[scottious]

> “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]

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.

[alephnerd]

> 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_di...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/india-withdraws-b...

[2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mul...

[3] - https://usea.org/sites/default/files/022011_Coal-to-oil,%20g...

[applfanboysbgon]

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.

[pretzellogician]

> "solely for the crime of having a larger population than your country"

I think there's an interesting question here. Perhaps having a larger population is indeed a bad thing, and should be considered as such?

(Yes, India's fertility rate, like many other countries, is dropping quickly)

[alephnerd]

Climate change doesn't divvy impact based on per capita usage.

And large countries and blocs like the US, China, EU, India, etc would survive in a world with significant climate crises. So the incentive to change doesn't exist.

And this is why the world will burn.

[applfanboysbgon]

The Chinese government invested ~$1 trillion in clean energy in 2025, while the Chinese economy had a further ~$2 trillion in growth surrounding EVs, batteries, and solar. You talk about "no incentive to change", but things are actively changing. What more would you like China to do, in concrete terms? Stop manufacturing for the West, even though that will, as aforementioned, likely result in a net increase in emissions when Western countries resume their substantially worse per-capita manufacturing for themselves? Or perhaps you would like China to cull its population by half for you? I'm interested in hearing your proposal.

[alephnerd]

> I'm interested in hearing your proposal

I have no proposal because to a certain extent you are correct.

That said, investing trillions in GreenTech does nothing when China is still emitting 13 gigatons of CO2, and it takes the next 7 countries combined to reach that number. Additionally, India will likely end up emitting a similar amount as China within a decade as well.

Only the leadership of the US, China, and India can decide on a roadmap on how to reduce CO2 usage globally, and everything else is just rhetoric.

[leonidasrup]

Personaly I would like to see China invest less in renewables and more in nuclear power. If France could replace its coal power plants with nuclear power plants in 1970s, 1980s then China should be capable to do it.

China endured famines for centuries, introduction of nitrogen fertilizers helped to solve this problem.

"The meeting of Mao Zedong and Nixon in 1972 changed drastically the fundamental relation between China and USA. In 1973 China contracted importation of 13 large-scale ammonia plants with 330,000 t/y capacity and urea plants with 500-600,000 t/y capacity with the companies of USA, Japan and Europe."

https://kagakushi.org/iwhc2015/papers/21.MineTakeshi.pdf

[peterashford]

Climate change is the result of aggregate human actions. What we contribute per human is exactly the metric to use.

[card_zero]

Or is it the result of government policies? Then we should look to the governments in control of the biggest portions.

[alphabeta3r56]

Out of these two, only EU and US are showing reluctance to change quickly. Both China and India depend heavily on imported fossil fuels and for them solar is as much of a sovereignty issues as it is pollution, and then climate.

[ZeroGravitas]

The EU also depends heavily on imported fossil fuels. They just have more politicians that have been bought off.

[legacynl]

> China, The US, and India all turned down invites despite generating 34%, 12%, and 7.6% of global emissions respectively [0]

Perhaps this is for the best? I assume if they did intend they would be mostly saying 'no' to everything?

Now things might get actually accepted by willing participants, which might allow it to snowball and gain traction, which might convince one of those 3 to join at a later date.

[alephnerd]

They can't though. None of the participants hold cards that can convince the US, China, or India otherwise, as those 3 also represent around 42% of the global economy [0].

Additionally, other major polluters like ASEAN (Indonesia, Vietnam, Phillipines, Malaysia), Russia, the GCC (Saudi Arabia, UAE), and Turkiye turned down the invitation.

[0] - https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPSH@WEO/OEMDC/ADVE...

[triceratops]

> 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

Even if India and China went 0 carbon today the world will continue heating due to historic emissions. The US and Europe account for 54% of cumulative CO2 emissions. [1]

Not to mention there would be no conversation without China's manufacturing prowess that has made solar panels and batteries so cheap.

> the larger countries know they can eat the cost of climate change

I'm curious how you think India will "eat the cost" of losing most of its freshwater.[2] And if think you it's feasible to do so (which again, I don't see how), then it's even more important that they develop their economy to "eat the cost" right? You can't fault them for doing everything they can to grow their economy. It's not like anyone else is going 0 carbon either, and they're the most vulnerable large country.

1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...

2. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/himalayas-melting-c...

[cmxch]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Ruined cars piled up in streets waste even more energy - temporarily.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/31/why-were-the-f...

[DangitBobby]

So we are no longer worried about catastrophic or runaway climate change based on these revisions?

[tialaramex]

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]

Care to put any dates to your doomerisms? Can I take the other side of the bet?

[tialaramex]

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]

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.

[tialaramex]

Extinction isn't a mechanical consequence but a cultural one. Each generation of future humans learn that their ancestors squandered better conditions, and their offspring will definitely experience even worse conditions and they despair and have net fewer kids. We're not altering the climate for a few years, or a few decades, or even a few centuries, but more like millennia.

[senordevnyc]

I don’t think there’s any evidence that the human population will decline to anything approaching extinction levels due to people’s attitudes about the environment. To the contrary, we have the population that we have today because humans reproduce in spite of horrible conditions.

