This is why it's clear we will never do anything to slow the progression of climate change.

By far the most effective an immediate solution to limiting the damage of climate change is to simply to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

People talk about the economic pain of doing this, but that economic pain is nothing compared to the impact of unmitigated climate change.

Even though this would be painful, it is also by far the easiest and fastest to implement solution. It would take fantastically more time and resources to scale up direct air capture (even if it existed in a scalable format today) to come anywhere near addressing this problem.

> Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewables

This is not exactly true, we would have to experience global economic collapse in order to reduce our fossil fuel use. 80% of energy is not spent on electricity globally and this is non-electricity usage is where most of the fossil fuels are consumed and this drives most of the global economy. There's a good reason there are multiple wars being fought over for oil.

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Liftyee 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The economic pain is current. The impact of unmitigated climate change will happen in the future. Thus, the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians makes this sort of planning ahead difficult.

It seems like the whole economic system runs on a quarterly time scale - just look at all the times negligent maintenance to improve profits in the short term have caused disasters in the long term.

Not sure what the solution is though, so I won't complain too much.

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nomel 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Thus, the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians

I don't think they're the only ones to blame. People want what's cheaper/keeps their standard of living the same. Any of these changes temporality upset and outright destroy large portions of the economy. You would be kicking the silent majority right in the wallet, who doesn't care all that much about any of this.

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crystal_revenge 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians

Honestly, if we made even a step towards the changes necessary to limit the current damage most of HN readership, especially the "green" ones that don't seem to understand global energy usage, would be revolting as well.

The pandemic was a great example of what this would look like as a first step. If we even cared a tiny bit about slowing climate change, there would have been at least some amount of people voicing that we should actually continue to follow early pandemic economic restrictions since it did impact global oil usage.

I pointed this out pretty frequently at the time and was nearly always down voted for it. People want "green" to mean "buying the right thing", they don't want "green" to mean "slicing my annual pay to 1/3, never using Amazon or large retail company to purchase thing, no fruit in the winter, and expensive locally woven clothes".

	▲	senordevnyc 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I don’t want that world. And more to the point, there is literally no way to make that happen. None. It’s as pointless as suggesting we summon magic fairies to cool the earth. The totalitarian government required to get humanity to return to the lifestyle you’re suggesting here would itself consume vast amounts of energy and resources. We can’t go back, and almost none of us even want to. We have to figure this out with the tools we have now.

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jimnotgym 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Genuinely not being snide, I really do not know.

Is it possible to produce steel on industrial scales without coal?

I know early ironmaking (I live fairly close to Coalbrookdale!) used charcoal, but is that possible at a large scale?

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acdha 13 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s complicated: https://news.mit.edu/2025/decarbonizing-steel-tough-as-steel...

This is one of the stronger arguments for a carbon tax: if you can’t ignore externalities, people have strong incentives to use less (e.g. buying a car instead of an SUV or biking) and all of the alternative fuel and process work is going to be easier if the cost comparison is more even.

	▲	jimnotgym 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for the link. I read about electric arc furnaces reprocessing scrap steel somewhere else recently. Do we really never need virgin steel again, we already have all we need?