We're getting cooked. I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas, and 5-times more on electricity bills - AC's running non-stop. That's crazy, because I live in the area where you can't even walk to buy a piece of bread - we drive all the time. I fully expect for businesses very soon to operate at night. Costco, Walmart, groceries, even libraries will be working all night in places like Arizona, Texas and some parts of California.
I am currently in London. I have run AC every night since May in order to sleep. The interior of my new build luxury apartment in the financial district is routinely over 30°C during the day and can’t be cooled below that even with the windows covered and the (portable) AC running.
At the turn of the century the CIA predicted climate change and water being the primary drivers of conflict in the 20s.
We are already seeing the US deposing Venezuela’s government and taking their energy as US’s intentional fossil fuel dependency bites.
Things will only get worse unless radical changes are made. We have to move faster than the skeptics and entrenched interests desire.
To save the planet some people are going to lose their wealth power and position. Despite their protestations it’s entirely logical, just and necessary.
The US is still one of the leading CO2 emitters, both per capita and in absolute terms. And for cumulative past emissions, it's not even close.
The expectation is not a mere 18% decrease but something closer to halving emissions just to be on a per capita level comparable to the EU or China.
It doesn't mean China doesn't need to make efforts. China's emissions are yet to be stabilized.
But the US need to make their share, and at least honor and (re-)ratify past climate agreements, if anything to dampen the economic arms race between China and the US.
Yes, let's look at "Asia" (as if that's some meaningful grouping in this context when the countries are so different culturally, geographically, and economically).
Since 2005, a huge amount of US manufacturing and resource processing (both large emitters) have been outsourced (largely to Asia, and more specifically China). Our economy doesn't function without these imported emissions, yet they don't count as "US emissions". Even excluding these emissions, the US makes up 4% of the world population and emits 13% of world emissions. Asia makes up 60% of the world's population and emits 52% (more than 3x less per-capita than the US). If you actually consider that the countries in Asia are vastly diverse, you'll find the large majority of these emissions are from China (from said manufacturing and resource processing), and India for example emits far less than its share of the population.
This also completely ignores that the effects of warming are from cumulative emissions (not just point-in-time emissions) because CO2 doesn't just disappear every year. As a share of historical emissions, Europe comes off far worse than Asia per capita, and the US even worse than Europe.
Even despite this, at least China (and the rest of Asia to a lesser extent) is investing in clean energy. China produces > 80% of the world's solar panels and > 70% of the world's lithium batteries. Meanwhile, in the US the administration is doubling down on subsidies for fossil fuels and issuing stop-work orders on renewable energy projects already under construction.
And because I know I have to give this disclaimer these days: I am no apologist for everything else wrong with China and their authoritarian government. But I can't bear this attitude of absolving ourselves of blame for climate change because some other continent has a bigger number than us.
American gas is not cheap. In absolute-numbers-sense, it's comparable to the current prices in Russia. And by all means and for all the different reasons, one would expect gasoline to be enormously expensive there right now. Far more expensive than in the States. It doesn't seem to be the case.
Yes it is. I don’t know why you picked Russia to compare to. Russia’s government heavily intervenes in markets to keep prices low, including subsidizing refineries and banning exports at times. The fact that our prices are as low as theirs means our gas is cheap.
I feel like you have not watched any videos of what's going on there right now. People lining up to buy any gas, and those lines are miles long, sometimes they have to wait for 8-10 hours. The crisis now causing shortages in neighboring countries - Central Asian republics and Mongolia. Average gas prices jumped considerably - 8-10x, and you'd think, well, how expensive the gas then? And it's about $4 per gallon. So, just like I said - the "cheap" American gas is comparable to the most expensive gas in modern history of Russia. Of course, there's purchasing power parity and other factors, that's why I said "in absolute-numbers-sense".
> and you'd think, well, how expensive the gas then? And it's about $4 per gallon. So, just like I said - the "cheap" American gas is comparable to the most expensive gas in modern history of Russia.
You have completely missed the point. The gas is cheap due to the government forcing it to be.
If the prices were set by the free market, it would not be $4 per gallon with shortages causing lines to stretch 10 hours long.
Russia also has 1/3 the median household income of the US. So in parity adjusted dollars they’re paying something closer to 3X as much as you for gas. Not the same amount.
Yes, that's why I mentioned all that - the parity and it not being the same amount. But I stand corrected - my initial claim of "US gas is not cheap" was incorrect. I just needed to look up "How US gas prices compare to the global average" and the answer is "significantly cheaper". I apologize for wasting your time. I got distracted by what's going on in Russia in the context of gasoline pricing.
Better solution would be migration and building and expanding cities. I have huge doubts current systems will be able to or even consider to tackle catastrophic problems that are 10-20-30 years ahead, huge public investments, forcing capital to share too, drain dry all the oil biz. Instead it will be free for all
But what will be the safe places people could migrate to? I'm not sure we can really predict this, especially since the least affected locations are going to be the ones everybody will be interested in. And given the ramping-up xenophobia I can't imagine climate refugees suddenly being welcomed with open arms...
Haha. I guess you imagined "Deep Dive Dubai" or something? My pool is basically an oversized bathtub. We would've called it exactly that if it was installed inside the house.
A sheet of plastic floating in the surface while you don't use it could help to reduce the evaporation. If is a big pool put some holes here and there to allow air access if somebody or a pet falls into the pool.
Some marginal plants strategically placed and Nymphaeas can shadow the water (reduce the amount of heat that reaches the water), but you would have a very different kind of pool then and they have their own maintenance issues.
If your area allows the culture of columnar cactus and succulents, use it near the pool to provide shadow. They will rarely trow anything into the water and may be beautiful to see by itself. Look for the less vicious species like Euphorbia or Pilosocereus azureus that are strongly vertical while young, refreshing to see (blue is blue) and will not pose any problem if cultured in a wooden raised bed.
The idea would be to make a short wall using the cactus as logs placed a few dm apart to allow the wind passing trough. You will need to avoid the access to cats protecting the dirt with a mesh, aizoaceae, gravel or rocks. Allow a lot of space for the roots. A small pot will not really work.
Cactus or succulents allowed to grow on the roof or near the house will act also as fire retardants (but not fire supressors) as they accumulate water.
Have you never used a garden hose? Do you know that a regular, average hose left running overnight can waste like 5,000 gallons of water? My HOA enforces a rule - you must keep at least two trees per household. Trees need water. Not that much, of course, I shared the overnight hose number just for the sense of measure. Now you do the math - couple of trees, bathrooms, showering, drinking, cooking - that water usage adds up.
Trees don’t grow otherwise in that area? Like if you would stop watering, will they die? Future proof solution could be selling and buying somewhere where climate change won’t hit as hard, eg north, but I guess not everyone can afford that, and cooler regions may not offer sufficient sustenance or infrastructure like schools and jobs.
If you live in what sounds like the desert and you're constantly watering your trees, it might be the case that you've picked non-native species that don't handle heat well. Check out the crime pays but botany doesn't on YouTube, he does a lot of videos about this, people in Texas etc planting English oaks and needing to water them all the time while native species are ignored or cut down because they're "messy".
No, I meant exactly in the petrol sense. Darn americanims - you never know if gas is gasoline, or poison, anesthetic, or flatulence, or you're just being gaslighted.
Even if you’re driving a Prius and getting 50mpg, if you’re “driving all the time” you’re spending at least $100 a month in gas. There’s nowhere in the country where a water bill is $1000 a month unless you’re doing a lot of irrigation.
> I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas, and 5-times more on electricity bills
Comparing ratios of bills is confusing. This statement would be unsurprising if you drove 10 miles per week in a Prius. It would be very confusing if you were filling up your tank every week and spending $1000/month on a water bill.
I can explain. I work from home - no commute. Yes, I don't have to drive as much as the average person has to in my area. This summer has been extremely hot, hotter than any previous - seems that's becoming a new normal. Past couple of weeks the heat remained in the 90s, even around midnight. Water district installed big banners with warnings "draught stages in effect", there's a penalty for irrigating at certain hours - it gets added to the bill. These banners getting erected for the past three years. Yes, water here is expensive.
Don’t you think this was important information to include in your post? Your whole point was built on spending more on water than gas, but then we had to read the comments to discover that you don’t commute and you have water-hungry situations like a pool and HOA mandated landscaping?
I'm not trying to deceive anyone - no matter how anyone could twist it, it is true - the heat is real, the water shortages are the new reality, and I am in fact spending more on water than gas. And it's not because I don't have to drive at all - I do, just not as much as the average person who needs to go to the office every single day. I still need to drive daily.
A few years ago (before wildfires forced us to move), we were in the East Bay of San Francisco. East Bay gets unusually hot - the mountain range prevents cool winds from the ocean passing over. Summer was extreme, the AC couldn't keep up, we had to hose the outer walls every evening, just to cool it a bit.
One day we woke up, had breakfast and the power line had failed. I quickly imagined what happens if it lasts more than a few hours, checked the heatmap, found an area that wasn't dark orange, and told everyone to pack - we're leaving. We headed towards Half Moon Bay. It's a little over an hour drive, but it took us another forty minutes to find a beach with a room for parking - entire coast was packed with the heat escapees like us. The beach was full of stinking kelp, there were tons of flies - they've tormented our stay, but we had little choice. We thought we were lucky to find a spot with not too many people, only to realize there was a carcass of a dead sea lion and it was dead-cat-stenchy. At least, being next to the ocean offered some relief from the heat. Later that afternoon, our neighbors called us to tell us that they were sitting in their minivan, at an empty parking lot. The power was still out, and to have a dignified dinner, they've grabbed some food and convened in the car, which had a working AC. But they didn't want it to look weird, so they drove away from their street, away from curious neighbors and friends.
