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Meh when I see that we are barely able to stop the growth of fossile fuel usage ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_cons... ), I'm not sure why peoples are so optimistic.

And it's not like Enr and other suggestion you propose will not need insane amount of ressource extraction.

Heat pump usually need a well insulated home, just isolating all the needed house in the next 25 years is probably a challenge itself between cost and having enough workers. And it's not like there was an article last week on electrician shortage ...

I guess when I look at that chart I’m actually optimistic:

- coal and oil not really growing (but there is Covid at one end and no Ukraine war effects). This is especially noteworthy for coal because china continues to increase coal power generation so the only way for it to be flat is many others decreasing

- the ‘other’ section growing at 16% per yer (doubling in less than 5 years) is basically renewables

I am sad that fossil fuels continue being burned more and I’m sad nuclear isn’t growing but the growth in renewables is encouraging.

A thing people often say when looking at per-country data is something like ‘emissions in developed countries are only decreasing because they are offloading polluting industry to developing nations which you can see are burning more’ but this doesn’t appear to be true. Studies that try to measure trade-adjusted emissions find that they aren’t massively different from the raw amounts and that the difference has stayed pretty steady for a while even as developed countries’ emissions have fallen despite growing economies.

I think you are being optimistic because you are neglecting the urgency of this issue. We have maybe 10 years left to get to 0 emissions. We are not even decreasing.

If this graph were something happening in the 80s, I would be ecstatic (well, if I had been born and had known about global warming). Right now, it's far too little far too late.

This is not a time for finding a new way of abundance, it is a time for accepting that we have been growing our economy on burrowed time, and we have to significantly shrink the global economy ourselves, or the planet will do it for our children or grandchildren 20-50 years from now.

I don’t think the crises or emergency phrasing is particularly accurate. We have already locked in a great deal of climate change over the coming decades and urgent actions now won’t change that. I don’t think ‘emergency’ should apply to situations where things get worse over the next 30 years but actions today may cause them to be less terrible in 80 years.

The narrative about shrinking economies doesn’t make sense to me because for lots of countries like the US, they emitted more when their economies were smaller. We don’t want to go back to that.

I think pushing to reduce emissions by shrinking economies is unconscionable as it effectively corresponds to reducing standards of living across the world and particularly harms the poorest countries. I also dislike it because it is obviously politically unpalatable and so the people who favour it either long for some kind of authoritarian to impose it[1] or get to smugly say they were right while their desired plan doesn’t get implemented. I would much rather governments were pushed towards policies that would be desirable to people while also reducing emissions.

[1] I also note that the biggest authoritarian country is burning more and more coal with increasing emissions while the biggest non-authoritarian countries have falling emissions and growing economies.

US domestic emissions have fallen slightly - much less than US manufacturing was moved overseas.

Also, I am definitely in no way advocating for authoritarianism. I'm advocating for realistic, charismatic politicians to present the real situation to people and help them understand the urgency of this threat to the future of the world.

Not to mention, there is plenty of room for reducing economic activity without materially impacting living conditions for the vast majority of consumers. All the cheap plastic crap being produced and shipped overseas is an obvious contender, which produces both massive emissions and additional, faster working pollution. Fast fashion and fast food need more care (as they are important to many poor people around the world), but more sustainable alternatives that reduce overconsumption without impact on basic necessity are certainly possible. Regulating and reducing advertising is a more indirect approach that would help revert the trend of encouraging massive overconsumption in all aspects of life (since one of the biggest focuses of modern advertising is simply to increase the whole market, and only incidentally to advocate for a particular brand).

And note that this very much is an emergency, even if the effects are slow to be seen. It's like a contamination with prions - if you don't stop it right this second, it will inevitably produce disastrous effects 5-10 years from now, with no possibility to stop it or even mitigate it later. Just because the disastrous effects will happen later in the future doesn't make the current moment any less of an emergency.

Regarding the first sentence note that trade-adjusted emissions for the US have still fallen - though offshored emissions fell most around the time of the financial crises. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption... (enter United States into the ‘change country’ box)

I don’t really have much of a response to the rest of your comment. I can’t tell if the foundation of the argument in your comment above is on that false claim or not.

