But we sure did make a great profit on those datacentres so worth it to destroy the planets habitats.
I think I would take the opposite side of your bet, maybe not at even odds but not at terrible ones either.
This is an incredibly short sighted and ignorant view. If you live close to the equator, the climate is visibly changing and is becoming borderline deadly.
> we run the real risk of collapsing civilisation if we don't change urgently
It's not a long comment.
Remember, WW2 didn't bring civilizational collapse. In fact one could argue it even accelerated industrial development. Doesn't mean much to those who perished.
It depends where you lived.
It sure did in China, Japan, Germany, large chunks of the USSR.
Civilisation was rebuilt, but it sure collapsed.
Perhaps the author of that comment comes from the USA?
Back to serfdom that is.
99.9% of species are already extinct, the fossil record is huge. I get that people don't like change, but species going extinct doesn't really move the needle much. That is what they do. Every species eventually goes extinct, species going extinct isn't much of a motivator to go around making humans suffer. We can't stop species going extinct but we can make people comfortable.
And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. If we've got cheap energy then pretty much any problem is solveable and most of the cheap energy production is coming out of the country with the most fossil fuel plants.
There's a limited amount of fossil fuels on Earth. We definitely are going to stop using them as a major energy source at some point because of that, the question is if we get to get a choice as to how we reduce and stop using them or let the production curve peak and the economy collapse once that happens if nothing was anticipated. With additional climate change to deal with by that point.
Edit, because I'm guessing the "civilizational collapse" line's going to catch the response, instead of the "will, not capacity" part:
Pick any one of:
* Sea levels rise by 2-3ft
* The jet stream breaks down
* The north atlantic current breaks down
* Large swaths of the globe between, say, +/-33deg off the equator experience heat waves sufficient to make being outside more than ~30 or so minutes unprotected a life threatening event for normally healthy individuals multiple times per year (note these areas of the planet contain several billion people, and not the rich ones).
* Climates change sufficient to move productive agricultural zones substantially outside of where they've been for roughly the entire industrial area, causing regular crop failures and unpredictable food prices
* Large scale droughts and flooding become a regular event
* Category 5 becomes the low side of what we'd expect a hurricane to hit
And walk through the political, economic, and social ramifications of it, and then realize we're looking at all of them - and we're already seeing the beginnings of them _today_.
I'm not arguing against environmentalism. I'm arguing for humanity and against doom prophesies. We are the descendants of the survivors of the last cataclysmic instant-hellfire-and-brimstone extinction event, and we've only gotten more robust since.
Predictable climate is key to keeping everyone fed. Random droughts, freezes, and unlivable temps will have pretty notable impacts on our ability to produce food.
Will we continue to be able to produce enough food for the world? Who knows. But that's the thing that has me most concerned. If there's a doomsday related to climate it will be that.
Greenhouses can produce several orders of magnitude more food per acre than dryland mechanized farming does. (Greenhouses are just one example, there are lots of other ways to produce food more expensively). If we lose ~half of US food production capacity due to climate change we don't halve food production, we switch to more expensive production methods.
Increased food prices might collapse poor societies, but you're going to need a lot more than that to collapse rich societies.
First, think “the fall of Rome” when you hear “civilization collapse.”
Second, consider that this isn’t just affecting the US, but every major populated country.
And then consider you’ll be living through it, not reading about it in a book.
And fall of Rome isn't anywhere close to collapse of civilization. Collapse of Rome scenarios I'll accept as plausible. Collapse of civilization, no.
If we climate control them and light them. Then yes. It also depends on the crop being grown. That takes electricity.
There are many crops that simply aren't well suited to greenhouses. Primarily because they are nutrient thin. Those are popular crops that people and livestock eat.
And, importantly, we don't have those greenhouses built yet. Not even a fraction of a percentage of our food comes from them today. It's possible that we can make the switchover, but that will take decades of build out.
The other thing to consider is we won't really have much warning before we need these greenhouses. About the only thing that will trigger action here with the way society is structured is famine. Importantly, capitalism will work against wanting to produce these greenhouses as famine will kick up prices and traditional farming will remain the cheapest way to produce food. Plenty of large corporate farmers will be happy to just continue raising prices rather than build out.
Let's say that India faces the same problem - that's a nuclear armed state. How does that play out?
Remember the power outage in Texas? By and large, that was because Texas didn't have its grid hooked up to the rest of the country - but how many different areas do you think need to be facing the same conditions before we knock out the power across a region we can't laugh at for a substantial amount of time? What happens if we have to deal with that on a regular basis?
People think "civilizational collapse" is "we're now hunter-gatherers" - typically, it means "the existing state apparatus falls apart, the wealth and health of the people diminishes significantly, and what was a previously recognizable culture and lifestyle is no more. Think "Roman Empire circa 450CE" - that's what we're facing. Yes, there will be humans in 100 years - pending that India question, of course - but that's not the victory condition here.
Well, the ~33% of food that gets wasted in the US would probably need to be handled a lot more carefully. Probably the obese people would need to eat less. And the strategy of growing the population every year through migration might need to be rethought if more farmland can't be found. Plus maybe there'd need to be more fertiliser produced. That involves fossil fuels.
