Clean tech will save the day (low carbon generation, batteries, electrification trajectories and rate of change, broadly speaking), but the global fossil industry will need to be dismantled faster than some will like. It is a matter of survival, not politics or economics. My hunch is there are not many globally who want to suffocate while trying to exist for shareholder value.
I think you’re grossly underestimating how much the average American can deny with the assistance of social media.
The number of people I personally know who thought the country was going to end on J6 who now call the entire thing a “political hoax” breaks my brain.
Not to mention the endless posts about “where are all the people claiming COVID was so deadly now?” Who literally completely ignore the MILLIONS of deaths caused by COVID…
Until these people have their own son or daughter killed by X - they’ll happily claim it’s not actually a problem. Or find something completely unrelated to blame instead if it doesn’t align with their Twitter feed.
> My hunch is there are not many who want to suffocate while trying to exist for shareholder value.
Have you... read the news lately? You say it's not a matter of politics, but the politicians are absolutely trying to roll back the clock, push dirty tech, eliminate all environmental protections and regulations.
You do us all a disservice by saying “the politicians”. The REPUBLICANS are attempting to ignore reality and burn more fossil fuels. Nobody else in America. Name the problem, otherwise you’re implying it’s a bipartisan effort.
To be fair, looking from the outside, democrats don't seem to be very eager to do anything about it either, most politicians in the US seems to be playing for the same team; the rich and wealthy.
Huh??? Did you just miss Biden's entire term? Democrats literally passed a massive bill that included $783 billion in funds for renewable energy to fight greenhouse gas emissions. Exactly what else do you want them to do?
You have to be born yesterday to believe that Democratic leaders haven't merely hand-waved and virtue-signaled about global warming for decades. I realized this back in the 1990s.
Democrats have superior rhetoric, and they are less openly hostile, but their long record of doing nothing to help is unsurpassed. They will fiddle while Republicans burn Rome. And don't forget that Joe Manchin for example was a Democrat, one who dominated Democratic policy during the Biden administration.
We need to push for clean tech obviously. I disagree with Republicans blocking wind farm construction and rolling back regulations, but American energy independence is important for national security, which is a shorter term issue than climate change. And developing more domestic clean energy helps with that as well.
Exactly. As a Democrat my eyes were opened when I saw the senior leadership do absolutely nothing to impede Trump other than form a strongly worded tweet.
You do the people causing this problem a great service with false equivocations like this. It is clear one group would prefer us to ignore the problem and do nothing at all - in fact encourage the problematic behavior - and the other would very much like to take action on the issue if they had the political power.
> the other would very much like to take action on the issue if they had the political power.
They had political power! During the Biden administration, during the Obama administration, during the Clinton administration.
Al Gore is a famous environmentalist... for making a movie after he was out of power. What the hell did he do for the environment when he was literally in the Oval Office, at the side of the President?
The Biden admin did try to make large-scale investments in renewables and policy changes to encourage the energy transition in the US. The situation at the end of the admin was far better than when it started.
Why are you using a tone that implies that's not the case?
>During the Biden administration, during the Obama administration, during the Clinton administration
The president doesn't actually control much in the USA, despite the nonsensical shit republican congresses let them get away with. Obama, Biden, and Clinton could not do anything that wasn't approved by congress.
Democrats have not really held enough power to do anything at all in like 40 years. A 1 or 2 vote "majority" in a chamber is not really meant to allow you to do anything.
Hell, that very first graph makes it pretty clear why shit is so bad in the US, we used to actually fire congress and replace them with different people.
> A 1 or 2 vote "majority" in a chamber is not really meant to allow you to do anything.
1) Democrats had a filibuster-proof super-majority during Obama's first term.
2) The filibuster is not in the Constitution. It can be abolished at any time by a simple majority vote.
The Democrats don't do anything because they don't want to do anything. There's always a convenient excuse. You can blame Manchin or Sinema or whomever, but they're Democrats too.
There really wasn't. The person you replied to covered as much. They had the opportunity for a few big bills, which they did - much of it ultimately stemming from concerns around climate change.
You’re talking badly about the people who actually crafted real industrial policy for clean energy. It was dismantled by Trump and Republicans - even when the output was going to be a factory making batteries on US soil, wind and solar farms, etc.
Like the Republicans are absolutely embarrassing on this issue, the idea that they’re “two wings of the same bird” is nuts.
