Sea level much higher than assumed in most coastal hazard assessments

Which effectively means that renewable deployment in the west might still be a good idea, but not because it supposedly slows or stops global warming.

When you must look to the third derivative before you can find any trace of hope, you're not in a good situation.

If it's boring, it's because we've given up.

The US has Alaska, but if it wants more newly arable land in the future, the only options seem to be Greenland and Canada, the two places which Trump just so happens to be obsessed with annexing.

The vast majority of new electricity generation installed in the US over the last 15 years has been wind and solar. That naturally results in fossil fuels being fazed out when existing power plants age and thus need to be replaced. 70% of US electricity came from fossil fuels in 2010, that dropped to 60% by 2020. More significantly it mostly swapped to natural gas which emits far less CO2/KWh than coal.

We could go faster but the tail end of the curve represents a small fraction of the CO2 vs the peak. Even natural gas is facing severe pressure from ultra cheap battery backed solar. More importantly natural gas power plants don’t last nearly as long so will get fazed out much faster.

EV’s are also about more than tailpipe emissions, making and transporting gasoline is quite harmful before it ends up in a gas tank.

We absolutely have the capacity, it's just being given to already wealthy families to ensure their wealth is contained to themselves rather than the country.

At present, the bare economics of it, without any subsidies, put solar as the most cost-effective new power capacity to add.

Last year—2025, the first year of Trump's second term—something like 90% of all new generating capacity in the US was solar. Even with his active antipathy toward it.

There no longer needs to be a massive movement willing to pay more for energy just to get it decarbonized. All we need is for the fossil fuel industry and the people in its pay to get out of the way.

History is full of examples, but maybe not explanations, of the type of behavior coming out of the current administration in the US. They’re not particularly special, or extraordinary, by any measure. They’ve simply made the decision to hit the “defect” button over and over again like a teenage boy discovering porn for the first time.

And since the adults that preceded them were reasonable and responsible, they built up plenty of rules and norms, creating many opportunities to now hit “defect”.

The status quo's power rests on its institutions, stability, and the fact that it is the social norm - generally humans are tied to social norms and attack anything that violates them. The challenger, to succeed, needs to disrupt the institutions, stability, and norms, and one tactic is to just constantly attack them, regardless of the consequences, as a means to the end of taking down the status quo and gaining power.

Someone commented along the lines of "I never thought the people bringing about the destruction or the planet would be such dweeby dorks."

Part of the reason it is still far away despite the increasing prevalence of renewable sources is that not everything is a 1:1 replacement between electric power and fossil fuels, fertilizer and many of our chemical productions can be done without fossil fuels, but at 10x the energy cost that we currently use.

We like to focus on things like cars and engines, but those were always an easy win because internal combustion is only 30% efficient to start with while electric motors are 90%+. But as a source of chemical process energy not only can fossil fuel sources be more efficient than as a motor fuel, our electric energy replacement for chemical synthesis and purification is not always very efficient itself, on top of being an energy intensive product already.

I think last time I looked, which was admittedly a few years ago now, fertilizer production with fossil fuels consumed 1% of the world's electrical production, and the best anyone could hope for in synthesizing nitrogen from the air and not using any fossil fuels was at least a 10 fold increase in energy requirements. Which means clean fertilizer requires at least 10% of total world electrical production, which is obviously an ass ton. Perhaps we have slightly more efficient fertilizer synthesis now, but at the same time farmland utilization has dropped which means a higher reliance and demand for artificial fertilizer.

Of course I think this is all avoidable if we weren't complete slaves to capital markets and just built tons of nuclear reactors and solar plants even if it that means they weren't all profit makers. Energy production and availability is ultimately one of our largest bottlenecks across almost every industry and human endeavor.