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It's unstoppable because clean energy is - by far and no small margin - the most economical option to generate energy. Meaning that recessions and messing with tax incentives has a short term effect of slowing down but not stopping the transition. Regardless of any incentives, economics still apply and people use those to their advantage.

We've long crossed the point where renewables are dependent on incentives to make them economical. IEA is known for their conservative predictions. So, them saying that this might be true means it's basically a done deal and that they can no longer deny this is happening.

Other side effects of recessions and fossil fuel price induced inflation include increased price sensitivity for things like oil and gas. Those things suddenly getting very expensive are a main driver of people wanting to reduce their dependence on those things.

I don't get your vehicle emissions formula. How does the years of service reduce the emissions when literally every mile you drive them blows more emissions out of the tailpipe? If anything, that only gets worse for older vehicles because their engines wear out and the fuel efficiency drops. Tail pipe emissions are gigantic for these vehicles. This is not reduced in any way by the years of service. Any year you drive these things longer, you add to that. It's a cumulative effect. You drive 15000 miles in an old car in a year doing 10 miles to the gallon (which would be very nice for an old car), that's 1500 gallons of fuel in a year. That's a lot of CO2 emissions and other pollution. Add to that oil changes, new parts, etc. And it only gets worse.

And the economics of this are that have to buy that fuel. Every year. Depending what state you are in that could be as much as 5$/gallon. So, 7500/year. The economics of that are pretty terrible. Adds up to a new Tesla Model 3 in about 5-7 years basically. That's excluding maintenance of course. Also not nothing for an old car.

> It's unstoppable because clean energy is - by far and no small margin - the most economical option to generate energy.

That's the reason why Germany and Denmark have one of the most expensive electricity prices in EU?

Germany has very high taxes on electricity:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/ber...

It also doesn't help that Germany still uses a lot of gas and coal, the two most expensive common sources of electricity.

Does not matter what makes energy expensive. Germans are losing competitiveness of their own industry... because German energy is expensive. If those are just taxes, it should be easy to just slash them? But they are not doing that.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-economy-minister...

Price and cost are two things. Cost is about the same everywhere. Somebody has to pay for it. The way energy markets work you pay for that indirectly via taxes, subsidies, and other incentives. And you pay some of it directly via whatever price the energy has. And some of the cost is offloaded on future generations via loans or simply deferring spending on e.g. nuclear storage, cleaning up oil spills, and dealing with global warming. That trillion dollar IRA in the US is going to have a cost. I'd say it's a good investment though. But it's not free.

There's a reason Danish and German companies currently dominate the exponentially growing market for wind and offshore wind. They have invested wisely into these sectors over the years. The cost for that is indeed reflected out in energy prices. That's not that different from how the US has subsidized in its energy sector via multi trillion dollar wars to secure access to "cheap" oil, lots of government subsidies flowing to oil companies, etc. Just so it can pretend to have cheap energy. And of course as renewable cost drops, those prices can come down too.

At this point a lot of the price is actually just paying for US LNG imports (production of which is subsidized in the US!) and coal imports. Getting rid of that dependence is indeed becoming more urgent for the Germans.

Does not matter how you want to defend it. German + Danish electricity is on of the most expensive in Europe, despite lot of renewables, which should have made it cheap. And it is especially stupid to defend high prices while you are trying to electrify your a car fleet.

> By far the most environmentally friendly thing to do currently is to keep existing vehicles running for longer, until they are eventually traded for something more efficient.

That is not true. The breakeven point vis-a-vis carbon emissions is 2 years, assuming the average milage of 13,500 miles. An EV is better than an equivalent new gasoline car if it drives at least 13,500 miles before being scrapped. A new EV is better than an equivalent used gasoline car if it drives at least 27,000 more miles before being scrapped.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/04/new-ev-vs-old-beater-wh...

> I'm yet to be convinced that these EV batteries will serve out the 10 years they claim

There are lots of >10 year old Leafs and Model S's on the road. And Leaf is the worst case scenario. Without temperature management they wear out a lot quicker than every other car battery does. And remember that used batteries don't get thrown out, they generally get repurposed into stationary storage. They can be recycled but generally aren't because they're too useful as is.

> And remember that used batteries don't get thrown out, they generally get repurposed into stationary storage. They can be recycled but generally aren't because they're too useful as is.

