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Meanwhile governments are electing to either do nothing or actively make the problem worse (particularly in the case of the US — expanding fossil fuel extractio
Meanwhile governments are electing to either do nothing or actively make the problem worse (particularly in the case of the US — expanding fossil fuel extraction, pushing data center build out and attacking renewables like wind).
This has been aided by the fact that energy has been heavily politicized. Fossil fuels are 'murican and renewables are woke. It's horrifying.
Does your hypothesis predict that Texas would be one of the most renewable-energy-heavy states in the U.S.?
That’s just economics. That doesn’t excuse what the current admin has done in terms of prioritization.
It’s not a hypothesis. It’s an observation of reality. The current administration canceled massive renewable projects and has incentivized reopening coal plants, subsidized fossil fuels, and opened government land to oil drilling.
China is doing it the right way : use fossils but pouring that money into renewables. Use economic forces to cut the dependency . Everything else is just pipe dream building never happened utopian communism 2.0 .
How many degrees hotter will it get as a consequence? How many windmills will it take to make the world a degree colder?
Serious question.
The almighty buck wins at the end of the day. But how long the day is, that's political.
The F150 Lightning would be Texas's best-selling vehicle if their hypothesis was untrue.
It's funny that environmentalists would rather see the world burn than solve all emissions problems with nuclear.
Climate change is Schroedingers extinction event. It's only bad when you can solve it with solar panels and wind. It's nothing to worry about when you can solve it with fission and eventually fusion.
Man, the knee-jerk downvotes for this are awful.
One can observe a problem while not advocating support for it.
It is quite true that energy decision making has been tremendously politicized, and I don't think that's good for anyone.
Data centers use no more than 1.5% of electricity globally[1], and a long LLM query uses only a little more than 5 minutes of general laptop use ~3x the energy of running an LED light for 5 minutes.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-and-artificial-intelligence-use https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...
The US isn't expanding fossil fuel extraction, its quite the opposite. They're funding the modernization of existing plants in order to take older plants offline:
June 2026:
New coal-fired plants in Anchorage, Alaska, and Mt. Storm, West Virginia, would total 2.85 GW. They would be the first new U.S. coal plants to come online since 2013.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doe-announces-850m-modernize-coal-capacity-build-new-plants/822109/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doe-announces-850m-moderniz...
Meanwhile in China (from 2023):
China permitted more coal power plants last year than any time in the last seven years, according to a new report released this week. It's the equivalent of about two new coal power plants per week. The report by energy data organizations Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air finds the country quadrupled the amount of new coal power approvals in 2022 compared to 2021.
"Everybody else is moving away from coal and China seems to be stepping on the gas," she says. "We saw that China has six times as much plants starting construction as the rest of the world combined."
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-six-times-more-new-coal-plants-than-other-countries-report-fin https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
Meanwhile in India (2026):
India plans to increase its coal production by nearly 100m tonnes to 1.15bn tonnes in the 2025-26 fiscal year to help meet the country’s rising demand for electricity to support economic growth and contend with heatwaves, which have become more severe and more frequent because of the climate crisis.
The planned increases come despite signs that the world is beginning to turn its back on coal in favour of renewable electricity, Global Energy Monitor said.
The US could switch every ICE vehicle to EV's and install solar and wind turbines in every inch of the country and it won't combat what's going on in China, India and other developing countries that rely on coal for cheap energy.
You are looking at the acceleration but without looking at the initial state.
A more fair metric would be Co2 emissions/person and I’m getting
USA 14.3 t, China 8.8 t, EU 5.5 t, India 2.2 t
> A more fair metric would be Co2 emissions/person and I’m getting
We don't care about that notion of "fair": the cold hart truth is that China has 1.4 billon people.
Another way to put it: China has one billion more people than there are in the US.
Or another way to put it: 4.1x more people.
Which means China is emitting nearly 3x more Co2 than the US.
Our only hope is that China is using coal and fossil fuels only has a mean to sustain its insane growth while they transition to solar and nuclear (which they also do, at an amazing speed).
Hillbillies and redneck with their gigantic pick-up trucks in the US are really the least of worries.
This is the very definition of the Tragedy of the Commons. Without everyone committing to common limits, it is folly for anyone to.
And FWIW, I don't buy the "but the countries that bred like rabbits for the past few decades are owed their due reserved quota". Having a massive population isn't something you need to be rewarded for, not to mention that the math doesn't even make sense. For China and India to get their "per quota" backlog, we're basically so firmly in self destruction territory that it makes no sense for anyone else to even bother.
Solar energy is the fastest growing source of energy in the US. That's because it's also the cheapest source of energy. So markets are working.
https://abcnews.com/US/solar-generates-energy-coal-us-1st-time-report/story?id=133783328 https://abcnews.com/US/solar-generates-energy-coal-us-1st-ti...
"Solar and storage provided 90% of all new power added in the U.S." is mind blowing. How about we give the US credit for this?
Fossil fuel extraction is not the problem. The problem is fossil fuel usage. Given the world consumes fossil fuel I prefer they use American fossil fuel vs. Russian or Saudi fossil fuels. I don't understand why we are dwelling on the wrong metric here. Also consider the US has just removed a sh~tload of fossil fuels from the world economy. How about some extra credits there?
Similarly data centers are going to get built somewhere. If they're already built I'd rather they are built in places like the US.
Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem. This is already happening with solar. Where I would be critical about US policy is that I think they are introducing more tariffs on imported solar panels. This might fit into governments make things worse and hopefully everyone regardless of their political affiliation can push back on this specific item.
The world all going to act together stronger than the markets is not going to happen. You can argue that is unfortunate but it's also where we are.
We are doing a lot. Almost 90% of electricity capacity added last year was renewables. Nearly 1 in 3 cars sold are now EVs. The world is spending over $2 trillion every year on low‑carbon energy investment. Solar and wind have already avoided more than 2 gigatons of CO2 being added to the atmosphere. In the US, the IRA will drop emissions 40% to below 2005 levels.
What do you mean we are doing nothing?
[flagged]
The federal government is paying energy companies to cancel plans to build wind farms:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e1vg0gjl5o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e1vg0gjl5o
Yes we're still building renewable energy, but goddamn is our government making it hard.
We are still building renewable energy even with a stupid government because it's now cheaper than fossil fuels in many markets.
Those are refunds of money already paid, it's not any extra money
That's added capacity. Fossil fuel use is at an all times high. Everything else is meaningless.
2mo ago
China is the biggest problem. US Carbon emissions are going down, China's are exploding.
This was one of the big fears. That countries that had far more people than the western world would end up trying to chase that middle class lifestyle. And yet here we are.
I suspect we are going to be like the aphids on a rosebush that will suck it dry just trying to live and most of us go with it.
