> “The mere fact that the conference is happening is already a success,” said Claudio Angelo, senior policy adviser at Brazil’s Climate Observatory, a network of environmental, civil society and academic groups
The bar has been set so low that talking about it is seen as success now.
Sometimes I think the only way we'll really make meaningful progress is if we simply run out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we're just too good at getting them and too motivated to do so.
The point of that comment is not that the talking is happening, it's that the hope of action isn't going to be blocked by industry-captured and plain moronic countries like Saudia Arabia and US, respectively.
Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point. They can also help build economies of scale, and take advantage of the myriad economic benefits of renewables that other countries are leaving on the table.
> Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point
China, The US, and India all turned down invites despite generating 34%, 12%, and 7.6% of global emissions respectively [0]
If the world's 3 largest polluters (even if two of them are heavily investing in GreenTech) who represent ~54% of global emissions are not interested in the conversation, it's all for naught.
None of the attendees are in the position to pressure the big 3 polluters. And it doesn't matter - the larger countries know they can eat the cost of climate change. It's the poorer or smaller countries that face the brunt of the impact.
And it's only going to get worse. India turned down hosting COP33 in 2028 [1] because India is deciding to to double down on coal [2] as the Iran Crisis has shown China's bet on Coal Gasification that began during the Iraq War [3] was correct.
It is beyond shameful how Westerners misallocate the blame for pollution, using misleading statistics. India has ~17% of the world's population. That it only produces 7% of global emissions means it is contributing far, far, far less than whatever country you possibly come from in relative terms, so at that point you are besmirching it solely for the crime of having a larger population than your country.
China, while having a disproportionate share of the pollution relative to its population, only has that pollution because the West offshored almost the entirety of its manufacturing capacity to China. Is China really at fault for pollution caused creating goods for the West? If China shuts down all export manufacturing overnight, and the West is forced to resume manufacturing for itself, resulting in ~the same global emissions, is that what's necessary to stop blaming China even though there's no shift in demand for manufactured goods or total pollution? Moreover, China is investing more seriously into non-fossil-fuel energy than any country in the West, by far. If you let the West resume its own manufacturing, you would actually end up with higher total emissions, because the West does not take this subject seriously at all.
Climate change doesn't divvy impact based on per capita usage.
And large countries and blocs like the US, China, EU, India, etc would survive in a world with significant climate crises. So the incentive to change doesn't exist.
The Chinese government invested ~$1 trillion in clean energy in 2025, while the Chinese economy had a further ~$2 trillion in growth surrounding EVs, batteries, and solar. You talk about "no incentive to change", but things are actively changing. What more would you like China to do, in concrete terms? Stop manufacturing for the West, even though that will, as aforementioned, likely result in a net increase in emissions when Western countries resume their substantially worse per-capita manufacturing for themselves? Or perhaps you would like China to cull its population by half for you? I'm interested in hearing your proposal.
Personaly I would like to see China invest less in renewables and more in nuclear power. If France could replace its coal power plants with nuclear power plants in 1970s, 1980s then China should be capable to do it.
China endured famines for centuries, introduction of nitrogen fertilizers helped to solve this problem.
"The meeting of Mao Zedong and Nixon in 1972 changed drastically the fundamental
relation between China and USA. In 1973 China contracted importation of 13 large-scale
ammonia plants with 330,000 t/y capacity and urea plants with 500-600,000 t/y capacity with
the companies of USA, Japan and Europe."
I have no proposal because to a certain extent you are correct.
That said, investing trillions in GreenTech does nothing when China is still emitting 13 gigatons of CO2, and it takes the next 7 countries combined to reach that number. Additionally, India will likely end up emitting a similar amount as China within a decade as well.
Only the leadership of the US, China, and India can decide on a roadmap on how to reduce CO2 usage globally, and everything else is just rhetoric.
Out of these two, only EU and US are showing reluctance to change quickly. Both China and India depend heavily on imported fossil fuels and for them solar is as much of a sovereignty issues as it is pollution, and then climate.
> China, The US, and India all turned down invites despite generating 34%, 12%, and 7.6% of global emissions respectively [0]
Perhaps this is for the best? I assume if they did intend they would be mostly saying 'no' to everything?
Now things might get actually accepted by willing participants, which might allow it to snowball and gain traction, which might convince one of those 3 to join at a later date.
They can't though. None of the participants hold cards that can convince the US, China, or India otherwise, as those 3 also represent around 42% of the global economy [0].
Additionally, other major polluters like ASEAN (Indonesia, Vietnam, Phillipines, Malaysia), Russia, the GCC (Saudi Arabia, UAE), and Turkiye turned down the invitation.
> If the world's 3 largest polluters (even if two of them are heavily investing in GreenTech) who represent ~54% of global emissions are not interested in the conversation
Even if India and China went 0 carbon today the world will continue heating due to historic emissions. The US and Europe account for 54% of cumulative CO2 emissions. [1]
Not to mention there would be no conversation without China's manufacturing prowess that has made solar panels and batteries so cheap.
> the larger countries know they can eat the cost of climate change
I'm curious how you think India will "eat the cost" of losing most of its freshwater.[2] And if think you it's feasible to do so (which again, I don't see how), then it's even more important that they develop their economy to "eat the cost" right? You can't fault them for doing everything they can to grow their economy. It's not like anyone else is going 0 carbon either, and they're the most vulnerable large country.
Why is it thankful the US has the power to force everyone to keep wasting money on US-controlled energy sources? What's the difference between this situation and a Mafia protection racket?
Many people don’t realize the IPCC walked back (refined as they put it) some of its most dire scenarios… others may choose to ignore the walkback. Akin to the rocket and feather phenomenon that affects pricing.
Many people were saying that things were not as dire as they claimed. I’m glad they revised but you had silly people gluing themselves to thoroughfares (cars stuck in traffic waste more energy) and vandalizing what some people consider precious art and or national patrimony in the name of climate change thinking that those most dire predictions were indeed correct and we were all headed to hell in a hand basket.
> So we are no longer worried about catastrophic or runaway climate change based on these revisions?
Don't listen to mc32, they're intentionally confusing the issue. This is the paper they're presumably referencing from last month[1].
The IPCC reports are based on a number of carbon emissions scenarios based on how the world acts: how do countries coordinate, what are the mixes of new electricity generation that come online, how are old fossil fuel plants shut down, what cars are sold, etc. In their reports they simulate multiple scenarios to show what could happen depending on the choices made, since you can't really simulate policy decisions (like presidents paying companies billions to shut down wind projects), wars (ahem), and economic changes.
There were five main scenarios in the IPCC sixth report, from very low to very high GHG emissions.
What was "walked back" is not about climate simulation or feedback loops, but they've retired the very high emissions scenario they developed in the mid 2010s of a world that went all in on heavy economic growth all powered by fossil fuels and little effort toward electrification or decarbonization.
Basically based on renewable energy prices in the years since, electrification, etc, it's just not plausible that the world will grow in that way, so it's no longer worth trying to do simulations based on it.
Note that this was literally called the "very high emissions scenario" in the report, and that's there's still a "high" emissions scenario that will be included in the seventh IPCC report as an upper bound of plausible emissions. A couple of economic models already estimated that we'll likely emit less carbon than the new upper bound high emissions scenario, the same as it was for the very high scenario in the sixth report. Like then, though, it's still worth simulating because it is at least still plausible, and you never know how things will develop sociopolitically (this paper proposes six scenarios from very low to high and a new "high to low" scenario, see section 2.3) .
That’s tough to say. Weather systems are difficult to model. We have minimal understanding of the causes or inputs that control the very long climate cycles. Like we know that some day thousands of years from now we’ll have another unstoppable glacial period. We’ll also have a period free of polar ice. Those are cyclical and independent of CO2. We cannot stop either. We live in a very precious time.
I also think we should limit or be judicious as much as we can about what we pump into the atmosphere (or oceans or ground)
Unfortunately the crisis will get much, much worse before ordinary people go "Wait, so, we're all going to die? How do we prevent that?" and the idea that it's too late isn't compatible with their model of the world so they will reach for increasingly crude "solutions" to what they have belatedly realised is a dire situation.
It might I suppose be fun to catalogue, what are the priorities? Do we kill all the poor people before we decide that maybe we can't afford to keep obligate carnivores as pets? How about the elderly? When do the animals kept for meat go, is that later? At some point I expect there's a backlash, a phase where the populists who insisted that say, if we just murdered everybody with the wrong skin colour, or the wrong religious beliefs or whatever that would fix it - well what if we kill the populists instead? But it won't last, following is in people's nature.
Fossil fuel consumption declines, belatedly, as the human population goes extinct. The mass extinctions eventually settle into a new order. The warm, damp rock is slightly warmer, for a while, and a few non-human niches expand and something else occupies them. And maybe one day an intelligent life eventually wonders why, according to the best available data, in the long depths of pre-history there was a weird climate spike. Huh.
50-250 years to the general population realising they're fucked and looking desperately for a non-existent way out. It is extremely unlikely that both of us would live long enough for me to collect.