I'm old enough to remember the Obama Admin's support for the nascent battery and PV industries.
Ditto Biden Admin's support for our transition to renewables (IIJA, IRA). Unprecedented. The type of Keynesian investment in the USA (industrial policy, pro-labor) unseen since FDR's New Deal.
> don't forget that Joe Manchin
No one on the left ever will.
That said, it's important to note that the Democratic (center-left) coalition is wicked hard to hold together.
Have you read Caro's (epic) biographies of LBJ? It's amazing how much skill, subterfuge, and manipulation was required to pass progressive legislation over the objections of the die-hard reactionaries.
Everything about politics sucks. Chaos, apathy, nihilism, grifting are the default. It's absolutely amazing that anything gets done at all. So we should celebrate, and learn from, the occasional success.
> So we should celebrate, and learn from, the occasional success.
What success? It's too late. The time for decisive action was decades ago. The worst case scenario is occurring now. Humanity totally failed to avert a disaster. We've already blown past the global temperature thresholds that scientists warned about. Now we're going to have to deal with the consequences. There's no going back in time to prevent it. This was never a problem that we could wait on for "the occasional success."
Methinks our current path has been determined since ~1980, with ~2000 probably being the last chance we had to stay under 1.5C.
So, well, whaddya gonna do?
The trick is deluding oneself that we can somehow muddle thru this. (Humanity has in fact survived worse.) Otherwise I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Is that reasonable? If not, then I might as well soldier on.
> Methinks our current path has been determined since ~1980, with ~2000 probably being the last chance we had to stay under 1.5C.
That's why I said "I realized this back in the 1990s" and was later complaining about Al Gore.
> Otherwise I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Is that reasonable?
This is not like nuclear war—which could still happen, because we still have the weapons, and the madmen to use them—where we're all going to die tomorrow. We're already seeing the effects—as the submitted article shows—but the worst is yet to come. We're cursing our descendants with a world much more hostile than the one we were born into, for no other reason than greed and selfishness. It's the ultimate betrayal of the future. (By the way, I'm a human and deliberately chose to use em dashes, because I felt like it.)
The best thing to happen for global warming in recent years was not the Biden administration but actually the pandemic, because it significantly cut industrial output for an extended time.
I concur. On (most) all points you've made in this thread.
Two things.
#1
What if you're wrong? What if one day you wake up and the world (as we know it) hasn't ended?
I totally understand nihilism, despair, despondency, hopelessness, etc. Under Reagan and living near Boeing, I was convinced we'd get nuked. I embraced the punk/goth lifestyle. Then I was diagnosed at 19yo with a terminal disease (aplastic anemia).
Then the weirdest thing happened.
We didn't get nuked. And I somehow beat the odds, surviving an experimental treatment (and its aftermath).
"Well shit" I said to myself. "Now what?"
And make no mistake; It was monumentally hard to pivot. To plan further ahead then "what's for breakfast?"
Fortunately, I had role models and mentors. Like the two science and policy people I worked (volunteered) for at Audubon. They knew the score. And yet they continued to fight. Marveling, I asked how they did it. Saving the salmon (in this case) was their day job. Living their lives, as best as they could, during their own time. It wasn't denial or compartmentalizing. It was choosing to embrace life, to give them the energy and purpose to continue the fight.
#2
What else are you gonna do?
During the 2000s, I was so filled with anger and disgust. I somehow fell into direct activism (leading vs just volunteering). I met so many other angry people. Most of them stuck in a doom loop. (Therefore useless, detrimental even, to activism.)
Learning activism as I went, I eventually decided a key factor to change was somehow transmuting that outrage into action. So we leaders stopped just opposing bad policy and decisions. We advocated for a better way, as best able.
So, ya, the world's going to hell. What are you going to do about it? Check out? (Which, IMHO, is a perfectly rational and valid decision for most people.) Will you fight for what's yours? Defending the future, and our planet, and a more just society.
The hardest part, for me, to becoming an activist was how to get started. There are few resources and even fewer mentors. Most people who try bounce off the wall of policy and politics and gatekeepers. So I know that individuals converting their outrage into action is wicked hard.
My Big Idea, as a recovering activist myself, for maybe mitigating that hurdle was starting an activism book study / support group. The goal was get something rolling, then document it, then spawn off new cells. (Something I learned how to do with design pattern study groups, back in the day.)
