really have this both ways. Closing Hormuz and blowing up Iranian export facilities has been massively decarbonizing. Chinese solar exports are massively up because countries have had to find new energy sources.
There is currently a multi-billion, if not trillion, dollar industry (advertising and marketing) that is convincing everyone to behave the opposite way, i.e. maximize consumption with no regard to negative externalities. If we simply curb them, or better yet, use those same mechanisms to propagate a more rational message, yes, that that's all we need to do.
Granted fossil fuels are much more ubiquitous than CFCs and comparatively more difficult to replace, but we have prior art for changing industrial practices in the interest of improving climate conditions.
We couldn't have stopped using fossil fuels heavily until nuclear power was widespread and implemented, around the late 70s or 80s.
We could have traditioned our grids off of fossil fuels but we also depend on them for fertilizer to feed the world and for transportation which, until very recently, didn't have a viable alternative.
Nuclear was also kneecapped by FUD and astroturfing, and we didn't properly fund renewables because Republican administrations were in the pockets of big oil. Did you know GM made a fully viable electric car that people loved back in the 90s? Setback after setback, all self-inflicted, people pretending we have these insurmountable hurdles all over the place. Pathetic for an empire that prides itself as a champion of industry.
The fertilizer thing is a perfect example. We don't need to extract, refine, and burn nearly as much fuel as we do to get the fertilizer we need. People make the same empty argument about the cheap plastic shit that dominates the economy as if the world didn't exist before cheap plastic shit and couldn't exist after.
> and we didn't properly fund renewables because Republican administrations were in the pockets of big oil.
The world is a lot bigger than the US and they've all followed pretty much the same trajectory the last two decades. A slow long term investment in R&D/manufacturing techniques, followed by increased adoption when it became economically competitive. Combined with varying levels of government incentives and measured regulation, to ease transitions so it doesn't destroy the economy which we still depend on for everything else.
These major shifts always happen slowly then start exponentially growing once it's demonstrated to be practical.
I agree the US isn't the only country but I believe at that time we had the resources and clout to make green energy research happen everywhere and export our successes. We were still a global leader at the time both politically and technologically, especially where energy was concerned. And the world certainly took notice and set back the movement when the largest polluter per capita repeatedly signalled it had no interest in joining the rest of the world in a green future.
Definitely true. But you see the blame placed on the public fearing nuclear from these events. There was some fear, but also astroturfing to make sure nuclear stayed dead.
> a bunch of people spreading lies about it for 100 years or so.
To be fair to past humans the deliberate lies and misinformation didn't really start until the 1970s, the oil crisis of that decade, the coming together of the UN to recognise the issue following the geophysics papers of the 1960s that nailed the CO2 problem against oil consumption, etc.
That's the period in which Koch money started flowing to think tanks and agencies that spun hard against smaller cars, public transport, integrated rail in cities, etc. The push for bigger cars as freedom.
Arrhenius' 1896 Model of the Greenhouse Effect didn't exactly have enough bite to kick of anti-prop in 1926, the world had other pressing issues.
Also worth noting that Three Mile Island was an earlier stain on public perception that kicked in a power station slow down well before Chernobyl.
You right. 50 years or so. I was trying going back far enough to include the discovery of man-made climate change and not necessarily starting right at the plugging our ears portion of the timeline.
Regarding the nuclear FUD, I'm not backing down. We'll never know how much the fear of nuclear was grassroots and how much was turf, but we can know for sure that someone didn't want Americans to have energy independence.
Fear of nuclear weapons was backed in as part of the Cold War Mutually Assured Destruction stand off doctrine - rather hard to achieve when pushing the Atoms For Peace warm fuzzy alternative.
Didn't help that nukes didn't make good civil engineering tools or help conquer space by farting out tiny bombs.
Even Carl Sagan was pushing the nuclear should not be used primal back brain reaction by over hyping (?) nuclear winter for a disarmament argument.
From a western european perspective, I can think of only one country where misinformation appears to have been a relevant factor for climate policy. Sure, until the early 2000s or so, it was all a bit nonspecific and seemed expensive, but latest by the 2013 paris agreement with falling renewable prices everyone knew what the solutions were going to have to look like for at least electricity, heating, and intracontinental mobility. Surely there'll be other examples too, but the USA is also the only country that both sits among the top emitters and easily had the resources to address their share. I have a hard time believing that "nobody really knew for sure" is what'll go down in history books as the underlying cause for most countries' inaction
To be totally clear, I'm not trying to absolve Americans of our responsibility. Americans are remarkably stupid and basically feral (I'm obviously exaggerating but that's how it feels living here). I have had shocking conversations about climate change and domestic energy policy. About half the country, especially older people, were very eager to hear comforting lies about how the lives to which we've grown accustomed need not be adjusted in any way. Despite it now being quite undeniably knocking on our front door, a solid portion of older Americans still don't think climate change is man made and still resist any hint of a green transition. It's fucking crazy town over here.