I don’t think it’s true that a charismatic leader will cause people to vote for to make their lives worse in the short term with a truthful promise of making their lives worse in the short term. If people vote for such a leader, they will vote them out when their lives get worse. I don’t really understand why I should be convinced that the way forward is for some supreme charisma to appear (from where?) and persuade the World’s people to suffer hardship for the greater good. I am particularly unconvinced because I think that kind of suffering is unnecessary and not particularly helpful for reducing GHG emissions or climate change.

I continue to not think it’s an emergency for the same reason that your mortality is not an emergency when you are in your mid fifties.

I roughly expect: government-support / industrial policy causes low-carbon power generation to grow a bit faster than predictions, and gets cheaper to the point that fossil fuel power generation becomes uneconomical apart from leaker plants which take longer to die out; new cars to become mostly-electric sooner than predicted because most car companies get good enough at them and the electric cars are just better cars (potentially hybrid cars should be preferred as a policy if cars are limited by battery production: most miles are short journeys so would still be all on the smaller batteries); global warming / climate change to continue increasing for a while; maybe some improvements to carbon capture but I’m a bit doubtful it would be done much unless power gets a lot cheaper; much migration and ensuing strife due to the uneven consequences of climate change; some powerful country that cares less about the ethics of it (eg China) doing some big geoengineering thing (eg silver particles in the upper atmosphere) to try to reduce the effects of climate change they suffer. Bit of a mixed bag but not entirely hopeless.

So far we've mostly replaced coal with gas. That is a questionable improvement. Total carbon emissions are still rising quickly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Maybe that's because Global Warming isn't the only environmental issue that they're concerned about? We started getting massive bio diversity reduction since the 70s and that wasn't because of AGW. Human consumption of natural resources (esp. habitat) is a huge issue for the environment and "a lot of factories producing ev cars, appliances, and batteries" will accelerate that.

Yep this is like saddest thing that 50% of species died in last 50 years due to human activity.

> There are many zombie environmental groups that will continue to fight against anything humans try to change about the built environment, but over time the astonishingly good economics will move them to the side.

I think environmental groups are just the tip of the iceberg that gets blamed for things because they're visible. They just don't have that much political clout (aside from the very large "environmental group" that's people who are concerned about climate change -- which may be a majority of all living humans at this point).

As an example, consider strict environmental regulations on oil refineries. It seems like those must be pushed by environmental groups, right? But it can also be a case of regulatory capture by the incumbent refineries. The regulations don't apply to them because they were grandfathered in, but the regulations are their moat protecting them from any upstart competitors.

Or consider fuel economy standards. Those must be pushed by environmentalists, right? But then why do light pickup trucks have very strict fuel economy standards, and larger trucks have looser, easier-to-meet standards to the point where it's hard to actually make a light truck that conforms to the standards and isn't really slow and underpowered. It's almost like the incumbent automakers have been successful at lobbying for regulations that protect the lucrative market for oversized trucks by ensuring that smaller trucks are unappealing, unavailable, or too expensive. (The chicken tax is another example.)

>It feels like an iceberg has been slowly turning over for the past 10 years, and is now flipping quickly.

>Economic growth is now more correlated with carbon reduction than increase.

Does it now make sense why so many hydrocarbon companies want to fight against climate change and push and promote some inefficient processes – like hydrogen that mostly still use hydrocarbons to power them?

They know that weaning people off oil directly means a hit to their easy money streams. They don't want their hegemony to die and they are doing their very best to keep us addicted to easy and "cheap" energy.

At this point in time, if you have a politician that wants to slow down decarbonisation they are either in the pocket of big oil or just stupid. The alternative, tightly coupled energy system that feeds dictators and polluters, is not something we should contribute to any longer.

> Environmental groups and common knowledge haven't caught up yet, but the fastest route to a low carbon future is a lot of factories producing ev cars, appliances, and batteries.

Not sure where you are getting this, but sounds like you just have an axe to grid.

Environmental groups have been pushing for decarbonization and accelerating the shift toward a renewable grid for forever and a day. They were the ones who educated the public about the imminence and perils of climate change, drove legislation in places like California that created the environment where EVs became popular. It wasn't Chevron, or Ford, or even Tesla that did that.

