> “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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
(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)
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 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.
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 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.
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].
> “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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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‘ve had talks about this topic decades before I was born, but progress is a bit underwhelming.
Reminds me of this onion bit: https://theonion.com/scientists-politely-remind-world-that-c...
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.
> 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.
"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)
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 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.
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 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.
Yes, obviously this gas price spike is what climate change activists wanted all along, only not nearly as much as they'd like.
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...