Clean tech will save the day (low carbon generation, batteries, electrification trajectories and rate of change, broadly speaking), but the global fossil industry will need to be dismantled faster than some will like. It is a matter of survival, not politics or economics. My hunch is there are not many globally who want to suffocate while trying to exist for shareholder value.
I think you’re grossly underestimating how much the average American can deny with the assistance of social media.
The number of people I personally know who thought the country was going to end on J6 who now call the entire thing a “political hoax” breaks my brain.
Not to mention the endless posts about “where are all the people claiming COVID was so deadly now?” Who literally completely ignore the MILLIONS of deaths caused by COVID…
Until these people have their own son or daughter killed by X - they’ll happily claim it’s not actually a problem. Or find something completely unrelated to blame instead if it doesn’t align with their Twitter feed.
> My hunch is there are not many who want to suffocate while trying to exist for shareholder value.
Have you... read the news lately? You say it's not a matter of politics, but the politicians are absolutely trying to roll back the clock, push dirty tech, eliminate all environmental protections and regulations.
You do us all a disservice by saying “the politicians”. The REPUBLICANS are attempting to ignore reality and burn more fossil fuels. Nobody else in America. Name the problem, otherwise you’re implying it’s a bipartisan effort.
To be fair, looking from the outside, democrats don't seem to be very eager to do anything about it either, most politicians in the US seems to be playing for the same team; the rich and wealthy.
Huh??? Did you just miss Biden's entire term? Democrats literally passed a massive bill that included $783 billion in funds for renewable energy to fight greenhouse gas emissions. Exactly what else do you want them to do?
You have to be born yesterday to believe that Democratic leaders haven't merely hand-waved and virtue-signaled about global warming for decades. I realized this back in the 1990s.
Democrats have superior rhetoric, and they are less openly hostile, but their long record of doing nothing to help is unsurpassed. They will fiddle while Republicans burn Rome. And don't forget that Joe Manchin for example was a Democrat, one who dominated Democratic policy during the Biden administration.
We need to push for clean tech obviously. I disagree with Republicans blocking wind farm construction and rolling back regulations, but American energy independence is important for national security, which is a shorter term issue than climate change. And developing more domestic clean energy helps with that as well.
Exactly. As a Democrat my eyes were opened when I saw the senior leadership do absolutely nothing to impede Trump other than form a strongly worded tweet.
You do the people causing this problem a great service with false equivocations like this. It is clear one group would prefer us to ignore the problem and do nothing at all - in fact encourage the problematic behavior - and the other would very much like to take action on the issue if they had the political power.
> the other would very much like to take action on the issue if they had the political power.
They had political power! During the Biden administration, during the Obama administration, during the Clinton administration.
Al Gore is a famous environmentalist... for making a movie after he was out of power. What the hell did he do for the environment when he was literally in the Oval Office, at the side of the President?
The Biden admin did try to make large-scale investments in renewables and policy changes to encourage the energy transition in the US. The situation at the end of the admin was far better than when it started.
Why are you using a tone that implies that's not the case?
>During the Biden administration, during the Obama administration, during the Clinton administration
The president doesn't actually control much in the USA, despite the nonsensical shit republican congresses let them get away with. Obama, Biden, and Clinton could not do anything that wasn't approved by congress.
Democrats have not really held enough power to do anything at all in like 40 years. A 1 or 2 vote "majority" in a chamber is not really meant to allow you to do anything.
Hell, that very first graph makes it pretty clear why shit is so bad in the US, we used to actually fire congress and replace them with different people.
> A 1 or 2 vote "majority" in a chamber is not really meant to allow you to do anything.
1) Democrats had a filibuster-proof super-majority during Obama's first term.
2) The filibuster is not in the Constitution. It can be abolished at any time by a simple majority vote.
The Democrats don't do anything because they don't want to do anything. There's always a convenient excuse. You can blame Manchin or Sinema or whomever, but they're Democrats too.
