Yeah, plus the ethical angle. It's a bit ridiculous that we have people researching the 'theoretical ethical treatment of LLMs' when we are doing such awful things to animals on a massive scale.

We have dogs and cats as pets and we eat cows and pigs (in Western countries). As if cows and pigs didn't also have personalities, memories, parental bonds, the ability to feel pain. It's a mass wilful ignorance.

What's the difference between us and animals? I would argue that it's our ability to take ethical decisions and not inflict suffering even if it goes against our base instincts.

Beef is already too expensive for most people. Americans are probably the exception but I can assure you that most Europeans do not have beef heavy diets. Even culturally, pork (and now chicken) were the proteins of choice.

Going vegetarian would only cut it if you stayed clear of dairy. Gram for gram it's better to eat chicken than cheese for the climate.

I question the methodology of that 100kg (per kg) figure for beef, for several reasons:

1. It's not the true Carbon or CO2 figure. It's weighted for other greenhouse gases. That's kind of an issue because methane naturally breaks down (into CO2 and water) over time. The methane issue comes up all the time in such estimates (eg leaks in natural gas pipelines) where methane is a worse greenhouse gas but temporary (7-12 years) and CO2 is essentially forever (until sequestration or photosynthesis);

2. Production method really matters here. American beef, for example, is primarily grain fed. That grain requires fertilizer (more natural gas) and distribution. Australian beef, for example, is largely fed on natural grasses and vegetation, typically until the last 60-120 days where it's transitioned to grain for marbling. American cattle is also heavily fed on corn, which really shouldn't exist in the quantities it does;

3. Ecosystems are complex. One of the big causes of the dust bowl, for example, was the destruction of the great bison herds. Replacing the natural grasses with crops like wheat was just the last straw. The point of the bison is that they're heavy, like up to 2000+ lb heavy, and they leave deep hoof prints on the plains. Water collects there when it rains and feeds cgrasses and the aquifers.

This has been backed up elsewhere too. China has had long projects to stop the desertification of the Gobi and spent a ton on planting trees with varied successes. You know what did work? Horses. They released horses and the same thing happened. Horse hoof prints allowed water to collect and grasses to grow and spread. Grasses, as it turned out, were key to stopping desertification, not trees.

So the point is that certain ecosystems need large herd herbivores to survive. So if you got rid of cattle entirely, what other second order effects would there be?

More practically, people just arne't going to give up meat. Sorry. Unless it become sprice prohibitve (as beef arguably is rapidly becoming now).

Indeed. And also it's not healthy, compared to veggies, or even leaner meats like poultry

Wait, how does beef emit carbon? I thought the main problem with beef was methane, not carbon emissions.

Ah, I see, your graph says CO2-equivalent, not CO2. It's the methane.

There's tens of millions of well-armed Americans who'd rather die fighting then let anyone take away their right to eat red meat, so good luck trying.

Jensen Huang said we need 1000x more power than we currently have just for AI:

https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/jensen-huang-says-...

Let's make that the next frontier and have zero AI.

EDIT: I see that we have EA losers here who want people to eat worms but spend as much on paperclips ^W graphics cards as possible.

How many miles does the burger drive my car? Not to question your numbers but they lack context. Also, it would be good for nature if there were fewer or no humans on this planet. But then there would be no human here to enjoy nature.

Meat, and red meat, is truly a miracle food. Dense in nutrients, satiating and of course tasty.

Nature needs animals as well. In fact it is essential.

Agricultural reform or innovation is certainly an avenue to explore; but this strange obsession with "stop eating red meat" is a bit too much.

It's the sporadic good news item in a sea of bad?

Moving away from fossil fuels is a big task, these are the first signs that things are happening.

But so is German industry - every day in the news either insolvency or workforce reduction and moving production to Eastern Europe - main reason often stated "expensive Energy". I wonder what are the stats for industrial production in 2025 or total energy consumption in Germany?

RE "...... yes, absolute generation from fossil fuels is declining quickly...."

The challenge is to nake renewables reliable accross several days .

This is the most expensive part for needed storage and transmission lines ....

I think I have read that heat is hard to convert to useful energy. Can someone confirm? But the, if that's true, why use heat as energy storage?

I know someone who runs a mineral water company. His biggest expense was the energy cost for washing the glas bottles. He now built a absolutely massive solar farm that feeds directly into heating a well insulated underground water tank. At the time he told me about it (ca two years ago) he said according to his research it is not unlikely to be the biggest such hot water storage in Europe.

The amount of energy needed to test things is just intuitively huge. Boiling one liter of water takes the equivalent amount of energy as lifting 34 metric tons up a meter. Or to translate it to human scale: the same as walking a vertical climb of 1000m with a weight of 34kg.

The continent is literally on fire due to global warming. Europe does not produce any fossil fuels and needs energy independence. It's because politicians dragged their feet for so long on net zero that we are even in this mess in the first place. Better now than never.