If we were to live closer to what many philosophers and religions of modesty, we probably would have never gone down this path. Yes, we wouldn't have most of the great stuff we have today but we also wouldn't be looking at a system that can lurch over and crash. There is no winning move in the universe just dances and responses.
Huh? That's not true.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-have-now-been-flat-or-falling-for-21-months https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
Quite a lie: https://www.theenergymix.com/u-s-emissions-rise-chinas-fall-in-massive-shift-between-worlds-biggest-climate-polluters/ https://www.theenergymix.com/u-s-emissions-rise-chinas-fall-...
This just isn't true. Chinas emissions peaked back in 2024.
The voters bear much of the blame too. The oil, gas and coal producing countries that still have democracies need to stop voting for short term profits and star voting for rapid rampdown of fossils production.
From the perspective of our evolutionary fitness function the most critical thing is to eliminate existential risk, and from the dawn of the industrial revolution to now all we've done is create them. Fossil Fuels allow us to keep 8 billion people alive at the same time temporarily, which is a reckless and irresponsible thing to do. If it isn't sustainable it's a joke.
So are you saying Germany achieved a greater reduction due to shutting down nuclear than they would have otherwise? If not, your argument is moot.
I'm observing that a country with an actual environmentalist political presence achieved a greater overall reduction than one without. Maybe they aren't the problem, as popular as they may be to bitch at on this forum.
Even if one of their policy points is counterproductive, the rest more than made up for it.
Or, perhaps, them not being in power, it wasn't them who shut them down?
I'm sure they influenced the policy and were happy (and wrong) about it, but they were in the opposition, and had been for several years.
Ah yes, the famously environmentalist CDU. Obviously the center-right conservative party consists 100% of environmentalists, that's why they fight so hard to push back the ICE ban, prop up the oil & gas industry (just look up Katharina Reiche if you want to feel sick for a bit), and why they run smear campaigns against the Greens.
The current Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy Katharina Reiche is continuing the powerplant strategy of the previous Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy Robert Habeck.
The 2024 plans under Green minister Robert Habeck called for 25 GW of capacity of new gas power plants (which should be in future fueled with green hydrogen. But until enough hydrogen is available at good price, the new gas powerplants will burn natural gas. Some skeptics say that the cost of green hydrogen will be higher than natural gas for a very long time). The estimated construction costs for the new gas powerplants was in 2024 around 40 billion EUR. Most of this costs will be covered by the German state.
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/kraftwerksstrategie-106.html https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/kraftwerksstra...
> [...] Katharina Reiche is continuing the powerplant strategy of the previous Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy Robert Habeck
I'm honestly flabbergasted at this propaganda attempt, because you happen to have left out (just a tiny excerpt):
- Reiche's previous employer being one of Germany's biggest energy firms (Eon), and almost every decision she has made happens to be according to Eons interests
- Reiche has been trying to stop renewable energy projects in any way she can: https://www.t-online.de/heim-garten/aktuelles/id_101189302/netzpaket-von-reiche-in-90-landkreisen-droht-stopp-fuer-solar-und-wind.html https://www.t-online.de/heim-garten/aktuelles/id_101189302/n...
- Reiche is trying to move parts of her ministry to run on consultants instead: https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Strategische-Top-Beratung-Reiche-will-Aufgaben-des-Ministeriums-an-Berater-auslagern-id30679526.html https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Strategische-Top-Beratung-Reiche...
- Reiche is subsidizing fossil fuels enough for her own party to criticize her plans: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/spritpreise-entlastung-pendlerpauschale-cdu-kritik-reiche-100.html https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/spritpreise-entlastung-pend...
- Reiche ignores studies from her own ministry that show positive economic results regarding renewable energy: https://www.t-online.de/finanzen/energie/id_101226464/wirtschaftswachstum-durch-energiewende-reiche-laesst-studie-verschwinden.html https://www.t-online.de/finanzen/energie/id_101226464/wirtsc...
- Reiche is literally and explicitly asking the fossil industry to supply reasons her ministry can use for swerving investments from renewable towards non-renewable energy (and these requests were not documented as required, before investigative journalism found them): https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/katherina-reiches-ministerium-bat-enbw-um-argumente-fuer-gaskraftwerke-a-1ce69ada-8eff-444b-a7f9-4eaf4d6e5447 https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/katherina-reiches-minister...
- Reiche keeps lying to the population about the costs of renewables, and many other related numbers: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/katherina-reiche-so-vergeigt-die-union-ein-weiteres-zukunftsprojekt-kolumne-a-94e5ac30-f259-474e-ba8a-a50bc0e3e1ac https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/katherina-reiche-... (heading "Entweder sie weiß es nicht – oder sie lügt"; there are older issues where she lied, easy to look up)
- Reiche is introducing legislation that's openly corrupt enough for the Bundeskartellamt to publish a statement against it: https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Meldung/DE/AktuelleMeldungen/2026/05_07_2026_Stellungnahme_Entwurf_StromVKG.html https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Meldung/DE/Aktuel...
- Reiche's change in plans compared to Habeck is disastrous enough to unnecessarily cost the population up to 40 billion euros: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/verfehlt-reiche-ihr-ziel-wirtschaftsministerin-konnte-energiewende-40-milliarden-euro-teurer-machen-15587598.html https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/verfehlt-reiche-ihr-ziel...
- Reiche's modifications of a law planned by Habeck is so disastrous that even the oil & gas lobby spoke out against them: https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Auch-Reiches-Verbuendete-warnen-vor-neuem-Heizungsgesetz-id30887570.html https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Auch-Reiches-Verbuendete-warnen-...
- Reiche's modifications of said law, e.g. removing the ban on new fossil heating systems, are unconstitutional: https://www.fr.de/wirtschaft/belastet-reiche-gebaeudemodernisierungsgesetz-verfassungswidrig-gutachten-zr-94374634.html https://www.fr.de/wirtschaft/belastet-reiche-gebaeudemoderni...
- Internal documents show that Reiche is literally acting in the interest of her previous employer, one of Germany's biggest energy firms: https://fragdenstaat.de/artikel/exklusiv/2026/07/die-eon-ministerin/ https://fragdenstaat.de/artikel/exklusiv/2026/07/die-eon-min...
- Reiche is trying to push back the ICE ban, which is not only incredibly dangerous from a climate change perspective, but which is going to kill the German car industry because they'd rather stick with ICEs than actually invest into building EVs, when the EV market is growing rapidly! https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-07/co2-flottengrenzwerte-eu-kommission-katherina-reiche-autobauer-strafzahlungen https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-07/co2-flotteng...
- Reiche is using dirty tricks (like not hiring enough employees in certain positions) to prevent a supply chain due diligence law from actually taking effect: https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/lieferketten-gesetz-reiche-100.html https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/lieferketten-ges...