There really wasn't. The person you replied to covered as much. They had the opportunity for a few big bills, which they did - much of it ultimately stemming from concerns around climate change.
You’re talking badly about the people who actually crafted real industrial policy for clean energy. It was dismantled by Trump and Republicans - even when the output was going to be a factory making batteries on US soil, wind and solar farms, etc.
Like the Republicans are absolutely embarrassing on this issue, the idea that they’re “two wings of the same bird” is nuts.
I'm old enough to remember the Obama Admin's support for the nascent battery and PV industries.
Ditto Biden Admin's support for our transition to renewables (IIJA, IRA). Unprecedented. The type of Keynesian investment in the USA (industrial policy, pro-labor) unseen since FDR's New Deal.
> don't forget that Joe Manchin
No one on the left ever will.
That said, it's important to note that the Democratic (center-left) coalition is wicked hard to hold together.
Have you read Caro's (epic) biographies of LBJ? It's amazing how much skill, subterfuge, and manipulation was required to pass progressive legislation over the objections of the die-hard reactionaries.
Everything about politics sucks. Chaos, apathy, nihilism, grifting are the default. It's absolutely amazing that anything gets done at all. So we should celebrate, and learn from, the occasional success.
> So we should celebrate, and learn from, the occasional success.
What success? It's too late. The time for decisive action was decades ago. The worst case scenario is occurring now. Humanity totally failed to avert a disaster. We've already blown past the global temperature thresholds that scientists warned about. Now we're going to have to deal with the consequences. There's no going back in time to prevent it. This was never a problem that we could wait on for "the occasional success."
Methinks our current path has been determined since ~1980, with ~2000 probably being the last chance we had to stay under 1.5C.
So, well, whaddya gonna do?
The trick is deluding oneself that we can somehow muddle thru this. (Humanity has in fact survived worse.) Otherwise I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Is that reasonable? If not, then I might as well soldier on.
> Methinks our current path has been determined since ~1980, with ~2000 probably being the last chance we had to stay under 1.5C.
That's why I said "I realized this back in the 1990s" and was later complaining about Al Gore.
> Otherwise I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Is that reasonable?
This is not like nuclear war—which could still happen, because we still have the weapons, and the madmen to use them—where we're all going to die tomorrow. We're already seeing the effects—as the submitted article shows—but the worst is yet to come. We're cursing our descendants with a world much more hostile than the one we were born into, for no other reason than greed and selfishness. It's the ultimate betrayal of the future. (By the way, I'm a human and deliberately chose to use em dashes, because I felt like it.)
The best thing to happen for global warming in recent years was not the Biden administration but actually the pandemic, because it significantly cut industrial output for an extended time.
I concur. On (most) all points you've made in this thread.
Two things.
#1
What if you're wrong? What if one day you wake up and the world (as we know it) hasn't ended?
I totally understand nihilism, despair, despondency, hopelessness, etc. Under Reagan and living near Boeing, I was convinced we'd get nuked. I embraced the punk/goth lifestyle. Then I was diagnosed at 19yo with a terminal disease (aplastic anemia).
Then the weirdest thing happened.
We didn't get nuked. And I somehow beat the odds, surviving an experimental treatment (and its aftermath).
"Well shit" I said to myself. "Now what?"
And make no mistake; It was monumentally hard to pivot. To plan further ahead then "what's for breakfast?"
Fortunately, I had role models and mentors. Like the two science and policy people I worked (volunteered) for at Audubon. They knew the score. And yet they continued to fight. Marveling, I asked how they did it. Saving the salmon (in this case) was their day job. Living their lives, as best as they could, during their own time. It wasn't denial or compartmentalizing. It was choosing to embrace life, to give them the energy and purpose to continue the fight.
#2
What else are you gonna do?
During the 2000s, I was so filled with anger and disgust. I somehow fell into direct activism (leading vs just volunteering). I met so many other angry people. Most of them stuck in a doom loop. (Therefore useless, detrimental even, to activism.)