Members picked a topic, the smallest possible change, the lowest hanging fruit, they wanted to see happen. So participants could learn and experience the whole process and skill building needed for success. (Something I learned from Luke Hohmann, wrt teams delivering products, back in the day.)
And then we supported each other's efforts. We were off to a good start; 7 members, meeting twice monthly.
Alas, I had some health and family crises, and that study group didn't survive my departure. (Another wicked hard problem.)
In conclusion...
I think I understand where you're at. I feel like I was in a similar place, more than once.
All I want to convey is that you might be able to find a way thru by finding some positives to focus on.
Recovering from radiation, I used kitten and puppy pictures to cheer myself up. To prove I'm also not a bot, here's my corpus: https://imgur.com/user/zappini/favorites
Now I binge on podcasts like David Roberts' Volts. He's a natural born pessimist, like me. Yet he chooses to find and signal boost the people doing the hard work of implementing our glorious all electric future. He's also been (for me) a gateway to finding more sources of joy and optimism.
> What if you're wrong? What if one day you wake up and the world (as we know it) hasn't ended?
It appears that you misunderstood. I said, "This is not [emphasis added] like nuclear war" and "We're cursing our descendants with a world much more hostile than the one we were born into". Much more hostile does not imply the end of the world, and indeed the existence of our descendants implies that everyone is not dead.
> I think I understand where you're at.
I don't think you do, and I wasn't in need of therapy.
> but the politicians are absolutely trying to roll back the clock, push dirty tech, eliminate all environmental protections and regulations
Yes, in one country who seems hellbent on destroying itself.
But looking globally, more and more countries seems to get it at this point, and at least move in the right direction, compared to others. The others will make themselves irrelevant faster than the others can reach a future without fossil fuels.
> Yes, in one country who seems hellbent on destroying itself.
One of the largest countries in the world, measured by size, population, economy, and military. If you hadn't noticed, the US can do a lot of damage to the rest of the world all by itself. And pollution does not respect borders. Global warming does not respect borders.
Right, but again, it'll matter less and less as the US hegemony is dying and other countries will pick up the torch, and the ones who are taking over seem to be a bit more willing to both commit and execute on plans to reduce pollution and global warming in general.
> The US just deposed the leaders of two countries, Venezuela and Iran, but ok.
If that's how you judge what "empires" will be left in a decade, good for you, ignorance is a bliss sometimes I suppose. Don't look at how the average person live and survives, if you want to continue that way...
> If that's how you judge what "empires" will be left in a decade, good for you
I don't make such predictions. I'm not Nostradamus, and neither are you. I don't think anyone can predict what will happen exactly in a decade. After all, who predicted this a decade ago?
> ignorance is a bliss
This insult doesn't even make sense. I'm not experiencing bliss over the situation.
> My hunch is there are not many globally who want to suffocate while trying to exist for shareholder value.
I hate this kind of hyperbole because it obscures the real dangers. No one is going to suffocate any time soon. Atmospheric CO2 is around 450ppm. The CO2 in a meeting room of a typical office can easily reach 1500ppm or more[1]. Is everyone in meeting rooms "suffocating"?
I post to educate and inform, the votes are meaningless to me as an observer and scholar field reporting. Humans are tricky, mental models are rigid and can be tied to identity. Facts, data, and information stand on their own regardless of belief. Reality > incomplete or suboptimal mental models.
It takes ~ten years to build a nuclear generator. In that time, 10TW of solar PV will be deployed at current deployment rates (1TW/year), a bit higher than total global electricity generation capacity currently (~9TW).
Fusion is solved, at a distance, with solar, wind, and batteries. Half an hour of sunlight on Earth can power humanity for a year. Long duration storage remains to be solved for, but look how far we’ve come in 1-2 decades.
(at this time, short duration storage will likely be LFP, sodium, and other stationary friendly chemistries, but this could change as the state of the art advances rapidly and the commodities market fluctuates)
Fusion isn't in our lifetimes. Its been 10 years away since the 50s - only to get more R&D grant funding for budget building.
If it happened it would be a huge game changer for our economies but it is far away from deployment let along lab proven. It still requires more energy to start/maintain the reaction then it can produce - which is fundamental to success.