But if trusted leadership told everyone that we were roasting the planet instead of telling them we weren't and that roasting the planet is un-American, you can bet your sweet ass we'd have some green and nuclear energy going by now.
>I can think of only one country where misinformation appears to have been a relevant factor for climate policy.
I can think of a lot of countries where it wasn't a factor, maybe because if you are a rational economic actor trying to decide to throw money and messing with what people believe you can concentrate on just the biggest country that everybody does what it says. I mean what would be the point in convincing a large part of the Danish population that climate change wasn't real? It seems like it would be inefficient.
on edit: rational in this context is just using money in a way that maximizes the result one gets while minimizing the expenditure, in case anyone was getting ready with a clever rebuttal.
Most people agree on basic values. It's really not that big a stretch to appeal to such common values, seeing as rapid global warming would cause mass relocation, suffering, adaptation costs for those who can stay put, etc.
Considering how current world powers are heavily increasing military spending as well as the heavy rightward shift in many governments, I'm no longer convinced we'll do the right thing. It feels more and more like poor countries will be left to fend for themselves, so the "developed world" can plunder the remains to prop ourselves up just a bit longer.
Bit of an easy claim without concrete examples as I gave. Would hold more water if you'd tell us which local or global culture does not have basic decency towards each other as a value / wants to cause any of the things I mentioned such as forced relocation
> if you'd tell us which local or global culture does not have basic decency towards each other as a value
Look around the thread at how people are treating each other, and then keep in mind that HN is probably like 99th percentile for civility on the Internet in this regard.
Look at what happens in threads about any other politically charged issue, for that matter. Heck, look how far the discussion will veer into politically charged off-topic matters, whenever the OP is about some meta-level "how to be convincing" "how to argue fairly" etc. point.
Not really the topic here but I actually think most people agree on most things; everyone wants to do right by them and theirs. We just focus on the areas where we differ in opinion on how to get there and have things to discuss
Not true. El Nino (increases CO2) and Albedo (long term - it's decreasing) are problematic issues in this area. If it's settled science why bother to even consider other factors? Doubtful if humanity would survive the catastrophe resulting from a global interdiction of the kind you suggest and we're not dense for understanding that. Greening of the planet (plants need carbon to grow) which has contributed $trillions to world productivity would also taper off. Moreover the related sulfate emissions actually mask warming - reductions in these emissions is related to some of the recent temperature increases. So you could likely get a temporary spike in warming. All that said, there are sensible routes to reducing human influence on the planet.
I’m a capitalist, but the only conclusion I can arrive at is that neo liberal capitalism makes it impossible to « do the right thing ». What we have is the logical result of the incentives at play
I have come to the same conclusion, but let me ask you, how can you still be a capitalist having had that insight?
Why would you support a system that you recognize makes it impossible to do the right thing even as we're dying from its consequences?
You're not going to do anything at all without money as a fungible exchange mechanism (a sometime measure of 'value'). Capitalists see value in things and try to generate that value. Yes, politicians and the rest of us have the job of regulating that process and sometime fail to do a good job. Do you know the right thing to do? I doubt it. You seriously do not see this as an immensely complicated issue? Finally please give chapter and verse for the 'dying'. Maybe compare the world of 2026 with that of 1900 and the quality of life for people in general and our concern for the life on this planet. Concern isn't action but it's a necessary prerequisite for it.
[dead]
Would have been doable if we could have switched to nuclear, but no.
It would've helped a ton but it's not like electricity generation is the only source of emissions. You can't run a car or a plane on nuclear power. You can technically run a cargo ship on nuclear power but that's also not gonna happen. Yet transport is the second largest source of emissions.
Batteries have only recently-ish gotten energy dense and cheap enough for electric cars to be competitive, completely different solutions are needed for long distance shipping by sea or air.
It's the same situation across many other sectors like agriculture, construction and waste management. Lots of things causing emissions that's not electricity generation.
As Romanians will tell you in August 2026, you can't run nuclear power stations without a cooling mechanism. In this case, it's Danube which is failing to offer that. Fusion is almost nowhere to be seen.
There's way more to climate change than fossil fuels: consuming less and changing diet.
A single cow alone requires lots of crop, water, and produces tons of methane (which is 200 times more dangerous than carbon dioxide).