Next summer wildfires came back. This time bigger than ever. Dealing with both smoke and COVID restrictions together felt like too much, and we decided to move. We headed East, our first stop was Barstow, CA - we decided to rest a night. It's pretty far from where the actual fires were raging, yet when we woke up, we were greeted with what looked like snow at first. It was ash. Our car was covered with it. We kept driving. The sky was black from the smoke. It only started clearing out when we crossed into New Mexico. We were all terrified to realize the scale of that disastrous event. Which has now become "a seasonal climate occurrence" - it's almost guaranteed that each year something will massively burn somewhere in the West Coast. And the fuck are we doing about that? Entertaining a clown with renaming a lake.
Maybe I am pessimistic but it seems no one cares about climate change these days. All of Los Angeles is sweltering now. Just pointing fingers and dropping individual names while the world continues to heat slowly. Any suggestions to get involved are welcome, I don’t want to be just a complainer.
Get politically involved, vote and and volunteer for local pro-climate candidates. Talk about and promote public transport, cycling, better zoning and infrastructure etc. People underestimate the power of local politics.
On a macro scale all you can really do is vote for national level candidates that care about these issues. Luckily it’s not hard to see which ones do and which ones don’t.
Individually you can't do anything. You can drive an EV, set your AC to 78, or whatever makes you feel good but only national governments can make the regulatory changes that will really have an impact.
I even roll my eyes at my city council spending even one second on climate change policy (and they have spent whole meetings on it). Our city of 80,000 people could disappear from the face of the planet and it would not make a bit of difference.
Working at the level of 80,000 people is a lot more effective than working at the level of an individual.
Working on your own carbon footprint is a $100M marketing trick played on you by oil companies like BP.
Leah Stokes' new book offers instead a "carbon wave" -- how to evaluate and maximize your impact at a local, state, national, and global level. Here's a LinkedIn post. She's got a new book coming out about this: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7496265286...
Yes you can but you'll have to vote against your immediate self interest and comfort. The sort of changes that will have an impact on the climate will mean giving up a lot of what makes modern life convenient and comfortable.
Not that much of a difference for the average or lower classes of people that outnumber the rich by quite a lot. It would have a great and positive impact for them.
Carbon taxes can be implemented such that average folks benefit from them, e.g. by paying everyone back the average tax amount. Wealth generally correlates with carbon emissions, so wealthy people would pay more than they get back. This would greatly incentivize less emissions-intensive products and services.
Unfortunately there's no way the rich would ever let this go through.
Thermodynamics; your convenience and comfort (CnC) are merely externalized on others not eliminated; someone else makes your stuff, deals with the environmental toll in the future.
Happy to sacrifice some of your CnC to ease obligations on those you give no assurances to.
Changes can be phased in. For example that's why places phasing out ICE cars are generally doing it by phasing out new ICE sales over many years and letting any cars already on the road when new sales stop stay on the road, and are concurrently building public charging infrastructure.
Best the corresponding parties can do is banning plastic straws (no impact but feels great) and massive bureaucratic hurdles for air conditioning in private homes (because it's an "unnecessary luxury" and if your apartment is unbearably hot during a heat wave where the temperature doesn't drop below 25 even at night, you're just not correctly using shades and windows).
This is far too complex a conversation to have at the level of abstraction you're trying to have it.
Just say what you're trying to say. I don't know what "green parties" refers to across the entire globe of climate efforts, but quite obviously yes, most of the positive climate policies have been pushed by people who care about the climate.
Just as obvious, most of those policies were not successfully enacted by the fringiest and most extreme versions of pro-climate people.
Not to mention there are plenty of environmental improvements that are vast and near-term quality of life improvements. The only penalty on many of these things is financial, but even that is only in the near-term, and in the medium to long term become financial wins.
Both parties in the United States are pretty much turning a blind eye to climate change. What we need to do is start boycotting parties, telling them we won’t vote for them unless they have really strong climate platforms. We need to make them want our vote.
This is some “both sides” absolute bullshit. The Biden administration passed the IRA, huge incentives for personal and commercial renewable energy production, EVs, all kinds of things.
Trump is paying people to burn more coal, blocking solar, canceling wind.
Could the dems have done more, sure. Are those programs perfect, absolutely not. But one party is moving in the right direction and the other is actively trying to accelerate climate change. Gtfo with that both sides crap.
> I even roll my eyes at my city council spending even one second on climate change policy
Every meeting minute spent on discussing climate change is another minute not spent on authorizing things like Flock or permitting data centers. That's nothing to roll your eyes about
You can do all of that, and then Elon Musk will use his hundreds of billions to install another pedofile in charge who won't give a shit about the environment.
He could use his assets/wealth to ensure everyone on earth has a functional, hygienic toilet. Would improve QOL for many who still live with open sewer systems.
Elon Musk was never trying to make the world a better place. He was always a businessman and he was using that to con the government into giving him money so he can make more money.
I think that, if people who believe in climate change want to be convincing, it would be more effective to avoid blaming specific instances of weather on climate change without strong justification. Especially when the weather isn’t even abnormal.
Los Angeles, especially inland and in the valley, is hot in the summer. It was hot in the summer 30 years ago and it’s still hot in the summer. It’s the typical hot season right now, and the valley appears to be only slightly above season average temperatures today, and coastal LA seeks be slightly cooler than average. Apparently it will be unseasonably cool in a couple days.
You’re correct that LA is usually hot (95F+) this time of year, but the humidity is what’s abnormal. The dew point in Disneyland was higher than in Disney World yesterday due to a tropical storm that dissipated west of the LA basin.
More tropical storms are approaching LA and that’s increasing humidity is why it’s sweltering.
A separate LA Times article explained that the humidity is due to lingering effects of a recent hurricane/tropical storm.
"Forecasters attributed the punishing humidity to the remnants of Tropical Storm Iselle moving over the state, as well as unusually warm ocean temperatures due to a combination of a months-long marine heat wave, a powerful El Niño and climate change.
"Dew points in the Los Angeles Basin have been “really high,” hovering around 70 degrees in many places, with a few coastal areas like Redondo Beach and Torrance reaching a dew point of 73 to 75 on Friday, said Ryan Kittell, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. The metric measures the moisture content in the air."
Exactly! What a strange about what’s going on in the LA basin right now is the extremely high humidity for this time of year. A 69° dewpoint is unheard of in this region. And this is what’s associated with the El Niño and associated with climate change.
I haven't paid much attention to la lately.is this true? San Diego is having an unusually hot and humid summer. Water temperatures are nearly tropical right now too
“Both-sides”ing this is ridiculous. Certain leftists might sometimes disproportionally blame corporations for the issue rhetorically but they aren’t broadly opposed to the kinds of taxes and regulations - on corporations or individuals - that would be needed to bring carbon emissions down.
If you insist on finding a way to criticize leftists on the climate file, a much better tack would be pointing out how some environmentalists have opposed nuclear power or densification.
The next two replys are people telling me it's corporations...
Maybe 10ish years ago the left was all on board with individual action, but now it has heavily shifted to "I can drive my SUV because it's on Big Oil to fix the climate"
> some environmentalists have opposed nuclear power
At some point we finally will need to admit that they were not fools for saying that.
Fresh water is vanishing. Nuclear plants need water (and absence of arsonists) to not go out of control. They will need ten years (or most) to be built. At this point the place may be in the way to be flooded by the sea, or in the way to became a desert. Can a new nuclear plant return their investment if they will be operative only for ten years more before to turn into a rusty reef?. Probably not.
Had we spent this pile of money into renewables, we would be in a much better position.
For most individuals there is no lifestyle change they can make that will matter. Fixing it requires collective action.
The way individuals can meaningfully contribute is by supporting politicians that will make policies and rules and regulations the meaningfully encourage that collective action, and when they have a choice between more than one corporation for some product or service that are not too different as far as impact on the lifestyle goes choosing the one that is better from a climate change point of view.
The politicians and the corporations (encouraged by incentives and regulations by the politicians) can then bring about changes that will make it so the lifestyle changes for individuals that help with climate change also improve the individual's situations so people voluntarily make them in large numbers.
For example there are a lot of people in the US who would be better off if their next car was an EV except the public charging infrastructure isn't good enough for their needs. Build a lot more public chargers that support 800V cars and many of these people will pick an EV. This is something government can bring about.
For an average individual it is perfectly fine, to use a sports analogy, to play the game as it is now while supporting league wide changes to the rules to make it a better game in the future.
> For most individuals there is no lifestyle change they can make that will matter. Fixing it requires collective action.
Sorry but this is absolute nonsense.
What we eat matters. A huge amount of what people eat is unnecessarily excessive in terms of resources required to create it. Beef and dairy, most meat, are good examples of this.
An individual can reduce their contribution to climate change by up to 30% by simply forgoing meat and dairy. That percentage obviously varies quite a lot, but it can be huge.
Add in that food waste is a huge problem and this makes more sense.
> and the left thinks it's on corporations (not themselves)
Of course... Every year where the consequences weren't in sight, saying we should consume less, buy less, eat less meat, I have been called 'degrowther' and it has been explained to me that I would increase human suffering because it would reduce the economy size. Ok, fair, I just wanted to help future human, but if you don't plan to have any, you do you.
Now I'm told I think it's corporations that should fix it. Of course.
