There is no "new normal", we are in a slope. As long as we emit CO2, the climate will get worse. Year after year. With effects like fires accelerating it, or the loss of the Amazon (it's pretty much lost already, isn't it?) that will just result in more CO2 being released.
We don't have to adapt to the situation as it is now, because it is pretty much the best scenario. We have to adapt to the fact that it will get worse, and worse, and worse. And save what we can. Worried about your country not dominating on the AI scene? Wait until your biggest worry is food.
Even if we stopped emissions today, Earth will keep warming up for a couple of decades. We’re not at equilibrium temperature for the current CO2 levels.
One not very well known fact is that even if we stop emissions today, the elevated CO₂ levels will remain for many centuries.
They way I think/hope we can fix this is two parts:
1. The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale is to permanently sequester it underground. The oil/gas industry can cheaply deposit huge amounts of gas there. The unsolved problem is extracting enough CO₂ from the atmosphere at reasonable cost. People are working on that, but it will probably be decades before it's is approaching practicality.
Which is why we need to do this in the meantime:
2. Spray the stratosphere with SO₂. This reflects some some sunlight and cools the planet. It sounds scary, but is actually safe: https://makesunsets.com/pages/new-faq
No, we are at the end of the Interglacial. The climate was warming before global warming and if it ends it'll keep warming from that point forward until a new ice age starts.
If CO2 emissions stop today, it'll keep warming very quickly for several decades, and then it'll slow down but keep warming slowly. What takes half a century now will take a millenium.
And nothing whatsoever humanity does with CO2 will result in cooling on a short timescale.
The fundamental reason that climate change is an issue is because it happens over timescales which the ecosystem and human society struggle to keep up. No one reasonable believes we can cool from where we're headed, minus some extreme technical approaches, slowing it down is the goal.
You don't seem to be denying human caused, or maybe you'd say accelerated, climate change. If we could flip a switch and spread the future warming over a millennium instead of half a century I think everyone would take that deal.
> You don't seem to be denying human caused, or maybe you'd say accelerated, climate change. If we could flip a switch and spread the future warming over a millennium instead of half a century I think everyone would take that deal.
You know, that's yet another major problem. You're wrong. If we did that, meltwater water supply would essentially stop (in somewhere between 8 months and 2 years), everywhere on the planet. Big, highly populated areas of our planet will dry up (Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Ganges valley in India depends significantly on meltwater. That's easily 2 billion people)
In the past century, humanity has adapted itself to constant climate change. Any variable that depends on the temperature delta that we depend on will rapidly become problematic if we stop accelerating global warming.
Now I live in Europe. I don't expect water problems here (or only temporary). I do however expect problems. I'm not even sure what but there is a fuckton of things that will change back if global warming slows and I highly doubt that will just go down smoothly.
I know the theory behind green parties is "let's just stop doing what humanity is doing, and nature will save us". I'm kind of hoping people will realize that that, too, is bullshit. We will need to decide and agree what we want the climate to do, and then make it happen. No matter the choice made, this will have existential consequences for a bunch of places on this planet, and nothing can help that.
"Let's stop global warming" is not a solution to ecological problems, and not necessarily a better solution than continuing it. We WILL need to take control of the climate, and that includes dealing with the consequences of whatever decision we make. "stop CO2" is as much a soundbite, and as stupid, as "drill, baby, drill". Thunberg is as problematic as Trump, it's just harder to realize that that is the case.
Not that I think there's a chance in hell that global warming will stop or even just slow down whatever we decide to do in the west. Getting China, South Asia, and now more and more India and in the future Africa to agree to not use fossil fuels is not politically feasible. There is no solution there either.
So my vote? Aerosols to cool the planet. Which one, and how to spread? TBD. And, yes, that may mean the planet cools again BUT ALSO parts of the planet become uninhabitable. We'll need to agree and deal with that.
> If we did that, meltwater water supply would essentially stop (in somewhere between 8 months and 2 years), everywhere on the planet
How? Why? Meltwater comes from the temperature difference between summer and winter, how does it have anything to do with this?
> Any variable that depends on the temperature delta that we depend on will rapidly become problematic if we stop accelerating global warming.
What variable depends on a temperature _delta_?
> Now I live in Europe. I don't expect water problems here (or only temporary).
We have water problems right now. Agriculture has problems, nuclear reactors have to shut down because of too warm(France) or missing (Romania) water. Dry forests leading to more fire.
> I know the theory behind green parties is "let's just stop doing what humanity is doing, and nature will save us".
I have never heard of this, I have a hard time that anybody relevant claims this.
> You're wrong. If we did that [spread manmade climate change over next millennium], meltwater water supply would essentially stop (in somewhere between 8 months and 2 years), everywhere on the planet.
What exactly are you talking about here? Meltwater amounts would be roughly the same compared to the last millennium, until glaciers start vanishing (only, in that obviously favorably scenario, in 500ish years instead of this century).
I get the impression that you think that manmade climate change is somewhat helpful compensation for natural trending towards ice age. This is not the case at all, because the rate of change is too high. See https://xkcd.com/1732/.
A (natural) looming ice age is not problematic or threathening at all because that happens so slowly that we get many centuries to act.
This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing. Meanwhile power from nuclear plants are very expensive, comparatively.
So why should we invest in nuclear energy? I have the impression a lot of the debate about nuclear energy and Germany's decision to fade it out is now driven more by emotion/ignorance than reason.
Nuclear is proportionally expensive for one because we build a lot less and lose insititional knowledge and manufacturing capacity.
Secondly because of ridiculous legislation and europes extreme ability to fuck with it politically.
Thirdly because we don't count the gas plant to cover the intermitency of the renewables as part of the cost and if they'd take those out they'd find they run out of options for the cheap storage options as they become a larger share of the grid nor did they drew out the lifetime cost over the full length of a nuclear plants lifetime (shit gets replaced in the meantime)
At this point it may very well be better to go for renewables for much more of the grid coverage (after they fix their damn grid connections)
But those pushing the cost picture have been everything but honest over the past 2 decades.
I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage and such and a nuclear cost based on one unfinished american plant.
Renewables and batteries are great for peaks though. And not very good for base load
Nuclear is great for base load, not great for peaks
Our current situation is we are building tons of renewables and storage but still burning tons of fossil fuels because they cannot replace the base load very effectively. Nuclear replaces the carbon part of the equation
Hydro is not renewable when the basins are being refilled by glacial melt as is the case for most of Europe, and precipitation is also becoming more erratic. For example, Iceland is currently relying on hydro power for 70% of its electricity, but current models predict that glacial runoff will peak around 2060 (or earlier, if the arctic temperature continues its upward trend). After that, the potential power to be generated from hydro will gradually decrease, which is why Iceland is now diversifying towards geothermal and wind.
Ok... but now we're damaging ecosystems by installing hydroelectric power stations and dams and such in these areas.
Besides, not every country can effectively utilize hydroelectric power.
Germany, like other countries, should be investing in a mix of power sources. You probably want your backbone to be nuclear and then renewables where it makes sense with a goal (at least in western countries) of also eliminating reliance on China for renewables/batteries.
Just replacing expensive fossil energy with cheap renewables and storage doesn't help. The problem is Jevons paradox. Cheaper energy means more consumption.
A sensible global policy could be:
- Tax carbon positive energy consumption to death. I.e. coal, oil or natural gas.
- Tax (close to) carbon neutral energy consumption at a fixed high rate, e.g. solar, hydro, nuclear or wind. Tax nuclear separately because of its other side effects if you want.
- Use the proceeds to negatively tax carbon negative energy consumption only.
Not that I have any illusions of any policy even remotely like this ever getting enacted. Zero consensus on earth and too many dangerous and selfish idiots.
Jevons paradox is often claimed, but largely irrelevant in this case, imo. If the demand rises, the price rises again, as well. It doesn't force anybody to keep using fossil energy
One problem with renewables is that they rely a lot on electronics, which relies a lot on petrochemicals (just to build them) and on globalisation. In a world without abundant oil, can we keep producing and maintaining as many solar panels as we need?
This gets repeated again and again. They are not in conflict with each other - both need to be done in tandem. It is not a this or that strategy - it is an all of the above strategy.
Nuclear is critical for long term generating power. Batteries and solar are good not able to maintain the same level of power quality and duration though are definitely incredibly important.
Nuclear is a high-capex source of electricity. It doesn’t do well economically in a grid where power if essentially free on sunny or windy days but you need a lot of backup power for a few hundred hours per year.
All power projects have to look at economic viability. Every project has different needs and market dynamics. THERE IS NOT A ONE TYPE OF PROJECT WORKS FOR ALL LOCATIONS. Resources mixes vary as do the demands of the power.
I can't stress this enough solar and battery dont work everywhere and they dont provide indefinite power quality. Nor does nuclear. They all need to be resourced where appropriate.
FWIW - there aren't a lot of grids that have the resource mix you described.
> Nuclear is a high-capex source of electricity. It doesn’t do well economically in a grid where power if essentially free on sunny or windy days but you need a lot of backup power for a few hundred hours per year.
Fair enough, but it's still incredibly helpful as a source of no-carbon electricity.
> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage?
Recent report on restarting German nuclear:
> The easiest group of reactors to restart could produce electricity at an average of €37 per megawatt-hour before the end of 2031.The most difficult restarts could produce electricity at roughly €58 per megawatt-hour by the mid 2030s.
I wonder how much battery you could install in a typical nuclear site. Maybe even stacked; if we make an apples-to-apples comparison in materials and say we can use the same amount of concrete and metal, could probably have several levels of batteries. Except no water needed, and no waste risks.
The top of this German article [1] has a rendering of a planned 1.4GW power, 6GWh storage battery plant, with the decommissioned nuclear plant in the background. The battery energy storage is a bit smaller in area and of course of lot less tall. Eyeballing, the area is actually very comparable if you deduct the power plant's parking lot. The nuclear plant is Grohnde, a 1.43GW single-reactor plant.
The similar power output is not a coincidence. The biggest bottleneck for new solar and battery storage plants in Germany is getting them connected to the grid, and the freshly decommissioned nuclear plant has a great grid connection that this project wants to reuse
I'm not so sure about the "no water needed" as batteries require cooling (and sometimes heating). And perhaps batteries are not risky like nuclear waste, but by volume there would me much more battery material than nuclear material, and there is fire risk that must be mitigated. You can't just wire up a big stack of batteries, they need carefully designed separation and fire suppression so that if one battery goes into a thermal runaway it doesn't take out the entire installation.
It depends on how much you value land use and care about the knock on effects of the associated mining. I’d rather figure out how to build out nuclear cheaply like South Korea and China and use more land for wild space. The per hectare land use of nuclear is minuscule.
> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing
Our power demands are increasing faster than we can build out renewables and storage.
Despite how much investment we are making into solar, wind, batteries, we're still burning more carbon year over year to make up for the demand for energy. We need a source of energy that can actually replace the base load carbon, not just augment it like renewables are. Nuclear is the most likely source to use for that purpose.
Edit: if we're being honest, we probably should have built out nuclear 20, 30, 40 years ago but we didn't. The expense now is kind of the cost of our poor policy decisions in decades past. We can continue to make poor decisions or we can learn our lesson and eat the cost now to fix those mistakes. I think failing to invest and shift to nuclear now would be yet another instance of passing the buck to the future generations, with even more interest
> They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing.
Yet France, which invested heavily in nuclear[1], has energy prices that are 40% lower than Germany's[2]. Something isn't adding up about the repeated claims that renewables are cheaper than nuclear.
I think the point of this question is that the Green party of Germany chose in 2003 that closure of nuclear power plants was more important than global warming.
