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> Both of these no one has any plans yet which wouldn’t require major changes in the way people live

Eh... I mean, nearly every country in the EU has seen reducing greenhouse gas emissions for years (even _with_ replacement of some gas generation with higher-intensity coal generation due to the invasion of Ukraine), on the foot of building retrofitting, increased renewable generation, etc. The US and China have also been investing significantly in renewable generation (though, I believe, at least in the US's case, building retrofitting has yet to start on a large scale). US emissions are broadly declining and have been for a while, Chinese emissions have almost flatlined, though are still inching up. People are doing stuff.

> the way the US interacts with the world which would put them at a major disadvantage with everyone else

Huh? I would think that the US is actually in a rather good position here, certainly relative to Europe and probably to China. The US is very physically big, so lots of space for renewables, and is more self-sufficient on lower-carbon-intensity fossil fuel (ie gas, likely realistically essential as a transition fuel) than the others. It would also likely find lower-intensity agriculture easier to cope with, if it comes to that.

> And this isn’t a problem caused just by the US. So even if the US did this, the rest of the world would keep on trucking and making the issue worse.

China is if anything currently outpacing the US on renewable and other low-intensity (nuclear) generation capacity.

This feels like a comment written 30 years ago, back when no-one was doing anything much. Today, the big three are doing some stuff, with plans for more.

> Until the problem is causing real, unavoidable, unambiguous issues for everyone, of course it’s going to be denied.

The denial is interesting. In the developed world, it's only a significant factor in the US, Canada, and Australia, all of which have large fossil fuel industries, and in all of which it has been highly politicised. (Similar pattern in the developing world; the big denial cheerleader there being Indonesia). In most countries, it is fairly broadly accepted to be happening, and to be at least largely humanity's fault. Even in countries where denial is a significant political issue, it is generally on the decline (as you'd expect; the percentage of the electorate who'll die off anyway before we see really major impact is declining).

Ho man. To stop major, major climate impacts we long ago passed the point where reductions or caps would even make a dent.

To even have a hope of not seeing major disruptive climate change we would have had to be at the point of net-negative fossil carbon releases years ago. And we’re nowhere near that.

Those changes are something of course. and we’d be in a (marginally) worse situation without them. But they’re overall just minor impacts.

The changes required to actually address the issue have barely been contemplated, and will be massively disruptive.

I agree. Zero emissions is only the first step. It's like removing the foot from the gas pedal. But the car is still moving very fast and we need negative emissions to prevent crashing into a wall.

Unfortunately even zero emissions seems like a miracle at this point.

"Zero Emissions are just the first step". A lot of people's critique of environmentalism is that they are anti growth. Comments like this just seem to feed that skepticism

Perhaps, in about the same way that chemotherapy on a stage 4 cancer patient is anti-growth.

And the patient is still chain-smoking.

It seems as a society we have chosen palliative care; we would like to forgo the treatment and just be made as comfortable as possible before the damage is totally overwhelming and we reach organ failure and death

Do you know how much of a settlement patients get for experiencing Chemotherapy when their cancer diagnosis was false and they went through the harrowing experience because an expert misdiagnosed the source of their problem? High 6 figures. low 7 figures.

Again, the current stage of climate change we are in is analogous to stage 4 cancer.

Don't pretend climate change isn't real. It is already impacting humanity today.

What I'm arguing is that we need aggressive negative emissions. In case it's not obvious this means not only stop putting carbon in the atmosphere but also removing what's already there.

I'm all for growth as long as we don't deplete the Earth and don't cook ourselves to death.

Reaching net-negative, or even net-zero, won't be happening anytime soon, obviously, but it's far from true to think that no-one's doing anything.

> To stop major, major climate impacts

Yeah, no, that ship has sailed.

I never said no one was doing anything. I said no one is doing enough to make any significant difference in the outcome. Maybe it is enough to shift things around a couple years! That isn’t nothing.

But even if 100% of the population stopped driving cars and ordering on Amazon or whatever, that isn’t going to stop it either.

Well yeah because cars are at the most like 10% of global emissions.

