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> “The mere fact that the conference is happening is already a success,” said Claudio Angelo, senior policy adviser at Brazil’s Climate Observatory, a network o

> “The mere fact that the conference is happening is already a success,” said Claudio Angelo, senior policy adviser at Brazil’s Climate Observatory, a network of environmental, civil society and academic groups The bar has been set so low that talking about it is seen as success now. Sometimes I think the only way we'll really make meaningful progress is if we simply run out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we're just too good at getting them and too motivated to do so.

MattGrommes 5mo ago
The point of that comment is not that the talking is happening, it's that the hope of action isn't going to be blocked by industry-captured and plain moronic countries like Saudia Arabia and US, respectively. Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point. They can also help build economies of scale, and take advantage of the myriad economic benefits of renewables that other countries are leaving on the table.
- cmxch 5mo ago
  The US still has enough power to stop it though, thankfully. We aren’t captured by environmental activists that force the poor to shoulder the compliance burden while the rich get to defer and delay.
  - tardedmeme 5mo ago
    Why is it thankful the US has the power to force everyone to keep wasting money on US-controlled energy sources? What's the difference between this situation and a Mafia protection racket?
  - mc32 5mo ago
    Many people don’t realize the IPCC walked back (refined as they put it) some of its most dire scenarios… others may choose to ignore the walkback. Akin to the rocket and feather phenomenon that affects pricing.
    - altcognito 5mo ago
      It was based on co2 emissions doubling by 2050. Though energy output has doubled, as a share coal has dropped in China and the US. Wouldn’t you expect estimates based on difficult to predict human behavior to change based on new data?
      - mc32 5mo ago
        Many people were saying that things were not as dire as they claimed. I’m glad they revised but you had silly people gluing themselves to thoroughfares (cars stuck in traffic waste more energy) and vandalizing what some people consider precious art and or national patrimony in the name of climate change thinking that those most dire predictions were indeed correct and we were all headed to hell in a hand basket.
        TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
        Ruined cars piled up in streets waste even more energy - temporarily. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/31/why-were-the-floods-in-spain-so-bad-a-visual-guide https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/31/why-were-the-f...
        DangitBobby 5mo ago
        So we are no longer worried about catastrophic or runaway climate change based on these revisions?
        mc32 5mo ago
        That’s tough to say. Weather systems are difficult to model. We have minimal understanding of the causes or inputs that control the very long climate cycles. Like we know that some day thousands of years from now we’ll have another unstoppable glacial period. We’ll also have a period free of polar ice. Those are cyclical and independent of CO2. We cannot stop either. We live in a very precious time. I also think we should limit or be judicious as much as we can about what we pump into the atmosphere (or oceans or ground)
- alephnerd 5mo ago
  > Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point China, The US, and India all turned down invites despite generating 34%, 12%, and 7.6% of global emissions respectively [0] If the world's 3 largest polluters (even if two of them are heavily investing in GreenTech) who represent ~54% of global emissions are not interested in the conversation, it's all for naught. None of the attendees are in the position to pressure the big 3 polluters. And it doesn't matter - the larger countries know they can eat the cost of climate change. It's the poorer or smaller countries that face the brunt of the impact. And it's only going to get worse. India turned down hosting COP33 in 2028 [1] because India is deciding to to double down on coal [2] as the Iran Crisis has shown China's bet on Coal Gasification that began during the Iraq War [3] was correct. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... [1] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/india-withdraws-bid-host-annual-un-climate-talks-2028-2026-04-08/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/india-withdraws-b... [2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mulls-extending-coal-power-expansion-for-another-12-years https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mul... [3] - https://usea.org/sites/default/files/022011_Coal-to-oil,%20gas%20and%20chemicals%20in%20China_ccc181.pdf https://usea.org/sites/default/files/022011_Coal-to-oil,%20g...
  - applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
    It is beyond shameful how Westerners misallocate the blame for pollution, using misleading statistics. India has ~17% of the world's population. That it only produces 7% of global emissions means it is contributing far, far, far less than whatever country you possibly come from in relative terms, so at that point you are besmirching it solely for the crime of having a larger population than your country. China, while having a disproportionate share of the pollution relative to its population, only has that pollution because the West offshored almost the entirety of its manufacturing capacity to China. Is China really at fault for pollution caused creating goods for the West? If China shuts down all export manufacturing overnight, and the West is forced to resume manufacturing for itself, resulting in ~the same global emissions, is that what's necessary to stop blaming China even though there's no shift in demand for manufactured goods or total pollution? Moreover, China is investing more seriously into non-fossil-fuel energy than any country in the West, by far. If you let the West resume its own manufacturing, you would actually end up with higher total emissions, because the West does not take this subject seriously at all.
thijson 5mo ago
Brazil has had a pretty active program of converting cane sugar to ethanol for a while now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil Sugar cane doesn't require replanting every year either, like corn does. Plants are actually not a good converter of solar energy to chemical energy though. They capture a few percent of it. Solar cells are able to capture about 10 times that, a much smaller footprint.
- jl6 5mo ago
  Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy. We will need to synthesise it (or other synfuels and feedstocks), to fully transition away from fossil sources, and that 10x efficiency factor will be essential, as synthesis is highly energy-lossy.
  - busterarm 5mo ago
    > Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy. Am I missing something? Ethanol is hydrophilic and hygroscopic. In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly. In a closed system this ends up with phase separation and the freed water causes engine corrosion. I'm not sure we want people running a still or molecular sieve in their homes to deal with fixing long-term-stored ethanol.
    - bluGill 5mo ago
      > In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly Citation needed. (hint you won't find one because it isn't true). Be careful here - this myth has been repeated enough that a search will find plenty of claims that don't check out. High concentration alcohol doesn't spoil. Even lower concentrations don't spoil, but they mix with poor quality gas that does spoil. Well when you get very low it will, but alcohol is poison to living things and so it won't spoil. (I'm not sure how ethanol stands up to UV - but we generally keep it in a tank so that isn't an issue) Ethanol will absorb water, but it doesn't take it out of the air anymore than anything else.
dylan604 5mo ago
Even artificially limiting their availability causing prices to shoot up does not quench the thirst. I am always confused why the conversation seems to be about switching the toggle switch from fossil fuels only to renewables only. It's obvious the best way is more of potentiometer where you slowly change from one by adding renewables to the point of being able to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels. We're seeing it happen all across the planet. That should be the low bar.
- PaulHoule 5mo ago
  To "simply run out of fossil fuels" is like that potentiometer you mention, it isn't like you run out all at once but you run out of the cheap ones first and it gets more expensive. I remember reading https://www.amazon.com/Hubberts-Peak-Impending-Shortage-Revised/dp/0691116253 https://www.amazon.com/Hubberts-Peak-Impending-Shortage-Revi... in the early 2000s which was about the coming peak of conventional oil production and it turned out to be wrong in the sense that we knew in the 1970s that there were huge amounts of oil and gas in tight formations that we didn't know how to exploit. People were trying to figure out how to do that economically and had their breakthrough around the time that book came out so now you drive around some parts of Pennsylvania and boy do you see a lot of natural gas infrastructure. I remember being in my hippie phase in the late 1990s and having a conversation with a roughneck on the Ithaca Commons who was telling me that the oil industry had a lot of technology that was going to lift the supply constraints that I was concerned about... he didn't tell me all the details but looking back now I'm pretty sure he knew about developments in hydrofracking and might even have been personally involved with them.
