Oceans hit highest temperature on record (bbc.com)

Western democracies at this point can't do anything at that even hints at minimally inconveniencing 5% of the population. Any 5% at that. We are stuck in local maximum even if it slowly and surely slides into the shitter

The EU is not "most at risk" compared to eg south Asia, the middle east, parts of Africa, etc; and this idea that AMOC collapse will turn Europe into a glacier is a blatant exaggeration that does not root itself in reality.

I suspect that unless there is a consensus or at least a large majority in favor of it, nothing will be done.

Lets say the EU does geoengineering and then there are crop failures in India the next year. Their fault or not, they are going to get blamed for it and actions taken. The EU would become the scapegoat for any kind of weather/climate issues in future.

This is the trolley problem done at a global scale.

I don't think that's the popular reasoning those downvoting have taken to. Can you think of reasons other than they think doing nothing sounds like a great plan people might be downvoting about? If not, I could share a few concerns with the approach that come to my mind (if it helps). It would have been nice if more of those people just commented directly instead of downvoting and moving on.

I agree with you. We are actually at huge risk. "Western Civilization" rose out of our stable European climate and that is over now.

However, we need a global consensus for geoengineering. That's just how that works... the Jet Stream. Meanwhile one country believes that global warming is a benefit, aka Russia. They currently appear to have control of the West.. so what in the actual f?

For a far more dire diatribe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49427651

What could possibly go wrong?

They can't do anything, everything is in China's hands and the EU does not have the hard or soft power to make China do or not do anything.

Spoken as if climate engineering were an established science with no potential pitfalls or downsides...

Wow, guy on internet solves problem within seconds. And you didn't even have to visit the site. Incredible.

> Keep the freshwater, use it for irrigation etc.

In this scenario, haven't you poured a bunch of ocean water into the lake? I don't see how to can fill the locks with ocean water and not have it pour into the lake.

So putting the technical critique aside, are you blaming the BBC for accurately reporting how the canal functions?

> The operation as currently described is so inefficient, even for the 1960's!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal

Construction began: 1 January 1881

Date completed: 15 August 1914

> The energy released when lowering can be stored either in gravitational energy of a mass, or be used to power a second parallel lock operated in counter phase (so while one lock is lowering ships say eastwards, the energy is used to raise ships traveling westwards, and afterwards their roles reverse). To speed up a second gravitational potential energy store (and optional flywheel) can be used to accelerate and decelerate the pumping.

if the canal didn't exist, and we were designing it as a greenfield project in 2026, that would definitely be a design worth considering.

could it be retrofitted onto the existing canal? sure, in theory.

in practice, they currently handle 36 ships per day, and lowering that limit by just 2-4 per day is significant enough that it makes international news [0]

so whatever retrofitting you have in mind, the construction would need to be done completely non-invasively, without disrupting the daily operation of the locks. it's nowhere near as simple as you're making it out to be.

0: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/08/21/panama-...

Does your hypothesis predict that Texas would be one of the most renewable-energy-heavy states in the U.S.?

It's funny that environmentalists would rather see the world burn than solve all emissions problems with nuclear.

Climate change is Schroedingers extinction event. It's only bad when you can solve it with solar panels and wind. It's nothing to worry about when you can solve it with fission and eventually fusion.

Man, the knee-jerk downvotes for this are awful.

One can observe a problem while not advocating support for it.

It is quite true that energy decision making has been tremendously politicized, and I don't think that's good for anyone.

So you’re saying we could significantly cut energy use globally by limiting data center build outs?

1.5% is a //huge// amount. If it was a “drop” in your bucket, it would only hold 67 more of those drops.

1.5% of electricity, not energy

that would be 0.3% of global energy use

1.5% of electricity. That's a significant difference. Only about 1/7th of all our energy usage is electricity

1.5% of global energy use would be a shocking amount. Aviation is at about 3%. 1.5% of global electricity is about 0.2% of global energy use, a much more manageable figure

Ah yes, "just" 485 TWh, equal to all electricity consumption of Germany. Drop in the bucket

Wow, even with that being electricity rather than energy, that's orders of magnitude more than I would have guessed. That's a tremendous amount of electricity.

