We just passed 1.5C, we will almost certainly pass 2C by about 2035 and its going to be catastrophic. Far from decreasing CO2 emissions we are not only continuing to increase but doing so at an increasing rate. We will be extinct a large number of species on the planet at this rate, likely 50% or more and we run the real risk of collapsing civilisation if we don't change urgently.
But we sure did make a great profit on those datacentres so worth it to destroy the planets habitats.
I would bet a very large amount of money that we will not have climate change induced civilizational collapse by 2050. Or 2100, if I'm around to see it.
I too will bet a large amount of anything that will only be valuable if civilization does not collapse that civilization will not collapse, even though my pessimistic nature inclines me to expect civilization's collapse.
Offering to make a bet and put some skin in the game is sometimes a very sincere and persuasive expression of confidence in one’s position. In this case, what you’re offering will be valueless if you lose the bet.
I think you're probably right, but there's an enormous gap between "things start to go really bad for everyone around us" and civilization collapse.
Remember, WW2 didn't bring civilizational collapse. In fact one could argue it even accelerated industrial development. Doesn't mean much to those who perished.
Climate crisis and WW2 do not compare. Many people died in WW2, but entire animal and plant species were not wiped out.
We're killing what we eat (and what we eat is nurtured by) at a rapid speed, at scale. This will first show in bearable price increases (as it already does with coffee and cocoa) and only get worse from there, think famine (in regions where this has not happened in a lifetime).
Good luck with keeping a civilization 'stable' when people are hangry at scale.
And the worst part is: While war can be ended, un-extincting is not a solved problem at all.
Well, if we lower the bar to "Would something like WW2 happen again?" then I'm not comfortable betting against it. After all, humanity has already managed to do that on its own without any help from the climate!
You can safely bet agains any large scale war like WW2. We no longer have the money or resources for that. We can't build hundreds of thousands of airplanes, tanks, ships, guns, etc. This doesn't include nukes. We have lots of those. But any nuke war will be very very short, over in a day, not like WW2.
Civilization collapse for the temperate zones of the Globe, probably not, but civilization collapse for parts of Africa and Central Asia, most likely. Temperatures are getting out of hand right now, with 50+ Celsius happening more and more. The world is not ready to handle hundreds of millions of climate refugees, if these people need to leave their countries in order to be able to survive.
I think at some point everyone must face the fact that they're not on this planet by themselves.
Personally I think we could end up like the old SF series Incorporated. 95% of the worlds population living in hellish conditions, 5% living a great life.
Yeah. That was really presicent :-) I especially liked the scene where the main protagonist commuted to work from his nice gated community far out there into downtown, and from the inside it looked all nice and park-like along the highway. Then it zoomed out, like in a video game. Turns out it was all vr-like projection. Slums! Nothing but slums :-)
OTOH why referring to something almost nobody knows, when it's basically the same shit in 'The Expanse" for most of the people on earth? They even have worthless UBI and free meals, and it's an absolute shithole in spite of that.
Depends on how you classify the collapse of civilisation.
It seems highly plausible that there will be a large exodus of humans from previously habitable zones as the temperatures increase and access to food and water become highly variable. Some areas will likely still have access to decent agricultural conditions (e.g. greenhouses can help to control the local climate in order to grow food), but there will undoubtedly be increased conflict over dwindling resources.
> We will be extinct a large number of species on the planet at this rate, likely 50% or more and we run the real risk of collapsing civilisation if we don't change urgently.
There are a bunch of confident predictions like yours that I feel ignore higher-order effects. Climate change won't make the earth uninhabitable, but it will cause more frequent droughts and other disasters, driving up food prices and causing a lot more climate migration from poor countries, which is already causing fatal societal autoimmune reactions in much of the first world. Additionally, for a while I thought the stories about people deciding not to have children because of climate change were an exaggeration, but it's now widespread enough that it's clearly a real trend which will probably accelerate as climate change drives CoL up further, which in turn is a huge headwind on civilization.
I think I would take the opposite side of your bet, maybe not at even odds but not at terrible ones either.
This is an incredibly short sighted and ignorant view. If you live close to the equator, the climate is visibly changing and is becoming borderline deadly.
> We will be extinct a large number of species on the planet at this rate, likely 50% or more
99.9% of species are already extinct, the fossil record is huge. I get that people don't like change, but species going extinct doesn't really move the needle much. That is what they do. Every species eventually goes extinct, species going extinct isn't much of a motivator to go around making humans suffer. We can't stop species going extinct but we can make people comfortable.
And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. If we've got cheap energy then pretty much any problem is solveable and most of the cheap energy production is coming out of the country with the most fossil fuel plants.
This is an absolutely unhinged take. We're facing civilizational collapse because we couldn't be arsed to stop burning fossil fuels, not because we didn't have other options. We've known how to do solar, wind, and nuclear for decades, we've known about anthropogenic climate change for decades, we've known the risks, and we've done absolutely nothing about it. This is a problem of will, not capacity.
Edit, because I'm guessing the "civilizational collapse" line's going to catch the response, instead of the "will, not capacity" part:
Pick any one of:
* Sea levels rise by 2-3ft
* The jet stream breaks down
* The north atlantic current breaks down
* Large swaths of the globe between, say, +/-33deg off the equator experience heat waves sufficient to make being outside more than ~30 or so minutes unprotected a life threatening event for normally healthy individuals multiple times per year (note these areas of the planet contain several billion people, and not the rich ones).
* Climates change sufficient to move productive agricultural zones substantially outside of where they've been for roughly the entire industrial area, causing regular crop failures and unpredictable food prices
* Large scale droughts and flooding become a regular event
* Category 5 becomes the low side of what we'd expect a hurricane to hit
And walk through the political, economic, and social ramifications of it, and then realize we're looking at all of them - and we're already seeing the beginnings of them _today_.
It's not clear to me how any of these lead to civilizational collapse. That's equally unhinged doom fetishization. There is an incredible amount of resiliency baked into our society, and resourcefulness baked into our biology. Pick any one of those and explain the steps to, and what exactly is meant by, "collapse."
I'm not arguing against environmentalism. I'm arguing for humanity and against doom prophesies. We are the descendants of the survivors of the last cataclysmic instant-hellfire-and-brimstone extinction event, and we've only gotten more robust since.
Ok, let's say US Agricultural production drops in half - I don't mean prices double, I mean for every two tons of produce we produce today, we produce one ton in this scenario. What do you think that looks like for our country? How do you think we adjust to that? Do you think it looks like the same place that it does today? Note too that this is not an uncorrelated change - there's no "somewhere else" to get food here.
Let's say that India faces the same problem - that's a nuclear armed state. How does that play out?
Remember the power outage in Texas? By and large, that was because Texas didn't have its grid hooked up to the rest of the country - but how many different areas do you think need to be facing the same conditions before we knock out the power across a region we can't laugh at for a substantial amount of time? What happens if we have to deal with that on a regular basis?
People think "civilizational collapse" is "we're now hunter-gatherers" - typically, it means "the existing state apparatus falls apart, the wealth and health of the people diminishes significantly, and what was a previously recognizable culture and lifestyle is no more. Think "Roman Empire circa 450CE" - that's what we're facing. Yes, there will be humans in 100 years - pending that India question, of course - but that's not the victory condition here.