They had this as an explicit choice, and they demanded other parties went along with closing the nuclear power plants. They knew, it was discussed, that keeping them open would help with global warming, and they explicitly chose against that. Then they stood by that choice, and kept standing by it even up to 2023.
Now you obviously can't fault them for the fact that the Ukraine war would make things 10x worse (by forcing Germany back onto coal and LNG), but you CAN fault them for making that choice, and standing by it. This makes them the main responsible party for the current electricity prices problem in Germany.
European green parties have explicitly chosen that their other goals mattered more than global warming. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are absolutely 100% unwilling to make compromises elsewhere to help fix global warming, when they are the ones making a compromise.
And, frankly, if we can't compromise as a country in parliament we may as well stop attempting to do anything about global warming. Green parties are demanding big compromises from everybody else, but cannot give a millimeter themselves? Obviously everybody else is just going to fight them tooth and nail, forever, and we'll get nowhere.
The environmentalists who railed against nuclear for the last 30 years are very much responsible for how many dead dinosaurs we've burnt over that time. Excuse me if I'm skeptical about what they now say about energy policy.
To put it another way, I could flip your statement on its head: Renewables are just a distraction to try to keep us burning dead dinosaurs for longer instead of building durable nuclear power capacity.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "like Germany", but singling out Germany seems a strange choice given that the main global offenders are orders of magnitude worse in terms of their greenhouse gas emissions. Germany is currently producing more than half of its electricity from renewables.
Check out this year's edition of Ember's Global Electricity Review [0]. The table on p. 78 lists the following five countries as having the highest CO2-equivalent emissions (in Mt):
| China | 5,565 |
| United States | 1,737 |
| India | 1,395 |
| Russia | 536 |
| Japan | 492 |
In comparison, the whole of the European Union (consisting of 27 individual countries, including Germany) is emitting 587 Mt.
All these numbers should probably be put into perspective, though, by taking the population size into account. But even then, the whole of the EU does not fare too bad.
The reason Germany gets singled out is because it was a massive policy misstep and highlights the shortsightedness of the environmental movement. It seems that they have changed their tune about it nuclear - but their entrenched efforts (and concerns in the 80s) killed the last 40 years of nuclear power - arguably inflaming our current CO2 crises by opening the doors wide open for Oil and Gas to fill the void.
In Germany add in that they then needed to rely on Russia to provide natural gas to fill in the void - which drove up the costs of power and made their manufacturing base a little less competitive.... Best intentions don't always prove to be good policy making. That's the TL;DR why Germany gets singled out.
Germany is in Europe and the economist is about Europe, so it makes sense to look at high emitters in Europe, no?
Also, while it's important to look at the global picture, let's not ignore the local effects: air quality in Germany is pretty bad, perhaps the worst in Europe. Poland is pretty bad too, especially in the winter. That's not China's or USA's fault.
Germany is singled out because decided to close their safe and well functioning zero emission power plants for no good reason, thus exploding their CO2 emissions.
Yeah, other emit more, but the rank stupidity of this environmental vandalism deserves the scorn it gets!
While I would agree that it is regrettable Germany sunset their nuclear early when they should've extended the runtime for another 5-10 years to avoid excess carbon emissions since shutdown, but clean energy has already surpassed coal in Germany and they will likely hit net zero in the next decade at current deployment rates of renewables and batteries. [My note: The US states of Illinois and California got this right, subsidizing their existing merchant nuclear generator fleets until more renewables can replace them]
> Germany has various targets in place that require a rapid expansion of wind and solar power, including cutting economy-wide emissions to net-zero by 2045. The nation is also aiming to increase renewables’ share of electricity consumption to 80% by 2030 to achieve a “largely climate neutral” power system by 2035.
It's time to get over the nuclear issue, it's history. It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid, and tens of billions of dollars or euros. Germany deploys ~2GW/month of solar. Total global nuclear generation capacity is ~380GW as of this comment. At current global solar PV deployment rates, even assuming capacity factor delta between solar and nuclear, you could replace total global nuclear generation with ~18 months of solar PV deployment. Batteries and solar will continue to rapidly decline in cost, nuclear will not.
(total annual solar PV deployment is approaching, but not quite yet, at 1TW/year, and continues to increase year over year)
I think that's net zero for electricity only, not net zero for all power generation. It excludes heavy industry and freight shipping, which still have a projected investment window of at least 25 years. Heavy industry in particular would have benefitted from the predictable high-power output of nuclear energy.
Nuclear is an amazing solution for industrial steady state demand... This is data centers, smelters (glass and metal), lots of industrial processes (think auto plants).
But nuclear is terrible at TV pickup situations because it is simply not that responsive.
Delivery to industrial customers (regardless of source) is also much simpler than it is to domestic - and I don't think that were even beginning to address the issues there.
You realize that "green energy" in EU is dependent on gas and/or coal? When there's no wind or sun, we will gladly burn gas or coal, and call it green energy.
Nuclear doesn't have this requirement. It's truly zero carbon.
Unless you can show me plans to fill this gap with batteries on a national scale, renewables < nuclear
Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. We have solved fusion at a distance with solar and batteries. We're arguing speed and cost of deployment for the collection and storage system. The technology drops in cost rapidly, it lasts for decades with no moving parts and minimal maintenance. It can be trivially recycled today with no further technology advancements needed. It fails gracefully.
Yes, some fossil fuels will be burned to fill energy consumption gaps until we have fully replaced all fossil generation with that produced from the sun. Again, remember the fact that every year we are adding ~1TW of solar that can account for energy consumption growth and push out fossil generation. We won't know until we look back over time, but we are very likely at peak fossil fuel consumption globally. New generation will be clean tech simply out of economics, and old fossil generation will be replaced eventually with clean tech, because it cannot last forever.
> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.
> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.
> To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.
> Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year
Sure, the sun is incredible, but our capacity of actually using that power is the bottleneck. We still have to have energy to dig up the materials and manufacture the panels and batteries and deploy them and such.
China is the top user of energy globally, and they are electrifying everything while moving rapidly to renewables for generation. This is the blueprint the rest of the world will eventually follow. China's clean energy generation will be used to spin the clean tech manufacturing flywheel up faster (which will lead to more global clean tech exports to the world). The sun will power the end to end supply chain for making more solar and batteries.
Nearly a third of new heavy truck sales in China Electric in 2025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676673 - June 2026 ("China targeting EVs to make up 40% of heavy truck sales by 2030 - EVs to make up 20% of heavy truck fleet by 2030 - Trade-in schemes will prioritise EV trucks to boost adoption")
~110GW of nuclear capacity targeted by 2030. I respect their attempt to diversify, iterate, and drive down the cost of nuclear, but it pales in comparison to renewables (~90-100GW of solar installed per month, on average).
> China continues to view nuclear as an electricity source that advances its energy security while also reducing reliance on fossil fuels, as noted in the latest FYP (Part II, Chapter 7): “Promote the safe, reliable, and orderly replacement of fossil fuels with non-fossil energy sources; pursue a multi-pronged approach that combines wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear power; and implement the ten-year plan to double non-fossil energy capacity.” The remarkable growth of renewable energy sources and coal’s continuing preeminence have shaped nuclear energy’s role as a non-carbon-emitting baseload in China’s power generation portfolio (Table 1). Nuclear energy seems to serve as a versatile power source that supplements coal’s role as an energy security enforcer as well as the role of renewables as clean energy boosters. By 2030, China targets 110 gigawatts (GW) of installed nuclear power capacity. If realized, the installed capacity in China will surpass that of the United States unless U.S. capacity—currently the world’s largest—grows substantially from 102.5 GW (gross) in 2025.
I disagree, but I'm not the decision maker so it's irrelevant. Nuclear is throwing good money after bad imho (based on current and projected levelized cost of energy [LCOE]), I think the next five years will prove that out.
> China set a 2020 wind target of 210 GW and finished the year with about 282 GW. Its solar target was 110 GW, while delivery reached roughly 253 GW. The later commitment to reach at least 1,200 GW of combined wind and solar by 2030 was crossed in 2024, six years early. By the end of 2025, China had about 640 GW of wind and 1,202 GW of solar, for a combined 1,842 GW. Nuclear moved in the other direction: about 50 GW against a 58 GW target in 2020, and about 62 GW against a 70 GW target in 2025. The current goal of 110 GW by 2030 may still be achieved, but the previous record gives no reason to convert it directly into a forecast.
> This is not evidence that Beijing has quietly abandoned nuclear power. China has the world’s largest reactor construction programme, continues approving new units and is building an increasingly domestic supply chain around designs such as Hualong One. The divergence lies between approval and operation. Another difference is that when renewables blow past targets China set much bigger targets, but when nuclear misses targets, the targets don’t change. That difference is harder to explain than the results.
Certainly sounds like China's nuclear goals are aspirational, based on the data. The construction gives nuclear proponents hope, but construction is not generation. At some point, you have to deliver.
You're free to doubt, healthy skepticism is a good thing imho, there is no will to spend what nuclear would cost and renewables and batteries keep getting cheaper. We're locked on a hockey stick trajectory of their uptake purely through the economics. Spain is phasing out the last of their nuclear for more renewables, for example.
Fossil gas will fill the gap until solar, wind, batteries, and transmission push the last of fossil generation out of the mix, and every year less and less gas will be used until remaining fossil gas generators sit idle.
Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-n... | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~2GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~17 months; per Electricity Maps, only 18.79% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/12mo/monthly)
> As long as major countries like Germany are keeping their ban on nuclear power
Frankly, it doesn't matter what Germany or other European nations do - their carbon footprint has dramatically decreased.
The issue is everyone else [0]. China (12 GT), the US (5 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent over half of all global carbon emissions. The EU and UK's combined carbon emissions are half of Asia (excluding China and India) emissions.
Countries like India and Vietnam are expected to see GDP growth in the 6-8% range for the next decade, and both are doubling down on coal [1][2] and other carbon heavy fuels, so emissions are only going to grow further. Any marginal decrease in carbon emissions at this point is too little too late given that much of Asia and South America is expected to see carbon emission grow in the 3-8% range.
Sure, but don't blame China when 90% of the shit you buy is made there, they don't pollute because they're Chinese, they pollute because they're your factory
How can articles on major news sites have typos this bad up for over a month?
"The crisis in France has claimed dozens of lives, with 40 people drowning while attempting to call off from the heat since June 18"
Call off should be "cool off".
And forgive me if this is a stupid question, but don't nuclear power plants produce enough energy that they could power their own cooling? Why do they have to rely on the free cooling provided by a river?
The last time any company was interested to build a nuclear reactor in Germany was in the 1970s. About thirty years before the eventual (first) ban.
We can rant all day about how stupid it was of the conservatives to re-enact the ban on nuclear power without restarting the subsidies for renewables, and lament that they thus ensured that coal power would thus have to replace more of the lost load, but that's all in the past and we can't change that.
If you think we need more nuclear power to fight CO2 emissions, you're 50 years late. That ship has sailed before most of us here were born.
The fires don't accelerate it much. That wood and shrub would either burn or rot down the line and release methane and co2 anyway.
Forests don't sequester much at all despite what people seem to believe.
Consequentially running a fireplace is a lot more climate neutral than driving a car, taking a flight, utilising the myriads of high carbon footprint goods or having a gas heater or so.
On the other hand the bogs that we're losing (and kelp forests) are a lot better at sequestring co2 but they're small.
Permafrost will also actually accelerate stuff since....well it __was__ permanently forsty.
