If we don’t do something about this, I fear future generations will not view us in a positive light.
Or did you mean to do something differently?
There has been a lot of debate over AC use. Everyone chiming in only discusses runtime energy use.
The biggest issue is mining and manufacturing, and the moving of all the materials, parts, and such.
Every AC has sheathed wires and circuit boards.
Every airplane, car, phone, network router, refrigerator... same expansive mess creation.
Gamers complaining about disc less games despite that problem pipeline and waste.
Complaining about RAM prices despite the problem pipeline.
No one is focused on the lag effects, externalities, of billions using up an endless supply of technologies and dumping airplane smog in the atmosphere. Etc, etc, etc
Thermodynamics makes it pretty clear that energy is not gone just hanging out in the atmosphere.
Thermodynamics means we may be fucked even if we slow down; that energy in the atmosphere can only go from atmosphere into oceans, glaciers, and permafrost. There's a lot of potential energy in the Earth to release as it absorbs the heat already in the atmosphere
Tbf the issue is the user-hostile parameters of buying a diskless game. Most people would be happy to download their games if they could back them up to a thumb drive and never get locked out of them and sell the game when they’re done with it.
Seems deeply tangential, but it’s not. Blaming people for wanting a physical thing because the alternative is being further abused by a corporation - that’s a miss. Be mad at game platforms for not offering real ownership in whatever the most climate-friendly way possible. Be mad at governments for not forcing companies to cost in the negative externalities of their business.
FairTax is regressive and does nothing to stop a trillionaire from launching dick rockets to nowhere. Each rocket and launch using more resources than a poor person will their entire life.
So you oppose green tax policy on the grounds that it isn't punitive enough against rich people? A rich person living a miserly life would pay little in taxes, I see no problem with that.
I assume that you are alluding to someone specific with the rocket launching trillionaire quip. That would be the same person who helped make electric vehicles viable and also helped develop reusable rockets, far greener than one time use ones, no?
Though, I do recognise that having one regressive tax wouldn't necessarily make the entire tax-and-transfers system regressive (or even more regressive, if that tax money is spent).
But regarding your second statement. The actual problem is the greenhouse effect of CO2 and Methane in the atmosphere which traps the suns energy in our atmosphere heating up oceans, ice and landmass. The heat we produce is negligible compared to the energy the sun sends every day. The greenhouse gases are the problem. And you are right, pulling away that blanket so that more heat can dissipate into space will take a looong time (growing trees) or cost an insane amount of (clean) energy, reversing the chemical processes of burning oil, gas and coal.
But without more info, that seems like a pretty awful assumption. A lot of the stuff we export are services and high value goods that I would think have a relatively low "emissions to value" ratio compared to the lower value manufactured goods we import.
I don't know why you think that, pretty much everything we buy devolves to energy in some form or another.
And, when you look at actual data, e.g. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33812, that is exactly what you see.
Co2 parts per million are a stock, like the level of water in a bathtub. Annual emissions are a flow, like how strongly the water is flowing in.
The tub is fuller than ever before AND filling at the fastest rate ever.
The problem is that carbon energy is useful. So unless something globally beats almost all use cases then somewhere marginally it will be worth burning vs not burning it.
They do increase in rate as you said (for now).
If your stat had any sense then atmospheric carbon levels would rapidly plunge in a few centuries without humans burning carbon. They plainly don't do that.
You are right the the ocean is the largest carbon sink, and it has the negative side effect of acidifying.
If we do what we do now, what the UN IPCC is focusing on, which is lowering CO2 in the west to bring CO2 usage up everywhere else. China, India, and Africa and South Africa (hopefully) in the future then we've not just achieved nothing, we've made things worse.
It seems to me if oil keeps being dug up what we do on the usage side just does not matter unless everyone agrees to lower the total, because someone will use it. By the way, CO2 will keep increasing if we burn more than about 18 mbd (0.03% of what we use now).
This means nothing will matter unless you get US, Norway, Russia, China, and the Middle East to comply. And by comply I don't mean lowering the oil pumping, but stopping 100% (yes, technically 99.97% or more). That includes the oil they pump for their own use.
And obviously I realize this argument doesn't work. We cannot proceed along this way, it's not reasonable towards so many people, who have the right to life, an economy and energy. So we'll have to find an entirely different way to deal with these changes.
Markets are powerful. No real solution other than making market competitive alternatives such that the desire to dig up oil is simply lost. This may or may not be feasible.
However, every other sector has been rather flat in terms of emissions since the 90s. When you account for the fact that a large amount of industries have moved to China and other developing countries, the fact that emissions from industries have been flat, means that the overall consumption has gone up.
If you account for the emissions that we’ve offshored, we’d not be looking so good.
Because they outsource their dirty work. To get a true picture of US/EU emissions you need to factor in the factories in Asia that are producing their consumer goods, as well as the global transport network that supports this.
The EU has already seeing 10,000 excess deaths from climate changed caused heat waves and this is a minuscule taste of what's to come.