My naive understanding is that climate change poses no real risk of human extinction, or even anything approaching it, at least not for centuries or longer. Which isn’t to say that the high cost of climate change is something we should shrug and just pay, especially because it will fall on the poorest.
But c’mon now, you’re being wildly overdramatic, and that doesn’t actually help our ability to deal with the threat.
Extinction isn't a mechanical consequence but a cultural one. Each generation of future humans learn that their ancestors squandered better conditions, and their offspring will definitely experience even worse conditions and they despair and have net fewer kids. We're not altering the climate for a few years, or a few decades, or even a few centuries, but more like millennia.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that the human population will decline to anything approaching extinction levels due to people’s attitudes about the environment. To the contrary, we have the population that we have today because humans reproduce in spite of horrible conditions.
We've had deaths due to climate related storms in NZ now, and we haven't been hit anywhere near as hard as, say, Pakistan who had 1/3 of their country flooded in one go. And it's getting worse. That may not be human extinction but its definitely plausible that mass casualty events are possible
Even artificially limiting their availability causing prices to shoot up does not quench the thirst. I am always confused why the conversation seems to be about switching the toggle switch from fossil fuels only to renewables only. It's obvious the best way is more of potentiometer where you slowly change from one by adding renewables to the point of being able to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels. We're seeing it happen all across the planet. That should be the low bar.
To "simply run out of fossil fuels" is like that potentiometer you mention, it isn't like you run out all at once but you run out of the cheap ones first and it gets more expensive.
in the early 2000s which was about the coming peak of conventional oil production and it turned out to be wrong in the sense that we knew in the 1970s that there were huge amounts of oil and gas in tight formations that we didn't know how to exploit. People were trying to figure out how to do that economically and had their breakthrough around the time that book came out so now you drive around some parts of Pennsylvania and boy do you see a lot of natural gas infrastructure.
I remember being in my hippie phase in the late 1990s and having a conversation with a roughneck on the Ithaca Commons who was telling me that the oil industry had a lot of technology that was going to lift the supply constraints that I was concerned about... he didn't tell me all the details but looking back now I'm pretty sure he knew about developments in hydrofracking and might even have been personally involved with them.
Just to be clear... Are you saying "amen" to not running out of fossil fuels, or to the possibility of a large number of people dying from heat stress, or both?
Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy. We will need to synthesise it (or other synfuels and feedstocks), to fully transition away from fossil sources, and that 10x efficiency factor will be essential, as synthesis is highly energy-lossy.
> Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy.
Am I missing something? Ethanol is hydrophilic and hygroscopic. In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly. In a closed system this ends up with phase separation and the freed water causes engine corrosion.
I'm not sure we want people running a still or molecular sieve in their homes to deal with fixing long-term-stored ethanol.
Ethanol doesn't "spoil". It is a very stable molecule and miscible with water.
The main issue is that it has a strong affinity for water so it needs to be stored in containers that are sealed from the environment. The same issue exists with the ubiquitous ethanol/gasoline blends.
> In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly
Citation needed. (hint you won't find one because it isn't true). Be careful here - this myth has been repeated enough that a search will find plenty of claims that don't check out.
High concentration alcohol doesn't spoil. Even lower concentrations don't spoil, but they mix with poor quality gas that does spoil. Well when you get very low it will, but alcohol is poison to living things and so it won't spoil. (I'm not sure how ethanol stands up to UV - but we generally keep it in a tank so that isn't an issue)
Ethanol will absorb water, but it doesn't take it out of the air anymore than anything else.
nah, it loves to absorb water out of the ambient air.
ethanol that is distilled forms an azeotrope has a hard time getting past 98% on its own. even if you used advanced techniques and additives, it has a strongly hygroscopic nature, meaning it actively attracts and absorbs water vapor directly from the air.
in other words, it will do everything it can to get back to 98%.
to keep ethanol above 98%, you need airtight seals or "molecular sieves" (zeolite beads) inside the tank to constantly "bead up" and trap any incoming water molecules.
What is the conversion efficiency for electricity + C02 + H20 -> ethanol/hydrocarbons?
Because that is the overall path (for long-term storable chemical energy, i.e. usable for transport or seasonal energy storage in countries where solar is highly seasonal).
A brazilian "senior policy adviser" patting himself on the back over a conference taking place is always amusing. One could easily get the impression the brazilian government was not actively taxing the crap out of solar panels, solar installations, electrical vehicles, pretty much every good alternative to fossil fuels, literally right now.
There is so much coal. There is at least 130 years worth at current consumption levels. And despite what everyone says about renewables and green energy and etc, world use still hit a high in 2024. We aren't going to run out of (coal at least) for a long time--and usage is still going up!
Also, China and India are both doubling down on coal after the Iran Crisis as their Coal Gasification [0] strategies [1] were made for this kind of supply chain risk in mind.
If the world is to stay within a range of carbon emissions that avoids catastrophic global warming, 80 percent of the fossil fuel industry’s reserves must remain unused in the ground.
If we "run out" we'll have done ourselves terrific injury.
Interesting that Colombia is currently powering more than 70% of their electrical consumption on hydropower. They currently have about 65 TWh of hydropower capacity; the total feasible generation potential is around 200 TWh. Makes then an interesting country to host such talks.
Good for them, but for most of the world there are no good hydropower locations left. And even when they exist building them is a local ecological disaster.
Practically everything we do is a local ecological disaster.
Pumped storage hydro electricity is one of our least ecologically devastating options and we are not even remotely close to exhausting locations we can put them.
Most of South America has worked like this for decades. Hydropower is king even in Venezuela. It's altruistic on their part, but it may have reduced their long-term economic growth. Viewed in terms of GDP per capita, South America is a laggard. But if you change the denominator and look at GDP per kWh (energy intensity) they are surprisingly close to the rich world.
There is a hidden upside to all this hydro: it could potentially be upgraded to pumped storage and support a massive expansion of solar and wind. However, no SA country has such a forward-looking energy policy.
Do you have a source for GDP/kWh? Last time I was curious I dumped some raw stats (copied from wikipedia) into excel and venezuela was among the bottom three. I recall being surprised that there wasn't any strong correlation between GDP/kWh and any other obvious metric like technological development, population, land size, climate, etc.
There are three main sources of green house gases. Top one which is power is declining. Transportation is still growing and the last one is agriculture which is stable. There is progress if you look at the details.
But the growth of CO2 emissions is slowing, even though the global economy is growing and many more countries are industrialising and becoming wealthier (both proxies of CO2 emissions).
So we're working on it. Not as fast as we need, but progress is being made.
> So we're working on it. Not as fast as we need, but progress is being made
It's too little too late.
India's CO2 emissions growth rate is around 4% [0], and India's economy is expected to grow at around 6-7% a year for at least the next decade. This means India's contribution alone will grow massively.
And what about other large countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, Nigeria, etc who are also seeing massive expansions.
Edit: can't reply
The Indian government's "electro-state" transition is predicated on coal expansion [1] - yes at a rate slower than before, but still at a rate that is a net negative for the environment.
This is also why India backed out of hosting COP33 in 2028 [2] - it would have brought this inconvenient truth to the forefront [3]
India is taking a shortcut so to say. If climate friendly energy becomes successful in India, it will bbee successful in other countries to. Currently the biggest threat is US forcing people to buy its venezualan and fracking oil.
Nice video but doesn't estimate when India will reach peak CO2 emission, doesn't estimate when India will reach net zero.
Chinese burning of coal for electric power generation decreased, but total coal consumption has increased. In China, coal use is shifting from power production to synthetic fuels and chemicals made from coal, the carbon from synthetic fuels will be emitted as CO2. Will this shift happen also in India?
Progress has been incredibly rapid. Solar power in particular has gotten exponentially cheaper and more widely deployed. We are in an incredibly deep hole and are aiming at a rapidly moving target (energy demand is growing rapidly due to AI) but we've already hit our first inflection point in terms of renewables making up almost of our added capacity and it's within reach for fossil fuel usage to peak and start falling. Of course, that's still only early milestones since we will continue to add GHGs even as the pace slows. But right now it actually really seems like we have a grip on the problem and are moving in the right direction. It's really not the time to despair, but to double down.
Treating alternative energy and PHEVs/EVs as a core national security concern should have started in the early 2000s. Yes, the PV revolution hadn't happened yet, but the hybrid auto was released in 1998 or so, and a PHEV is a natural extension to that.
I'm weak on recollection as to when PV and wind started their big price plummet, but it was certainly in the 2010s.
It's still not too late for ... everyone.
In particular, I think PHEVs should be an regulated requirement for all consumer (and probably semis, why aren't they hybrids yet just so they can have better acceleration/torque and regen braking) vehicles in ten years, with a 10-year decreasing subsidy for PHEV and a 10-year increasing penalty for car registration and new car purchases of pure ICE.
PHEVs will maximize available battery supply to the most electrification of transport.
I also think home solar+storage should be heavily subsidized, because you don't need to do nearly as much grid adaptation and, keeping with national security, it makes communities much more disaster resilient if homes are somewhat power independent and they can charge a vehicle for trips.