This is just a tiny excerpt from the last few months. Since the current government came into power, Reiche has been relentlessly acting in the interests of the fossil lobby while deliberately putting the breaks on anything renewable, all while lying and acting as a mouthpiece for fossil propaganda (again, explicitly proven!).
---
Seriously, I'd love to know - why do you deliberately spread propaganda for the fossil industry, like you did here?
So, tl;dr, it's the environmentalists' fault?
I was only comparing the fact, that because of nuclear phase-out and the future coal phase-out both the previous and current Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy agreed that a large expansion of gas power plants is necessary, this was known already in 2024.
If we are now criticizing persons, please remember that German Economy Minister Robert Habeck famously stated in July 2022 during the energy crisis that "we do not have an electricity problem, we have a gas problem"
https://www.merkur.de/wirtschaft/nord-stream-eins-pipeline-gas-stopp-krise-deutschland-russland-ukraine-krieg-zr-91659756.html https://www.merkur.de/wirtschaft/nord-stream-eins-pipeline-g...
Nuclear phase-out at any cost, including lying to the public. Withholding documents about nuclear phase-out until court order.
https://www.cicero.de/innenpolitik/meistgelesene-artikel-2024-april-habecks-geheimakten-wie-die-grunen-beim-atomausstieg-getauscht-haben https://www.cicero.de/innenpolitik/meistgelesene-artikel-202...
The personal connections between Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and
Agora Energiewende - Patrick Graichen.
https://www.weforum.org/people/patrick-graichen/ https://www.weforum.org/people/patrick-graichen/
During the energy crisis debates, government-commissioned or environmental institute estimates (such as from the Öko-Institut) argued that procuring new fuel rods required 18 months to two years, which was cited as a physical constraint preventing longer life extensions for Germany's final reactors before they shut down in April 2023. But Westinghouse Electric Germany told a parliamentary committee of inquiry that federal ministries never asked if the standard production time for nuclear fuel elements could be shortened.
https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1033104 https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1033104
Until the incoming administration declares that safely storing nuclear waste is woke and allows their close friends or maybe even their own companies to just dump it in a desert at a premium because the bible never mentions the associated hazards.
Or it says facility inspections cause autism and transgenderism so they have to deregulate for their pals.
Or that nuclear safety itself is a symptom of low testosterone and turns the frogs gay.
...
Still better than climate change. But thanks for making my point for me.
Hahaha... sigh... takes a swig!
> just dump it in a desert
Hmmm, a radioactive desert vs an entire polluted atmosphere, I wonder which is worse...
No, storing a few cans of solid waste is decidedly NOT a real problem. However, undoing the damage we've done to the global ecosystem instead, now that's gonna be fun.
Environmentalists have no power whatsoever and most of the people in the younger generation do not have the same antipathy towards nuclear power because we grew up in a post-SALT world and haven't lived through the spectre of reactors being used for nuclear proliferation and weapons production.
Regardless, governments do not typically care about public sentiment when making strategic moves for long-term time horizons. It's why we have a strong military and why despite so much whining about its cost, the F-35 exists and is being fielded by as many squadrons as can get their hands on it. If they wanted to build out nuclear power in a civilian capacity, they would. We already do it for subs and ships.
This is so lame man. A few construction vehicles aren't why the world is burning. It's burning because we pump and dig up billions of tons of fossil fuels to burn in large scale power plants, cargo ships etc. And a bunch of other reasons of course, but the main point is we could easily run data centers and everything else includibg most if not all construction vehicles etc on renewables and nuclear if we wanted to.
The problem is not that we are building more things that use electricity, the problem is that we are generating electricity using fossil fuels. We should have phased out fossil fuels decades ago yet here we are ramping it up while everyone's bickering about inconsequential bullshit like datacenters.
Datacenters are not the problem. Construction is not the problem (except concrete which generates huge emissions but we can't really do much about that). Some things are infinitely easier to fix than others. Power generation is such a thing. We have the solution, we've had it for like a century (nuclear) and we're getting even more solutions.
We could run all power production with hardly any fossil fuels if we really wanted, nearly all land transport could be electric. These two changes alone would eliminate the vast majority of emissions. And we can do that, it's realistically possible.
We could also probably run global shipping and aviation on non-fossil fuels if we really wanted to, though I don't really know anything about that. There are large scale mining excavators, dozers and trucks running on electricity, and hybrid solutions.
Stop bickering about the small stuff. The only thing we should be focused on is transitioning all electricity production to green as fast as possible. That takes care of almost half of all emissions by itself and opens up lots of opportunities for solving other problems without emissions. For example we could use green energy to produce hydrogen from water, or biogas, ethanol etc, and then we'd have emission-free fuels we could use where combustion engines are still necessary.
But no let's just bicker about data centers and other inconsequential shit while the world ends.
Link some zero carbon ones if there are ‘many’.
Like xAI's running gas generators non-stop?
Can I have 1.5% of your net worth?
Ohhh, carbon neutral energy generation, if only we could use that to replace the non-neutral energy sources, instead of using it to power virtual X-Ray goggles so MAGA incels can goon at "naked Taylor Swift". Or to answer "please do my work for me" of lazy fucks planet-wide. You know, to stay relevant to the comment thread of "Oceans hit highest temperature on record"...
We are already in a very bad situation regarding climate change. Do you really think we have the buffer for an increase in percentage points of energy consumption?
That figure likely doesn't include crypto mining, either. That's another 0.5% or so.
0.5% is about the entire energy consumption of two Swedens or half a Thailand.
> we could significantly cut energy use globally by limiting data center build outs?
No, we couldn't, because degrowth solutions aren't really an option.
I call degrowth "abstinence based" environmental policy in allegory to abstinence based sex education. The latter is the "we don't need condoms or birth control, just teach people not to have sex" thing, which doesn't work either.
You really think you're going to convince people to become poorer? Not possible in a democracy. It'd require some kind of ecofascist totalitarian thing where you take peoples' energy and resource use away and fire tear gas and rubber bullets at them when they protest.
Or we could build non-carbon-based energy sources. Cause we have those, and they work. You can also have safe sex if you put a rubber thing on your wing-wong.
And right now the fuel for fascism seems to be coming from the newly minted billionaires who own or profit off of the data centers.
> It'd require some kind of ecofascist totalitarian
That’s correct and eventually that will have to happen. There aren’t much other actual options. It’s mostly a question of how long that can be avoided. We developed a system that blocked us in the current local optimum, with no ways to take the drastic actions we need to handle global issues like climate change.
(And to be clear, an ecofascist regime would be horrible to live under)
Only if you hold the view that AI will not lead to use using energy more efficiently.