How does that work from a consumer point of view?

Say I've got an EV and it eventually needs a battery replacement. I take it to the dealer and they swap batteries and charge me $B for the new battery and $L for labor. Let's say the old battery is worth $S on the market for batteries for stationary story.

I assume that the normal procedure is that the dealer keeps the old battery after a swap. If that is the base does the $B I pay include a discount for the $S the dealer can get reselling the old battery?

If not can I tell the dealer I want to keep the old battery? If so is there some established marketplace I can then sell it for stationary storage?

The warranty on Tesla (and others similar) goes to 8yrs/120k miles. So any swap you pay for is going to be on a 120k mile+ car. At that stage, putting a new battery in is kind of lopsided. Not many people will spend 5 figures on a car that used, they'll sell it instead. And whoever buys it will probably just drive it instead of replacing the battery. A car with a battery at 70-85% of new capacity is still useful. And that'll likely continue until the car is scrapped, when the scrap dealer pulls out the battery and sells it on.

If you do want to replace the battery, I would think you're more likely to put a used battery in than a new one. And scrap dealers are normally quite open to swaps.

From the article:

> The idea is right up there with the myth that the United States is powered almost entirely by coal and that EVs are thus worse polluters than gas engines. The reality is that coal makes up about 20 to 22 percent of the national power grid.

Coal is not the only problem. Power stations can also use some forms of oil, gas (whether they call it green or not, is still a pollutant), etc. Building the infrastructure for green energy itself has a carbon footprint that takes a while to pay off.

Secondly, in the Reuters article it assumes the comparison vehicle is brand new, and starts with a carbon offset: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...

Under the assumption you already have the Toyota, and the question is "should I scrap my Toyota to buy an electric car", and the electricity is generated from 20% coal (not including other carbon sources), the answer is simply no - keep driving your old car.

> There are lots of >10 year old Leafs and Model S's on the road. And Leaf is the worst case scenario. Without temperature management they wear out a lot quicker than every other car battery does. And remember that used batteries don't get thrown out, they generally get repurposed into stationary storage. They can be recycled but generally aren't because they're too useful as is.

I think the Nissan Leaf has survivor bias - it's one electric car that was successful, plus all the ones with failed batteries are no longer on the road, you only see the good ones still driving. What's really important though is the remaining capacity. An EV that claims 500 miles that can only do 200 miles after some years will start to become a hindrance.

As the capacity of the battery drops, I imagine the internal resistance of the battery increases and more of that energy gets converted to heat. Put simply, the EV gets less efficient as time goes on. Unfortunately we don't really have good numbers for this yet.

Take the graph from the reuters article. Shift the red line down so the origin starts at 0. That represents the removal of the initial carbon offset, aka the "used Toyota" scenario. Notice that the new red line and the old green line now intersect at about year 2 instead of at year 1 like they did when the gasoline car included the carbon produced during production.

> Unfortunately we don't really have good numbers for this yet

Just survey drivers of 10 year old Model S's.

2021 article based on probably even older emission data and price points.

Battery and EV production process moves quite fast.

2C is criticized as insufficient, because even a warming of two degrees will have serious consequences for humans and the environment, as demonstrated in particular by the IPCC Special Report on the consequences of a global warming of 1.5C [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Report_on_Global_War...

This is actually spelled out in the first paragraph of the link they provided, which makes me wonder why they linked to it in the first place.

Battery manufacturing emissions are dwarfed by lifetime emissions of a gasoline powered car, according to the EPA. They do about double the emissions for manufacturing, but that's not all that much.

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths

This doesn't take away the main point of your comment of course, you're right that keeping a vehicle longer is the most impactful decision.

I drive a small car approx 3000 miles a year. Is it true for me?

Almost all the claims in your link are qualified with the word "typical"

Surely you can input the numbers yourself and find out? Just use the GREET model that is mentioned there, it exists as an Excel spreadsheet.

The mistake you're making is assuming that the only advantage of renewable energy is that it's clean and that countries are sacrificing a lot to get them installed. But that's not true, and the wars you mention have only accelerated the push for renewables. Not only are they cheaper but now there's the factor of trying to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels.

Here's an article when the war in the Ukraine started on how this will result in even more expansion of renewable energy, which is in fact what happened: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/putins-war...