China is currently implementing this national security strategy. Each addition EV car driving in China a car running on domestic solar+coal electricity and not running on imported oil.
China is also turning coal to synthetic fuels.
"
The sector last year turned 276 million tons of coal - equivalent to almost a year of European coal use - into chemicals, oil and gas, according to the China National Petroleum and Chemical Planning Institute"
The PV revolution has happened. Most countries with significant energy grids get most of their energy from PV during the daytime. Some even get 50% of their yearly energy from PV.
Do I see every single building covered in residential solar? Can I install grid independent solar in a typical house for under $5,000 or maybe $2,000? Because I think that's what's on the horizon still.
Solar has yet to incorporate likely a fundamental cost drop from perovskites, silicon perovskite multi junction, and fundamental advances in sodium ion battery storage.
And every time you bring up solar wind taking over the majority of a grid, you get the pro-nuclear people ringing their hands over grid stability and the like. I do think of a little bit is that overblown but there's definitely a large structural cost to grid adaptation and issues with industrial power using current battery storage and PV wind economics, especially when you start talking about everybody having a phev or an EV charging.
Utility scale ground mounted solar is cheaper than residential solar (often 50% less per watt).
Residential PV for $5,000 is too expensive for many people in many countries, Pakistan is doing it for much less. Large scale battery storage is too expensive for most countries.
Pro-solar people like to point out that LCOE of solar is lowest of all forms of electricity generation. At the same time they ignore the increased costs for grid upgrades and grid stabilization (short term stabilization - grid inertia, voltage stabilization, frequency stabilization) (long term stabilization - backup gas/coal power plants). If don't invest enough in grid stabilization and your country has grid that is not connected to other countries, you can get a blackout like in Spain.
On the other hand, blackouts or load shedding are much more common in developing countries and have large economic impact.
"The costs associated with load shedding have led to an annual GDP reduction of 1 to 1.3% since 2007, with daily economic losses estimated between $85 million and $230 million for the country."
Just like pro-solar people have their favorite future solar improvements: perovskites, multi junction, battery storage, long term energy storage, etc. Pro-nuclear people have their favorite future nuclear improvements: small modular reactors, ship mounted reactor, generation 4 reactors, breeder reactors recycling nuclear waste.
I say put a carbon tax on all countries (including China, India, US) on all forms of emissions (including mining, refining, manufacturing, transportation, shipping) and let the cheapest technology win.
I would love to see how the industry of China would evolve if China had the same carbon tax as Europe. The same applies to India, US.
You're talking to a molten salt reactor nut so I have some enthusiasm in the nuclear market.
The problem with nuclear is that all the fancy designs aren't ready to go, all of them have 10 to 20 year permitting and construction cycles with the inevitable price overruns as well, there aren't enough nuclear industry people anymore...
And really the biggest problem is that you can't Target an economic price 10 to 20 years out. Because wind and solar are dropping still on a constant improvement curve, as is grid storage.
So already price non-competitive nuclear, and you fund a large-scale build out of nuclear reactors, and then in another 10 to 20 years have a bunch of reactors that are now three or four times. Less competitive than they were when you initially started construction.
> In particular, I think PHEVs should be an regulated requirement for all consumer (and probably semis, why aren't they hybrids yet just so they can have better acceleration/torque and regen braking) vehicles in ten years, with a 10-year decreasing subsidy for PHEV and a 10-year increasing penalty for car registration and new car purchases of pure ICE.
That's the actual plan for Europe. They are planning to start ICE phase-out by 2035, with only limited exceptions where it's impractical (like long-haul cargo or specialized machinery).
I actually don't think that the hybrid timeline could have been accelerated significantly. A lot of foundational technology, such as compact power electronics became accessible only by the early 2000s. Lithium batteries also became commercially viable by then.
EVs are 3 to 4 times more efficient than ICE vehicles. So just converting to EVs is a huge efficiency gain. In fact, if we electrified industrial and transportation using existing technology we could reduce energy demand by up to 40%. And as you recommended, power generation from solar (where/when feasible) removes the need for ongoing fossil fuel purchases.
That 40% number is impossible. First of all transportation is 30% of energy, which already makes 40% impossible, second if it's 4 times more efficient then it would still use 8% to 10% of energy, making your actual savings 20% of energy at the MOST.
But your 3 to 4 times number is also not real, because the actual number is 2 to 3 - and that's measured at the outlet, if you measure starting from primary power generation they are about 2 times as efficient, not 4.
So I stand by what I said: Electric vehicles are not what matters for clean energy, what matters is power generation.
(for the young'uns this is a reference to the also-senseless Iraq War, which had a follow on effect of distracting from this issue in favor of solipsistic entitlement and the adoption of SUVs. but looking back wistfully, at least the government and media didn't insult us by not even manufacturing a casus belli)
Maybe he has been installed by the renewable energy sector actually to get the whole world onto renewables as soon as possible.
Of course, they had to give up on or delay America’s renewable future, but that may be a small
Price to pay, and anyways renewables are growing in the U.S. despite the administration’s frankly insane efforts to block it
internal consumption engines (ICE), are rapidly becoming niche power sources
sodium batteries and solar pv, will take over most of the worlds grids quite quickly now, there are no bariers left
any country that resists will be left behind
and suffer the consequences of uncompetitive
costs
The remaining barriers elsewhere are often policy related.
There are many examples across the world where countries are doing very sub optimal things that simply don't make any economical sense. Germany has a lot of industry close to where coal used to be mined that is very energy intensive that is now being powered with expensive gas. Likewise, instead of using electrical heat pumps, most of their buildings still use gas boilers. Worse, they are not even fixing that in new buildings they build.
The UK has lots of wind power. But it prices its electricity based on the highest cost generation on the grid, which is usually gas. So, data centers get built close to London because the electricity isn't any cheaper in Scotland where all the clean renewable power is. And since they have too much of that, they actually just curtail it instead of giving a little discount to the locals (or just pricing it negatively and paying them to consume the power). So, like the Germans, the Scots also use gas for heating their houses.
Germany has a few million apartment blocks. They pretty much all run on gas. There is no plan to fix that. You might have noticed that gas is really expensive and has to be imported in LNG form as of a few years ago. That's costing many billions per year. Even if they would build gas power plants and converted all those buildings to use electrical heat pumps, it would still save billions in less imported gas (heat pumps are amazingly efficient). And of course they have a lot of frequently curtailed wind power as well. Germany is too busy spending money on gas to fix the problem that they need so much gas.
Policy changes could straighten inefficiencies like these out in a relatively short time. But those are controversial because high prices mean high profits for incumbent companies. So governments are dragging their feet and are not doing anything about this. Those big companies are lobbying to protect their profits. And the fossil fuel industry is cheering them along and pitching fantasy schemes about hydrogen to delay their inevitable demise. The public spending on that is insane if you understand how piss poor the economics around hydrogen are. Incentives are completely misaligned, policy prevents a lot of otherwise very rational/economical action, and a lot of that is perpetuated by companies that thrive on the expensive status quo and the politicians they have in their pocket.
The current crisis in the Gulf is probably going to accelerate a lot of policy changes by quite a lot. Nothing like a good crisis to force some changes.
I've seen this succintly and accurately described this way: "No One Goes to War Over a Solar Panel" [1].
If you think about it, once you build a solar panel, it just produces power for the next 20-30 years. Then you buy another one and replace it. To get oil or natural gas, you need to drill a well. That well requires constant labor. What many don't seem to know is that oil wells decline in production over time. It's called the "decline rate". For the Permian Basin (source of the US shale revolution), the decline rate is 15-20% per year. So a well producing 1000bpd (barrels per day) will be producing ~500bpd in 3 years. That means you have to constantly be drilling new wells.
Oil wells (and resource extractors like mines in general) are great wealth concentrators. Solar panels are not. So the point of that quote is that a limited resource creates wealth and is limited but also war is profitable (for the weapons manufacturers) so every incentie lays in continued fossil fuel use because it's constantly minting new billionaires.
One thing I'll add here is that there are a lot of energy usages for fossil fuels for which we have no alternative. Aviation is a big one. To some extent, so is truck freight (although China is busy electrifying this too [2]). There are a lot of non-energy uses too eg plastics, industrial, chemicals, construction. So fossil fuels aren't going away anytime soon but we sure could take a leaf out of Chin's commitment to renewable energy [3][4][5].
Instead we get nonsense like warnings to Europe of a dangerous dependency on Chinese clean tech [6].
> One thing I'll add here is that there are a lot of energy usages for fossil fuels for which we have no alternative. Aviation is a big one.
The status of "fossil fuels" isn't crucial to these uses, it's just cheaper. You can just make kerosene, but you wouldn't because you already use fossil fuels for power. However if you have abundant energy without fossil fuels and you want kerosene for some reason you can make it for $$$$
Doesn't China have most of the exotic rare earths and stuff that you need in order to build solar panels and systems? I am not anti-solar, but I also don't think China is some guaranteed-friendly party that the whole world can trust not to wield their power once they have it.
I assume anyone who doesn't immediately recognize their planned takeover of Taiwan next year will have a hard time getting any type of raw materials like that.