I mean, I was asking you to supply the "what happens then" part. That's my point, most doom prophecies seem to take the form of:
1. Scary event
2. ???
3. Collapse
I think it does just kind of come down to an innate optimism vs. pessimism. Nobody really knows how any given scenario plays out, it's too complex to predict and could hinge on some tiny little detail or singular event. I look at the Texas thing, or Covid, as evidence of, no big deal, we kept on truckin, pretty much business as usual.
What was the cause of the agricultural issues? How do we know there isn't a solution? We do rationing, we curb new births, we find alternate ways to produce, we optimize the system that was lazy when there was excess, we mobilize everything we have to solve the problem. Yeah it becomes kind of a wartime effort, things aren't exactly 100% as they were, but cultural expectations normalize and adapt and go in new directions. Sometimes it just feels like a fear of change, of the unknown, if you ask anyone today yeah they would not choose to give this and that up but when necessity calls for it you adapt pretty quickly. I still don't see how we get from "food is more scarce right now" to "state apparatus falls apart."
And just to be clear, I am all for efforts to prevent these outcomes. I'm not saying fuck it who cares. I'm just saying fear is the mind-killer.
> I mean for every two tons of produce we produce today, we produce one ton in this scenario. What do you think that looks like for our country?
Well, the ~33% of food that gets wasted in the US would probably need to be handled a lot more carefully. Probably the obese people would need to eat less. And the strategy of growing the population every year through migration might need to be rethought if more farmland can't be found. Plus maybe there'd need to be more fertiliser produced. That involves fossil fuels.
The US has an explicit strategy of growing the population every year. That is a strategy that eventually leads to famine. Pointing out that global warning might lead to famine is less scary than pointing out that business as usual certainly leads to one - the poulation of the US doubled since 1950 and that is equivalent to halving the food production per person. In fact, letting natural population decline take hold would solve both problems and let the smaller population enjoy higher living standards.
> Let's say that India faces the same problem - that's a nuclear armed state. How does that play out?
They're switching over to industrial farming as far as I'm aware, they're probably going to be fine. Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_India looks like a 50% reduction in farmland would knock them back to 90s levels of production efficiency, and they were mostly ok in the 90s. That is value not calories though, doing a precise estimate is probably more than I can manage for a comment.
> Remember the power outage in Texas?
Civilisation in Texas didn't get anywhere near to a collapse. I'm no expert on 450CE Rome, but from what I do know it looked nothing like modern Texas. I wish I could trade for problems like that and enjoy Texan electricity prices. I don't mind having to be ready for an emergency, that is already something that I need to do. Texas got a good deal on that one.
---
I want to stress here that I'm on board with the idea that these are all catastrophic risks that could end badly. But that is business as usual for humanity, we ignore a lot of catastrophic risks on an average day. These are all things we've faced before and faced anyway without the climate changing at all. Cheap energy is the best bet to manage those risks and turning away from it is madness.
The biggest impact to consider is the disruption to food production.
Predictable climate is key to keeping everyone fed. Random droughts, freezes, and unlivable temps will have pretty notable impacts on our ability to produce food.
Will we continue to be able to produce enough food for the world? Who knows. But that's the thing that has me most concerned. If there's a doomsday related to climate it will be that.
Disruption to food production makes it more expensive. We use ~all the land to produce food not because we need to, but because that's the cheapest way.
Greenhouses can produce several orders of magnitude more food per acre than dryland mechanized farming does. (Greenhouses are just one example, there are lots of other ways to produce food more expensively). If we lose ~half of US food production capacity due to climate change we don't halve food production, we switch to more expensive production methods.
Increased food prices might collapse poor societies, but you're going to need a lot more than that to collapse rich societies.
> Greenhouses can produce several orders of magnitude more food per acre than dryland mechanized farming does.
If we climate control them and light them. Then yes. It also depends on the crop being grown. That takes electricity.
There are many crops that simply aren't well suited to greenhouses. Primarily because they are nutrient thin. Those are popular crops that people and livestock eat.
And, importantly, we don't have those greenhouses built yet. Not even a fraction of a percentage of our food comes from them today. It's possible that we can make the switchover, but that will take decades of build out.
The other thing to consider is we won't really have much warning before we need these greenhouses. About the only thing that will trigger action here with the way society is structured is famine. Importantly, capitalism will work against wanting to produce these greenhouses as famine will kick up prices and traditional farming will remain the cheapest way to produce food. Plenty of large corporate farmers will be happy to just continue raising prices rather than build out.
And how long does it take to do that? What do our reserves look like? Where are those new greenhouses? Who pays for the food? How do we adjust our food system around that? How long does _that_ take? How many restaurants, shops, farmers go out of business? What happens to them? How does the economy shift around this? We already have people starving today, how many more do we add in this scenario?
I might ask you to tweak your model as well..."collapse of civilization" is such an extreme, dramatic, far-reaching term, people are always going to latch onto that. It's sensationalism. I would describe what you're talking about as "widespread suffering and hardship" more akin to a world war.
What do you define as “civilization”? Is it culture, norms, practices, a lifestyle, an economy, basic assumptions about the availability of goods and services and health care and medicine, basic assumptions about government, and norms and standards thereof? Is it literally every part of your life that you live every day?
Using greenhouses to prevent famine is a nice idea in theory, but in practise the world has had many famines since the introduction of greenhouses.
Realistically, it's a problem with food distribution whereby the richest countries can attempt to purchase food from alternate supplies and the poorest countries simply starve.
Billions of people have died in the past, but it would obviously be a catastrophic tragedy if billions of people died this year.
Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place. The current rate of extinction is hundreds of times higher than that, and leads to ecosystem collapse.
> Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place.
That is just a mathematical truism. If all species died tomorrow and only humans were left we'd still hit an equilibrium where species were going extinct at the same rate new ones were appearing. The system moves quickly to an equilibrium where usually extinctions = new species.
In practice ecosystems collapse fairly regularly. This stuff isn't planned and nature is messy. Every time something changes ecosystems might collapse.
> Billions of people have died in the past, but it would obviously be a catastrophic tragedy if billions of people died this year.
Sure. Most people would make a show of moral objection to that. But if we look at what the humans actually do - they typically kill everything in sight that is larger than dog, concrete over what is left and poison any insects that made it through the slaughter. I dunno if anyone is tracking how many species we've wiped out on the road to apex predator, but there are going to be quite a few already. Cities are great for humans and not much else. In fact, we purposefully cause ecosystem collapses because it suits us.
That argument is only going to get pushback from very argumentative people but it is actually unpersuasive in practice. A billion human deaths is a tragedy but extinct species seems like it would be acceptable for bettering the material comfort of humans. Humans have generally accepted that trade in the past and we're still purposefully trying to ... I dunno, specie-cide a few that we don't like.
If all species besides humans went extinct tomorrow, humans would also quickly go extinct. The equilibrium would be 0 extinctions and 0 new species.
Maybe millions or billions of years years later that would increase to >0, but i think its fair to call that a total collapse of all life on Earth for those interim years.