Fishing is another earth destroying endeavor. A single boat, a single one, practicing bottom trawling is more dangerous to the environment than the emissions of tens of thousands of gasses.
Seriously, stop believing the fossil fuels gaslighting. They are indeed a problem, but the cause for climate change is all of our toxic habits and our incapacity to say "enough", take the bus or eath healthier (for us and the planet).
If only China and US could get their shit together....
China is the only country that is seriously doing anything about anything. They've single handedly built more renewable energy capacity than every other country combined, they've pulled millions of diesel and gasoline cars off roads, reforested one of the world's biggest deserts, this year they've finally reduced coal usage, and next year the long awaited Tokamak is set to fire for the first time.
The US is busy sending warships across the planet to blow up oil refineries which will be rebuilt. It's not bad enough we are busy grinding sand, but we are actively making things worse.
And with that they built the manufacturing engine that is supplying the rest of the world with renewable tech
To be fair, closing the straight of hormuz has probably put a dent in carbon emissions.
Temporarily, all of the middle east oil infrastructure will be rebuilt because their biggest customer still has no real tangible plan to wean itself off.
Is US the biggest customer?
You can't really have this both ways. Closing Hormuz and blowing up Iranian export facilities has been massively decarbonizing. Chinese solar exports are massively up because countries have had to find new energy sources.
Oil is a small proportion of carbon emissions. Coal is where it's at, and Iran has very little to do with that.
Chinese solar was a big deal globally long before Trump's Iran blunder
https://apnews.com/article/wind-solar-energy-china-climate-c...
Republicans are the bad guys right now.
Per capita CO2 emissions in the US are down about 36% from their 1973 peak (https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions).
Ah yes it could have been so easy: All we needed to do was convince everyone in the world to behave a certain way.
There is currently a multi-billion, if not trillion, dollar industry (advertising and marketing) that is convincing everyone to behave the opposite way, i.e. maximize consumption with no regard to negative externalities. If we simply curb them, or better yet, use those same mechanisms to propagate a more rational message, yes, that that's all we need to do.
Exactly, kinda like what we did with CFCs!
Granted fossil fuels are much more ubiquitous than CFCs and comparatively more difficult to replace, but we have prior art for changing industrial practices in the interest of improving climate conditions.
It really was very achievable, the main reason we didn't was we had a bunch of people spreading lies about it for 100 years or so.
We couldn't have stopped using fossil fuels heavily until nuclear power was widespread and implemented, around the late 70s or 80s.
We could have traditioned our grids off of fossil fuels but we also depend on them for fertilizer to feed the world and for transportation which, until very recently, didn't have a viable alternative.
Nuclear was also kneecapped by FUD and astroturfing, and we didn't properly fund renewables because Republican administrations were in the pockets of big oil. Did you know GM made a fully viable electric car that people loved back in the 90s? Setback after setback, all self-inflicted, people pretending we have these insurmountable hurdles all over the place. Pathetic for an empire that prides itself as a champion of industry.
The fertilizer thing is a perfect example. We don't need to extract, refine, and burn nearly as much fuel as we do to get the fertilizer we need. People make the same empty argument about the cheap plastic shit that dominates the economy as if the world didn't exist before cheap plastic shit and couldn't exist after.
> and we didn't properly fund renewables because Republican administrations were in the pockets of big oil.
The world is a lot bigger than the US and they've all followed pretty much the same trajectory the last two decades. A slow long term investment in R&D/manufacturing techniques, followed by increased adoption when it became economically competitive. Combined with varying levels of government incentives and measured regulation, to ease transitions so it doesn't destroy the economy which we still depend on for everything else.
These major shifts always happen slowly then start exponentially growing once it's demonstrated to be practical.
I agree the US isn't the only country but I believe at that time we had the resources and clout to make green energy research happen everywhere and export our successes. We were still a global leader at the time both politically and technologically, especially where energy was concerned. And the world certainly took notice and set back the movement when the largest polluter per capita repeatedly signalled it had no interest in joining the rest of the world in a green future.
To be fair, Chernobyl didn't exactly help the cause.
Definitely true. But you see the blame placed on the public fearing nuclear from these events. There was some fear, but also astroturfing to make sure nuclear stayed dead.
> a bunch of people spreading lies about it for 100 years or so.
To be fair to past humans the deliberate lies and misinformation didn't really start until the 1970s, the oil crisis of that decade, the coming together of the UN to recognise the issue following the geophysics papers of the 1960s that nailed the CO2 problem against oil consumption, etc.
That's the period in which Koch money started flowing to think tanks and agencies that spun hard against smaller cars, public transport, integrated rail in cities, etc. The push for bigger cars as freedom.
