We don't have to adapt to the situation as it is now, because it is pretty much the best scenario. We have to adapt to the fact that it will get worse, and worse, and worse. And save what we can. Worried about your country not dominating on the AI scene? Wait until your biggest worry is food.
Largest battery storage in Germany set for partial commissioning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104584 - July 2026
Analysis: Wind and solar power overtake fossil fuels in Germany for first time ever - https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-wind-and-solar-power-ov... - July 28th, 2026
> Germany has various targets in place that require a rapid expansion of wind and solar power, including cutting economy-wide emissions to net-zero by 2045. The nation is also aiming to increase renewables’ share of electricity consumption to 80% by 2030 to achieve a “largely climate neutral” power system by 2035.
It's time to get over the nuclear issue, it's history. It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid, and tens of billions of dollars or euros. Germany deploys ~2GW/month of solar. Total global nuclear generation capacity is ~380GW as of this comment. At current global solar PV deployment rates, even assuming capacity factor delta between solar and nuclear, you could replace total global nuclear generation with ~18 months of solar PV deployment. Batteries and solar will continue to rapidly decline in cost, nuclear will not.
(total annual solar PV deployment is approaching, but not quite yet, at 1TW/year, and continues to increase year over year)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
Yeah, it's nowhere near enough. We need to seriously revamp how we manage forests. They must be regularly cleaned, huge fire breaks between fenced areas and roads must be created and maintained. Prescribed burns on a regular schedule. Houses cannot be too close to the trees, no matter how pretty it looks. A huge clean radius must be maintained between houses and trees and between properties. All this work must be done in the winter and everything must be prepared for the summer. Every year. Everywhere.
I see none of this happening at a proper scale in my country (Portugal). So of course every summer we se huge forest fires. Lives lost, ecosystems destroyed. Next year it happens again...
It's only going to get worse.
Good luck doing any work in the winter in places like, oh say, the Rocky Mountains.
It's basically normal people should sacrifice their standards of livings and pay taxes to reduce carbon emission while the same rules doesn't apply for the other class of the society. Most people are living pay check to pay check and out of all the worries in their minds, climate change is the last thing they can afford to worry about.
There's a point where "head in stand" becomes deliberately malicious.
Far right, far left, far center, it's all the same: money, power, money, power, stay in the EU, free market, money, power.
X to doubt, I'll believe it when I see it, for now they are like a galaxy away from that goal.
And also that'll be even harder to reach if they want to improve their atrociously low electricity heating rate.
Fossil gas will fill the gap until solar, wind, batteries, and transmission push the last of fossil generation out of the mix, and every year less and less gas will be used until those generators sit idle.
Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-n... | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~2GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~17 months; per Electricity Maps, only 15.45% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/12mo/monthly)
Nuclear doesn't have this requirement. It's truly zero carbon.
Unless you can show me plans to fill this gap with batteries on a national scale, renewables < nuclear
Our power demands are increasing faster than we can build out renewables and storage.
Despite how much investment we are making into solar, wind, batteries, we're still burning more carbon year over year to make up for the demand for energy. We need a source of energy that can actually replace the base load carbon, not just augment it like renewables are. Nuclear is the most likely source to use for that purpose.
Nuclear is critical for long term generating power. Batteries and solar are good not able to maintain the same level of power quality and duration though are definitely incredibly important.
At this point it may very well be better to go for renewables for much more of the grid coverage. But those pushing the cost picture have been everything but honest over the past 2 decades.
Frankly, it doesn't matter what Germany or other European nations do - their carbon footprint has dramatically decreased.
The issue is everyone else [0]. China (12 GT), the US (5 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent over half of all global carbon emissions. The EU and UK's combined carbon emissions are half of Asia (excluding China and India) emissions.
[0] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
co2 per country or capita doesn't mean shit when the world uses China as a factory:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-embedded-in-...
Their carbon footprint is only going to increase as a result.
Check out this year's edition of Ember's Global Electricity Review [0]. The table on p. 78 lists the following five countries as having the highest CO2-equivalent emission (in Mt):
| China | 5,565 |
| United States | 1,737 |
| India | 1,395 |
| Russia | 536 |
| Japan | 492 |
All these numbers should probably be put into perspective, though, by taking the population size into account. But even then, the whole of the EU will not fare too bad.
[0] https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electric...
Also, while it's important to look at the global picture, let's not ignore the local effects: air quality in Germany is pretty bad, perhaps the worst in Europe. Poland is pretty bad too, especially in the winter. That's not China's or USA's fault.
In the meantime batteries + solar or wind can be built quickly and hooked up pretty much anywhere.