> ~3x the energy of running an LED light for 5 minutes.

Why would this not be the energy of running an LED light for 15 minutes?

When all is said and done, data centers are going to be complimentary to green energy. They can spin up and down to buffer non-linear power nodes.

They also represent investment in economic growth that doesn't come from resource extraction or travel or manufacturing.

Laptop use and LED light use (and most other uses of electricity) are not increasing so rapidly that they can not be accommodated by the normal expansion in electric system capacity that has been part of long term planning for quite a while.

Instead much of it is being handled by bringing new fossil power plants on line that would not have been built if not for all the new data centers.

The other things that are causing significant increases in electricity use, like more people getting heat pumps and EVs, are all very spread out and so are much less likely to force new fossil fuel power plants.

You are looking at the acceleration but without looking at the initial state.

A more fair metric would be Co2 emissions/person and I’m getting

USA 14.3 t, China 8.8 t, EU 5.5 t, India 2.2 t

You said "modernization of existing plants" but quoted "New coal-fired plants."

China's 2025 five year plan targets peak coal before 2030 and might have already reached it in 2026. https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-tre...

You can't compare capacity without comparing capacity factors too.

Could China and India get more electricity by investing the same amount in new solar production instead of coal?

> The US isn't expanding fossil fuel extraction, its quite the opposite.

Not according to the federal government's data. BTUs from fossil fuel production set a record last year and is on a faster pace this year. Your bringing up a few coal plants is only tangentially relevant.

https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec1_3.pdf

> The US could switch every ICE vehicle to EV's and install solar and wind turbines in every inch of the country and it won't combat what's going on in China, India and other developing countries that rely on coal for cheap energy.

Are you familiar with the concept of necessary but not sufficient?

In any event the war with Iran is speeding up the future that was coming anyway. China's EV and solar exports are surging throughout the world. Both China and India have said for many years that their emissions would rise and then fall.

> The US could switch every ICE vehicle to EV's and install solar and wind turbines in every inch of the country and it won't combat what's going on in China, India and other developing countries that rely on coal for cheap energy.

"Today the US government announced CO2 tariffs against polluting nations - products sold in the USA need to be produced in carbon-neutral manner or face punishing taxes.".

Pipe dream, of course, because the populace will vote for the guy offering cheap instead of sustainable...

The quote you pulled for China is conveniently 3 years old and missing the global context that it was in response to supply issues with other fossil fuels, not a reflection in meeting demand.

These charts address your points:

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india

India is a bit more concerning for a number of reasons (lower per capita income means they are lower on per-capita emissions currently and hence have more room to grow, and they don't have the resources that China does to build out renewables) but criticizing China from a renewables perspective (there are a whole lot of other valid reasons to criticize them) is insane.

China installed more solar in 2025 than the IS has in total.

There are several problems with this.

First, you are ignoring gas. The US stopped building coal plants because of the fracking boom. That gave the US huge sources of natural gas which was cheaper than coal.

China has little natural gas but abundant coal, so when they need fossil fuel for something they cannot yet do with renewables they use coal whereas the US uses gas.

Second, you are looking at number of plants, but not looking at capacity factor (which is a measure of how much they are actually used). The new Chinese coal plants have lower capacity factors. They are being built as backups and peakers rather than baseload, designed (or retrofitted in the case of existing plants being upgraded) to be able to cycle up and down to balance wind and solar.

Many are idle so much that their owners have financial difficulty keeping them open, and the government has had to start paying them for their idle time so they won't go under.

Many are also built to replace existing plants that cannot not yet be replaced with renewables, so are at worst neutral on coal usage and are usually actually more efficient than the old plants so there is a reduction.