What’s your point in relation to this article?

"Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."

Batteries paired with the right inverters solve this fully. Buys you enough time for powering up backup power in the form of a good old steam turbine (gas or coal powered). No need to keep spinning if they aren't needed.

The good news is that batteries are deployed at almost the same scale as solar now on grids world wide. They can respond in more or less real-time to huge fluctuations in supply and demand and smooth out peaks and dips in those.

Thankfully this is one of the easiest limitations to get around technically. Grid forming inverters and inertia markets make this pretty straightforward to solve IMO. Storage is the key thing we need to solve

This is such a misleading comparison. The energy used that comes from a solar panel is already in an extremely low-entropy, highly usable form. The energy used from a fossil fuel is highly inefficient and hard to harness.

For instance, if you just go by the number of joules in an electric car's battery versus the number of joules in a gasoline car's tank with the same range, you'll see that a 'normal' electric car gets around 15 kWh/100km whereas even a rather efficient gas car needs something more like 50kWh/100km. That's because gas combusion loses gigantic amounts of energy to heat and sound.

If you want to talk about 'total energy consumption' and compare solar/wind against fossil fuels, you should count the amount of energy in the sunlight that hits the surface of the solar panel, or the amount of wind energy hitting the turbine blade, rather than the amount of energy they deliver to the grid.

When looking at hat kind of graphs, it's good to keep in mind that burning hydrocarbons is relatively inefficient: only ~20-30% of the energy in the fuel turns into useful work, while electricity is much, much more efficient. So, we need much less of it.

Still a long ways to go regardless, but much less bleak. And also, exponentially growing deployments of wind and solar are harder to spot on this 2-year old graph which goes only up to 2024.

Also interesting to look at the chart per country. [2] US fossil fuel is 4x entire Germany, while for China just coal is over 8x all of Germany. So good and relevant news at a local scale! But pretty irrelevant at a global one... A scale at which there is more talk than action in parts of the world, probably because it would be too economically painful if not unfeasible to e.g. limit or tax imports, outsourcing etc by emission source.

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-source-bar...

yes.

I think this is more about tribalism than conservatism. There's nothing inherently "conservative" about opposing renewable energy.

The political movement that's currently leading the Republican party shouldn't be understood as "conservative". At least, certainly not in terms of the conservative values of respect for the rule of law, traditional mores and institutions, or personal integrity. The populist energy that passes for "conservative" is reactionary and much more concerned with scoring points on social media than governing sensibly.

To be fair, the populist left is also ascendant with its own set of bad ideas.

I'm confused too, and I often self-identify as conservative.

Part of the problem is you think there is unity in any large movement. There is not, only tiny movements with no political power have unity. There are multiple factions is always the right answer and you have to understand each. As a short cut, many (often the majority) are willing to live with those in their midst but don't actually care.

Fossil fuel companies have long supported conservative positions. This is their payback, they get support back.

Many do see renewables as the "left", and so they don't care to think, they just oppose anything the left does. (you often see the reverse)

I'm confused by the US conservatives' full court press for fossil fuels and against wind/solar.

It's almost all tribalism: the left is for it, so they're against it. They have a partially valid point that a lot of so-called environmentalists are anti-progress degrowthers, but the response should be to demonstrate that clean energy (including nuclear) is very good for growth. When conservatives do what they're supposed to and let market forces work, you see things like Texas producing more renewable energy than California.

I know what you mean. You'd think nationalists would want to put the citizens of their country first but nope they can all go and get cancer from coal power plants.

> Imagine how much better carbon emissions would be in Germany if they hadn't dismantled nuclear!

Germany has 15.4 GW of hard coal generation, and 14.7 GW of lignite, for a total of 30.1 GW:

* https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

In 2010, before the shutdowns started, it had 21.5 GW of nuclear.

So if all the other rollouts (renewables, etc) had stayed the same, but the shutdown of nuclear and coal was swapped, Germany could have reduced its emission generation capacity by an extra 66%. (Focusing mainly on coal, since that is (AIUI) the worst of the carbon emitters.)

Don’t forget the low IQ move that Germany did when they replaced the windfarm in NRW with coal.

Those carbon emissions are tuition. Germany is now ramping battery storage, as most of Europe is, to push out more expensive fossil gas.

Ember Energy: Batteries and demand flexibility are ready to scale across the EU - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/batteries-and-deman... - June 24th, 2026 ("The EU battery fleet is projected to grow fourfold, from 37 GW in 2025 to 178 GW by 2030. As this growth unfolds, batteries reduce the need for regular gas backup. By 2030, EU batteries could deliver in a single hour over 80% of the power that all EU gas power plants combined can generate in the same period, up from about 20% in 2025.")

Largest battery storage in Germany set for partial commissioning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104584 - July 2026 (0 comments)

Germany's solar installations drop while new battery storage hits record - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019046 - May 2026 (8 comments)