  - leonidasrup 5mo ago
    We have still lot of known fossil fuel reserves. More than we should put into atmosfere in form of CO2. Coal for 139 years Oil for 56 years Gas for 49 years https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-of-fossil-fuel-reserves-left https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-of-fossil-fuel-rese... This is a bit simplified because high fossil fuel prices also drive inovations in mining, exploration and could increase known reserves.
  - 5mo ago
tialaramex 5mo ago
Unfortunately the crisis will get much, much worse before ordinary people go "Wait, so, we're all going to die? How do we prevent that?" and the idea that it's too late isn't compatible with their model of the world so they will reach for increasingly crude "solutions" to what they have belatedly realised is a dire situation. It might I suppose be fun to catalogue, what are the priorities? Do we kill all the poor people before we decide that maybe we can't afford to keep obligate carnivores as pets? How about the elderly? When do the animals kept for meat go, is that later? At some point I expect there's a backlash, a phase where the populists who insisted that say, if we just murdered everybody with the wrong skin colour, or the wrong religious beliefs or whatever that would fix it - well what if we kill the populists instead? But it won't last, following is in people's nature. Fossil fuel consumption declines, belatedly, as the human population goes extinct. The mass extinctions eventually settle into a new order. The warm, damp rock is slightly warmer, for a while, and a few non-human niches expand and something else occupies them. And maybe one day an intelligent life eventually wonders why, according to the best available data, in the long depths of pre-history there was a weird climate spike. Huh.
- Our_Benefactors 5mo ago
  Care to put any dates to your doomerisms? Can I take the other side of the bet?
  - tialaramex 5mo ago
    50-250 years to the general population realising they're fucked and looking desperately for a non-existent way out. It is extremely unlikely that both of us would live long enough for me to collect.
- senordevnyc 5mo ago
  My naive understanding is that climate change poses no real risk of human extinction, or even anything approaching it, at least not for centuries or longer. Which isn’t to say that the high cost of climate change is something we should shrug and just pay, especially because it will fall on the poorest. But c’mon now, you’re being wildly overdramatic, and that doesn’t actually help our ability to deal with the threat.
nomel 5mo ago
The only way we make meaningful progress has never changed, for a scale that matters: have a cheaper alternative.
matheusmoreira 5mo ago
A brazilian "senior policy adviser" patting himself on the back over a conference taking place is always amusing. One could easily get the impression the brazilian government was not actively taxing the crap out of solar panels, solar installations, electrical vehicles, pretty much every good alternative to fossil fuels, literally right now.
lukan 5mo ago
"if we simply run out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we're just too good at getting them and too motivated to do so." Less oil, more wars about it.
titzer 5mo ago
There is so much coal. There is at least 130 years worth at current consumption levels. And despite what everyone says about renewables and green energy and etc, world use still hit a high in 2024. We aren't going to run out of (coal at least) for a long time--and usage is still going up!
- alephnerd 5mo ago
  Also, China and India are both doubling down on coal after the Iran Crisis as their Coal Gasification [0] strategies [1] were made for this kind of supply chain risk in mind. [0] - https://usea.org/sites/default/files/022011_Coal-to-oil,%20gas%20and%20chemicals%20in%20China_ccc181.pdf https://usea.org/sites/default/files/022011_Coal-to-oil,%20g... [1] - https://coal.gov.in/sites/default/files/ncgm/ncgm21-09-21.pdf https://coal.gov.in/sites/default/files/ncgm/ncgm21-09-21.pd...
- j-bos 5mo ago
  But coal's essential as a backup in case of a dead (civilizational) restart.
  - lief79 5mo ago
    That seems to be based on the assumption that coal is easily accessible. I'm not sure that's true.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
rexpop 5mo ago
If the world is to stay within a range of carbon emissions that avoids catastrophic global warming, 80 percent of the fossil fuel industry’s reserves must remain unused in the ground. If we "run out" we'll have done ourselves terrific injury.