If we assume that the forests will regrow to their former strength then the fires are indeed not all the consequential. The trees release the stored CO2 when they burn, and new plants will take up an equivalent amount of CO2 again when they grow. The CO2 sequestered in a forest is more or less just the biomass in it (some is in the soil, but not that much)
But if climate change leads to permanently losing those forests, that is an effect we will feel. Still less bad than losing permafrost
If we figured out how to store chopped down trees somewhere where the wood doesn't break down, that would be a really effective way to get CO2 out of the air!
Easier said than done, of course. Sinking millions of trees to the bottom of the ocean might be the most practical way.
The theory is that it can reach a point where it won't be able to survive, and therefore it will die. We are around that limit. It may well be that it has already passed it and therefore it will die.
I didn't mean "it is not there anymore", I meant "we won't be able to preserve it, it may already be too late for that".
And aside the greenhouse effect, we're also using more power than we've ever used before, building 10Msqft boxes that ultimately turn electricity into heat. We could go all-solar and we'd still be warming our environment.
The amount of heat generated directly by all of the energy use by humans - from fossil, nuclear or renewables - is a tiny, miniscule rounding error compared to the excess heat absorbed by the atmosphere and oceans due to CO2 and the greenhouse effect.
The heat output of every single data centre on earth isn’t even worth thinking about on the scale of the global climate system.
Agreed. I was just mentioning it because people don't seem to realise that we are on the verge of losing it (and it may actually be that it is too late).
Of course we should fight to preserve as much as we can. Nobody wants to live in a bunker on mars. Almost...
I mean european forests are mostly monocultures created after we cut down everything natural we had. Maybe fire/warm resistent trees and forests will be planted. Its not like the fires are destroying 20000 years old ecosystems. Most of the forests were basically dead long before.
> Worried about your country not dominating on the AI scene?
The thing is, the obsession with the AI race is making this problem so much worse. We're using up so much more energy and burning so much more fossil fuel as a direct result of AI mania.
We're so obsessed with becoming king of the ashes we're not even noticing we're burning the whole damn place down.
It's tragic, it's irresponsible and many here are at the very least complicit.
People are truly having a climate change discussion fatigue. They hear all the time from politicians, celebrities, influencers, etc. that they should stop eating meat, should not drive non-electric vehicles, should not use AC, reduce consumption, and all other bullshit while the people preaching those have started wars that emit billions of tons of carbon, travel on their private planes to climate change summits, taking their private plane to ski in Aspen and throw lavish parties to celebrate birthdays, etc.
It's basically normal people should sacrifice their standards of livings and pay taxes to reduce carbon emission while the same rules doesn't apply for the other class of the society. Most people are living pay check to pay check and out of all the worries in their minds, climate change is the last thing they can afford to worry about.
Well climate change is happening whether wealthy people are hypocrites or not.
Also there a lot of people in very poor countries (india, south east asia, africa) that are already feeling the effects and need to worry about it a lot.
I would actually say rich people can afford the most to not worry about climate change, because they can stave off the effects better than poor people (moving to colder climates, building cooling systems, or fleeing to mars [1])
> Well climate change is happening whether wealthy people are hypocrites or not. Also there a lot of people in very poor countries (india, south east asia, africa) that are already feeling the effects and need to worry about it a lot.
no shit sherlock, poor people in those countries have been suffering from starvation, diseases and lack of basic necessities even before the climate change was a thing. For them, it's just another misery on top of their already miserable lives.
Nobody gave a shit about those people in poor countries 20-30 years ago, all of a sudden everyone is worries about climate change because Europe is burning. Had it been a monsoon flooding or a drought in South Asia, nobody in the Economist would even bat an eye, let alone publish an article.
well I have good news! normal people don't have to sacrifice, fossil fuel companies do. if the govt mandates something (like with the ozone layer, or with lead acid battery recycling), something that was once impossible becomes possible.
and then what? are people going to ride horses to work? beg on the street because the manufacturing companies have closed and they lost their source of income? or are you just dumb or maybe naive to think that banning CFC and fossil fuel consumption would have the same effect on the everyday lives of normal people?
> hat they should stop eating meat, should not drive non-electric vehicles, should not use AC, reduce consumption, and all other bullshit while the people preaching those have started wars that emit billions of tons of carbon,
This is a lie. The people preaching those did not started those wars.
Those wars were started by conservatives who dont believe climate change, find vegetarianism unmanly and instinctively oppose any suggestion to lower consumption.
"Being better at fighting fires, though, is not enough."
Yeah, it's nowhere near enough. We need to seriously revamp how we manage forests. They must be regularly cleaned, huge fire breaks between fenced areas and roads must be created and maintained. Prescribed burns on a regular schedule. Houses cannot be too close to the trees, no matter how pretty it looks. A huge clean radius must be maintained between houses and trees and between properties. All this work must be done in the winter and everything must be prepared for the summer. Every year. Everywhere.
I see none of this happening at a proper scale in my country (Portugal). So of course every summer we se huge forest fires. Lives lost, ecosystems destroyed. Next year it happens again...
being good at fighting fires is part of the problem as that allows people to keep natural limited area fires from happen regularly and then eventually you get one huge fire.
Every forest has different needs. OP is in Portugal, I don't know much about forest there, but the plan seems reasonable for there. The Rocky Mountains need a different plan, but it isn't much different.
Portugal has about 10% forested land, of which an estimated 25% is non-native eucalyptus (an active pyrophyte), and over 50% in some areas. I've seen the aftermath of eucalyptus forest fires while travelling through Alentejo.
People keep reiterating this probably because Trump keeps reiterating but it just sounds ridiculous.
How do you clean forests? The debris is part of the forest, not all areas of a forest are easily accessible or feasible to transport debis out of there. A dead tree is actually an ecosystem of fungi and insects. Cleaning it may make it more fire prone as broken sticks and leaves shield the ground from the sun allowing the soil to hold on to moisture a little longer. There is plenty of room for nuance here.
I would need to listen to actual experts on this, the correct solution is probably something akin to resorting wetlands and beavers which act as fantastic self maintaining fire breaks.
However when you suggest things like this you see the actual issues pop up, local farmers protest and others using NIMBY laws to block so they get payouts.
Prescribed burns are a good tool, but they're not a silver bullet. Because of the decades without fires, there's so much debris that fires burn incredibly hot, so you either need people to go in and thin the debris (this is actually a thing they do, as ridiculous as "cleaning the forest" sounds), or deal with the extra damage and risk of a very hot fire. Then you need a decent amount of personnel to make sure the fire doesn't get out of hand (and they regularly do), and do it when the weather is right (wet season, low winds). A prescribed burn is still a forest fire, with all the risks, it's just one that's started at a time and place we control.
This year Europe's fires are not the start. Few years ago we had very extended Australia fires, US/Canada fires, and other not so put in the spotlight fires in other countries around the world. At some point they diverged enough from normal to reach a scale that raised enough eyebrows.
And it is not just forest fires. Floods caused by extreme rainfalls, running out of letters in hurricane seasons, once in a century/millenia extreme weather events happening several times in a decade are increasingly noticeable, and they are just symptoms of bigger but harder to directly perceive global trends like that the global yearly average temperature increased a few tens of degrees or that the ocean is winning heat at a rate of 6 Hiroshima bombs per second.
Climate change will create winners and losers. Losers -- anyone on the equator or within the the tropic of cancer/capricorn. Winners -- those outside those regions or with enough $ to adapt.
Give me solar geoengineering, 2x increase in R&D spending on reducing fossil fuel usage, and funding for direct carbon capture (and a financial incentive to do it).
It's going to get worse before it gets better sadly.
I'm not sure there are all that many winners. There are those that lose big time with some places potentially becoming uninhabitable, and those that merely have to spend a fortune on new flood prevention infrastructure, deal with massive changes to how they do agriculture and forestry in a new climate, and in the future deal with streams of climate refugees from countries on the list of even bigger losers.
Russia and Canada might end up winning from this, but for everyone else it seems like a big negative, with some silver linings
I'm a firm believer that sooner or later we will be extinct by extreme heat and suffocation.
Two weeks ago here in Umbria, Italy the heat was extreme. It was 40°C without a breeze of air, it literally felt like braathing hot air. One morning while I was walking I couldn't believe the amount of dry leaves on the street, by pictures people would have guessed that it was autumn.
I have a really good tolerance to high temperatures but this time I got home very dizzy.
Hope is not too late to revert the current situation, but realistically year after year temperatures have been raising steadly.
Europe (and the world at large, really) can either wait for its demise, through increasingly oppressive climate hostile to human occupation and de-industrialization while the rest of the world continues on the current trajectory, or start getting its shit together and immediately commence climate engineering on a continental scale. Start with stratospheric aerosol injection, and mandate it not unlike "sustainable" aviation fuels on aircraft flying at the minimum altitude required to have any effect, as it should be possible [0], expedite research into other climate engineering efforts including space-based ones, promptly address the complete and utter reliance on fossil fuels and those profiting from it.. if climate change isn't something worth approaching as a war would be, then there's no point discussing it at all. Researchers and journals have been warning of crossing the point of no return and temperature targets for years now, you either submit to it and keep chasing emission reduction targets, or take action. The idea of simply "adapting to it getting worse" is suicidal, hard to sell to the public and depends on bureaucrats not getting kicked out.
Don't worry we will end up spraying the atmosphere to buy more time, and the Earth will cool, and people will believe that the problem is solved and we can just go back to burning fossil fuels.
So the fighting will continue while we keep duct taping and band aiding the problem.
What ever happened to biomass energy? I'd rather burn wood in a controlled way that produces the best possible exhaust than have it burn uncontrolled. Encouraging biomass energy would create a market and economic incentives to manage forests.
As Macron said in 2023: "Who could have predicted the climate crisis?"
The people in charge a either clinically retarded or willingly ignoring the problem, either way we're fucked, the point of no return is behind us now, this is the new normal, and it'll only get worse
In some ways I wonder if these timescales are "beyond comprehension" for most people. You can tell people the temperature will go up in 20 years, but you can't make them feel what it will be like. In the same way you can tell a 10 year old what it's like to be age 35 but they don't get it, and I've heard what it's like to be age 80 but I don't really know and won't for some time.
> You can tell people the temperature will go up in 20 years
I think the biggest issue with the climate change communication is that the scientists decided to focus on a temperature delta.
There is no meaningful temperature delta, it's just something that you get after a lot of aggregation and averaging.
Sure it makes sense for scientists running their models and such, but it should never have been the primary communication tool to politicians and laymen.
I think it would have been significantly better if they invented some new scale, like the Richter scale or the hurricane severity scale, which instead incorporates the effects of the average temperature rising. A scale which directly communicates a sense of how many more fires will we see per year, how many more severe storms, flash floods etc.
I think we've gotten to the point where the question can be asked looking back, not forward: think back to your childhood and how much things have changed since then? If you've lived long enough you can notice these things.
I used to have snow for weeks each winter in my city and now if I get 2-3 days of snow a year it's unusual. Extreme weather events where it rains in one day as much as in one month have become a recurring event to the point we're re-planning sewage systems around these things.
> Arguably it's rational (though selfish) to think like this.
Is it? We are not talking about screwing the climate for the people who will come in 200 years, right? In the last decades we have been saying "if we don't change the trend, your children will most likely die because of the climate change".
Is it rational to be 30 and not care about the fact that we will be screwed long before we reach the age of retirement?
What we all need to understand is that after oil, we just won't have enough energy to maintain our current way of life. Not just energy by the way: our way of life relies on petrochemical products (from fertilisers to electronics). Solar panels need electronics, we don't know if we can build/maintain them at scale without computers that need petrochemical products.
So we need as much as we can of everything. Both renewables and nuclear.