Whoever wrote that was smart to predict the future - it's a bad idea to misinterpret the present.

> What makes 1.5C key? Why not 2C

This is like asking why a specific number of cigarettes per day (or a specific level of alcohol consumption) is bad — it's all bad (given we go faster than evolution can keep up), but the more you do, the greater the risk.

The reason we don't aim for "0 C" is that this is too hard, just as giving up smoking is too hard for most. Think of this as a "SMART" goal: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

As a separate point:

The timescales on [2] would make all of human history since the evolution of Homo Sapiens a single pixel. It isn't capable of supporting your claim that "earth's temperature has risen fast in the past" in comparison to that done by anthropogenic effects.

> That said, if you really want to make a dent, start tackling the shipping industry rather than the individual.

We have to do as much as possible everywhere in every aspect. This includes shipping, even though it's one of the lower-emitting sectors even when combined with aviation: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector

> The emissions from these ships is also likely directly acidifying our oceans too.

Yes, although ironically for this reason the world switched away from sulphur-rich shipping fuels about a year ago, and… the temperature immediately went up because those sulphur compounds were seeding high-altitude clouds that reflected a lot more sunlight.

> I'm yet to be convinced that these EV batteries will serve out the 10 years they claim

10 year old Model S’s have 80-90% of the original range.

Yep, most EV car batteries ever produced are still performing fine.

EV manufacturers give eight year warranties on batteries + drive trains because they basically break down so rarely that they can do so safely. 100K miles or eight years. Whichever comes first. EV batteries tend to survive the vehicle they are in and have second and third lives for e.g. grid storage before eventually being recycled.

> By far the most environmentally friendly thing to do currently is to keep existing vehicles running for longer, until they are eventually traded for something more efficient. I'm yet to be convinced that these EV batteries will serve out the 10 years they claim and they also have a higher emissions for manufacturing

Well no, the emissions threshold between both types of cars is only around 35k km on the lifetime of the vehicle. So unless you are retired and only going once per month to the nearby supermarket until you decommission the car, the most environmental friendly in most common scenarios is to get rid of the petrol car in favor of an electric one.

Part of the reason behind these results is the very high polluting petrol infrastructure and the other part is the very low efficiency of petrol cars at around 35% which certainly doesn't help.

I was originally planning to switch to an EV in 2027, but during the past three years I've been doing less than 6k km annually.

I still fire it up twice a month to do a weekend trip to places without public transport infrastructure, but that's it.

And this is the sort of edge case where it makes more sense to keep the fossil car - not your average daily user who racks up more miles annually than I do in three years.

My hope is that in the future I will be able to convert it to fully electric, since it's a hybrid.

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/ev-fossil-cars-cli...

Has graphs and data to further illustrate your point on EVs vs continued use of an ICE.

> Buying a new EV will often result in lower emissions compared to buying a second-hand petrol car unless you only plan to drive it for a year or two, or you’re driving very little.

Please see another comment (don't want to duplicate the comments on HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37998960

> By far the most environmentally friendly thing to do currently is to keep existing vehicles running for longer

Not at all. Even if that were true (it is for some vehicle classes and use cases but not generally), CO2 emissions are not the only car-related emmissions.

> The emissions from these ships is also likely directly acidifying our oceans too.

But sulfuric emmissions are actually cooling the atmosphere, so limiting them won't do anything good for the climate. And to stop global warming it would not be enough anyway.

> Then put in some regulation/tax regarding the import of materials or goods from countries that do not have good emissions standards.

Done: https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/carbon-border-adjustme...

> Not at all. Even if that were true (it is for some vehicle classes and use cases but not generally), CO2 emissions are not the only car-related emmissions.

Please see another comment (don't want to duplicate the comments on HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37998960

> But sulfuric emmissions are actually cooling the atmosphere, so limiting them won't do anything good for the climate. And to stop global warming it would not be enough anyway.

Let's start ramping up sulphur fires then /s. I don't think this is a good option. I think getting a handle on shipping would make a quick enormous dent.

> Done: https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/carbon-border-adjustme...

It's only as good as it can be enforced. Last time I checked I can still get cheap crap from China made with the worst environmental considerations.

> I don't think this is a good option.

It's certainly not a good thing to willingly emit sulfur into atmosphere, but removing such emmissions does nothing positive to battle climate change.