And because of climate lag, we're still only experiencing the effect of emissions from a couple of decades ago. Plus there are climatic feedbacks to take into consideration which nobody really knows with certainty how these will react in the coming decades.

> The denial is interesting. In the developed world, it's only a significant factor in the US, Canada, and Australia

It depends on where the denial is hitting. E.g. plastic straw bans are made fun of, probably legitimately. Anything that is something an individual can do and feel good about is often not something that will be effective compared to the massive amount of pollution and waste being generated through the general uplift of people out of poverty.

In terms of the US: they're leading the way with Tesla on electrification of vehicles, which is a great, large-scale solution to a big source of pollution (or if not a solution, a key element in the larger solution). Canada and Australia I know less about.

Plastic straw bans are nothing much to do with global warming; they're a general hand wave-y "good for the environment" thing (and, like, they are, but not in a particularly impactful way).

> they're leading the way with Tesla on electrification of vehicles

... Eh? I'm not sure that's really particularly clear; Tesla is in global terms a fairly small part of the market, and the EU and China are both significantly outdoing the US on actual adoption of electric cars. That said, as above, the US is generally doing fairly well on emissions reduction, better than people often give it credit for (albeit partially accidentally due to cheap gas).

However, my point was that the US (and the other two) are unusual in that significant numbers of people there, with a significant political voice, believe that anthropogenic climate change is _not a thing_ (or in extreme cases that climate change period is not a thing). This is unusual.

> Plastic straw bans are nothing much to do with global warming

What I was saying was the "climate denialists", being a label applied by people who disagree with them, including on things like straws, is an extremely broad church, and not very useful for actually describing what people think.

> Tesla is in global terms a fairly small part of the market

Can you cite?

We posted almost the same comment. I do disagree with one point. The US is the country with the most global power and is instrumental in driving global change so I really disagree that they do not hold a huge responsibility.

I mean, Germany is trying to lead by example, but their attempt is pathetic. Nobody is going to care what Germany does and they do not have the economic and political power to enforce global change. But the US does.

I am not saying the US can do it alone, but it has to show both initiative and willingness.

Not only that, but people see Germany as being fundamentally unserious about climate change when they retire nuclear and keep burning insane amounts of destructive brown coal. I don’t think the electricity mix is even significantly cleaner than the US’s

EDIT: confirmed, the US had 365grams of CO2 per kWh (805lbs per MWh) but Germany had 385g per kWh in 2022.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290224/carbon-intensity...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1247991/annual-power-sec...

People see Germany as a foolish naive nation which is currently hurting itself economically and making a clown of itself. It is having the opposite of the desired effect. Other countries will be more hesitant to transition to green technologies when they see Germany suffering.

Really? Which countries would those be? All the European countries that have far higher renewable use than Germany?

No one considers Germany a leader in renewables. It's just a straw man for the nuclear fanboys.

Germany sees itself as a leader in the green transition even if this is not factually correct.

Oh, well you don't have to worry about other countries being put off by Germany's decisions, because no one else does. Good news, eh!

It's not like Nord Stream 2s destruction was the single largest act of industrial sabotage in human history, alongside the single largest carbon emission in human history. Being complicit in one pipeline being bombed could undermine decades of progress in a single moment.

Good question, I just checked. The numbers I can find for 2022:

Renewables: US: 21.5% Germany: 44%

Nuclear: US: 18.2% Germany: 6%

Fossil: US: 60.2% Germany: 45.9%, 20.1% from lignite (brown coal)

So pretty clear win on the renewables for Germany. Adding Nuclear for "clean energy" it's still pretty ahead. However, Fossil in the US is mainly gas, which is cleaner than lignite. Hard to quantify.

Sources: US: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3 Germany: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

It’s not actually that hard to quantify. Per kWh, the US got 365g of CO2 per kWh (804lb/MWh) in 2022 compared to 385g/kWh for Germany.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1247991/annual-power-sec...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290224/carbon-intensity...

That's just electricity generation, which is only a portion of total energy usage. Both countries use about 15% renewables overall. The exact number is hard to measure, complicated by importation and exportation of energy and other factors.

German electricity mix is ~50% renewable (https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?...).

