Hank Green did a good short video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvAznN_MPWQ

TL;DW: It is important that individuals show that there is a real problem and that they perform actions that address the problem. This demonstrative behaviour leads to social dynamics where more people feel encouraged to perform actions and to drive larger change.

You need to start somewhere.

I agree with you that consumer-level personal responsibility is absolutely not the way to go. To a certain extent I try to non-dogmatically "do the right thing", but I know it's simply a cute hobby.

The only solution is systemic. The incentives need to be in order for businesses and consumers to do the right thing not because it is the right thing, but because it's cheaper or more convenient. That can only be implemented via legislation and investment of public resources, hence from the political level.

And what determines whether the politicians in charge are ones who will implement the changes needed to mitigate the problem, rather than ones who will keep alive the system which is intensifying it? Well, we're back to square one: each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.

I hear what you're saying but also have lately felt a lot of frustration with this framing. I definitely agree that large corporations share an outsized portion of the blame; they have misled and misdirected us past the brink of crisis in pursuit of profit. And as you point out, one of the special cruelties of their system is that it prearranges individual consumer options so that we have the illusion of choice, but ultimately wind up complicit no matter what we choose. Thus its incumbent on us (collectively) to make a decision that's not on the menu we've been handed. But (critically) its still going to be individuals making that choice. It's not enough to merely topple Big Oil at a social scale, we will also have to give up our F-450s and sprawling SFH tracts with four car garages. It's not necessarily fair, and it's not necessarily our fault, but it's still our responsibility (because it's ultimately our future that's at risk).

Corporations do whatever is in their financial interest, provided it is legal. They're neither good or evil. (If they were DnD characters their alignment would be "lawful greedy".) What is legal is determined by governments, who are elected by individuals like you.

This is why people need to be reminded of the impact and causes of climate change. You can't just say, "Oil corporations are evil" and absolve yourself of responsibility. That's how nothing gets done. Corporations are not going to stop being "evil" of their own accord. They're going to obey the laws and regulations set forth by the governments they operate under.

Americans elected a president who openly campaigned on bringing back coal and said, "Drill baby drill!". Oil executives made campaign donations but, ultimately, this is the fault of Americans. They're not educated enough and they tolerate too much money in their politics. Scapegoating oil companies does nothing to solve these problems.

While arguments can be made at the futility of individual action against a system action, it’s not like companies are making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash. There are consumers of what is being produced!

Society’s choices and lifestyles are the cause of fossil fuel consumption, at a very high level. The plastic bag exists because it has users.

There are quantitative arguments against many silly consumer-focused initiatives. In aggregate tho companies aren’t burning fossil fuels for fun. Burning fossil fuels costs money, and a lot of people would rather not spend that money!!

I never understood this. The companies sold you fossil fuel, you burnt it and got benefits out of it: transportation, energy, heating, constructions, fertilizers and food, etc. You want them to pay for the negative consequences of your fossil fuel consumption while you keep all the generated benefits?

Its a case of prisoner's dilemma. Individuals making the proposed lifestyle changes in order to make a genuine dent in AGW amount to jumping on the tracks in order to stop a freight train.

This is the one issue where I feel some sympathy with the right. I hate "Virtue signaling" about as much as they do. I'm sorry, but if you are going to snap at people over eating beef, while you fly/drive all over the country/world unnecessarily, you are absolute full of shyte.

Problem is that we if we all stand in a circle and point fingers at the next guy who is to blame, that doesn't really move us toward any sort of solutions.

In fact the reason it's so easy to find others to blame is that the responsibility is a shared one. Holding consumers responsible doesn't absolve producers, or governments for their participation. All have to be held responsible for their actions. That's the only way forward.

It is still everyone's responsibility, just not to equal extent. That petrolstate also rose to power through democratic elections.

> consumer-level personal responsibility

Indeed, the biggest personal responsibility is to make this a top political priority when deciding who to elect. Nothing will change until we consistenly fire leaders who refuse to act decisively on this.

If you drive a fossil fuel vehicle, you have chosen to buy into this. If you drive it 3 blocks when you could walk, you've chosen to go the way the fuel company wants you to. That's you.

Plastic is a bit different, you didn't choose the packaging. And you probably don't have the option to recycle anyway. Putting in a special bin doesn't change the fact that it's probably going to a landfill anyway.

Some of it's consumer level. Do what you can. Don't whatabout it.

There is nothing g to “disagree” about. Of course systemic changes are required. But if the individual improve their actions it will have a meaningful impact too

Americans use a lot of power. Buying big houses means they have higher heating and cooling costs. All this makes a big difference.

It’s actually a lot more systematic than you think: https://magarshak.com/blog/government-and-industry-distract-...

Andrew Forrest, a well connected billionaire, puts the blame on a group of 1000 "captains of industry".

https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/inside-and...

The 2 biggest contributors to climate change are ...

- US Military

- Cargo Ships

You fix those 2 things and like 60% of pollution goes away.

If everyone chose to eat veggie burgers and seitan steaks instead of using beef, the climate's trajectory would immediately improve. For all the responsibility of industry, many individual world citizens could, and many have, changed their lifestyle due to the moral issue of climate-changing emissions.

> not capital

Capital, and by relation the system that centers the idea of Capital as a method for moving around resources is at the very center of this.

Since Capital follows near-term incentive, if the "pollute the world" path has a greater near-term incentive, that's where the market will follow. If a single member of the system goes for long-term incentive(not cooking the earth), other near-term incentive chasers will eat their lunch and remove a player.

