I remember all the hate USA got when it didn't sign the Kyoto Protocol. Its emissions have fallen ever since then, despite population rising by a quarter.
Done and dusted, problem solved.
Edit: I got a "posting too fast" nonsense message. So here is my response to "solar is cheaper than coal, they are fools":
China has a TON of solar panels and batteries. They make most of them. So they apparently think coal is worth it anyway. If coal was more expensive or worse overall, theu would be absolute suckers to ship their product to us.
Solar is already far cheaper than coal for new installations, and the price is still falling.
Up until this year coal has been cheaper than batteries for this task. That changed this year and they're now building some very large battery farms and i invasive their coal builds will drop.
This is an under-considered point: just because energy sources like coal or solar, etc. are being installed NOW doesn't mean they will be there forever. Here in the UK, there is often a lot of opposition to solar and wind farms. But I would expect those eventually to be phased out in the same way as coal once better/cheaper forms of generation come along.
If AI and crypto use 2% of a country's electricity, that's a big deal relative to the average growth in electricity usage of 1% per annum.
But the challenge is converting 100% of the power to carbon-free. If you can do 100% you can do 102%.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/30/end-of-an-e...
2021 reversed this trend. Guess why?
I think you may be surprised here.
Regardless, you also probably aren't accounting for the well known https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox that means you can't expect to reduce energy use through efficiency gains. Energy is too important to raising quality of life, people invariably find uses for it unless the cost goes.
It’s like saying “John refused to do chemotherapy yesterday and he’s still alive today”.
Yeah, he had some improvement. That doesn’t mean anything about whether or not a certain action would have led to more improvement or not.
Further, specifically regd. The Kyoto protocol, the largest economy in the world not signing the Kyoto Protocol or exiting the Paris agreement has massive knock on effects on other countries as well. Their leaders will find it much more difficult to push better policies and can easily refuse being bound to actual targets because why should they do it if the largest economy in the world doesn’t.