By the way, I still think it's consumerism (and consumption capitalism) the reason we can't deal with the issue. That corporations are the biggest voice that push for this system is incidental, but yes, breaking big corps in smaller entities would probably help solve the problem. A bit too late now, but better than never.
Also, who on the left think that corpos will do anything to help humanity? Really? I think at most, some thinks it's the government to do everything but corpo? Really? Your friends on the left seems to me very, very much in the center, center right to be exact.
Sf Bay Area didn’t have a single day above 100 this year. Not counting Livermore etc. it’s the first time in a long time I can remember the entire summer being so nice and relatively cool.
They appear (I skimmed) to be investing in all any feasible ideas to capture CO2 from the air - this is a good thing.
The numbers are daunting and the returns are scant, but the effort is one that should be made.
The upside is I saw little sign of Gorgan LNG style Carbon Capture; where a massive source of CO2 greenwashes releasing 100 units of CO2 by stuffing 1 unit back in the hole it came from.
For every ton of CO2 pulled from the air is another ton that something else will emit. Once the emitting is lowered, pulling it out of the air might have a chance
That's more of the "Gorgan LNG style Carbon Capture" I noted above - that's "capture" in the sense of releasing massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere while extracting massive amounts of natural gas .. but "making up for it" by not letting quite all of it escape and pushing a bit back.
Dubious accounting trick at best .. not even working as it was sold on the box in practice.
Atmospheric CO2 already floating about appears to be what the air-mining crowd are targeting (albeit small scale so far).
Renewable energy is expanding faster than ever. And it's hard for people to look at that and think we're moving too slowly. But we still are. That's the basic cultural disconnect.
When nuclear power became a thing in the seventies, there was massive planning around a presumed nuclear-powered future. The largest energy storage facilities in the US were all built around that time. This turned out to be a mirage as the cost of nuclear went up with the safety expectations of the electorate, while petrochemical prices dropped. But this time it's not prices we're predicting, it's temperature, which is much more reliable.
Nuclear has a lot of environmental impact too. You need to mine a lot of earth to get a little uranium, and a lot of that activity is very polluting and a lot of that activity is not climate neutral. Then you have the waste problem that's not figured out, proliferation etc.
We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems. That way we roll from one crisis into the next. There's so many issues we're causing, like entire ecosystems going extinct. Sooner or later that will lead to crises too. We have to stop externalising.
And yes the electorate wants to be safe and for good reason. Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.
Uranium mining is a dirty business and if we're going to be needing a lot more of it due to expansion of nuclear and leaving the mining to the lowest bidder it will be very polluting.
I think you missed the point of the nuclear tangent. The point was that people might be reluctant to build out energy storage capacity before demand appears because of what happened last time. The difference is that climate change is more predictable than the economy.
I'll go against the grain but our capitalist way of life is totally incompatible with solving climate change. Likewise one country can't solve this problem alone. You need the whole world on board. I truly think the only real solution is a one world government truly working toward for the betterment of the planet and it's occupants. We all know that ain't ever gonna happen though so we're hosed.
Hey I grew up super environmental and I have plenty of hippie cred, but this statement gave me shudders "the only real solution is a one world government". Yeesh, yeah a single government, surely nothing could go wrong.
The Savior fallacy. With power more concentrated, the ability to avoid being impacted for those in power rises and rises and rises. How are incentives then aligned? I'm sure that having 10 million governments would be much better than having one to solve the issue.
I've had this thought too. And when I think about it in the big picture way, I don't think it doesn't need to be all that hard to solve. It's not like we're talking about like, you know, some huge slice of GDP or something. Yes, the price of fossil fuels effectively doubles. But we can create lots of jobs to make solar and nuclear and all these other solutions in the meantime.
An economy that seizes climate solutions can zoom ahead in terms of innovation, manufacturing, and enforcement. The changing climate is one of the biggest economic opportunities we've ever seen in human history, but somehow we've convinced ourselves that it's not only the worst non-opportunity ever but somehow would break capitalism. The richest man on the planet makes electric cars.
Let me guess, you think it’s somehow impossible that people like Trump and Musk would end up running this One World Government like Trey have done in the US because…reasons.
Are they led by Trump and Musk though? You've misinterpreted the meaning of the question. I didn't ask what countries would accept being led by a national demagogue. Also, would other countries accept being led by the leader of the countries you listed?
My best advice is not to approach people with numbers and figures and all the danger, start with saying you’re concerned about the future. It’s kind of an open ended conversation starter.
The big problem is this is all driven by consumption and it’s hard for people to cut back on consumption. I don’t know how to explain to people how a simple life is much easier than the complicated life of the rich and famous they see every day on the Internet.
I don’t think there is an answer for this, I think there’s way too much propaganda on the other side of the equation. My only hope from this El Niño is that it creates such damage and disaster that it starts waking people up. I think if it affects the ranchers and farmers that will be a big plus because they are usually on the side of not believing in climate change.
What I do right now is just keep talking to people and preparing, but I’m lucky since I live in a minivan full-time. I mean, I can drive anywhere. The weather suits me.
> The global average sea-surface temperature hit a record 70 degrees on Aug. 22, according to Europe’s Earth observation agency Copernicus, which has been tracking the metric daily since 1979. The previous single-day record was measured in March 2024.
That's like saying coastal sea level rise is nothing to worry about in places like Florida because that whole area was at the bottom of an ocean 100 million years ago.
In any event, who cares what the climate was like before humans walked the planet? We do care about what it is like while we’re around because it puts significant constraints on our lives.
Yes, but it’s not uniform at all. The paper shows cooling in some parts of the north, and heating in the southern latitudes, along with significant variations by depth.
There’s a lot of nuance in this stuff - far more than global average surface temperature (which is primarily good for scary headlines) and “fish don’t have AC”.
That's not the issue, though I recognise the poster above was remarking about fish. High surface temps means more cyclones / typhoons / hurricanes, more coral bleaching, lower fish breeding and feeding because reefs die, impacts out food chains and destroys our homes.
Im Australian, so it also means droughts, water restrictions, and significant increases in bushfire number and severity after a few years of drought. Drought followed by cyclone, or bulk rain events causes catastrophic flooding. Its a shit show.
Sometimes I wonder if the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been growing more popular is a tactical tool used by individuals who don't actually believe in it but instead have accepted that they would rather be wealthy and destroy the planet and are pricing in the consequences of that decision.
There's also a prisoner's dilemma situation. Suppose you're some wealthy media magnate promoting culture war distractions from your portfolio of asset strippers and polluters, thinking of defecting to team decency.
That hypothetical you can look around at the rest of the global political class and see that the rest of the establishment will destroy the livability of the biosphere whether that hypothetical you starts putting all of your money into unions, green technology and BECCs or not and conclude that the only available choice is whether to be poor in a collapsing world or rich in a collapsing world.
Why would investing in green tech make you poor? That's what's wrong with that argument.
Moving away from fossil fuels is cheaper. Green energy is very cheap, it just misses a base load component right now. It's just that the people benefiting are different ones. And those people are going to lose sooner or later anyway, because in addition to climate change, fossil fuels are also finite.
The only reason trump is on the oil bandwagon is because many of his buddies are benefiting from it. And probably because he's still pissed at the Scotland windmill thing.
But doing the right thing doesn't have to make you poor. It will benefit everyone including the investors.
The optimal strategy for short term oligarchic revenue maximisation is a mixed strategy of mostly fossil fuels with some green tech.
The optimal strategy for long term biosphere habitability is a mixed strategy of mostly green tech with a tiny amount of fossil fuels exclusively for those metal smelting roles where arc furnaces and biofuels are unsuitable.
Investment portfolios dominated by technology that lifts everybody up are less profitable than greedy choices of risky investment, per some of the finer details of the mutual fund separation theorem.
"Hello, is this the Murdoch family office? I'd like to speak to your team's permanent director of assets strategy about how wonderful it would be for your income to drop by ten to fifteen percent."
You could do the same with the accounting team on retainer for the US Commerce Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Education Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Interior Secretary's family portfolio, or the head of NASA's family portfolio, or the Middle East Special Envoy's family portfolio, or the Administrator-in-Chief of the Small Business Administration's family portfolio.
These are all individuals with a net worth of over a billion dollars who each separately employ a full time accounting and financial team with its own IT and HR just to maximise family income. What's ten million a year in operating costs versus at least sextuple that in return?
Each oligarch of size is the figurehead of a corporation dedicated to number go up.
I’m sympathetic to the intent of your argument, but man, that’s a hallava gotcha there. Other than nuclear there isn’t a compelling story for a base load source of green energy. And all the new-gen nuclear tech is a long shot for safe, cost efficient, rapid scaling right now.
And I think the artificially created right wing shift was to enable Israel to do a lot of killing without the rest world being united to tell them to stop with this.
Forget about global trends, forget "unprecedented events", this isn’t rocket science, I’ve seen the climate shift myself, in my lifetime, and I’m not even that old. It’s difficult to imagine how people elsewhere aren’t seeing the same, like we aren’t inhabiting the same reality somehow?
In Continental Europe we used to have winters with regular snow even in large cities. I know, I really liked playing in the snow as a kid. It was cold. For the past dozen or so years, there is less and less snowfall, with milder and milder winters. Snow in the cities amounts to maybe a week or three of weak drizzle. Forget about what my grandpa remembered about how the Danube used to freeze over so you could walk across the river. What we do seem to get more of is wild, torrential rainfall in sudden bursts amid long dry spells. Bad for infrastructure, even worse for agriculture.
