Fossil CO2 emissions decrease in 2026
news.exeter.ac.ukEmissions budgets are calculated using accounting best practice, which are not designed for full transparency (ref: the creative accounting used to obscure every financial scandal and economic bubble). THIS is the curve that matters:
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/global.html
The Iran blip is clearly seen, but it's just that - a blip. Levels continue to steadily rise.
These two views are not necessarily in conflict: atmospheric CO2 concentration is (vagely/roughly) the integral of emissions. So if emissions are basically flat (-0.4%) you'd still see atmospheric levels rise.
Because flat is still very much an issue, we need a big reduction in output before we start to see the absolute value level off :/
There’s too much for abstinence to fix it now. We are going to have to intervene in land management practices to draw down the CO2 we already released. They’ve been trying to figure out how to decarbonize concrete and some of those techniques might eventually lead to net negative or at least closer to neutral.
We can think about capturing AFTER we stop emissions. Emissions can be significantly reduced. All vehicles can be electric, they add storage to the system and can supply power back, which means we can wean off of oil (transportation), coal and natural gas (electricity, heating).
If people stop buying gas cars, and every vehicle bought is EV, it will take 20 years for all vehicles to be EVs. Thats enough to build massive storage just using EVs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50257308
Western countries have high wealth and disposable incomes, they can ban all ICE cars and bring down costs significantly (already cheaper CapEx and cheaper OpEx), accelerating everything else. Ethiopia banned new gas cars in 2024, western countries can do it too.
This is doable in 20 years. All road transport, electricity from fossil fuels. In these 20 years, we can focus on other things and have R&D breakthroughs (maybe zero/low carbon concrete).
Realistically it's easier to stop producing more than sequestering carbon. That's what the only target should be to stop releasing more carbon into the atmosphere as carbon capture etc requires energy which releases more carbon till we reach carbon free energy all form of carbon sequestration is mostly a con to get government contract or by oil and gas companies/countries to keep burning more.
If we reach net 0 carbon, which we won't, we still have the extra carbon we already added. That doesn't just go away. We will have to get to net negative to fix most of this.
Particularly because all the CO2 we dump into the ocean will return to the surface in ocean upwellings once the currents have run a full cycle.
if we get to 0 carbon that would mean we have reached carbon free energy so then using it capture and store carbon would be okay till then any carbon capture apart from growing more tree is pointless
Carbon free energy is not free energy. Store where? For how long?
I am for converting back to hydrocarbons for long term storage and use. Ie convert to oil, gas and fertilizer it will be practically be free if its a carbon free energy as that would mean it is either renewables or nuclear fusion.
That's wishful thinking:
https://www.futuretimeline.net/blog/2025/09/27-underground-c...
Whatever we release now, we should expect to be permanent.
I'm not talking about putting gas into holes in the ground and then expecting it to not bubble back out and/or kill us. I'm talking about recarbonizing farm land, which we will need anyway to deal with climate change, aforestation, and probably accelerated rock weathering.
It took us 200 years to break it, we'll probably be 300 years fixing it, at which point the ocean will have likely absorbed all it can and started giving it back to us.
That’s like an alcoholic saying it took 60 years to destroy his liver but it’ll just take 90 years to fix it. It doesn’t work like that.
I'm sure you're trying to be clever but you've succeeded in communicating nothing.
We don't have 300 years to fix this.
The silver lining is that if world population really has peaked and we are on the decline, we can follow the model of Christchurch and The Netherlands and refuse to let people rebuild in the most vulnerable areas. We can return those areas to nature and in some cases, like the Netherlands, use those areas to also improve the chances to survive the next extreme weather event. Every time the a Netherlands declares a moratorium after a flood, their ability to avoid flooding in population centers improves a little bit. And the reforest land which helps a bit with the drawdown (asterisk for methane production, which may represent less carbon in the atmosphere but a greater greenhouse effect)
It’s too late for the pebbles to vote. It’ll take as long as it takes. And it will seem like it will take even longer because we will need to find new physics, chemistry, biology, and manufacturing to solve it.
It doesn't matter that abstinence couldn't fix everything anymore, because additional emissions still make the problems worse!
Of course. But this isn't a process that can be made fast and "flattening" increase of emissions is a cool milestone.
I am not too worried about it in the long term.
Electric Cars are the future, and that is speaking as someone who still prefers to drive a petrol / gasoline car. It will be a long 10-20 year replacement cycle. And China is rapidly reducing its CO2 emissions. To the point I won't be surprised if in the future they could advertise to the west about their product being cleanly produced.
Solar and Batteries are advancing fast. To the point it isn't even about being green, it makes zero economic sense not to use it. We aren't that far away from it.
It is going to be a bit of a bumpy road. But we are advancing in the right direction.
Transport is only 25% of emissions. If we converted all planes, trucks, ships etc to electricity tomorrow then emissions would go back to what they were in... 2005.
China emits ~33% of global CO2, they could get 50% of their electricity to be renewable in next 5 - 10 years. When Solar and Batteries ( Semi Solid State Sodium Battery ) catches up for grid, and Electric cars, we are talking about a global reduction of ~20%+ say by 2035.
It is not perfect, but I dont think that is too bad. We should be able to cut 50% globally by 2050 if not earlier. As I believe both the technology and production scale will accelerate in typical Chinese fashion.
And all of that is without any incentives. Just pure economical play.
The difference between those curves isn't "accounting", it's that the emission rate is essentially[1] the time derivative of the CO2 concentration. They have different shapes because they're different (but related) quantities.
It's entirely consistent with precise and good faith emissions measurements for CO2 to be still increasing.
[1] Modulo the seasonal variation, absorption in the ocean, emission from other sources like permafrost thawing, yada yada.
Levels as in emission levels or total levels? Emission levels may have blipped (and the Iran war is a pretty clear inflection point especially in the developing world) but obviously until we're net negative total levels will not decline because it's cumulative
How would we get to negative emission levels?
If we stopped emitting carbon, cutting down forests, and got lucky with forest fires, natural processes would automatically begin to bring down total atmospheric carbon.
How long would it take to go down, and how sure are we?
I'm sure natural processes have some capacity to absorb additional carbon, but I feel like we're way past that point. Given how much we've already increased CO2, it will likely take centuries for any noticeable drop.
I didn't make any promises about the rate of decrease.
Going meaningfully faster will require massive reforestation and maybe some geo-engineering.
I didn't say you made any promises. But I've noticed that in the context of discussions like the one around climate change, this kind of ambiguity has a high chance to poison the debate - IMO because it unnecessarily leaves room for wildly unrealistic interpretations, which then become the assumptions on which subsequent arguments build. Once there are enough opposing assumptions it becomes impossible to bridge the gap, because you can't even tell anymore which faulty assumptions are at the root vs. which ones sprouted from those.
So I'm asking you in the hopes that your argument will be understood correctly, instead of being misleading due to distorted interpretations.
No matter what happens after it, getting to net zero carbon and net zero deforestation is step 1. That does not change - ambiguity or not.
Millenia. If it gets bad enough, human intervention will be necessary. And it's almost certainly going to be bad enough over the next 100 years.
Carbon capture presumably. Something we've only just started experimenting with.
I like the idea of fertilizing the dead parts of the ocean with iron oxide.
Recarbonizing the soil will also help make us more resilient to drought.
It will be interesting to see if the security implications of unreliable fossil fuel supply brings forward the date of peak co2 emissions. Adoption of EVs and solar PV is really spiking, particularly in the developing world.
Its also entirely possible things go back to "normal", like happened after the ME oil shocks of the 70s.
From 1980 -> 1990 the CO2 mole fraction (ppm) rose 20pts. from ~340 to ~360.
From 2022 -> 2025 the CO2 mole fraction (ppm) rose 10pts. from ~416 to ~426.
It seems we'll have the ppm rise 10pts. in 6 years, which is 40% faster than 40 years ago, which seems like an insane increase to me; almost like things are getting MUCH worse not better.
why did you use 2 different time scales? why not 10 or 3 years for both? What is the 10 year increase 2015 to 2025?
edit: I looked up the answer to my question. NOAA reported 25 ppm increase 2015 to 2025, from 400 parts per million (ppm) to over 425 ppm. (A 25% increase from 1980s)
NOAA has nice charts of ppm growth rate by year and decade https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gr.html
What is responsible for the blip? I'm amazed that in the charts you shared there is no "blip" during the COVID lockdowns
The headline buries the lede.
"With emissions from land-use change (such as deforestation) projected to increase slightly this year, total CO2 emissions are projected to be 43.3 billion tonnes in 2026 – up from 42.8 billion tonnes last year."
Total annual CO2 emissions are projected to increase by ~half a billion tonnes as a result of land use changes.
One of the things that COVID make crystal clear to me is that radical changes for the better are much more straightforward than people think, and the only reason they don't happen is the people in charge couldn't be bothered.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/chinas...