A very large percentage of mass extinction events have their roots in increased atmospheric CO2, but all of them on dramatically increased time scales. The closest thing in the history of the planet to what's happening to day was PETM [0] and that was only a lessor extinction event because the Earth was already quite warm (for example, there was already no polar ice at the time).
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_therm...
People aren't getting together and having children at even replacement rate (2.1)
The OECD developed countries population basically peaked a few years ago, even including migration. After the peak, they're on track to lose 300-350 million people in the following 40-50 years.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/books/review/ian-mcewan-w...
We can't. We're too late.
China (13 GT), the US (4.6 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent 51% of global carbon emissions - and at least in India's case, it is growing at a rate of 5%.
Throw in other large polluters like Russia (2 GT), Indonesia (0.8 GT), Iran (0.8 GT), KSA (0.6 GT), Brazil (0.5 GT), and Vietnam (0.5 GT) whose rate of carbon emissions is growing in the 5-10% range and you see there is no path forward.
Any amount of de-carbonization that China or the collective West does is automatically negated by the other countries I listed. At best global carbon emissions stagnate - which by default is going to lead to a 2-3 °C increase in temperatures.
That's why nothing will happen.
Developing countries like India, Indonesia, and Vietnam are continuing to expand their emissions as they industrialize. All are expected to have an GDP growth rate in the 6-8% range over the next decade, as will their peers across Asia, so the carbon footprint globally will only increase.
Even China's emissions rate aren't decreasing - they're stagnant, which is a good shift, but not enough to turn the tide given how large China's existing carbon footprint is.
Edit: can't reply
> but they're not going to expand by taking on coal and fossil fuels...
India [0], Vietnam [1], and other large industrializing nation in Asia have all doubled down on expanding coal usage over the last 6 months. And that's ignoring increased usage of NatGas and Oil.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-will-use-more-...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-looks-more-c...
But the UK and EU (the only large polluters who have even considered carbon tariffs) have largely watered them down - for example, yesterday with the UK increasing it's duty free steel quota for India [0] as Tata Steel owns much of the UK's steel capacity and demand (JLR is a Tata company). Add to that the EU's largest steel maker is owned by India's Mittal family (AcrelorMittal) and European conglomerates like Renault [1] are expanding manufacturing in markets like India, which means using Indian steel.
And all of that ignores domestic growth in all those countries. Base GDP growth rates are expected to be in the 6.5-8% for India and ASEAN despite deglobalization because domestic markets are growing.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-14/india-win...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/renault-plans-boost-indi...
I have seen the argument shift from 'That's a lie. Global warming doesn't exist. Stop pushing regulations for a non-existent problem.' To 'Maybe it does, or there is some human impact but this is all within normal variation and the climate can take some amount of pollution so stop trying to regulate it!' to, I guess the new argument of, 'It's too late so why try? We shouldn't change course because it won't matter so stop trying to regulate the problem away.' It isn't too late. Do something.
And that does nothing to stop the collective 8 GT of carbon emissions coming from India and the other countries I listed with an average emissions increase rate of around 3-5%.
Huh. "China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 1% in the final quarter of 2025, likely securing a decline of 0.3% for the full year as a whole" [1].
So "rapidly de-carbonising" is wrong. But decarbonising per se is correct.
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory, 2 (OCO-2) provides the most complete dataset tracking the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂), the main driver of climate change. Every day, OCO-2 measures sunlight reflected from Earth’s surface to infer the dry-air column-averaged CO₂ mixing ratio and provides around 100,000 cloud-free observations.The main point to be landed by that terse comment was that the world isn't merely reliant on CCP statements.
*Observing CO2 from space*: A Decade of progress from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatories (OCO-2 and OCO-3)
The take away is that the orbiting readings are bedded in reality and don't contradict what's being released as official ground numbers for China (they have ground reading networks that overlap with internationally staffed / instrument supplied networks)
(2025) A recent article published in the journal of Earth and Space Science provides a comprehensive evaluation of the latest version of the OCO-2 total column CO2 retrievals against data collected from a global ground-based network known as the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON).
~ https://www.tccon.caltech.edu/
(2026) We provide the first global comparison between OCO-2/3 with COCCON observations to evaluate the mean differences between the ground- and space-based data sets and identify regions where these differences are most pronounced.
Sure, I gave you that. But you went further. China is not “rapidly de-carbonizing right now.” It’s forecast to start rapidly decarbonizing in the next decade.
Not sure what your point is, just posting lies?
Ordinary plebs trying to prevent climate change is like subtracting $100 from a billion dollars - it does not make any meaningful difference.
Ultimately consumption is 2/3s of all emissions, and the majority of it is not billionaires.
And, if some do, do they not maximise that profit by seeking to maximise the consumption of others?
It stops making any difference if everyone stops trying. You compare this to subtracting $100 from a billion, but a billion dollars is composed of 10 million $100, and there's only a few rich people in those 10 million.
we were sorta going to do something about it, but then we invented LLMs and now nobody cares because $$$ and AI is shiny
> I fear future generations will not view us in a positive light.
you can be sure that they already will curse us