If you would like to bet how much nuclear will be operating in ten years, place your bet. I’m willing to bet $10k to a charity of the winner’s choice nuclear generation remains about the same total capacity as today while renewables scale to terawatts. Let me know if I should have a Longbet spun up for accountability.
While that is true that there is a lag time to deploy nuclear - that is a vestige of the last 40 years of regulating it out of existence. That has changed - technology has improved and regulatory is under scrutiny. The difference is that once nuclear starts to roll out, as it will in the next 3-5 years, we will be seeing large deployments of clean dedicated load ripple through our electrical system in a product assembly line.
Solar and storage are great assets - and will continue to grow but they have other sets of constraints and deploy at small scale (relatively). The large scale deployments have long time horizons.
In the US, people bend over backwards to ensure that there is free storage for automobiles. And that housing and businesses are forced to include that expensive (parking spots can run into the 10's of thousands of dollars for some kinds of construction) amenity. Fortunately that's starting to change, but it is a big battle. And meanwhile, CO2 levels keep rising.
Furthermore, yes, getting to the point where we're no longer starving and in thatched huts did require fossil fuels, but now we know what they do, and that they're actively having an effect on the environment, and clearly us, are we so stuck in our ways we can't change our actions to secure a life for those that come after?
What difference does it make what they're referencing?
I'm glad we agree that fossil fuels were necessary. It has nothing to do with "shareholder value" -- it has to do with minimizing human suffering.
Also, it's noteworthy that US emissions peaked in 2007. We're down ~20% since then. The world is absolutely addressing climate change, and the worst case scenarios have already been avoided. Faster would be better but we're moving reasonably fast.
The reason other countries are able to move so much faster than the U.S. is because parties that have power in the U.S. push back with economic concerns. The distance between "shareholder value" and "stock market performance" is miniscule.
What is this obsession with "shareholder value"? Moving away from fossil fuels too quickly will hurt normal people. It will increase the cost of everything (energy prices determine the cost of stuff), make it harder to heat/cool people's homes, etc. You'll also see people burning more wood, which is far worse for air quality and may be worse in terms of CO2.
Consumerism is the problem. If fossil fuels were used on necessities sure. Single use plastics, individually packaged consumables, planned obsolescence are examples of things that are not necessary. These examples have all to do with shareholder value.
Consumerism is not the problem. Human beings don't stop wanting to improve their lives once they have the bare necessities and there is nothing wrong with this.
We can have our cake and eat it, we just need to transition to cleaner forms of energy. Which we are doing.
Interesting that this question didn't warrant a response.
Anyway, here's new research demonstrating the near polar opposite of the original claim, in case anyone digging up these old threads was also wondering if slibhb's foundational arguments held up: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389855619_Global_Wa...
Never heard this take before. Care to elaborate? It seems like crop failure and disease are the typical causes of food shortages, if not outright human logistical failures. Sounds like saying pouring gasoline on a tiny fire is the only reason we aren't cold (ignoring that more firewood would be the solution). An unsustainable solution is not in-fact a good solution. So if your assertion is correct, then we should all prepare for our thatched huts in which we will starve.
Not the person you're replying to, but I think I can explain it this way:
The quality of life of a human being is directly related to the amount of free energy (i.e. thermodynamic free energy, not free as in no cost) they have access to. Life must be able to generate more energy than it needs, even tiny bacteria. As humans developed, we found more ways to access and utilize free energy.
There is a phrase: Energy return on investment (or EROI). You can map the development of humanity pretty cleanly to an increasing EROI over the entire course of our history.
Fossil Carbon allowed us to explode our EROI and gave us access to never before seen amounts of free energy. Unless we find ways to maintain that EROI, our quality of life will necessarily diminish.
Obviously we need to cut our use of fossil carbon. And if we don't, we're simply going to run out, and then we'll be stuck anyway. But we also don't have anything with a comparable EROI to replace it with.
This is the root problem we're facing. If we had working fusion, it would be a whole lot easier to decarbonize.
> Green Revolution techniques also heavily rely on agricultural machinery and chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and defoliants; which, as of 2014, are derived from crude oil, making agriculture increasingly reliant on crude oil extraction.
Those are derived from crude oil only because for a long time that has been the cheapest way to make them, not because oil were necessary in any way.
And it was the cheapest way only because most prices are fake, because they do not correspond to the cost of closed cycles of the materials used to make a product.