Learning activism as I went, I eventually decided a key factor to change was somehow transmuting that outrage into action. So we leaders stopped just opposing bad policy and decisions. We advocated for a better way, as best able.
So, ya, the world's going to hell. What are you going to do about it? Check out? (Which, IMHO, is a perfectly rational and valid decision for most people.) Will you fight for what's yours? Defending the future, and our planet, and a more just society.
The hardest part, for me, to becoming an activist was how to get started. There are few resources and even fewer mentors. Most people who try bounce off the wall of policy and politics and gatekeepers. So I know that individuals converting their outrage into action is wicked hard.
My Big Idea, as a recovering activist myself, for maybe mitigating that hurdle was starting an activism book study / support group. The goal was get something rolling, then document it, then spawn off new cells. (Something I learned how to do with design pattern study groups, back in the day.)
Members picked a topic, the smallest possible change, the lowest hanging fruit, they wanted to see happen. So participants could learn and experience the whole process and skill building needed for success. (Something I learned from Luke Hohmann, wrt teams delivering products, back in the day.)
And then we supported each other's efforts. We were off to a good start; 7 members, meeting twice monthly.
Alas, I had some health and family crises, and that study group didn't survive my departure. (Another wicked hard problem.)
In conclusion...
I think I understand where you're at. I feel like I was in a similar place, more than once.
All I want to convey is that you might be able to find a way thru by finding some positives to focus on.
Recovering from radiation, I used kitten and puppy pictures to cheer myself up. To prove I'm also not a bot, here's my corpus: https://imgur.com/user/zappini/favorites
Now I binge on podcasts like David Roberts' Volts. He's a natural born pessimist, like me. Yet he chooses to find and signal boost the people doing the hard work of implementing our glorious all electric future. He's also been (for me) a gateway to finding more sources of joy and optimism.
> What if you're wrong? What if one day you wake up and the world (as we know it) hasn't ended?
It appears that you misunderstood. I said, "This is not [emphasis added] like nuclear war" and "We're cursing our descendants with a world much more hostile than the one we were born into". Much more hostile does not imply the end of the world, and indeed the existence of our descendants implies that everyone is not dead.
> I think I understand where you're at.
I don't think you do, and I wasn't in need of therapy.
> but the politicians are absolutely trying to roll back the clock, push dirty tech, eliminate all environmental protections and regulations
Yes, in one country who seems hellbent on destroying itself.
But looking globally, more and more countries seems to get it at this point, and at least move in the right direction, compared to others. The others will make themselves irrelevant faster than the others can reach a future without fossil fuels.
> Yes, in one country who seems hellbent on destroying itself.
One of the largest countries in the world, measured by size, population, economy, and military. If you hadn't noticed, the US can do a lot of damage to the rest of the world all by itself. And pollution does not respect borders. Global warming does not respect borders.
Right, but again, it'll matter less and less as the US hegemony is dying and other countries will pick up the torch, and the ones who are taking over seem to be a bit more willing to both commit and execute on plans to reduce pollution and global warming in general.
> The US just deposed the leaders of two countries, Venezuela and Iran, but ok.
If that's how you judge what "empires" will be left in a decade, good for you, ignorance is a bliss sometimes I suppose. Don't look at how the average person live and survives, if you want to continue that way...
> If that's how you judge what "empires" will be left in a decade, good for you
I don't make such predictions. I'm not Nostradamus, and neither are you. I don't think anyone can predict what will happen exactly in a decade. After all, who predicted this a decade ago?
> ignorance is a bliss
This insult doesn't even make sense. I'm not experiencing bliss over the situation.
> My hunch is there are not many globally who want to suffocate while trying to exist for shareholder value.
I hate this kind of hyperbole because it obscures the real dangers. No one is going to suffocate any time soon. Atmospheric CO2 is around 450ppm. The CO2 in a meeting room of a typical office can easily reach 1500ppm or more[1]. Is everyone in meeting rooms "suffocating"?