MattGrommes 5mo ago

The point of that comment is not that the talking is happening, it's that the hope of action isn't going to be blocked by industry-captured and plain moronic countries like Saudia Arabia and US, respectively. Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point. They can also help build economies of scale, and take advantage of the myriad economic benefits of renewables that other countries are leaving on the table.

cmxch 5mo ago
The US still has enough power to stop it though, thankfully. We aren’t captured by environmental activists that force the poor to shoulder the compliance burden while the rich get to defer and delay.
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
  Why is it thankful the US has the power to force everyone to keep wasting money on US-controlled energy sources? What's the difference between this situation and a Mafia protection racket?
- mc32 5mo ago
  Many people don’t realize the IPCC walked back (refined as they put it) some of its most dire scenarios… others may choose to ignore the walkback. Akin to the rocket and feather phenomenon that affects pricing.
  - altcognito 5mo ago
    It was based on co2 emissions doubling by 2050. Though energy output has doubled, as a share coal has dropped in China and the US. Wouldn’t you expect estimates based on difficult to predict human behavior to change based on new data?
    - mc32 5mo ago
      Many people were saying that things were not as dire as they claimed. I’m glad they revised but you had silly people gluing themselves to thoroughfares (cars stuck in traffic waste more energy) and vandalizing what some people consider precious art and or national patrimony in the name of climate change thinking that those most dire predictions were indeed correct and we were all headed to hell in a hand basket.
      - TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
        Ruined cars piled up in streets waste even more energy - temporarily. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/31/why-were-the-floods-in-spain-so-bad-a-visual-guide https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/31/why-were-the-f...
      - DangitBobby 5mo ago
        So we are no longer worried about catastrophic or runaway climate change based on these revisions?
        mc32 5mo ago
        That’s tough to say. Weather systems are difficult to model. We have minimal understanding of the causes or inputs that control the very long climate cycles. Like we know that some day thousands of years from now we’ll have another unstoppable glacial period. We’ll also have a period free of polar ice. Those are cyclical and independent of CO2. We cannot stop either. We live in a very precious time. I also think we should limit or be judicious as much as we can about what we pump into the atmosphere (or oceans or ground)
alephnerd 5mo ago
> Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point China, The US, and India all turned down invites despite generating 34%, 12%, and 7.6% of global emissions respectively [0] If the world's 3 largest polluters (even if two of them are heavily investing in GreenTech) who represent ~54% of global emissions are not interested in the conversation, it's all for naught. None of the attendees are in the position to pressure the big 3 polluters. And it doesn't matter - the larger countries know they can eat the cost of climate change. It's the poorer or smaller countries that face the brunt of the impact. And it's only going to get worse. India turned down hosting COP33 in 2028 [1] because India is deciding to to double down on coal [2] as the Iran Crisis has shown China's bet on Coal Gasification that began during the Iraq War [3] was correct. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... [1] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/india-withdraws-bid-host-annual-un-climate-talks-2028-2026-04-08/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/india-withdraws-b... [2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mulls-extending-coal-power-expansion-for-another-12-years https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mul... [3] - https://usea.org/sites/default/files/022011_Coal-to-oil,%20gas%20and%20chemicals%20in%20China_ccc181.pdf https://usea.org/sites/default/files/022011_Coal-to-oil,%20g...
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
  It is beyond shameful how Westerners misallocate the blame for pollution, using misleading statistics. India has ~17% of the world's population. That it only produces 7% of global emissions means it is contributing far, far, far less than whatever country you possibly come from in relative terms, so at that point you are besmirching it solely for the crime of having a larger population than your country. China, while having a disproportionate share of the pollution relative to its population, only has that pollution because the West offshored almost the entirety of its manufacturing capacity to China. Is China really at fault for pollution caused creating goods for the West? If China shuts down all export manufacturing overnight, and the West is forced to resume manufacturing for itself, resulting in ~the same global emissions, is that what's necessary to stop blaming China even though there's no shift in demand for manufactured goods or total pollution? Moreover, China is investing more seriously into non-fossil-fuel energy than any country in the West, by far. If you let the West resume its own manufacturing, you would actually end up with higher total emissions, because the West does not take this subject seriously at all.

thijson 5mo ago

Brazil has had a pretty active program of converting cane sugar to ethanol for a while now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil Sugar cane doesn't require replanting every year either, like corn does. Plants are actually not a good converter of solar energy to chemical energy though. They capture a few percent of it. Solar cells are able to capture about 10 times that, a much smaller footprint.

jl6 5mo ago
Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy. We will need to synthesise it (or other synfuels and feedstocks), to fully transition away from fossil sources, and that 10x efficiency factor will be essential, as synthesis is highly energy-lossy.
- busterarm 5mo ago
  > Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy. Am I missing something? Ethanol is hydrophilic and hygroscopic. In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly. In a closed system this ends up with phase separation and the freed water causes engine corrosion. I'm not sure we want people running a still or molecular sieve in their homes to deal with fixing long-term-stored ethanol.
  - bluGill 5mo ago
    > In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly Citation needed. (hint you won't find one because it isn't true). Be careful here - this myth has been repeated enough that a search will find plenty of claims that don't check out. High concentration alcohol doesn't spoil. Even lower concentrations don't spoil, but they mix with poor quality gas that does spoil. Well when you get very low it will, but alcohol is poison to living things and so it won't spoil. (I'm not sure how ethanol stands up to UV - but we generally keep it in a tank so that isn't an issue) Ethanol will absorb water, but it doesn't take it out of the air anymore than anything else.

dylan604 5mo ago

Even artificially limiting their availability causing prices to shoot up does not quench the thirst. I am always confused why the conversation seems to be about switching the toggle switch from fossil fuels only to renewables only. It's obvious the best way is more of potentiometer where you slowly change from one by adding renewables to the point of being able to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels. We're seeing it happen all across the planet. That should be the low bar.