All those things require mostly energy, air, water and a few abundant minerals and metals to be made. Technologies to make them in this way have already existed for almost a century (e.g. making synthetic hydrocarbons, to replace oil), but they are still very inefficient. However, the inefficiency is mostly due to the fact that negligible amounts of money have been allocated for the development of such technologies (because as long as the use of fossil oil is permitted, there is no way for synthetic hydrocarbons to be cheaper), in comparison with the frivolous amounts of money that are wasted on various fads, like AI datacenters.
I think their point is more along the lines of the energy availability of Fossel Fuels allows for the Mass Farming and Construction that we do, not so much that we can pour it on a fire in place of wood.
You clearly haven't given a lot of thought to questions like "where does all this cheap food/housing/heating come from?"
The fact that fossil fuels -- since their mass adoption in the late 19th century -- are the single largest cause of improved living conditions is standard economic history.
> An unsustainable solution is not in-fact a good solution.
It was a perfectly good solution. It replaced wood fires which are clearly worse. Coal was great until natural gas became available. As solar/wind/nuclear become abundant, they are conintuing to displace fossil fuels.
This all seems very confused. I would say you clearly have not thought this through, but that would be fairly rude given the tiny scope of this comment thread. If your definition of better (or perfectly good) is: makes me more comfortable in the short term then I can understand that perspective.
So your opinion is that humanity should not have burned fossil fuels, we should have kept burning wood, until solar/wind/nuclear were invented? Seems obviously wrong.
Almost anything is better than the destruction of the biomes that support human life. I'm not really sure how there is even a discussion to be had about that. But anyone who claims "coal was great" either doesn't understand or doesn't care.
This was true until the advent of nuclear energy, and became very much less true after the addition of solar PV, industrial-scale wind, and Li-Ion (and now Na-Ion) batteries.
I'd say this statement has been almost entirely false since roughly 2020. The only areas where fossil fuels aren't readily replaceable are long-haul aviation (only a few percent of global emissions) and long-haul shipping (also a few percent). So we can probably cut emissions by 80-90% with no meaningful impact to standard of living.
At this point the pro fossil fuel position is kind of like "you realize camp fires are why we don't get eaten by lions!" Yes, that was true once.
BTW the degrowthers are also wrong. We can cut emissions by 80-90% without degrowth.
Two things can both be true. Fossil fuels greatly improved quality of life for a large number of people in the past few centuries. And their continued use on a massive scale now threatens to hurt a lot of people.
But society needs to progress. We left thatched huts and moved to cities with streets full of human sewage. Humans living together as a society was progress. And then we progressed further and lived together AND removed dumping sewage onto our streets.
The high school my friend's kids attend installed CO2 sensors during the pandemic as an indirect way to measure airflow.
It turned out the building had been sealed extremely tightly to keep out the winter cold and because it is old, it does not have a proper HVAC system.
They discovered that CO2 levels stayed around 1200 ppm throughout the entire winter, sometimes even higher. This had likely been the case for decades.
It is a school in a small, low‑income town. I cannot help wondering how many kids were labeled as underperforming when they were actually struggling with the effects of chronically elevated CO2 levels.
I went to a Catholic school and had to attend services. I thought that I was just bored, but I'm pretty sure that my yawning had more to do with elevated CO2 levels.
I've thought about making a C02 scrubber for indoor use. The simplest way, using commercial lime, would mean replenishing a consumable to keep it going. The C02 scrubbers that acquarium owners use also don't seem to be able to be regenerated.
I think it would be interesting to see what effect, if any, an indoor C02 level of near 0 would have on humans and mammals. Because your blood has to stay in a narrow PH range, and C02 is part of maintaining that, I wouldn't presume it would be good.
I think a small desktop C02 scrubber might have a market in the same demographic that pays for air ionizers, de-ionizers, HEPA filters and incense burners.
I have friends that fell down air monitoring rabbit holes in the situation of the early 2020s and one of the things they have remained obsessed about is home CO2 levels and have active monitoring equipment and "pager alerts" and other things setup.
Home carbon capture is sort of a thing already: buy more houseplants, keep them alive and healthy.
Though the most common home interventions for now are still "open a window" and/or "run a fan to circulate the air better". I suppose it's neat that we can home automate that, if you are willing to invest in that.
I can't find it now, but I saw a video where a guy was trying to offset just the CO2 he produced himself with plants.