Doesn't China have most of the exotic rare earths and stuff that you need in order to build solar panels and systems?
Solar panels do not require rare earth elements. Some types of permanent magnets require rare earth elements, and some of those magnets are used in wind turbines, which might be where this confusion comes from since wind turbines and solar panels are frequently mentioned together. (Although even most wind turbines do not use rare earth magnets.)
Crystalline silicon solar panels account for more than 95% of the global solar market. These are mostly made of glass, aluminum, silicon, and polymers. The rarest element typically used in them is silver, for metallic pastes used to form cell contacts. China is a significant but not dominant silver producer. In 2024 it accounted for about 13% of world silver production:
China currently provides a the great majority of that stuff partly because nobody else has bothered to produce much. China doesn't have a majority of world reserves (although the USGS says it's close), just a majority of production.
As another commenter put it, a solar panel is a drill bit not oil. What's the alternative here? Are you arguing we maintaint the dependence on fossil fuels, which can be switched off any day, because of some hypothetical future where China might stop selling "drill bits" (that last 30 years)? That's why this argument is so silly.
As for rare earths, they aren't as rare as the suppliers would seem to suggest. The difference is that China has invested in rare earth extraction and processing and really nobody else has. Likewise, the solar investment was an intentional policy goal. Imagine where the US might be if the $8T+ spent on the so-called Global War on Terror had been spent on renewable infrastructure instead.
As for China behaving in such a belligerent fashion, I'm sorry but let's just compare. Here's a list of US military actions since 1945 [1] and a history of US-led, backed or supplied regime change [2]. The fearmongering around China is just so... manufactured.
I'm not arguing against solar or pro-oil in any way. I meant only to point out that imagining an all-PV future as eliminating conflict over resources would be a mistake.
And I was corrected about how much we need China for solar panels - though with them being a hugely dominant current producer of the panels themselves, I still think they have moderate leverage. But indeed limited if other countries theoretically can build out a PV industry without China's blessing.
And I'd like to acknowledge the 'drill bit' metaphor. Would still be painful to not be able to replace solar panels that are constantly aging out, but not nearly as painful as losing a portion of oil or gas supply has been lately.
Absolutely hilarious to me that the biggest catalyst toward global attention to renewables in the last two decades is Trump's ridiculous adventure in the gulf.
I would argue that subsidized solar panels and batteries from China are the the most important factor. If renewables weren’t economically competitive we’d see approximately zero deployment.
Not to forget storage solutions have become viable as well. Generating renewable power is only part of the equation. It has a large variable that needed to be filled for the equation to fully compute waiting for storage.
Yes but you could argue that one key driving force behind their policies is the knowledge that a Republican president was going to mess up their oil supply sooner or later.
Yes I came to say the same thing. It's a truism that people don't care about supply till it stops.
Interruptions of supply cause people to get antsy. They start looking for alternatives. A drought leads to a surge in well-points and bore holes. Rainwater collection goes up. Electricity outages lead to generators, solar and so on, all easily installed at domestic level.
Food shortages lead to more strategic agriculture choices. Oil shortages start to make EVs more attractive. This is the first major interruption in oil supply since the 70s. I start to think the next car I buy will be electric. I already have solar so it makes sense.
The biggest way to change society is to make the perception that supply is precarious or expensive. Long after the drought ends, the lessons remain.
The leading climate-denier voice , who rails against clean energy, has also caused a world-wide understanding of how precarious our oil supply is. That lesson will stick, regardless of your politics.
Partially the Ukraine war got at least parts of Europe started, then adding Trumps mess on top but keeps the ball rolling.
I've heard a lot of people being critical of wind turbines, calling them ugly and wanting nothing to do with them. After the Ukraine war started I remember driving into town, seeing the five massive wind turbines at the harbour, providing three time the power the city needs, and thinking "not only do they look great, they're also part of our self sufficiency".
The US is a different place, but the hate parts of the US have towards renewable energy is pretty insane. I know the wind isn't always blow, the sun not always shining, but each installation is still one step closer to not being beholden to the whims of some crazy person in a far of land.
Wind turbines are ugly. But I'll take ugly for free energy. It's such an obvious tradeoff. I can deal with ugly. Energy is much harder to do without. Anyone who would give up free energy just because it's ugly is someone who needs to touch grass.
By the way, wind turbines off the coast of one of Trump's golf properties in Scotland are the reason he keeps trying to ban wind turbines.
Are they? I mean, that's very much a taste thing. I think they're pretty nifty looking, especially the enormous modern ones with blades longer than airliner wings. Great products of industry and engineering have their own beauty, and these are definitely on the list with stuff like the Great Wall or Hoover Dam, IMHO.
I dunno. The curve of solar adoption has looked "great" since 2000. There are lots of troubles remaining like:
- storage over the 24 hour cycle
- storage over yearly cycles
- how to fix nitrogen for agriculture
- how to make carbon-free metals
- how to run the chemical industry without fossil fuels
The good news has been the expansion of solar through markets, the diffusion of innovation, competition, and something like Moore's Law. The bad news is we are reaching the saturation point for the grid being able to absorb solar energy in many places and that's going to stop the growth unless those bottlenecks are overcome.
That's not really relevant. Even if you look at countries like Norway that have gone all in on EVs and decarbonizing rapidly, they still export oil faster than ever. So long as no one interrupts the global trade of fossil fuels, they don't care.
> “The mere fact that the conference is happening is already a success,” said Claudio Angelo, senior policy adviser at Brazil’s Climate Observatory, a network of environmental, civil society and academic groups
The bar has been set so low that talking about it is seen as success now.
Sometimes I think the only way we'll really make meaningful progress is if we simply run out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we're just too good at getting them and too motivated to do so.
The point of that comment is not that the talking is happening, it's that the hope of action isn't going to be blocked by industry-captured and plain moronic countries like Saudia Arabia and US, respectively.
Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point. They can also help build economies of scale, and take advantage of the myriad economic benefits of renewables that other countries are leaving on the table.
> Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point
China, The US, and India all turned down invites despite generating 34%, 12%, and 7.6% of global emissions respectively [0]
If the world's 3 largest polluters (even if two of them are heavily investing in GreenTech) who represent ~54% of global emissions are not interested in the conversation, it's all for naught.
None of the attendees are in the position to pressure the big 3 polluters. And it doesn't matter - the larger countries know they can eat the cost of climate change. It's the poorer or smaller countries that face the brunt of the impact.
And it's only going to get worse. India turned down hosting COP33 in 2028 [1] because India is deciding to to double down on coal [2] as the Iran Crisis has shown China's bet on Coal Gasification that began during the Iraq War [3] was correct.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/india-withdraws-b...
[2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mul...
[3] - https://usea.org/sites/default/files/022011_Coal-to-oil,%20g...
It is beyond shameful how Westerners misallocate the blame for pollution, using misleading statistics. India has ~17% of the world's population. That it only produces 7% of global emissions means it is contributing far, far, far less than whatever country you possibly come from in relative terms, so at that point you are besmirching it solely for the crime of having a larger population than your country.
China, while having a disproportionate share of the pollution relative to its population, only has that pollution because the West offshored almost the entirety of its manufacturing capacity to China. Is China really at fault for pollution caused creating goods for the West? If China shuts down all export manufacturing overnight, and the West is forced to resume manufacturing for itself, resulting in ~the same global emissions, is that what's necessary to stop blaming China even though there's no shift in demand for manufactured goods or total pollution? Moreover, China is investing more seriously into non-fossil-fuel energy than any country in the West, by far. If you let the West resume its own manufacturing, you would actually end up with higher total emissions, because the West does not take this subject seriously at all.
> "solely for the crime of having a larger population than your country"
I think there's an interesting question here. Perhaps having a larger population is indeed a bad thing, and should be considered as such?
(Yes, India's fertility rate, like many other countries, is dropping quickly)
Climate change doesn't divvy impact based on per capita usage.
And large countries and blocs like the US, China, EU, India, etc would survive in a world with significant climate crises. So the incentive to change doesn't exist.
And this is why the world will burn.
The Chinese government invested ~$1 trillion in clean energy in 2025, while the Chinese economy had a further ~$2 trillion in growth surrounding EVs, batteries, and solar. You talk about "no incentive to change", but things are actively changing. What more would you like China to do, in concrete terms? Stop manufacturing for the West, even though that will, as aforementioned, likely result in a net increase in emissions when Western countries resume their substantially worse per-capita manufacturing for themselves? Or perhaps you would like China to cull its population by half for you? I'm interested in hearing your proposal.
Personaly I would like to see China invest less in renewables and more in nuclear power. If France could replace its coal power plants with nuclear power plants in 1970s, 1980s then China should be capable to do it.
China endured famines for centuries, introduction of nitrogen fertilizers helped to solve this problem.
"The meeting of Mao Zedong and Nixon in 1972 changed drastically the fundamental relation between China and USA. In 1973 China contracted importation of 13 large-scale ammonia plants with 330,000 t/y capacity and urea plants with 500-600,000 t/y capacity with the companies of USA, Japan and Europe."
https://kagakushi.org/iwhc2015/papers/21.MineTakeshi.pdf
> I'm interested in hearing your proposal
I have no proposal because to a certain extent you are correct.