There is no excuse for every government in the world to not be covering every bit of rooftop or scrap land with solar. China is losing money on panels at the moment they have such production capacity. Its free money for anyone country who wants to do it.
To be fair. The government tried in my country, and it completely backfired. Because the power grid cannot handle the current load anymore. We've had more frequent blackouts because of it.
Because of this issue, starting next year I will be paying my power company money for surplus solar energy that I give back. Unfortunately, batteries are expensive and impractical to install in our houses.
So now, it's not that popular to buy solar panels unless you can also immediately finance the batteries.
It didn't backfire, the easy sensible solutions were ignored for 15 years until a problem was caused.
And they get away with it because people are so willing to believe ridiculous lies like this. Their newspapers have told them "this is a problem" nearly daily for years. Any problem can immediately be blamed on renewables with no need to wait for expert input. A triumph of propaganda.
I didn't blame renewables themselves. I blame the government for pushing the renewables without also pushing the improvement of the underlying infrastructure.
I don't know what your exact situation is, but for some people you can consider other "battery" options. Almost everyone needs heat in some way (hot water, space heating) so if you're making a lot of excess electricity you could get an electric resistance hot water heater. It can be used to pre-heat your hot water before entering your main hot water tank, or be used to loop through your residence for hydronic heating.
This wouldn't be for everyone but there are other options to chemical batteries depending on whats easy for you to do.
In my case, I'm already using pretty much all my solar energy. So it's not that big of a deal for me honestly.
I'd like a hot water tank like that, but I don't really have the attic space to place it near my boiler. I have a gas powered CV unit, so I already have on demand hot water. Ideally I'd replace it for a hybrid boiler that would work of electricity until demand exceeds electric capability. But it's still well within its lifespan.
Genuine question, because I am pretty ignorant to European laws; if you're producing so much excess that selling it back would actually cost you money, wouldn't this be a pretty good case for something akin to those Tesla Powerwalls?
Not necessarily that brand specifically but something similar?
Belgium. I have solar panels, a battery (Pylontech, not Tesla), and an electric car. Summers are cheap, winters are less expensive than they used to be. The market is asymmetric. If I push onto the net, I get 33% of what I pay when I pull. I also have to pay a fixed cost to be able to do this. I'm currently considering another battery, and maybe cryptomining or so. Selling my electricity is just not worth it.
Folding@Home! If it's power that might go to waste anyway, why not contribute to medical research?
> if you're producing so much excess that selling it back would actually cost you money, wouldn't this be a pretty good case for something akin to those Tesla Powerwalls?
Yes, I mentioned that in my comment. They are quite an investment, and they're impractical to place in many houses. So it's not always an option. I personally have the space. But there's some ongoing projects that make it impossible for me to currently install them.
Again, I don't know the laws in other countries, but in the US, it's generally relatively cheap to build your own powerwall with used electric car batteries. Total investment would be less than ~$2000 (United States dollars) though you would need to check your local laws to see if you're allowed to install it yourself or need a licensed electrician. Might be worth looking into.
Yeah that's likely not allowed, or really doable. Anything beyond a simple plug-in battery requires a licensed installer. There are some small capacity batteries that aren't that expensive, you just need the room for it.
A lot of houses here are terraced, so actual room for a powerwall is very limited. You usually only have a few meters of front and back exterior walls, with big windows. And any apartment owner is going to have to fight with the HoA to install something.
Not saying it's impossible for all houses. But I was replying to the "why don't we cover all buildings with solar" sentiment.
Please don’t play with used electric car batteries.
The LiFePO4 batteries really are't that dangerous. Certainly other types of electric car batteries should be handled with extreme caution.
Please don’t rewire your house if you are not an electrician (less dangerous than a car battery of any chemistry)
This requires navigating complicated permits in most large US cities.
That process is expensive enough to make a purpose built option approximately equal in price. The companies selling this sort of system are pretty smart with pricing. Same for any kind of solar/water storage/etc solution.
No, you likely can not jerry rig this yourself and burn down the neighborhood.
And when your house burns down and the insurance company finds out why, you’re going to be homeless.
> They are quite an investment, and they're impractical to place in many houses
In densely populated areas clearly that can be a problem, for solar and for heat pumps
Could a potential solution be neighborhood scale installations?
We do not be isolated from each other
Netherlands? The problem here is that they incentivised putting solar on peoples roofs, but forgot to increase the capacity of our grid for this completely predictible change.
Thank Mark Rutte and his short sightedness.
Yup, Netherlands.
Kept pushing for renewables and more electrical dependency. And then oops, sorry, the infrastructure can't handle it.
Frequent blackouts? In NL? There were maybe two regional ones in the last year that I can remember. It's all relative of course, but if you offered that level of service to someone in SA they would be extremely happy.
Frequent relative to what was normal for the area, I should've clarified that.
would solar + a house battery not help with grid congestion? Seems like it would mean less power transmitted overall.
They do. And you can guess the influx of battery installation companies that are now pushing their services. It's basically went from solar to batteries.
But they are quite big, so you need good place to put them. That doesn't work too well for people in apartment buildings or a lot of terraced houses.
I'm not the commentor but, in my area storage batteries for solar are not permitted in or near homes. They can be in a shed or away from the home. That doesnt help apartments or attached style homes.
Meanwhile the motorways are untolled and public transit fares rise.
That the motorways are untolled is not the only relevant number. There is also the tax in petrol which is quite far from being 'untolled'. Taxing petrol is much better for privacy in general than a toll for the roads.
Well, it means that people who need petrol are basically paying for EV owners to use the roads. I also worry about privacy but ANPR is everywhere is it not?
I remember paying for tolls with cash, but then, I'm ancient...
The damage to roads by heavy vehicles is the fifth power of the weight. So it’s trucks that are subsidizing your driving an EV and that’s perfectly fine.
Well I don’t have a car and pay for everyone! But ultimately we don’t price externalities well
You buy groceries don’t you? You use 911? You get visited by relatives? You need roads and traffic control even if you stay entirely in the crosswalks. And critically, you need the worst sort of traffic on those roads. Tractor trailers, fire trucks, construction equipment.
Here (New Zealand) we pay road user charges on distance traveled as recorded by the odometer
Of course you can possibly cheat, but mostly we are law abiding
Some people will cheat any system, but in a functioning society, not many.
It really sucks because there is a technical solution to this (load dumping) but I don't think most non-battery controllers support that
Why are you giving it "back"? I'd stop immediately if I had to pay. Can you not set your inverter to "zero-export"?
You can, and that is what's going to happen. We gave back because we used to get reimbursed for it. But it's essentially going to get flipped around now.
I honestly have no clue how I can configure my inverter, there is zero option to configure on my end. So I'd probably have to get the installer here to set that up. The panels were already on my house.
> The government tried in my country
Which country?
The Netherlands. The government pushed solar for years through subsidies.
They, however, kinda forgot to factor in the outdated electrical grid. Even though power companies warned them constantly.
I very much think nobody can be bothered, not just the people in charge. We're all the same people and if there was an actual want by the regular person, the ones in charge in most of the world would be influenced enough to either want it too or have to do something
I, along with many other people, have fitted solar panels on my roof, installed a battery in my loft and replaced my gas boiler with a heat pump. Lots of people are bothered.
I believe the nobody can be bothered is a figure of speech, meaning: way too little.
Unluckily, your noble and exceptional on a global but even on a national scale efforts are not pulling that CO2 chart down.
I bet you had to fight the government or give away some of your produced energy to them to get it done.
No: in Scotland I got a subsidy for the heat pump install capital cost, and I'm on the old feed in tariff scheme that pays me for every unit of energy produced. Including, oddly, energy I consume myself.
It's not so advantageous for new installs because the point of awkwardness in the UK has switched to storage. It's currently possible for some battery owners to make money from arbitrage because the grid hasn't bought enough batteries and north/south links yet.
Not the person your replied to, but I'm in the same position.
No? Unless you consider an HOA the government. Why would the make this hard? I now quite a few that will subsidize it. Fill in some paperwork, submit it along with the invoice and wait a few weeks/months for some free money back.
Olson's Theory of Collective action explains why this isn't true.
Concentrated interests can defeat popular movements. It fits the facts very neatly.
And popular movements can defeat concentrated interests. What do we learn from it?
That it's not sensible to suggest that because something isn't happening that automatically means the majority of people don't want it, even in healthy democracy.
Romantic model of people being heard. 500M speaks more than a single vote. Its a shame. This already disproves your model - however, we should move towards it!
It's well known that everyone hated remote work and demanded they return to the office because they love sitting in traffic so much.
People are in charge, especially in democracies. Not to mention that they are the end consumers, everything produced is eventually for something that people buy, use, eat, burn, throw into the garbage fast. People need to act, not some dedicated father figure (actually servant) making things good for them by a swish of a wand [1], compensating for the consumption and emissions.
[1] As of the wishful thinking that huge capacity solar panels bring joy, one aspect of the several directly related is this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-026-02144-0. An other one of the further ones: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-government-appro.... So big dreams and delegating responsibility are not enough for the people.