1. He gave up on "plants" because they were nowhere close to offsetting him.
2. Switching to algae, he used a 55 gallon drum of it because the numbers said that would work. He gave up when the CO2 level reached something like 2000 ppm
3. He ended up with something like 3 drums, as well as special mixers to make sure the algae got access to as much CO2 as possible, and he had lights focused on the algae drums to make them as efficient as possible, and he still ended up barely keeping the CO2 at the "dangerous but not completely toxic" level, and it wasn't stable either.
To my understanding, as with most carbon sequestration efforts, house plants are a long-term planning horizon solution. Filling your house with plants won't fix your biggest spikes in the CO2 in your home, but they'll lower the overall floor/median/average over a large enough span of time (months to years).
Relates to the long running "joke" that the best way to sequester CO2 today is to plant new growth forests 50 years ago.
CO2 increase of 400ppm decreases cognitive function by >20% [1]
I frequently send this medium article [1] to friends + family for a basic dive into how CO2 affects our thinking and abilities at various levels in common areas.
The article cites a study [2] which graphs cognitive score for different activities at different CO2 concentrations. Each activity's cognitive score is worse at higher CO2 concentrations, EXCEPT "focused activity" or "Information search" (up to some point)
I've started questioning this premise given that concentration of CO2 in the lungs (while resting) never falls below 10000ppm (I'm possibly underestimating this number).
Though I'm not excluding the possibility that indoor CO2 concentration strongly correlates with cognitive underperformance, which may be caused by other compounds emitted by human body.
> Humans evolved in an atmosphere containing roughly 280–300 ppm of CO₂. The average annual increase over the past decade has been about 2.6 ppm per year, with 2024 recording a 3.5 ppm rise.
So currently we're at 428 with 3.5 increase per year, yeah, that's scary if it doesn't slow down soon. Makes you wonder about what indirect health side-effects that could have on us.
I literally said this down below and got down voted. This has been my theory for a few years now. It's not the only thing, but the flynn effect has certainly reversed.
When the wildfires during COVID hit some folks did some work to figure out how much of a cognitive effect wildfire smoke has on the brain. Its pretty staggering.
Exercise rises CO2 levels in blood and there are specific exercises to increase CO2 tolerance. Also, extra ventilation during very long exercises (hours) lowers CO2 blood level.
As the recovery from aerobic and resistance exercises also increase ventilation, I think we should just train a little more.
I think regular exercise can help to offset some of the effects of rising CO2 levels. Clearly not an end game solution but it's something to consider because you do have control over this one.
A rise in blood bicarbonate, even if in the normal range, particularly at the upper end of normal, is still dangerous at times. The problem is that it has an effect of diminishing extracellular potassium which leads to spikes in heart rate, risking a cardiac emergency. I have witnessed it first hand.
In the reference period 1999->2020, the instruments used by NHANES to track this data changed at least 3 times, they don't account for other changes to the general population that increase bicarbonate levels in serum (i.e. Number of obese Americans rose by ~40% in the reference period [1]). I'm not entirely convinced that using a proxy for C02 levels that can be confounded by a multitude of other health conditions that are common in the American population is a good way of going about this.
And while we pump CO2 into the atmosphere, we also shrink the engines that could get it out again, like the rainforest in Brazil. Perfect optimisation!
(I don't want to shame Brazil, it's a global chain of problems. And other forests are decimated, too, like in Sweden and Estonia, for the demand of produce worldwide.)
This is compounded by modern lifestyle factors such as staying indoors more, keeping the windows closed to help the aircon/heating be more efficient, etc.
I think a lot of people would be surprised at the CO2 level in different indoor environments they spend time in each day.
There's an oversimplified assumption here that the plants will be less nutritious, and so people will eat more calories to make up for the deficit.
I suspect the presence of protein, fats and sugars influence the hormone production regulating appetite far more than these changes account for. I would expect the same health issues to be affecting other animal species in just as drastic a measure as humans if it were true, and also that global obesity happened at a more uniform pace rather than coinciding with the introduction of modern western eating habits and lifestyles.
More specifically, yes, protein content decreases with rising CO2 levels. Maybe not enough to cause obesity on its own, but enough to be a compounding factor. Especially when your staple is, say, rice -- which is what the paper linked above looks at.
