[elzbardico]

In practice non-western countries will keep on using fossil fuels to enable their development and nothing will stop them till they burn the last drop of oil.

Denmark is a tiny country and their emissions are frankly, negligible.

So, just another emotional decision from western politicians.

[gklitz]

If you are spending 10$ a day on Starbucks and your net after a month is -1000$ sure, cutting the coffee won’t save your budget, but that’s no reason not to cut it, and it’s not “just an emotional decision”.

The idea that no individual small change will ever solve the whole problem so we should just ignore it completely is a childish emotional reaction to the fact that changes have to happen.

[elzbardico]

Well. Like every analogy, this one doesn't capture the issue.

You see, our biggest issue right now is that despite all efforts from the west, we (as in we the world) is not ramping down or fossil fuel usage significantly and on the contrary, we can expect it to keep on growing.

In the past, given the disparity of power between the G-7 and the rest of the world, we could rely more or less on diplomatic pressure to keep the developed countries more or less inline on this global effort, but, right now, our capacity has been diminished on this front.

And the problem with decisions like that, and other stupid ones like the insistence on renewables as the panacea, to the detriment of real solutions like Nuclear energy, we are increasing our costs, because no matter how much PR you do about LCOE, the real hard fact is that renewables are fucking expensive in a system-wide based opposed to the fairy-tale world of LCOE, and this is ensuring the west is less competitive and thus less powerful. The reason for that, I am afraid, is beyond the current midwit zeitgeist, so I won't elaborate more, but it is fact easily proven by analyzing energy costs for consumers viz. penetration of renewables in a given market.

So, you see, individual small changes are not always positive, because sometimes small changes have unexpected side effects that their proponents rarely take into account.

Right or wrong, the developing world thinks that they are not responsible for most of the excess carbon on our atmosphere and think that if we became rich by spewing gigatons of carbon, it is only fair they have the same choice. And as we use less and less fossil fuels, at the same time our energy costs increase, we are even helping them by making fossil fuels less expensive.

So, yes, probably we (North America and Western Europe) will get closer and closer to net zero, at the cost of destroying our economies and our ability to lead the world in a more sensible way.

Yeah, I agree with you that changes have to happen. But they need to be rational changes, they have to be taken based on the context of objective reality. Voluntarism, taking action just for the sake of action usually sucks. There are almost unlimited ways of doing anything wrong, and usually just a few ways of doing it right.