The US has an explicit strategy of growing the population every year. That is a strategy that eventually leads to famine. Pointing out that global warning might lead to famine is less scary than pointing out that business as usual certainly leads to one - the poulation of the US doubled since 1950 and that is equivalent to halving the food production per person. In fact, letting natural population decline take hold would solve both problems and let the smaller population enjoy higher living standards.
> Let's say that India faces the same problem - that's a nuclear armed state. How does that play out?
They're switching over to industrial farming as far as I'm aware, they're probably going to be fine. Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_India looks like a 50% reduction in farmland would knock them back to 90s levels of production efficiency, and they were mostly ok in the 90s. That is value not calories though, doing a precise estimate is probably more than I can manage for a comment.
> Remember the power outage in Texas?
Civilisation in Texas didn't get anywhere near to a collapse. I'm no expert on 450CE Rome, but from what I do know is it looked nothing like modern Texas. I wish I could trade for problems like that and enjoy Texan electricity prices. I don't mind having to be ready for an emergency, that is already something that I need to do. Texas got a good deal on that one.
---
I want to stress here that I'm on board with the idea that these are all catastrophic risks that could end badly. But that is business as usual for humanity, we ignore a lot of catastrophic risks on an average day. These are all things we've faced before and faced anyway without the climate changing at all. Cheap energy is the best bet to manage those risks and turning away from it is madness.
Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place. The current rate of extinction is hundreds of times higher than that, and leads to ecosystem collapse.
Solar is cheaper now. Has been for awhile.
Ehhhhh this argument is hopeful at best. The problem is we're changing the temp faster than base keystone species' evolution can adapt.
Without them it's super super unpredictable what'll actually happen.
The worry being mass extinction because we lost plankton or similar. Huge amounts of oxygen production and co2 capacity disappears rapidly with that.
Species extinctions are insignificant if evolution and migration can allow other species to fill niches left behind. This is the first time extinctions are happening faster than evolution. And while migration is significantly disrupted by infrastructure.
As to your second comment, solar is the cheapest energy.
But, my comment was only responding to the assertion that "This is the first time extinctions are happening faster than evolution."
The more common baseline I've come across is comparing the estimated rate of species extinction from the last century or so versus the baseline historical extinction rate.
To pick an arbitrary article about extinction rates with citations to published research:
> But this estimated [background extinction] rate is highly uncertain, ranging between 0.1 and 2.0 extinctions per million species-years. Whether we are now indeed in a sixth mass extinction depends to some extent on the true value of this rate. Otherwise, it’s difficult to compare Earth’s situation today with the past.
> In contrast to the the Big Five [mass extinction events], today’s species losses are driven by a mix of direct and indirect human activities, such as the destruction and fragmentation of habitats, direct exploitation like fishing and hunting, chemical pollution, invasive species, and human-caused global warming.
> If we use the same approach to estimate today’s extinctions per million species-years, we come up with a rate that is between ten and 10,000 times higher than the background rate.
https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-mass-extinction-and-ar...
Objectively untrue. Globally, though the rise over the last couple of decades is disturbing, emissions are most likely leveling off again; they may have broken past the mid 2010s levels and appear to be rapidly rising in the last few years, but this is just a slight "over-recovery" from the impressive ~5.7% drop in 2020 (mainly from COVID restrictions of course). US emissions peaked in 2005 and were ~18.6% lower in 2023 (the last year of Our World in Data figures). And, you know, China is pivoting.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
> and its going to be catastrophic.... But we sure did...
This attitude tends to inspire unproductive doomerism rather than urgent change.
No, that is true already. Look at the "rate" tab of the Mauna Kea data, it shows growth on average. Of the rate of CO 2 growth.
France's nuclear electricity isn't even that cheap and they were all built decades ago.
the scale of impact goes beyond extinction, to encompass wiping out entire system types.
Heck this also takes away any incentive to restart the coal plants by private companies if they are being financially supported and already in the process of converting them to nuclear, and it takes away an incentive to build more long-term because each nuclear plant provides a lot more power on average. Another thing to lobby for would be for more SMRs funding and less regulation overall in nuclear (it's insane how overly regulated nuclear is based on one soviet fuck up of a crappy underfunded/flawed powerplant (chernobyl). Fukushima plants (commissioned in 1971!) were hit with a once in a lifetime 9.5 magnitude earthquake and tsunami on top despite being less than 100 miles from the epicenter even with regulatory lapses and no direct deaths.
Citation needed. The famous SV names are all dumping money into right wing authoritarian political causes.
"There are no rich, low energy countries"
[1] Both numbers on page 14: https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2025/09/China-Energy-Tr...
Besides, if the cost of keeping up with China is breathing deadly coal smoke, I’m not sure the decision is as obvious as you make it seem.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-china-is-still-bu...
When all the carbon frozen in the permafrost of Siberia is released back into the ecosystem, the Earth with once again look like a tropical paradise it once was, being able to sustain giant cold-blooded reptiles.
(Well, not sure they actually were reptiles, but most likely cold-blooded.)
https://oaklandside.org/2025/09/22/oakland-coal-terminal-leg...
The GOP was the leader but the Democrats added to it but pretended they cared. At least the GOP told the truth that they were out to destroy the Climate.
We had almost 50 years to work on it, but people who could lead decided they wanted to keep their jobs and bribes instead of doing good for the US and the World.
For this, I fully blame Reagan and his enablers.
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