> I think getting a handle on shipping would make a quick enormous dent.

You can think that, but should also prove that. I think ocean shipping is quite down on the list because shipping is energy-effective. It only emits about 2.9% of total greenhouse gasses. By comparison, road transport is at about 10%.

With a global recession and wars increasingly prevalent, a lot of legislation around clean energy may be required for economic and security purposes.

Indeed. Does your country import fossil fuels? Then you're at the mercy of global energy prices. Whereas renewables lock in the purchase of energy over 20+ years with a big upfront payment.

Ironically the rise in interest rates may be the worst factor affecting the transition.

If there is local resistance against any new generation sites, storage and transmission, then renewables will be difficult to get into place while old stuff can still work - never underestimate the resistance to change.

Wars are going to play havoc with fossil fuel deliveries. Basically any place that relies on cheap overseas ship-born delivery of liquid fuels (think, Europe and much of Asia) is going to have a tough time if things get bad enough. Once built, renewable sources have no fuel needs.

" the phase down of fossil fuels is not happening quickly enough"

It is not happening net - CO2 emissions are increasing.

I have posted this on HN before, but the reaction I have got have been its depressing, rather than anything can be done about it. Look at the the lovely graph: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/03/co2-emissions-will-keep-risin....

"That said, if you really want to make a dent, start tackling the shipping industry rather than the individual."

Agreed. Reducing shipping and international transport would also make it harder to move environmentally damaging manufacturing to a country that just allows it.

"The emissions from these ships is also likely directly acidifying our oceans too."

I am glad someone is mentioning ocean acidification which I think is a bigger concern. However, I do not think it makes a difference where the CO2 is released - surely the atmosphere and ocean CO2 levels are in some sort of equilibrium (a shifting one, of course) so the result is much the same?

> Reducing shipping and international transport would also make it harder to move environmentally damaging manufacturing to a country that just allows it.

It would also make manufacturing less effective and therefore more resource-intensive.

> I would not be making such claims with a global recession and wars increasingly prevalent. A lot of legislation around clean energy may be pushed aside for economic or security purposes.

The economics of renewables are favorable in comparison to fossil fuels, even when you remove all subsidies. What makes them appear more expensive today is that the infrastructure for fossil energy carriers is already there, the one for renewables is often just being built. Obviously there is a tipping point somewhere in the future. Unfortunatly, time is the one thing we don't have.

> What makes 1.5C key? Why not 2C [1]? And is this normalised for background rise vs actual rise?

The Wikipedia link you provided alludes to the reasoning why 1.5 °C are key. The article also links to a longer piece by the IPC explaining the reasoning.

> The earth's temperature has risen fast in the past too [2].

True, the changes in temperature earth has experienced over the last 500 millions years are vastly larger than 2 °C. Only 400 millions years ago oceans were hot baths with a thriving ecosphere! From this vantage point the "there is no planet B" slogan seems less clever, agreed. Climate change will not end earth or nature in general, both will be fine. It will just end the living conditions in which humanity can thrive or even survive.

> By far the most environmentally friendly thing to do currently is to keep existing vehicles running for longer, until they are eventually traded for something more efficient. I'm yet to be convinced that these EV batteries will serve out the 10 years they claim and they also have a higher emissions for manufacturing.

There are 10-year old EV on the road today. Their batteries are still working. Even so, recycling batteries is possible and on the verge of economic feasibility. There are numerous service providers and some say there is going to be big money in it. According to Argonne's GREET model the break-point, where an EV shows a smaller overall environmental footprint versus an ICEV, is somewhere around the 20000km mark [1][5]. The environmental damage caused by an ICEV over its lifetime therefore exceeds the damage caused by an EV and it becomes worse the longer the ICEV runs. Maybe cars in general are just not the ideal solution if reducing environmental damage is the priority? I don't know. Anyhow, considering that driving ICE cars is not banned anywhere, you can go this route. Some nations have banned admitting new ICEs, but that is not the same.

> They are also only as environmentally friendly as the energy generation which is continuously under threat and very difficult to scale without significant investment.

That is actually a strength of EV. Any improvement in electricty generation and distribution is immediatly applicable to EV. And it is not hard, only expensive in terms of money. But drilling oil wells, building nuclear power plants, or coal mines is also expensive in terms of money, so what? I do not understand the remark concerning threats. How is renewable energy any more threatened than fossil fuels?