The climate is changing here, and it’s getting hotter, not colder or more balanced. Wildfires are increasing in frequency, and God knows what’s going on with the country’s underground aquifers, we never seem to care about those, because we’ve always just had plenty, so why worry. Of course all this is easily dismissed as anecdata. But when I read about the research labelling Europe the fastest warming continent, I don’t have trouble believing it. Sure, someone living in the northernmost reaches of Europe might not see anything, yet, this doesn’t mean the research is wrong.
Worse yet, the infrastructure for dealing with this simply isn’t there in most countries, and I’m not talking about stuff that will "reverse global warming" or whatever, I’m talking steps that will keep cities livable in the short to medium time-span. Most societies are unwilling to mentally deal with or consider what might happen two, three decades down the line. They aren’t willing to contend with a future where their children will have to endure water rationing, curfews, economic and other hardship, mass migration or any number of scenarios that will affect their wellbeing.
We have to greenify the streets, reduce the number of heat-producing vehicles, upgrade the pipelines, irrigation, water collection, and other systems across European cities... I have a sneaking suspicion it will take some massive, un-ignorable crisis, like a record number of elderly people dying from heat exposure to actually start investing in any of this. And by then it might be too late.
Could we stop chopping down trees from primary forests in the Amazon to save the planet for us humans? Could we manage with a little less beef and soy?
Just 5 days ago the news was https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62m4gpnp78o. Different wording, few measurements later, this will run that way til December at the very least. We can shout another bird most days till there, or discuss the projections to the peak of the event (and how they usually correcting it upwards), that may give a better warning.
So, any legit climate scientists or oceanographers here? Or agronomists? How abnormal (and not just, the climate graphs for the last century say this is bad) is this on a longer timescale. Like, when was the water this warm last?
I feel this is going to be a "big one" this year? And probably the culmination of extreme heat, crop failures, and high diesel prices are going to trigger more conflict too? To be clear, I'm an optimist, I think things will be "good" in the long run, but I have a feeling the next 12-24 months are going to be a doozie with the 4 or 5 things converging...
Like, I don't want to have this crazy flamewar thing, but like, what do the numbers say, how fucked is this particular one?
I scuba dive in Monterey, CA every other weekend, and just came back from a liveaboard in Galapagos in May. The water is much warmer this year, and it is very noticeable because usually in Galapagos, divers are expected to wear 8mm wetsuit or dry suit to be comfortable in the water, but this year even a 5mm made me feel too warm. In Monterey, water temp used to be around 11-13°C but this year it’s easily above 16°C, divers also reported more sightings of spiny lobsters which were rare in Monterey because water was too cold for them.
I can’t overstate how it is. And you will need to be prepared. Be prepared for floods and just weird weather. While we humans are adaptable to these weather changes, plants and animals are not. This is going to affect feed crops for both humans and animals. So I would expect some inflation because of this.
I also want to state for those of you living in Southern California to be prepared for a possible earthquake. It’s a salton sea fills up with a lot of water quickly It could most likely trigger an earthquake.
But those are the impacts just in the United States. We might be looking at food price shocks in combination with the ongoing war in Iran.
By the way for those of you complaining about the heat in Los Angeles, it’s not really the heat. It’s the humidity. The LA basin has had record high dewpoint temperatures. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable.
How do we fix this? The only thing I can think of is a spiritual awakening where owning and doing less is more attractive than flying around in jets and building AI data centers.
You can’t get a more direct example of failure of collective action.
I’m not sure the human species has the capacity to actually coordinate behavior at the scale needed, irrespective of any future warning etc…, to be able to combat this
We all reduced CFC use and stopped ozone depletion.
The problem with climate change is that there is a huge incentive to not fix it, and the culprit is not just rich oil corporations. Many countries subsist solely on oil profits and have no other natural resources to sustain themselves, i.e. Saudi Arabia. Those countries have influence over others like the US.
There are alternative options already available to replace fossil fuels for most things. In first-world countries, the only thing stopping a transition is the loss of corporate profits.
Stripe's climate researcher Zeke Hausfather is coming to AirMiners this Wednesday to share about El Niño climate science, the impacts, and then we're going to work on what we can do to avert the worst impacts of this storm.
The planet started out a ball of molten stardust, completely inhospitable to life as we know it. But then there was not only life, but life detached from the ground too. Then K-T event wiped out almost all of it. But the planet kept going! It can be argued it got better and more diverse.
Are people in trouble? Perhaps. If we stop technological achievement in the name of a few degrees centigrade, then definitely.
With the depletion of the coal and oil deposits the industrial revolution relied on the first time around, it is now locked in that this century is human civilization's only shot at reaching some kind of abstract technology escape velocity.
Crash now and there will never be a second chance, just iron age stuff in a harsher environment for however many tens of millennia it takes to have some random pandemic that wipes the descendants out occur.
I think the idea is that, the current trajectory of technology is just making problems worse. More and more powerful, capable of pulling us further and further from a healthy equilibrium as we see with global warming etc.
Theoretically, if we can crack fusion or some other source of abundant, cheap energy, we could build many of the bandaid solutions proposed today that are not feasible due to energy constraints, while transitioning society to a more sustainable path. Tilt the curve as it were.
Our psyches unfortunately aren't built for the globalized world we live in, and unless we figure out some sort of collective awakening to transcend our egos... Our best hope is likely solutions that allow the march of progress, while slowing, stopping, and eventually undoing a bunch of damage humans have done to the biosphere over our history. Definitely a moon shot, but hopefully we can figure something out.
We're getting cooked. I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas, and 5-times more on electricity bills - AC's running non-stop. That's crazy, because I live in the area where you can't even walk to buy a piece of bread - we drive all the time. I fully expect for businesses very soon to operate at night. Costco, Walmart, groceries, even libraries will be working all night in places like Arizona, Texas and some parts of California.
I am currently in London. I have run AC every night since May in order to sleep. The interior of my new build luxury apartment in the financial district is routinely over 30°C during the day and can’t be cooled below that even with the windows covered and the (portable) AC running.
At the turn of the century the CIA predicted climate change and water being the primary drivers of conflict in the 20s.
We are already seeing the US deposing Venezuela’s government and taking their energy as US’s intentional fossil fuel dependency bites.
Things will only get worse unless radical changes are made. We have to move faster than the skeptics and entrenched interests desire.
To save the planet some people are going to lose their wealth power and position. Despite their protestations it’s entirely logical, just and necessary.
Maybe this country focusing so much on keeping the gas cheap might have something to do with it.
US emissions have declined 18% since 2005.
Look at Asia.
Both sides of the equation need to be solved.
The US is still one of the leading CO2 emitters, both per capita and in absolute terms. And for cumulative past emissions, it's not even close.
The expectation is not a mere 18% decrease but something closer to halving emissions just to be on a per capita level comparable to the EU or China.
It doesn't mean China doesn't need to make efforts. China's emissions are yet to be stabilized.
But the US need to make their share, and at least honor and (re-)ratify past climate agreements, if anything to dampen the economic arms race between China and the US.
Yes, let's look at "Asia" (as if that's some meaningful grouping in this context when the countries are so different culturally, geographically, and economically).
Since 2005, a huge amount of US manufacturing and resource processing (both large emitters) have been outsourced (largely to Asia, and more specifically China). Our economy doesn't function without these imported emissions, yet they don't count as "US emissions". Even excluding these emissions, the US makes up 4% of the world population and emits 13% of world emissions. Asia makes up 60% of the world's population and emits 52% (more than 3x less per-capita than the US). If you actually consider that the countries in Asia are vastly diverse, you'll find the large majority of these emissions are from China (from said manufacturing and resource processing), and India for example emits far less than its share of the population.
This also completely ignores that the effects of warming are from cumulative emissions (not just point-in-time emissions) because CO2 doesn't just disappear every year. As a share of historical emissions, Europe comes off far worse than Asia per capita, and the US even worse than Europe.
Even despite this, at least China (and the rest of Asia to a lesser extent) is investing in clean energy. China produces > 80% of the world's solar panels and > 70% of the world's lithium batteries. Meanwhile, in the US the administration is doubling down on subsidies for fossil fuels and issuing stop-work orders on renewable energy projects already under construction.
And because I know I have to give this disclaimer these days: I am no apologist for everything else wrong with China and their authoritarian government. But I can't bear this attitude of absolving ourselves of blame for climate change because some other continent has a bigger number than us.
You mean the place where we buy all our crap from?
China built more solar in 2025 than the US has in total. Meanwhile trump ripping up wind and solar builds.
But the sins of out grandgrandpas haven't vanished, and still will need to be paid.
American gas is not cheap. In absolute-numbers-sense, it's comparable to the current prices in Russia. And by all means and for all the different reasons, one would expect gasoline to be enormously expensive there right now. Far more expensive than in the States. It doesn't seem to be the case.
> American gas is not cheap.
Yes it is. I don’t know why you picked Russia to compare to. Russia’s government heavily intervenes in markets to keep prices low, including subsidizing refineries and banning exports at times. The fact that our prices are as low as theirs means our gas is cheap.
I feel like you have not watched any videos of what's going on there right now. People lining up to buy any gas, and those lines are miles long, sometimes they have to wait for 8-10 hours. The crisis now causing shortages in neighboring countries - Central Asian republics and Mongolia. Average gas prices jumped considerably - 8-10x, and you'd think, well, how expensive the gas then? And it's about $4 per gallon. So, just like I said - the "cheap" American gas is comparable to the most expensive gas in modern history of Russia. Of course, there's purchasing power parity and other factors, that's why I said "in absolute-numbers-sense".