It was only for the better if you were in an industry like ours, which even benefited and also allows remote work.
For a huge number of people it ruined their lives. Which is why it’s sensitive to this day. Like the financial bailouts there was a sense that some people benefited while others got ruined.
Bad example to invoke for “beneficial change.” If that’s the answer then it can’t be done in a democracy.
Of course COVID was a disaster, what I mean is that rapid reactions were demonstrated to be a question of political willpower rather that logistical challenges.
* Total reorganization of society was carried out in a matter of weeks.
* Oil is worth negative dollars if society isn't forced to consume.
* Generous payments were made to those who couldn't work, with no one humming and hawing about how it'll be paid for.
If the governments of the world were serious about climate change they would focus on it with that same iron will...
There were plenty of people in our industry who suffered during it. If anything I would say the divide was between introverts and extroverts.
it's not that the people in charge can't be bothered. the people really in charge see the status quo as a profitable situation. it'a "good" for them and bad for everyone else.
Solar in Sweden produce at this hour 2.26 MW out of a capacity of 5000 MW, and it is 4 pm. The highest peak today was around 400 MW.
Prices are also around 100 times higher than what prices are during optimal sunny summer days (right now it sits at around €0.6 per kw/h).
The radical change during COVID was consuming less on a global scale. Simple!
Yes, and to take the point further governments keep promising to reduce CO2 emissions without reducing standards of living which rules out just consuming less.
Wasn't the complete worldwide failure to anything about COVID exactly a high speed analogue io how we've also failed to do anything about climate change?
Sort of, but there is a crucial difference: the lockdowns affected the treats. There is nothing about a rapid rollout of renewable energy in the US and elsewhere that would threaten the supply of McNuggets, the main thing people would see is their energy bills go down as they get plentiful daytime solar and can charge house batteries on cheaper night rates.
A big one. We just need to look at the noaa.gov CO2 chart.
> There is no excuse for every government in the world to not be covering every bit of rooftop or scrap land with solar.
is it intentional hyperbole and you mean something else, or are you making exactly this kind of claim?
because there are many many caveats to add here (even if we go with plan that specifically governments should be doing it)
For start: land with legitimate environmental protection, land where connecting power would be ruinously expensive, area likely to be destroyed by floods and landslides or scheduled to be overbuilt and so on...
Its a bit hyperbolic, but you know what I mean. Build it out very rapidly.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pakistan/@30.1940381,71.49...
You can look at random cities in somewhere like Pakistan and see their rooves are covered in solar from a boom that has occurred in only the past 2-3 years. In comparison I live in a far wealthier country and people hesitate.
Pakistan had country-wide blackout in 2023 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Pakistan_blackout ) and it was part of pattern.
In such situation own supply of power is much more valuable.
And I bet that it was not government run build-out, unless you count failing to have consistently working power grid.
Land is not a constraint in many places, definitely not in the US. Something like half the corn harvest is already used for solar energy in the form of ethanol. PV produces 20x the useful energy that corn for ethanol does, converting that land to PV would produce 3x the electricity we currently consume. On top of that there's other bio-energy crops like soy bean oil, or land that shouldn't be used for farming at all due to unsustainable water practices.
The US, and "many places" is not every country in the world though.
Bio energy crops are a terrible idea and solar would be better where possible.
So we need to paralyze 30% of the economy, that would have gone to bankruptcy within months if not for massive money creation, just to get a -10% in CO2 emissions. Easy. Then, where do you get the next -10%? And the next one? And...
Maybe there is a way to get -10% without paralyzing the economy. But nobody is looking. Or they’ve devices that it’s “too expensive” to invest in tech that will save 10% later.
If we continue to do nothing effective, the economy will be paralyzed by 100%.
We could get to net negative, just with carbon capture, for less than Iran is costing us. (Atmospheric carbon capture, if scaled, would cost ~ $1-2 to capture a gallon of gasoline's CO2 emissions).
Of course, that's one of the dumbest ways to get to carbon neutral. Solar and wind + batteries cost less than internal combustion engines, yet they're somehow "too expensive" and would cripple the economy.
Back when companies were talking about carbon capture seriously, it would have cost $1-2 / gallon of gasoline equivalent to put atmospheric CO2 back in the ground.
That's much less than the Iran war is costing us.
It's extremely inefficient to put solar on buildings, especially compared to utility-scale installations in a field
Why is it so bad? Idk about buildings but I always thought putting them over parking lots would be a good idea since it would provide shade for the cars. I feel like only using it in empty fields has it's own downsides and getting mixed used purpose could be good, but I won't pretend to have thought through this.
Parking lots are even worse than putting them on buildings. You have to build expensive structures that can hold the panels. Buildings at least already exist. It is more expensive, and dangerous, to work on elevated structure than to build low framework. For rooftop solar, the installation is more than the panels.
These days, panels are cheap enough that dropping them straight on the ground makes sense. Empty fields are cheap.
> You have to build expensive structures that can hold the panels.
What is particularly expensive about the structures? It seems like you just need a cheap framework and maybe some channels for wiring. The 'roof' pays for itself.
And then your parking lot offers sheltered parking, valuable on hot days or during precipitation. Think of one of those off-site airport lots that had shelter, so you don't return on a cold night to a car buried in snow.
Maybe, but there is accessibility
I flew in and out of Sydney last week, and the city has a significant number of rooftops covered with solar cells.
So many are finding it doable, even if you are correct that it is "extremely inefficient".
And the heat island effect making heat pumps less efficient, increasing the heat island effect.
Yes. If I can make that choice everyday so can everyone else. But we have to change peoples hearts, not their minds.
> the people in charge couldn't be bothered.
Watching the last decade of American politics has led me to absolutely despise the culture of learned helplessness and attitude of "everything is someone else's fault."
You're absolutely right about the first part. Radical change is much more straightforward. At the individual level there are absolutely things that can be done that are pretty easy Consuming less and recycling more is a huge one. But if the attitude is, "we can't or won't do it individually. We need someone to make us behave," then that's a losing culture. The last American election reassured me that indeed, even if the elite class wants something, no amount of money will override the will of the people. The people just don't want this badly enough.
Which people are you talking about? The ones that voted? The problem with American politics (and Australia provides an easy point to compare against) is that the young do not vote. Consequently, they have no power, and no one in charge is inclined to do anything that will have long-term impact.
Is this pointing fingers at young people and saying, "everything is someone else's fault?"
I am a young person. So no, it is not someone else's fault per se. I am frustrated by my generation, but I also understand it.
The nice thing about blaming someone else is it absolves you of all responsibility to change yourself. Win-win.
It makes no sense to sacrifice yourself if collective action is needed. Democracy allows people to express the direction they want society to go in, and consuming less and causing less fossil fuel emissions is clearly not what the majority of people want.
It is logical to vote and advocate for policies that require everyone to consume less while not individually doing so. Similar to wanting changes in taxing policy while still only paying the minimum required tax.
Someone has to be the example they want to see emulated. Expecting the hoi polloi to have as much imagination as you, when you’re doing nothing with that imagination except complain, is foolishness.
Be the change.
The number of people in my personal and professional life who are willing to make sacrifices as long as they cost them absolutely nothing is simply astounding.
That’s not how sacrifice works.
If you want to stop rewarding bad actors you often have to give up something in return. Such as Amazon Prime. Or McDonald’s French fries.
Well the young votes in 2024 for the current admin, and again this year for the opposite of the current admin, it's not exactly fair to say that they're not showing up to the polls when 2024 and 2026 was driven pretty much by them
>is that the young do not vote.
Because they realized they're minority compared to boomers so they can't outvote them anyway, so then what's the point of going to vote just to see yourself lose.
That's the issue with democracy. The bigger group wins.
Is this true though? The 18-29 range is roughly 15% of the population, boomers are only ~18% themselves. The boomer demographic isn't enough to single-handedly decide the vote, the issue is young voters historically have always had low turnout.
> "we can't or won't do it individually. We need someone to make us behave,"
Well, we need to be organized around a plan, such as electrifying power generation and transport. Since government already heavily manages those things, it's not a matter of individual behavior, apart from the behavior of voting, and generally expressing approval of policies.
I do think you should stop with the guilt-tripping of individuals, and I do think that they're powerless - without organization - and that attacking consumers is wrong-headed. To complain about consuming says that the problem is that we have industry and nice things, but that's incorrect. It's a hard sell, firstly because people like nice things and think they're entitled to them, and secondly because they're right about that. The problem is that we have emissions, not that we have consumer goods.
Yes, if anything they want the opposite. Cheap gas.
> But if the attitude is, "we can't or won't do it individually. We need someone to make us behave," then that's a losing culture.
This is every culture. We address it structurally or not at all.
> The last American election reassured me that indeed, even if the elite class wants something, no amount of money will override the will of the people.
:|
The event after which dozens of governments were destabilized and incumbents were ousted from power all over the world… convinced you that radical change is easy…?