I post to educate and inform, the votes are meaningless to me as an observer and scholar field reporting. Humans are tricky, mental models are rigid and can be tied to identity. Facts, data, and information stand on their own regardless of belief. Reality > incomplete or suboptimal mental models.
It takes ~ten years to build a nuclear generator. In that time, 10TW of solar PV will be deployed at current deployment rates (1TW/year), a bit higher than total global electricity generation capacity currently (~9TW).
Fusion is solved, at a distance, with solar, wind, and batteries. Half an hour of sunlight on Earth can power humanity for a year. Long duration storage remains to be solved for, but look how far we’ve come in 1-2 decades.
(at this time, short duration storage will likely be LFP, sodium, and other stationary friendly chemistries, but this could change as the state of the art advances rapidly and the commodities market fluctuates)
Fusion isn't in our lifetimes. Its been 10 years away since the 50s - only to get more R&D grant funding for budget building.
If it happened it would be a huge game changer for our economies but it is far away from deployment let along lab proven. It still requires more energy to start/maintain the reaction then it can produce - which is fundamental to success.
If you would like to bet how much nuclear will be operating in ten years, place your bet. I’m willing to bet $10k to a charity of the winner’s choice nuclear generation remains about the same total capacity as today while renewables scale to terawatts. Let me know if I should have a Longbet spun up for accountability.
While that is true that there is a lag time to deploy nuclear - that is a vestige of the last 40 years of regulating it out of existence. That has changed - technology has improved and regulatory is under scrutiny. The difference is that once nuclear starts to roll out, as it will in the next 3-5 years, we will be seeing large deployments of clean dedicated load ripple through our electrical system in a product assembly line.
Solar and storage are great assets - and will continue to grow but they have other sets of constraints and deploy at small scale (relatively). The large scale deployments have long time horizons.
In the US, people bend over backwards to ensure that there is free storage for automobiles. And that housing and businesses are forced to include that expensive (parking spots can run into the 10's of thousands of dollars for some kinds of construction) amenity. Fortunately that's starting to change, but it is a big battle. And meanwhile, CO2 levels keep rising.
Furthermore, yes, getting to the point where we're no longer starving and in thatched huts did require fossil fuels, but now we know what they do, and that they're actively having an effect on the environment, and clearly us, are we so stuck in our ways we can't change our actions to secure a life for those that come after?
What difference does it make what they're referencing?
I'm glad we agree that fossil fuels were necessary. It has nothing to do with "shareholder value" -- it has to do with minimizing human suffering.
Also, it's noteworthy that US emissions peaked in 2007. We're down ~20% since then. The world is absolutely addressing climate change, and the worst case scenarios have already been avoided. Faster would be better but we're moving reasonably fast.
The reason other countries are able to move so much faster than the U.S. is because parties that have power in the U.S. push back with economic concerns. The distance between "shareholder value" and "stock market performance" is miniscule.
What is this obsession with "shareholder value"? Moving away from fossil fuels too quickly will hurt normal people. It will increase the cost of everything (energy prices determine the cost of stuff), make it harder to heat/cool people's homes, etc. You'll also see people burning more wood, which is far worse for air quality and may be worse in terms of CO2.
Consumerism is the problem. If fossil fuels were used on necessities sure. Single use plastics, individually packaged consumables, planned obsolescence are examples of things that are not necessary. These examples have all to do with shareholder value.
Consumerism is not the problem. Human beings don't stop wanting to improve their lives once they have the bare necessities and there is nothing wrong with this.
We can have our cake and eat it, we just need to transition to cleaner forms of energy. Which we are doing.
Interesting that this question didn't warrant a response.
Anyway, here's new research demonstrating the near polar opposite of the original claim, in case anyone digging up these old threads was also wondering if slibhb's foundational arguments held up: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389855619_Global_Wa...
Never heard this take before. Care to elaborate? It seems like crop failure and disease are the typical causes of food shortages, if not outright human logistical failures. Sounds like saying pouring gasoline on a tiny fire is the only reason we aren't cold (ignoring that more firewood would be the solution). An unsustainable solution is not in-fact a good solution. So if your assertion is correct, then we should all prepare for our thatched huts in which we will starve.