> and you'd think, well, how expensive the gas then? And it's about $4 per gallon. So, just like I said - the "cheap" American gas is comparable to the most expensive gas in modern history of Russia.
You have completely missed the point. The gas is cheap due to the government forcing it to be.
If the prices were set by the free market, it would not be $4 per gallon with shortages causing lines to stretch 10 hours long.
Russia also has 1/3 the median household income of the US. So in parity adjusted dollars they’re paying something closer to 3X as much as you for gas. Not the same amount.
Yes, that's why I mentioned all that - the parity and it not being the same amount. But I stand corrected - my initial claim of "US gas is not cheap" was incorrect. I just needed to look up "How US gas prices compare to the global average" and the answer is "significantly cheaper". I apologize for wasting your time. I got distracted by what's going on in Russia in the context of gasoline pricing.
Better solution would be migration and building and expanding cities. I have huge doubts current systems will be able to or even consider to tackle catastrophic problems that are 10-20-30 years ahead, huge public investments, forcing capital to share too, drain dry all the oil biz. Instead it will be free for all
But what will be the safe places people could migrate to? I'm not sure we can really predict this, especially since the least affected locations are going to be the ones everybody will be interested in. And given the ramping-up xenophobia I can't imagine climate refugees suddenly being welcomed with open arms...
> I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas
Are you irrigating an enormous yard?
No, but I have a pool and it's been drying up below the skimmers, I need to keep the water level or the filtration dies.
lol. What a first world problem to have. Sounds like a very solvable problem too (remove the pool then)
Thank you captain. I'm sure this would greatly reduce the climate change effects. Doing it posthaste - the world needs saving.
To be fair, you were the one complaining about water costs as if it was a climate-related issue, when it's... your pool.
Haha. I guess you imagined "Deep Dive Dubai" or something? My pool is basically an oversized bathtub. We would've called it exactly that if it was installed inside the house.
Tragedy of the commons.
It's not just you. It's you + the millions of people using the same "I'm a unique snowflake" logic.
If 8 billion people can't do it, maybe consider not doing it.
A sheet of plastic floating in the surface while you don't use it could help to reduce the evaporation. If is a big pool put some holes here and there to allow air access if somebody or a pet falls into the pool.
Some marginal plants strategically placed and Nymphaeas can shadow the water (reduce the amount of heat that reaches the water), but you would have a very different kind of pool then and they have their own maintenance issues.
If your area allows the culture of columnar cactus and succulents, use it near the pool to provide shadow. They will rarely trow anything into the water and may be beautiful to see by itself. Look for the less vicious species like Euphorbia or Pilosocereus azureus that are strongly vertical while young, refreshing to see (blue is blue) and will not pose any problem if cultured in a wooden raised bed. The idea would be to make a short wall using the cactus as logs placed a few dm apart to allow the wind passing trough. You will need to avoid the access to cats protecting the dirt with a mesh, aizoaceae, gravel or rocks. Allow a lot of space for the roots. A small pot will not really work.
Cactus or succulents allowed to grow on the roof or near the house will act also as fire retardants (but not fire supressors) as they accumulate water.
Maybe they mean consumption is the same but price is up.
The only way I can read what they wrote to mean that is if they are saying water costs $30-40 a gallon.
Have you never used a garden hose? Do you know that a regular, average hose left running overnight can waste like 5,000 gallons of water? My HOA enforces a rule - you must keep at least two trees per household. Trees need water. Not that much, of course, I shared the overnight hose number just for the sense of measure. Now you do the math - couple of trees, bathrooms, showering, drinking, cooking - that water usage adds up.
I mean sure don’t leave a garden hose running overnight. That’s insane. If you leave it running next your house you’ll flood your basement.
You said you had a pool though. That and trying to keep 2 non native trees alive in the desert is probably equivalent to irrigating a large yard.
Trees don’t grow otherwise in that area? Like if you would stop watering, will they die? Future proof solution could be selling and buying somewhere where climate change won’t hit as hard, eg north, but I guess not everyone can afford that, and cooler regions may not offer sufficient sustenance or infrastructure like schools and jobs.
If you live in what sounds like the desert and you're constantly watering your trees, it might be the case that you've picked non-native species that don't handle heat well. Check out the crime pays but botany doesn't on YouTube, he does a lot of videos about this, people in Texas etc planting English oaks and needing to water them all the time while native species are ignored or cut down because they're "messy".
I assume they mean natural gas
No, I meant exactly in the petrol sense. Darn americanims - you never know if gas is gasoline, or poison, anesthetic, or flatulence, or you're just being gaslighted.
Or driving a small, economical car?
Even if you’re driving a Prius and getting 50mpg, if you’re “driving all the time” you’re spending at least $100 a month in gas. There’s nowhere in the country where a water bill is $1000 a month unless you’re doing a lot of irrigation.
I read the comment as an overview of their utility costs—natural gas, not gasoline.
OP confirmed it was gasoline.
> I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas, and 5-times more on electricity bills
Comparing ratios of bills is confusing. This statement would be unsurprising if you drove 10 miles per week in a Prius. It would be very confusing if you were filling up your tank every week and spending $1000/month on a water bill.
I can explain. I work from home - no commute. Yes, I don't have to drive as much as the average person has to in my area. This summer has been extremely hot, hotter than any previous - seems that's becoming a new normal. Past couple of weeks the heat remained in the 90s, even around midnight. Water district installed big banners with warnings "draught stages in effect", there's a penalty for irrigating at certain hours - it gets added to the bill. These banners getting erected for the past three years. Yes, water here is expensive.
> I work from home - no commute.
Don’t you think this was important information to include in your post? Your whole point was built on spending more on water than gas, but then we had to read the comments to discover that you don’t commute and you have water-hungry situations like a pool and HOA mandated landscaping?
I'm not trying to deceive anyone - no matter how anyone could twist it, it is true - the heat is real, the water shortages are the new reality, and I am in fact spending more on water than gas. And it's not because I don't have to drive at all - I do, just not as much as the average person who needs to go to the office every single day. I still need to drive daily.
How much water usually cost in dryer regions of USA?
Libraries in SW Colorado were packed! Alot of people just using the AC since most houses dont even have it
A few years ago (before wildfires forced us to move), we were in the East Bay of San Francisco. East Bay gets unusually hot - the mountain range prevents cool winds from the ocean passing over. Summer was extreme, the AC couldn't keep up, we had to hose the outer walls every evening, just to cool it a bit.
One day we woke up, had breakfast and the power line had failed. I quickly imagined what happens if it lasts more than a few hours, checked the heatmap, found an area that wasn't dark orange, and told everyone to pack - we're leaving. We headed towards Half Moon Bay. It's a little over an hour drive, but it took us another forty minutes to find a beach with a room for parking - entire coast was packed with the heat escapees like us. The beach was full of stinking kelp, there were tons of flies - they've tormented our stay, but we had little choice. We thought we were lucky to find a spot with not too many people, only to realize there was a carcass of a dead sea lion and it was dead-cat-stenchy. At least, being next to the ocean offered some relief from the heat. Later that afternoon, our neighbors called us to tell us that they were sitting in their minivan, at an empty parking lot. The power was still out, and to have a dignified dinner, they've grabbed some food and convened in the car, which had a working AC. But they didn't want it to look weird, so they drove away from their street, away from curious neighbors and friends.
Next summer wildfires came back. This time bigger than ever. Dealing with both smoke and COVID restrictions together felt like too much, and we decided to move. We headed East, our first stop was Barstow, CA - we decided to rest a night. It's pretty far from where the actual fires were raging, yet when we woke up, we were greeted with what looked like snow at first. It was ash. Our car was covered with it. We kept driving. The sky was black from the smoke. It only started clearing out when we crossed into New Mexico. We were all terrified to realize the scale of that disastrous event. Which has now become "a seasonal climate occurrence" - it's almost guaranteed that each year something will massively burn somewhere in the West Coast. And the fuck are we doing about that? Entertaining a clown with renaming a lake.
This reads like a very good dramatic catastrophy movie. This is very alarming.
So you live in a place where it’s unsustainable and complain about what exactly? Aren’t you the problem?
Maybe I am pessimistic but it seems no one cares about climate change these days. All of Los Angeles is sweltering now. Just pointing fingers and dropping individual names while the world continues to heat slowly. Any suggestions to get involved are welcome, I don’t want to be just a complainer.
Get politically involved, vote and and volunteer for local pro-climate candidates. Talk about and promote public transport, cycling, better zoning and infrastructure etc. People underestimate the power of local politics.
On a macro scale all you can really do is vote for national level candidates that care about these issues. Luckily it’s not hard to see which ones do and which ones don’t.
Individually you can't do anything. You can drive an EV, set your AC to 78, or whatever makes you feel good but only national governments can make the regulatory changes that will really have an impact.
I even roll my eyes at my city council spending even one second on climate change policy (and they have spent whole meetings on it). Our city of 80,000 people could disappear from the face of the planet and it would not make a bit of difference.
Working at the level of 80,000 people is a lot more effective than working at the level of an individual.
Working on your own carbon footprint is a $100M marketing trick played on you by oil companies like BP.
Leah Stokes' new book offers instead a "carbon wave" -- how to evaluate and maximize your impact at a local, state, national, and global level. Here's a LinkedIn post. She's got a new book coming out about this: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7496265286...
