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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_activism_of_Al_G...
Guy tried.
Give him a sticker.
As it turns out, close advisors still don't get to set policy.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat...
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.
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.
Like the Republicans are absolutely embarrassing on this issue, the idea that they’re “two wings of the same bird” is nuts.
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/global-solar-install...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/battery-price-vs-cumulati...
Trajectories are favorable and compelling. We can go faster though. “You can just do things.”
real politics are often concerned with survival
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.
https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/11/05/impact-of-climate-cha...
https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/08/19/global-climate-change...
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2024/12/09/how-americans...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/09/what-the-...
Clean tech on its own is too slowly to be meaningfully impactful by the time we need it.
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)
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"?
[1] https://www.popsci.com/conference-carbon-dioxide-tired-offic...
( This book goes into detail but is quite readable: https://www.henrygrabar.com/paved-paradise )
All the rest of society pays massive amounts in construction costs:
> adding tens of thousands of dollars per housing unit and, in some cases, increasing total construction costs by more than 50%.
This is from a recent update to Donald Shoup's estimates from the classic "The high cost of free parking": https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9f88x32n
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.
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.
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.
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?
[0] https://www.bureauofinternetculture.art/memes/shareholder-va...
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.
We can have our cake and eat it, we just need to transition to cleaner forms of energy. Which we are doing.
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.
Do you have a source on this?
- fossil fuels have provided huge benefits
- the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere is causing gradually increasing problems that will eventually become severe in some places
- a lot of people made a lot of money along the way
- at some point, some people chose to lie about the problems
- lying about the problems is morally wrong
- the transition off fossil fuels will be expensive
- that is not a sufficient reason not to do it
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.
I only paid for fuel, not lies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...
* https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
* https://tomtoro.com/cartoons/
* https://condenaststore.com/featured/the-planet-got-destroyed...
I wonder how long before in-home CO2 extraction becomes a thing.
This is actually really funny to think about.
I frequently send this medium article [1] to friends + family for a basic dive into how CO2 affects our thinking and abilities at various levels in common areas.
The article cites a study [2] which graphs cognitive score for different activities at different CO2 concentrations. Each activity's cognitive score is worse at higher CO2 concentrations, EXCEPT "focused activity" or "Information search" (up to some point)
[1, note it is from 2016] https://medium.com/@joeljean/im-living-in-a-carbon-bubble-li... [2]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26502459/
I find it hard to believe that stat you provide -- seems like a bit of a shiny lure without much merit.
Maybe if CO2 PPM wasn't so high I could make sense of it.
Though I'm not excluding the possibility that indoor CO2 concentration strongly correlates with cognitive underperformance, which may be caused by other compounds emitted by human body.
I think it would be interesting to see what effect, if any, an indoor C02 level of near 0 would have on humans and mammals. Because your blood has to stay in a narrow PH range, and C02 is part of maintaining that, I wouldn't presume it would be good.
I think a small desktop C02 scrubber might have a market in the same demographic that pays for air ionizers, de-ionizers, HEPA filters and incense burners.
It turned out the building had been sealed extremely tightly to keep out the winter cold and because it is old, it does not have a proper HVAC system.
They discovered that CO2 levels stayed around 1200 ppm throughout the entire winter, sometimes even higher. This had likely been the case for decades.
It is a school in a small, low‑income town. I cannot help wondering how many kids were labeled as underperforming when they were actually struggling with the effects of chronically elevated CO2 levels.
Home carbon capture is sort of a thing already: buy more houseplants, keep them alive and healthy.
Though the most common home interventions for now are still "open a window" and/or "run a fan to circulate the air better". I suppose it's neat that we can home automate that, if you are willing to invest in that.
I suspect the presence of protein, fats and sugars influence the hormone production regulating appetite far more than these changes account for. I would expect the same health issues to be affecting other animal species in just as drastic a measure as humans if it were true, and also that global obesity happened at a more uniform pace rather than coinciding with the introduction of modern western eating habits and lifestyles.
For example: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-co2-levels-ris...