Agreed that the people in charge do nothing and don't understand the problem.
However, the people in charge (e.g. in France) are elected by the people, and therefore represent it. Do you think that the far-right will care more about the climate crisis? The French people is likely to elect them next year.
It's too easy to vote for people who don't give a shit about the climate crisis, and then blame them.
> either way we're fucked, the point of no return is behind us now
The faster and the harder we react, the more we save. Fires are a good example: because many trees are burning now (therefore they are already dead) and many trees will burn (because the fire won't magically stop), it's worth fighting to preserve as much as we can. Saying "we won't get those dead trees back, so we may as well let the rest of the forest burn" is counter-productive.
We need to act now. And not by electing morons and then blaming them for being morons.
* CO2 emissions are screwing the climate, and CO2 emissions come from fossil fuels. We need to stop using fossil fuels.
* Our way of life depends on fossil fuels. In some cases it's obvious (we transport food in trucks that need oil), but it's too easy to believe that we may replace that with electricity. It's a lot more complicated than that: everything depends on petrochemical products. How do you transport food without plastics? How do you build electronics without petrochemical products (the PCBs need them, for one)? Without electronics, how do you manage solar panels?
* We don't necessarily have to go back to the Middle-Age: first we probably couldn't: we are way too many for that, and second we know a lot more than they did.
But overall, we will have to do a lot less with a lot less. We have to think about what's fundamental, and how we want to preserve it. I'm not saying "choose between a new game console or a new smartphone every two years instead of having both". I'm saying "do you want to preserve some nature? Produce enough food for everybody? Keep some kind of democratic system?".
Of course, it's too much, we cannot do everything that we need, and we won't be able to preserve everything that we want. We need to accept it and start prioritising.
Overall, I would say that a good first step would be to get informed about how bad it is. There are enough books and resources about that. The people need to be informed in order to elect informed people. Too many don't give a shit, spend their free time on TikTok and then blame the ruling class.
> As Macron said in 2023: "Who could have predicted the climate crisis?"
The people in charge a either clinically retarded or willingly ignoring the problem,
The "people in charge" as well as the "climate experts" are generally aligned on the climate crisis, but everyone has been surprised by unexpected acceleration and the very sudden swings.
Put differently, you can predict and act, according to the trend, but the sudden and unpredictable timing of these swings is a separate, and more difficult issue to navigate.
For instance, can anyone predict specifically what will happen "next" and "where" and prepare to mitigate the impact?
This is completely wrong. The climate experts are not surprised by this at all. We've known about it for decades. We just didn't give a shit because it was not impacting us directly.
Now it's starting to impact us directly, but we still don't really give a shit. In a few weeks it will be business as usual.
It will get worse every year, and we will be more and more willing to do something as it gets worse. But we will have fewer and fewer resources to do it, and less stuff to save (once a forest disappears, you as a human won't see it come back in your lifetime).
The specific swings are a little surprising, but only in the way that a macaroni jumps around in hard to predict directions if you put it in boiling water. We’ve made the weather less predictable, but we knew we were doing it.
While we haven’t known the exact trajectory of the crisis, it has been known for decades that the trend would generally and increasingly point towards “future is bad” if we didn’t reduce emissions. World leaders bet on having more time to shift away from harmful policy and lost.
I always find it interesting when politicians mention temperature target goals.. what are you still talking about, it's done. We now need to worry about the hundreds of millions of people that are neither asylum migrants or economic migrant but survival migrants. The real discussion will become how we keep those out very soon. And since there are no good solutions from the "good" people who ignored everything and got us into this mess it will be the bad people giving us the only remaining "solution": violence.
It's not. The climate will warm as much as we emit CO2. Sure, the CO2 that we have already emitted won't leave. We've passed 1.5C, that won't come back in our lifetime. But the more we emit, the worse it will get. To keep what we have now, we have to stop emitting entirely, right now.
> We now need to worry about the hundreds of millions of people
We need to worry about the problems that are coming from the CO2 we have already emitted, that's true. But we also need to worry a lot about the fact that we are making it worse every single day. We are not reducing our CO2 emissions, we are increasing them right now.
Are you worried about hundreds of millions of refugees? The way it's going, we'll reach 4C. It means that billions of people will have to move.
I don't think we can still use the concept of "refugee" when its entire countries that need to move because their part of the world has become so hot that humans cannot survive outside without life support (that's what will happen to billions of people with 4C). At this point, it's entire countries moving with their military, it's just global war.
hundreds of millions of people coming to europe (i didn't mention) is still lowballing on purpose. sure it's billions, but not all will go to one place was my thinking here.
you are talking reason, you are in the wrong timeline buddy. i'm talking about what we will chose as a society, i feel we can't help ourselves.
You can convince a person (me certainly) that we should stop immediately (or very very short time frame). But most people have experienced their entire lifetime of propaganda and fallacious arguments that words and reason have lost all meaning.
We are still getting cooked so slowly that people will only see unrelated incidents for a long time. World War(s) 3 is what the survivors will call it.
Our software and AI capabilities have improved astronomically… but nature is still nature. Working with the physical world is still so hard. Humbling, in a way.
Maybe I've missed it because I don't follow news on this much (apart from "it will get warmer/worse"), but what happens after that? Seems like I've been hearing "by 2100" for the last 20 years, but now that's only 74 years away. Some people alive today will live to see it. Will it just keep getting warmer or will it level off somewhat? Or is it not worth discussing because preceding events will already be such an overwhelming disaster?
> Will it just keep getting warmer or will it level off somewhat?
It will get warmer for every kg of CO2 we emit. If we emitted less every day, it would still warm, but slower. Right now we are emitting more every day, so it will warm faster and faster.
> Or is it not worth discussing because preceding events will already be such an overwhelming disaster?
It's always worth discussing. It is not linear: every extra degree makes it a lot worse than the previous one. We're finding it worrying now with 1.5C? We should do everything we can to stay as close as possible to it. Probably we cannot avoid 2C, and if we keep going with the current emissions, that's 4C. 4C means that billions of people have to leave their country. I think it pretty much means that more than half of us die in a global war?
There is hope: we don't have to reach 4C. But we have to change our way of life for that. Which should be worth it, right? I'm ready to change my way of life to... survive.
So Economist is now stating Climate Change is an issue. Where was that magazine in the 80s and 90s. Oh, the were writing how fossil fuels are still a good investment and are still the future. And I expect they stated Trump was the better choice in 2020 and 2024.
So in 2026, this magazine (and others) are reporting how +2C will be far worse than +1.5C. How about reporting stopping at +2C is a pipe dream. We are heading straight to +3C and probably +4C.
Time to start reporting on how we need to stop using fossil fuels now, not later. But even doing that really will not stop us from reaching +2.5C due to inaction by world Gov. over the last 50 years.
There is no "new normal", we are in a slope. As long as we emit CO2, the climate will get worse. Year after year. With effects like fires accelerating it, or the loss of the Amazon (it's pretty much lost already, isn't it?) that will just result in more CO2 being released.
We don't have to adapt to the situation as it is now, because it is pretty much the best scenario. We have to adapt to the fact that it will get worse, and worse, and worse. And save what we can. Worried about your country not dominating on the AI scene? Wait until your biggest worry is food.
Even if we stopped emissions today, Earth will keep warming up for a couple of decades. We’re not at equilibrium temperature for the current CO2 levels.
One not very well known fact is that even if we stop emissions today, the elevated CO₂ levels will remain for many centuries.
They way I think/hope we can fix this is two parts:
1. The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale is to permanently sequester it underground. The oil/gas industry can cheaply deposit huge amounts of gas there. The unsolved problem is extracting enough CO₂ from the atmosphere at reasonable cost. People are working on that, but it will probably be decades before it's is approaching practicality.
Which is why we need to do this in the meantime:
2. Spray the stratosphere with SO₂. This reflects some some sunlight and cools the planet. It sounds scary, but is actually safe: https://makesunsets.com/pages/new-faq
No, we are at the end of the Interglacial. The climate was warming before global warming and if it ends it'll keep warming from that point forward until a new ice age starts.
If CO2 emissions stop today, it'll keep warming very quickly for several decades, and then it'll slow down but keep warming slowly. What takes half a century now will take a millenium.
And nothing whatsoever humanity does with CO2 will result in cooling on a short timescale.
The fundamental reason that climate change is an issue is because it happens over timescales which the ecosystem and human society struggle to keep up. No one reasonable believes we can cool from where we're headed, minus some extreme technical approaches, slowing it down is the goal.
You don't seem to be denying human caused, or maybe you'd say accelerated, climate change. If we could flip a switch and spread the future warming over a millennium instead of half a century I think everyone would take that deal.
> You don't seem to be denying human caused, or maybe you'd say accelerated, climate change. If we could flip a switch and spread the future warming over a millennium instead of half a century I think everyone would take that deal.
You know, that's yet another major problem. You're wrong. If we did that, meltwater water supply would essentially stop (in somewhere between 8 months and 2 years), everywhere on the planet. Big, highly populated areas of our planet will dry up (Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Ganges valley in India depends significantly on meltwater. That's easily 2 billion people)
In the past century, humanity has adapted itself to constant climate change. Any variable that depends on the temperature delta that we depend on will rapidly become problematic if we stop accelerating global warming.
Now I live in Europe. I don't expect water problems here (or only temporary). I do however expect problems. I'm not even sure what but there is a fuckton of things that will change back if global warming slows and I highly doubt that will just go down smoothly.
I know the theory behind green parties is "let's just stop doing what humanity is doing, and nature will save us". I'm kind of hoping people will realize that that, too, is bullshit. We will need to decide and agree what we want the climate to do, and then make it happen. No matter the choice made, this will have existential consequences for a bunch of places on this planet, and nothing can help that.
"Let's stop global warming" is not a solution to ecological problems, and not necessarily a better solution than continuing it. We WILL need to take control of the climate, and that includes dealing with the consequences of whatever decision we make. "stop CO2" is as much a soundbite, and as stupid, as "drill, baby, drill". Thunberg is as problematic as Trump, it's just harder to realize that that is the case.
Not that I think there's a chance in hell that global warming will stop or even just slow down whatever we decide to do in the west. Getting China, South Asia, and now more and more India and in the future Africa to agree to not use fossil fuels is not politically feasible. There is no solution there either.
So my vote? Aerosols to cool the planet. Which one, and how to spread? TBD. And, yes, that may mean the planet cools again BUT ALSO parts of the planet become uninhabitable. We'll need to agree and deal with that.
> If we did that, meltwater water supply would essentially stop (in somewhere between 8 months and 2 years), everywhere on the planet
How? Why? Meltwater comes from the temperature difference between summer and winter, how does it have anything to do with this?
> Any variable that depends on the temperature delta that we depend on will rapidly become problematic if we stop accelerating global warming.
What variable depends on a temperature _delta_?
> Now I live in Europe. I don't expect water problems here (or only temporary).
We have water problems right now. Agriculture has problems, nuclear reactors have to shut down because of too warm(France) or missing (Romania) water. Dry forests leading to more fire.
> I know the theory behind green parties is "let's just stop doing what humanity is doing, and nature will save us".
I have never heard of this, I have a hard time that anybody relevant claims this.
> You're wrong. If we did that [spread manmade climate change over next millennium], meltwater water supply would essentially stop (in somewhere between 8 months and 2 years), everywhere on the planet.
What exactly are you talking about here? Meltwater amounts would be roughly the same compared to the last millennium, until glaciers start vanishing (only, in that obviously favorably scenario, in 500ish years instead of this century).