You can vote
Yes you can but you'll have to vote against your immediate self interest and comfort. The sort of changes that will have an impact on the climate will mean giving up a lot of what makes modern life convenient and comfortable.
Not that much of a difference for the average or lower classes of people that outnumber the rich by quite a lot. It would have a great and positive impact for them.
No, the rich will be able to pay the carbon taxes easily, the average folks will suffer under them.
Carbon taxes can be implemented such that average folks benefit from them, e.g. by paying everyone back the average tax amount. Wealth generally correlates with carbon emissions, so wealthy people would pay more than they get back. This would greatly incentivize less emissions-intensive products and services.
Unfortunately there's no way the rich would ever let this go through.
Thermodynamics; your convenience and comfort (CnC) are merely externalized on others not eliminated; someone else makes your stuff, deals with the environmental toll in the future.
Happy to sacrifice some of your CnC to ease obligations on those you give no assurances to.
Changes can be phased in. For example that's why places phasing out ICE cars are generally doing it by phasing out new ICE sales over many years and letting any cars already on the road when new sales stop stay on the road, and are concurrently building public charging infrastructure.
I think there are gradients to this
It would be hard for me to vote against indoor plumbing if that was needed to save the planet
I would vote against "Same Day Delivery" in a heartbeat though, if it helped
Best the corresponding parties can do is banning plastic straws (no impact but feels great) and massive bureaucratic hurdles for air conditioning in private homes (because it's an "unnecessary luxury" and if your apartment is unbearably hot during a heat wave where the temperature doesn't drop below 25 even at night, you're just not correctly using shades and windows).
Not really. We've made significant enough progress on this issue to prove that policy-driven progress is in fact possible.
This type of cynicism is both unwarranted and unhelpful.
These changes were often not driven by the "green" parties though.
This is far too complex a conversation to have at the level of abstraction you're trying to have it.
Just say what you're trying to say. I don't know what "green parties" refers to across the entire globe of climate efforts, but quite obviously yes, most of the positive climate policies have been pushed by people who care about the climate.
Just as obvious, most of those policies were not successfully enacted by the fringiest and most extreme versions of pro-climate people.
Not to mention there are plenty of environmental improvements that are vast and near-term quality of life improvements. The only penalty on many of these things is financial, but even that is only in the near-term, and in the medium to long term become financial wins.
Entirely depends on your district. There are many districts where it doesn't matter, especially with gerrymandering.
Better to volunteer for a swing district. You can write letters or fundraise from home, anywhere in the country.
It's absolutely worth voting even in a "safe" district because political mandates are won separately from political power itself.
You should also volunteer for a swing district though! Very good idea.
Both parties in the United States are pretty much turning a blind eye to climate change. What we need to do is start boycotting parties, telling them we won’t vote for them unless they have really strong climate platforms. We need to make them want our vote.
Imagine thinking that politicians give literally even one single fuck about non-voters' opinions lmao
This is some “both sides” absolute bullshit. The Biden administration passed the IRA, huge incentives for personal and commercial renewable energy production, EVs, all kinds of things.
Trump is paying people to burn more coal, blocking solar, canceling wind.
Could the dems have done more, sure. Are those programs perfect, absolutely not. But one party is moving in the right direction and the other is actively trying to accelerate climate change. Gtfo with that both sides crap.
100%. Would have gone even harder if some moderates didn’t gunk up the works too.
The both sides bit is jaw droppingly ignorant if you pay attention to regional and national politics.
> I even roll my eyes at my city council spending even one second on climate change policy
Every meeting minute spent on discussing climate change is another minute not spent on authorizing things like Flock or permitting data centers. That's nothing to roll your eyes about
well obviously YOU couldn't. you seem to lack the willpower to sacrifice a single convenience in favor of the rest of us, per your confession below.
that's the difference between you and the public servants that you roll your eyes at.
“Everyone wants the village, nobody wants to be the villager.” Maybe look into changing what you want.
You can do all of that, and then Elon Musk will use his hundreds of billions to install another pedofile in charge who won't give a shit about the environment.
I remember when Musk was genuinely trying to make the world better with electric cars.
Now he's more worried about which toilets people use.
He could use his assets/wealth to ensure everyone on earth has a functional, hygienic toilet. Would improve QOL for many who still live with open sewer systems.
He does that by sponsoring tons of H1Bs.
> I remember when Musk was genuinely trying to make the world better with electric cars.
People rarely 'go bad' like that. You just learn more about who they really are over time.
Elon Musk was never trying to make the world a better place. He was always a businessman and he was using that to con the government into giving him money so he can make more money.
> All of Los Angeles is sweltering now.
I think that, if people who believe in climate change want to be convincing, it would be more effective to avoid blaming specific instances of weather on climate change without strong justification. Especially when the weather isn’t even abnormal.
Los Angeles, especially inland and in the valley, is hot in the summer. It was hot in the summer 30 years ago and it’s still hot in the summer. It’s the typical hot season right now, and the valley appears to be only slightly above season average temperatures today, and coastal LA seeks be slightly cooler than average. Apparently it will be unseasonably cool in a couple days.
You’re correct that LA is usually hot (95F+) this time of year, but the humidity is what’s abnormal. The dew point in Disneyland was higher than in Disney World yesterday due to a tropical storm that dissipated west of the LA basin.
More tropical storms are approaching LA and that’s increasing humidity is why it’s sweltering.
A separate LA Times article explained that the humidity is due to lingering effects of a recent hurricane/tropical storm.
"Forecasters attributed the punishing humidity to the remnants of Tropical Storm Iselle moving over the state, as well as unusually warm ocean temperatures due to a combination of a months-long marine heat wave, a powerful El Niño and climate change.
"Dew points in the Los Angeles Basin have been “really high,” hovering around 70 degrees in many places, with a few coastal areas like Redondo Beach and Torrance reaching a dew point of 73 to 75 on Friday, said Ryan Kittell, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. The metric measures the moisture content in the air."
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-08-28/forget-f...
Exactly! What a strange about what’s going on in the LA basin right now is the extremely high humidity for this time of year. A 69° dewpoint is unheard of in this region. And this is what’s associated with the El Niño and associated with climate change.
Climate change is a fact. You can’t believe in a fact.
I haven't paid much attention to la lately.is this true? San Diego is having an unusually hot and humid summer. Water temperatures are nearly tropical right now too
The right thinks it's a hoax and the left thinks it's on corporations (not themselves) to fix it.
To put it plainly, everyone wants the problem to go away without having to change anything about their lifestyle.
“Both-sides”ing this is ridiculous. Certain leftists might sometimes disproportionally blame corporations for the issue rhetorically but they aren’t broadly opposed to the kinds of taxes and regulations - on corporations or individuals - that would be needed to bring carbon emissions down.
If you insist on finding a way to criticize leftists on the climate file, a much better tack would be pointing out how some environmentalists have opposed nuclear power or densification.
The next two replys are people telling me it's corporations...
Maybe 10ish years ago the left was all on board with individual action, but now it has heavily shifted to "I can drive my SUV because it's on Big Oil to fix the climate"
> some environmentalists have opposed nuclear power
At some point we finally will need to admit that they were not fools for saying that.
Fresh water is vanishing. Nuclear plants need water (and absence of arsonists) to not go out of control. They will need ten years (or most) to be built. At this point the place may be in the way to be flooded by the sea, or in the way to became a desert. Can a new nuclear plant return their investment if they will be operative only for ten years more before to turn into a rusty reef?. Probably not.
Had we spent this pile of money into renewables, we would be in a much better position.
For most individuals there is no lifestyle change they can make that will matter. Fixing it requires collective action.
The way individuals can meaningfully contribute is by supporting politicians that will make policies and rules and regulations the meaningfully encourage that collective action, and when they have a choice between more than one corporation for some product or service that are not too different as far as impact on the lifestyle goes choosing the one that is better from a climate change point of view.
The politicians and the corporations (encouraged by incentives and regulations by the politicians) can then bring about changes that will make it so the lifestyle changes for individuals that help with climate change also improve the individual's situations so people voluntarily make them in large numbers.
For example there are a lot of people in the US who would be better off if their next car was an EV except the public charging infrastructure isn't good enough for their needs. Build a lot more public chargers that support 800V cars and many of these people will pick an EV. This is something government can bring about.
For an average individual it is perfectly fine, to use a sports analogy, to play the game as it is now while supporting league wide changes to the rules to make it a better game in the future.
> For most individuals there is no lifestyle change they can make that will matter. Fixing it requires collective action.
Sorry but this is absolute nonsense.
What we eat matters. A huge amount of what people eat is unnecessarily excessive in terms of resources required to create it. Beef and dairy, most meat, are good examples of this.
An individual can reduce their contribution to climate change by up to 30% by simply forgoing meat and dairy. That percentage obviously varies quite a lot, but it can be huge.
Add in that food waste is a huge problem and this makes more sense.
> and the left thinks it's on corporations (not themselves)
Of course... Every year where the consequences weren't in sight, saying we should consume less, buy less, eat less meat, I have been called 'degrowther' and it has been explained to me that I would increase human suffering because it would reduce the economy size. Ok, fair, I just wanted to help future human, but if you don't plan to have any, you do you.
Now I'm told I think it's corporations that should fix it. Of course.
By the way, I still think it's consumerism (and consumption capitalism) the reason we can't deal with the issue. That corporations are the biggest voice that push for this system is incidental, but yes, breaking big corps in smaller entities would probably help solve the problem. A bit too late now, but better than never.