The United States was a couple feet from an actual coup dude.
Leaving aside whether they were, and whether all countries are necessarily equally unstable.
Would that not have been different? I certainly haven't heard of a suspected coup by disgruntled democrats and/or minorities.
I suspect the coup you allude to would have amounted to a coup of the people in power to stay in power. Not a popular, armed uprising. So I don't see how it's relevant to the point you are trying to make.
Is instability only instability if it's the right shape or color or flavor?
The point is that the radical change that was "so easy" during COVID was 1) forced by an emergency, and 2) triggered a stream of emergencies that we're still dealing with today across the entire world.
If GP meant "radical change is easy so long as you can accept a stream of emergencies with uncertain outcomes for an indefinite amount of time into the future," then sure... radical change is easy!
Straightforward isn't the same as easy, it's just that the difficulty of a transition to a carbon free economy is heavily overestimated
Sure, if you’re willing to trample on civil rights & use extraordinary social pressure to deride previously mundane activities as equivalent to murder!
I'm surely not and still I think it's overestimated, just like the climate crisis is downplayed, like the health effects of tobbaco, lead and asbestos were hidden, because it hurts quarterly reports to focus effort and thus money on things other than making more money.
So in other words: radical change was almost easy?
"Easy" is kinda a "for whom?" question.
The pandemic was easy for me to live through because I'm just like that; and it was easy for the disease to evolve in a wet market*…
… but that whole "flatten the curve" thing was because it came within a hair's breadth of overwhelming national healthcare systems and this was obviously a risk to be mitigated before the event.
* this happened in wet markets many times, not just COVID; and this will happen again if steps aren't taken to mitigate that, no matter what you may think about lab leaks which do also happen sometimes because humans are fallible and do make mistakes on occasion.
If you think the "killing the people in charge" is the hard part of radical change, then you haven't read much history.
Given how the much-vaunted "checks and balances" seem to be, well, rather unbalanced ... and how the country is so, so, partisan over "their own side" that politics is mainly theatre... It seems like the US doesn't really need any italics in that statement. From an outside perspective, it seems fairly vulnerable to fascism actually.
In any event, over here in the UK there's a real wind-power push (with the surrounding water being so shallow that off-shore wind-farms are very possible), but even in these extended latitudes, solar power is viable and the government currently make them VAT-free for installs, with no planning requirements because they fall under 'permitted development'. Renewable energy was at ~56% Q2 2026.
The UK government set up 'Great British Energy' with £8.3B of funding for coinvestment with private firms in various clean energy generation. I think the UK is definitely doing its part.
First past the posts for a nationwide position (president) ensures two party polarization even without any external influences (and there are many). In the UK (and Canada) you use fptp for the lower house but due to regional differences that can still create multiple parties and more viewpoints within parties. Regional differences get obliterated with a nationwide fptp position, making every act of compromise a betrayal.
It's not perfect in the UK, I suspect we could have avoided Brexit with a proportional system.
Whether that is a good thing or depends on whether you were in favour of Brexit or against.
I actually think we would have got Brexit faster. Cameron decided on the referendum because the Conservatives were losing voters to UKIP. With proportional representation voters would have turned into seats much more effectively. UKIP for 13% of the vote in 2015 - with proportional representationism they would have been the third biggest party.
On the other hand the Lib Dems would have been stronger under PR. That could have put a lid on it.
They would have had more seats, but would have taken them almost entirely from other pro-EU parties.
Remember this was at pretty much the peak of support for the EU among MPs and the big parties - that is why Cameron thought he would win the referendum.
Labour had become firmly pro-EU, except for a few old socialists like Dennis Skinner. The Conservative euro-sceptics were still a small group. The SNP was doing very well. The SNP alone would have had about 25 fewer seats under PR and that alone have wiped out about half the gain the Lib Dems would have had.
>Labour had become firmly pro-EU
Barely, their leader at the time had been criticising the EU for a long time and I'm still not convinced he voted remain.
oh it’s far from perfect. it’s better, though
> The United States was a couple feet from an actual coup dude.
How does this square with the oft-repeated line that the Second Amendment is useless when the government has tanks, bombs, and aircraft carriers? January 6th was a bunch of unarmed boomers. If you really think the government was >this< close to being overthrown by them, then you might as well pack it up. The US wouldn't stand a chance if a couple thousand armed Russian or Chinese nationals decided to show up to the Capitol.
That statement assumes that the government orders the military to fight against the coup. The commander in chief would not order it, and had the coup succeeded, the Congress would certify that the commander should continue in power.
At that point it would require the top generals to stage a coup of their own. Which they probably would have. But I'm glad we didn't find out.
The military is extremely strong and would easily show off foreign invaders. But the Constitution didn't foresee an elected but corrupt executive overthrowing the government. That is a blind spot they reasonably didn't anticipate.
Go read some books on how coups work and the numerous historical examples. This comment is just too full of either bad faith or too-far-afield misunderstandings to be rectified in an HN comment thread.
In my mind Jan 6 was not the most dangerous moment regarding the transfer of power. That came earlier when Trump was trying to get the DoJ to declare voting irregularities, ie "Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen." His acting AG at the time refused, and his predecessor Barr had refused to get involved as well. Had Trump had the forethought to pack DoJ with toadies (like he has now) things could have gone very differently.
You really don't see why the US would be less willing to shoot its own citizens than those of an invading nation?
> One of the things that COVID make crystal clear to me is that radical changes for the better are much more straightforward than people think
"Radical changes for the better" ??? During COVID, it was the suspension of law and constitution, an authoritarian regime that forced people to change their behavior, and it completely trashed the economy in a way that we are still recovering from today, let alone the debt it generated. People like you are totally nuts for even suggesting anything like this.
Now tell us how you feel about green M&Ms.
What's interesting in the numbers is that despite the relative political philosophy and fanfare, on a % basis.. the US reduced emissions about the same as the EU and both reduced them more than China.
This is somewhat to be expected though, because energy use in China is still growing (from industrialization and catch-up in living standards) and barely at European levels, while European/US energy use has been decreasing slightly already (efficiency improvements, electrification, low/negative growth for energyy-heavy industries).
US energy use is ~2x higher per person though than Europe or China, giving much more room for reductions.
So you'd expect emission changes in China to require the most "effort" (difficult to cut emissions while energy demand/use grows), followed by Europe (where energy use is already down to current chinese levels and demand/use is decreasing), while making progress in the US is by far the easiest since you very high baseline makes it much easier to cut/reduce.
This tracks with political reality I feel.
Energy use: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?tab=line&count...
CO2/capita (basically the same): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
If it is territorial emissions, couldn't it also be that EU and US consume more products made and exported from China?
The CO2/capita in my comparison is already consumption based, i.e. trade-adjusted.
For specific countries like Switzerland this makes a big difference (times 3!), but for the US and even China this matters surprisingly little.
Here's the unadjusted numbers: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...
Well we have had 2 years of orange man with the rollback of climate related consumer incentives/tax credits, paying an offshore wind farm developer to go away, pushing more fossil fuel friendly legislation, etc.
And yet we end up basically neck-and-neck with the EU that is almost religious about all things green.
So that to me is surprising and brings into question how much government policy matters vs relative global market costs.
I do agree with you that things could've went even worse given Trump2.
But its important to keep in mind that only the relative change stayed similar. US is worse than EU/China by a factor of 2 (in emissions/capita); under a "good" government, I'd hope for that factor to actually decrease instead of just staying the same.
Trump2 already effected climate-negative outcomes; among other things, DOGE cut/cancelled some big projects for "green concrete" which is a significant emission source.
But policy decisions like this can take a long time until they are visible in emission curves. You could argue that only in the last years we've started reaping the investments from German (and to a lesser degree Japanese) government investments into solar power back in the early 2000's, and the whole solar boom might have only come half a decade later without those (so calling it a triumph of market forces over policy might be highly reductive).
I do question if some of the US energy intensity factor is again economic in two ways - we are wealthier/higher income, and also have lower energy costs because we are an energy producer.
US emissions per capita are somewhere around the average of OPEC countries for example.
I can't quite find this dataset but would be interesting to compare say rich EU country households making > 100K EUR to a similar US cohort what that would look like.
Luxembourg, Switzerland, Norway and Austria are all similar in adjusted median income and all of those emit significantly less, so there should be room for improvement.
Norway cheats with overabundant hydro though, and population density is admittedly higher.
I think comparing income cohorts would be very difficult because you just don't have the data to accurately assign emissions (e.g. just consider emissions from roadworks/public infrastructure: How to even split those?)
Median income (living cost adjusted): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-income-after-tax-l...
Per capita emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
Nothing neck-to-neck about this, US emissions are >twice the EU per capita emissions.
It's like saying "I beat Tom Brady / Kobe / Ronaldo / etc. in their training commitment, because I increased traininig time by 1000% since starting to go running after only sitting on a sofa all day, but they essentially stayed at the same level. Losers."