I get the impression that you think that manmade climate change is somewhat helpful compensation for natural trending towards ice age. This is not the case at all, because the rate of change is too high. See https://xkcd.com/1732/.
A (natural) looming ice age is not problematic or threathening at all because that happens so slowly that we get many centuries to act.
As long as major countries like Germany are keeping their ban on nuclear power, climate change cannot be that urgent.
This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing. Meanwhile power from nuclear plants are very expensive, comparatively. So why should we invest in nuclear energy? I have the impression a lot of the debate about nuclear energy and Germany's decision to fade it out is now driven more by emotion/ignorance than reason.
Nuclear is proportionally expensive for one because we build a lot less and lose insititional knowledge and manufacturing capacity. Secondly because of ridiculous legislation and europes extreme ability to fuck with it politically. Thirdly because we don't count the gas plant to cover the intermitency of the renewables as part of the cost and if they'd take those out they'd find they run out of options for the cheap storage options as they become a larger share of the grid nor did they drew out the lifetime cost over the full length of a nuclear plants lifetime (shit gets replaced in the meantime)
At this point it may very well be better to go for renewables for much more of the grid coverage (after they fix their damn grid connections) But those pushing the cost picture have been everything but honest over the past 2 decades. I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage and such and a nuclear cost based on one unfinished american plant.
There will always be a need for on-demand power. Renewables are great, but cannot deal with peaks as easily and capacity is dependent on weather.
But nuclear also can't deal with peaks.
Renewables and batteries are great for peaks though. And not very good for base load
Nuclear is great for base load, not great for peaks
Our current situation is we are building tons of renewables and storage but still burning tons of fossil fuels because they cannot replace the base load very effectively. Nuclear replaces the carbon part of the equation
Hydro is renewable, can deal with peaks and not directly dependent on weather.
Use its power down when in need of electricity. Bring water up hill when too much electricity is available.
Hydro is not renewable when the basins are being refilled by glacial melt as is the case for most of Europe, and precipitation is also becoming more erratic. For example, Iceland is currently relying on hydro power for 70% of its electricity, but current models predict that glacial runoff will peak around 2060 (or earlier, if the arctic temperature continues its upward trend). After that, the potential power to be generated from hydro will gradually decrease, which is why Iceland is now diversifying towards geothermal and wind.
Won't climate change lead to more droughts making hydro less stable in the future?
Ok... but now we're damaging ecosystems by installing hydroelectric power stations and dams and such in these areas.
Besides, not every country can effectively utilize hydroelectric power.
Germany, like other countries, should be investing in a mix of power sources. You probably want your backbone to be nuclear and then renewables where it makes sense with a goal (at least in western countries) of also eliminating reliance on China for renewables/batteries.
Dogmatism about renewables is self-defeating.
That’s why they mentioned batteries.
Just replacing expensive fossil energy with cheap renewables and storage doesn't help. The problem is Jevons paradox. Cheaper energy means more consumption.
A sensible global policy could be:
- Tax carbon positive energy consumption to death. I.e. coal, oil or natural gas.
- Tax (close to) carbon neutral energy consumption at a fixed high rate, e.g. solar, hydro, nuclear or wind. Tax nuclear separately because of its other side effects if you want.
- Use the proceeds to negatively tax carbon negative energy consumption only.
Not that I have any illusions of any policy even remotely like this ever getting enacted. Zero consensus on earth and too many dangerous and selfish idiots.
Our children will be boiling frogs and angry.
Jevons paradox is often claimed, but largely irrelevant in this case, imo. If the demand rises, the price rises again, as well. It doesn't force anybody to keep using fossil energy
One problem with renewables is that they rely a lot on electronics, which relies a lot on petrochemicals (just to build them) and on globalisation. In a world without abundant oil, can we keep producing and maintaining as many solar panels as we need?
Nuclear is different in that regard.
This gets repeated again and again. They are not in conflict with each other - both need to be done in tandem. It is not a this or that strategy - it is an all of the above strategy.
Nuclear is critical for long term generating power. Batteries and solar are good not able to maintain the same level of power quality and duration though are definitely incredibly important.
Nuclear is a high-capex source of electricity. It doesn’t do well economically in a grid where power if essentially free on sunny or windy days but you need a lot of backup power for a few hundred hours per year.
All power projects have to look at economic viability. Every project has different needs and market dynamics. THERE IS NOT A ONE TYPE OF PROJECT WORKS FOR ALL LOCATIONS. Resources mixes vary as do the demands of the power.
I can't stress this enough solar and battery dont work everywhere and they dont provide indefinite power quality. Nor does nuclear. They all need to be resourced where appropriate.
FWIW - there aren't a lot of grids that have the resource mix you described.
> Nuclear is a high-capex source of electricity. It doesn’t do well economically in a grid where power if essentially free on sunny or windy days but you need a lot of backup power for a few hundred hours per year.
Fair enough, but it's still incredibly helpful as a source of no-carbon electricity.
> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage?
Recent report on restarting German nuclear:
> The easiest group of reactors to restart could produce electricity at an average of €37 per megawatt-hour before the end of 2031.The most difficult restarts could produce electricity at roughly €58 per megawatt-hour by the mid 2030s.
* https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restarting-german...
* PDF: https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/_files/ugd/ae75b7_bc5db59...
I wonder how much battery you could install in a typical nuclear site. Maybe even stacked; if we make an apples-to-apples comparison in materials and say we can use the same amount of concrete and metal, could probably have several levels of batteries. Except no water needed, and no waste risks.
The top of this German article [1] has a rendering of a planned 1.4GW power, 6GWh storage battery plant, with the decommissioned nuclear plant in the background. The battery energy storage is a bit smaller in area and of course of lot less tall. Eyeballing, the area is actually very comparable if you deduct the power plant's parking lot. The nuclear plant is Grohnde, a 1.43GW single-reactor plant.
The similar power output is not a coincidence. The biggest bottleneck for new solar and battery storage plants in Germany is getting them connected to the grid, and the freshly decommissioned nuclear plant has a great grid connection that this project wants to reuse
1: https://www.heise.de/news/Mehr-als-1-4-Gigawatt-Riesige-Batt...
I'm not so sure about the "no water needed" as batteries require cooling (and sometimes heating). And perhaps batteries are not risky like nuclear waste, but by volume there would me much more battery material than nuclear material, and there is fire risk that must be mitigated. You can't just wire up a big stack of batteries, they need carefully designed separation and fire suppression so that if one battery goes into a thermal runaway it doesn't take out the entire installation.
It depends on how much you value land use and care about the knock on effects of the associated mining. I’d rather figure out how to build out nuclear cheaply like South Korea and China and use more land for wild space. The per hectare land use of nuclear is minuscule.
> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing
Our power demands are increasing faster than we can build out renewables and storage.
Despite how much investment we are making into solar, wind, batteries, we're still burning more carbon year over year to make up for the demand for energy. We need a source of energy that can actually replace the base load carbon, not just augment it like renewables are. Nuclear is the most likely source to use for that purpose.
Edit: if we're being honest, we probably should have built out nuclear 20, 30, 40 years ago but we didn't. The expense now is kind of the cost of our poor policy decisions in decades past. We can continue to make poor decisions or we can learn our lesson and eat the cost now to fix those mistakes. I think failing to invest and shift to nuclear now would be yet another instance of passing the buck to the future generations, with even more interest
> They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing.
Yet France, which invested heavily in nuclear[1], has energy prices that are 40% lower than Germany's[2]. Something isn't adding up about the repeated claims that renewables are cheaper than nuclear.
[1] https://montel.energy/resources/blog/two-different-energy-sy...
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Germany still has expensive thermal power plants which dictate the price of electricity given the bidding system used for pricing it.
Sweden and Norway have very cheap electricity while mostly being renewables.
I think the point of this question is that the Green party of Germany chose in 2003 that closure of nuclear power plants was more important than global warming.
They had this as an explicit choice, and they demanded other parties went along with closing the nuclear power plants. They knew, it was discussed, that keeping them open would help with global warming, and they explicitly chose against that. Then they stood by that choice, and kept standing by it even up to 2023.
Now you obviously can't fault them for the fact that the Ukraine war would make things 10x worse (by forcing Germany back onto coal and LNG), but you CAN fault them for making that choice, and standing by it. This makes them the main responsible party for the current electricity prices problem in Germany.
European green parties have explicitly chosen that their other goals mattered more than global warming. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are absolutely 100% unwilling to make compromises elsewhere to help fix global warming, when they are the ones making a compromise.
And, frankly, if we can't compromise as a country in parliament we may as well stop attempting to do anything about global warming. Green parties are demanding big compromises from everybody else, but cannot give a millimeter themselves? Obviously everybody else is just going to fight them tooth and nail, forever, and we'll get nowhere.
I think that is what is meant by that question.
Of course it would, but there's less profit for capitalists to make with distributed sovereign renewable energy.
30 years ago the answer was nuclear. Not today, it's just a distraction to try to keep us burning dead dinosaurs for longer.
The environmentalists who railed against nuclear for the last 30 years are very much responsible for how many dead dinosaurs we've burnt over that time. Excuse me if I'm skeptical about what they now say about energy policy.
To put it another way, I could flip your statement on its head: Renewables are just a distraction to try to keep us burning dead dinosaurs for longer instead of building durable nuclear power capacity.
While I agree that the ban is stupid, Hungarys nuclear power plant closed today due to lack of water: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungarys-paks-nuclea...
I don't know exactly what you mean by "like Germany", but singling out Germany seems a strange choice given that the main global offenders are orders of magnitude worse in terms of their greenhouse gas emissions. Germany is currently producing more than half of its electricity from renewables.
Check out this year's edition of Ember's Global Electricity Review [0]. The table on p. 78 lists the following five countries as having the highest CO2-equivalent emissions (in Mt):
In comparison, the whole of the European Union (consisting of 27 individual countries, including Germany) is emitting 587 Mt.All these numbers should probably be put into perspective, though, by taking the population size into account. But even then, the whole of the EU does not fare too bad.
[0] https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electric...
The reason Germany gets singled out is because it was a massive policy misstep and highlights the shortsightedness of the environmental movement. It seems that they have changed their tune about it nuclear - but their entrenched efforts (and concerns in the 80s) killed the last 40 years of nuclear power - arguably inflaming our current CO2 crises by opening the doors wide open for Oil and Gas to fill the void.
In Germany add in that they then needed to rely on Russia to provide natural gas to fill in the void - which drove up the costs of power and made their manufacturing base a little less competitive.... Best intentions don't always prove to be good policy making. That's the TL;DR why Germany gets singled out.
Germany is in Europe and the economist is about Europe, so it makes sense to look at high emitters in Europe, no?
Also, while it's important to look at the global picture, let's not ignore the local effects: air quality in Germany is pretty bad, perhaps the worst in Europe. Poland is pretty bad too, especially in the winter. That's not China's or USA's fault.
> let's not ignore the local effects: air quality in Germany is pretty bad, perhaps the worst in Europe
What... you know you could've looked this up pretty easily before posting?
https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/sites/default/files/styles/...
I did: https://aqicn.org/map/europe/
Germany is singled out because decided to close their safe and well functioning zero emission power plants for no good reason, thus exploding their CO2 emissions.
Yeah, other emit more, but the rank stupidity of this environmental vandalism deserves the scorn it gets!
Which major countries other than Germany and Italy have a ban on nuclear power?
Iran. But the ban comes from outside.
We've ran out of time. Even if political will shifted immediately, getting new nuclear plants on the grid is going to take a decade or more.
In the meantime batteries + solar or wind can be built quickly and hooked up pretty much anywhere.
Even if we had nuclear fusion, solar+batteries could still win on cost and time to deploy!