Their use will continue to decline because China is massively deploying renewables. They also are adding massive amounts of grid battery storage and UHV transmission lines (60000 km so far spanning the country with another 12000 km under construction or permitted--the US is a bit behind that at 0 km), which means the can move electricity from where renewables are strongest to places with high needs but fewer renewables much easier that most other countries can which is further going to reduce the amount of time those new coal plants run.

Third, for India, even if we compare by country rather than by the correct per capita measure (see other comments below for explanation of why per capita is the correct measure when comparing energy policies of different countries), India's current emissions are only 68% of US emissions even though the have 4.3x as many people. That 10% increase you cite that they plan for coal in 2025-2026 still leaves them doing WAY better than the US.

India is also expanding renewables rapidly. They have around 10 nuclear reactors under construction, and are adding lots of solar and wind. They are currently up to 136 GW of solar capacity (64% of US and 11% of China), and last year added around 38 GW (the US added 34 GW). They added 6.3 GW of wind compared to 6.2 GW in the US.

They are almost certainly not going to get anywhere close to the US total emissions. (And per capita where they emit 1/6th what the US does they are definitely not going to even remotely near the US).

Calling China a country that "bred like rabbits" over the past few decades is first of all offensive and second of all stupid for a country that has one of the biggest problems with their coming population pyramid and limited couples to a single child for most of the last 40 years.

What a weird, rose-tinted view of the US you have. Just because the markets are working and the US bungled its way into another war over oil doesn’t mean we should ignore the absolutely braindead political opposition to energy modernization.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/3226/

Markets are fundamentally unable to take into account externalities, but yes, let's "focus on markets and let them take care of the problem". Conveniently ignore the fact that the only reason solar is the cheapest power is because a country put in their political will and power into making it so.

Your sacred market has been killing us all and will continue to keep killing us all if it makes a few pennies.

I would have agreed with you on giving credit but we did an about face in the last 2 years and now are spending billions of dollars to pay off companies that were already building renewables because we failed when trying to just illegally cancel them[1]

We’re not letting the market handle it and we’re going in a backwards direction. Can’t really crow about our accomplishments given that.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/06/rwe-deal-win...

I'm in the US and _I_ don't want us to get credit. Even the worst of people do something good every now and then. But if you reward that, they won't change.

> So markets are working.

> Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem.

Blind faith in the markets is what got us in this mess.

> Fossil fuel extraction is not the problem. The problem is fossil fuel usage.

Yes, and usage is not decreasing. As solar is growing, it's only adding capacity, not replacing fossil fuels. 2025 was the record year for global emissions and fossil fuel consumption.

But sure, let's let "the markets" dictate our ecological policy. Maybe they'll mercifully let us stop burning oil sometimes in the 2150s.

> Also consider the US has just removed a sh~tload of fossil fuels from the world economy. How about some extra credits there?

Huh? Americans very consistently rank among the biggest emitters, basically only surpassed by citizens of petrostates.

I'll just put this here: as long as burning fossil fuel is profitable, "the markets" won't help at all, quite the contrary. And oil being unprofitable isn't happening anytime soon. Our societies are already suffering from Climate Change immensely, and it will only get worse as the years go by. We should have stopped emissions yesterday, we can't let "the markets" take away our agency on the matter and decide our fate.

> How about we give the US credit for this?

If it weren't for the huge efforts put into it by china to make solar and batteries so cheap and capable we wouldn't be nearly as far along in the solar transition as we are. Solar is growing in spite of US policy, not because of it.

> Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem.

The problem is politics and banana republic levels of corruption (aka lobbying) preventing chinese evs to enter the market. If you opened the automotive market to competition ie:

> focus on markets and let them take care of the problem.

then the need for fossil fuels would decline.

> Also consider the US has just removed a sh~tload of fossil fuels from the world economy.

Do you mean the war with Iran that released in the initial weeks over 5 million metric tons of CO₂?

No, you see, US bad

The federal government is paying energy companies to cancel plans to build wind farms:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e1vg0gjl5o

Yes we're still building renewable energy, but goddamn is our government making it hard.

