All we needed to do was stop burning fossil fuels we really are fucking dense.
In the UK and other European countries, I see every month we're breaking records on the percentage of power generated from renewables.
Check out https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live - it shows the UK is currently generating 30%+ of it's power from solar, which is incredible.
Batteries have only recently-ish gotten energy dense and cheap enough for electric cars to be competitive, completely different solutions are needed for long distance shipping by sea or air.
It's the same situation across many other sectors like agriculture, construction and waste management. Lots of things causing emissions that's not electricity generation.
If we just wait around forever for a perfect solution to appear, then we'll simply be waiting around forever. That's not the path of progress.
We'll never stop burning fossil fuels -- not in our lifetimes, anyway. They're too useful.
Like: Cement kilns. They're ridiculously intensive of energy, and they're necessary. They burn approximately everything, from coal and natural gas to heavy fuel oil and petcoke to used tires. About the cleanest thing I've heard of them burning is old railroad ties, which isn't really so great either. :)
But if we solve some of the other big industrial users and mostly leave the cement factories, then that's... that's actually pretty good.
And we can make cement with electricity. There are companies working on scalable processes to accomplish exactly that. Electricity has just historically been very cost-prohibitive compared to alternatives in the cement-making world for it to be practical.
But! If we'd landed in the age of cheap electricity instead of this timeline, then that process would probably have been solved long ago; the incentives would have been so great that solving it would be inevitable.
And it really may have once been possible at one point to have steered things in that direction, and it even may still be possible today. But we're certainly not there (yet?).
Why would you support a system that you recognize makes it impossible to do the right thing even as we're dying from its consequences?
Value for who? Value as determined by who?
> Finally please give chapter and verse for the 'dying'.
You're commenting on it right now. Rivers here are drying out. Glaciers are melting. Forests are burning. How long do you think we can keep going like this?
> Maybe compare the world of 2026 with that of 1900 and the quality of life for people in general and our concern for the life on this planet.
You can compare the results of those 126 years right here: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/01/23/learning/GlobalTe...
Regarding your quality of life claim, let me refer back to the burning forests, drying rivers etc. Would you call that an improvement?
Clearly, its not going great. And action is actively being sabotaged by the most capitalist major power: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/climate/trump-climate-int...
So how do we proceed with all this in mind?
How long can we keep optimizing for capital self-reproduction at the expense of the base conditions we survive on? The incentive structure does not allow for making the systemic changes required for continued thriving of humanity. What good is it then? How is it anything but a suicide pact?
Value for us, real people who have needs. We decide what we want to buy and not some apparatchik on their pedestal.
>>Rivers here are drying out. Glaciers are melting. Forests are burning.
As if this never happened before capitalism?
The values of the poor are not reflected. The values of the indigenous are not reflected. The values of the non-capitalist are not reflected. The value of the unborn is not reflected. The value of nature is not reflected.
The glacier doesn't participate in the market and neither does the river. Are they without value?
> As if this never happened before capitalism?
That's correct. Look at the graph I posted above, you'll notice that things weren't always this hot. Before capitalism they sure weren't.
That is just straight up not true. The tribal elder in the Amazon, who's forest capitalists are burning down never got asked how he defines value. The child not yet born was never asked if it's atmosphere should be heated up for data centers. Neither was the fish in the river or the river itself for that matter.
> what do you mean by rivers, glaciers or others not participating in the market?
I'm not sure what's unclear. The glacier melts as a result of somebody who's not the glacier deciding "value" on a market. In reality, the market doesn't decide value. Value is not price. The market decides power structures and violence distribution. The glacier has a value completely separate from the market, and not derived from it.
> There were a lot of natural disasters
Why are we pivoting to natural disasters now?
So I'd appreciate if we stopped pretending the market did, when it fails to account for anything that's not somebody with money.
How could it possibly assign "value" that way?
Run inaccurate pricing of carbon emissions long enough and something bad is bound to happen. Same ordeal with cattle ranching & agriculture to feed it in the Amazon basin: >20% of the 55-million-year-old Amazon rainforest has been degraded for cattle in the past 55 years, partially because consumers don't pay accurate prices and producers don't pay accurate costs.