TBF More reflection of how accounting standards distorts reality. It's limited report (CO2 only) with expected biases/quirks of current accounting frameworks that defacto launder numbers to reward fossil exporters while punishing clean energy producers.
Points out US headline CO2 emissions down from energy generation using several proxies (looks like no real territorial measurements). That on paper, US less coal more nat gas = less CO2 (spreadsheet true), but in reality US natgas leaks / fugitive methane emissions like magnitude worse than coal.
Broadly also reinforces that US... the worlds largest fossil producer/exporter in last 10 years... somehow should not be penalized for any of the extraction which gets shifted to consumers. Meanwhile PRC.... the worlds largest renewable producer/exporter, somehow should be penalized for making goods that averts emissions, while averted emission credits to consumers. Because world of difference between extracting raw inputs vs raw energy, processing, then packaging inside a carboard box vs a metal barrel.
This basically accounting outcome of fossil lobby fighting over geopolitical / territorial accounting standards (scope 1-4 emissions) 20 years ago which shapes science and reporting downstream. Alternative framing of Gt of emissions per year.
Current account standards
US: 5Gt, PRC: 13Gt
Adjust for fossil trade
US+2: 7Gt, PRC-3: 10Gt
Adjust for renewable displacement
US+0: 7Gt, PRC-15: -5Gt (net negative)
EVERY YEAR, PRC produces ~500GW of solar, whose 30 year operational life will displace 40 billion barrels of oil equivalent, i.e. 100m+ barrels per day, more than annual global oil consumption. Philosophically, and in practice, every year PRC is printing enough solar to avert an entire years of oil from being used in future, which functionally makes PRC emission negative in terms of emission + avoiding emission. But under current standards they're just polluting with solar overcapacity.
> EVERY YEAR, PRC produces ~500GW of solar, whose 30 year operational life will displace 40 billion barrels of oil equivalent, [...]
Just to add: "30 year operational life" doesn't mean the panels will break after 30 years. All signs point to solar panels producing power indefinitely, with efficiency lowering to ~70-80%.
> EVERY YEAR, PRC produces ~500GW of solar, whose 30 year operational life will displace 40 billion barrels of oil equivalent, i.e. 100m+ barrels per da
That sounds interesting. But is it true? What and where is the evidence?
Do you believe industrial reports and all the western accusations of PRC solar overproduction. According to them PRC makes 500-600GW of solar, 85% of global. Half domestic, half export. Domestic install can be validated with geospatial, export can be validated with bilateral trade data. Are there fulsome accounts, I don't know, but no one serious/ly questions these figures.
Then its simple napkin math, 550gw solar, 30 year life span, 17% capacity factor = 820 Twh/yr in primary energy equivalent (substitution method 1 unit of solar = 3 unit of oil @ 35% work efficiency). Or about 4 million barrel per day worth, over 30 years... 44 billion barrels over life time, about 1.2 years of total global oil consumption. Translate that to emissions averted... 44 barrel billion oil is ~15Gt of emissions, the equivalent carbon biomass sink to absorb that much emissions is 500,000 sqkm of Amazon, i.e 7% of Amazon rain forest.
Frame it in flow instead of stock terms, PRC solar generates 4mbd of oil equivalent per day, 1.4b per year, 0.6Gt co2, which would take equivalent of 1,200,000 sqkm (25%) of Amazon at annual absorption rate.
This all basic downstream math if you accept approximate consensus on PRC solar production. If nothing changes, PRC on trend to do this every year. PRC has solar capacity to do 2x this. Again, just solar, not other renewables. Unless numbers off by magnitudes, there isn't any interpretation where PRC renewable is not single handily the greatest emission AVERTING force - it does not reduce emissions but it prevents more emissions than world capable of reducing. Global energy demand is only going to increase, west tightening belts to drop fossil from 100% to 80% is rounding error vs PRC preventing fossil from 100% to 200%.
In pictures like the ones in https://www.admiddleeast.com/story/worlds-biggest-solar-farm...?
If you don't trust those (which is somewhat fair these days, given how easy it's become to generate fake imagery), you can always go there and see them for yourself. Or, since they're visible from space, launch a satellite to take your own photos.
Wierd
I never said I did not believe, did not trust.
I just want a source
Too much to ask I guess...
I'd argue that China has done far more work than the US have on reducing emissions. It's just that they also have a large rural population that's rapidly modernizing at the same time, and the increased energy use per capita from that is overlapping with their emissions reduction. The EU and US both went through that stage decades earlier, and it seems unfair to hold it against China for doing the same.
For example, there's been a massive drop in overall poverty in China over the past two or three decades [1]. Two decades ago they had tens of millions of people that didn't even have access to electricity [2], and half a billion people without access to clean cooking fuels [3]. They've had a 3.4x increase in car ownership [4] in the same period that the US had a 1.2x increase [5], a significant and growing share of which are electric [6] compared to the small and not growing share in the US.
On the energy generation side, China has built 5x as much low-carbon generation the US has over the past decade [7] despite the latter's economy being 50% bigger, and their CO2 per kWh is dropping faster [8] (especially over the past two years...).
It looks to me that the bulk of the US's emission reduction has come from switching from coal to gas, which is happening purely due to their relative costs. I guess it is a real reduction in emissions, but it's not decarbonizing. What happens when they run out of coal plants to convert? I feel like the US has just got lucky with timing and the cost of coal vs gas, whereas China has got unlucky with the timing of their standard of living improvements.
The top level "x% change in emissions" figure is too simple to capture any of this detail. I think it's mostly a coincidence that the figure is about the same for the three groups at the moment -- at some point China will finish raising its standard of living to western levels everywhere and, if nothing else changes, their emissions will start heading downwards faster then everyone else's. People will probably be surprised but the indications are that it's already happening, it's just being hidden for now.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?countr... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-population-w... [3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/access-to-clean-fuels-and... [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/285306/number-of-car-own... [5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle... [6] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electric-car-sales-share?... [7] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&... [8] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...
(As for the EU, I didn't really look at many of their stats. My general feel is that they've spent a reasonable amount of effort, but a lot of it has been on efficiency improvements -- which are welcome, and they benefit everybody which means that some of their effort unfairly shows up under other people's figures, but which might actually have been counter-productive [9] without the associated actual decarbonization of electricity generation.)
> India’s emissions are projected to increase by 4.4% – higher than the 3.5%
seems india is the only one still increase in major eco? conside the air polluion recently. https://www.cnbctv18.com/india/environment/99-of-world-100-m...
99 of world's 100 most polluted cities are in India
do they even have a plan?
They have been building out a lot of solar and batteries (target 500 GW by 2030). They also have 7-9 nuclear reactors currently under construction. India has also electrified 100% of their massive railway network.
As for that 99/100 stat, it’s seasonal. If you average that across the year the number in India is 66/100. Not anything to celebrate but not nearly as bad.
Looking towards innovations that accelerate the energy transition, I have a question for the startups and founders on hackernews:
Is anyone working on a "solid state" or "caloric" (I'm not sure which terms is the best to use) heat pump and do you have any insight on when these will come to market?
I want to replace the gas boiler in my apartment wiht a heat pump, but it will most likely have to be wall mounted and produce too much noise, which makes is infeasible. I've been reading about how future heat pumps will use "magnetocaloric, electrocaloric, elastocaloric, and barocaloric" effects to shrink the size, weight and noise of a heat pump.
The problem, I'm afraid, isn't going to go away with different kinds of heat pumps.
Most of the noise of a heat pump comes from the fan. The entire proposition of a heat pump is that you use the heat in the atmosphere -- which still exists, even on a cold day. But that means moving a lot of air past the radiator.
You can replace the compressor with a variety of mechanisms, but even if they were silent (like a Peltier device), the heat exchanger is still going to be noisier than a gas flame.
heat exchangers against solid / liquid "heat stores" (aka ground/water) do not need large fans and huge airflow, just pumps - and they are comparatively extremely quiet. Granted, boreholes aren't cheap either. And retrofitting isn't helped by that either.
But heat pumps needn't be noisy. Ground source / water source heat pumps are extremely efficient and extremely quiet. For new developments like block of flats (US "condos"?) those "are the ones".
Shallow boreholes are pretty cheap, but trenching can get expensive real quick.
Tech Ingredients used a borehole they dug for $300. The trick is they used soil amendments to increase thermal conductivity, allowing use of a small low-cost borehole.
This is good, but also total emissions still expected to increase? Yeesh
More work needed to fix that, but we are on the right track. You can't get to lower total emissions without all the steps in between. First lower the rate of increase compared to the previous year (done), then decrease the rate compared to the previous year, (done for this year anyway, time will tell), then decrease the rate even more every year, until finally we get to net negative (a very hard place to get - not impossible, the earth is naturally slightly net negative)
We're on the very, very wrong track, but it could have been even worse.
CO2 concentration follows an exponential curve. And it remains for very long.
We will be cornerded into geo-engineering, enough said.