1.5% of electricity, not energy
that would be 0.3% of global energy use
1.5% of electricity. That's a significant difference. Only about 1/7th of all our energy usage is electricity
1.5% of global energy use would be a shocking amount. Aviation is at about 3%. 1.5% of global electricity is about 0.2% of global energy use, a much more manageable figure
Ah yes, "just" 485 TWh, equal to all electricity consumption of Germany. Drop in the bucket
Wow, even with that being electricity rather than energy, that's orders of magnitude more than I would have guessed. That's a tremendous amount of electricity.
> ~3x the energy of running an LED light for 5 minutes.
Why would this not be the energy of running an LED light for 15 minutes?
When all is said and done, data centers are going to be complimentary to green energy. They can spin up and down to buffer non-linear power nodes.
They also represent investment in economic growth that doesn't come from resource extraction or travel or manufacturing.
Building data centers relies on immense manufacturing. The GPUs, systems, cooling, batteries, etc don't come from no where. They have strict replacement schedules too.
While yes they can spin up and down, there is the deeper question of what it is all for.
This is why so many AI proponents always talk about future gains rather than what is happening today. It a lot of what it claimed to be coming doesn't happen then it will all look very silly.
Time will tell and depending on were you sit, either we will be there shortly or it will never happen.
> They can spin up and down
Nope. Every moment that hardware is not ran is wasted money that could have been used to buy something else that's actually productive.
Secondary effects like depreciation make this phenomenom even stronger. You've only got a few years to exploit any given piece of hardware before it's obsoleted by newer, more efficient hardware.
That's why any hardware investment with a high upfront cost operates as close to 24/7 as possible — nuclear power plants, factories. Continuous operation amortizes the costs as well as possible.
Laptop use and LED light use (and most other uses of electricity) are not increasing so rapidly that they can not be accommodated by the normal expansion in electric system capacity that has been part of long term planning for quite a while.
Instead much of it is being handled by bringing new fossil power plants on line that would not have been built if not for all the new data centers.
The other things that are causing significant increases in electricity use, like more people getting heat pumps and EVs, are all very spread out and so are much less likely to force new fossil fuel power plants.
Solution to save the environment: China should separate out Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia as separate independent countries. Hong Kong and Macao too. And then split north-south so that Shanghai and Beijing become their own capitals. Continue this process and eventually the population and emissions of each individual country will be low enough that they can be ignored, thus solving the problem once and for all.
The EU has more people than the USA but emits 1/3 of the USA's, what's the exceptionalist excuse for that?
The only relevant metric is ppm in the atmosphere. Every single other, especially per capita ones are distructioo
That is both completely right and completely wrong.
It is right because all the planet cares about is the amount in the atmosphere.
It is completely wrong because whatever total amount X of CO2 emissions we decide we need to limit humanity to, we have to somehow allocate that CO2 emission budget to people.
Unless you can make a good case that some people have some sort of natural or divine right to a bigger share than others the only way to do it is for every person to have the same share. (Maybe on top of that there can be some system of trading, so that people whose emissions go toward things that the world finds more useful can trade for a bigger share, but it would still have to start from everyone is equal).
Since it is countries that would be the ones actually enforcing whatever the limit is, the country effectively ends up as the entity in charge of the shares of all its population, making the allocation at the country level equal on a per capita basis between countries.
Another way to see that anything other than per capita is nonsense is that anything else would allow groups of people to manipulate their allocation by splitting the country into multiple countries or merging multiple countries into one.
> the only way to do it is for every person to have the same share
That is not a very good idea.
Think about it, just breeding more people would give humanity a bigger share.
Much better to let every square mile (or some other arbitrary region) have a share and divide that among the people living there. Higher population density would translate to less shares per person.
Clever plan!
1. Get rich from cheap coal
2. Pull up the ladder behind you
I'm sure everyone will comply.
You said "modernization of existing plants" but quoted "New coal-fired plants."
China's 2025 five year plan targets peak coal before 2030 and might have already reached it in 2026. https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-trends-july-2026-snapshot/ https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-tre...
You can't compare capacity without comparing capacity factors too.
Could China and India get more electricity by investing the same amount in new solar production instead of coal?
> The US isn't expanding fossil fuel extraction, its quite the opposite.
Not according to the federal government's data. BTUs from fossil fuel production set a record last year and is on a faster pace this year. Your bringing up a few coal plants is only tangentially relevant.
https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec1_3.pdf https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec1_3.pdf
> The US could switch every ICE vehicle to EV's and install solar and wind turbines in every inch of the country and it won't combat what's going on in China, India and other developing countries that rely on coal for cheap energy.
Are you familiar with the concept of necessary but not sufficient?
In any event the war with Iran is speeding up the future that was coming anyway. China's EV and solar exports are surging throughout the world. Both China and India have said for many years that their emissions would rise and then fall.
> The US could switch every ICE vehicle to EV's and install solar and wind turbines in every inch of the country and it won't combat what's going on in China, India and other developing countries that rely on coal for cheap energy.
"Today the US government announced CO2 tariffs against polluting nations - products sold in the USA need to be produced in carbon-neutral manner or face punishing taxes.".
Pipe dream, of course, because the populace will vote for the guy offering cheap instead of sustainable...
The quote you pulled for China is conveniently 3 years old and missing the global context that it was in response to supply issues with other fossil fuels, not a reflection in meeting demand.
These charts address your points:
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india
India is a bit more concerning for a number of reasons (lower per capita income means they are lower on per-capita emissions currently and hence have more room to grow, and they don't have the resources that China does to build out renewables) but criticizing China from a renewables perspective (there are a whole lot of other valid reasons to criticize them) is insane.
China installed more solar in 2025 than the IS has in total.
There are several problems with this.
First, you are ignoring gas. The US stopped building coal plants because of the fracking boom. That gave the US huge sources of natural gas which was cheaper than coal.
China has little natural gas but abundant coal, so when they need fossil fuel for something they cannot yet do with renewables they use coal whereas the US uses gas.
Second, you are looking at number of plants, but not looking at capacity factor (which is a measure of how much they are actually used). The new Chinese coal plants have lower capacity factors. They are being built as backups and peakers rather than baseload, designed (or retrofitted in the case of existing plants being upgraded) to be able to cycle up and down to balance wind and solar.
Many are idle so much that their owners have financial difficulty keeping them open, and the government has had to start paying them for their idle time so they won't go under.
Many are also built to replace existing plants that cannot not yet be replaced with renewables, so are at worst neutral on coal usage and are usually actually more efficient than the old plants so there is a reduction.
Their use will continue to decline because China is massively deploying renewables. They also are adding massive amounts of grid battery storage and UHV transmission lines (60000 km so far spanning the country with another 12000 km under construction or permitted--the US is a bit behind that at 0 km), which means the can move electricity from where renewables are strongest to places with high needs but fewer renewables much easier that most other countries can which is further going to reduce the amount of time those new coal plants run.