Anchoring against the cumulative number of species that have ever existed is a strange baseline, that's a metric that will emphasise "hey, life on earth is old" but makes it very hard to say if there's anything unusual or not about the current period.
The more common baseline I've come across is comparing the estimated rate of species extinction from the last century or so versus the baseline historical extinction rate.
To pick an arbitrary article about extinction rates with citations to published research:
> But this estimated [background extinction] rate is highly uncertain, ranging between 0.1 and 2.0 extinctions per million species-years. Whether we are now indeed in a sixth mass extinction depends to some extent on the true value of this rate. Otherwise, it’s difficult to compare Earth’s situation today with the past.
> In contrast to the the Big Five [mass extinction events], today’s species losses are driven by a mix of direct and indirect human activities, such as the destruction and fragmentation of habitats, direct exploitation like fishing and hunting, chemical pollution, invasive species, and human-caused global warming.
> If we use the same approach to estimate today’s extinctions per million species-years, we come up with a rate that is between ten and 10,000 times higher than the background rate.
This is an interesting analysis, but it does feel a bit apples-to-oranges. It is good to seek perspective on the impact we are having, but in terms of "are we in an extinction event" it feels woefully premature to me, perhaps even comically futile.
1. For all of the others, we are piecing together bits of evidence spanning eons. Can we really compare estimated background extinction rates over hundreds of millions of years to the by-comparison hyper-detailed and extensive data we have from the last 100?
2. This time it's different. Humans are categorically different from past drivers of extinction. I don't think there is a whole lot to extrapolate from. We can selectively preserve species we care about. We can run roughshod over others without even noticing. The impacts of our actions on the global ecosystem, from construction to medicine to pollution to deforestation, are unique. We could hold in a relative stasis where biodiversity continues declining but at too slow of a rate to really be considered a mass extinction. Or we could blow it all up tomorrow. Or we could unlock bioengineering and see an explosion unlike any before. By the criteria in the article it could be millions of years before we can say anything conclusively.
Even during the worst collapses, massive species extinctions took centuries or milleniums. Doing it in a couple of decades instead is unprecedented.
Species extinctions are insignificant if evolution and migration can allow other species to fill niches left behind. This is the first time extinctions are happening faster than evolution. And while migration is significantly disrupted by infrastructure.
As to your second comment, solar is the cheapest energy.
Yes, and some dinosaurs are still alive today. We call them birds. The environment of the earth was still radically altered in an instant, and our ancestors were the winners.
Phew, you made me feel more optimistic about the world. Our current extinction event is comparable to one where a literal huge asteroid hit the planet :-)))
I mean, I do actually find solace in the fact that extinction events in general can create new conditions for new forms of life, and that one in particular paved the way for mammals.
But, my comment was only responding to the assertion that "This is the first time extinctions are happening faster than evolution."
> civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. If we've got cheap energy then pretty much any problem is solveable and most of the cheap energy production is coming out of the country with the most fossil fuel plants.
> And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels.
There's a limited amount of fossil fuels on Earth. We definitely are going to stop using them as a major energy source at some point because of that, the question is if we get to get a choice as to how we reduce and stop using them or let the production curve peak and the economy collapse once that happens if nothing was anticipated. With additional climate change to deal with by that point.
This particular argument is a complete non-issue if we just do “nothing” and let the price mechanism work in the energy markets. There might be a long-term and permanent contraction that reflects the physical reality of energy becoming less available, but there will not be a proper collapse unless some well-meaning central planner tries to avoid it.
Except that by letting the market burn all available fossil fuels we'll get the worst possible case of climate change. And markets aren't known for thinking long-term; by the time we're going to be lacking fuels it will be a bit late to massively build nuclear power plants that takes years to build, massively install renewable and build / install massive storage, or adjust the entire world to less predictable electricity generation if using renewables without massive storage.
France has been doing well with electricity, thanks to central planning that pushed for nuclear. The problem is bad planning, regardless of whether it's public sector or private sector.
The record shows that civilizations collapse when they deplete their resources or otherwise live out of balance with their environment. Which civilizations collapsed because they did not use enough resources?
> And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels
I don't understand the reasoning behind that. Obtaining fossil fuels, refining and delivering them to where they are needed all requires a substantial number of systems working together. Disruption to e.g. refineries will stop people from being able to use fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, alternate sources such as solar and wind are cheaper and require far less civilisation to make workable (e.g. setup your own solar cell and plug it into your isolated supply).
> 99.9% of species are already extinct, the fossil record is huge. I get that people don't like change, but species going extinct doesn't really move the needle much. That is what they do.
Ehhhhh this argument is hopeful at best. The problem is we're changing the temp faster than base keystone species' evolution can adapt.
Without them it's super super unpredictable what'll actually happen.
The worry being mass extinction because we lost plankton or similar. Huge amounts of oxygen production and co2 capacity disappears rapidly with that.
> Far from decreasing CO2 emissions we are not only continuing to increase but doing so at an increasing rate.
Objectively untrue. Globally, though the rise over the last couple of decades is disturbing, emissions are most likely leveling off again; they may have broken past the mid 2010s levels and appear to be rapidly rising in the last few years, but this is just a slight "over-recovery" from the impressive ~5.7% drop in 2020 (mainly from COVID restrictions of course). US emissions peaked in 2005 and were ~18.6% lower in 2023 (the last year of Our World in Data figures). And, you know, China is pivoting.
That data lags because it's noisy and because it's measuring the air, which lags production of the CO2. The rate of increase has been increasing as India and especially China have been undergoing economic revolution, but China is also now known to be pivoting on their energy policy. That's already underway, not just planned (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45545644).
You're looking at total atmospheric CO2, which is increasing at an increasing rate. The OP's claim was about CO2 emissions, however, which are increasing at a decreasing rate.
Reminder that we have enough nuclear fuel to power all of humanity with zero emissions for hundreds of years. Anyone who’s talking about this issue and not pushing nuclear is likely trying to use it as a political tool instead of actually trying to solve the problem.
I'm all for nuclear, specifically nuclear fusion, specifically the great big fusion reactor in the sky that bathes the Earth in more free energy in a day than we as a planet use in a year.
Most people pushing nuclear are trying to sell fossil fuels for another 50 or so years and delay implementation of cheaper solutions. If we committed to building out nuclear today, we'd get our first one online in about 20 years. We need about 1000 of them in the US, which would take a lot longer than 20 years.
> Most people pushing nuclear are trying to sell fossil fuels for another 50 or so years and delay implementation of cheaper solutions.
This claim explains a lot about our previous interactions. It's also the polar opposite of my experience.
I have never heard a single advocate of nuclear advocating for fossil fuels, and I certainly don't do it myself. I've also never heard them speak against solar (and again I also don't do this). It's purely about defending nuclear from fear-mongering and trying to make it possible faster, rather than being crushed under ridiculous and unjustified regulations.
Eh. Not really anymore. Except at extreme latitudes, solar + battery now beats Nuclear on year round cost and especially on time to installation. It's only going to get more stark as time passes.
Doubt this will happen. Coal production in the US has plummeted, coal mines and infrastructure is not coming back. At best they would import cheap coal (but maybe not with tarrifs?) but even that would require sizable capex in ports… its just not gonna happen.