Let's hope it's not just a temporary dip, I'm not holding my breath but we could really do with some longer term good news at the moment.
The link says it's a temporary dip.
It says the report "finds that clean energy growth is not yet fast enough for a durable decline in global fossil CO2 emissions" and quotes the report's lead as “A decline in fossil CO2 emissions is encouraging, but a reduction driven partly by geopolitical shocks is not a sustainable climate solution.”
The most optimistic note was “If further acceleration of clean technology deployment can be supported through time, a sustained peak and decline in global CO2 emissions could be a few years away.”
> but a reduction driven partly by geopolitical shocks is not a sustainable climate solution.
Oh, but it is. The two most recent major conflicts resulted in fossil fuel related infrastructure to be destroyed - particularly Qatar had a huge chunk of its natural gas infrastructure irrecoverably damaged.
It's going to take close to two years to rebuild it, but that can only really start after the hostilities cease.
On a different front datacentre buildout created a huge backlog for natural gas turbines, making them for the first time everunattractive for peak shaving compared to batteries.
And even after it's resolved it's a friendly reminder that supply chains are fragile.
Yeah; the refinery strikes (both sides) are the only part of the Iran war that's doing anyone any good.
I predict we'll spend 10x what it would cost to de-carbonize the US economy over there just to protect historical CO2 emission growth curves.
> If further acceleration of clean technology deployment can be supported through time, a sustained peak and decline in global CO2 emissions could be a few years away
Unfortunately the opposite might happen in the next years. It seems this year China is starting to export less solar panels: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-18/china-sol... . Despite the low prices, some countries are investing less in solar panels and wind turbines for many different reasons. Other technologies might come but are slower to develop.
We don’t need to invest an ever increasing amount in solar panels to transition because existing panels degrade slowly. Scale things out another 20 years and at current rates solar will have squeezed out just about everything else.
Sure, we can always move faster but hydro and wind limit how much solar we actually need. Batteries have cycle limits so even if wind is unreliable producing power at 2AM just to increase battery lifetimes makes sense.
20TW is roughly current world marketed energy consumption. But, on Earth, solar power plants have a capacity factor around 20%, so you need 100TW of solar panels to produce those 20TW. Moreover, we should expect human energy consumption to continue to grow, not suddenly become constant, especially since solar energy is so much cheaper than older sources of energy; 20 years from now we might need four times that much, depending on how AI works out. In that case you'd need to produce about 400TW÷20 years = 20TW/year.
According to the IEA, we currently have only about 1.5TW/year of manufacturing capacity: https://www.solarplaza.com/resource/13581/article-global-sol...
Hydropower is already scaled nearly to its limits, and wind energy is useful and important, but is dropping in cost much more slowly than solar, and it's tapping a much smaller resource.
> 20TW is roughly current world marketed energy consumption. But, on Earth, solar power plants have a capacity factor around 20%, so you need 100TW of solar panels to produce those 20TW.
This confuses primary energy with work. 1 TWh of solar can displace multiple TWh of primary energy. This depends on details, of course; in some cases it makes sense to directly convert solar output resistively to heat even if that takes a second law loss.
This is a good point; in particular, electrification of transport will reduce the figure substantially, especially because car engines are usually less than 30% efficient. But electrical power is already about a third of the total, isn't it?
No, 31,746.92 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2025 / 365 / 24h = 3.6TW. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
3.6 / 20 = 18%.
You're right, that's less than a fifth. Thank you.
So, the other 82% of primary energy consumption could be reduced by about 60%, except for the part that's already used for heating (how much is that?), and by about 75% when it's being burned in the inefficient internal combustion engines commonly used in cars and the like.
Ballparking, this seems like fueling the current economy purely with electricity, and counting "primary energy usage" as the output in the case of solar panels (rather than "the sunlight hitting them" as you advocated elsewhere, which is a defensible convention but not one anyone uses) would cut primary energy usage by about a third.
> except for the part that's already used for heating
Heat pumps are ~300% efficient on average across most of the globe outside of a few areas. Even just cooking with resistive heating uses less fuel because you’re not heating up air to supply oxygen to a fire.
Also, reducing fossil fuel refining and transportation is a surprisingly large fraction of that primary energy supply with 40% of global shipping by weight being oil. Think of it this way if you’re buying 10 gallons of gasoline a week that’s 6.2 lb/g * 10 * 52 = 62 * 52= 3,200 lb a year in fuel ie the weight a car shipped from some oil field to a refinery then to you.
You have some good points, but I think there are some flaws in them.
Heat pumps are probably now economic only in niche scenarios, even at current PV module prices; they cost dramatically more than the solar panels they displace. And they're really only applicable to climate control, not to other applications of heat, such as cement kilns, electric arc furnaces, or baking bread. I do use one to heat my bedroom in winter, but I don't think they are really relevant to the future.
It is true that electric cooking is more efficient, especially when the heat can be produced in close proximity to the food, as in induction stovetops, crockpots, and microwave ovens. I don't know how to size this, but I don't think it's very large.
40% of global shipping by weight is fossil fuels, not just oil (https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/the-happiest-number-ive-...) but that's by weight, not energy consumption. The vast majority of fossil-fuel shipping is shipped by shipping ships, not by railroads, tractor-trailer trucks, stepvans, small boats, or personal cars, and, if I'm understanding https://unstats.un.org/unsd/energystats/pubs/documents/2026p... correctly, only 2.5% of the global total energy supply ("TES", the UN's term for world marketed energy consumption) is the bunker fuel that powers those ships. (I had guessed 3%.)
So, completely eliminating fossil fuel shipping will save about 1% of total energy consumption.
> I don't know how to size this, but I don't think it's very large.
It covers every use case for high temperatures and more impactful the higher temperature you want. Melting iron using fossil fuels at 1,500 °C also means wasting high temperature exhaust air.
It's quite common in such situations to use the outgoing hot gas to preheat incoming air. This kind of technology goes back more than a century. This cannot be 100% effective (entropy created in the process has to go somewhere) but can greatly reduce the energy needed.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/cowper-stov...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_preheater#Regenerative_air...
Pre heating air is very much a thing, but it only buys you so much.
Really high efficiency home furnaces require cooling the exhaust gasses low enough for water to condense but that low temperature heat isn’t particularly useful at a smelter where low relatively temperature waste heat is plentiful.
There’s other issues like introducing drag which requires either a large chimney with hot exhaust gasses or fans to force airflow etc.
In the end the only thing that matters for these calculations is relative efficiency where electricity wins by ~20% or so in the real world plus fuel lost in transit.
The better home tech analogy would be air-to-air heat exchangers. These exhaust air from inside a house, replacing it with a stream of outside air, and transfer almost all the difference in heat energy from one stream to the other.
At home, air to air heat exchangers run into humidity issues. If it’s 100f at 98% humidity you don’t get even vaguely close to 70f 50% humidity by using cooler internal air to cool hot humid air.
> that low temperature heat isn’t particularly useful at a smelter where low relatively temperature waste heat is plentiful.
I suggest you read through the links pfdietz provided, and understand them, because you are mistaken about this point. It is not a peripheral issue; it has been central to thermodynamic machinery since Stirling.
Feel free to quote any part that actually disagrees with what I said.
Coal is the only fossil fuel with minimal hydrogen turning O2 into H20. Latent heat of vaporization for water is very high, but you can only extract that by cooling the exhaust gasses below its dew point. Preheating alone doesn’t let you extract that energy from exhaust gasses.
You may be computing Carnot efficiency backwards; heat pumps are less impactful for producing higher temperatures, not more. Also, there are practical difficulties with trying to build a heat pump that can function at several hundred degrees.
Aside from pfdietz's good point about regenerators, resistively melting iron with electricity doesn't require any high-temperature exhaust air.
> 20TW is roughly current world marketed energy consumption
Primary energy for solar panels is the sunlight hitting them not the electricity they produce. Fossil fuels care about primary energy because you pay for the fuel. Further, roughly 40% of global shipping by weight is moving fossil fuels.
> solar power plants have a capacity factor around 20%
This varies widely by technology and location. ~30% isn’t uncommon in the US. Capacity factor 29.7% (average 2015–2017, MS1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Signal_Solar tracking vs fixed makes a huge difference. Rooftop solar sucks vs grid scale in terms of production but you save on grid transmission losses the numbers aren’t directly equivalent.
Further PV panels degrade every year, but you see 30 year old panels still in use.
> human energy consumption to continue to grow > 20 years from now we might need four times that much
Population growth + Electric cars + AI changed US electricity consumption from 4.03TWh in 2018 to 4.19 TWH in 2025. That’s less than 0.6% per year, suggesting 4x increase in primary energy consumption from AI in 20 years as a meaningful possibility is insane. https://statbase.org/data/usa-electricity-consumption/
Yes, single-axis trackers often get capacity factor over 25%, and solar farms in sunny places very commonly use them. But the picture isn't so sunny everywhere; solar capacity factor in China, Germany, and the Netherlands has been a dismal 10%. So 20% is a ballpark figure, and it's possible to do better under favorable circumstance.