That's added capacity. Fossil fuel use is at an all times high. Everything else is meaningless.

We are doing loads, I just fear we cannot outrun Jevon's paradox. Until we start actively reducing emissions, we are just adding to the scale of consumption with no end in sight.

That we are still adding any fossil fuel based system today is something I would have figured would have stopped by now. I figured we would still have some legacy stuff, but overall would be decommissioning more than we would add. Instead, we just add to everything.

This was one of the big fears. That countries that had far more people than the western world would end up trying to chase that middle class lifestyle. And yet here we are.

I suspect we are going to be like the aphids on a rosebush that will suck it dry just trying to live and most of us go with it.

If we were to live closer to what many philosophers and religions of modesty, we probably would have never gone down this path. Yes, we wouldn't have most of the great stuff we have today but we also wouldn't be looking at a system that can lurch over and crash. There is no winning move in the universe just dances and responses.

Huh? That's not true.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

Quite a lie: https://www.theenergymix.com/u-s-emissions-rise-chinas-fall-...

This just isn't true. Chinas emissions peaked back in 2024.

There are regions on the planet that will likely fare better than others, though.

Even the US military treats climate change as not only real but as a destabilizing threat.

What other endorsement could one possibly need?

Almost no one has the capability to intuitively understand cascading failure modes in complex systems. Especially, those with non-linear or flip-flop behaviour. It takes a lot of education to understand very particular types of complex systems, and then more effort to generalize those lessons to other types of systems.

For example, a science model might predict only a 5% drop in global food production. That is easy to ignore because we waste so much food. But that 5% might be enough to trigger countries to impose food export bans, and some dominoes falling later, there are localized famines in particular places with 50% loss of food supply. That then triggers wars. It's impossible to predict if and when such types of event chains will happen. The only way out is to be very conservative, and aggressively defend against failure.

The future because of resource decline per capita and climate blow back, I suspect the future for many in the west will merely look like a rising tide of poverty.

From what we've seen, so far the (not projected to be underwater) coastal areas might be the areas spared in this scenario too, because being by the water still moderates temperature swings.

It's everywhere else that'll be getting record breaking heat/drought and snow, which have been far more damaging. The disaster radius of hurricanes reaches far more inland than just the coast.

Your relatives clearly aren't MAGA if they're not concerned about what rising sea levels will do to Mar-a-Lago.

I mean they're right, rising oceans will be a drop in the bucket for the majority of us. Unless we act together, human civilization will end through the combination of breakdown of global trade, mass migration due to heat and resource wars, and collapse of our food chain. Ocean levels are just one of the side effects that goes along with rising global temperatures.

Beef production in the US is already down from 30 years ago. At some point you won't be able to raise cows anywhere, less alone feed them. Corn and wheat have seen tremendous fluctuations in the past and will likely continue to fall. Imagine corn yields dropping by more than 80% in the US [1]. Of course MAGA people will probably only notice once the shelves aren't being restocked.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0906865106

Well, at least they are honest about their stupidity. I live in Japan and am constantly shocked how many raised SUVs with the oversized max-grip tires in cities. Japan used to be a "doing it right" country in terms of not going overboard with waste. If you asked them why, they would probably say "it's cool!".

Turns out humans will always choose status symbols and vanity over facts. Oh well

The temperature of a fever is not measuring the temperature outside.

Think even bigger. 1 degrees inside your house? Not noticeable at all. But on a planet-wide scale? A 1 degree difference requires a LOT of energy.

It's like boiling a cup of water vs an Olympic sized swimming pool. The latter is going to take a lot more energy than the former.

Just figure out how many 7-foot-tall persons you'd have to add to your country to increase the average height by 1 inch.

7 feet = 2.1336 meters 1 inch = 2.54 centimeters

I said this elsewhere. Land temperature raises quicker than oceans. So a 2c increase globally is actually a 4c over land. If we hit 3c, that will be 6c over land.