US renewables + nuclear ist at ~40% (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/03/us-electricity-energy...).

Also note the growth rate: German renewable electricity fraction went from 26% to 50% while the US went from 12% to 23% (since 2012). So they appear significantly more serious about climate change than the US.

Total CO2/capita/year is also significantly higher for the US (15 tons vs 9 tons, approx.)

Yeah, but total CO2/capita/year is like <4 for France.... That's where nuclear power really shines. Of course these calculations do not really capture all CO2 required for nuclear power.

Electricity mix is a fairly useless number on it's own. Especially for an industrial powerhouse like Germany. Renewable's share of total energy consumption in Germany is about 15%, and has been decreasing.

The number is the US is similar, and has been rising.

You need to be careful with these statistics because Germany is a (large) net importer of electricity. How are imports counted is not always obvious (nor should it be, Netherlands exports electricity to Germany, sometimes it's mostly solar powered, sometimes purely gas)

That certainly complicates the situation, as Germany imports and exports energy. But Germany is a net exporter, not importer, at least in 2022, but I believe it's so for most years.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/even-crisis-germany-...

Huge responsibility - sure.

Has to do anything - that statement is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Ethically/morally? Probably.

But that isn’t how international (or national!) politics tends to work!

Practically, why/when should the most powerful nation in the world, with the worlds most powerful military (fossil fuel based, no less), worlds reserve currency (due to the world using it for fossil fuel purchases, and because of the stable US economic system which is currently based on fossil fuels), etc. undermine itself exactly?

If it’s the breadwinner of the family doing the heaviest drinking, but literally everyone is also drinking, it’s going to be even harder to take the booze from the alcoholic - because no one is going to actually try, because they’re all alcoholics.

Realistically, the US will ‘have to do something’ when the current situation becomes actually nonfunctional in some real way, or it becomes so patently obvious that it will shortly become so that a sufficient majority starts being willing to make sacrifices to start the change.

Or someone figures out a way to make “everyone rich” if we switch.

Here’s hoping!

This is a question of perceived cost and benefit. I do not actually think that the US would be undermining itself if it nudged the world's economy to transition to green technologies. I think it would protect itself and even benefit economically.

Not that I used the word "perceived" in my original comment.

The issue here is that ‘nudged’ doesn’t make the actual changes necessary.

‘Nudged’ isn’t transitioning anyone’s military off fossil fuels. Or international shipping. Or major capex outlays in things like home heating when existing (fossil fuel) options are cheaper and more effective, etc. Things that require double digit percent of GDP expenditures, which are often required.

Germany tried (guilt perhaps?) and made a dent - but far from solved the problem, and is still consuming massive amounts of fossil fuels and is now burdened with debt and very high energy bills.

They cut back from a case a day to half a case a day, and are clearly unhappy about it and far from sober.

What do you mean US is the country with the most global power? India and China are polluting more than the US Annual CO₂ emissions by world region shows that China and India are responsible for a majority of carbon emissions since the year 2000, while the US and European rates have dropped in the last 23 years. India and China need to be hugely responsible as they are the ones building new coal plants https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-two-...

> The political climate is mostly about what people want.

Man someone should tell all the oil companies that are actively running campaigns to push propaganda on folks to change political opinions.

Yes, it is "what people want". You're missing the line of "How did we get to the point of people wanting this".

But instead of asking that question, you're jumping to blaming the victims and not the system that allowed a few people with money to completely change the thoughts and behaviors of millions of people.

Now you're cooking with gas!

I’m pretty sure the people voting think it’s what they want - I’ve seen some get angry if you question it too.

> . . . mostly about what people want.

Which is all marketing. Marketing is designed to influence and to make us want. We can't blame people because marketing to them works.

> If you’re ever tried to take the booze from an alcoholic, it’s obvious what’s going to happen

I don't think it is obvious what happens when you take booze away from an alcoholic. Are you aware that the absence of alcohol can kill them? Were you trying to kill them?

Often they’ll attack you while denying there is a problem.

Occasionally they’ll be okay with it. At least until the DT’s.

It’s usually not pretty either way.

And doing it too fast can kill them, yes.