The assumption is not the variation in the nutrient counts, but in the link to obesity.
The rise in obesity has much stronger correlating factors than CO2 levels- diet and sedentary lifestyle being far stronger.
This is especially obvious when looking at the cited study:
> The new study evaluated 18 types of commonly grown rice to see how they would respond to elevated levels of carbon dioxide. In the experiments, the researchers increased ambient carbon dioxide levels to concentrations between 568 and 590 parts per million. Currently, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations hover around 410 ppm—but at the rate they’re currently rising, they could reach the high levels used in the study by the end of the century, if action isn’t taken to curb them.
The study examines the behavior at levels of C02 we don't currently have. The decline in nutrients has, thus far, been too small to have the impact on obesity we've already observed.
In the last sixty years, there has been an alarming decline in food quality and a decrease in a wide variety of nutritionally essential minerals and nutraceutical compounds in imperative fruits, vegetables, and food crops. The potential causes behind the decline in the nutritional quality of foods have been identified worldwide as chaotic mineral nutrient application, the preference for less nutritious cultivars/crops, the use of high-yielding varieties, and agronomic issues associated with a shift from natural farming to chemical farming. Likewise, the rise in atmospheric or synthetically elevated carbon dioxide could contribute to the extensive reductions in the nutritional quality of fruits, vegetables, and food crops.
The decline in nutrients isn't limited to rice and/or CO2 levels but spread across almost all varieties of fruit, vegetables and food crops with margins as high as 80% dilution and causes from chemical/genetical agriculture to rising CO2 levels.
That would work if obesity levels increased equally across the globe. But even if obesity does increase globally, there are very wide disparities. Contrary to popular belief, there US is not the world.
People who are vegetarians are already engaging in a disciplined diet, so they are more likely to eat a restricted calorie diet as well.
Add enough ranch sauce, cheese, oil, refined sugars and carbs to your meals and you'll be just as overweight as someone who does that and has steak too.
Anyway, CO2 levels rise on planet earth, which cause indoor levels to rise too. As it turns out, because of ventilation and such, indoor levels are always a bit higher than outdoor levels. We cross some critical threshold and it gets really hard for us to take on complex cognitive tasks and make good decisions. This effects everyone equally more or less a bit worse at planning, a bit worse at solving problems, a bit worse and making critical decisions.
In the long run, planners make worse decisions, governments make work decisions, voters make worse decisions, students perform more poorly... you get the picture. Over 20 or 30 years these bad decisions start to ramp up into meaningful impacts on the world. At risk of "post hoc ergo proctor hoc"-ing myself, the tipping point for this being somewhere close to 400ppm would make a lot of sense, because people seem to be noticeably dumber some time after 2014 ish? Hard to really pin it down though, but once CO2 levels started to routinely crest over that 1000ppm it seems to me that the world started to get a lot crazier.
Like, we can blame it on one politician we don't like or another, or on bad economic forecasting, or on the schools, or on latent racism / sexism / whatever-ism. To be clear, those are all legitimate concerns, but at the end of the day we're just animals more or less stuck on this orb zipping through the cosmos and if we're suddenly unable to do high level reasoning as well wouldn't you expect to see an increase in "dumb ideas" being accepted?
This actually has me just as concerned as rising temperatures. And its a pretty hard thing to argue against, no matter your politics. Elon even brought it up when he did that interview with Trump in late 2024 to convince him that we should still care about CO2 levels in the atmosphere, even if you think the threat of a changing climate is overblown. Trump really had no response.
Reminder that an individual can cut their emissions by a staggering amount by just not eating meat/dairy.
Depending on how much you consume, you can cut your emissions by 50%!
Regenerative ranching is a lie and is more based in "vibes" and "energies" than science. Making beef production 0.01% more efficient then increasing consumption does not help. Meat is a "status symbol" food based in excess, grass fed beef is just another excuse to use more resources on a good to show how much of a status symbol it is. Grass fed beef is not good for environment. That's nonsense. It's less efficient beef called green. It's more expensive so people can claim superiority for buying it.
Our ego, pride, heritage, and machismo are used to manipulate us into beating our chests and consuming more protein, cuz winners eat 1.2g protein per kg and go to the gym. See how our health is used to manipulate us and justify excessive consumption in the form of "health and fitness"? Our colonist/conquerer society is dead set on us consuming more and more. We gotta buy more funco pops to keep up with social media influencers.