A developer in the Bay Area just spent 10 years litigating for the right to build a coal terminal at the Port of Oakland, and having won the suit now intends to go ahead and build it, aiming to go into operation by 2028. So clearly some people with sizable capex at their disposal disagree with you.
When all the carbon frozen in the permafrost of Siberia is released back into the ecosystem, the Earth with once again look like a tropical paradise it once was, being able to sustain giant cold-blooded reptiles.
(Well, not sure they actually were reptiles, but most likely cold-blooded.)
That's on chapter 9, "The Conquest of Land and the Radiation of Amphibians". Caution, this is a book from 1988, the Carboniferous era may have changed a lot since then.
(Carboniferous = Mississippian + Pennsylvanian.)
An image search for "Paleozoic and Mesozoic amphibians and reptiles" may also be gratifying. I'm fond of Moschops ("calf face"), though that's after the Carboniferous rainforest collapse.
How does self hosting change the power consumption? Don't you still need to power those devices? If you're running fully on renewable, sure you have a point. But if everyone self hosts, the power companies still have to fill the energy gap, right?
Less bizarre when you consider we’ve effectively made corruption legal, and created a system where a wealthy incumbent has a lot more pull than a new player.
being realistic given the current administration, the best avenue for those that care about climate change would be to lobby their representatives for nuclear and specially coal to nuclear transitions (https://www.energy.gov/ne/coal-nuclear-transitions) and lobby for more government funding directed to accelerate this. This would be palatable to the current administration while also supporting the goal of less c02 and other emissions.
Heck this also takes away any incentive to restart the coal plants by private companies if they are being financially supported and already in the process of converting them to nuclear, and it takes away an incentive to build more long-term because each nuclear plant provides a lot more power on average. Another thing to lobby for would be for more SMRs funding and less regulation overall in nuclear (it's insane how overly regulated nuclear is based on one soviet fuck up of a crappy underfunded/flawed powerplant (chernobyl). Fukushima plants (commissioned in 1971!) were hit with a once in a lifetime 9.5 magnitude earthquake and tsunami on top despite being less than 100 miles from the epicenter even with regulatory lapses and no direct deaths.
What do you suppose this administration dislikes about solar that wouldn't be equally unpalatable about nuclear? Keeping fossil fuels propped up is the only reason I can see solar not being an easy sell to Trump. Domestic solar panel production could be the space race of our time, and fit right into the tariff narrative, with the right prompting.
Eh. This is less of a US political party problem. We aren't the only consumers and emitters. Even if we were, I don't think this _really_ is democrat vs republican. Silicon Valley types vote left. Also pushed gaming, cryptocurrency, AI, internet marketing, and everything else that helps us consume more dumbshit.
We started seeing the "smoke" when Reagan became President after Carter put Solar Panels on the White House. Each President (& Congress) since then kowtowed to the Fossil Fuel industry to varying degrees.
The GOP was the leader but the Democrats added to it but pretended they cared. At least the GOP told the truth that they were out to destroy the Climate.
We had almost 50 years to work on it, but people who could lead decided they wanted to keep their jobs and bribes instead of doing good for the US and the World.
These were initiated by Nixon, removed late in the Reagan era when the roof was replaced, then new panels installed by Bush 2, followed by more under Obama.
China cut fossil fuel use 2% in H1 2025 (compared to H1 2024). It cut coal use 2% in H1 2025 (compared to H1 2024) [1]. The majority of new energy production is wind and solar, not nuclear, and certainly not coal.
As of past 1.5 years, the use of fossil fuels for electricity generation in China seems to have reached a plateau. They are building new coal plants, more new plants than they are retiring old plants. But even with new coal plants, they have not been burning more coal.
They are barely building any nuclear plants, so far zero finished in 2025.
In terms of coal its usage has started to decrease in actual terms since the start of 2025. All demand growth and more is solved by new built renewables and storage.
We just passed 1.5C, we will almost certainly pass 2C by about 2035 and its going to be catastrophic. Far from decreasing CO2 emissions we are not only continuing to increase but doing so at an increasing rate. We will be extinct a large number of species on the planet at this rate, likely 50% or more and we run the real risk of collapsing civilisation if we don't change urgently.
But we sure did make a great profit on those datacentres so worth it to destroy the planets habitats.
I would bet a very large amount of money that we will not have climate change induced civilizational collapse by 2050. Or 2100, if I'm around to see it.
I too will bet a large amount of anything that will only be valuable if civilization does not collapse that civilization will not collapse, even though my pessimistic nature inclines me to expect civilization's collapse.
Offering to make a bet and put some skin in the game is sometimes a very sincere and persuasive expression of confidence in one’s position. In this case, what you’re offering will be valueless if you lose the bet.
I really thought that was the crux of what was meant to be a very dark joke. But if it wasn’t… oof
I think you're probably right, but there's an enormous gap between "things start to go really bad for everyone around us" and civilization collapse.
Remember, WW2 didn't bring civilizational collapse. In fact one could argue it even accelerated industrial development. Doesn't mean much to those who perished.
Climate crisis and WW2 do not compare. Many people died in WW2, but entire animal and plant species were not wiped out.
We're killing what we eat (and what we eat is nurtured by) at a rapid speed, at scale. This will first show in bearable price increases (as it already does with coffee and cocoa) and only get worse from there, think famine (in regions where this has not happened in a lifetime).
Good luck with keeping a civilization 'stable' when people are hangry at scale.
And the worst part is: While war can be ended, un-extincting is not a solved problem at all.
> Remember, WW2 didn't bring civilizational collapse
It depends where you lived.
It sure did in China, Japan, Germany, large chunks of the USSR.
Civilisation was rebuilt, but it sure collapsed.
Perhaps the author of that comment comes from the USA?
Well, if we lower the bar to "Would something like WW2 happen again?" then I'm not comfortable betting against it. After all, humanity has already managed to do that on its own without any help from the climate!
You can safely bet agains any large scale war like WW2. We no longer have the money or resources for that. We can't build hundreds of thousands of airplanes, tanks, ships, guns, etc. This doesn't include nukes. We have lots of those. But any nuke war will be very very short, over in a day, not like WW2.
You are making that bet.
For themselves and everyone else
Civilization collapse for the temperate zones of the Globe, probably not, but civilization collapse for parts of Africa and Central Asia, most likely. Temperatures are getting out of hand right now, with 50+ Celsius happening more and more. The world is not ready to handle hundreds of millions of climate refugees, if these people need to leave their countries in order to be able to survive.
I think at some point everyone must face the fact that they're not on this planet by themselves.
Olive oil is already more expensive because of climate change[1]
Sure, we won't collapse to Mad Max levels, not in the West at least, but our quality of life will decline steeply.
[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20231218-why-olive-oil-...
I will bet a large amount of money that the world will not detonate in 2026, any takers?
Personally I think we could end up like the old SF series Incorporated. 95% of the worlds population living in hellish conditions, 5% living a great life.