The unwillingness to merely partially solve obvious market failures via accurate pricing is a catastrophic hypocrisy in those among us who thump their chests about 'free markets' while conflating the concept with modern capitalism.
Though my version of capitalism isn’t the libertarian free market one, libertarianism will always evolve into oligarchy or something fascistic given enough time, it’s just baked into the incentives.
My personal ideology aligns with a managed capitalism, markets are created by an authority that ensures the incentives aligns with its overall goals. Mixed with very liberal social values.
I don’t know if that can survive overtime though. And that would very likely degenerate into something else when under stress.
As I said, I feel conflicted. But I appreciate the question
You seem like a thoughtful dude, kudos.
I fully agree with your assessment about capitalism devolving into either fascism or some sort of feudalism.
I, too, have been struggling with what a more just system could look like.
Personally, some aspects of Yugoslav worker self-management appeal to me.
Basic idea is: Companies compete on a market, but theres no stock market. Companies <= 5 employees can be run however the founders envisioned, past that boundary the board and exec suite are required to be elected by the workers.
Combined with state grants and regulations to direct the overall direction of the economy, I feel like it solves for a lot of issues of shareholder capitalism without swapping them for a whole separate set of Commissariat problems.
Of course, the state itself wasn't democratic in Yugoslavia and it suffered from ethnic tensions that ultimately tore it apart. But we don't need to copy their setup wholesale.
Wonder how you'd feel about something like that?
Inflation was horrendous in many countries, including lots of very capitalist ones. Think Weimar Germany for a famous example, or the Latin American debt crises of the 80s and 90s for ones contemporaneous with Yugoslavia (note also the IMF involvement here)
In the case of Yugoslavia, there's a good argument to be made that the root cause were western trade barriers as part of the successful plan to push it into IMF loans that could then be used to dismantle the country.
Anyways, why are we even religitating the 20th century? We need to be looking forward and figuring out a solution to the crisis right in front of us instead of going all cold war again. The forest are burning right now. The rivers are running low right now. Yugoslavia, however you may feel about it, ended decades ago.
And surely, you know that as well. Then why this farce? Ideological commitment?
Could you please be a bit more constructive and solutions-oriented?
The rivers are drying out. I'm sure you saw the news. Can we please not derail this to talk about your pet topic? The Cold War is over, move on. We got our own problems in the 21st century.
Every system is potentially broken, there is always room for it to go extreme in some way. The last thing I would want in Europe is for of unhinged corrupted oligarchy that US has - common folks are squeezed like there is no tomorrow, crappy healthcare and expensive education, almost no chance to escape their allotted class within system based on income ('american dream' is not really... realistic to be polite and I could easily use a word 'lie' there, just to keep poor desperate masses in check around the elections or during crises). Maximization of pure income to suffer in literally every single other aspect that makes society a well working society long term - no thank you, we can and do get it better overall.
So one has to be realistic, there is no ideal system, Swiss system of minimal centralized power that is frequently changing hands is, as many things Swiss had come up with, IMHO the most resilient for the future. Any counter-argument to that can be easily dealt with the reality of frequent public votes on all major topics. If you follow their politics a bit its lightyears ahead of typical cesspool US or EU politics had become daily. But one can't have this system (or any other) without underlying population making it work, day by day, out in the streets. Swiss have it working, work actively and hard on preserving it as much as possible, again not something I see elsewhere, certainly not in EU.
Despite what people keep repeating on the internet, capitalism is a very general idea, and growth at all costs is not a value from it exactly.
https://www.cfainstitute.org/insights/articles/private-equit...
The US is busy sending warships across the planet to blow up oil refineries which will be rebuilt. It's not bad enough we are busy grinding sand, but we are actively making things worse.
Republicans are the bad guys right now.
>If only China and US could get their shit together....
If people in the US are still consuming multiples more than people in other societies, then a decrease of 36% means the US still does not have their shit together. Presumably, zahlman's response of pointing out the 36% decrease was a refutation of fHr's claim for China and US to get their shit together.
