Do they have to be a magic bullet?

Switching from ICE to electric is a much smaller ask than switching from personal cars to... bicycles?

That explains the 300 IQ attempt on claiming Greenland.

I really wanna know the kind of person you are that thinks that Trump makes logical decisions.

Soil is generally garbage though. Just saying.

So I've been on a journey of discovering basically this - limits to growth - for the last few years. It's been .... an emotional roller coaster as someone living in the developed world. I'm following the work of Nate Hagens and others in the space, but The Dread still ebbs and flows.

How do you hold this dispassionately? How do you get to a point of wanting to reproduce, or even wanting to continue, as an act of radical hope? Absurdism? Pure interest in watching it all unfold? I'm pretty aware that we are going to have constraints forced on us as like, a thermodynamic function, but ... how to cope? Go back to the tragedy?

-confused, interested, fascinatedly dreading

It reminds me of what I used to say whenever I've completed a contract for a client.

"And remember, now that I'm gone, every problem that occurs is my fault. So stop looking for the culprit, find a solution"

They’re referring to this: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/bidens...

The Republicans are even more protectionist and sinophobic, however. Nobody ever had the option to vote for importing Chinese EVs.

Remember when Republicans blamed 9/11 on Obama, not remembering that it happened when Bush was president?

> India and China burn orders of magnitude more

The US accounts for significantly higher emissions than India[1], despite having only a quarter the population.

> and they aren't going to slow down

There's a pretty good case to be made that China is slowing down[2], albeit not as fast as any of us need to be.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

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

> India and China burn orders of magnitude more

They don't, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

> and they aren't going to slow down.

China already did, according to https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/11/china-co2-emis...

Disagree with this perspective entirely.

Not only is it factually wrong (US emissions are much higher than Indian ones despite India being like 4x as many people), it also ignores second order effects of sane environmental policy completely:

By demonstrating that emission reduction is feasible, smaller wealthy western nations can have giant effects on billions of people living in poorer states. Not only does this demonstrate that wealth and environmental concerns are compatible, it also allows "follower-nations" to emulate such efforts cost effectively by picking proven technologies and avoiding technological dead-ends.

Just consider wind/solar in China: I would argue that the whole industry and growth rates only got to the current point so quickly is thanks to research, development and investment done in western nations in the decades prior.

Countries like Germany (<100M) had a huge effect on energy development in China (>1b people). If they had just kept using fossils until now, Chinese electricity might well be >90% coal power as well.

Geoengineering is a naive pipedream in my view because all proposals are either the height of recklessness and/or completely financial lunacy: CO2 capture for small individual emitters like cars is never gonna be even close to cost competitive with just reducing those emissions in the first place (but I'm always curious about any novel approaches).

Our behaviour is also responsible for China's and India emissions. We've exported lot of our production to those countries and are importing it back. If we were to measure emissions not by the country of the producer but the country of the consumer, our numbers (USA and Europe) would look dramatically different.

As consummer we are responsible for the whole world emissions in the end. Changing those habbits, can impact things far beyond borders. But that's a political choice which goes against a constant growth based economy and it seems that not many people in our countries are ready to accept this. We want to buy and travel as much as we always did but bear no reponsibilities for the impact it has.

Actually it would matter. Less CO2 would be released. It just wouldn't stop all the CO2 being released - but we don't need nor want to stop it all for it to matter.

China outpaced the US for renewable energy rollout years ago, and isn't stopping now, because it's seen as energy security. It's not even close.

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

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

Right on schedule folks, it's a climate topic and we will now have the traditional recitation of the lies.

America could set the standard and then use its soft power (or sanctions if it came to that) to make India and china follow suit. The problem is that America is now hellbent on burning the world, and its soft power is all but gone.

China has actually been leading the charge in terms of green energy lately, at least in terms of making solar power equipment more accessible by way of driving down cost.

I have no idea however if they're just exporting this to other countries or if they're also pushing renewable energy domestically.

From what little I've read on this topic in recent years though they seem to realize that all of that smog is coming from somewhere and are taking meaningful action to remedy it, which is in stark contrast to what we're doing in the states these days with stifling clean energy and promoting coal.

China is already slowing down the addition new fossil fuel power plants. Yes, they still build new ones, yes they generate a lot of emissions. But they are also adding more than the rest of the world combined of renewable (solar, wind) electricity generation each year. Realistically, if China stopped 100% of emissions tomorrow, they'd be in much better position to replace it with clean alternatives than most other countries.

USA burns orders of magnitude more per capita. And if you take historical emission (and you should!) then the disproportion is absolutely absurd.

That's a bit defeatist, and kind of a whataboutism. Sure, it is the greatest tragedy of the commons in history playing out as a slow motion trainwreck, but you don't solve the tragedy of the commons by continuing to make it tragic "because everyone else is doing it". You focus on your own impact and you also focus on diplomacy with your neighbors. You don't just stop, you put in twice the work.

It's also somewhat easy to shift that viewpoint a little, too, right now: China's emissions numbers have started a rapid deceleration downward. They are doing more about their emissions faster than the US. Does the US want to lose to China that badly that we shouldn't even try to align US policy to more of the emissions reductions that China is already succeeding at today? (Much less their robust plans for future emissions reductions?)

Why so blatantly lean into Jevans paradox?

In this case, there is no ceiling on global emissions. If one country reduces to zero there would absolutely be less emissions than if they hadn't. There's no incentive for China and India to pick up the slack and create more pollution just to cover what the US stopped making.

Orders of magnitude more? Do you have a citation for that tremendous claim?

Stopping 100% of emissions from the US would not be enough, but it would absolutely matter. We're still the #2 CO2 emitter. China is only about 3x more, not anything like "orders of magnitude." India is quite a bit less than the US.

Thankfully none of the serious solutions are nation-specific. Also they do not emit "orders of magnitude more"

https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025

That an often repeated old lie even if out of ignorance

China now has 51% electric vehicles, they are switching the whole country to electric

USA won't do that for many decades

https://electrek.co/2025/08/29/electric-vehicles-reach-tippi...

Canada is now allowing Chinese cheap electric car imports which will be a fascinating experiment

not per capita though

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