[peterashford]

We've had deaths due to climate related storms in NZ now, and we haven't been hit anywhere near as hard as, say, Pakistan who had 1/3 of their country flooded in one go. And it's getting worse. That may not be human extinction but its definitely plausible that mass casualty events are possible

[triceratops]

There are fates nowhere near extinction that would still mean massive human suffering.

[dylan604]

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]

To "simply run out of fossil fuels" is like that potentiometer you mention, it isn't like you run out all at once but you run out of the cheap ones first and it gets more expensive.

I remember reading

https://www.amazon.com/Hubberts-Peak-Impending-Shortage-Revi...

in the early 2000s which was about the coming peak of conventional oil production and it turned out to be wrong in the sense that we knew in the 1970s that there were huge amounts of oil and gas in tight formations that we didn't know how to exploit. People were trying to figure out how to do that economically and had their breakthrough around the time that book came out so now you drive around some parts of Pennsylvania and boy do you see a lot of natural gas infrastructure.

I remember being in my hippie phase in the late 1990s and having a conversation with a roughneck on the Ithaca Commons who was telling me that the oil industry had a lot of technology that was going to lift the supply constraints that I was concerned about... he didn't tell me all the details but looking back now I'm pretty sure he knew about developments in hydrofracking and might even have been personally involved with them.

[leonidasrup]

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-rese...

This is a bit simplified because high fossil fuel prices also drive inovations in mining, exploration and could increase known reserves.

[TheOtherHobbes]

We're not going to run out of fossil fuels. We are going to start running out of habitable biosphere because of climate degradation.

It's only a matter of time - likely a few years - before there's a significant wet-bulb heat catastrophe that kills a huge number of people.

For example.

[PaulHoule]

Amen!

[thefunkychook]

Just to be clear... Are you saying "amen" to not running out of fossil fuels, or to the possibility of a large number of people dying from heat stress, or both?

[PaulHoule]

To say that I agree with your analysis, not that I think a mass casualty event is a good thing.

[thijson]

Brazil has had a pretty active program of converting cane sugar to ethanol for a while now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil

Sugar cane doesn't require replanting every year either, like corn does.

Plants are actually not a good converter of solar energy to chemical energy though. They capture a few percent of it.

Solar cells are able to capture about 10 times that, a much smaller footprint.

[jl6]

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]

> 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.

[jandrewrogers]

Ethanol doesn't "spoil". It is a very stable molecule and miscible with water.

The main issue is that it has a strong affinity for water so it needs to be stored in containers that are sealed from the environment. The same issue exists with the ubiquitous ethanol/gasoline blends.

[busterarm]

The cheap thin-walled gas containers you find in the auto parts store or on Amazon sell a heck of a lot better than the good stuff.

This just doesn't meet up with the day to day reality of your average consumer.

Even your gas station underground tanks aren't airtight. The problem is that the air around us has tons of water vapor in it.

[bluGill]

> 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.

[red-iron-pine]

nah, it loves to absorb water out of the ambient air.

ethanol that is distilled forms an azeotrope has a hard time getting past 98% on its own. even if you used advanced techniques and additives, it has a strongly hygroscopic nature, meaning it actively attracts and absorbs water vapor directly from the air.

in other words, it will do everything it can to get back to 98%.

to keep ethanol above 98%, you need airtight seals or "molecular sieves" (zeolite beads) inside the tank to constantly "bead up" and trap any incoming water molecules.

[don_esteban]

What is the conversion efficiency for electricity + C02 + H20 -> ethanol/hydrocarbons?

Because that is the overall path (for long-term storable chemical energy, i.e. usable for transport or seasonal energy storage in countries where solar is highly seasonal).

[thijson]

There's an alternative path that removes carbon from the cycle:

electricity + H20 + N2 -> NH3 + O2

Ammonia can be liquified and stored similar to Propane, it does attack copper and brass.

It can be burned in an internal combustion engine, it's about half as energy dense as hydrocarbons though.

There's a danger to humans from it though, it requires sprinkler systems if there is ever a leak.

I think that a large part of the energy budget in a plant is harvesting and concentrating CO2 from the air. N2 is a lot more abundant in the air.

There is work currently on using giant sodium batteries in these large container ships. That might be more cost effective than the above longer term.

[don_esteban]

Yeah, concentrating CO2 from atmospheric concentrations is not easy. The benefit is that it actually removes carbon from the atmosphere. Whether it can ever be done on a large scale is a question, though.

Is there any work on doing that, at a low energy cost? (I mean concentrating CO2, not removing it by weathering rocks?)

Yeah, ships are not really weight constrained, unlike airplanes, really cheap sodium batteries should be feasible.

[matheusmoreira]

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.

[rexpop]

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.

[titzer]

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]

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,%20g...

[1] - https://coal.gov.in/sites/default/files/ncgm/ncgm21-09-21.pd...

[j-bos]

But coal's essential as a backup in case of a dead (civilizational) restart.

[lief79]

That seems to be based on the assumption that coal is easily accessible. I'm not sure that's true.

[nomel]

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

[lukan]

"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.