That said, investing trillions in GreenTech does nothing when China is still emitting 13 gigatons of CO2, and it takes the next 7 countries combined to reach that number. Additionally, India will likely end up emitting a similar amount as China within a decade as well.
Only the leadership of the US, China, and India can decide on a roadmap on how to reduce CO2 usage globally, and everything else is just rhetoric.
Climate change is the result of aggregate human actions. What we contribute per human is exactly the metric to use.
Or is it the result of government policies? Then we should look to the governments in control of the biggest portions.
Out of these two, only EU and US are showing reluctance to change quickly. Both China and India depend heavily on imported fossil fuels and for them solar is as much of a sovereignty issues as it is pollution, and then climate.
The EU also depends heavily on imported fossil fuels. They just have more politicians that have been bought off.
> China, The US, and India all turned down invites despite generating 34%, 12%, and 7.6% of global emissions respectively [0]
Perhaps this is for the best? I assume if they did intend they would be mostly saying 'no' to everything?
Now things might get actually accepted by willing participants, which might allow it to snowball and gain traction, which might convince one of those 3 to join at a later date.
They can't though. None of the participants hold cards that can convince the US, China, or India otherwise, as those 3 also represent around 42% of the global economy [0].
Additionally, other major polluters like ASEAN (Indonesia, Vietnam, Phillipines, Malaysia), Russia, the GCC (Saudi Arabia, UAE), and Turkiye turned down the invitation.
[0] - https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPSH@WEO/OEMDC/ADVE...
> If the world's 3 largest polluters (even if two of them are heavily investing in GreenTech) who represent ~54% of global emissions are not interested in the conversation
Even if India and China went 0 carbon today the world will continue heating due to historic emissions. The US and Europe account for 54% of cumulative CO2 emissions. [1]
Not to mention there would be no conversation without China's manufacturing prowess that has made solar panels and batteries so cheap.
> the larger countries know they can eat the cost of climate change
I'm curious how you think India will "eat the cost" of losing most of its freshwater.[2] And if think you it's feasible to do so (which again, I don't see how), then it's even more important that they develop their economy to "eat the cost" right? You can't fault them for doing everything they can to grow their economy. It's not like anyone else is going 0 carbon either, and they're the most vulnerable large country.
1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...
2. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/himalayas-melting-c...
The US still has enough power to stop it though, thankfully.
We aren’t captured by environmental activists that force the poor to shoulder the compliance burden while the rich get to defer and delay.
Why is it thankful the US has the power to force everyone to keep wasting money on US-controlled energy sources? What's the difference between this situation and a Mafia protection racket?
Many people don’t realize the IPCC walked back (refined as they put it) some of its most dire scenarios… others may choose to ignore the walkback. Akin to the rocket and feather phenomenon that affects pricing.
It was based on co2 emissions doubling by 2050.
Though energy output has doubled, as a share coal has dropped in China and the US.
Wouldn’t you expect estimates based on difficult to predict human behavior to change based on new data?
Many people were saying that things were not as dire as they claimed. I’m glad they revised but you had silly people gluing themselves to thoroughfares (cars stuck in traffic waste more energy) and vandalizing what some people consider precious art and or national patrimony in the name of climate change thinking that those most dire predictions were indeed correct and we were all headed to hell in a hand basket.
Ruined cars piled up in streets waste even more energy - temporarily.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/31/why-were-the-f...
So we are no longer worried about catastrophic or runaway climate change based on these revisions?
> So we are no longer worried about catastrophic or runaway climate change based on these revisions?
Don't listen to mc32, they're intentionally confusing the issue. This is the paper they're presumably referencing from last month[1].
The IPCC reports are based on a number of carbon emissions scenarios based on how the world acts: how do countries coordinate, what are the mixes of new electricity generation that come online, how are old fossil fuel plants shut down, what cars are sold, etc. In their reports they simulate multiple scenarios to show what could happen depending on the choices made, since you can't really simulate policy decisions (like presidents paying companies billions to shut down wind projects), wars (ahem), and economic changes.
There were five main scenarios in the IPCC sixth report, from very low to very high GHG emissions.
What was "walked back" is not about climate simulation or feedback loops, but they've retired the very high emissions scenario they developed in the mid 2010s of a world that went all in on heavy economic growth all powered by fossil fuels and little effort toward electrification or decarbonization.
Basically based on renewable energy prices in the years since, electrification, etc, it's just not plausible that the world will grow in that way, so it's no longer worth trying to do simulations based on it.
Note that this was literally called the "very high emissions scenario" in the report, and that's there's still a "high" emissions scenario that will be included in the seventh IPCC report as an upper bound of plausible emissions. A couple of economic models already estimated that we'll likely emit less carbon than the new upper bound high emissions scenario, the same as it was for the very high scenario in the sixth report. Like then, though, it's still worth simulating because it is at least still plausible, and you never know how things will develop sociopolitically (this paper proposes six scenarios from very low to high and a new "high to low" scenario, see section 2.3) .
[1] https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/19/2627/2026/
That’s tough to say. Weather systems are difficult to model. We have minimal understanding of the causes or inputs that control the very long climate cycles. Like we know that some day thousands of years from now we’ll have another unstoppable glacial period. We’ll also have a period free of polar ice. Those are cyclical and independent of CO2. We cannot stop either. We live in a very precious time.
I also think we should limit or be judicious as much as we can about what we pump into the atmosphere (or oceans or ground)
So the climate scientists of every government are lying? The calculations about how much heat is trapped by different CO2 amounts, bunk?
Unfortunately the crisis will get much, much worse before ordinary people go "Wait, so, we're all going to die? How do we prevent that?" and the idea that it's too late isn't compatible with their model of the world so they will reach for increasingly crude "solutions" to what they have belatedly realised is a dire situation.
It might I suppose be fun to catalogue, what are the priorities? Do we kill all the poor people before we decide that maybe we can't afford to keep obligate carnivores as pets? How about the elderly? When do the animals kept for meat go, is that later? At some point I expect there's a backlash, a phase where the populists who insisted that say, if we just murdered everybody with the wrong skin colour, or the wrong religious beliefs or whatever that would fix it - well what if we kill the populists instead? But it won't last, following is in people's nature.
Fossil fuel consumption declines, belatedly, as the human population goes extinct. The mass extinctions eventually settle into a new order. The warm, damp rock is slightly warmer, for a while, and a few non-human niches expand and something else occupies them. And maybe one day an intelligent life eventually wonders why, according to the best available data, in the long depths of pre-history there was a weird climate spike. Huh.
Care to put any dates to your doomerisms? Can I take the other side of the bet?
50-250 years to the general population realising they're fucked and looking desperately for a non-existent way out. It is extremely unlikely that both of us would live long enough for me to collect.
My naive understanding is that climate change poses no real risk of human extinction, or even anything approaching it, at least not for centuries or longer. Which isn’t to say that the high cost of climate change is something we should shrug and just pay, especially because it will fall on the poorest.
But c’mon now, you’re being wildly overdramatic, and that doesn’t actually help our ability to deal with the threat.
Extinction isn't a mechanical consequence but a cultural one. Each generation of future humans learn that their ancestors squandered better conditions, and their offspring will definitely experience even worse conditions and they despair and have net fewer kids. We're not altering the climate for a few years, or a few decades, or even a few centuries, but more like millennia.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that the human population will decline to anything approaching extinction levels due to people’s attitudes about the environment. To the contrary, we have the population that we have today because humans reproduce in spite of horrible conditions.
We've had deaths due to climate related storms in NZ now, and we haven't been hit anywhere near as hard as, say, Pakistan who had 1/3 of their country flooded in one go. And it's getting worse. That may not be human extinction but its definitely plausible that mass casualty events are possible
There are fates nowhere near extinction that would still mean massive human suffering.
Even artificially limiting their availability causing prices to shoot up does not quench the thirst. I am always confused why the conversation seems to be about switching the toggle switch from fossil fuels only to renewables only. It's obvious the best way is more of potentiometer where you slowly change from one by adding renewables to the point of being able to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels. We're seeing it happen all across the planet. That should be the low bar.
To "simply run out of fossil fuels" is like that potentiometer you mention, it isn't like you run out all at once but you run out of the cheap ones first and it gets more expensive.
I remember reading
https://www.amazon.com/Hubberts-Peak-Impending-Shortage-Revi...
in the early 2000s which was about the coming peak of conventional oil production and it turned out to be wrong in the sense that we knew in the 1970s that there were huge amounts of oil and gas in tight formations that we didn't know how to exploit. People were trying to figure out how to do that economically and had their breakthrough around the time that book came out so now you drive around some parts of Pennsylvania and boy do you see a lot of natural gas infrastructure.
I remember being in my hippie phase in the late 1990s and having a conversation with a roughneck on the Ithaca Commons who was telling me that the oil industry had a lot of technology that was going to lift the supply constraints that I was concerned about... he didn't tell me all the details but looking back now I'm pretty sure he knew about developments in hydrofracking and might even have been personally involved with them.