> That said, if you really want to make a dent, start tackling the shipping industry rather than the individual. This is where we make big changes quickly [3]. The emissions from these ships is also likely directly acidifying our oceans too.

This is a worthwhile target. But 1) why only do one or the other if we can do both? And 2) shipping may be causing significant damage, but there are relativly few ships around (around 100000 [2]). You get scaling effects far beyond the effect of more environmental friendly shipping when you tackle the billion+ cars on this planet, too [3].

> Then put in some regulation/tax regarding the import of materials or goods from countries that do not have good emissions standards. This would force Countries like China to clean up their act and stop Countries outsourcing their carbon emissions.

That's a good idea! Let's see how the CBAM works out. It goes into effect in January 2024. [4]

[1] https://www.anl.gov/topic/greet [2] https://unctad.org/publication/handbook-statistics-2022 [3] https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2021/06/how-many-cars-are-the... [4] https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/carbon-border-adjustme... [5] Found this later: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...

> This would force Countries like China to clean up their act and stop Countries outsourcing their carbon emissions.

It's baffling to me that China and India are missing from almost all discussion of carbon emissions. They produce more CO2 than the west combined, and it's growing. And this isn't because of emission exports, as exports from china are falling yet their emissions are growing. It's because of their growing internal consumption.

Any serious discussion needs to include them. Otherwise you are not actually trying to solve the CO2 problem, just virtue signalling or actually wanting western decline, not a global warming solution.

They are missing in large part because the participants in the discussions are typically from the west and have little to no agency in china or India.

Additionally trying to point blaming fingers at these distant countries is typically easily identified as a tactic to do less oneself and to shift blame.

Additionally it is often not brought up because (and i hope you don't mind me picking the more extreme comparison to be made.) India has a co2 output per capita about 1/10th of that of the US which should hint at the fact that the US since it's the more developed country has boatloads of low hanging fruit it could tackle. Especially since it outputs more than double per capita than let's say the EU.

Additionally it is often not brought up because after decades of outputting comparatively gargantuan amounts of co2 having those large emitters then pointing at countries not developed to the same standard and denied much of the same easy source of energy influential in achieving said development is a surefire way to get those countries to not give a single fuck and consequentially just contributes to screwing us all.

Additionally it is often not brought up because trying to draw it down to singular nationstate comparisons as if they're individual actors in all this aside from being absolutely useless and obviously dishonest innevitably leads to a comparison to some tiny petrostate which despite putting out loads of co2 and not giving a fuck still looks better in the dishonest comparison than the likes of the US.

None of those arguments hold up.

Those countries do have agency, they do participate in discussions and sign treaties, they just keep increasing CO2 emissions.

Per capita does not matter, totals do. Would it make a difference if Switzerland stopped emitting CO2 completely and no one else changes anything.

You cannot change the past, you can change the future. Unless those countries follow the same standards as the west (and very, very soon) then CO2 emissions are going to keep rising. Right now China has single companies that emit more CO2 that the whole of the UK, they are building coal powered power stations, and generally not giving a fuck. They see advantages in arctic ice melting and temperatures rising, as does Russia.

It is reasonable to say they cannot be expected to follow higher standards because they west did not, BUT only if you are willing to accept that CO2 emissions will therefore keep rising.

> Per capita does not matter, totals do.

I have no idea how this point gets brought up every time when it is so obvious to refute.

We, as a civilizations, have some amount of CO2 per year that we can emit without catastrophic consequences. You are basically arguing the US/European citizens should be allowed to emit a completely outsized proportion of that CO2 budget, which to me is very clearly unethical.

Also consider:

1) China splits into 10 individual states- suddenly their emissions don't matter anymore using your accounting?!

2) It seems absoutely obvious to me that reducing CO2 emissions by the same amount is MUCH easier if you start from a higher baseline: Saving a ton of CO2/year for a US family basically means "fewer individual trips on the second car the family owns". For an Indian rice farmer to save one ton means "no heating during winter".

It seems to me that you think "the west" is some kind of role model in CO2 emissions, and the onus is on developing nations to "follow the same standards"-- but that is complete bullshit; "the west" (especially the US) is doing much WORSE than basically every developing nation (which becomes very clear from CO2/capita numbers).