So with a fever, 37c jumped up to 43c goes from normal and stable to a very quick death.

And when the Earth was 3C cooler, NYC was nearly under an ice sheet.

The current estimate is that we're heading for +3C warmer, which is gonna have some big impacts.

> Plus watching the Children of Men style xenophobia and callous disregard for climate refugees set in all over the world.

There are no climate refugees... Yet.

Cortisol is the hormone that creates tight social bonds. It is what make you love your kids so much. So the secret to a loving and kind society is to just pour this stuff in the drinking water supply, right?

No it strengthened social bonds, both toward family and friends and equally against others. It makes people VERY tribal.

Cortisol is also released in long term stressful situations. With a rising tide of poverty and climate blow back, I suspect stress will increase and so too will said tribalism.

What we see today with the rising popularist and isolationist political parties is but an echo of the future.

We see some of these tendencies when a few thousand or tens of thousands of refugees turn up in a country. What happens when this becomes millions? I have said it for years, many will be welcomed with open arms - those arms being machine guns, bombs and drones.

This is the dark future I fear and I hope I am wrong.

I do not have kids, it wasn't by choice. But what looked like something of a negative might actually turn out to be a near miss in future. Just keep your kids safe and try to have peace and compassion to others that are trying to do the same.

Frankly I think expressing it in Celsius has made Americans think it’s less of a problem than it is. It took me awhile to realize that it’s basically 4°F, which is enormous.

El nino predictions are pretty spot on. They won't be able to tell you "There will be a storm on the 30th" but they will be able to tell you that you should expect flash floods next year.

Unfortunately for where I'm at, the prediction due to el nino is more drought, which sucks because we are already desperately dry. Hopefully the following la nina year will bring us some moisture.

yeah, Id actually like to see a reasonable prediction of the trajectory, factoring in recent few years data [ faster warming, current emissions, cleaner air / reduced aerosols and issues like those you mention such as equilibration and ocean heat buffering ]

The graphs I see all have ridiculous ranges, either +1.5C hopium or +6C hellscape - whereas +2.6C within 20 to 30 years seems a most likely [and unpleasant] scenario.

Is not the same a record that may be broken in the next 100 years than one that will be broken most days till end of year. One is an event, the other is a running process with no clear end, besides that won’t be the current point.

That 99% may be just Australia and not the entire world? There seems to be a ton of new coal and gas plants still coming online, 95% of them in China and India. 100 GW of new coal plants and 100 GW of gas. There are probably ~1000 gas plants in the pipeline just in US for data centers. And a ton more onsite gas turbines, like Musks Colossus DC, 1GW of compute powered by gas turbines.

From: https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-coal-plants-hit-10-year-glob...

> In 2025, coal-capacity growth hit a 10-year high, with 97 gigawatts (GW) of new power

> The number of new coal-fired power plants built around the world hit a “10-year high” in 2025

> It adds that 95% of the new coal plants were built in India and China.

> 70% of the coal-fired units scheduled to retire globally in 2025 did not do so

Yes I think so too. It wasn't CO2, but methane in the form of methane hydrate.

>why not the planet?

greed

Love the planet as you love your self. Just be.

Easy to say, difficult to do.

Then there is a good chance we would never have moved up to a technological state that allowed us to leave the planet. We probably wouldn't also be facing blow back from digging up and burning the planets solar battery.

That's crazy! Are you enjoying the van life? Always dreamed of doing it myself.

I get the feeling the coming summer is going to be brutal.

On one hand, heat + humidity will literally kill some vulnerable people. One the other hand, heat + extreme dryness will literally kill people via wildfires.

Before summer comes around I need to clear various dry leaves and branches and general fire-fuel garden waste from around my house and yard. Somehow, my house doesn't have a water tank, and that makes me feel vulnerable, and it's only recently that I've felt that as a potential threat, mental note: water tank + pump near the top of the to-do/buy list.