We have still lot of known fossil fuel reserves. More than we should put into atmosfere in form of CO2.
Coal for 139 years
Oil for 56 years
Gas for 49 years
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-of-fossil-fuel-rese...
This is a bit simplified because high fossil fuel prices also drive inovations in mining, exploration and could increase known reserves.
We're not going to run out of fossil fuels. We are going to start running out of habitable biosphere because of climate degradation.
It's only a matter of time - likely a few years - before there's a significant wet-bulb heat catastrophe that kills a huge number of people.
For example.
Amen!
Just to be clear... Are you saying "amen" to not running out of fossil fuels, or to the possibility of a large number of people dying from heat stress, or both?
To say that I agree with your analysis, not that I think a mass casualty event is a good thing.
Brazil has had a pretty active program of converting cane sugar to ethanol for a while now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil
Sugar cane doesn't require replanting every year either, like corn does.
Plants are actually not a good converter of solar energy to chemical energy though. They capture a few percent of it.
Solar cells are able to capture about 10 times that, a much smaller footprint.
Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy. We will need to synthesise it (or other synfuels and feedstocks), to fully transition away from fossil sources, and that 10x efficiency factor will be essential, as synthesis is highly energy-lossy.
> Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy.
Am I missing something? Ethanol is hydrophilic and hygroscopic. In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly. In a closed system this ends up with phase separation and the freed water causes engine corrosion.
I'm not sure we want people running a still or molecular sieve in their homes to deal with fixing long-term-stored ethanol.
Ethanol doesn't "spoil". It is a very stable molecule and miscible with water.
The main issue is that it has a strong affinity for water so it needs to be stored in containers that are sealed from the environment. The same issue exists with the ubiquitous ethanol/gasoline blends.
The cheap thin-walled gas containers you find in the auto parts store or on Amazon sell a heck of a lot better than the good stuff.
This just doesn't meet up with the day to day reality of your average consumer.
Even your gas station underground tanks aren't airtight. The problem is that the air around us has tons of water vapor in it.
> In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly
Citation needed. (hint you won't find one because it isn't true). Be careful here - this myth has been repeated enough that a search will find plenty of claims that don't check out.
High concentration alcohol doesn't spoil. Even lower concentrations don't spoil, but they mix with poor quality gas that does spoil. Well when you get very low it will, but alcohol is poison to living things and so it won't spoil. (I'm not sure how ethanol stands up to UV - but we generally keep it in a tank so that isn't an issue)
Ethanol will absorb water, but it doesn't take it out of the air anymore than anything else.
nah, it loves to absorb water out of the ambient air.
ethanol that is distilled forms an azeotrope has a hard time getting past 98% on its own. even if you used advanced techniques and additives, it has a strongly hygroscopic nature, meaning it actively attracts and absorbs water vapor directly from the air.
in other words, it will do everything it can to get back to 98%.
to keep ethanol above 98%, you need airtight seals or "molecular sieves" (zeolite beads) inside the tank to constantly "bead up" and trap any incoming water molecules.
What is the conversion efficiency for electricity + C02 + H20 -> ethanol/hydrocarbons?
Because that is the overall path (for long-term storable chemical energy, i.e. usable for transport or seasonal energy storage in countries where solar is highly seasonal).
There's an alternative path that removes carbon from the cycle:
electricity + H20 + N2 -> NH3 + O2
Ammonia can be liquified and stored similar to Propane, it does attack copper and brass.
It can be burned in an internal combustion engine, it's about half as energy dense as hydrocarbons though.
There's a danger to humans from it though, it requires sprinkler systems if there is ever a leak.
I think that a large part of the energy budget in a plant is harvesting and concentrating CO2 from the air. N2 is a lot more abundant in the air.
There is work currently on using giant sodium batteries in these large container ships. That might be more cost effective than the above longer term.
A brazilian "senior policy adviser" patting himself on the back over a conference taking place is always amusing. One could easily get the impression the brazilian government was not actively taxing the crap out of solar panels, solar installations, electrical vehicles, pretty much every good alternative to fossil fuels, literally right now.
There is so much coal. There is at least 130 years worth at current consumption levels. And despite what everyone says about renewables and green energy and etc, world use still hit a high in 2024. We aren't going to run out of (coal at least) for a long time--and usage is still going up!
But coal's essential as a backup in case of a dead (civilizational) restart.
That seems to be based on the assumption that coal is easily accessible. I'm not sure that's true.
Also, China and India are both doubling down on coal after the Iran Crisis as their Coal Gasification [0] strategies [1] were made for this kind of supply chain risk in mind.
[0] - https://usea.org/sites/default/files/022011_Coal-to-oil,%20g...
[1] - https://coal.gov.in/sites/default/files/ncgm/ncgm21-09-21.pd...
The only way we make meaningful progress has never changed, for a scale that matters: have a cheaper alternative.
"if we simply run out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we're just too good at getting them and too motivated to do so."
Less oil, more wars about it.
If the world is to stay within a range of carbon emissions that avoids catastrophic global warming, 80 percent of the fossil fuel industry’s reserves must remain unused in the ground.
If we "run out" we'll have done ourselves terrific injury.
Interesting that Colombia is currently powering more than 70% of their electrical consumption on hydropower. They currently have about 65 TWh of hydropower capacity; the total feasible generation potential is around 200 TWh. Makes then an interesting country to host such talks.
Good for them, but for most of the world there are no good hydropower locations left. And even when they exist building them is a local ecological disaster.
Practically everything we do is a local ecological disaster.
Pumped storage hydro electricity is one of our least ecologically devastating options and we are not even remotely close to exhausting locations we can put them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
Maybe they will have to divert their hydropower funds into solar or wind.
Most of South America has worked like this for decades. Hydropower is king even in Venezuela. It's altruistic on their part, but it may have reduced their long-term economic growth. Viewed in terms of GDP per capita, South America is a laggard. But if you change the denominator and look at GDP per kWh (energy intensity) they are surprisingly close to the rich world.
There is a hidden upside to all this hydro: it could potentially be upgraded to pumped storage and support a massive expansion of solar and wind. However, no SA country has such a forward-looking energy policy.
Do you have a source for GDP/kWh? Last time I was curious I dumped some raw stats (copied from wikipedia) into excel and venezuela was among the bottom three. I recall being surprised that there wasn't any strong correlation between GDP/kWh and any other obvious metric like technological development, population, land size, climate, etc.
It's on Wikipedia, sorted backwards:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_in...
Venezuela is an unusual case because their economy has been a disaster for the last half decade. And I agree that the data aren't so straightforward.
Yeah looks like Venezuela is definitely an outlier in south america. French Guiana is also a big outlier in the other direction.
We‘ve had talks about this topic decades before I was born, but progress is a bit underwhelming.
There is no progress in CO2 reduction, we are still emiting more CO2 each year.
" Global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes increased by +0.7% within 2025."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-026-00780-4
There are three main sources of green house gases. Top one which is power is declining. Transportation is still growing and the last one is agriculture which is stable. There is progress if you look at the details.
The most important metric is total emission and we failing at this metric.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/india
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/china
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/indonesia
But the growth of CO2 emissions is slowing, even though the global economy is growing and many more countries are industrialising and becoming wealthier (both proxies of CO2 emissions).
So we're working on it. Not as fast as we need, but progress is being made.
It is a bit sad that we have to celebrate bending the third derivative of the relevant metric in the right direction after like fifty years of talks.
Usage going up is not progress.
Emissions rate of increase slowing is progress in the same way that taking your foot off the gas pedal is progress towards coming to a stop.
But we didn't take our foot off the gas pedal.
> So we're working on it. Not as fast as we need, but progress is being made
It's too little too late.
India's CO2 emissions growth rate is around 4% [0], and India's economy is expected to grow at around 6-7% a year for at least the next decade. This means India's contribution alone will grow massively.
And what about other large countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, Nigeria, etc who are also seeing massive expansions.
Edit: can't reply
The Indian government's "electro-state" transition is predicated on coal expansion [1] - yes at a rate slower than before, but still at a rate that is a net negative for the environment.
This is also why India backed out of hosting COP33 in 2028 [2] - it would have brought this inconvenient truth to the forefront [3]
[0] - https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mul...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/india-withdraws-b...
[3] - https://www.dw.com/en/why-india-walked-away-from-its-bid-to-...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=BPqR9jy6C3U&is=PFRfRJ23MXSFnRV4
India is taking a shortcut so to say. If climate friendly energy becomes successful in India, it will bbee successful in other countries to. Currently the biggest threat is US forcing people to buy its venezualan and fracking oil.
Nice video but doesn't estimate when India will reach peak CO2 emission, doesn't estimate when India will reach net zero.
Chinese burning of coal for electric power generation decreased, but total coal consumption has increased. In China, coal use is shifting from power production to synthetic fuels and chemicals made from coal, the carbon from synthetic fuels will be emitted as CO2. Will this shift happen also in India?
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/chines...
China is still building new coal power plants, they will be probably used as backup for solar.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-coal-five-year-plan
If you prefer a text and graphs to a video take a look at https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-...