> Even if we had nuclear fusion, solar+batteries could still win on cost and time to deploy!
In a world with abundant fossil fuels on which globalisation relies.
The question is: what happens when it stops? Can renewables win in a world without abundant oil? We don't know, we haven't tried.
While I would agree that it is regrettable Germany sunset their nuclear early when they should've extended the runtime for another 5-10 years to avoid excess carbon emissions since shutdown, but clean energy has already surpassed coal in Germany and they will likely hit net zero in the next decade at current deployment rates of renewables and batteries. [My note: The US states of Illinois and California got this right, subsidizing their existing merchant nuclear generator fleets until more renewables can replace them]
Largest battery storage in Germany set for partial commissioning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104584 - July 2026
Analysis: Wind and solar power overtake fossil fuels in Germany for first time ever - https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-wind-and-solar-power-ov... - July 28th, 2026
> Germany has various targets in place that require a rapid expansion of wind and solar power, including cutting economy-wide emissions to net-zero by 2045. The nation is also aiming to increase renewables’ share of electricity consumption to 80% by 2030 to achieve a “largely climate neutral” power system by 2035.
It's time to get over the nuclear issue, it's history. It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid, and tens of billions of dollars or euros. Germany deploys ~2GW/month of solar. Total global nuclear generation capacity is ~380GW as of this comment. At current global solar PV deployment rates, even assuming capacity factor delta between solar and nuclear, you could replace total global nuclear generation with ~18 months of solar PV deployment. Batteries and solar will continue to rapidly decline in cost, nuclear will not.
(total annual solar PV deployment is approaching, but not quite yet, at 1TW/year, and continues to increase year over year)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
I think that's net zero for electricity only, not net zero for all power generation. It excludes heavy industry and freight shipping, which still have a projected investment window of at least 25 years. Heavy industry in particular would have benefitted from the predictable high-power output of nuclear energy.
This needs to be higher up.
Nuclear is an amazing solution for industrial steady state demand... This is data centers, smelters (glass and metal), lots of industrial processes (think auto plants).
But nuclear is terrible at TV pickup situations because it is simply not that responsive.
Delivery to industrial customers (regardless of source) is also much simpler than it is to domestic - and I don't think that were even beginning to address the issues there.
> and they will likely hit net zero in the next decade at current deployment rates of renewables and batteries.
In and around winter? I think that's a fantasy.
You realize that "green energy" in EU is dependent on gas and/or coal? When there's no wind or sun, we will gladly burn gas or coal, and call it green energy.
Nuclear doesn't have this requirement. It's truly zero carbon.
Unless you can show me plans to fill this gap with batteries on a national scale, renewables < nuclear
Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. We have solved fusion at a distance with solar and batteries. We're arguing speed and cost of deployment for the collection and storage system. The technology drops in cost rapidly, it lasts for decades with no moving parts and minimal maintenance. It can be trivially recycled today with no further technology advancements needed. It fails gracefully.
Yes, some fossil fuels will be burned to fill energy consumption gaps until we have fully replaced all fossil generation with that produced from the sun. Again, remember the fact that every year we are adding ~1TW of solar that can account for energy consumption growth and push out fossil generation. We won't know until we look back over time, but we are very likely at peak fossil fuel consumption globally. New generation will be clean tech simply out of economics, and old fossil generation will be replaced eventually with clean tech, because it cannot last forever.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/solar-panel-prices-... (solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled)
https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline (lithium-ion battery prices fell by 19% every time global cumulative production doubled)
Ember Energ: Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... - June 21st, 2025
The Economist: The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40746617 - June 2024 (66 comments)
> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.
> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.
> To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.
(think in systems)
> Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year
Sure, the sun is incredible, but our capacity of actually using that power is the bottleneck. We still have to have energy to dig up the materials and manufacture the panels and batteries and deploy them and such.
China is the top user of energy globally, and they are electrifying everything while moving rapidly to renewables for generation. This is the blueprint the rest of the world will eventually follow. China's clean energy generation will be used to spin the clean tech manufacturing flywheel up faster (which will lead to more global clean tech exports to the world). The sun will power the end to end supply chain for making more solar and batteries.
Ember Energy: From scale to system: navigating the next phase of China’s battery storage - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/from-scale-to-syste... - July 16th, 2026
China Battery Storage Use Surges After Policy Shift, Ember Energy Says - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-15/china-bat... | https://archive.today/QBXxV - July 15th, 2026
China Crosses Energy Milestone as Coal Falls Below 50% of Power - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110187 - July 2026
Nearly a third of new heavy truck sales in China Electric in 2025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676673 - June 2026 ("China targeting EVs to make up 40% of heavy truck sales by 2030 - EVs to make up 20% of heavy truck fleet by 2030 - Trade-in schemes will prioritise EV trucks to boost adoption")
China Is The World’s First Electrostate - https://cleantechnica.com/2025/05/26/china-is-the-worlds-fir... - May 26th, 2025
China’s Oil & Gas Giant Sinopec Says Peak Oil Demand Already Happened In China - https://cleantechnica.com/2023/10/11/chinas-oil-gas-giant-si... - October 11th, 2023
China is also building more nuclear than anyone else
https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/china-building-half...
:)
~110GW of nuclear capacity targeted by 2030. I respect their attempt to diversify, iterate, and drive down the cost of nuclear, but it pales in comparison to renewables (~90-100GW of solar installed per month, on average).
Lets see what 2030 looks like.
China’s Nuclear Energy Priorities Under Its 15th Five-Year Plan - https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-nuclear-energy-prioriti... - May 11th, 2026
> China continues to view nuclear as an electricity source that advances its energy security while also reducing reliance on fossil fuels, as noted in the latest FYP (Part II, Chapter 7): “Promote the safe, reliable, and orderly replacement of fossil fuels with non-fossil energy sources; pursue a multi-pronged approach that combines wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear power; and implement the ten-year plan to double non-fossil energy capacity.” The remarkable growth of renewable energy sources and coal’s continuing preeminence have shaped nuclear energy’s role as a non-carbon-emitting baseload in China’s power generation portfolio (Table 1). Nuclear energy seems to serve as a versatile power source that supplements coal’s role as an energy security enforcer as well as the role of renewables as clean energy boosters. By 2030, China targets 110 gigawatts (GW) of installed nuclear power capacity. If realized, the installed capacity in China will surpass that of the United States unless U.S. capacity—currently the world’s largest—grows substantially from 102.5 GW (gross) in 2025.
My point is that China realizes that their energy goals should include a nuclear plan too
If you're going to point at them and say "we should be doing what they're doing" then part of that includes doing nuclear.
I disagree, but I'm not the decision maker so it's irrelevant. Nuclear is throwing good money after bad imho (based on current and projected levelized cost of energy [LCOE]), I think the next five years will prove that out.
China Keeps Beating Renewable Targets And Missing Nuclear Ones - https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/25/china-renewable-targets... - July 25th, 2026
> China set a 2020 wind target of 210 GW and finished the year with about 282 GW. Its solar target was 110 GW, while delivery reached roughly 253 GW. The later commitment to reach at least 1,200 GW of combined wind and solar by 2030 was crossed in 2024, six years early. By the end of 2025, China had about 640 GW of wind and 1,202 GW of solar, for a combined 1,842 GW. Nuclear moved in the other direction: about 50 GW against a 58 GW target in 2020, and about 62 GW against a 70 GW target in 2025. The current goal of 110 GW by 2030 may still be achieved, but the previous record gives no reason to convert it directly into a forecast.
> This is not evidence that Beijing has quietly abandoned nuclear power. China has the world’s largest reactor construction programme, continues approving new units and is building an increasingly domestic supply chain around designs such as Hualong One. The divergence lies between approval and operation. Another difference is that when renewables blow past targets China set much bigger targets, but when nuclear misses targets, the targets don’t change. That difference is harder to explain than the results.
Certainly sounds like China's nuclear goals are aspirational, based on the data. The construction gives nuclear proponents hope, but construction is not generation. At some point, you have to deliver.
> they will likely hit net zero in the next decade at current deployment rates of renewables and batteries.
X to doubt, I'll believe it when I see it, for now they are like a galaxy away from that goal.
And also that'll be even harder to reach if they want to improve their atrociously low electricity heating rate.
You're free to doubt, healthy skepticism is a good thing imho, there is no will to spend what nuclear would cost and renewables and batteries keep getting cheaper. We're locked on a hockey stick trajectory of their uptake purely through the economics. Spain is phasing out the last of their nuclear for more renewables, for example.
Fossil gas will fill the gap until solar, wind, batteries, and transmission push the last of fossil generation out of the mix, and every year less and less gas will be used until remaining fossil gas generators sit idle.
Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-n... | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~2GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~17 months; per Electricity Maps, only 18.79% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/12mo/monthly)
> As long as major countries like Germany are keeping their ban on nuclear power
Frankly, it doesn't matter what Germany or other European nations do - their carbon footprint has dramatically decreased.
The issue is everyone else [0]. China (12 GT), the US (5 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent over half of all global carbon emissions. The EU and UK's combined carbon emissions are half of Asia (excluding China and India) emissions.
Countries like India and Vietnam are expected to see GDP growth in the 6-8% range for the next decade, and both are doubling down on coal [1][2] and other carbon heavy fuels, so emissions are only going to grow further. Any marginal decrease in carbon emissions at this point is too little too late given that much of Asia and South America is expected to see carbon emission grow in the 3-8% range.
[0] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mul...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-looks-more-c...
Your link shows the US also decreased their carbon footprint, and a big part of the rest of the world stays kinda stable.
India and most of ASEAN (Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc) are expected to see GDP grow rates in the 6-8% range for the next decade.
Their carbon footprint is only going to increase as a result.
India [0], Vietnam [1], and others have all doubled down on coal for energy security reasons.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mul...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-looks-more-c...
It should be illegal in 2026 to have such a naive view.
co2 per country or capita doesn't mean shit when the world uses China as a factory:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-embedded-in-...
The effects of climate change aren't felt on a per capita basis.
Edit: can't reply
> they don't pollute because they're Chinese, they pollute because they're your factory
If that was the case, then global CO2 emissions would have been stagnant for 30 years, not rising.
Sure, but don't blame China when 90% of the shit you buy is made there, they don't pollute because they're Chinese, they pollute because they're your factory
Lets just name names. China. India.
And every country which moved their factories there
Nuclear Power is useless in a climate change scenario.
France and Spain are having to shut down their nuclear plants because they can't cool them during heatwaves: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/weather/extreme-weather-events/fra...
How can articles on major news sites have typos this bad up for over a month?
"The crisis in France has claimed dozens of lives, with 40 people drowning while attempting to call off from the heat since June 18"
Call off should be "cool off".
And forgive me if this is a stupid question, but don't nuclear power plants produce enough energy that they could power their own cooling? Why do they have to rely on the free cooling provided by a river?
The last time any company was interested to build a nuclear reactor in Germany was in the 1970s. About thirty years before the eventual (first) ban.
We can rant all day about how stupid it was of the conservatives to re-enact the ban on nuclear power without restarting the subsidies for renewables, and lament that they thus ensured that coal power would thus have to replace more of the lost load, but that's all in the past and we can't change that.
If you think we need more nuclear power to fight CO2 emissions, you're 50 years late. That ship has sailed before most of us here were born.
The fires don't accelerate it much. That wood and shrub would either burn or rot down the line and release methane and co2 anyway. Forests don't sequester much at all despite what people seem to believe.
Consequentially running a fireplace is a lot more climate neutral than driving a car, taking a flight, utilising the myriads of high carbon footprint goods or having a gas heater or so.