Even if we had nuclear fusion, solar+batteries could still win on cost and time to deploy!
No, it’s not lost already. We should attempt to preserve what remains, not assume failure is inevitable.
Consequentially running a fireplace is a lot more climate neutral than driving a car, taking a flight, utilising the myriads of high carbon footprint goods or having a gas heater or so.
On the other hand the bogs that we're losing (and kelp forests) are a lot better at sequestring co2 but they're small. Permafrost will also actually accelerate stuff since....well it __was__ permanently forsty.
toasty228•24m ago
The people in charge a either clinically retarded or willingly ignoring the problem, either way we're fucked, the point of no return is behind us now, this is the new normal, and it'll only get worse
csto12•18m ago
The everyday person votes for those in charge, and the everyday person couldn’t care less.
cbmuser•18m ago
throwaway894345•14m ago
GlacierFox•10m ago
cbg0•10m ago
toasty228•9m ago
andsoitis•17m ago
The "people in charge" as well as the "climate experts" are generally aligned on the climate crisis, but everyone has been surprised by unexpected acceleration and the very sudden swings.
Put differently, you can predict and act, according to the trend, but the sudden and unpredictable timing of these swings is a separate, and more difficult issue to navigate.
For instance, can anyone predict specifically what will happen "next" and "where" and prepare to mitigate the impact?
palata•12m ago
Now it's starting to impact us directly, but we still don't really give a shit. In a few weeks it will be business as usual.
It will get worse every year, and we will be more and more willing to do something as it gets worse. But we will have fewer and fewer resources to do it, and less stuff to save (once a forest disappears, you as a human won't see it come back in your lifetime).
toasty228•11m ago
It's been predicted for decades, in multiple reports, over and over and over and over again... No excuses
> can anyone predict specifically what will happen "next" and "where" and prepare to mitigate the impact?
Something bad, duh? And reduce emissions, duh?
The things people have been predicting and advocating for during the past like 50 years at that point. Are we still debating these details lol?
foco_tubi•7m ago
palata•17m ago
However, the people in charge (e.g. in France) are elected by the people, and therefore represent it. Do you think that the far-right will care more about the climate crisis? The French people is likely to elect them next year.
It's too easy to vote for people who don't give a shit about the climate crisis, and then blame them.
> either way we're fucked, the point of no return is behind us now
The faster and the harder we react, the more we save. Fires are a good example: because many trees are burning now (therefore they are already dead) and many trees will burn (because the fire won't magically stop), it's worth fighting to preserve as much as we can. Saying "we won't get those dead trees back, so we may as well let the rest of the forest burn" is counter-productive.
We need to act now. And not by electing morons and then blaming them for being morons.
andsoitis•16m ago
What does this look like, precisely, in practice?
toasty228•11m ago
adrianN•5m ago
Chiefly we need to replace fossil fuels with electricity from carbon free sources and electrify transportation, heating, and industry.
toasty228•
nancyminusone•16m ago
ifwinterco•13m ago
Life is short, there's no point freezing and living off leaves for the next few decades when you'll be old in the blink of an eye anyway
palata•8m ago
Is it? We are not talking about screwing the climate for the people who will come in 200 years, right? In the last decades we have been saying "if we don't change the trend, your children will most likely die because of the climate change".
Is it rational to be 30 and not care about the fact that we will be screwed long before we reach the age of retirement?
dfxm12•2m ago
there's no point freezing and living off leaves for the next few decades
I don't think the ask here is so unreasonable. It's disingenuous to frame it this way.
cbg0•6m ago
I used to have snow for weeks each winter in my city and now if I get 2-3 days of snow a year it's unusual. Extreme weather events where it rains in one day as much as in one month have become a recurring event to the point we're re-planning sewage systems around these things.
pengaru•14m ago
Of course we're fucked.
tuco86•8m ago
palata•3m ago
It's not. The climate will warm as much as we emit CO2. Sure, the CO2 that we have already emitted won't leave. We've passed 1.5C, that won't come back in our lifetime. But the more we emit, the worse it will get. To keep what we have now, we have to stop emitting entirely, right now.
> We now need to worry about the hundreds of millions of people
We need to worry about the problems that are coming from the CO2 we have already emitted, that's true. But we also need to worry a lot about the fact that we are making it worse every single day. We are not reducing our CO2 emissions, we are increasing them right now.
Are you worried about hundreds of millions of refugees? The way it's going, we'll reach 4C. It means that billions of people will have to move.
I don't think we can still use the concept of "refugee" when its entire countries that need to move because their part of the world has become so hot that humans cannot survive outside without life support (that's what will happen to billions of people with 4C). At this point, it's entire countries moving with their military, it's just global war.