Third, for India, even if we compare by country rather than by the correct per capita measure (see other comments below for explanation of why per capita is the correct measure when comparing energy policies of different countries), India's current emissions are only 68% of US emissions even though the have 4.3x as many people. That 10% increase you cite that they plan for coal in 2025-2026 still leaves them doing WAY better than the US.
India is also expanding renewables rapidly. They have around 10 nuclear reactors under construction, and are adding lots of solar and wind. They are currently up to 136 GW of solar capacity (64% of US and 11% of China), and last year added around 38 GW (the US added 34 GW). They added 6.3 GW of wind compared to 6.2 GW in the US.
They are almost certainly not going to get anywhere close to the US total emissions. (And per capita where they emit 1/6th what the US does they are definitely not going to even remotely near the US).
Per capita is the only metric that matters as it attributes equal worth to each human life.
If China was split up into 20 countries would that be better because the emissions were divided by 20 for each individual country? I honestly don't know how so many people fail understand this very basic point.
Also talking about breeding continent sized populations, the USA is third with 340+ million and rapidly expanding at millions a year. The median country size is around a population of 9 million so the USA having 340+ million is clearly deeply irresponsible.
> China bringing enormous greenhouse gas burning capacity online
Your knowledge is out of date, Chinas total CO2 emissions have likely already peaked back in 2024: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-have-now-been-flat-or-falling-for-21-months https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
> If China and India are going to "make up" for their historic per capita greenhouse gas emissions.
Except China likely peaked their emissions at a much lower per capita rate than even the USA does now. India will probably be the same.
> the worst case scenario is 100% guaranteed and everyone else might as well go wild as well.
It can always be worse.
> 3 billion people cannot continue the mistakes of the past, but a lot of very foolish people seriously make that argument.
Sure and a country of 340 million cannot continue to burn as much as it is doing but continues to do so.
Also how much money is the USA going to send to developing countries to help them develop without burning fossil fuels? Oh yeah they cancelled it and they continue to be the worlds second largest emitter.
They should better colonize other countries like Europeans did to reduce populations.
I'm weird. Just to be fair I'll acknowledge that certain political actors in the US deny there's any man made climate change and fight renewable energy because it conflicts with some narrow business or political interests. I'm not denying that.
But...
The political criticism in the US (and in Canada where I'm from) against fossil fuel extraction makes no sense. We should want that fossil fuels are extracted here. Not overseas. It's true some element of the "right" are ideologically driven here in the wrong direction but many in the "right" are also pragmatic. Instead of fighting we need to get to common ground and the way to get there is by market forces. Most would prefer the get solar energy if it's cheaper vs. more expensive fossil fuels. And certainly if all else was equal (panels made in the US, American jobs, whatnot). So you can take the adversarial route or you can take the pragmatic route and make real progress.
The other stupid political battle here is boycotting Tesla. How does that make sense? We "punish" Elon by using more fossil fuels.
I don't understand. Are you making the argument that extracting fossil fuel here is better than extracting it elsewhere? Or, perhaps more to the point, you do see that the issue is the use of fossil fuels and that extracting _more_ is just contributing to it?
About the (unrelated) boycott question, I would invite you to consider the reasons motivating people to boycott Tesla. If think everyone do that to "hurt" or "punish" Musk, perhaps that's why it doesn't make sense to you.
Yes. I am making the argument that if we extract a barrel of oil in Canada that is all in all better than in Russia or Saudi. We have more environmental standards and we put that money towards better things.
Canada was able to give me a rebate on my EV purchase. Where do you think that money comes from? I drive a Tesla because at the time it was (and maybe still is) the best EV. I benefit from the network of superchargers. It is one, if not the, of the most efficient EVs in terms of energy/km. Batteries last a very long time due to battery management. It has been very reliable for me. My decision (way back) was really strictly on what is the best EV with no political considerations (and that was before a lot of the more recent political issues).
Fair enough. I'll expand.
> The political criticism in the US (and in Canada where I'm from) against fossil fuel extraction makes no sense.
If you _must_ extract fossil fuel, you can arguably say that it's better to do it somewhere with higher environmental standards (of course, here I'm disregarding people disdain to see wilderness areas they know and have an emotional attachment with transformed into oil fields). But what about _stop_ fossil fuel usage? Sure, it would cost a lot of money. So is AI currently, for doubtful returns. Sure, it would require people changing habits. So has the Internet, and we went through it.
It's like hearing an alcoholic telling you that sure, he still drinks 3 bottles a day but hey, it's Canada-made alcohol, "all in all better than alcohol coming from Russia", right? Yes, I guess it's better for the Canadian economy, but what about just stop drinking?
About your Tesla, deciding to buy without any political consideration is your choice, which you are entitled to. But why would it be impossible to understand someone actually considering the political/social side of things? All your acts and conscious decisions are strictly driven by objective, scientific criteria, never taking into account anything else?
I try to be pragmatic and not religious/ideology driven and I try to take in the complete picture. I think we could all use more of that. A lot of my climate thinking is influenced by someone I know who is also very pragmatic and knows a lot more about this. I am more or less echoing some of those thoughts because I think they're important and I agree with them.
We are not all going to "just stop" using fossil fuels. That is not a realistic goal. If it was possible then I'd entertain it. Being religious about this doesn't help make progress because it alienates people. I am all for pragmatic measures that reduce fossil fuel usage globally. Tanking Canada's economy to make zero or negative global impact is how I evaluate some of the proposed aggressive policies. What is happening is that we are funding Russia's war on Ukraine indirectly due to our lack of ability to replace that supply in Europe. That to me feels like obviously bad policy.
I made changes in my life to reduce fossil fuel usage and am considering more. I also try and influence others where I can to make similar changes. I am not optimizing for $'s here, I can afford to spend more and use less fossil fuels. This isn't really to boast or anything, just to say that this approach works for me and can work for others.
My wife boycotts Nestle for political considerations. I sort of get it but also not get it. That's not to say I would never consider something like that but I also am not a believer in the efficiency of that driving change and I don't have time to research everything in enough depth to come to a conclusion about everything I buy. Not buying Tesla for politics X is a very one dimensional decision. I don't understand how to make that decision and so I don't bother.
> The other stupid political battle here is boycotting Tesla. How does that make sense? We "punish" Elon by using more fossil fuels.
There are other EV manufacturers. Boycotting Tesla != buying ICE vehicles. That’s a bad faith framing.
Why does it matter where on the planet the fossil fuels are extracted in terms of dealing with global climate change?
The US and Canada combined are responsible for 28% and 31% of the global oil and natural gas extraction respectively. If this share were eliminated, then it would force global demand down via the supply/demand price curve especially as there are competitive clean alternatives to burning fossil fuels for energy these days.