Also, who on the left think that corpos will do anything to help humanity? Really? I think at most, some thinks it's the government to do everything but corpo? Really? Your friends on the left seems to me very, very much in the center, center right to be exact.
Sf Bay Area didn’t have a single day above 100 this year. Not counting Livermore etc. it’s the first time in a long time I can remember the entire summer being so nice and relatively cool.
Come join our El Niño session on Wednesday with Stripe's climate scientist Zeke Hausfather: https://luma.com/tu0uvbx1
We'll talk climate science, impacts, and what we can do to avert the worst impacts of the worst El Niño in human history.
It’s a thing you can avert? Or do you mean one in the far future which we might avert by reducing carbon emissions now?
They appear (I skimmed) to be investing in all any feasible ideas to capture CO2 from the air - this is a good thing.
The numbers are daunting and the returns are scant, but the effort is one that should be made.
The upside is I saw little sign of Gorgan LNG style Carbon Capture; where a massive source of CO2 greenwashes releasing 100 units of CO2 by stuffing 1 unit back in the hole it came from.
For every ton of CO2 pulled from the air is another ton that something else will emit. Once the emitting is lowered, pulling it out of the air might have a chance
CO2 capture produces more green house gases than it captures
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/24/shell-ccs-facility-in-canada...
That's more of the "Gorgan LNG style Carbon Capture" I noted above - that's "capture" in the sense of releasing massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere while extracting massive amounts of natural gas .. but "making up for it" by not letting quite all of it escape and pushing a bit back.
Dubious accounting trick at best .. not even working as it was sold on the box in practice.
Atmospheric CO2 already floating about appears to be what the air-mining crowd are targeting (albeit small scale so far).
The strategy is to walk and chew gum.
Whoops, my bad. Edited. We can avert the worst impacts of the worst El Nino in human history.
Renewable energy is expanding faster than ever. And it's hard for people to look at that and think we're moving too slowly. But we still are. That's the basic cultural disconnect.
When nuclear power became a thing in the seventies, there was massive planning around a presumed nuclear-powered future. The largest energy storage facilities in the US were all built around that time. This turned out to be a mirage as the cost of nuclear went up with the safety expectations of the electorate, while petrochemical prices dropped. But this time it's not prices we're predicting, it's temperature, which is much more reliable.
Nuclear has a lot of environmental impact too. You need to mine a lot of earth to get a little uranium, and a lot of that activity is very polluting and a lot of that activity is not climate neutral. Then you have the waste problem that's not figured out, proliferation etc.
We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems. That way we roll from one crisis into the next. There's so many issues we're causing, like entire ecosystems going extinct. Sooner or later that will lead to crises too. We have to stop externalising.
And yes the electorate wants to be safe and for good reason. Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.
Modern lithium batteries or solar panels for that matter don’t get magiced out of nothing.
Those materials are mined also. At least forethought is given to handling/disposal for nuclear since it’s a known issue.
Well yes but lithium is easily recycled and solar panels are made from sand and nowhere near rare earth.
See how the soviets destroyed half the Czech countryside looking for Uranium for their bombs and power plants: https://www.rferl.org/a/soviet-uranium-mines-explored-abando...
Uranium mining is a dirty business and if we're going to be needing a lot more of it due to expansion of nuclear and leaving the mining to the lowest bidder it will be very polluting.
I think you missed the point of the nuclear tangent. The point was that people might be reluctant to build out energy storage capacity before demand appears because of what happened last time. The difference is that climate change is more predictable than the economy.
Well demand is pretty much a given now with AI, so I think either way this is not an issue. We will want all the power we can generate.
I'll go against the grain but our capitalist way of life is totally incompatible with solving climate change. Likewise one country can't solve this problem alone. You need the whole world on board. I truly think the only real solution is a one world government truly working toward for the betterment of the planet and it's occupants. We all know that ain't ever gonna happen though so we're hosed.
Hey I grew up super environmental and I have plenty of hippie cred, but this statement gave me shudders "the only real solution is a one world government". Yeesh, yeah a single government, surely nothing could go wrong.
The Savior fallacy. With power more concentrated, the ability to avoid being impacted for those in power rises and rises and rises. How are incentives then aligned? I'm sure that having 10 million governments would be much better than having one to solve the issue.
I mean we're staring at apocalypse here so it's not like the alternative is any better.
It can ALWAYS get worse.
It seems we are no more capable of organizing than bacteria in a petri dish could avoid replicating until the resources are exhausted.
I've had this thought too. And when I think about it in the big picture way, I don't think it doesn't need to be all that hard to solve. It's not like we're talking about like, you know, some huge slice of GDP or something. Yes, the price of fossil fuels effectively doubles. But we can create lots of jobs to make solar and nuclear and all these other solutions in the meantime.
An economy that seizes climate solutions can zoom ahead in terms of innovation, manufacturing, and enforcement. The changing climate is one of the biggest economic opportunities we've ever seen in human history, but somehow we've convinced ourselves that it's not only the worst non-opportunity ever but somehow would break capitalism. The richest man on the planet makes electric cars.
Let me guess, you think it’s somehow impossible that people like Trump and Musk would end up running this One World Government like Trey have done in the US because…reasons.
The rest of the world would have to accept a Trump and Musk leadership. That seems like a really big ask
China accepts a dictator. Russia accepts a dictator. India accepts a nationalist demagogue.
Are they led by Trump and Musk though? You've misinterpreted the meaning of the question. I didn't ask what countries would accept being led by a national demagogue. Also, would other countries accept being led by the leader of the countries you listed?
My best advice is not to approach people with numbers and figures and all the danger, start with saying you’re concerned about the future. It’s kind of an open ended conversation starter.
The big problem is this is all driven by consumption and it’s hard for people to cut back on consumption. I don’t know how to explain to people how a simple life is much easier than the complicated life of the rich and famous they see every day on the Internet.
I don’t think there is an answer for this, I think there’s way too much propaganda on the other side of the equation. My only hope from this El Niño is that it creates such damage and disaster that it starts waking people up. I think if it affects the ranchers and farmers that will be a big plus because they are usually on the side of not believing in climate change.
What I do right now is just keep talking to people and preparing, but I’m lucky since I live in a minivan full-time. I mean, I can drive anywhere. The weather suits me.
> but I’m lucky since I live in a minivan full-time.
Tell us more
The time for prevention has passed. The course has been set. Now Darwin rules the day - we'll see which species survive. We chose this.
// Now Darwin rules the day
How many children do you have?
> The global average sea-surface temperature hit a record 70 degrees on Aug. 22, according to Europe’s Earth observation agency Copernicus, which has been tracking the metric daily since 1979. The previous single-day record was measured in March 2024.
70°F is 21°C
Fish don't have AC.
since 1979
And what about the years before that?
Other agencies tracked ocean thermoclines.
Eg: Totally not tracking submarines, we're looking at dolphins and whales!
With notable funky bespoke hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP
Scripps itself has been running since 1903.
Hint: the world had much hotter periods before humans and capitalism
That's like saying coastal sea level rise is nothing to worry about in places like Florida because that whole area was at the bottom of an ocean 100 million years ago.
Did you mean “humans or capitalism”?
In any event, who cares what the climate was like before humans walked the planet? We do care about what it is like while we’re around because it puts significant constraints on our lives.
Hint: https://xkcd.com/1732/
Earth has, human civilization as we know it has not.
How deep is the surface measurement though? It’s a record nonetheless, but a few meters deeper - where fish actually live is likely cooler.
Deep ocean temperatures have also been rising over the decades: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
Yes, but it’s not uniform at all. The paper shows cooling in some parts of the north, and heating in the southern latitudes, along with significant variations by depth.
There’s a lot of nuance in this stuff - far more than global average surface temperature (which is primarily good for scary headlines) and “fish don’t have AC”.
Do you think the general statement “ocean temperatures are rising” is misleading?
No, but it's so vague that it's meaningless.
> Yes, but it’s not uniform at all.
Translation: "I expect all areas to be affected the same, despite axial tilt, fluid dynamics, etc."
No. Not everyone boils everything down to a sophomoric take.
That's not the issue, though I recognise the poster above was remarking about fish. High surface temps means more cyclones / typhoons / hurricanes, more coral bleaching, lower fish breeding and feeding because reefs die, impacts out food chains and destroys our homes.
Im Australian, so it also means droughts, water restrictions, and significant increases in bushfire number and severity after a few years of drought. Drought followed by cyclone, or bulk rain events causes catastrophic flooding. Its a shit show.
Sometimes I wonder if the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been growing more popular is a tactical tool used by individuals who don't actually believe in it but instead have accepted that they would rather be wealthy and destroy the planet and are pricing in the consequences of that decision.
There's also a prisoner's dilemma situation. Suppose you're some wealthy media magnate promoting culture war distractions from your portfolio of asset strippers and polluters, thinking of defecting to team decency.
That hypothetical you can look around at the rest of the global political class and see that the rest of the establishment will destroy the livability of the biosphere whether that hypothetical you starts putting all of your money into unions, green technology and BECCs or not and conclude that the only available choice is whether to be poor in a collapsing world or rich in a collapsing world.
Why would investing in green tech make you poor? That's what's wrong with that argument.
Moving away from fossil fuels is cheaper. Green energy is very cheap, it just misses a base load component right now. It's just that the people benefiting are different ones. And those people are going to lose sooner or later anyway, because in addition to climate change, fossil fuels are also finite.
The only reason trump is on the oil bandwagon is because many of his buddies are benefiting from it. And probably because he's still pissed at the Scotland windmill thing.