On the other hand the bogs that we're losing (and kelp forests) are a lot better at sequestring co2 but they're small. Permafrost will also actually accelerate stuff since....well it __was__ permanently forsty.
If we assume that the forests will regrow to their former strength then the fires are indeed not all the consequential. The trees release the stored CO2 when they burn, and new plants will take up an equivalent amount of CO2 again when they grow. The CO2 sequestered in a forest is more or less just the biomass in it (some is in the soil, but not that much)
But if climate change leads to permanently losing those forests, that is an effect we will feel. Still less bad than losing permafrost
If we figured out how to store chopped down trees somewhere where the wood doesn't break down, that would be a really effective way to get CO2 out of the air!
Easier said than done, of course. Sinking millions of trees to the bottom of the ocean might be the most practical way.
> (it's pretty much lost already, isn't it?)
Not even close. Look at satellite imaging.
Not only is the Amazon far from lost, the jungles in Africa/Borneo/PNG all look to be doing surprisingly okay.
The theory is that it can reach a point where it won't be able to survive, and therefore it will die. We are around that limit. It may well be that it has already passed it and therefore it will die.
I didn't mean "it is not there anymore", I meant "we won't be able to preserve it, it may already be too late for that".
It still got damaged a lot : https://www.maapprogram.org/amazon-tipping-point/
> As long as we emit CO2
And aside the greenhouse effect, we're also using more power than we've ever used before, building 10Msqft boxes that ultimately turn electricity into heat. We could go all-solar and we'd still be warming our environment.
The amount of heat generated directly by all of the energy use by humans - from fossil, nuclear or renewables - is a tiny, miniscule rounding error compared to the excess heat absorbed by the atmosphere and oceans due to CO2 and the greenhouse effect.
The heat output of every single data centre on earth isn’t even worth thinking about on the scale of the global climate system.
> the loss of the Amazon (it's pretty much lost already, isn't it?)
No, it’s not lost already. We should attempt to preserve what remains, not assume failure is inevitable.
Agreed. I was just mentioning it because people don't seem to realise that we are on the verge of losing it (and it may actually be that it is too late).
Of course we should fight to preserve as much as we can. Nobody wants to live in a bunker on mars. Almost...
https://www.jameslovelock.org/the-earth-is-about-to-catch-a-...
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceo...
https://rogerhallam.com/the-insurance-industry-predicts-mass...
https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p...
I mean european forests are mostly monocultures created after we cut down everything natural we had. Maybe fire/warm resistent trees and forests will be planted. Its not like the fires are destroying 20000 years old ecosystems. Most of the forests were basically dead long before.
> Worried about your country not dominating on the AI scene?
The thing is, the obsession with the AI race is making this problem so much worse. We're using up so much more energy and burning so much more fossil fuel as a direct result of AI mania.
We're so obsessed with becoming king of the ashes we're not even noticing we're burning the whole damn place down.
It's tragic, it's irresponsible and many here are at the very least complicit.
People are truly having a climate change discussion fatigue. They hear all the time from politicians, celebrities, influencers, etc. that they should stop eating meat, should not drive non-electric vehicles, should not use AC, reduce consumption, and all other bullshit while the people preaching those have started wars that emit billions of tons of carbon, travel on their private planes to climate change summits, taking their private plane to ski in Aspen and throw lavish parties to celebrate birthdays, etc.
It's basically normal people should sacrifice their standards of livings and pay taxes to reduce carbon emission while the same rules doesn't apply for the other class of the society. Most people are living pay check to pay check and out of all the worries in their minds, climate change is the last thing they can afford to worry about.
Well climate change is happening whether wealthy people are hypocrites or not. Also there a lot of people in very poor countries (india, south east asia, africa) that are already feeling the effects and need to worry about it a lot.
I would actually say rich people can afford the most to not worry about climate change, because they can stave off the effects better than poor people (moving to colder climates, building cooling systems, or fleeing to mars [1])
[1] https://www.spacex.com/humanspaceflight/mars
> Well climate change is happening whether wealthy people are hypocrites or not. Also there a lot of people in very poor countries (india, south east asia, africa) that are already feeling the effects and need to worry about it a lot.
no shit sherlock, poor people in those countries have been suffering from starvation, diseases and lack of basic necessities even before the climate change was a thing. For them, it's just another misery on top of their already miserable lives.
Nobody gave a shit about those people in poor countries 20-30 years ago, all of a sudden everyone is worries about climate change because Europe is burning. Had it been a monsoon flooding or a drought in South Asia, nobody in the Economist would even bat an eye, let alone publish an article.
well I have good news! normal people don't have to sacrifice, fossil fuel companies do. if the govt mandates something (like with the ozone layer, or with lead acid battery recycling), something that was once impossible becomes possible.
and then what? are people going to ride horses to work? beg on the street because the manufacturing companies have closed and they lost their source of income? or are you just dumb or maybe naive to think that banning CFC and fossil fuel consumption would have the same effect on the everyday lives of normal people?
> hat they should stop eating meat, should not drive non-electric vehicles, should not use AC, reduce consumption, and all other bullshit while the people preaching those have started wars that emit billions of tons of carbon,
This is a lie. The people preaching those did not started those wars.
Those wars were started by conservatives who dont believe climate change, find vegetarianism unmanly and instinctively oppose any suggestion to lower consumption.
"Being better at fighting fires, though, is not enough."
Yeah, it's nowhere near enough. We need to seriously revamp how we manage forests. They must be regularly cleaned, huge fire breaks between fenced areas and roads must be created and maintained. Prescribed burns on a regular schedule. Houses cannot be too close to the trees, no matter how pretty it looks. A huge clean radius must be maintained between houses and trees and between properties. All this work must be done in the winter and everything must be prepared for the summer. Every year. Everywhere.
I see none of this happening at a proper scale in my country (Portugal). So of course every summer we se huge forest fires. Lives lost, ecosystems destroyed. Next year it happens again...
It's only going to get worse.
being good at fighting fires is part of the problem as that allows people to keep natural limited area fires from happen regularly and then eventually you get one huge fire.
> All this work must be done in the winter and everything must be prepared for the summer. Every year. Everywhere.
Good luck doing any work in the winter in places like, oh say, the Rocky Mountains.
Every forest has different needs. OP is in Portugal, I don't know much about forest there, but the plan seems reasonable for there. The Rocky Mountains need a different plan, but it isn't much different.
Portugal has about 10% forested land, of which an estimated 25% is non-native eucalyptus (an active pyrophyte), and over 50% in some areas. I've seen the aftermath of eucalyptus forest fires while travelling through Alentejo.
Portugal is 35k square miles. The Rockies are 300k square miles, much of it, notably, is mountainous.
I do not think “cleaning” it is going to work, so I’m curious what this “not much different” plan looks like.
See a forester. I would not assume the entire Rockies need the same plan.
In general I would say start fires near towns, and let fires that start elsewhere burn.
>They must be regularly cleaned
People keep reiterating this probably because Trump keeps reiterating but it just sounds ridiculous.
How do you clean forests? The debris is part of the forest, not all areas of a forest are easily accessible or feasible to transport debis out of there. A dead tree is actually an ecosystem of fungi and insects. Cleaning it may make it more fire prone as broken sticks and leaves shield the ground from the sun allowing the soil to hold on to moisture a little longer. There is plenty of room for nuance here.
I would need to listen to actual experts on this, the correct solution is probably something akin to resorting wetlands and beavers which act as fantastic self maintaining fire breaks.
However when you suggest things like this you see the actual issues pop up, local farmers protest and others using NIMBY laws to block so they get payouts.
Prescribed burns are a good way to clean forests!
Burn the debris every 10-20 years rather than let it accumulate and become unstoppable disaster fires once a century.
This tends to be very hard hard to do in a democratic system though. People really don't like their forests burning.
Prescribed burns are a good tool, but they're not a silver bullet. Because of the decades without fires, there's so much debris that fires burn incredibly hot, so you either need people to go in and thin the debris (this is actually a thing they do, as ridiculous as "cleaning the forest" sounds), or deal with the extra damage and risk of a very hot fire. Then you need a decent amount of personnel to make sure the fire doesn't get out of hand (and they regularly do), and do it when the weather is right (wet season, low winds). A prescribed burn is still a forest fire, with all the risks, it's just one that's started at a time and place we control.
This year Europe's fires are not the start. Few years ago we had very extended Australia fires, US/Canada fires, and other not so put in the spotlight fires in other countries around the world. At some point they diverged enough from normal to reach a scale that raised enough eyebrows.
And it is not just forest fires. Floods caused by extreme rainfalls, running out of letters in hurricane seasons, once in a century/millenia extreme weather events happening several times in a decade are increasingly noticeable, and they are just symptoms of bigger but harder to directly perceive global trends like that the global yearly average temperature increased a few tens of degrees or that the ocean is winning heat at a rate of 6 Hiroshima bombs per second.
http://archive.today/o61rE
Using nextDNS, this page redirects me to a Russian ISP (TTK) block page for some reason and I’m nowhere near Russia (!)
bah, all is not lost.
Climate change will create winners and losers. Losers -- anyone on the equator or within the the tropic of cancer/capricorn. Winners -- those outside those regions or with enough $ to adapt.
Give me solar geoengineering, 2x increase in R&D spending on reducing fossil fuel usage, and funding for direct carbon capture (and a financial incentive to do it).
It's going to get worse before it gets better sadly.
I'm not sure there are all that many winners. There are those that lose big time with some places potentially becoming uninhabitable, and those that merely have to spend a fortune on new flood prevention infrastructure, deal with massive changes to how they do agriculture and forestry in a new climate, and in the future deal with streams of climate refugees from countries on the list of even bigger losers.
Russia and Canada might end up winning from this, but for everyone else it seems like a big negative, with some silver linings
I'm a firm believer that sooner or later we will be extinct by extreme heat and suffocation.
Two weeks ago here in Umbria, Italy the heat was extreme. It was 40°C without a breeze of air, it literally felt like braathing hot air. One morning while I was walking I couldn't believe the amount of dry leaves on the street, by pictures people would have guessed that it was autumn.
I have a really good tolerance to high temperatures but this time I got home very dizzy.
Hope is not too late to revert the current situation, but realistically year after year temperatures have been raising steadly.
Europe (and the world at large, really) can either wait for its demise, through increasingly oppressive climate hostile to human occupation and de-industrialization while the rest of the world continues on the current trajectory, or start getting its shit together and immediately commence climate engineering on a continental scale. Start with stratospheric aerosol injection, and mandate it not unlike "sustainable" aviation fuels on aircraft flying at the minimum altitude required to have any effect, as it should be possible [0], expedite research into other climate engineering efforts including space-based ones, promptly address the complete and utter reliance on fossil fuels and those profiting from it.. if climate change isn't something worth approaching as a war would be, then there's no point discussing it at all. Researchers and journals have been warning of crossing the point of no return and temperature targets for years now, you either submit to it and keep chasing emission reduction targets, or take action. The idea of simply "adapting to it getting worse" is suicidal, hard to sell to the public and depends on bureaucrats not getting kicked out.
0. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
Consequences of inaction, as predicted, will continue until you can't live there anymore.
Don't worry we will end up spraying the atmosphere to buy more time, and the Earth will cool, and people will believe that the problem is solved and we can just go back to burning fossil fuels.
So the fighting will continue while we keep duct taping and band aiding the problem.
What ever happened to biomass energy? I'd rather burn wood in a controlled way that produces the best possible exhaust than have it burn uncontrolled. Encouraging biomass energy would create a market and economic incentives to manage forests.
