Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative.<p>The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect.<p>This only stops it.<p>Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.
>Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative.<p>And individual action has switched to just holding governments and industry responsible. Which basically amounts to giving up.<p>"Welp, just gonna buy this truck, enjoy my burgers, set the AC at 68 and fly on all vacations this year because it's nothing compared to Big Oil."
Don’t forget eating meat, the easiest thing to stop doing (people needs cars and trucks for work, they don’t need cheeseburgers). People can’t be bothered to make any changes, it’s always someone else’s problem.<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/27/meat-gas-emissions-reporting" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/27/meat-gas...</a>
Even cutting back on meat can have an impact. Halving quantities in cooking etc. really is hardly noticeable.
People need cars... But not trucks for work :)
Yeah, good catch, thanks.
Well, truth be told.. It _is_ nothing compared to Big Oil.
Acting politically for what matters is not giving up :)<p>Though, as always, we can and really should do both.
Governments and industry <i>are</i> responsible. Personal consumption/waste is not the primary driver of climate change, no matter how much corporations tell us that using paper straws is the solution. It's tough to expect average people to take major action when corporations are essentially given carte blanche.
And who is buying all that stuff from corporations? Who is actually the one consuming?<p>We can quibble about edge effects like "induced demand", but by and large, people just love cheap energy, cheap calories, and can shift the moral burden by playing "not my responsibility" games.
The technology-will-save-us mentality is part of the reason we are here. We live in a society that doesn't do anything unless it makes money for some set of decrepit old men.<p>We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition) but people made money doing the opposite. And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US.<p>So we get to watch the world burn down around us.
No it isn't, the idea that strict vegan diets would have stoped climate change is just nonsense. Run the numbers. "Strict vegan diets" is the attitude of US activists telling the developing world that they need to change their behavior before the US activist is willing to accept driving less or adopting dense urban infill housing.<p>"Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.<p>People who refused to acknowledge the reality of human society, refused to acknowledge that the profit system exists whether they want it to or not, are responsible for focusing action on ineffective means of change.
Significant amounts of the third world are already eating de-facto vegetarian or vegan diets. Many for religious reasons (i.e. in India where the vast majority of people either eat no meat or only chicken/fish), and many others for financial reasons.<p>Strict vegan diets would objectively massively help reduce climate change.
Strict vegan diet consumes more CO2 than regular meat diet! It has way more ethical conserns, regulations, land to grow!<p>If you hunt wildlife, the meat diet is zero emmisions! It reduces CO2 emmisions!
Just like it isn’t possible to get politicians to stop spending other people’s money, it isn’t possible to stop enterprises from making as much money as possible while spending as little as possible on a global scale (it may work locally!)<p>Thus, technology-will-save-us is the rational choice. Drill all the oil, build the biggest datacenters and speedrun to fusion before the collapse so we can sequester the carbon back into the ground and still have energy left to run Haber-Bosch, ideally with hydrolysis instead of natgas.<p>Disclaimer: I used to be heavily in the sustainability camp in my younger years
Technology is more feasible than politically driven "degrowth" or any of the other proposals.
It is quite ironic that capitalism and the profit motive are now the best hope for staving off climate change, all thanks to the technologists and entrepreneurs that have mad renewables and storage so cheap.<p>The 2020s climate action movement in the US (and the UK) was <i>disastrous</i> in their strategy, action, and outcomes. I was there, I followed along because it seemed like the best way to get climate action, but things like Sunrise and XR at their very best did nothing. They focused on all the wrong people, focused on all the wrong levers. They turned allies into enemies, by "protesting" tech companies that were at the forefront of real action. They refused to acknowledge the massive effects of technology change, and the need for quick adoption, and the huge money saving nature of the solution.<p>I have zero patience for those attitudes now, the difference between a degrowther and a climate change denying politician are minimal in effect, and the effects are all that matter now.
Supposing all anthropogenic emissions went to zero today, we'd still keep warming almost as far as three degrees with all of the disasters and famines that entails, because there's a lag time between existing emissions and their effects.<p>We need massive bounty programs that pay out irrespective of nationality for every possible kind of improvement and gain to carbon capture technology if we want to prevent 90% of all land on Earth between 30°N and 30°S from slowly turning into copies of the uninhabitable stretches of the Middle East.
How could this happen? I've faithfully sorted all of my recyclables into their respective bins to maximize profit for my city's garbage collection just like they asked
There hasn't been a question about this in a decade or more. There was no path, even theoretically, to stopping our CO2 emissions without dramatically lowering quality of life for maybe a couple billion people.<p>We won't slow climate change. We can build resilience to the effects, and we have good incentives to do so. But we'll keep burning fossil fuels for a very long time.
Quality of life will be dramatically lower for many because we did not take action
Maybe it will be a good incentive to rebuild our global infrastructure without having to go through a world war ?
> We can build resilience to the effects<p>Oh yeah, would love to see the resilience that would have prevented the Nepalese disaster
Interestingly, financial markets are a good place to see the “price” of some environmental issues. As made up example: “Should I buy bonds that are backed by electricity sales from a yet-to-be-built hydroelectric dam? Will there be enough rainfall to fill the reservoir reliably? I’ll have to receive a higher interest payment to offset that risk.”