Although, also funny is that the US's 36% decline is partly (significantly?) due to exporting CO2 emissions from manufacturing to China, but that applies to the rest of the world too.
They didn't have to agree to it, you know. But you can look at consumption-based carbon accounting and still get a picture that the US is, indeed, getting its shit together.
But we all know the voting majority wants to consume. It doesn’t take decades to come down to still being 2x or more than other developed countries.
There are ~200 countries, of course on average your country will be less than .5% of emissions. Thinking .5% is small enough to do nothing is exactly the kind of thinking that leads us to inaction.
So yeah, china and the US need to get their act together, but so does every other country.
Developed countries hiding behind the fact that their contribution is small. Of course it's small...
For context in France we regularly hear about how France is responsible for only less than a percent of global emissions. That's specifically what my argument is against.
Granted fossil fuels are much more ubiquitous than CFCs and comparatively more difficult to replace, but we have prior art for changing industrial practices in the interest of improving climate conditions.
Oh, boy. There was a huge number of loud people complaining about that.
And worst thing is that most of them only knew about the CFCs being replaced years after it stopped being in sprays.
This isn't even true at a local level, let alone at the global scale.
Look around the thread at how people are treating each other, and then keep in mind that HN is probably like 99th percentile for civility on the Internet in this regard.
Look at what happens in threads about any other politically charged issue, for that matter. Heck, look how far the discussion will veer into politically charged off-topic matters, whenever the OP is about some meta-level "how to be convincing" "how to argue fairly" etc. point.
We could have traditioned our grids off of fossil fuels but we also depend on them for fertilizer to feed the world and for transportation which, until very recently, didn't have a viable alternative.
The fertilizer thing is a perfect example. We don't need to extract, refine, and burn nearly as much fuel as we do to get the fertilizer we need. People make the same empty argument about the cheap plastic shit that dominates the economy as if the world didn't exist before cheap plastic shit and couldn't exist after.
To be fair to past humans the deliberate lies and misinformation didn't really start until the 1970s, the oil crisis of that decade, the coming together of the UN to recognise the issue following the geophysics papers of the 1960s that nailed the CO2 problem against oil consumption, etc.
That's the period in which Koch money started flowing to think tanks and agencies that spun hard against smaller cars, public transport, integrated rail in cities, etc. The push for bigger cars as freedom.
Arrhenius' 1896 Model of the Greenhouse Effect didn't exactly have enough bite to kick of anti-prop in 1926, the world had other pressing issues.
Also worth noting that Three Mile Island was an earlier stain on public perception that kicked in a power station slow down well before Chernobyl.
Regarding the nuclear FUD, I'm not backing down. We'll never know how much the fear of nuclear was grassroots and how much was turf, but we can know for sure that someone didn't want Americans to have energy independence.
Didn't help that nukes didn't make good civil engineering tools or help conquer space by farting out tiny bombs.
Even Carl Sagan was pushing the nuclear should not be used primal back brain reaction by over hyping (?) nuclear winter for a disarmament argument.
The world is a lot bigger than the US and they've all followed pretty much the same trajectory the last two decades. A slow long term investment in R&D/manufacturing techniques, followed by increased adoption when it became economically competitive. Combined with varying levels of government incentives and measured regulation, to ease transitions so it doesn't destroy the economy which we still depend on for everything else.
These major shifts always happen slowly then start exponentially growing once it's demonstrated to be practical.
China won there because they can build things, they are also built 60+ nuclear reactors over the past decade. That's the main difference between them and the west. It's not a lack of government grants for green R&D.
They made renewable energy affordable for both themselves and others... by allowing industry to operate efficiently and affordably.
Tesla couldn't build a Lithium Battery plant in California for their electric cars because made it impossible via environmental air regulations. But now the west is benefiting from Chinese production.
105m range on nimh which rapidly degrades isn't a fully viable car and a maximum of 1000 people "loved" it considering that's all they made.
GM is in business to make money. They didn't cancel a car that was a viable product.
To pick one example: Once Studebaker decided to branch into self-going car territory, they were selling electric cars[1] nearly a century before GM's EV-1 project started delivering vehicles.