More specifically, yes, protein content decreases with rising CO2 levels. Maybe not enough to cause obesity on its own, but enough to be a compounding factor. Especially when your staple is, say, rice -- which is what the paper linked above looks at.
So currently we're at 428 with 3.5 increase per year, yeah, that's scary if it doesn't slow down soon. Makes you wonder about what indirect health side-effects that could have on us.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9196888/
Essentially, this affects every person and animal on the planet.
also is it accurate to say that the blood co2 level is mostly a snapshot of the moment blood is drawn? or is it affected by longterm environment
I think a lot of people would be surprised at the CO2 level in different indoor environments they spend time in each day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr_effect
I think regular exercise can help to offset some of the effects of rising CO2 levels. Clearly not an end game solution but it's something to consider because you do have control over this one.
I'm sure there's other papers out there, but this is the first one for this post: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013232...
Anyway, CO2 levels rise on planet earth, which cause indoor levels to rise too. As it turns out, because of ventilation and such, indoor levels are always a bit higher than outdoor levels. We cross some critical threshold and it gets really hard for us to take on complex cognitive tasks and make good decisions. This effects everyone equally more or less a bit worse at planning, a bit worse at solving problems, a bit worse and making critical decisions.
In the long run, planners make worse decisions, governments make work decisions, voters make worse decisions, students perform more poorly... you get the picture. Over 20 or 30 years these bad decisions start to ramp up into meaningful impacts on the world. At risk of "post hoc ergo proctor hoc"-ing myself, the tipping point for this being somewhere close to 400ppm would make a lot of sense, because people seem to be noticeably dumber some time after 2014 ish? Hard to really pin it down though, but once CO2 levels started to routinely crest over that 1000ppm it seems to me that the world started to get a lot crazier.
Like, we can blame it on one politician we don't like or another, or on bad economic forecasting, or on the schools, or on latent racism / sexism / whatever-ism. To be clear, those are all legitimate concerns, but at the end of the day we're just animals more or less stuck on this orb zipping through the cosmos and if we're suddenly unable to do high level reasoning as well wouldn't you expect to see an increase in "dumb ideas" being accepted?
Depending on how much you consume, you can cut your emissions by 50%!
Regenerative ranching is a lie and is more based in "vibes" and "energies" than science. Making beef production 0.01% more efficient then increasing consumption does not help. Meat is a "status symbol" food based in excess, grass fed beef is just another excuse to use more resources on a good to show how much of a status symbol it is. Grass fed beef is not good for environment. That's nonsense. It's less efficient beef called green. It's more expensive so people can claim superiority for buying it.
Our ego, pride, heritage, and machismo are used to manipulate us into beating our chests and consuming more protein, cuz winners eat 1.2g protein per kg and go to the gym. See how our health is used to manipulate us and justify excessive consumption in the form of "health and fitness"? Our colonist/conquerer society is dead set on us consuming more and more. We gotta buy more funco pops to keep up with social media influencers.
At the current point, the ONLY thing that makes sense is to cut your excessive consumption. We arent removing anything from the environment at this point and "recycling" and "regeneration" are meaningless.
We've blown past every milestone of destruction we have. We consistently increase our emissions and consumption. We are not doing anything to stop this.
Reduce and sacrifice is all that matters right now. Soon, a lot of this won't be an option for people, it'll be forced on them because of our selfishness today.
Our kids and grandkids have every reason to blame us. We are finding, creating and using every excuse we can for why this isn't our fault as we bite into a cheap burger.
[1] https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...
indoordin0saur•1h ago
Tade0•1h ago
https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
But a distant second in per year emissions:
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
The EU, not listed here, sits between the US and India at about 3.05 billion tonnes.
It's all up to China, which took over a huge chunk of the world's manufacturing. And all up to us, buying Chinese products.
bspinner•37m ago
Sorting the table by "per capita" is much more interesting IMHO.
triceratops•11m ago
China also reduced their emissions last year while the US increased them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292
Stop pointing fingers. Start working.