The system itself is a tight feedback loop searching for local maxima, and the local max is often the most destructive. With chasing the local maxima, also comes profit and capital that influence the political system.

> Marine cloud brightening could produce meaningful planetary cooling for roughly $5 billion per year at scale (NAS estimate).

Eh. Cloud brightening is a temporary hack, stops working as soon as you stop actively doing it, and isn't an alternative to switching away from fossil fuels. It's probably worth doing to push back the "ice melts and releases more carbon" thing but let's not confuse it with the extent of what needs to be done. You can't actually solve the problem for $5B/year.

> AI investment is private capital chasing returns.

Getting private capital to work for you is a good way to solve the problem. The real problem is politics.

The EV tax credits and the subsidies oil companies get were costing about the same amount of money, but we only got rid of one of them. Nuclear should cost less than fossil fuels, but we're told that fission is scary and Deepwater Horizon is nothing but spilled milk so the one with the much better environmental record has to be asymmetrically regulated into uncompetitiveness.

If we actually wanted to solve it we'd do the "carbon tax but 100% of the money gets sent back to the people as checks" thing, since then you're not screwing everyone because on average the check and the tax cancel out and corporations pay the tax too but only people get the check. Then everyone, but especially the heaviest users, would have the incentive to switch to alternative energy and more efficient vehicles etc., because everybody gets the same check but the people putting thousands of miles on non-hybrid panzers pay more in tax.

The "problem" is that it would actually work, which is highly objectionable to the oil industry and countries like Russia since it would cause their income to go away, hence politics.

Cooling the planet is neither a technical nor financial problem. The problem is that environmentalists want this to be a moral issue. They already decided on the solution. If the solution is not environmental communism with them in power, they will not have it.

> Renewable energy technology is ready, right now today, to replace fossil fuels. All we have to do is start doing it, but the Oil lobby is just too strong apparently. There is no political will. I wish I was wrong, but I just don't see humanity pulling together to solve this one.

Sorry, but its really not. Perhaps in some sectors such as ground transportation, but definitely not in air and sea transport and fertilizer production, and many industrial processes. At least not at scale, where would have to make massive lifestyle sacrifices which are not politically acceptable outside of extreme authoritarian states who have no reason to do this anyway.

We are a planet of 8 billion people, interest will vary widely. Expecting everyone to swarm on the same issue at the same time is simply not how humanity has worked in the past. Innovation often happens because many people go different directions, testing what works and what doesn't. Getting AI to play SimCity may be a stepping stone to real life urban planning, or it may be nothing, who knows?

If you're near Lake Powell, you could also visit it right now and compare it to what you remember. Not a simulator, just a pretty scary real thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCEJDU9_p4Q

Gotta love the cycle 200 heat death

I found Half-Earth Socialism: The Game[1] to be fun for quite a few playthroughs.

1. https://play.half.earth/

> It's not clear how much energy all of our AI systems will use, and while it's tempting to outright believe they'll simply use more and more, even that's not yet clear based on arguments presented.

For the last 20 years, power consumption of HPC is increased per cubic inch as systems are miniaturized and density increased. The computing capacity increased more than the power use, but this doesn't mean we didn't invent more inefficient ways to undo significant part of that improvement.

It's same for AI. Cards like Groq and inference oriented hardware doesn't consume as power as training oriented cards, but this doesn't mean total power use will reduce. On the contrary. It'll increase exponentially. Considering AI companies doesn't care about efficiency yet means we're wasting tons of energy, too.

I'll not enter into the water consumption debacle, because open-loop systems waste enormous amounts of water.

All in all, we're wasting a lot of water and energy which would sustain large cities and large number of people.

with regards from your friendly HPC admin.

> It's not clear how much energy all of our AI systems will use

Is it superior to zero?

Does AI replace existing, more costly energy use patterns to the extent that its own energy use is offset?

Outside AI independently uncovering some energy breakthrough there is nothing it can do to help, only hurt. We already have a source of clean, cheap, unlimited energy, we aren't rolling it out the way we could and should because some rich people would rather have us on a subscription plan where we literally light our source of energy on fire so we have to keep coming back for more.

Perhaps someday. For now, it amount of energy used to produce and run these models is astronomical. It may be the case AI is a net positive for the environment at some point, but as it stands that is nothing but speculation. The reality is it is making the situation worse.

The simple counterargument is that there many more of us than there are of them, so even if on an individual level we have less effect collectively we have much more.

But https://chatgpt.com/share/698cee2c-b8c4-800f-b3cb-fa8869f874...

Imagine if we had people that actually listened to scientists, reduced their carbon footprint and changed their habits.

I agree. But at least in a democratic system, the "each and everyone of us" are politicians that each and everyone elects. So it starts from the basis, IMHO.

You laugh but if everyone changed just some of their behavior, we would be in a much better place.

We used to reuse glass jars, now it’s plastic. We used to can goods, now it’s plastic. We used to use refillable bottles, now it’s plastic. We used to have car doors that went “thunk” when you slammed them shut, now it’s plastic.

If we each are mindful of the amount of trash/litter/waste we produce and take an active step towards minimizing it, we would all be in a better place.

I make lots of compost for my own use. Composting is at best delaying carbon release. As soon as you stop recycling materials the carbon will be released to the atmosphere. In permaculture circles the goal is to close open loops of waste/resources. If you want to permanently lock carbon in your soil, and improve fertility, make biochar. Throwing charcoal in your compost is the easiest way to make it into biochar. It really works and is a permanent amendment.

If you wanted you could even weigh the raw charcoal to quantify the carbon you have sequestered.

Sorry to be a debbie-downer but

the composting process is also a source of greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9933540/