Yeah, in Melbourne here. It feels like Winter never really got going. Yeah, there is some rain and there have been a hand full of cold mornings at best. I do wonder how this summer is going to go, it is going to hit right at the peak of El Nino and they are anticipating some very dry conditions.

Seriously. People fuss over LLM energy consumption, but I did the math on my rig, and if I were to use my machine at full tilt for all of my waking hours, I would use roughly 1/10th the amount of energy the average American uses driving.

By the way, I highly recommend the Priority 600 :-)

I will kill myself the day I can no longer drive an internal combustion engine.

I don't really see any purpose if we have to be confined to computer enabled cars with built in surveillance with no resemblance of quality, control or freedom.

I have said multiple times that we should ban combustion engines in the energy grid. Sadly there isn't a single party that support such action here in Sweden, and the largest supporter of thermal power plants are the green party who see it as essential to enable renewable energy (is written as such in their party platform, website, and argued in public debates).

It would however be a really good first step to make the energy discussion a bit more honest. We don't need combustion engines in order to generate energy.

Multiple fishery collapses are probably incoming in the next decade or so. For as much as we have and do catch from the ocean, it is as a whole a fairly nutrient bare place by comparison to the land. Its scale and exploitation beyond recovery has allowed it to look far more prosperous than it really is.

So now use whatever political power you have to push for changes to mitigate, respond, or prevent as much of it as possible?

Good read. I do think it's giving too much credit to our evolutionary instincts, though, and not enough to personal and political choices.

Unless there's something lacking in the brain of climate change deniers (which as nice as it might be to believe that, there's no evidence to back up), they should be able to match the many people who are reacting in horror and fear to it.

This was a fun, light read, but nowhere near 'best', hardly more than a fun opinion piece, and even then it completely ignored relevant topics (class inequality at foot, performative climate action [taylor swift], disparate impacts).

This consumer/suburbia-level checklist of individual eco merit is more of a scapegoating ritual than something that makes a difference. This is not a job for solar panel rebates. It’s more of a job for things like Extinction Rebellion; political demonstrations and activism that forces the issue. Which in turn (if successful) will lead to real organized work towards and ecological future. One where we are chipping in together rather than hunking down in our single-home bunkers with our plastic recycling and electric bicycles.

Although things like adoption of EVs does probably have a great positive impact on the local pollution levels.

I think if you should be able to at least have the peace of mind that you did all you could (within reason, short of pulling a Ted Kaczynski or his modern equivalent Luigi Mangione). Maybe it’s inevitable - history shows tons of species go extinct and maybe unbridled capitalism is how we go, maybe seven million years give or take is all humans will have. Maybe I absorbed too much of Meditations by Aurelius.

The UN sustainability index once listed Cuba as the only sustainable economy. Another year it was Ecuador. Cuba might be eligible again because of the embargo. My point is that you can't convince folks in rich countries to be truly sustainable and you can't convince the rest to not aim for a higher standard of living. Putin said something like that and he was right.

And we keep coming up with ideas to make it worse: blockchain and now AI.

What about food and overall consumption?

Eating meet, beef especially, with fish a close second, is insanely impactful on the planet. Cows use tons of food, fresh water and release tons of methane, a gas 200 times worse than CO2.

Do you use AI?

Just saying, we could care but being light on the planet is very difficult without dramatically changing our life styles.

I know I do so much, but honestly an emission tax is the very first thing we need out there.

Because we can't be blamed into being eco-friendly as individuals, it's up to taxes to regulate consumption.

The thought and consideration is worth the time, I think.

However, in a certain respect this is why government is supposed to exist: we never would have gone to the moon. Or built the highway system. Or train tracks. Or a whole lot of big things which don’t immediately seem to have a benefit.

It takes a large body with power and money to enact regulations and movement and take on big projects which would obviously benefit a majority of people in the long-term.

When this is done, countries can move mountains, literally, but without it? We are just left to boil in our own juices as people running around flailing.