Arrhenius' 1896 Model of the Greenhouse Effect didn't exactly have enough bite to kick of anti-prop in 1926, the world had other pressing issues.
Also worth noting that Three Mile Island was an earlier stain on public perception that kicked in a power station slow down well before Chernobyl.
You right. 50 years or so. I was trying going back far enough to include the discovery of man-made climate change and not necessarily starting right at the plugging our ears portion of the timeline.
Regarding the nuclear FUD, I'm not backing down. We'll never know how much the fear of nuclear was grassroots and how much was turf, but we can know for sure that someone didn't want Americans to have energy independence.
Fear of nuclear weapons was backed in as part of the Cold War Mutually Assured Destruction stand off doctrine - rather hard to achieve when pushing the Atoms For Peace warm fuzzy alternative.
Didn't help that nukes didn't make good civil engineering tools or help conquer space by farting out tiny bombs.
Even Carl Sagan was pushing the nuclear should not be used primal back brain reaction by over hyping (?) nuclear winter for a disarmament argument.
> Did you know GM made a fully viable electric car that people loved back in the 90s?
105m range on nimh which rapidly degrades isn't a fully viable car and a maximum of 1000 people "loved" it considering that's all they made.
GM is in business to make money. They didn't cancel a car that was a viable product.
From a western european perspective, I can think of only one country where misinformation appears to have been a relevant factor for climate policy. Sure, until the early 2000s or so, it was all a bit nonspecific and seemed expensive, but latest by the 2013 paris agreement with falling renewable prices everyone knew what the solutions were going to have to look like for at least electricity, heating, and intracontinental mobility. Surely there'll be other examples too, but the USA is also the only country that both sits among the top emitters and easily had the resources to address their share. I have a hard time believing that "nobody really knew for sure" is what'll go down in history books as the underlying cause for most countries' inaction
To be totally clear, I'm not trying to absolve Americans of our responsibility. Americans are remarkably stupid and basically feral (I'm obviously exaggerating but that's how it feels living here). I have had shocking conversations about climate change and domestic energy policy. About half the country, especially older people, were very eager to hear comforting lies about how the lives to which we've grown accustomed need not be adjusted in any way. Despite it now being quite undeniably knocking on our front door, a solid portion of older Americans still don't think climate change is man made and still resist any hint of a green transition. It's fucking crazy town over here.
But if trusted leadership told everyone that we were roasting the planet instead of telling them we weren't and that roasting the planet is un-American, you can bet your sweet ass we'd have some green and nuclear energy going by now.
>I can think of only one country where misinformation appears to have been a relevant factor for climate policy.
I can think of a lot of countries where it wasn't a factor, maybe because if you are a rational economic actor trying to decide to throw money and messing with what people believe you can concentrate on just the biggest country that everybody does what it says. I mean what would be the point in convincing a large part of the Danish population that climate change wasn't real? It seems like it would be inefficient.
on edit: rational in this context is just using money in a way that maximizes the result one gets while minimizing the expenditure, in case anyone was getting ready with a clever rebuttal.
Most people agree on basic values. It's really not that big a stretch to appeal to such common values, seeing as rapid global warming would cause mass relocation, suffering, adaptation costs for those who can stay put, etc.
Considering how current world powers are heavily increasing military spending as well as the heavy rightward shift in many governments, I'm no longer convinced we'll do the right thing. It feels more and more like poor countries will be left to fend for themselves, so the "developed world" can plunder the remains to prop ourselves up just a bit longer.
> Most people agree on basic values
This isn't even true at a local level, let alone at the global scale.
Bit of an easy claim without concrete examples as I gave. Would hold more water if you'd tell us which local or global culture does not have basic decency towards each other as a value / wants to cause any of the things I mentioned such as forced relocation
> if you'd tell us which local or global culture does not have basic decency towards each other as a value
Look around the thread at how people are treating each other, and then keep in mind that HN is probably like 99th percentile for civility on the Internet in this regard.
Look at what happens in threads about any other politically charged issue, for that matter. Heck, look how far the discussion will veer into politically charged off-topic matters, whenever the OP is about some meta-level "how to be convincing" "how to argue fairly" etc. point.
Yeah they do, on the really basic stuff, on a global level.
Not really the topic here but I actually think most people agree on most things; everyone wants to do right by them and theirs. We just focus on the areas where we differ in opinion on how to get there and have things to discuss
individual people don't matter, they're peanuts. otoh the single biggest consumer of fossil fuels is the US DOD. and why is that, really?
Is this actually true? That sounds suspicious. I’d love to see that data.