Back to serfdom that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series)
Yeah. That was really presicent :-) I especially liked the scene where the main protagonist commuted to work from his nice gated community far out there into downtown, and from the inside it looked all nice and park-like along the highway. Then it zoomed out, like in a video game. Turns out it was all vr-like projection. Slums! Nothing but slums :-)
OTOH why referring to something almost nobody knows, when it's basically the same shit in 'The Expanse" for most of the people on earth? They even have worthless UBI and free meals, and it's an absolute shithole in spite of that.
Depends on how you classify the collapse of civilisation.
It seems highly plausible that there will be a large exodus of humans from previously habitable zones as the temperatures increase and access to food and water become highly variable. Some areas will likely still have access to decent agricultural conditions (e.g. greenhouses can help to control the local climate in order to grow food), but there will undoubtedly be increased conflict over dwindling resources.
The parent comment said nothing about civilization collapse. It was about extinction of species site to climate change.
> We will be extinct a large number of species on the planet at this rate, likely 50% or more and we run the real risk of collapsing civilisation if we don't change urgently.
It's not a long comment.
Reading skills are going down faster than our hopes of saving the planet.
Quoting that comment:
> we run the real risk of collapsing civilisation if we don't change urgently
There are a bunch of confident predictions like yours that I feel ignore higher-order effects. Climate change won't make the earth uninhabitable, but it will cause more frequent droughts and other disasters, driving up food prices and causing a lot more climate migration from poor countries, which is already causing fatal societal autoimmune reactions in much of the first world. Additionally, for a while I thought the stories about people deciding not to have children because of climate change were an exaggeration, but it's now widespread enough that it's clearly a real trend which will probably accelerate as climate change drives CoL up further, which in turn is a huge headwind on civilization.
I think I would take the opposite side of your bet, maybe not at even odds but not at terrible ones either.
Seems like most of silicon valley agrees with you.
arrogance
who is and where are "we"?
This is an incredibly short sighted and ignorant view. If you live close to the equator, the climate is visibly changing and is becoming borderline deadly.
How nice it is to be from a country with multiple climates you can flee to if one part becomes intolerable.
> We will be extinct a large number of species on the planet at this rate, likely 50% or more
99.9% of species are already extinct, the fossil record is huge. I get that people don't like change, but species going extinct doesn't really move the needle much. That is what they do. Every species eventually goes extinct, species going extinct isn't much of a motivator to go around making humans suffer. We can't stop species going extinct but we can make people comfortable.
And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. If we've got cheap energy then pretty much any problem is solveable and most of the cheap energy production is coming out of the country with the most fossil fuel plants.
This is an absolutely unhinged take. We're facing civilizational collapse because we couldn't be arsed to stop burning fossil fuels, not because we didn't have other options. We've known how to do solar, wind, and nuclear for decades, we've known about anthropogenic climate change for decades, we've known the risks, and we've done absolutely nothing about it. This is a problem of will, not capacity.
Edit, because I'm guessing the "civilizational collapse" line's going to catch the response, instead of the "will, not capacity" part:
Pick any one of:
* Sea levels rise by 2-3ft
* The jet stream breaks down
* The north atlantic current breaks down
* Large swaths of the globe between, say, +/-33deg off the equator experience heat waves sufficient to make being outside more than ~30 or so minutes unprotected a life threatening event for normally healthy individuals multiple times per year (note these areas of the planet contain several billion people, and not the rich ones).
* Climates change sufficient to move productive agricultural zones substantially outside of where they've been for roughly the entire industrial area, causing regular crop failures and unpredictable food prices
* Large scale droughts and flooding become a regular event
* Category 5 becomes the low side of what we'd expect a hurricane to hit
And walk through the political, economic, and social ramifications of it, and then realize we're looking at all of them - and we're already seeing the beginnings of them _today_.
It's not clear to me how any of these lead to civilizational collapse. That's equally unhinged doom fetishization. There is an incredible amount of resiliency baked into our society, and resourcefulness baked into our biology. Pick any one of those and explain the steps to, and what exactly is meant by, "collapse."
I'm not arguing against environmentalism. I'm arguing for humanity and against doom prophesies. We are the descendants of the survivors of the last cataclysmic instant-hellfire-and-brimstone extinction event, and we've only gotten more robust since.
Ok, let's say US Agricultural production drops in half - I don't mean prices double, I mean for every two tons of produce we produce today, we produce one ton in this scenario. What do you think that looks like for our country? How do you think we adjust to that? Do you think it looks like the same place that it does today? Note too that this is not an uncorrelated change - there's no "somewhere else" to get food here.
Let's say that India faces the same problem - that's a nuclear armed state. How does that play out?
Remember the power outage in Texas? By and large, that was because Texas didn't have its grid hooked up to the rest of the country - but how many different areas do you think need to be facing the same conditions before we knock out the power across a region we can't laugh at for a substantial amount of time? What happens if we have to deal with that on a regular basis?
People think "civilizational collapse" is "we're now hunter-gatherers" - typically, it means "the existing state apparatus falls apart, the wealth and health of the people diminishes significantly, and what was a previously recognizable culture and lifestyle is no more. Think "Roman Empire circa 450CE" - that's what we're facing. Yes, there will be humans in 100 years - pending that India question, of course - but that's not the victory condition here.
I mean, I was asking you to supply the "what happens then" part. That's my point, most doom prophecies seem to take the form of:
1. Scary event 2. ??? 3. Collapse
I think it does just kind of come down to an innate optimism vs. pessimism. Nobody really knows how any given scenario plays out, it's too complex to predict and could hinge on some tiny little detail or singular event. I look at the Texas thing, or Covid, as evidence of, no big deal, we kept on truckin, pretty much business as usual.
What was the cause of the agricultural issues? How do we know there isn't a solution? We do rationing, we curb new births, we find alternate ways to produce, we optimize the system that was lazy when there was excess, we mobilize everything we have to solve the problem. Yeah it becomes kind of a wartime effort, things aren't exactly 100% as they were, but cultural expectations normalize and adapt and go in new directions. Sometimes it just feels like a fear of change, of the unknown, if you ask anyone today yeah they would not choose to give this and that up but when necessity calls for it you adapt pretty quickly. I still don't see how we get from "food is more scarce right now" to "state apparatus falls apart."
And just to be clear, I am all for efforts to prevent these outcomes. I'm not saying fuck it who cares. I'm just saying fear is the mind-killer.
> I mean for every two tons of produce we produce today, we produce one ton in this scenario. What do you think that looks like for our country?
Well, the ~33% of food that gets wasted in the US would probably need to be handled a lot more carefully. Probably the obese people would need to eat less. And the strategy of growing the population every year through migration might need to be rethought if more farmland can't be found. Plus maybe there'd need to be more fertiliser produced. That involves fossil fuels.
The US has an explicit strategy of growing the population every year. That is a strategy that eventually leads to famine. Pointing out that global warning might lead to famine is less scary than pointing out that business as usual certainly leads to one - the poulation of the US doubled since 1950 and that is equivalent to halving the food production per person. In fact, letting natural population decline take hold would solve both problems and let the smaller population enjoy higher living standards.
> Let's say that India faces the same problem - that's a nuclear armed state. How does that play out?