I think your idea is absolutely worth personal consideration, but at the same time my feeling is the answer is somewhat obvious on a societal scale. But we’ve lost all trust in government, and there is no political will left to get almost anything done in North America

Do you have any credible source indicating that "billions will die"?

Yep, get in balance with nature or it will do it for you. And you don't want that.

> Is your carbon footprint below what is sustainable?

What a waste of time this is. Carbon footprint? Zero-emission homes? The climate is global and the balance sheet is spread across all of us. Someone with a disability might have much more use for cars and transporation than someone who is able-bodied. And homes out in the boonies without much sun (for solar power) might need a diesel generator for their three-times-a-year power outages in order to keep up productivity and a comfortable existence. And twenty miles from that house is a village full of grid-connected homes running on hydropower. As long as the “balance sheet” is okay we should not fret about this individual stuff.

“Carbon footprint” was explicitly designed as a distraction away from British Petroleum and onto the consumer. I think the kids call that a “whataboutism”.

> I consume things produced all around the globe, either as items like phones, or food, and the food I do probably daily (I really like fruit, so bananas, mangos, avocados etc).

Yeah things are made in Vietnam and China now. And that is the consumer’s fault? That eco-friendly wooden utensils used in Europe are made in China?

Step one. Create and design a deeply interconnected, global market with specializations. The signal is just money, the most fungible asset. Step two: externalities. Step three: use money (see step one) to market your scapegoating to everybody, in direct contradiction with the sheer simplicity of step one; no, consumers aren’t supposed to just use money/price as the signal, that’s evil and has a high Carbon Footprint.

> My point is: my carbon footprint is pretty low, and I try to be mindful about not wasting resources. And it's not that hard, I don't feel like I am missing out on something if I don't drive a car. But I still took my kids to Spain on a vacation, and we still flew there to sit on the beach. Giving that up is hard, and making them sacrifice their childhood fun is hard.

I dunno, an extra twelve degrees Celsius and beaches is worth those flights? And sacrificing childhood fun? Children are an endless maw of desires. Of course if you give them the idea of something (or the TV does) and then don’t go through with it is the greatest crime in the history of humanity. And yet, our parents went without all of that, etc., despite their identical child programming.

> My point is: my carbon footprint is pretty low, and I try to be mindful about not wasting resources.

While it might be low by western standards, it is probably still very high by global averages. For instance it is estimated that roughly 80% of people have never flowing in a plane, and that 10% of the remaining have never flown more than once. Flown 4 times last year puts you right near the top.

This isn't saying "You are a terrible person!", it is saying that we all have a habit of normalizing the world around us even if it is wildy unsustainable.

And even then, the planet doesn't care about were you sit in terms of other people, it just cares about your impacts.

Statistically, the homeless in my country (Australia) have a carbon foot print 3 times greater than the average African. What looks horrible here, resource wise, is far ahead of many in this world.

Covid killed over a million Americans and still half the population thinks the vaccine was worse than the disease.

There is a tiny problem with that hypothesis - there are I think at most 3 potentially viable climate reversal options - DAC, sun shield and aerosol injection in the atmosphere. All 3 options are likely cost through the nose and will require sums and efforts on a global scale. Any single country attempting them on its own, would require to set aside double digit amounts of its GDP for decades, effectively crippling itself economically, while the world passes them by. And all option would require decades, if not centuries of constant work because we don't have any meaningful net negative DAC tech, we don't have any sun shield expertise outside of the JWST and a few small science experiments, and we don't have the required planes to seed atmosphere and neither they are net negative yet. By we I mean both whole globe or any single country.

Indias per capita income is ~$2700.

The term 'Hyperobject' summarized it perfectly. Essentially the problem operates at such a large scale and requires such a level of systemic thinking that it becomes the scope of most people. Not because they are stupid but simply because just a side effect of it being such a large subject.

Also the multi-decade latency means it move slow enough that many can ignore it but it move quick enough that unaddressed it causes major issues.

Pretty much this.

While each action is tiny, collectively they add up.

The rain drop doesn't blame itself for the flood.