Using less is always an individual choice. But not a realistic one to expect 8 billion+ people to take. That's also why fossil fuel usage is still increasing.

However, you might be too pessimistic here. Fossil fuel usage is actually widely expected to peak in the next few years and then enter a steady decline.

Michael Liebreich of Bloomberg NEF did a pretty interesting editorial on this decline a few weeks ago: https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-energy/liebreich-the-p...

He uses a simple model with some very basic assumptions (conservative ones) where he shows how short term fossil fuel usage still increases. Mostly this is just market inertia. But then it will start decreasing and then some decades later, it declines all the way to zero with some long tail of hard to shift use cases.

He uses some very basic assumptions about economic growth continuing to grow by an average of 3%, a base assumption of renewables outgrowing energy demand increases by 3%, etc. You get to a modest fossil fuel decline by 2040, majority renewables powered economy by the 2050s. And virtually no fossil fuel left in the economy by 2065. The years change but the outcome stays the same as long as renewables outgrow demand increase.

There are lots of buts and ifs here but he's explicitly addressing the kind of pessimism you are voicing here.

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Jaxan 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I appreciate your reply, thanks!

About the “individual choice”: it indeed is, unless tech companies make bad choices. Like GitHub recently showed a button “what are my PRs?” When pressed it asked copilot to give you the list of PRs (incomplete btw). But there already exists a page for that! This is just wasteful and we should blame a company for that.

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immibis 2 days ago | parent [-]

Or Google running an AI summary on every single search even though you mostly ignore it. There was no need for Google to do that, and it wasn't my choice.

	▲	chermi 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm not saying it's a good reason, but very clearly there was a reason. I'd expect at least part of it trying to retain/capture Google search users and advertise that chatgpt isn't the only game in town. I'd bet without those summaries the lay person would not know Google had their own AI app.
	▲	hoyo1s 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		AI summaries are mostly shit.

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keybored a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Using less is always an individual choice. But not a realistic one to expect 8 billion+ people to take. That's also why fossil fuel usage is still increasing.

Thanks. This mindset is not always made this explicit.

That it is an individual-choice is just as true as the claim that it is a choice made by governments, corporations, non-profits, executives, etc. But this atomized fiction is the only one that is given focus. Why?

You said it yourself: the perspective is not even conducive to making any change! (“not a realistic...”) We can’t expect 8 billion to make atomized decisions for the betterment of the planet.

But that’s not what people with this mindset want. They want a scapegoat that (conveniently) cannot change. Or they want an excuse to keep doing what they are already doing. Because hey the entities “that are doing it” cannot change in the aggregate.