They're switching over to industrial farming as far as I'm aware, they're probably going to be fine. Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_India looks like a 50% reduction in farmland would knock them back to 90s levels of production efficiency, and they were mostly ok in the 90s. That is value not calories though, doing a precise estimate is probably more than I can manage for a comment.
> Remember the power outage in Texas?
Civilisation in Texas didn't get anywhere near to a collapse. I'm no expert on 450CE Rome, but from what I do know it looked nothing like modern Texas. I wish I could trade for problems like that and enjoy Texan electricity prices. I don't mind having to be ready for an emergency, that is already something that I need to do. Texas got a good deal on that one.
---
I want to stress here that I'm on board with the idea that these are all catastrophic risks that could end badly. But that is business as usual for humanity, we ignore a lot of catastrophic risks on an average day. These are all things we've faced before and faced anyway without the climate changing at all. Cheap energy is the best bet to manage those risks and turning away from it is madness.
The biggest impact to consider is the disruption to food production.
Predictable climate is key to keeping everyone fed. Random droughts, freezes, and unlivable temps will have pretty notable impacts on our ability to produce food.
Will we continue to be able to produce enough food for the world? Who knows. But that's the thing that has me most concerned. If there's a doomsday related to climate it will be that.
Disruption to food production makes it more expensive. We use ~all the land to produce food not because we need to, but because that's the cheapest way.
Greenhouses can produce several orders of magnitude more food per acre than dryland mechanized farming does. (Greenhouses are just one example, there are lots of other ways to produce food more expensively). If we lose ~half of US food production capacity due to climate change we don't halve food production, we switch to more expensive production methods.
Increased food prices might collapse poor societies, but you're going to need a lot more than that to collapse rich societies.
> Greenhouses can produce several orders of magnitude more food per acre than dryland mechanized farming does.
If we climate control them and light them. Then yes. It also depends on the crop being grown. That takes electricity.
There are many crops that simply aren't well suited to greenhouses. Primarily because they are nutrient thin. Those are popular crops that people and livestock eat.
And, importantly, we don't have those greenhouses built yet. Not even a fraction of a percentage of our food comes from them today. It's possible that we can make the switchover, but that will take decades of build out.
The other thing to consider is we won't really have much warning before we need these greenhouses. About the only thing that will trigger action here with the way society is structured is famine. Importantly, capitalism will work against wanting to produce these greenhouses as famine will kick up prices and traditional farming will remain the cheapest way to produce food. Plenty of large corporate farmers will be happy to just continue raising prices rather than build out.
And how long does it take to do that? What do our reserves look like? Where are those new greenhouses? Who pays for the food? How do we adjust our food system around that? How long does _that_ take? How many restaurants, shops, farmers go out of business? What happens to them? How does the economy shift around this? We already have people starving today, how many more do we add in this scenario?
Yes, it'll be horrible. But "collapse of civilization" is a pretty high bar.
Ok, now make two tweaks to your mental model:
First, think “the fall of Rome” when you hear “civilization collapse.”
Second, consider that this isn’t just affecting the US, but every major populated country.
And then consider you’ll be living through it, not reading about it in a book.
I might ask you to tweak your model as well..."collapse of civilization" is such an extreme, dramatic, far-reaching term, people are always going to latch onto that. It's sensationalism. I would describe what you're talking about as "widespread suffering and hardship" more akin to a world war.
What do you define as “civilization”? Is it culture, norms, practices, a lifestyle, an economy, basic assumptions about the availability of goods and services and health care and medicine, basic assumptions about government, and norms and standards thereof? Is it literally every part of your life that you live every day?
Fall of Rome took hundreds of years, up to 1000 depending on how you measure it.
And fall of Rome isn't anywhere close to collapse of civilization. Collapse of Rome scenarios I'll accept as plausible. Collapse of civilization, no.
Using greenhouses to prevent famine is a nice idea in theory, but in practise the world has had many famines since the introduction of greenhouses.
Realistically, it's a problem with food distribution whereby the richest countries can attempt to purchase food from alternate supplies and the poorest countries simply starve.
Fresh water is what I think will do it. Most countries are depleting their ground water rapidly and suffering from increasing droughts.
Billions of people have died in the past, but it would obviously be a catastrophic tragedy if billions of people died this year.
Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place. The current rate of extinction is hundreds of times higher than that, and leads to ecosystem collapse.
> Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place.
That is just a mathematical truism. If all species died tomorrow and only humans were left we'd still hit an equilibrium where species were going extinct at the same rate new ones were appearing. The system moves quickly to an equilibrium where usually extinctions = new species.
In practice ecosystems collapse fairly regularly. This stuff isn't planned and nature is messy. Every time something changes ecosystems might collapse.
> Billions of people have died in the past, but it would obviously be a catastrophic tragedy if billions of people died this year.
Sure. Most people would make a show of moral objection to that. But if we look at what the humans actually do - they typically kill everything in sight that is larger than dog, concrete over what is left and poison any insects that made it through the slaughter. I dunno if anyone is tracking how many species we've wiped out on the road to apex predator, but there are going to be quite a few already. Cities are great for humans and not much else. In fact, we purposefully cause ecosystem collapses because it suits us.
That argument is only going to get pushback from very argumentative people but it is actually unpersuasive in practice. A billion human deaths is a tragedy but extinct species seems like it would be acceptable for bettering the material comfort of humans. Humans have generally accepted that trade in the past and we're still purposefully trying to ... I dunno, specie-cide a few that we don't like.
If all species besides humans went extinct tomorrow, humans would also quickly go extinct. The equilibrium would be 0 extinctions and 0 new species.
Maybe millions or billions of years years later that would increase to >0, but i think its fair to call that a total collapse of all life on Earth for those interim years.
Anchoring against the cumulative number of species that have ever existed is a strange baseline, that's a metric that will emphasise "hey, life on earth is old" but makes it very hard to say if there's anything unusual or not about the current period.
The more common baseline I've come across is comparing the estimated rate of species extinction from the last century or so versus the baseline historical extinction rate.
To pick an arbitrary article about extinction rates with citations to published research:
> But this estimated [background extinction] rate is highly uncertain, ranging between 0.1 and 2.0 extinctions per million species-years. Whether we are now indeed in a sixth mass extinction depends to some extent on the true value of this rate. Otherwise, it’s difficult to compare Earth’s situation today with the past.
> In contrast to the the Big Five [mass extinction events], today’s species losses are driven by a mix of direct and indirect human activities, such as the destruction and fragmentation of habitats, direct exploitation like fishing and hunting, chemical pollution, invasive species, and human-caused global warming.
> If we use the same approach to estimate today’s extinctions per million species-years, we come up with a rate that is between ten and 10,000 times higher than the background rate.
https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-mass-extinction-and-ar...
This is an interesting analysis, but it does feel a bit apples-to-oranges. It is good to seek perspective on the impact we are having, but in terms of "are we in an extinction event" it feels woefully premature to me, perhaps even comically futile.
1. For all of the others, we are piecing together bits of evidence spanning eons. Can we really compare estimated background extinction rates over hundreds of millions of years to the by-comparison hyper-detailed and extensive data we have from the last 100?
