- The saddest part of global turmoil around AI, Iran war, etc. is how dramatically climate change has disappeared from the 'global conversation'. This is not something we can afford to ignore for much longer.
- Reducing the severity of climate change (we've already signed up for potentially civilization destroying consequences, even if we could go zero emissions today), requires keeping proven reserves in the ground. No amount of "green" energy will impact our future if it doesn't mean we start using less fossil fuels (globally) than today.
Darkly, a disastrous global nuclear war that sends us back in time 500 years would be the most effective and most probable way of achieving this.
- what if we could capture carbon at a significant rate? I know that we can't right now, it's a hypothetical
- yes, I guess with fusion this would be possible?
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- Climate hasn't been a real topic of discussion since the Obama administration.
- And the Obama administration really just talked about it. It was under his administration that the US shale oil extraction really started heating up.
The problem is the only solution to climate change is keeping oil in the ground. There are other things that can be done to make a zero emissions transition less painful, but oil (and all other fossil fuels) need to start staying in the ground.
During the Obama administration is when we started to see a dramatic increase in US oil production [0]. The US hegemony is oil powered and founded on the petro-dollar. There's no way US policy can be aligned with anything remotely resembling a path towards a sustainable energy environment.
0. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...
- No, it just got boring. There have been massive renewable buildouts since then, as a direct consequence of those policies. No matter how much trump hates it, the economic scales have already tipped.
- I disagree, Greta Thunberg's whole thing started in 2018, leading to larger and larger climate protests and action globally...
..until about 2020, with COVID/russia-ukraine/Oct 7/trumps re-election following and burying it below tons of other news cycles.
- Fox News and Trump still routinely say it's a hoax. And their devotees repeat that line in one breath, and in the next breath say, "wow, we just set a new high temp record in January!"
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- Not because of AI or Iran war. It’s because we, in the US, voted for it to disappear.
- The US has been taking steps in the wrong direction wrt climate change and they will undoubtedly be judged to jave been on the wrong side of history on this one.
In the near term, however, Americans will blame everything except man-made pollution for the fallout from climate change.
- Regardless of the politics of the day, where is the long-term, popular will (or capacity) for a "green/electric" revolution in the US? We are massively dependent on fossil fuels, and our quality of life is too.
At the same time, we don't have China's industrial capacity or their stomach for massive state-driven subsidies. I don't see how you escape peak oil otherwise.
- Oil is just one aspect of climate change, coal was far more important because there’s plenty of coal to case extrem harm.
The vast majority of new electricity generation installed in the US over the last 15 years has been wind and solar. That naturally results in fossil fuels being fazed out when existing power plants age and thus need to be replaced. 70% of US electricity came from fossil fuels in 2010, that dropped to 60% by 2020. More significantly it mostly swapped to natural gas which emits far less CO2/KWh than coal.
We could go faster but the tail end of the curve represents a small fraction of the CO2 vs the peak. Even natural gas is facing severe pressure from ultra cheap battery backed solar. More importantly natural gas power plants don’t last nearly as long so will get fazed out much faster.
EV’s are also about more than tailpipe emissions, making and transporting gasoline is quite harmful before it ends up in a gas tank.
- Your comment ignores how much corporate welfare the US already provides. Maybe the better question to ask is why the US government cares so much about making such a small amount of people more rich at the expense of not only the living population but future generations as well.
We absolutely have the capacity, it's just being given to already wealthy families to ensure their wealth is contained to themselves rather than the country.
- IIRC, polls show most Americans support action on climate change. When it's politicized, then they oppose it.
- I mean, to some extent, you're not wrong, but if a Democrat were in office right now, we wouldn't be actively fighting the rising tide of solar power.
At present, the bare economics of it, without any subsidies, put solar as the most cost-effective new power capacity to add.
Last year—2025, the first year of Trump's second term—something like 90% of all new generating capacity in the US was solar. Even with his active antipathy toward it.
There no longer needs to be a massive movement willing to pay more for energy just to get it decarbonized. All we need is for the fossil fuel industry and the people in its pay to get out of the way.
- > At present, the bare economics of it, without any subsidies, put solar as the most cost-effective new power capacity to add.
Not just more cost-effective for new power.
The operating expenses for a given coal plant are greater than the buildout cost for the equivalent solar+battery plant.
It no longer makes financial sense for coal plants to continue existing in almost all cases. This isn't some environmentalism thing, it's strictly hard math. Fossil energy is no longer viable without taxpayers keeping it on life support.
- I say this as an American... I can't help but feel that the US will be judged to have been on the wrong side of history in virtually every topic for which there are sides in the last decade if not longer. For reasons I don't understand, we seem to be actively and aggressively working to destroy our country and as many global institutions as we can.
- > For reasons I don't understand
History is full of examples, but maybe not explanations, of the type of behavior coming out of the current administration in the US. They’re not particularly special, or extraordinary, by any measure. They’ve simply made the decision to hit the “defect” button over and over again like a teenage boy discovering porn for the first time.
And since the adults that preceded them were reasonable and responsible, they built up plenty of rules and norms, creating many opportunities to now hit “defect”.
- Could you give us some of these examples?