Reminds me of this onion bit: https://theonion.com/scientists-politely-remind-world-that-c...
Progress has been incredibly rapid. Solar power in particular has gotten exponentially cheaper and more widely deployed. We are in an incredibly deep hole and are aiming at a rapidly moving target (energy demand is growing rapidly due to AI) but we've already hit our first inflection point in terms of renewables making up almost of our added capacity and it's within reach for fossil fuel usage to peak and start falling. Of course, that's still only early milestones since we will continue to add GHGs even as the pace slows. But right now it actually really seems like we have a grip on the problem and are moving in the right direction. It's really not the time to despair, but to double down.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/solar-surge-halts-fo...
Treating alternative energy and PHEVs/EVs as a core national security concern should have started in the early 2000s. Yes, the PV revolution hadn't happened yet, but the hybrid auto was released in 1998 or so, and a PHEV is a natural extension to that.
I'm weak on recollection as to when PV and wind started their big price plummet, but it was certainly in the 2010s.
It's still not too late for ... everyone.
In particular, I think PHEVs should be an regulated requirement for all consumer (and probably semis, why aren't they hybrids yet just so they can have better acceleration/torque and regen braking) vehicles in ten years, with a 10-year decreasing subsidy for PHEV and a 10-year increasing penalty for car registration and new car purchases of pure ICE.
PHEVs will maximize available battery supply to the most electrification of transport.
I also think home solar+storage should be heavily subsidized, because you don't need to do nearly as much grid adaptation and, keeping with national security, it makes communities much more disaster resilient if homes are somewhat power independent and they can charge a vehicle for trips.
China is currently implementing this national security strategy. Each addition EV car driving in China a car running on domestic solar+coal electricity and not running on imported oil.
China is also turning coal to synthetic fuels.
" The sector last year turned 276 million tons of coal - equivalent to almost a year of European coal use - into chemicals, oil and gas, according to the China National Petroleum and Chemical Planning Institute"
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/chines...
You can imagine the CO2 result of this strategy.
The PV revolution has happened. Most countries with significant energy grids get most of their energy from PV during the daytime. Some even get 50% of their yearly energy from PV.
Do I see every single building covered in residential solar? Can I install grid independent solar in a typical house for under $5,000 or maybe $2,000? Because I think that's what's on the horizon still.
Solar has yet to incorporate likely a fundamental cost drop from perovskites, silicon perovskite multi junction, and fundamental advances in sodium ion battery storage.
And every time you bring up solar wind taking over the majority of a grid, you get the pro-nuclear people ringing their hands over grid stability and the like. I do think of a little bit is that overblown but there's definitely a large structural cost to grid adaptation and issues with industrial power using current battery storage and PV wind economics, especially when you start talking about everybody having a phev or an EV charging.
Utility scale ground mounted solar is cheaper than residential solar (often 50% less per watt).
Residential PV for $5,000 is too expensive for many people in many countries, Pakistan is doing it for much less. Large scale battery storage is too expensive for most countries.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/17/pakistan...
Realistically we can expect 2-3x improvement in solar cell efficiency in coming decades, not much more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency
Pro-solar people like to point out that LCOE of solar is lowest of all forms of electricity generation. At the same time they ignore the increased costs for grid upgrades and grid stabilization (short term stabilization - grid inertia, voltage stabilization, frequency stabilization) (long term stabilization - backup gas/coal power plants). If don't invest enough in grid stabilization and your country has grid that is not connected to other countries, you can get a blackout like in Spain.
On the other hand, blackouts or load shedding are much more common in developing countries and have large economic impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Pakistan_blackout
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Pakistan_blackout
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Pakistan_blackout
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58733193
"The costs associated with load shedding have led to an annual GDP reduction of 1 to 1.3% since 2007, with daily economic losses estimated between $85 million and $230 million for the country."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis
Just like pro-solar people have their favorite future solar improvements: perovskites, multi junction, battery storage, long term energy storage, etc. Pro-nuclear people have their favorite future nuclear improvements: small modular reactors, ship mounted reactor, generation 4 reactors, breeder reactors recycling nuclear waste.
I say put a carbon tax on all countries (including China, India, US) on all forms of emissions (including mining, refining, manufacturing, transportation, shipping) and let the cheapest technology win.
I would love to see how the industry of China would evolve if China had the same carbon tax as Europe. The same applies to India, US.
https://www.scmp.com/opinion/china-opinion/article/3307482/c...
You're talking to a molten salt reactor nut so I have some enthusiasm in the nuclear market.
The problem with nuclear is that all the fancy designs aren't ready to go, all of them have 10 to 20 year permitting and construction cycles with the inevitable price overruns as well, there aren't enough nuclear industry people anymore...
And really the biggest problem is that you can't Target an economic price 10 to 20 years out. Because wind and solar are dropping still on a constant improvement curve, as is grid storage.
So already price non-competitive nuclear, and you fund a large-scale build out of nuclear reactors, and then in another 10 to 20 years have a bunch of reactors that are now three or four times. Less competitive than they were when you initially started construction.
> In particular, I think PHEVs should be an regulated requirement for all consumer (and probably semis, why aren't they hybrids yet just so they can have better acceleration/torque and regen braking) vehicles in ten years, with a 10-year decreasing subsidy for PHEV and a 10-year increasing penalty for car registration and new car purchases of pure ICE.
That's the actual plan for Europe. They are planning to start ICE phase-out by 2035, with only limited exceptions where it's impractical (like long-haul cargo or specialized machinery).
I actually don't think that the hybrid timeline could have been accelerated significantly. A lot of foundational technology, such as compact power electronics became accessible only by the early 2000s. Lithium batteries also became commercially viable by then.
I think if Bush had not won the 2000 election, we would be in a fundamentally different electrification of transportation situation.
Of course that's speculation, and crying overspilled milk
Cars are a very unimportant part of changing to clean energy.
The most important part is the generation. Making specific types of cars required right now is VERY premature, and will just cause backlash.
Let's focus on just one (main) thing: Clean generation of electricity. The rest will come in due course.
EVs are 3 to 4 times more efficient than ICE vehicles. So just converting to EVs is a huge efficiency gain. In fact, if we electrified industrial and transportation using existing technology we could reduce energy demand by up to 40%. And as you recommended, power generation from solar (where/when feasible) removes the need for ongoing fossil fuel purchases.
That 40% number is impossible. First of all transportation is 30% of energy, which already makes 40% impossible, second if it's 4 times more efficient then it would still use 8% to 10% of energy, making your actual savings 20% of energy at the MOST.
But your 3 to 4 times number is also not real, because the actual number is 2 to 3 - and that's measured at the outlet, if you measure starting from primary power generation they are about 2 times as efficient, not 4.
So I stand by what I said: Electric vehicles are not what matters for clean energy, what matters is power generation.
"Support our Troops!"
(for the young'uns this is a reference to the also-senseless Iraq War, which had a follow on effect of distracting from this issue in favor of solipsistic entitlement and the adoption of SUVs. but looking back wistfully, at least the government and media didn't insult us by not even manufacturing a casus belli)
Maybe Trump isn’t a Putin Manchurian candidate.
Maybe he has been installed by the renewable energy sector actually to get the whole world onto renewables as soon as possible.
Of course, they had to give up on or delay America’s renewable future, but that may be a small Price to pay, and anyways renewables are growing in the U.S. despite the administration’s frankly insane efforts to block it
Ha! I came here to say something similar. Anyhow, I'm happy that US has found a combative way to combat climate change. I'm also disappointed.
Sure. You know what Putin did the last time oil prices were this high?
internal consumption engines (ICE), are rapidly becoming niche power sources sodium batteries and solar pv, will take over most of the worlds grids quite quickly now, there are no bariers left any country that resists will be left behind and suffer the consequences of uncompetitive costs
The remaining barriers elsewhere are often policy related.
There are many examples across the world where countries are doing very sub optimal things that simply don't make any economical sense. Germany has a lot of industry close to where coal used to be mined that is very energy intensive that is now being powered with expensive gas. Likewise, instead of using electrical heat pumps, most of their buildings still use gas boilers. Worse, they are not even fixing that in new buildings they build.
The UK has lots of wind power. But it prices its electricity based on the highest cost generation on the grid, which is usually gas. So, data centers get built close to London because the electricity isn't any cheaper in Scotland where all the clean renewable power is. And since they have too much of that, they actually just curtail it instead of giving a little discount to the locals (or just pricing it negatively and paying them to consume the power). So, like the Germans, the Scots also use gas for heating their houses.
Germany has a few million apartment blocks. They pretty much all run on gas. There is no plan to fix that. You might have noticed that gas is really expensive and has to be imported in LNG form as of a few years ago. That's costing many billions per year. Even if they would build gas power plants and converted all those buildings to use electrical heat pumps, it would still save billions in less imported gas (heat pumps are amazingly efficient). And of course they have a lot of frequently curtailed wind power as well. Germany is too busy spending money on gas to fix the problem that they need so much gas.