It is true that it would be insane to expect the US to lead the transition to abundant renewable energy, but that doesn't mean the transition won't happen. It just means it will leave the US behind. The US's electricity production (though not energy production!) doubled in the 01960s and then stopped growing, and China's electricity production has doubled over the last 10 years and continues to grow rapidly. Worldwide, we should expect cheap solar panels to lower the cost of electrical energy, opening up new uses for it.
The Netherlands is an extreme edge case for solar. They are focusing on wind for obvious reasons so it’s a moot point. Most of the north is low enough population density that hydropower is plentiful for their needs.
Solar capacity factor is a function of how much sunlight hits a specific area. China has some terrible locations but tends to put the big farms where they are quite efficient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China#/media/Fi...
The Netherlands is much worse than average, but they're not an extreme edge case. Norway is the extreme edge case, and they're also focusing on wind. (Parts of Antarctica get more sun than most of Norway.)
I have no idea why China has such a dismal capacity factor! I suspect they have a shortage of transmission capacity between the sunny places and the populated places. Let me know if you find out.
NYC is 40° N, Fairbanks, Alaska is 64.8° N.
So Amsterdam in the Netherlands at 52.4° N is half way between them.
Those latitudes are pretty close, but that doesn't tell the whole story.
At noon on the equinox, Amsterdam gets 80% of the sun that NYC does, and Fairbanks gets 56%. But, at noon on the winter solstice, Amsterdam gets 55% of the sun that NYC does, and Fairbanks gets 7% ofthesun NYC gets. So, in terms of insolation above the atmosphere, Fairbanks is dramatically worse than Amsterdam. If the sine of the sun elevation was the whole story, to survive the winter on solar, you'd need 8× the solar panels in Fairbanks you'd need in Amsterdam, which would need less than 2× New York.
In fact, cloud cover is very important, and I think it narrows the gap a bit.
> In that case you'd need to produce about 400TW÷20 years = 20TW/year. According to the IEA, we currently have only about 1.5TW/year of manufacturing capacity: https://www.solarplaza.com/resource/13581/article-global-sol...
So, at the current production rate, we can produce solar cells that deliver 20TW/year in about 15 years. Eventually, we’ll have to replace lots of them, but given that the rapid growth of installed panels makes the majority of panels new, I think we can mostly ignore that in this calculation.
We need to produce enough solar panels to generate net new 20TW every year; 20TW/year as a measure of energy production doesn't make sense as the Watt is a measure of energy transfer. In other words, we need to increase production by 20TW per year every year for 20 years in order to hit the 400TW that we need to be producing all the time (in this model where global energy demand is 400TW)
Thank you. One minor detail: producing 20TW per year is in order to have 400TW of generation capacity installed, but only producing 80TW because of the 20% capacity factor.
Your stated 200 was primarily energy not energy consumption.
~30% if you’re using tracking panels in a good location. Rooftop solar is terrible, and is mostly a result of subsidies not economic efficiency.
I think you mean "primary energy", and I agree about that; we discussed that in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50439371.
Rooftop solar has both economic efficiency disadvantages (generally poorer siting, being dangerous and expensive to install) and advantages (no transmission losses, no added load on transmission and distribution systems, and in some cases elimination of inverters and other power electronics). It isn't clear to me whether it comes out to be overall more or less economically efficient, and I suspect that it probably depends on local circumstances, and especially on whether you can reduce or eliminate inverters.
However, the most persuasive case for rooftop solar is basically political rather than economic: it reduces or eliminates the building's dependency on utility-scale generation, transmission, and distribution. This dependency can bite in the form of unreliability (like California's intentional power outages during the now-yearly summer brushfire season, or the "load shedding" rolling blackouts South Africa had for several months last year), in the form of extortionate energy prices due to monopoly rent extraction (California being the poster child here at the moment, extorting 29.75¢/kWh from resident), or in the form of systemic fragility (currently there are blackouts in Kyiv because Russia is blowing up the power stations, which amplifies the coercive effect of Russian attacks on Ukraine).
I want to say, I greatly appreciate your help in getting these figures right.
> It isn't clear to me
That’s because there were so many rooftop solar subsidies, removing them gutted rooftop insulations. You will see many highly optimistic calculations because people are trying to sell you solar panels but they leave out details like the time cost of money. 30k upfront at even 5% annual return is a lot of money let alone borrowing 30k at 6%.
That may be true wherever you live (probably in the US), but it isn't true worldwide. US$30k buys 200 kilowatts (peak) of unsubsidized mainstream photovoltaic modules. Even in the US it buys half that. That's a utility-scale power plant, not a household rooftop installation.
Meanwhile, household rooftop and balcony installations continue to proliferate rapidly in Pakistan, Germany, Australia, here in Argentina, etc.
Photovoltaic modules on their own don’t do anything. Planning, permits, installation, inverters, etc are all dramatically more expensive in rooftop solar. Grid scale also doesn’t need to worry about when the roof gets replaced or additional leaks.
But you don’t need to take my word for it even with a 30+% subsidy on most instillations residential solar in the US only represents ~15% of total solar capacity. Globally the numbers are even lower.
Photovoltaic modules produce a voltage or current on their own. It's true that you have to connect them to a load for them to do work such as washing your laundry or heating your oven, but that load can be very cheap. Like, a wire. None of the dramatically more expensive things you're naming are necessary.
In the US you have a negative 100% subsidy on solar panels in the form of tariffs, and the planning and permit prices you're talking about are additional similar negative subsidies, not actual costs. They don't exist in Pakistan, and they could be set to zero tomorrow at the stroke of a pen, which is what has happened with balcony solar in several European countries. That's why you're talking about nonsense prices like US$30k for a household system.
In the end it depends on how you transition. I worked a lot on this subject. If solar panels last 20 years, or 30 or 60 it's not the same thing obviously. But in some places they're already replacing them, not because the panels can't continue to produce, but because they have more efficient panels and they don't have an infinite amount of territory to build new solar farms. Currently most studies use 30 years for the lifespan of solar panels.
Now what people don't see is to build these panels we use fossil fuels directly and indirectly. The GW/y we're able to install is highly correlated to our use of fossil fuels. The only way to achieve that transition is to use clean energy to build more energy capacity, so that at the end of the transition clean energy is able to sustain a world with clean energy (we can ignore a bit of fossil fuels here and there, we'll say it's mostly clean energy).
If today, we stopped increasing the amount of solar panels installed per year, the total amount of solar panels installed would continue to increase for 30 years (with that lifespan hypothesis). And then be stable, IF at this point, we produce enough energy to sustain the system. I did the math on this some years ago, and I was really not confident we could reach the numbers. We would not be producing enough energy in 30 years to achieve the transition. In all my models, if we start to reduce our CO2 emissions, we start to reduce our production of solar panels, which stops the transition. Obviously I only talked about solar panels but it applies to all other sources of energy, wind and nuclear included.
Basically there is no simple solution to replace fossil fuels, but there are "less worst" scenarios depending on the amount of wind / solar / nuclear / hydro etc. countries do.
Your model counts how many panels we have to build. But a lot of what the existing panels produce is wasted today. If we could store it, we would get more useful energy out of the panels we already have, and we would need fewer new ones. That is why I think the bottleneck isn't the panels, it's the batteries. Panels produce when the sun is up and overproduce, which leads to negative prices for the producers. Being able to store the energy produced during low demand helps stabilize the system, gives cheaper energy prices and a fair price to producers. What I'm actually saying is that building more solar panels makes no sense without storing the energy. Only by doing that will we manage to become more independent from fossil fuels, because then energy from renewable sources can meet demand much better.
It's a shame only China can produce solar panels...
Of course all the dips look temporary until one of them doesn't revert. That's probably not this one, of course, but it might be.
CO2 emissions will decrease in the next decades but mostly because of demographics. People get older and tend to pollute less, growth is slower. It happened to Europe and it'll happen to China sooner than we think when we look at their pyramid of age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
I think we shouldn't mix (1) negative events in the world which impact CO2 emissions (covid, Ukraine war, Iran war etc.), (2) with "normal" events such as population decline in polluting countries, (3) with an actual coordinated and effective action against global warming.
(1) and (2) can have a large impact on CO2 emissions. (3) is more difficult to notice.
The world population is still increasing in 2027. And the total population is pretty much irrelevant anyways. Rich people emit so much more CO2 than poor people that they number of poor people is just a rounding error. The rich are getting richer and poor people are continuing to join the middle class. Carbon intensive activities such as flying are increasing at a rapid rate. People are flying more in 2026 despite the cost of fuel going up.
I don't know if it's irrelevant. The rich are only rich after all because there's everyone else. If there weren't millions of poor people who have not much choice but to work for nothing in other countries, the rich wouldn't be so rich. If there weren't poor people to get into deep credit card debt and overspending, the rich wouldn't be so rich.