They were reasonably-reliable and they plugged into an outlet at home to recharge. Easy-peasy. But the range sucked: 40 miles is useful, but is just not very good for a lot of things that don't require any imagination to realize.
They did a lot better selling gas-fired cars than they did plug-in electric models[2], and this happened without requiring political conspiracy.
Anyway, it's 2026 and the range problem is solved well-enough for many folks. :)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studebaker_Electric
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studebaker#End_of_horse-drawn_...
I can think of a lot of countries where it wasn't a factor, maybe because if you are a rational economic actor trying to decide to throw money and messing with what people believe you can concentrate on just the biggest country that everybody does what it says. I mean what would be the point in convincing a large part of the Danish population that climate change wasn't real? It seems like it would be inefficient.
on edit: rational in this context is just using money in a way that maximizes the result one gets while minimizing the expenditure, in case anyone was getting ready with a clever rebuttal.
But if trusted leadership told everyone that we were roasting the planet instead of telling them we weren't and that roasting the planet is un-American, you can bet your sweet ass we'd have some green and nuclear energy going by now.
that article links to the dod's own reporting.
What you said is much more vague and could be reasonably interpreted to mean “the DoD uses more fossil fuels than the entire country of China,” which seems intuitively false.
It's like being in a traffic jam and complaining about the other people in the traffic jam... Dude, you're one of them.
A single cow alone requires lots of crop, water, and produces tons of methane (which is 200 times more dangerous than carbon dioxide).
Fishing is another earth destroying endeavor. A single boat, a single one, practicing bottom trawling is more dangerous to the environment than the emissions of tens of thousands of cars. In a single day it can have the same impact of deforestation on an area big as a montain.
Seriously, stop believing the fossil fuels gaslighting. They are indeed a problem, but the cause for climate change is all of our toxic habits and our incapacity to say "enough", take the bus or eath healthier (for us and the planet).
The problem is: when it comes to industrial food production, both fish and meat are insanely taxing on the environment.
But people, we, *don't want to accept that how they eat destroys the planet*
I can understand that. I already have many thoughts and problems, do I also have to feel guilty for what I consume and eat?
But it's the reality, and focusing on transport alone is the narrative that keeps accelerating how fast we kill the planet.
And the ideal, carbon-neutral reality is difficult to stomach: We humans just go back to the old ways (maybe the stone age is about the right period), wherein:
We build some stuff out of rocks (which themselves are difficult to form without even so much as copper tools). We use trees and plants where we have them (and we tend to die off when the use becomes unsustainable).
We grow and produce what we can on our own, and we do not tend to travel very far to trade for other things.
When the weather regionally turns ugly for a season or two, as it must eventually do, we have no fallback plan other than to starve until our numbers decrease to something that can be sustained (which may be zero).
We did all that stuff once. I don't think anyone really wants to go back to those methods.
So we do change what we can, where we can tolerate that change: It may be contradictive in some ways to charge up an EV at home with solar power and then make a special trip in that EV to pick up some cheeseburgers, but it's still an improvement over changing nothing at all.
And sure: We can do even better than that. We can build neighborhoods that are safe and efficient to walk or bike in so that it's more practical to get a cheeseburger without driving, and promote more of them by actually choosing to live in them. We can choose to eschew cheeseburgers altogether. There's lots of things we can do. There's a lot that we are doing.
(And I'm going to think about many of those ways this afternoon, in just a couple of hours after the weather dries up some, as predicted by our amazing computing-machines. I'll wash my hands with clean running water from the pipeline that runs all the way to my kitchen both before and after I get some prefabulated burger patties out of my grid-powered freezer and fire up the propane grill.
I'll do all of this while I bask in the unbridled decadence of not having had any opportunities to form memories of nearly running out of food as the yet another winter tirelessly wore on.
After that, I think I might work some on getting networked audio happening with Dante on my Linux desktop. I've got time for that kind of thing, since I'm not out tending the fields and chasing away the thieving poors with a stone hoe.)
What we need to do is all stop buying next day delivered pieces of plastic produced in Chinese factories. Boycotting Temu and Amazon and shopping at your local stores is the one massive thing the average person can do to help the planet.