To make energy requires not only a lot of time to be produced, but also a lot of energy to get it done. Industrial society is based on these "oil reserves" from the Mesozoic Era. All the stuff made in factories from the 19th century all the way to iPhones 17s relies on these diminishing EROI — which, instead of being underground, is now in our atmosphere. It's not like a jar on a shelf we can just take off because by the time the energy transfers through the ecosystem all the way it hits where the ecosystem the most fragile, melting the taiga and lowering the albedo.

These are all helpful contributions, but ultimately we need buy-in from decision makers (i.e. rulers/heads of nations).

And at least in the US we do not have it and are actively going in the opposite direction, mostly in the name of money.

Ironically what is pushing many countries to a faster adoption of renewables is not climate change but the recent Iran conflict.

Yes tech can help but implementation depends on human nature.

These awesome things will enable a higher human population. We are like a virus taking over the host organism and overdoing it.

> The answer can't be, let's just consume 10x less. We have to engineer our way out of it.

We will have to do both I am afraid

I’d be embarrassed to call myself a techno optimist and associate with someone who thinks empathy is bad.

I love technology but optimism about it is incompatible with the current capitalist system. Tech is exploited to make capital not to further our optimism.

Edit: if you’re gonna downvote at least offer a counter. lol pathetic.

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reducing consumption across the board isnt just unprofitable, it would mean everyone agreeing to overcome our biological gradients. i do not think it is possible for us to do, and evolution has not equipped us to do that as far as i can tell.

my semi-superstitious take is that the race to achieve ai is grounded in needing something that knows whats going on and is able to make decisions aligned to generational time horizons. whether that works out or not time will tell, but i get the sense a "good enough" ai is probably our best shot at saving us from ourselves. it's clear we can't do that on our own.

>The only real way to approach this problem is to reduce consumption across the board which as you might guess, isn't profitable.

We need a human civilization that is run for the benefit of human beings, not paper-clip maximizing overlords.

Which is why, to be blunt, libertarians and conservatives are wrong to demonize government without being equally or more skeptical of the corrupting power of money.

Government is the only apparatus that can govern unregulated motivations of capital, and we need regulations on pollution and investments in clean energy and waste creation/collection to stop things like climate change.

Gen X and forward grew up in a world that by default was cleaner due to regulations like the Clean Water Act, better for seniors due to things like Social Security and Medicare, and safer due to things like food regulations and vaccine mandates. The people who rail against these things are railing against the very things that made their world safer and in some instances kept them alive.

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Selfishness has nothing to do with it. Capitalism rewards anti-social investment strategies and capital accumulation, so that's what we get. "Capital" is not a force of nature, it's an emergent force from our economic system. It behaves sort of predictably and can be described: that's economics.

EDIT: got to love how anytime you write something even remotely critical of capitalism you get auto-downvoted. Fine, "climate change is only because of bad, selfish people". Is this explanation more palatable?

I am old enough to have witnessed how the climate has completely changed in Europe, where I live.

In the same place where I live now, when I was young there was permanent snow cover for 3 to 4 months.

During the last 10 years, there have been years with no snow and in the others a little snow has been present for 3 or 4 days of a year, when it melted the second day after falling.

I have not used again my winter boots and my winter jackets for the last 15 years or more.

This is really a huge change during less than a human lifetime.

Climate has changed over a lifetime though.

Looking back at the amount of snowfall I saw as a kid and the amount of snowfall I see now in my 30s, or at the number of hot summer days ... I find it hard to claim that climate is not changing over a lifetime. 20 years isn't even a lifetime, that's like 1/4th of a lifetime

Maybe climate is more stable wherever you live

I refer you to: https://xkcd.com/1732/

Huh? Sudden events are a very real part of larger processes like evolution and climate change. A volcano eruption, a meteor impact, or a drought year, or the ceasing of a current can absolutely have massive implications on larger systems.

Wishful thinking...

I wonder how people like you end up so hostile to experts.