Although it's not popular to say so, the entire system is acting here and it can't readily be decoupled. Even when it comes to flying - the rich wouldn't do so much flying if there weren't poor people working for nothing in resorts and gig work in tourism.
That's not to say I think poor people are to blame. But it does mean that increasing the number of poor and their resulting desperation gives the rich something to feed off of.
Poor people don't buy stuff, they don't make rich people rich. The global poor are also pretty useless as labor too in this modern economy: the bottom billion of the population are mostly illiterate. The The global poor also don't have credit so can't overspend.
(The American poor are solidly upper middle class by global standards)
There are other reasons. Solar and batteries now have become so cheap that there is financial incentive to use them. The war on Iran has shown the volatility of fossil fuels, adding political and strategic incentive. More and more energy use is electrified (transportation, heating), which further reduces primary energy usage.
All that builds a momentum that actually makes me somewhat optimistic that we have at least reached peak emissions.
China is doing real things to move their transportation to battery electric too, including big trucks. They have infrastructure to swap several hundred kwh battery packs, the truck can be back on the road in about 5 minutes.
China also did massive overbuilding of infrastructure; ceasing that will reduce CO2 emission.
Yes, concrete is huge CO2 emitter too. I think the real estate bubble crashed there.
It’s not coordinated action, it’s primarily massive renewable and nuclear buildouts in China, which will hopefully be followed by similar buildouts all throughout Asia.
Well, holding your breath would decrease the CO2 output but I wouldn't recommend it :)
Key word "fossil CO2". That doesn't include the burning of wood such as in the UK's Drax power station. Nor does it include any populations that have backtracked from fossil fuels to wood for cooking/heat.
If we are just leveling off that’s a cause for celebration.
I realize anything other than doom wallowing is verboten on the Internet but it is a massive achievement, especially since global economic growth continues which means we are actually switching (renewables, nuclear, EVs) and decoupling (less energy per $ gdp).
Now for the other side of the curve!
0.4% sounds like one solid volcano eruption and all that effort is gone.
Are volcano eruptions man made?
Is above measuring only man made emissions?
If I were the Economics Fairy I’d point out:
Fossil fuels increased in price in 2026.
Perhaps Trump was the dark knight of climate change activism all along?
Pretty ironic that part of this is due to Trump: reducing global trade with tariffs, blocking Ormuz...
In 10 years, there's about a 10% chance that cancer won't be a problem for anyone.
Say what you like but this is great news. Let’s keep going.
Reducing emissions by wars is not good news. Less so when you count all children killed and the oils spill that have occurred in the Strait of Hormuz.
Keep going, by starting wars to make oil more expensive?
When Ukraine burns a Russian refinery, do those emissions get counted?
Same with burning tankers in Iran...
It's not always directly counted, but we count CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to check CO2 emissions and we're able to attribute a large part of these emissions to countries. It's why it takes a long time to have accurate data on CO2 emissions. I'm not sure we even have the data for 2025 yet, they're usually released at the end of the next year. So obviously for 2026 it's only a vague estimate, we'll know at the end of 2027.
Burning a refinery likely reduces emissions, because the fuel this refinery produced would be burned anyway, and the destroyed refinery will cease producing fossil fuels. So it wouldn't be a surprise if all the refineries destroyed this year in Russia and in the Middle East contributed to a reduction in CO2 emissions.
Nitpick, some of the refineries products (~10-20%) are not burned but used to make plastics and other chemicals. I agree though, the effect of destroying the refinery, pushing up prices thus reducing demand dominates.
Ultimately most of those products get burned too. Waste-to-energy burns trash to make heat and electricity. It's an improvement over just straight up burning the oil but not by much.
Pushing up prices on new plastic does make recycling more economic but most of those products still get burned. If you're lucky on average they make it round the loop once, maybe your mountain dew bottle makes a plastic trash bag and then we burn the bag.
Only about 9% of plastics are recycled globally. 12% are incinerated. The rest go into the environment.
Incineration is probably better than nothing, even though it releases CO2.
I wonder whether burning the refinery is better than burning the fuel efficiently since you get more soot.
The refinery is then offline for couple of weeks or months, during which it does not emit, and does not refine oil for further emissions.
Do you think the oil that Russia was producing was going to be stored underground, or ...burned in combustion engines therefore releasing the Co2 anyway?
Now: Let's skip the AI build out and keep things in the right direction.
Decarbonization is going to happen by transitioning to non-fossil fuel electricity generation. That is, more solar, wind, and maybe nuclear power.
I don't see a plausible scenario in which there's a reduction in demand for artificial intelligence in the near future.
It would be really great if people started dialing back and started finding creative solutions for reusing old tech, developing less new stuff, and just slowed down the economy for a simpler life.
> started finding creative solutions for reusing old tech
As a general rule old tech is far more power hungry (per unit of work) than new tech. Sure my old Atari computer used very few watts compared to my modern 50 core server (I'm not sure what GPU), but the modern server can do a lot more per watt.
> developing less new stuff, and just slowed down the economy for a simpler life.
To each their own - I would find that world boring. I enjoy camping for a weekend, but I'm very glad to get back to modern civilization and there are plenty more luxuries that I want in development.
I laugh every time I see the power adapter for the Colecovision console [1]. I suspect that my laptop could emulate ten Colecovision consoles using less power than running a single real Colecovision.
[1] https://p.kagi.com/proxy/jaJn771.jpg?c=LeUEJczBkA3eiHIb6Q3EK... It doesn't quite come across in the picture but this adapter is gigantic.
your link doesn't work, and I never seen a Colecovion in person (at least not that I remember).
I'd guess the Colecovion has a linear power supply which is known to be very large for the power delivered, and very inefficient. A quick search says the power supply was 28.5 watts. I'm typing this on a laptop with a 15 watt power supply (pinebook pro - about as low power as you can get in a laptop); connected to a USB hub with a 20 watt power supply!. My work laptop has a 240 watt power supply. I'm not sure what laptop you have, but I'd guess it can draw more power than a Colecovision if you worked it - but also that if all you were doing was running 10 Colecovion emulators it would draw less power.
We also should mention that our laptops have a screen built in and counted as part of the power consumption. The Colecovion expected to be connected to a power hungry CRT television.
Hmm. The link worked fine for me in an incognito Window, so I assumed it didn't require any sign-in. Oh well; you're encouraged to find a YouTube video or something showing it.
Laptop is a Thinkpad P16s AMD Gen 2 (name rolls right off the tongue). I don't actually know what the power draw is, but it's plugged into a 100W power supply right now via USB-C.
> The link worked fine for me in an incognito Window, so I assumed it didn't require any sign-in.
I tried it and it redirected to the imgur.com front page. And I am logged into a paid kagi account. I guess the URLs are per-user.
Yeah I realized that later.
Regardless, it's not hard to find; if you go on YouTube people show off the colecovision adapter. I think even the Angry Video Game Nerd mentioned it in his video on the Colecovision.
> To each their own - I would find that world boring. I enjoy camping for a weekend, but I'm very glad to get back to modern civilization and there are plenty more luxuries that I want in development.
My point entirely is that people shouldn't have everything that they want if the creation of that thing is unsustainable.
Reusing old tech is great but why stop making new stuff? I want as much tech as possible with the lowest environmental impact. Old, new, repaired, recycled, everything all at once.
And the economy shouldn't slow down because it's still not big enough to give everyone a good life. We need lots of growth, and we need to distribute it better so profits go to improving normal peoples lives instead of making billionaires even richer.
Or do the build out to get to economies of scale with it faster.
And that helps us how...?
Scaling out causes us to climb an efficiency learning curve faster than bespoke, one-off weird data centers that require a jet engine to run
Again, how does that help us in regards to GP's point? Surely you understand that efficiency does nothing for us if we emit even more on the way there?
It increases the share of electricity compared to other types of energy. That makes it more worth it to build new production capacity.
This approach feels like we're driving toward a cliff, and rather than slamming on the brakes, we'd be choosing to hit the gas. Because if we just go fast enough, we might fly!
Even if everyone globally went carbon-neutral today, we'd already be pretty darn fucked, because is literally no buffer left! Temperatures would still increase for a few years, before settling at levels that will already cause catastrophic famines and escalating wars. And now we must consider that just looking at the raw numbers, we've never been further away from being carbon-neutral (plus/minus 1-2 years).
(let's please skip any discussions who should receive how much blame, since that's not relevant to this larger point)
Every bit of additional emissions today will kill more people and animals in the coming decades. And since Jevons paradox means that scaling will not cause the removal of our existing carbon infrastructure until it becomes fully cost-prohibitive, which is not purely a question of market forces, since politicians are already artificially keeping fossil power alive. They can just keep subsidizing the fossil industry!
So you're proposing that we put all our cards on the outcome that has a tiny chance of working out. Meanwhile, the current AI buildout is already strengthening the fossil industry, since suddenly there's huge demand for gas power!
Jevons Paradox
