And let’s also not forget, we all want the climate crises fixed, but nobody is willing to personally make any changes to their lifestyle!
All parties are incentivized against fixing this problem.
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That is fundamentally the problem with whole thing. Vast majority of population on Earth is not ready for personal sacrifices needed. And if some government will get to around it, I am pretty sure they will be replaced and most things are rolled back.
My guess is that we somehow end up geoengineering it with even more debt...
The majority of the population on earth goes with what's convenient. Which is something that can easily be influenced, even without banning any options
The solution will have to come from growth and technical innovations, not personal sacrifice.
I agree, because (and I'm being a bit flippant) I sure as hell am not giving up my gas stove while billionaires fly around in private jets and MAGA guys are coal-rolling in their F-250s...
It seems to me that carbon capture technology plus renewables and nuclear + dream energy (fission) will be the future but we're probably not going to go off of fossil fuels much, which will necessitate in part the need to suck this stuff out of the atmosphere.
CO2 capture and planetary albedo management are going to be the only way. For cO2 capture to be meaningful, we need to increase our planetary energy production by 2 or 3x so we can put that energy into sequestration, and obviously those gains cannot be based on fossil fuels. Albedo management is much faster to roll out, but will have a lot of pushback because it will also create locally undesirable outcomes.
The tipping point is one bad summer. Photosynthesis stops at 40-45c (some plants like cactuses can do night processing based on stored energy, but staple crops don’t do that). If we have just one bad summer, billions will die. Civilization is perpetually just a week or two without food for 30 percent of the population away from complete collapse, and it takes thousands of years of stable conditions to recreate.
If we have a bad summer in the northern hemisphere, we could easily lose the capability to sequester carbon or manage planetary albedo in a meaningful way. Stopping emissions is not a solution at this point, we are already way too deep in self reinforcing methane loops for that to even be the primary factor in warming acceleration.
It’s an inconvenient truth, to be sure.
Just in case if not aware yet: read Termination Shock, a Novel by Neal Stephenson
Ministry for the Future is, in my view, much better.
The only solution that will come is from large swaths of the words population to be rapidly reduced, from a garden variety of natural disasters
That's what's happening whether anybody wants it to or not.
Why would they be when they see the hypocrisy of the chattering classes? How many celebrities or billionaires have curtailed their own lifestyles while pitching for climate change? Has the number of luxury jets and superyatches gone up or down over time?
The average person may seem stupid but they are paying attention to the actions, and it all sounds like "I got mine, screw yours" to them.
Hypocrisy is really not as useful as people think. Imagine if some man, who beat his wife, made a career of talking about the important and harrowing issues of domestic abuse.
People would rightly scratch their heads at such an over-the-top hypocrite. But surely, the man would be correct: domestic abuse is an important issue. And imagine a response from the peanut gallery? "I'm not going to stop beating my _own_ wife until that hypocrite gets his comeuppance!"
Standard tragedy of the commons behavior...
And people in developing countries complain that "why should beef or jet vacations be taxed more, those Westerners got to enjoy it, and now when we want to enjoy it, it's suddenly bad?".
And we rich Westerners think it's sacrifice to have to drive an EV or pay more for beef...
What have luxury jets and superyachts got to do with the chattering classes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chattering_classes
Gas stoves and ordinary jets do.
at the end of the day 'personal changes' as a fix for climate change are just another lie big corporations fed us to make it feel like the onus was on a personal level.
the amount of co2 that industries pollute and that various regulation would be able to change is multiple orders of magnitude compared to regular personal responsibility.
This sounds right. An individual person can’t change a complex system that gives him everything they have, from plastic forks to gas cars. The society can get together and agree on things, but the society clearly just isn’t concerned enough. There is no solution or workaround to this, unless certain scientific discoveries get made that change the warming trends by sheer coincidence. They would have to coincide with popular demand, like more attractive electric cars, and new materials, or fusion energy that’s cheap. Or, perhaps, AGI decide it for us.
Changes to those corporations will obviously have downstream effects that voters will largely not tolerate.
Even outside of America?
"The amount[...] that industries pollute" is just "personal changes" with more steps.
Personal changes against the grain or personal changes following the grain.
Imagine I want to be responsible by drinking soy milk but it's hidden in a corner of the supermarket.
Now imagine every supermarket prominently displays soy milk and cow milk is hidden in the corner. Seems easier to make the change, right? Many people will change automatically because they don't really care and just do what's easiest.
I wish the soy one were hidden on a corner on my local supermarket. There isn't even one anymore in my country, and that's the biggest soybean producer in the world.
Other plant milks are 3x the price of the cow one because of economies of scale and subsidies. It's all a big joke.
In some countries they're not allowed to call it "soy milk" which is a big joke. I understand why you can't call it "milk <font size=1>of the soy variety</font>" but nouns with adjectives can, in fact, refer to things the adjective-less noun doesn't refer to.
So the soy yoghurt in Germany is called Alpro - the brand name. The dairy industry even fucked themselves over, because even their real yoghurt doesn't meet the strict definition and has to be called "mild yoghurt" instead.
Who do these corporations pollute for? Isn't it for individuals?
Who benefits from a corporation? Is it the customers, the workers or the owners?
In many cases, it's all three.
But not equally.
In some cases it might be and others it might not. In many cases that's going to be extremely hard to measure and equality might not even be desirable.
And in other cases, it's extremely bad for the consumers. See: enshittification due the lack of good regulations, https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/
For the accumulation of wealth and power. This is the natural consequence of unregulated capitalist incentives. Do you think the corporations care about the individuals?
I suppose you can see it that way, but ultimately the power is mostly in the hands of individuals, either by voting in elections or voting with their wallets.
However, this does not mean corporations aren't actively trying to influence and manipulate them, or that they don't exert pressure on politicians. Aren't Americans responsible as a whole for electing Donald Trump, for example?
Over 70% of Americans oppose data centers being built in their local area, yet they continue to be built, even when local elected representatives publicly oppose it. It's easy to see who really has the power and how futile elections can be.
We should abolish oil companies and make sure the only place you can gas up your lifted truck is the Democratic People's Fuel Depot, that will solve climate change.
Frankly, the self reinforcing methane loops we have already triggered make emissions almost irrelevant at this point. If we want a planet compatible with human prosperity, we have no choice but to do planetary scale geoengineering; albedo management and metascale carbon capture are really the only options at this point. We crossed the rubicon a few years ago and even stopping emissions altogether tomorrow won’t stop the avalanche at this point. It would buy us a few decades, at best.
What's your evidence we hit the methane runaway tipping point?
I think it’s fairly speculative, but I used to hang out with scientists from the UAF geophysical institute,
I still keep in touch. They seem to believe it is the case. some of them have told me that if they were to publish it would be career suicide, and one is actually afraid to talk about it except when he’s drunk.
I figure if those guys, at least as smart as I am and way, way better informed, think it’s probable then I should consider it a significant possibility.
I really hope they are all full of shit lol.
I mean, in the real world, people will just vote out politicians who raise their gas prices.
Doesn't seem to have worked this time.