- Here's an hypothesis: A fundamental model of politics is similar to the model of innovation in markets: The status quo power and the challenger or disrupter power.
The status quo's power rests on its institutions, stability, and the fact that it is the social norm - generally humans are tied to social norms and attack anything that violates them. The challenger, to succeed, needs to disrupt the institutions, stability, and norms, and one tactic is to just constantly attack them, regardless of the consequences, as a means to the end of taking down the status quo and gaining power.
- > wrong side of history on this one.
There's not much history left. What we're seeing right now is people getting ready to win the end game of civilization. The oligarchs are well aware of the myriad existential threats to our civilization (and species) and are playing the game to make sure they're the last person alive living in comfort.
History will increasingly be told by powerful, oligarchical, modern warlords.
- I don't think climate change is being ignored: AI, war profiteering, ICE, detention centers, destruction of the international system, global fascism are their answer to climate change.
It's not to prevent it, or to mitigate its damages, it's for the people who disproportionately caused it, and have already benefitted from it, to finalize their control over the resources they want. Some of those resources are some of us.
- You're giving them too much credit. They're just blindly seeking profit.
Humans are not that good at planning longer than 6 months to 5 years out. The brain is legacy hardware, optimized for the Pleistocene epoch. Reward circuitry (Striatum) often overpowers logical simulation (Cortex).
- The other thing is, we can't stop. Someone always will outcompete you if you try to pause.
- Disagree, the motives are the same with or without climate change. We're still at the slow part of the curve. Knowing what's coming doesn't change their behavior.
- There are also some people in power who believe climate change is related to the end of times and eagerly welcome it to hasten their idea of ‘Armageddon’
- You don't have to worry about the future if you ensure there is no future.
- And they aren't even really bothering to hide it anymore.
A lot of Trump's seemingly odd obsessions like taking over Greenland and Canada are less odd (but still very unsettling) when you accept that the global power elite have already accepted that run-away climate change is inevitable and the only open questions are who is going to profit from it and how.
- This is it exactly. Russia and Canada are in the best position to possibly "benefit" from global warming.
The US has Alaska, but if it wants more newly arable land in the future, the only options seem to be Greenland and Canada, the two places which Trump just so happens to be obsessed with annexing.
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- The rate of change is the issue sir. You can’t “aside” it.
- TBF the end state is probably also a bit of an issue. Just less so. More frequent higher energy storm systems would be economically detrimental.
- “But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
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- "People have been saying computers will start to speak since the Dartmouth Workshop in 1956. Here we are 50 years later in 2006 and there's no sign of progress yet! Nothing's happened. You really need to knock if off with the predictions."
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- > Has the climate collapsed? There are still glaciers in Glacier Nation Park. The Maldives remain islands, not seamounts.
Just to really quickly call out these tired old straw-men... all of these "predicted disasters" are far further along today than they were predicted to be by this date by, for example, the IPCC in 1990[0]. Deniers keep acting as if it scientists have been "crying wolf" for decades when the truth is that the 99% of the scientists doing real work on anthropogenic global warming have always been extremely conservative and reality has outpaced their predictions all along.
- The glaciers in Glacier Nation Park have reduced by 39% the last 50 years. There used to be 150 glaciers larger than 25 acres, now there is 26. Maybe not the best example.
https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/glaciers-rap...
- > Except that computers did, in fact, learn to speak.
But prior to it happening it was just a long term prediction that had kept not happening for the longest time.
> Has the climate collapsed?
There's an awful lot of room between "business as usual" and "total collapse".
Must we wait until after bad things have happened to only then discuss what we might have done about them in hindsight? Surely proactively avoiding problems is better?
- We just started another war with unforeseen consequences to the planet, while destroying all resources to feed the AI monster, forget about all those paper straws.
- Watch your warming oceans expand in real time here
https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today
above shows what may be the earliest ever peak sea ice
and
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/
and the one above is absolutly terrifying , or should be to wanabe hegemnons thinking that the naritive, is thiers.
- So we are more than 1 million square kilometers lower than our record minimum year of 2012. Holy shit.
https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/sea-ice-tools/charctic-inter...
- The first link contains a banner that perfectly illustrates the tragic moment we're in: "Due to non-renewed funding, several Sea Ice Today tools and services are now suspended or reduced."
- Can you explain what background knowledge I need to be terrified looking at the second one?
- it is a tool that shows daily snap shots of the SST to use it you need to have a good grasp on geography/oceanography, and then spen a bit of time each day looking at it, and cross corelating with things like hurricanes, to see the trace spiral of cooler water that a giant storm will imprint into the oceans surface, or this year, the very significant chanhes in the worlds major hot and cold currents, and size of the spill over from the south wester pacific into the atlantic.
- In almost every fictional story¹ dealing w/ near future outcomes every author just assumes that Miami & New York are under water.
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- The only thing you ever post is AI summaries of articles. Why?
- I assume that's a bot that helps us not have to click on articles for basic information. Personally, I find it quite useful. I'd love to have that built into HN.
- I think every browser has an AI summary feature now, if you find reading and engaging with information just too difficult and challenging.
- We are more than capable of reading thanks.
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94 points by jacquesm 5 hours ago | 56 comments