Not the person you're replying to, but I think I can explain it this way:
The quality of life of a human being is directly related to the amount of free energy (i.e. thermodynamic free energy, not free as in no cost) they have access to. Life must be able to generate more energy than it needs, even tiny bacteria. As humans developed, we found more ways to access and utilize free energy.
There is a phrase: Energy return on investment (or EROI). You can map the development of humanity pretty cleanly to an increasing EROI over the entire course of our history.
Fossil Carbon allowed us to explode our EROI and gave us access to never before seen amounts of free energy. Unless we find ways to maintain that EROI, our quality of life will necessarily diminish.
Obviously we need to cut our use of fossil carbon. And if we don't, we're simply going to run out, and then we'll be stuck anyway. But we also don't have anything with a comparable EROI to replace it with.
This is the root problem we're facing. If we had working fusion, it would be a whole lot easier to decarbonize.
> Green Revolution techniques also heavily rely on agricultural machinery and chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and defoliants; which, as of 2014, are derived from crude oil, making agriculture increasingly reliant on crude oil extraction.
Those are derived from crude oil only because for a long time that has been the cheapest way to make them, not because oil were necessary in any way.
And it was the cheapest way only because most prices are fake, because they do not correspond to the cost of closed cycles of the materials used to make a product.
All those things require mostly energy, air, water and a few abundant minerals and metals to be made. Technologies to make them in this way have already existed for almost a century (e.g. making synthetic hydrocarbons, to replace oil), but they are still very inefficient. However, the inefficiency is mostly due to the fact that negligible amounts of money have been allocated for the development of such technologies (because as long as the use of fossil oil is permitted, there is no way for synthetic hydrocarbons to be cheaper), in comparison with the frivolous amounts of money that are wasted on various fads, like AI datacenters.
I think their point is more along the lines of the energy availability of Fossel Fuels allows for the Mass Farming and Construction that we do, not so much that we can pour it on a fire in place of wood.
You clearly haven't given a lot of thought to questions like "where does all this cheap food/housing/heating come from?"
The fact that fossil fuels -- since their mass adoption in the late 19th century -- are the single largest cause of improved living conditions is standard economic history.
> An unsustainable solution is not in-fact a good solution.
It was a perfectly good solution. It replaced wood fires which are clearly worse. Coal was great until natural gas became available. As solar/wind/nuclear become abundant, they are conintuing to displace fossil fuels.
This all seems very confused. I would say you clearly have not thought this through, but that would be fairly rude given the tiny scope of this comment thread. If your definition of better (or perfectly good) is: makes me more comfortable in the short term then I can understand that perspective.
So your opinion is that humanity should not have burned fossil fuels, we should have kept burning wood, until solar/wind/nuclear were invented? Seems obviously wrong.
Almost anything is better than the destruction of the biomes that support human life. I'm not really sure how there is even a discussion to be had about that. But anyone who claims "coal was great" either doesn't understand or doesn't care.
This was true until the advent of nuclear energy, and became very much less true after the addition of solar PV, industrial-scale wind, and Li-Ion (and now Na-Ion) batteries.
I'd say this statement has been almost entirely false since roughly 2020. The only areas where fossil fuels aren't readily replaceable are long-haul aviation (only a few percent of global emissions) and long-haul shipping (also a few percent). So we can probably cut emissions by 80-90% with no meaningful impact to standard of living.
At this point the pro fossil fuel position is kind of like "you realize camp fires are why we don't get eaten by lions!" Yes, that was true once.
BTW the degrowthers are also wrong. We can cut emissions by 80-90% without degrowth.
Two things can both be true. Fossil fuels greatly improved quality of life for a large number of people in the past few centuries. And their continued use on a massive scale now threatens to hurt a lot of people.
But society needs to progress. We left thatched huts and moved to cities with streets full of human sewage. Humans living together as a society was progress. And then we progressed further and lived together AND removed dumping sewage onto our streets.