Have you ever been in a "farmed" forest? It's basically devoid of life besides trees. It's weird as hell.
I was getting a bit worried so it's good to see an economist headline saying this will happen - now I can relax
strong El Niño event
As Macron said in 2023: "Who could have predicted the climate crisis?"
The people in charge a either clinically retarded or willingly ignoring the problem, either way we're fucked, the point of no return is behind us now, this is the new normal, and it'll only get worse
In some ways I wonder if these timescales are "beyond comprehension" for most people. You can tell people the temperature will go up in 20 years, but you can't make them feel what it will be like. In the same way you can tell a 10 year old what it's like to be age 35 but they don't get it, and I've heard what it's like to be age 80 but I don't really know and won't for some time.
> You can tell people the temperature will go up in 20 years
I think the biggest issue with the climate change communication is that the scientists decided to focus on a temperature delta.
There is no meaningful temperature delta, it's just something that you get after a lot of aggregation and averaging.
Sure it makes sense for scientists running their models and such, but it should never have been the primary communication tool to politicians and laymen.
I think it would have been significantly better if they invented some new scale, like the Richter scale or the hurricane severity scale, which instead incorporates the effects of the average temperature rising. A scale which directly communicates a sense of how many more fires will we see per year, how many more severe storms, flash floods etc.
I think we've gotten to the point where the question can be asked looking back, not forward: think back to your childhood and how much things have changed since then? If you've lived long enough you can notice these things.
I used to have snow for weeks each winter in my city and now if I get 2-3 days of snow a year it's unusual. Extreme weather events where it rains in one day as much as in one month have become a recurring event to the point we're re-planning sewage systems around these things.
Arguably it's rational (though selfish) to think like this.
Life is short, there's no point freezing and living off leaves for the next few decades when you'll be old in the blink of an eye anyway
> Arguably it's rational (though selfish) to think like this.
Is it? We are not talking about screwing the climate for the people who will come in 200 years, right? In the last decades we have been saying "if we don't change the trend, your children will most likely die because of the climate change".
Is it rational to be 30 and not care about the fact that we will be screwed long before we reach the age of retirement?
Setting aside the fact that I want to leave things in a good place for my kids, neighbors' kids, nieces, nephews and all their friends...
Setting aside the fact that even if I was so selfish to care about my personal legacy, I'd want the world around long enough to learn about it...
there's no point freezing and living off leaves for the next few decades
I don't think the ask here is so unreasonable. It's disingenuous to frame it this way.
> “the people in charge”
The everyday person votes for those in charge, and the everyday person couldn’t care less.
Anyone opposing nuclear power is a contributor to climate change.
I'm not into blaming people like this.
What we all need to understand is that after oil, we just won't have enough energy to maintain our current way of life. Not just energy by the way: our way of life relies on petrochemical products (from fertilisers to electronics). Solar panels need electronics, we don't know if we can build/maintain them at scale without computers that need petrochemical products.
So we need as much as we can of everything. Both renewables and nuclear.
Who is opposing nuclear power? Or are you trying to imply that advocating for renewables is “opposing nuclear power”?
Plenty of people oppose it, about 36% of Germany for one example https://www.dw.com/en/german-poll-majority-for-return-to-nuc...
The french "far" left party getting 30%+ of votes does
Water: https://www.dw.com/en/danube-water-levels-hungary-romania-cu...
How did you get that from a quarter of a sentence haha
> As Macron said in 2023: "Who could have predicted the climate crisis?"
The oil companies in the 1970s for one:
* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063
Agreed that the people in charge do nothing and don't understand the problem.
However, the people in charge (e.g. in France) are elected by the people, and therefore represent it. Do you think that the far-right will care more about the climate crisis? The French people is likely to elect them next year.
It's too easy to vote for people who don't give a shit about the climate crisis, and then blame them.
> either way we're fucked, the point of no return is behind us now
The faster and the harder we react, the more we save. Fires are a good example: because many trees are burning now (therefore they are already dead) and many trees will burn (because the fire won't magically stop), it's worth fighting to preserve as much as we can. Saying "we won't get those dead trees back, so we may as well let the rest of the forest burn" is counter-productive.
We need to act now. And not by electing morons and then blaming them for being morons.
> Do you think that the far-right will care more about the climate crisis?
Far right, far left, far center, it's all the same: money, power, money, power, stay in the EU, free market, money, power.
People could vote for candidates who care. They just don't.
> We need to act now.
What does this look like, precisely, in practice?
The people here maintain a list of things: https://drawdown.org/explorer
Chiefly we need to replace fossil fuels with electricity from carbon free sources and electrify transportation, heating, and industry.
> Chiefly we need to replace fossil fuels with electricity from carbon free sources and electrify transportation, heating, and industry.
That's happening. For instance, China now generates less than half its energy from coal for the first time, as reported earlier today: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-generates-less...
Find the closest maths teacher with a polish last name and ask them
First, we have to accept the facts:
* CO2 emissions are screwing the climate, and CO2 emissions come from fossil fuels. We need to stop using fossil fuels.
* Our way of life depends on fossil fuels. In some cases it's obvious (we transport food in trucks that need oil), but it's too easy to believe that we may replace that with electricity. It's a lot more complicated than that: everything depends on petrochemical products. How do you transport food without plastics? How do you build electronics without petrochemical products (the PCBs need them, for one)? Without electronics, how do you manage solar panels?
* We don't necessarily have to go back to the Middle-Age: first we probably couldn't: we are way too many for that, and second we know a lot more than they did.
But overall, we will have to do a lot less with a lot less. We have to think about what's fundamental, and how we want to preserve it. I'm not saying "choose between a new game console or a new smartphone every two years instead of having both". I'm saying "do you want to preserve some nature? Produce enough food for everybody? Keep some kind of democratic system?".
Of course, it's too much, we cannot do everything that we need, and we won't be able to preserve everything that we want. We need to accept it and start prioritising.
Overall, I would say that a good first step would be to get informed about how bad it is. There are enough books and resources about that. The people need to be informed in order to elect informed people. Too many don't give a shit, spend their free time on TikTok and then blame the ruling class.
> we will have to do a lot less with a lot less.
What do you mean by this?
> As Macron said in 2023: "Who could have predicted the climate crisis?" The people in charge a either clinically retarded or willingly ignoring the problem,
The "people in charge" as well as the "climate experts" are generally aligned on the climate crisis, but everyone has been surprised by unexpected acceleration and the very sudden swings.
Put differently, you can predict and act, according to the trend, but the sudden and unpredictable timing of these swings is a separate, and more difficult issue to navigate.
For instance, can anyone predict specifically what will happen "next" and "where" and prepare to mitigate the impact?
This is completely wrong. The climate experts are not surprised by this at all. We've known about it for decades. We just didn't give a shit because it was not impacting us directly.
Now it's starting to impact us directly, but we still don't really give a shit. In a few weeks it will be business as usual.
It will get worse every year, and we will be more and more willing to do something as it gets worse. But we will have fewer and fewer resources to do it, and less stuff to save (once a forest disappears, you as a human won't see it come back in your lifetime).
> but everyone has been surprised by unexpected acceleration and the very sudden swings
It's been predicted for decades, in multiple reports, over and over and over and over again... No excuses
> can anyone predict specifically what will happen "next" and "where" and prepare to mitigate the impact?
Something bad, duh? And reduce emissions, duh?
The things people have been predicting and advocating for during the past like 50 years at that point. Are we still debating these details lol?
The specific swings are a little surprising, but only in the way that a macaroni jumps around in hard to predict directions if you put it in boiling water. We’ve made the weather less predictable, but we knew we were doing it.
While we haven’t known the exact trajectory of the crisis, it has been known for decades that the trend would generally and increasingly point towards “future is bad” if we didn’t reduce emissions. World leaders bet on having more time to shift away from harmful policy and lost.
Politicians are selling to their audiences, there's no more truth in their words than any other sales/marketing scheme.
Of course we're fucked.
I always find it interesting when politicians mention temperature target goals.. what are you still talking about, it's done. We now need to worry about the hundreds of millions of people that are neither asylum migrants or economic migrant but survival migrants. The real discussion will become how we keep those out very soon. And since there are no good solutions from the "good" people who ignored everything and got us into this mess it will be the bad people giving us the only remaining "solution": violence.
> what are you still talking about, it's done
It's not. The climate will warm as much as we emit CO2. Sure, the CO2 that we have already emitted won't leave. We've passed 1.5C, that won't come back in our lifetime. But the more we emit, the worse it will get. To keep what we have now, we have to stop emitting entirely, right now.
> We now need to worry about the hundreds of millions of people
We need to worry about the problems that are coming from the CO2 we have already emitted, that's true. But we also need to worry a lot about the fact that we are making it worse every single day. We are not reducing our CO2 emissions, we are increasing them right now.
Are you worried about hundreds of millions of refugees? The way it's going, we'll reach 4C. It means that billions of people will have to move.
I don't think we can still use the concept of "refugee" when its entire countries that need to move because their part of the world has become so hot that humans cannot survive outside without life support (that's what will happen to billions of people with 4C). At this point, it's entire countries moving with their military, it's just global war.
hundreds of millions of people coming to europe (i didn't mention) is still lowballing on purpose. sure it's billions, but not all will go to one place was my thinking here.
you are talking reason, you are in the wrong timeline buddy. i'm talking about what we will chose as a society, i feel we can't help ourselves.
You can convince a person (me certainly) that we should stop immediately (or very very short time frame). But most people have experienced their entire lifetime of propaganda and fallacious arguments that words and reason have lost all meaning.
We are still getting cooked so slowly that people will only see unrelated incidents for a long time. World War(s) 3 is what the survivors will call it.
Our software and AI capabilities have improved astronomically… but nature is still nature. Working with the physical world is still so hard. Humbling, in a way.
>by the end of the century
Maybe I've missed it because I don't follow news on this much (apart from "it will get warmer/worse"), but what happens after that? Seems like I've been hearing "by 2100" for the last 20 years, but now that's only 74 years away. Some people alive today will live to see it. Will it just keep getting warmer or will it level off somewhat? Or is it not worth discussing because preceding events will already be such an overwhelming disaster?
> Will it just keep getting warmer or will it level off somewhat?
It will get warmer for every kg of CO2 we emit. If we emitted less every day, it would still warm, but slower. Right now we are emitting more every day, so it will warm faster and faster.
> Or is it not worth discussing because preceding events will already be such an overwhelming disaster?
It's always worth discussing. It is not linear: every extra degree makes it a lot worse than the previous one. We're finding it worrying now with 1.5C? We should do everything we can to stay as close as possible to it. Probably we cannot avoid 2C, and if we keep going with the current emissions, that's 4C. 4C means that billions of people have to leave their country. I think it pretty much means that more than half of us die in a global war?
There is hope: we don't have to reach 4C. But we have to change our way of life for that. Which should be worth it, right? I'm ready to change my way of life to... survive.
Sounds like a threat
Simple advice, hard to follow
So Economist is now stating Climate Change is an issue. Where was that magazine in the 80s and 90s. Oh, the were writing how fossil fuels are still a good investment and are still the future. And I expect they stated Trump was the better choice in 2020 and 2024.
So in 2026, this magazine (and others) are reporting how +2C will be far worse than +1.5C. How about reporting stopping at +2C is a pipe dream. We are heading straight to +3C and probably +4C.
Time to start reporting on how we need to stop using fossil fuels now, not later. But even doing that really will not stop us from reaching +2.5C due to inaction by world Gov. over the last 50 years.
See also: https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5977751-trump-f...
There's a point where "head in stand" becomes deliberately malicious.
Arson is the main culprit not climate change