We're approaching a global crisis point - and every country needs to reign in fossil fuel extraction and consumption. It's morally indefensible to continue profiting from the sale of products that are f*cking up the planet. Just because there are others that are immoral, doesn't give you an excuse to act without morals. Or claim it's better that you act immorally than someone else.
It doesn't work like that. If the US and Canada stopped extraction of oil and gas for the most part that shortage would be made up in other places. As we remove our supply from the markets prices would rocket up and countries like Russia and Saudi would make immense profits while making up for most of the losses and not moving the demand needle as far as you think it will move for the environment. There will also be a move back to coal where that's an option (some power stations).
And that's ignoring the consequences of that on e.g. people in cold climates that rely on gas for heating or people that rely on gasoline for getting to work. The correct approach is to reduce the usage of fossil fuels which will lead to reduced extraction naturally.
You're not 100% wrong but the impact is marginal. Partly because some energy markets are a cartel. The prices aren't strictly governed by supply and demand but rather supplies are throttled to drive prices.
This is why that's the wrong thing to focus on. If we (e.g. Canada and the US) have strong economies that allows us to do more. Both internally and by influencing others. For example I can afford to drive an EV and use a heat pump because the Canadian economy does well, despite those not being economical options. Many early adopters of solar and EVs and other environmental approaches were only possible because we have strong economies, and those drive down prices for everyone.
By your own market argument, increasing oil supply depresses prices and boosts usage. And NA oil isn't particularly clean or environmentally-friendly - the benefits of local production are primarily political, with a side of cheaper gas, which again, is not fighting climate change with market forces.
And Tesla is not the only game in town for electrification, and it's been like that for years already. Tesla's EU sales plummeted while overall EV share rose quickly during the peak of the 2025 "boycott". Someone who was going to buy a Tesla but got turned off by the Musk-Trump coalition just bought an electric/hybrid from someone else - there is no movement to buy gas cars just to spite Musk (unlike, say, the "roll coal" crowd).
Pragmatism is better than adversarialism, sure, but when it comes to the environment the locus of adversarialism is more lopsided than you're trying to make out.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/3226/ https://xkcd.com/3226/
Markets are fundamentally unable to take into account externalities, but yes, let's "focus on markets and let them take care of the problem". Conveniently ignore the fact that the only reason solar is the cheapest power is because a country put in their political will and power into making it so.
Your sacred market has been killing us all and will continue to keep killing us all if it makes a few pennies.
We have seen 20 years of complete inaction precisely because of this “let the market handle it” nonsense. In 2012 Europe was all in on some cap-and-trade scheme that everybody knew was never going to work, everybody told them it was never gonna work, and it turns out it didn’t work. The markets are still not responding to this catastrophe even today, as we should be at absolute zero and we are not even at net zero.
The markets have failed everybody, and politicians who believed in the markets were wrong, and should be in jail now for criminal negligence.
I would have agreed with you on giving credit but we did an about face in the last 2 years and now are spending billions of dollars to pay off companies that were already building renewables because we failed when trying to just illegally cancel them[1]
We’re not letting the market handle it and we’re going in a backwards direction. Can’t really crow about our accomplishments given that.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/06/rwe-deal-wind-leases https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/06/rwe-deal-win...
Completely false and epic revisionism. 96.6% of all new energy sources in the US from 2024 to 2026 were green.
Nuclear, batteries, solar, wind, hydro.
You know people can just look this stuff up right?
Cancelling those contracts *IS* letting the market decide
The RWE paid 1.26 billion to acquire the lease on offshore wind. Payment is a refund.
Further, offshore wind is expensive in terms of maintenance. Stopping the project now is protecting billions in expenses in the future.
> The RWE paid 1.26 billion to acquire the lease on offshore wind. Payment is a refund.
The Trump administration told them it could continue to make the process drag out for more years as it has been or they could spend the money on fossil fuels. It was not any kind of market decision.
> Cancelling those contracts IS letting the market decide
They didnt cancel the contracts, they paid the companies to stop doing work that those companies(i.e. the market) wanted to do
> Further, offshore wind is expensive in terms of maintenance. Stopping the project now is protecting billions in expenses in the future.
Source yourself that this is worth it as per the market if you are going to claim this is a market decision
Making an offer they can’t refuse isn’t really a market decision
Edit: typo, changed is to isn’t
> Stopping the project now is protecting billions in expenses in the future
?
All power plants have maintenance charges. Unless I missed something, this statement is a non sequitur.
On top of that, Wind is practically free compared to the maintenance and running coats of other options.
I'm in the US and _I_ don't want us to get credit. Even the worst of people do something good every now and then. But if you reward that, they won't change.
> Even the worst of people do something good every now and then. But if you reward that, they won't change.
Scratching my head on that one.
I mean... is something not better than nothing? Or do you only get rewarded if it's 100% perfect? If so then by that metric nobody should be rewarded here. There's nobody in the world who has done enough, certainly none of the major economic powers.
Yes, none of the major economies get rewarded because fossil fuel usage needs to be zero now, already, to avoid catastrophic warming by the end of the century.
Do you reward a bull after wrecking a China shop because it decided to at least leave the employees in alive with near fatal wounds?
So what have you done to avoid using fossil fuel in your own life? fossil fuel, like almost all things sold, is a demand driven market. You want it to stop, stop doing things that use it.
Goodhart's Law. We want to incentivize right intent in addition to right action. This has nothing to do with degree of perfection and plays a part in why mental state factors significantly into culpability assessment in the law. We want to avoid inadvertently incentivizing reward hacking behavior, especially when the individual rewards are high, overall transparency is low, and the consequences far-reaching.
Because it’s different entities.
The market creates more solar power despite the actions of the government
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The self-flagellation has gotten too extreme. Photovoltaics were invented in the US, and the US helped subsidize it to the point where they were an economically viable source of energy.
Wikipedia says invented in France and developed by the Germans and Japanese. Do you have some references for US involvement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#History
"1954 – The first practical photovoltaic cell was publicly demonstrated at Bell Laboratories.[27] The inventors were Calvin Souther Fuller, Daryl Chapin and Gerald Pearson.[28]"
The references are on Wikipedia. Maybe do the most basic thing in Wikipedia and click on some links to the related pages before asking for sources. One can still quibble that 'first practical' is indeed different from 'first' but the practical part is the part that actually matters in this argument anyway (i.e. solar rollout).
(also, of course it was Bell Labs.)
> the US helped subsidize it to the point where they were an economically viable source of energy
Something one specific party has been fighting against for decades
Encouraging a desirable behavior is a better way to elicit more of that behavior than labeling someone as the worst no matter what. At that point, why wouldn’t they lean into the villain role?