2. This time it's different. Humans are categorically different from past drivers of extinction. I don't think there is a whole lot to extrapolate from. We can selectively preserve species we care about. We can run roughshod over others without even noticing. The impacts of our actions on the global ecosystem, from construction to medicine to pollution to deforestation, are unique. We could hold in a relative stasis where biodiversity continues declining but at too slow of a rate to really be considered a mass extinction. Or we could blow it all up tomorrow. Or we could unlock bioengineering and see an explosion unlike any before. By the criteria in the article it could be millions of years before we can say anything conclusively.
Even during the worst collapses, massive species extinctions took centuries or milleniums. Doing it in a couple of decades instead is unprecedented.
Species extinctions are insignificant if evolution and migration can allow other species to fill niches left behind. This is the first time extinctions are happening faster than evolution. And while migration is significantly disrupted by infrastructure.
As to your second comment, solar is the cheapest energy.
Check out the Cretaceous-Paleogene. Pretty important one.
We have fossils of dinosaurs that existed 40,000 years after that one.
Yes, and some dinosaurs are still alive today. We call them birds. The environment of the earth was still radically altered in an instant, and our ancestors were the winners.
Those were fossils of non-avian dinosaurs.
Ok I'm really missing your point then. Can you restate it in a way that contradicts something I'm saying?
I'm saying that the current extinction event is considerably worse and faster than the Cretaceous-Paleogene one.
Based on the prediction that some significant percentage of life will be extinct decades from now?
I don't see how anything that has happened yet in our timeline compares in any way to a massive asteroid impact.
Phew, you made me feel more optimistic about the world. Our current extinction event is comparable to one where a literal huge asteroid hit the planet :-)))
I mean, I do actually find solace in the fact that extinction events in general can create new conditions for new forms of life, and that one in particular paved the way for mammals.
But, my comment was only responding to the assertion that "This is the first time extinctions are happening faster than evolution."
> civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. If we've got cheap energy then pretty much any problem is solveable and most of the cheap energy production is coming out of the country with the most fossil fuel plants.
Solar is cheaper now. Has been for awhile.
> And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels.
There's a limited amount of fossil fuels on Earth. We definitely are going to stop using them as a major energy source at some point because of that, the question is if we get to get a choice as to how we reduce and stop using them or let the production curve peak and the economy collapse once that happens if nothing was anticipated. With additional climate change to deal with by that point.
This particular argument is a complete non-issue if we just do “nothing” and let the price mechanism work in the energy markets. There might be a long-term and permanent contraction that reflects the physical reality of energy becoming less available, but there will not be a proper collapse unless some well-meaning central planner tries to avoid it.
Except that by letting the market burn all available fossil fuels we'll get the worst possible case of climate change. And markets aren't known for thinking long-term; by the time we're going to be lacking fuels it will be a bit late to massively build nuclear power plants that takes years to build, massively install renewable and build / install massive storage, or adjust the entire world to less predictable electricity generation if using renewables without massive storage.
France has been doing well with electricity, thanks to central planning that pushed for nuclear. The problem is bad planning, regardless of whether it's public sector or private sector.
The record shows that civilizations collapse when they deplete their resources or otherwise live out of balance with their environment. Which civilizations collapsed because they did not use enough resources?
Isn’t the issue species going extinct that are critical parts of larger food chains?
And don't forget the pollinators - without them, agriculture changes drastically.
> And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels
I don't understand the reasoning behind that. Obtaining fossil fuels, refining and delivering them to where they are needed all requires a substantial number of systems working together. Disruption to e.g. refineries will stop people from being able to use fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, alternate sources such as solar and wind are cheaper and require far less civilisation to make workable (e.g. setup your own solar cell and plug it into your isolated supply).
> 99.9% of species are already extinct, the fossil record is huge. I get that people don't like change, but species going extinct doesn't really move the needle much. That is what they do.
Ehhhhh this argument is hopeful at best. The problem is we're changing the temp faster than base keystone species' evolution can adapt.
Without them it's super super unpredictable what'll actually happen.
The worry being mass extinction because we lost plankton or similar. Huge amounts of oxygen production and co2 capacity disappears rapidly with that.
This is a horrifically dangerous attitude.
this week's latest extinction: https://theconversation.com/and-then-there-were-none-austral...
the scale of impact goes beyond extinction, to encompass wiping out entire system types.
> Far from decreasing CO2 emissions we are not only continuing to increase but doing so at an increasing rate.
Objectively untrue. Globally, though the rise over the last couple of decades is disturbing, emissions are most likely leveling off again; they may have broken past the mid 2010s levels and appear to be rapidly rising in the last few years, but this is just a slight "over-recovery" from the impressive ~5.7% drop in 2020 (mainly from COVID restrictions of course). US emissions peaked in 2005 and were ~18.6% lower in 2023 (the last year of Our World in Data figures). And, you know, China is pivoting.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
> and its going to be catastrophic.... But we sure did...
This attitude tends to inspire unproductive doomerism rather than urgent change.
> Objectively untrue.
No, that is true already. Look at the "rate" tab of the Mauna Kea data, it shows growth on average. Of the rate of CO 2 growth.
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gr.html
That data lags because it's noisy and because it's measuring the air, which lags production of the CO2. The rate of increase has been increasing as India and especially China have been undergoing economic revolution, but China is also now known to be pivoting on their energy policy. That's already underway, not just planned (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45545644).
You're looking at total atmospheric CO2, which is increasing at an increasing rate. The OP's claim was about CO2 emissions, however, which are increasing at a decreasing rate.
Absence of necessary urgent change tend to inspire doomerism.
no, 2023 and 2024 both passed above 1.5c .. details:
https://berkeleyearth.org/august-2025-temperature-update/
You say "no", but then you agree...
Reminder that we have enough nuclear fuel to power all of humanity with zero emissions for hundreds of years. Anyone who’s talking about this issue and not pushing nuclear is likely trying to use it as a political tool instead of actually trying to solve the problem.
I'm all for nuclear, specifically nuclear fusion, specifically the great big fusion reactor in the sky that bathes the Earth in more free energy in a day than we as a planet use in a year.
The west can't seem to build and operate new reactors cheaply.
France's nuclear electricity isn't even that cheap and they were all built decades ago.
Most people pushing nuclear are trying to sell fossil fuels for another 50 or so years and delay implementation of cheaper solutions. If we committed to building out nuclear today, we'd get our first one online in about 20 years. We need about 1000 of them in the US, which would take a lot longer than 20 years.
> Most people pushing nuclear are trying to sell fossil fuels for another 50 or so years and delay implementation of cheaper solutions.
This claim explains a lot about our previous interactions. It's also the polar opposite of my experience.
I have never heard a single advocate of nuclear advocating for fossil fuels, and I certainly don't do it myself. I've also never heard them speak against solar (and again I also don't do this). It's purely about defending nuclear from fear-mongering and trying to make it possible faster, rather than being crushed under ridiculous and unjustified regulations.
Nuclear in 2025 is not cost competitive for two major reasons unrelated to regulations.
1. It relies on a ridiculously expensive massive steam turbine
2. It's a major infrastructure project, which the USA seems incapable of building without massive cost over run.
Yes, there are other reasons why nuclear is slow and expensive, but those two can't be fixed with a magic wand getting rid of nuclear regulations
Also, there's an easy way to minimize regalatory bother: just build an already approved design, like thr AP1000.