The groups that weren't onboard until now are mainstream capitalists and consumers.

> For 80% of the things we need to do, it's just people going to home depot.

As someone who has recently built an entire electrified high-performance house that consumes a fraction of the typical house's energy, I could easily buy into this, but it is flat out wrong.

What I accomplished was building a cheap-to-operate, comfortable, and healthy house for my family. It negligibly reduced the CO2 emitted on the grid, and significantly reduced the amount emitted on my behalf (by eliminating my direct natural gas usage) but I'm still reliant on a grid that is 50% fossil fuel powered.

What I did is not particularly easy to replicate either, unless you are doing a full gut remodel or new construction - so not something that trips to home depot can accomplish. The bottom line is that it's not a scalable near term solution for our climate issues.

Instead, a huge amount of what has to happen in the near term is development and deployment of firm grid scale renewables and the systems to coordinate and transmit energy between those and flexible sources of demand.

It's a little bit more complicated than that. They've held onto their legacy concerns about certain non-carbon power sources for other reasons, and many environmental groups seem convinced that there is no future where the planet is safe and our current economic system stays in place. I could even be convinced of the latter, but I know enough to know that both of these policies are political poison pills in effect. Plenty of environmental groups have done plenty of harm to the cause, largely from not accepting half a loaf.

> They've held onto their legacy concerns about certain non-carbon power sources for other reasons,

Is there a reason you are unable to just use the word "nuclear"? Non-proliferation was, and still is, a major concern for nuclear power. Add to that the fact that current uranium supply lines end in Russia. It may have a role in the future, and we should continue to invest in that possibility, but it's far from conclusive that it will be viable economically.

> and many environmental groups seem convinced that there is no future where the planet is safe and our current economic system stays in place.

Our economic system is always changing and evolving in response to social pressures. That's how we got the 5 day work week, Medicare, and historically low tax rates. Globalized capitalism itself is experiencing a retrenchement at this moment, which is as much a response to growing internal inequality in the developed world as it is about the aftermath of the pandemic and concern about onshore strategic manufacturing capacity.

Furthermore, negotiations are underway for the wealthy world (who put most of the CO2 into the atmosphere) to pay the developing world for the damage they have incurred due to climate change, and to develop in a renewable way.

Which is all to say, our current economic system is changing no matter what.

Yeah, because nuclear isn't the only one. Environmental groups never object to hydro power, right? They've never objected to helping brown coal be replaced by less CO2 emitting ones in poor countries right? They've never objected to replacing biomass burning with coal or coal with natural gas? Nope. They go to Africa and tell people to put soda bottles in their roof instead (ie our trash).

It's not just nuclear, but nice try.

The rest is too hostile to bother with. Sorry I dared question holy environmental groups who have never shot themselves in the foot.

Of course it will have to change. The point is how. I want it done, I just don't want to sacrifice our industrial society and I don't want to listen to pseudo-science justifying bad trade offs just because of vibes, mostly because I don't think most other people will either and then you get little or nothing.

France—not the US, ok, since I know US bad—has this all figured out. I'm sure you think I'm some sort of global warming denier or whatever. I'm not. I urgently want solutions. So urgently, I'm willing to look for less than utopian solutions.

Anyway, so how's this approach working out for you? Have we solved it?

> As someone who has recently built an entire electrified high-performance house

How much did it cost? If you don't mind me asking.

I paid a premium of about $60/sqft (about $90K in my house) for the high-performance stuff (heat pumps, HRV, airtight weather barrier, dense pack blown-in insulation, etc).

The remaining $/sqft is just like any other build in the Bay Area, so quite expensive, but a lot depends on structural changes, finish levels, premium features (or lack thereof), and other things that have little to do with energy performance of the building envelope.

As with all things, the bigger the house, usually the lower the cost per square foot for an individual system like a heat pump that have high fixed costs but scale up more cheaply. But the costs for things like a high performance external weather/air barrier and high performance insulation scale with the external surface area.

I'm not including things like electric stoves/ovens and heat pump dryer in that because those price differences are easy to find online.

In a new build, I think the premium for high performance could be brought down much lower, but only if performance is considered from the design stage.