Policy changes could straighten inefficiencies like these out in a relatively short time. But those are controversial because high prices mean high profits for incumbent companies. So governments are dragging their feet and are not doing anything about this. Those big companies are lobbying to protect their profits. And the fossil fuel industry is cheering them along and pitching fantasy schemes about hydrogen to delay their inevitable demise. The public spending on that is insane if you understand how piss poor the economics around hydrogen are. Incentives are completely misaligned, policy prevents a lot of otherwise very rational/economical action, and a lot of that is perpetuated by companies that thrive on the expensive status quo and the politicians they have in their pocket.
The current crisis in the Gulf is probably going to accelerate a lot of policy changes by quite a lot. Nothing like a good crisis to force some changes.
I've seen this succintly and accurately described this way: "No One Goes to War Over a Solar Panel" [1].
If you think about it, once you build a solar panel, it just produces power for the next 20-30 years. Then you buy another one and replace it. To get oil or natural gas, you need to drill a well. That well requires constant labor. What many don't seem to know is that oil wells decline in production over time. It's called the "decline rate". For the Permian Basin (source of the US shale revolution), the decline rate is 15-20% per year. So a well producing 1000bpd (barrels per day) will be producing ~500bpd in 3 years. That means you have to constantly be drilling new wells.
Oil wells (and resource extractors like mines in general) are great wealth concentrators. Solar panels are not. So the point of that quote is that a limited resource creates wealth and is limited but also war is profitable (for the weapons manufacturers) so every incentie lays in continued fossil fuel use because it's constantly minting new billionaires.
One thing I'll add here is that there are a lot of energy usages for fossil fuels for which we have no alternative. Aviation is a big one. To some extent, so is truck freight (although China is busy electrifying this too [2]). There are a lot of non-energy uses too eg plastics, industrial, chemicals, construction. So fossil fuels aren't going away anytime soon but we sure could take a leaf out of Chin's commitment to renewable energy [3][4][5].
Instead we get nonsense like warnings to Europe of a dangerous dependency on Chinese clean tech [6].
[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
[2]: https://prospect.org/2026/04/29/aftermath-china-electrifying...
[3]: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/12/china-adding-more-re...
[4]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/26/china-breaks-m...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping_Thought_on_Ecologic...
[6]: https://renewablesnow.com/news/europe-getting-dangerously-re...
> One thing I'll add here is that there are a lot of energy usages for fossil fuels for which we have no alternative. Aviation is a big one.
The status of "fossil fuels" isn't crucial to these uses, it's just cheaper. You can just make kerosene, but you wouldn't because you already use fossil fuels for power. However if you have abundant energy without fossil fuels and you want kerosene for some reason you can make it for $$$$
> "No One Goes to War Over a Solar Panel"
Doesn't China have most of the exotic rare earths and stuff that you need in order to build solar panels and systems? I am not anti-solar, but I also don't think China is some guaranteed-friendly party that the whole world can trust not to wield their power once they have it.
I assume anyone who doesn't immediately recognize their planned takeover of Taiwan next year will have a hard time getting any type of raw materials like that.
Doesn't China have most of the exotic rare earths and stuff that you need in order to build solar panels and systems?
Solar panels do not require rare earth elements. Some types of permanent magnets require rare earth elements, and some of those magnets are used in wind turbines, which might be where this confusion comes from since wind turbines and solar panels are frequently mentioned together. (Although even most wind turbines do not use rare earth magnets.)
Crystalline silicon solar panels account for more than 95% of the global solar market. These are mostly made of glass, aluminum, silicon, and polymers. The rarest element typically used in them is silver, for metallic pastes used to form cell contacts. China is a significant but not dominant silver producer. In 2024 it accounted for about 13% of world silver production:
https://silverinstitute.org/silver-supply-demand/
China also manufactures and exports oil drilling and coal mining equipment. Curious no one worries about that.
China currently provides a the great majority of that stuff partly because nobody else has bothered to produce much. China doesn't have a majority of world reserves (although the USGS says it's close), just a majority of production.
As another commenter put it, a solar panel is a drill bit not oil. What's the alternative here? Are you arguing we maintaint the dependence on fossil fuels, which can be switched off any day, because of some hypothetical future where China might stop selling "drill bits" (that last 30 years)? That's why this argument is so silly.
As for rare earths, they aren't as rare as the suppliers would seem to suggest. The difference is that China has invested in rare earth extraction and processing and really nobody else has. Likewise, the solar investment was an intentional policy goal. Imagine where the US might be if the $8T+ spent on the so-called Global War on Terror had been spent on renewable infrastructure instead.
As for China behaving in such a belligerent fashion, I'm sorry but let's just compare. Here's a list of US military actions since 1945 [1] and a history of US-led, backed or supplied regime change [2]. The fearmongering around China is just so... manufactured.
[1]: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2023/04/timeline-of-united-sta...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
I'm not arguing against solar or pro-oil in any way. I meant only to point out that imagining an all-PV future as eliminating conflict over resources would be a mistake.
And I was corrected about how much we need China for solar panels - though with them being a hugely dominant current producer of the panels themselves, I still think they have moderate leverage. But indeed limited if other countries theoretically can build out a PV industry without China's blessing.
And I'd like to acknowledge the 'drill bit' metaphor. Would still be painful to not be able to replace solar panels that are constantly aging out, but not nearly as painful as losing a portion of oil or gas supply has been lately.
If importing solar panels is a dependency on a foreign power then so is importing oil drills and coal mining equipment.
Panels are oil drills, not oil.
FWIW, a number of the panels I've looked at are rated for 50 years
Absolutely hilarious to me that the biggest catalyst toward global attention to renewables in the last two decades is Trump's ridiculous adventure in the gulf.
I would argue that subsidized solar panels and batteries from China are the the most important factor. If renewables weren’t economically competitive we’d see approximately zero deployment.
Not to forget storage solutions have become viable as well. Generating renewable power is only part of the equation. It has a large variable that needed to be filled for the equation to fully compute waiting for storage.
The availability of cheap alternatives to oil is completely part of the solution.
Convincing Joe Public to understand yesterday switching to those is in their best interest is also necessary and very hard to do.
Mission Acomplished.
Yes but you could argue that one key driving force behind their policies is the knowledge that a Republican president was going to mess up their oil supply sooner or later.
Yes I came to say the same thing. It's a truism that people don't care about supply till it stops.
Interruptions of supply cause people to get antsy. They start looking for alternatives. A drought leads to a surge in well-points and bore holes. Rainwater collection goes up. Electricity outages lead to generators, solar and so on, all easily installed at domestic level.
Food shortages lead to more strategic agriculture choices. Oil shortages start to make EVs more attractive. This is the first major interruption in oil supply since the 70s. I start to think the next car I buy will be electric. I already have solar so it makes sense.
The biggest way to change society is to make the perception that supply is precarious or expensive. Long after the drought ends, the lessons remain.
The leading climate-denier voice , who rails against clean energy, has also caused a world-wide understanding of how precarious our oil supply is. That lesson will stick, regardless of your politics.
Partially the Ukraine war got at least parts of Europe started, then adding Trumps mess on top but keeps the ball rolling.
I've heard a lot of people being critical of wind turbines, calling them ugly and wanting nothing to do with them. After the Ukraine war started I remember driving into town, seeing the five massive wind turbines at the harbour, providing three time the power the city needs, and thinking "not only do they look great, they're also part of our self sufficiency".
The US is a different place, but the hate parts of the US have towards renewable energy is pretty insane. I know the wind isn't always blow, the sun not always shining, but each installation is still one step closer to not being beholden to the whims of some crazy person in a far of land.
Wind turbines are ugly. But I'll take ugly for free energy. It's such an obvious tradeoff. I can deal with ugly. Energy is much harder to do without. Anyone who would give up free energy just because it's ugly is someone who needs to touch grass.
By the way, wind turbines off the coast of one of Trump's golf properties in Scotland are the reason he keeps trying to ban wind turbines.
> Wind turbines are ugly.
Are they? I mean, that's very much a taste thing. I think they're pretty nifty looking, especially the enormous modern ones with blades longer than airliner wings. Great products of industry and engineering have their own beauty, and these are definitely on the list with stuff like the Great Wall or Hoover Dam, IMHO.
I dunno. The curve of solar adoption has looked "great" since 2000. There are lots of troubles remaining like:
- storage over the 24 hour cycle - storage over yearly cycles - how to fix nitrogen for agriculture - how to make carbon-free metals - how to run the chemical industry without fossil fuels
The good news has been the expansion of solar through markets, the diffusion of innovation, competition, and something like Moore's Law. The bad news is we are reaching the saturation point for the grid being able to absorb solar energy in many places and that's going to stop the growth unless those bottlenecks are overcome.
Yes, obviously this gas price spike is what climate change activists wanted all along, only not nearly as much as they'd like.
I wonder how many attendees flew in on private jets, much less any transportation relying on carbon-based fuel
This kind of talk frightens me. Not because I don't think its what we need to do, but because then US will find an excuse to invade or interfere.
That's not really relevant. Even if you look at countries like Norway that have gone all in on EVs and decarbonizing rapidly, they still export oil faster than ever. So long as no one interrupts the global trade of fossil fuels, they don't care.