> So markets are working.
> Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem.
Blind faith in the markets is what got us in this mess.
> Fossil fuel extraction is not the problem. The problem is fossil fuel usage.
Yes, and usage is not decreasing. As solar is growing, it's only adding capacity, not replacing fossil fuels. 2025 was the record year for global emissions and fossil fuel consumption.
But sure, let's let "the markets" dictate our ecological policy. Maybe they'll mercifully let us stop burning oil sometimes in the 2150s.
> Also consider the US has just removed a sh~tload of fossil fuels from the world economy. How about some extra credits there?
Huh? Americans very consistently rank among the biggest emitters, basically only surpassed by citizens of petrostates.
I'll just put this here: as long as burning fossil fuel is profitable, "the markets" won't help at all, quite the contrary. And oil being unprofitable isn't happening anytime soon. Our societies are already suffering from Climate Change immensely, and it will only get worse as the years go by. We should have stopped emissions yesterday, we can't let "the markets" take away our agency on the matter and decide our fate.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
Still a ways to go but trending down for some time now. India and China are trending up and might cross us by 2030-2035 unless they reverse direction.
That's per capita. Total keeps increasing: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
Per capita decreasing is not nothing, but unfortunately the climate doesn't care about that particular metric.
> Americans very consistently show the most emissions per Capita.
Even beyond that, it is simply a false statement. Among the most, yes but consistently "the most", no
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=discrete-bar&time=latest&country=QAT~AUS~OMN~KAZ~CAN~SXM~NCL~ARE~SAU~TTO~BHR~BRN~KWT~USA~LUX~TKM~GRL~KOR~TWN~RUS~CUW~PLW~MNG~FRO https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
We can't even decrease the /rate/ at which we pump the shit into the air when we need to decrease the total amount of it in.
> Yes, and usage is not decreasing. As solar is growing, it's only adding capacity, not replacing fossil fuels.
This is the key point. While yes, it is brilliant that we are adding loads of solar, wind and whatever - it is the final emissions that really matter. Regardless of how well meaning we are intended with our build outs, the emissions is really the only metric that counts when we are focusing on climate blow back.
> How about we give the US credit for this?
If it weren't for the huge efforts put into it by china to make solar and batteries so cheap and capable we wouldn't be nearly as far along in the solar transition as we are. Solar is growing in spite of US policy, not because of it.
I was poking people a little with that statement. Can't help myself.
But really, there is growth under the policies, so saying "despite" doesn't work. You could try to argue that the policy makers tried to kill solar but achieved the opposite result. But at the end of the day the current policy environment led to a positive result. Correlation isn't causation but if I was writing a policy and I wanted to guarantee the opposite outcome I'll bet ya I could.
I happen to know some Americans who have worked really hard to advance renewable energies and have made an impact. To just view the US with one lens is not right is maybe the point I am making, without poking.
China makes cheap solar panels because there's a market for them. Panels aren't the only component in a solar system either. A lot of the technology comes from the US and American companies as well. Germany apparently gets some credit as does Australia. The Chinese did what they do best- low cost manufacturing. We got there together.
> Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem.
The problem is politics and banana republic levels of corruption (aka lobbying) preventing chinese evs to enter the market. If you opened the automotive market to competition ie:
> focus on markets and let them take care of the problem.
then the need for fossil fuels would decline.
> Also consider the US has just removed a sh~tload of fossil fuels from the world economy.
Do you mean the war with Iran that released in the initial weeks over 5 million metric tons of CO₂?
You can just as easily argue that markets caused all this. They don't incentivize the preservation of the planet or even life at all. There is no reason to believe that anything that comes out of markets organically is good, they don't converge towards worlds that have sound values. If they do in some instance then it's just by happenstance as in the solar example.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/#externalities https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta...
Also this seems to contradict your fossil fuel paragraph completely, the US is amongst the world's highest fossil fuel consumers per person: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels?fuel=total&metric=consumption&per_capita=per_capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels?fuel=total&m...
> Fossil fuel extraction is not the problem.
It is a problem though. Extraction and transportation of fossil fuels is a major source of methane, which is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.
hah https://abcnews.com/US/solar-generates-energy-coal-us-1st-time-report/story?id=133783328 https://abcnews.com/US/solar-generates-energy-coal-us-1st-ti... ends with
> Trump has touted coal as clean in the past, but experts say coal emits carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and several other pollutants.
Wow, experts say coal emits carbon dioxide. What a world we live in where that's considered expert knowledge.
> Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem. This is already happening with solar.
Markets do not care about externalities. That’s the whole issue. Markets by themselves cannot work for the benefit of humans, you need to regulate them, otherwise we would have child labor and slaves to trade. You need to force the participants to have to deal with their externalities and consider more than the next 2 quarters. Markets are a tool you have to use correctly, it’s not a magical thing that solves all humanity problems by itself
Markets arent going to fix this problem. Solar panels didnt get cheap by magic, they got cheap by investments backed by politics.
No modern market is truly free, government loans, subsidies, taxes ect all impact the direction of the market and every single one of them has been used at one point or another to push the market in a certain direction
We are doing loads, I just fear we cannot outrun Jevon's paradox. Until we start actively reducing emissions, we are just adding to the scale of consumption with no end in sight.
That we are still adding any fossil fuel based system today is something I would have figured would have stopped by now. I figured we would still have some legacy stuff, but overall would be decommissioning more than we would add. Instead, we just add to everything.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
"Exploding" while the US still emits 50% more than China and has been emitting more than double and triple before recent years.
Now please explain: why are you painting environmentalists as responsible for the phaseout, when the vast majority of nuclear plants were shut down under the conservative CDU? And when the Greens were simply following the laws established by the CDU following Fukushima?
The Greens, by the way, extended the lifetime of the existing plants beyond what the CDU had planned. Why are you failing to mention that?
If you were honest about your critique, I can't see how you can possibly make environmentalists responsible for Germany's course - during the last 20 years, they were the 2nd largest of 3 coalition partners during 1 governing period, compared to the CDU being the largest partner during 4 governing periods. From every angle, they deserve the majority of the blame.
Would the greens have done anything else if they were in power? This has been their stated policy goal since the 1970s.
That does not matter at all regarding your initial statement, which is simply wrong. You didn't argue that the environmentalists would have done so, you're spreading the false rumor that environmentalists were responsible for closing down all the nuclear plants.
It's not correct attach the same amount of blame for the nuclear phase out in Germany to both Greens and CDU. I would recommend to read little bit on the history nuclear power in Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
In 2002, under the Red-Green government of Gerhard Schröder, the "Act on the structured phase-out of the utilization of nuclear energy for the commercial generation of electricity" took effect, following a drawn-out political debate and lengthy negotiations with nuclear power plant operators. The act legislated for the shut-down of all German nuclear plants by 2021.