I don't think the AI should have the ability to pretend it's something it's not. Claiming it's achieved some level of consciousness is just lying -- maybe that's another thing it should be prevented from doing.
I can't imagine any positive outcome from an interaction where the AI pretends it's not anything but a tool capable of spewing out vetted facts.
Any imitation of humanity should be the line, IMO.
You know how Meta is involved in lawsuits regarding getting children addicted to its platforms while simultaneously asserting that "safety is important"...
It's all about the long game. Do as much harm as you can and set yourself up for control and influence during the periods where the technology is ahead of the regulation.
Our children are screwed now because they have parents that have put them onto social media without their consent from literally the day they were born. They are brought up into social media before they have a chance to decide to take a healthier path.
Apply that to AI, Now they can start talking to chat bots before they really understand that they bots aren't here for them. They aren't human, and they have intentions of their very own, created by their corporate owners and the ex CIA people on the "safety" teams.
You seem to be getting down-voted, but you are right. There's NO USE CASE for an AI not continuously reminding you that they are not human except for the creators wishing for you to be deceived (scammers, for example) or wishing for you to have a "human relationship" with the AI.
I'm sure "engagement" is still a KPI.
The lack of regulation is disturbing on a global scale.
That's fundamentally what LLMs are, an imitation of humanity (specifically, human-written text). So if that's the line, then you're proposing banning modern AI entirely.
I really want all my media players to include this. Cheers doesn't look the same since my 27" CRT died, and watching it through Shader Glass reminds me a lot of the look of that old TV.
We did the same. Switching was a cinch honestly - the only thing that screwed me up was some dumb page that returned a bunch of nonsense I was supposed to do to my docker-compose.yml file to make it more compatible with podman-compose. I spent a couple hours trying to figure out why things weren't working, until I finally rolled back all the stupid suggested changes, and my app fired right up.
The only impactful difference I've noticed so far is that the company is moving to an artifact repository that requires authentication, and mounting secrets using --mount doesn't support the env= parameter -- that's really it.
I treat podman like I did docker all day long and it works great.
You might as well say gfy to anyone using chat bots, search engines and price comparison tools. They're the one's who financially incentivize the scrapers.
Giving someone a "financial incentive" to do something (by gasp using a search engine, or comparing prices) does not make that thing ethical or cool to do in and of itself.
I wonder where you ever got the idea that it does.
Because there's a market to serve, that you refuse to serve, so the stop gap solution is for third parties to acquire the liabilities and risks for compensation.
You're shifting the frame, to one where morality doesn't come into it. You're asserting some kind of market inevitability, which is probably the same sort of rationalization arms and people traffickers use to sleep at night.
A weird aspect of my childhood: I brought a sandwich to lunch every day when I was in school. At first, my mom made it, but very quickly it became my own job, not that it was particularly difficult.
The school had subsidized lunches and milk. I always brought a nickel for milk. The teacher collected everybody's lunch money at the start of the day. That way, it was utterly opaque who was getting it for free. A simple system, appropriate for the times.
But I remember that my lunch was always better than the grim school lunch, and I always wondered: Why can't they ditch the hot lunch, and just give everybody a nice sandwich, and a piece of fruit, which is better?
I'm sure there are good arguments for the hot lunch, but still it's counterintuitive to me. And 55 years later, I still bring a sandwich, or leftovers, for lunch, and skip the hot meal at the company cafeteria.
It was really the first usable smartwatch in my mind.
My absolute favorite thing was that it gave developers the ability to create custom watch faces. I wrote a bunch of them and absolutely loved the dumb thing.
I'm guessing the author didn't play Cyberpunk at launch -- the cars and pedestrians would blink out of existence if you turned around. I couldn't help but think that Rockstar had figured this out 19 years prior in GTA3. :/
Flicking the camera down to despawn cars is a common trick in speedrunning those 3d GTA games. They did it better than cyberpunk, but it was not figured out.
