I'm not saying nothing will ever change. That's a misreading. I'm saying asking people to sacrifice will both be rejected and will not do enough, and that the only answer is changing where we get energy.

Environmentalists have been making the "abstinence first" guilt trip argument for decades and it's done absolutely nothing and it will never do anything. That approach is a total failure. I use the abstinence framing because it's like abstinence-based sex ed. Instead of having sex, teenagers have guilty sex.

Let's say Claude's wrong. The argument still stands if it's off by 10X. Soaking the rich won't help by more than a rounding error, and redistribution might actually increase resource use. It's also a one-time thing.

Speaking of AI: turning off all the AI data centers won't help either. They're a few percent of electricity use. A few percent won't matter and it's another one-time thing. It's not an ongoing solution to anything if the economy is still powered by burning stuff.

Then you have the developing world. Let's say we can cut energy requirements to live a middle class life style to 1/4 the current level, which might be possible.

There are about 1.4 billion people in Africa who mostly live below that level. We have no right to tell them they can't have what we have. There's also probably a billion more in Asia who are still climbing to middle class.

If Africa modernizes on coal like China did, that'll add another China worth of emissions, which would be catastrophic. The only way out is for Africa to industrialize and modernize on sources of power that don't emit CO2.

Luckily that's possible, but telling them to stay poor isn't how you make that happen. It's how you get them to say "fuck you" and ignore you.