So when the Greens first came to power in the Schröder administration of 1998 they achieved their major political goal for which they had fought for 20 years: abandoning nuclear energy in Germany.
The Greens wanted swift abandoning of nuclear energy in Germany already in the 2000s, but the government would have to compensate the nuclear power plant owners for the costs of building the nuclear power plants (multiple bilion DM in the 2000s, most of the nuclear power plants were still new and the costs of construction were still not payed by the electricity). Therefor the Government negotiated with each electric utility company a rest quota of nuclear produced electricity and as a result nuclear electricity production would continue until 2021 (with a planned decrease in production every year).
In 2007 amid fears that Russian energy supplies to western Europe might not be reliable, conservative politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel and Economics Minister Michael Glos, continue to question the decision to phase out nuclear power in Germany.
In September 2010, German government policy shifted back toward nuclear energy and the government wanted to extend the use of nuclear energy in Germany.
After the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, the conservative German government reversed it's nuclear position and returned back the original 2002 Red-Green nuclear phase-out time table.
The current conservative German government under Merz again reversed it's nuclear position towards a more pro-nuclear stance, but decided that it's too expensive to revive the nuclear industry.
I would not say that the current German Green party are environmentalists, currently they are mostly renewable industry lobbyists. CDU has connections to German heavy industry. SPD had strong connection to coal mining regions and coal unions. FDP connections to German car manufacturing.
>Seriously, I'd love to know - why do you deliberately spread propaganda for the fossil industry, like you did here?
I don't get it, the project was started by a Greens minister and continued by a non-green minister? The wall of text has nothing to do with anything.
Your claim was:
> They had enough power to close down all the nuclear power plants in Germany.
But the CDU were the ones who closed down almost all the nuclear power plants in Germany, and as I've shown the CDU are anything but environmentalists, so this is simply wrong.
My "wall of text" is to prove that the CDU are not behaving in the interests of environmentalists, rather nobody here can believe how deeply they've sold their souls to oil & gas.
As I already wrote, it was German Red-Green goverment in 2002 which put nuclear phase out in to law in 2002. CDU has always oscilated with positive and negative views on nuclear.
Germany had enough power to close down all nuclear power plants, because older coal power plants when taken offline have been carefully mothballed (preserved for later restart, when necessary).
In contrast the 2002 German nuclear law (deutsche Atomgesetz (AtG)) requires that nuclear power plants have to be started to be dismantled immidiately after shutting down. There are no technical reasons why nuclear power plant after shutting down, taking out nuclear fuel and decontamination (as is done regularly during maintanance) could not be preserved for 10, 20 or 50 year (you have to mostly periodicaly repair the roof, repair the paint and guard the buildings, e.g. it can be done without large costs).
I'm all for pragmatism. The issue is that most people claiming pragmatism are usually, in my experience, simply justifying status quo.
Sure, I get it, we won't literally _stop_ fossil fuels usage in the near future. I get it, other countries are large CO2 emitters. But why is it an argument to do nothing?
In Canada, Carbon tax was a pragmatic, reasonable policy. It was even enacted by conservatives. It was done at zero and even negative cost for most people. And yet, it was gunned down because it was easier to just yell "ax the tax" without even understanding what it was. All of it under the cover of "pragmatism" (hey, families are suffering, businesses are failing, we need to do something -- and of course, that something has nothing to do with the root causes of these issues).
I could go on: you cannot put bike lanes to encourage bike adoption (that's pragmatism: people stuck in traffic in their gaz guzzlers produce CO2!). You cannot improve public transport (that's pragmatism, it's too expensive and families don't want that anyway). You cannot have laws to enforce maximal arsenic content in the air in a residential neighborhood (that's pragmatism, what will the workers do when the plant close?). I could go on and on, just in Canada.
It's tiring to see pragmatism systematically invoked as an justification for doing the worst possible thing, environmentally speaking. It's tiring to see that this always raises the bar of what is environmentally acceptable, such that next decisions are even worse.
Kudos on you if you actually make pragmatic choices to reduce your fossil fuel consumption, both at an individual and societal level. But somehow I doubt it. I've seen too many "pragmatics".
> But what about _stop_ fossil fuel usage?
And how do you propose we do that if we’re not the ones selling the fossils?
Fossil fuel usage is for the most part, a transaction between willing participants at a fair market price. Will you ban that? How will you enforce it? I hate to be presumptuous, but I assume you’re not a fan of colonialism or wars in the Middle East.
While oil is as valuable as it is for heating, industry, transport, war, and gestures widely at our modern lifestyle. There are two realistic ways to stop it: replace it with something cheaper and better, or genocide.
Neither of these are likely to happen at the scale and timeline required to solve our predicament. But regardless, pretending we can just stop people far poorer than us from striving to meet our standing of living by… asking nicely? It doesn’t help, if your goal is indeed to solve the problem.
> And how do you propose we do that if we’re not the ones selling the fossils?
Because we would be the ones not _buying_ the fossils?
There are multiple ways to reduce fossil fuels dependency, and they are known (and no, they do not involve genocide or colonialism). In Canada, carbon tax is an example, backed by economic studies (from right wight economists) and originally introduced by conservative (in Canada at least). Of course, then right wing parties started to convince people to "axe the tax" because it was the root cause of their problems (which is was, of course, not).
That's always the issue, and that's always been bugging me. Why is it that not being able to replace, today, 100% of the fossil fuels usage means "gee, we should do nothing, let's actually increase our production!"? How do we come from "such an energetic transition is a multi generation work" (which is true) to "meh too hard, let's double down"? How can we seriously make the argument "hey, I _could_ clean up the mess in my backyard, but anyway my neighbor is way worse and he has a larger backyard, let's do nothing instead"?
I really don't see how these positions are seen as the "voice of reason". To me, there at best the voice of laziness.
The higher environmental standards that allow drilling in nature reserves?
Sorry that sounds like, if you get murdered than better here because the knives are cleaner.
Well I was trying to go with it for the sake of argument. I don't really think there is a "clean" way to extract fossil fuels, especially in oil sands like in Alberta. My point was that even if that was true, it still doesn't make sense to me.
Silly argument. You obviously want to be the very last nation on the planet to run out of fossil fuels.
But the US government allowed drilling in nature reserves, that is definitely not better than oil from already existing drills in Saudi Arabia.
If you assume fossil fuels are unlimited (or the limit is so much beyond than humans will decide to extract), that makes sense.
If you have a view that fossil fuels are practically limited (not necessarily in the literal sense ”run out of the last molecules” sense but in the practical/economic sense), you’d rather buy someone else’s and hoard your own reserves to extract later when the global supply is lower/price is higher.