Adding to those arguments, you can include exports/imports into the CO2 emission estimation and suddenly one sees that a good part of China's CO2 emissions are for products that are exported to the EU and the US (Edit: see e.g. [0]).

So shifting high-emission production to China and then pointing the finger at China for products we consume is kinda dishonest.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-co2-embedded-in-tra...

>Per capita does not matter, totals do. Would it make a difference if Switzerland stopped emitting CO2 completely and no one else changes anything.

And here comes the innevitable counter blaming finger: Stop emitting so much then. Learn from idk ... Oman.

The funny thing is that this litteral petrostate doesn't emit much more per capita than the US either.

Australia: 18 tonne/year/capita

US: 16 tonne/year/capita

Germany: 9 tonne/year/capita

China: 8 tonne/year/capita

France: 5 tonne/year/capita

India: 2 tonne/year/capita

And, I mean, China is doing a lot of nuclear and solar buildout, building high speed rail all over the place, and is one of the world leaders in electric car adoption (the only large countries where they have a higher market share for new cars are Germany and the Netherlands). It's unlikely to ever hit US/Australia per capita rates or anything like them.

There's a lot to criticise about China, don't get me wrong; it's a totalitarian state with a horrendous human rights record. But it's probably not the largest concern when it comes to emissions.

Also, China has stated a timeline to net zero. That timeline does call for more coal short term but then a decline and phase out as they build more and more solar, hydro, and nuclear.

China can plausibly actually meet their goals on that timeline.

Compare to the US where every time control of the White House or Congress changes parties there is a good chance the US will change its climate goals, or even abandon them. A good majority of US voters want the US to seriously address climate change, but the party that doesn't want that wins about half the elections (in large part due to gerrymandering).

> It's baffling to me that China and India are missing from almost all discussion of carbon emissions. They produce more CO2 than the west combined, and it's growing.

1. The atmosphere does a very good job of mixing CO2 emissions so except possibly near large continuous heavy CO2 emitters you'll only find about a 2.5% variation in CO2 concentration around the world.

That means that a ton of CO2 emission has essentially the same affect on everyone in the world no matter where it comes from. A ton of CO2 emitted by your activity is the same as a ton from my activity, or a ton from some rural Indian villager, or a ton from some poor African country, or a ton from anyone else.

From that it follows that for any given level of slowing or reversing warming we have a total worldwide budget for CO2 emissions per year.

The question then is how to allocate that budget.

Unless you can make a good case that some people deserve a bigger share of that worldwide CO2 budget, the only sensible allocation is to give each person an equal share. If we wanted to limit emissions to current levels that works out to a bit under 5 tons per person per year.

The US is doing about 15 tons per person per year, so we are using 300% of our fair share.

China is doing 7.5 tons per person (about the middle of the range that EU countries are doing), so 150% of their fair share.

India is doing under 2 tons per person, or only about 40% of their fair share.

Cumulative emissions still came mostly from the US, Canada, EU, Australia and Japan, so the geopolitical west:

https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2

The west bootstrapped modern civilization. Other countries dont need to because cleaner technology is available now.

Modern civilization is not sustainable and that's why we have this mess.

Right, the point is its disingeuous to compare total historical CO2 output.

> The west bootstrapped modern civilization

Bootstrapped? You mean raped, pillaged, exterminated and polluted.

> Other countries dont need to because cleaner technology is available now.

'Available'? You mean poor countries have to pay rich western countries exorbitant prices to use 'clean' technology when they could simply use abundant and cheap coal, oil, etc to develop?

You act like we are trying to give underdeveloped countries free technology. No what developing regions like india, asean, africa, etc should be doing is pumping out coal, nuclear, gas, oil, fossil fuel plants and improving the lives of their people.

> You mean …

Instead of assuming what I mean, why not ask for clarification? no, I mean technology and science largely developed by the west.

> You act like we are trying to give underdeveloped countries free technology

Actually yes, rich countries give less devloped countries free technology. Billions and billions worth.

But more importantly, Information is free.

There are many less devloped countries advancing at an incredible rate, more cleanly, because of technlology and information avaialble in the modern era.

You seem a bit outraged. History isnt clean and nobody claimed it was. Ghengis Khan killed 10% of the planets population and drove the world into a global Dark Ages.

Maybe go outside and smell the roses.