But doing the right thing doesn't have to make you poor. It will benefit everyone including the investors.
The optimal strategy for short term oligarchic revenue maximisation is a mixed strategy of mostly fossil fuels with some green tech.
The optimal strategy for long term biosphere habitability is a mixed strategy of mostly green tech with a tiny amount of fossil fuels exclusively for those metal smelting roles where arc furnaces and biofuels are unsuitable.
Investment portfolios dominated by technology that lifts everybody up are less profitable than greedy choices of risky investment, per some of the finer details of the mutual fund separation theorem.
Less profitable doesn't mean becoming poor. Far from it.
And oligarchs have kids too, don't they want them to live in a world worth living in?
"Hello, is this the Murdoch family office? I'd like to speak to your team's permanent director of assets strategy about how wonderful it would be for your income to drop by ten to fifteen percent."
You could do the same with the accounting team on retainer for the US Commerce Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Education Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Interior Secretary's family portfolio, or the head of NASA's family portfolio, or the Middle East Special Envoy's family portfolio, or the Administrator-in-Chief of the Small Business Administration's family portfolio.
These are all individuals with a net worth of over a billion dollars who each separately employ a full time accounting and financial team with its own IT and HR just to maximise family income. What's ten million a year in operating costs versus at least sextuple that in return?
Each oligarch of size is the figurehead of a corporation dedicated to number go up.
> it just misses a base load component right now.
I’m sympathetic to the intent of your argument, but man, that’s a hallava gotcha there. Other than nuclear there isn’t a compelling story for a base load source of green energy. And all the new-gen nuclear tech is a long shot for safe, cost efficient, rapid scaling right now.
This seems political and unrelated to the article.
The causes of the subject of the article are inherently political. It absolutely is relevant.
And I think the artificially created right wing shift was to enable Israel to do a lot of killing without the rest world being united to tell them to stop with this.
please refrain from referring to countries as if they were individuals
Forget about global trends, forget "unprecedented events", this isn’t rocket science, I’ve seen the climate shift myself, in my lifetime, and I’m not even that old. It’s difficult to imagine how people elsewhere aren’t seeing the same, like we aren’t inhabiting the same reality somehow?
In Continental Europe we used to have winters with regular snow even in large cities. I know, I really liked playing in the snow as a kid. It was cold. For the past dozen or so years, there is less and less snowfall, with milder and milder winters. Snow in the cities amounts to maybe a week or three of weak drizzle. Forget about what my grandpa remembered about how the Danube used to freeze over so you could walk across the river. What we do seem to get more of is wild, torrential rainfall in sudden bursts amid long dry spells. Bad for infrastructure, even worse for agriculture.
The climate is changing here, and it’s getting hotter, not colder or more balanced. Wildfires are increasing in frequency, and God knows what’s going on with the country’s underground aquifers, we never seem to care about those, because we’ve always just had plenty, so why worry. Of course all this is easily dismissed as anecdata. But when I read about the research labelling Europe the fastest warming continent, I don’t have trouble believing it. Sure, someone living in the northernmost reaches of Europe might not see anything, yet, this doesn’t mean the research is wrong.
Worse yet, the infrastructure for dealing with this simply isn’t there in most countries, and I’m not talking about stuff that will "reverse global warming" or whatever, I’m talking steps that will keep cities livable in the short to medium time-span. Most societies are unwilling to mentally deal with or consider what might happen two, three decades down the line. They aren’t willing to contend with a future where their children will have to endure water rationing, curfews, economic and other hardship, mass migration or any number of scenarios that will affect their wellbeing.
We have to greenify the streets, reduce the number of heat-producing vehicles, upgrade the pipelines, irrigation, water collection, and other systems across European cities... I have a sneaking suspicion it will take some massive, un-ignorable crisis, like a record number of elderly people dying from heat exposure to actually start investing in any of this. And by then it might be too late.
El Niño events are more than 36% stronger today than they were 40 years ago due to climate change.[1]
[1]J. E. Cole et al., Recent strengthening of eastern Pacific ENSO in the last millennium paleorecord. Science DOI:10.1126/science.ady2660
How about a new perspective on this, the biotic pump?
"When you are confined within the civilized scientific discourse and can't cry out 'It's the biosphere, stupid!'"
Please read what Anastassia Makarieva had to say on "the kid" 2 years ago: https://bioticregulation.substack.com/p/seeing-forests-throu...
Could we stop chopping down trees from primary forests in the Amazon to save the planet for us humans? Could we manage with a little less beef and soy?
Just 5 days ago the news was https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62m4gpnp78o. Different wording, few measurements later, this will run that way til December at the very least. We can shout another bird most days till there, or discuss the projections to the peak of the event (and how they usually correcting it upwards), that may give a better warning.
So, any legit climate scientists or oceanographers here? Or agronomists? How abnormal (and not just, the climate graphs for the last century say this is bad) is this on a longer timescale. Like, when was the water this warm last?
I feel this is going to be a "big one" this year? And probably the culmination of extreme heat, crop failures, and high diesel prices are going to trigger more conflict too? To be clear, I'm an optimist, I think things will be "good" in the long run, but I have a feeling the next 12-24 months are going to be a doozie with the 4 or 5 things converging...
Like, I don't want to have this crazy flamewar thing, but like, what do the numbers say, how fucked is this particular one?
I scuba dive in Monterey, CA every other weekend, and just came back from a liveaboard in Galapagos in May. The water is much warmer this year, and it is very noticeable because usually in Galapagos, divers are expected to wear 8mm wetsuit or dry suit to be comfortable in the water, but this year even a 5mm made me feel too warm. In Monterey, water temp used to be around 11-13°C but this year it’s easily above 16°C, divers also reported more sightings of spiny lobsters which were rare in Monterey because water was too cold for them.
they took the sulfur out of the shipping fuel and everything accelerated very quickly. nobody's even talking about it anymore
If you really think that's the main cause, I'd be interested in your sources.
I can’t overstate how it is. And you will need to be prepared. Be prepared for floods and just weird weather. While we humans are adaptable to these weather changes, plants and animals are not. This is going to affect feed crops for both humans and animals. So I would expect some inflation because of this.
I also want to state for those of you living in Southern California to be prepared for a possible earthquake. It’s a salton sea fills up with a lot of water quickly It could most likely trigger an earthquake.
But those are the impacts just in the United States. We might be looking at food price shocks in combination with the ongoing war in Iran.
By the way for those of you complaining about the heat in Los Angeles, it’s not really the heat. It’s the humidity. The LA basin has had record high dewpoint temperatures. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable.
How do we fix this? The only thing I can think of is a spiritual awakening where owning and doing less is more attractive than flying around in jets and building AI data centers.
Discussions:
Oceans hit highest temperature on record
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49424606
Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313428
Climate change is strengthening El Niño, coral records suggest
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49475404
The Strongest El Niño Ever Forecast and the Hunger It Will Leave Behind
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281960
You can’t get a more direct example of failure of collective action.
I’m not sure the human species has the capacity to actually coordinate behavior at the scale needed, irrespective of any future warning etc…, to be able to combat this
We all reduced CFC use and stopped ozone depletion.
The problem with climate change is that there is a huge incentive to not fix it, and the culprit is not just rich oil corporations. Many countries subsist solely on oil profits and have no other natural resources to sustain themselves, i.e. Saudi Arabia. Those countries have influence over others like the US.
There are alternative options already available to replace fossil fuels for most things. In first-world countries, the only thing stopping a transition is the loss of corporate profits.
Ironically the war in Iran was probably one of the most effective ways to cut oil consumption.
People can't even think big enough to zipper merge properly. We are absolutely cooked.
Stripe's climate researcher Zeke Hausfather is coming to AirMiners this Wednesday to share about El Niño climate science, the impacts, and then we're going to work on what we can do to avert the worst impacts of this storm.
Come join! https://luma.com/tu0uvbx1
CCS is a scam promoted by the fossil fuel companies
The planet started out a ball of molten stardust, completely inhospitable to life as we know it. But then there was not only life, but life detached from the ground too. Then K-T event wiped out almost all of it. But the planet kept going! It can be argued it got better and more diverse.
Are people in trouble? Perhaps. If we stop technological achievement in the name of a few degrees centigrade, then definitely.
Technological advancement needs to advance towards being sustainable or else it's a joke.
With the depletion of the coal and oil deposits the industrial revolution relied on the first time around, it is now locked in that this century is human civilization's only shot at reaching some kind of abstract technology escape velocity.
Crash now and there will never be a second chance, just iron age stuff in a harsher environment for however many tens of millennia it takes to have some random pandemic that wipes the descendants out occur.
Are we in prison? What is it we're hoping to escape from when we achieve technological escape velocity?
I think the idea is that, the current trajectory of technology is just making problems worse. More and more powerful, capable of pulling us further and further from a healthy equilibrium as we see with global warming etc.
Theoretically, if we can crack fusion or some other source of abundant, cheap energy, we could build many of the bandaid solutions proposed today that are not feasible due to energy constraints, while transitioning society to a more sustainable path. Tilt the curve as it were.
Our psyches unfortunately aren't built for the globalized world we live in, and unless we figure out some sort of collective awakening to transcend our egos... Our best hope is likely solutions that allow the march of progress, while slowing, stopping, and eventually undoing a bunch of damage humans have done to the biosphere over our history. Definitely a moon shot, but hopefully we can figure something out.
Present day scarcities of food, water, energy, useful land, etc
Only a Sith deals in absolutes ^_^