> Nuclear in 2025 is not cost competitive for two major reasons unrelated to regulations.
And yet Canada was able to build them decades ago, along with many other poorer countries.
Eh. Not really anymore. Except at extreme latitudes, solar + battery now beats Nuclear on year round cost and especially on time to installation. It's only going to get more stark as time passes.
Doubt this will happen. Coal production in the US has plummeted, coal mines and infrastructure is not coming back. At best they would import cheap coal (but maybe not with tarrifs?) but even that would require sizable capex in ports… its just not gonna happen.
A developer in the Bay Area just spent 10 years litigating for the right to build a coal terminal at the Port of Oakland, and having won the suit now intends to go ahead and build it, aiming to go into operation by 2028. So clearly some people with sizable capex at their disposal disagree with you.
https://oaklandside.org/2025/09/22/oakland-coal-terminal-leg...
Great news!
When all the carbon frozen in the permafrost of Siberia is released back into the ecosystem, the Earth with once again look like a tropical paradise it once was, being able to sustain giant cold-blooded reptiles.
(Well, not sure they actually were reptiles, but most likely cold-blooded.)
> most likely cold-blooded
I wonder if the vast chunk of humanity that shares this trait will be able to survive the scenario. I doubt it somehow.
Apparently at least a chunk of dinosaurs were warm blooded.
But this is about the Carboniferous, about 40 million years before the first dinosaurs.
Ah, my mistake. Do you happen to have a link to this? I didn't know about other giant reptiles, except for the dinosaurs.
What sort of a link would you like, perhaps this?
https://archive.org/details/Vertebrate.Paleontology.Evolutio...
That's on chapter 9, "The Conquest of Land and the Radiation of Amphibians". Caution, this is a book from 1988, the Carboniferous era may have changed a lot since then.
(Carboniferous = Mississippian + Pennsylvanian.)
An image search for "Paleozoic and Mesozoic amphibians and reptiles" may also be gratifying. I'm fond of Moschops ("calf face"), though that's after the Carboniferous rainforest collapse.
Those links work great, thank you! Turns out, life is weird and exciting and really old!
More reason to ditch big companies and self-host
How does self hosting change the power consumption? Don't you still need to power those devices? If you're running fully on renewable, sure you have a point. But if everyone self hosts, the power companies still have to fill the energy gap, right?
For one thing, if you switch from cloud to local storage, that avoids the need for the actual bandwidth, which requires energy.
My usage of stuff often correlates to the sun being in the sky; By hosting things at my house my power consumption roughly maps to my solar output.
I can also get away with no powered cooling for my gear. ie: I need cooling well before my gear does.
> I need cooling well before my gear does.
Well, that does make sense with your username....
(And it's been pointed out to me before that there's a "Zalman" company making computer cooling equipment! What a coincidence.)
The new datacenter spending is not for hosting. It's almost exclusively for AI.
Presents a golden opportunity for you to start your own infrastructure supplier to sell wind/solar/battery powered products.
The US government and some of the states are actively hostile towards solar.
Which is bizarre considering the amount of land suitable for solar farms and the climate in southern states.
Less bizarre when you consider we’ve effectively made corruption legal, and created a system where a wealthy incumbent has a lot more pull than a new player.
Dirt cheap US natural gas is running out in a decade or so, the dirt cheap "clean energy" produced from it needs a substitute.
Solar is cheaper still, although that’s currently complicated by the US trade war, and our unwillingness to build solar out.
being realistic given the current administration, the best avenue for those that care about climate change would be to lobby their representatives for nuclear and specially coal to nuclear transitions (https://www.energy.gov/ne/coal-nuclear-transitions) and lobby for more government funding directed to accelerate this. This would be palatable to the current administration while also supporting the goal of less c02 and other emissions.
Heck this also takes away any incentive to restart the coal plants by private companies if they are being financially supported and already in the process of converting them to nuclear, and it takes away an incentive to build more long-term because each nuclear plant provides a lot more power on average. Another thing to lobby for would be for more SMRs funding and less regulation overall in nuclear (it's insane how overly regulated nuclear is based on one soviet fuck up of a crappy underfunded/flawed powerplant (chernobyl). Fukushima plants (commissioned in 1971!) were hit with a once in a lifetime 9.5 magnitude earthquake and tsunami on top despite being less than 100 miles from the epicenter even with regulatory lapses and no direct deaths.
What do you suppose this administration dislikes about solar that wouldn't be equally unpalatable about nuclear? Keeping fossil fuels propped up is the only reason I can see solar not being an easy sell to Trump. Domestic solar panel production could be the space race of our time, and fit right into the tariff narrative, with the right prompting.
(And where did you get 9.5 from?)
It's woke.
I wish I was kidding.
This claim requires more substantiation, and definition, to be taken seriously.
Eh. This is less of a US political party problem. We aren't the only consumers and emitters. Even if we were, I don't think this _really_ is democrat vs republican. Silicon Valley types vote left. Also pushed gaming, cryptocurrency, AI, internet marketing, and everything else that helps us consume more dumbshit.
> Silicon Valley types vote left
Citation needed. The famous SV names are all dumping money into right wing authoritarian political causes.
"The famous SV names" you have in mind are a tiny, elite fringe. The culture among typical workers is obvious. Consider https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/company-news/2025/08/20... for example.
We started seeing the "smoke" when Reagan became President after Carter put Solar Panels on the White House. Each President (& Congress) since then kowtowed to the Fossil Fuel industry to varying degrees.
The GOP was the leader but the Democrats added to it but pretended they cared. At least the GOP told the truth that they were out to destroy the Climate.
We had almost 50 years to work on it, but people who could lead decided they wanted to keep their jobs and bribes instead of doing good for the US and the World.
For this, I fully blame Reagan and his enablers.
These were initiated by Nixon, removed late in the Reagan era when the roof was replaced, then new panels installed by Bush 2, followed by more under Obama.
How else is the US supposed to keep up with China? They are building new nuclear + coal plants every week.
"There are no rich, low energy countries"
https://x.com/Andercot/status/1895572458922795118/photo/1
China cut fossil fuel use 2% in H1 2025 (compared to H1 2024). It cut coal use 2% in H1 2025 (compared to H1 2024) [1]. The majority of new energy production is wind and solar, not nuclear, and certainly not coal.
[1] Both numbers on page 14: https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2025/09/China-Energy-Tr...
China’s building tons of solar and wind, too. If we’re interested in keeping up with them, we could start by not cancelling already planned solar projects (https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/feds-appear-to-canc...).
Besides, if the cost of keeping up with China is breathing deadly coal smoke, I’m not sure the decision is as obvious as you make it seem.
As of past 1.5 years, the use of fossil fuels for electricity generation in China seems to have reached a plateau. They are building new coal plants, more new plants than they are retiring old plants. But even with new coal plants, they have not been burning more coal.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-china-is-still-bu...
They are barely building any nuclear plants, so far zero finished in 2025.
In terms of coal its usage has started to decrease in actual terms since the start of 2025. All demand growth and more is solved by new built renewables and storage.