PaulHoule 5mo ago
To "simply run out of fossil fuels" is like that potentiometer you mention, it isn't like you run out all at once but you run out of the cheap ones first and it gets more expensive. I remember reading https://www.amazon.com/Hubberts-Peak-Impending-Shortage-Revised/dp/0691116253 https://www.amazon.com/Hubberts-Peak-Impending-Shortage-Revi... in the early 2000s which was about the coming peak of conventional oil production and it turned out to be wrong in the sense that we knew in the 1970s that there were huge amounts of oil and gas in tight formations that we didn't know how to exploit. People were trying to figure out how to do that economically and had their breakthrough around the time that book came out so now you drive around some parts of Pennsylvania and boy do you see a lot of natural gas infrastructure. I remember being in my hippie phase in the late 1990s and having a conversation with a roughneck on the Ithaca Commons who was telling me that the oil industry had a lot of technology that was going to lift the supply constraints that I was concerned about... he didn't tell me all the details but looking back now I'm pretty sure he knew about developments in hydrofracking and might even have been personally involved with them.
- leonidasrup 5mo ago
  We have still lot of known fossil fuel reserves. More than we should put into atmosfere in form of CO2. Coal for 139 years Oil for 56 years Gas for 49 years https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-of-fossil-fuel-reserves-left https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-of-fossil-fuel-rese... This is a bit simplified because high fossil fuel prices also drive inovations in mining, exploration and could increase known reserves.
- 5mo ago

tialaramex 5mo ago

Unfortunately the crisis will get much, much worse before ordinary people go "Wait, so, we're all going to die? How do we prevent that?" and the idea that it's too late isn't compatible with their model of the world so they will reach for increasingly crude "solutions" to what they have belatedly realised is a dire situation. It might I suppose be fun to catalogue, what are the priorities? Do we kill all the poor people before we decide that maybe we can't afford to keep obligate carnivores as pets? How about the elderly? When do the animals kept for meat go, is that later? At some point I expect there's a backlash, a phase where the populists who insisted that say, if we just murdered everybody with the wrong skin colour, or the wrong religious beliefs or whatever that would fix it - well what if we kill the populists instead? But it won't last, following is in people's nature. Fossil fuel consumption declines, belatedly, as the human population goes extinct. The mass extinctions eventually settle into a new order. The warm, damp rock is slightly warmer, for a while, and a few non-human niches expand and something else occupies them. And maybe one day an intelligent life eventually wonders why, according to the best available data, in the long depths of pre-history there was a weird climate spike. Huh.

Our_Benefactors 5mo ago
Care to put any dates to your doomerisms? Can I take the other side of the bet?
- tialaramex 5mo ago
  50-250 years to the general population realising they're fucked and looking desperately for a non-existent way out. It is extremely unlikely that both of us would live long enough for me to collect.
senordevnyc 5mo ago
My naive understanding is that climate change poses no real risk of human extinction, or even anything approaching it, at least not for centuries or longer. Which isn’t to say that the high cost of climate change is something we should shrug and just pay, especially because it will fall on the poorest. But c’mon now, you’re being wildly overdramatic, and that doesn’t actually help our ability to deal with the threat.

nomel 5mo ago

The only way we make meaningful progress has never changed, for a scale that matters: have a cheaper alternative.

matheusmoreira 5mo ago

A brazilian "senior policy adviser" patting himself on the back over a conference taking place is always amusing. One could easily get the impression the brazilian government was not actively taxing the crap out of solar panels, solar installations, electrical vehicles, pretty much every good alternative to fossil fuels, literally right now.

lukan 5mo ago

"if we simply run out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we're just too good at getting them and too motivated to do so." Less oil, more wars about it.

titzer 5mo ago

There is so much coal. There is at least 130 years worth at current consumption levels. And despite what everyone says about renewables and green energy and etc, world use still hit a high in 2024. We aren't going to run out of (coal at least) for a long time--and usage is still going up!

alephnerd 5mo ago
Also, China and India are both doubling down on coal after the Iran Crisis as their Coal Gasification [0] strategies [1] were made for this kind of supply chain risk in mind. [0] - https://usea.org/sites/default/files/022011_Coal-to-oil,%20gas%20and%20chemicals%20in%20China_ccc181.pdf https://usea.org/sites/default/files/022011_Coal-to-oil,%20g... [1] - https://coal.gov.in/sites/default/files/ncgm/ncgm21-09-21.pdf https://coal.gov.in/sites/default/files/ncgm/ncgm21-09-21.pd...
j-bos 5mo ago
But coal's essential as a backup in case of a dead (civilizational) restart.
- lief79 5mo ago
  That seems to be based on the assumption that coal is easily accessible. I'm not sure that's true.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]

rexpop 5mo ago

If the world is to stay within a range of carbon emissions that avoids catastrophic global warming, 80 percent of the fossil fuel industry’s reserves must remain unused in the ground. If we "run out" we'll have done ourselves terrific injury.