At the current point, the ONLY thing that makes sense is to cut your excessive consumption. We arent removing anything from the environment at this point and "recycling" and "regeneration" are meaningless.
We've blown past every milestone of destruction we have. We consistently increase our emissions and consumption. We are not doing anything to stop this.
Reduce and sacrifice is all that matters right now. Soon, a lot of this won't be an option for people, it'll be forced on them because of our selfishness today.
Our kids and grandkids have every reason to blame us. We are finding, creating and using every excuse we can for why this isn't our fault as we bite into a cheap burger.
Reminder that corporations spent a ton of money on propaganda to make us all believe individual sacrifices can have a noticeable impact when the largest offenders are all corporate. Even if everyone reduced their personal carbon footprint by avoiding meat/dairy and the industrial cattle farms mysteriously disappeared overnight, that's still a drop in the overall greenhouse gas emission problem. Also note that "everyone" is doing a lot of work in that sentence and also means collective effort is required to make the change noticeable/effective rather than individual efforts.
Collective action is what matters. Corporate regulation is what matters. An enhanced EPA with real enforcement powers (not just fines, but the ability to shut down companies and/or outright murder them; which is also a larger debate because right now Americans generally don't believe in corporate murder and think corporations have a right to indefinitely exist) is what is necessary.
It is because of our selfishness, but also our selfishness extends to not working together in enough solidarity and instead fingerpointing at individuals to "do their part, alone, and without support systems and systemic change". That's pretty selfish, too. We need systemic change. We need support systems. We need a government that prioritizes the environment and our collective health and well-being. We need companies to understand that ethics matter as much as profits and if they cannot find profits that are ethical, including and especially in relationship to their externalities like greenhouse gas emissions, then they do not deserve to make those profits and may not deserve to continue operation as a company.
There are US states that are very deep into multi-stream recycling with 5 or 6 different bins. (Most of them are on the West Coast.)
There's an interesting debate on single-stream versus multi-stream recycling and its perverse incentives. Multi-stream recycling is more labor efficient, so in some cases more profitable, pushing labor to the unpaid consumer so that fewer laborers are needed at the recycling plants. Multi-stream recycling is often less efficient at overall recycling. Improperly sorted items are more likely to end up in landfills when the specialized recycling plant is an entirely different company with its own delivery schedule and process, versus a single-stream company that has to sort everything anyway.
In a somewhat surprising twist, some of the most efficient recyclers are the landfill companies themselves. Landfills take up space and don't produce income on their own. Finding any things that are recyclable and resellable is sometimes big profit. Sorting work is thus incentivized as profit growth. There are cities investigating going truly "single stream" again for all trash and continuing to incentivize the landfill companies to grow their recycling sorting processes.
Not only is that itself an illustration that companies need to be incentivized to do the right thing more than people need to be incentivized to do extra labor that result in less efficient outcomes, but it is also another example of how certain corporation's propaganda pushed the narrative from corporate action to consumer action.
The original lesson plan in the 1990s designed by some smart teachers was the Three R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. They were put in this order specifically because they are in order of importance. Debates on if we are doing enough our own individual parts for Recycling have already lost the battle on how much corporations are helping us to Reuse things rather than recycle them, and better yet, to Reduce the number of things we need to even consider reusing or recycling or trashing. Both reduce and reuse require more collective action. They require companies to work outside of the "single use" box. Single use is more profitable, because it sells more single use things.
To some extent, yes, it is deeply for the love of the game: planned obsolescence, single use products, nothing built to last, "razor blades and ink cartridges" where worse user experiences sell more products, intentional over-production to drive over-consumption through consequent demand for artificially low priced goods ("the Wal-Mart effect"), and so forth.
If we don't find ways to price in externalities into the markets and/or the regulations, companies find ways to push things to externalities to cut corners and artificially increase sales and/or profits or have easy ways to market "cheaper" products versus better quality products.
You may want to point fingers at the demand side, but even the most basic, simplified micro-economics is all about how supply-and-demand is a complex dance, supply has more tools up its sleeve than it seems, and a lot more control than demand. Consumers can demand more durable, more reliable products until they are blue in the face, but suppliers are free to just not supply them because cutting corners makes more profits and somewhat happy return customers are more profitable than a very satisfied one-and-done-for-life customer.
