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.
> 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"?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.“
For those unaware, this is the dialogue/caption in Tom Toro's 2012 New Yorker cartoon:
* https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
* https://tomtoro.com/cartoons/
* https://condenaststore.com/featured/the-planet-got-destroyed...
It's like the ending for the Dinosaur TV series.
And parking is abundant!
A few years old now, but still worth checking out:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking
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And in many places makes more than minimum wage.
If you have the money for it.
https://easypark.rs/news/cheapest-countries-to-park-in/
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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.
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But everyone wants everyone else to suffocate while delivering shareholder value for themselves. Classic Prisoner's Dilemma.
Where can I find some of that optimism in 2026?
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that very much is a matter of politics, people should stop being afraid to acknowledge it
real politics are often concerned with survival
I thought the current policy was "Drill, baby, drill!"?
> 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.
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I'd be willing to bet they go the Spaceballs route and make cans of oxygen a must-have item before they cut the emissions.
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I think you are being downvoted because people only skim "Clean tech will save the day" without reading the whole text.
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> 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"?
[1] https://www.popsci.com/conference-carbon-dioxide-tired-offic...
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Nuclear will save the day in combination with clean tech.
Clean tech on its own is too slowly to be meaningfully impactful by the time we need it.
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People say shit like this as if fossil fuels aren't the single biggest reason we aren't starving and living in thatched huts.
Op was referencing a comic [0]
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?
[0] https://www.bureauofinternetculture.art/memes/shareholder-va...
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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.
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I'm not mad about the fuel. I'm mad about the lies.
I only paid for fuel, not lies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...
All these things can be true at the same time:
- fossil fuels have provided huge benefits
- the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere is causing gradually increasing problems that will eventually become severe in some places
- a lot of people made a lot of money along the way
- at some point, some people chose to lie about the problems
- lying about the problems is morally wrong
- the transition off fossil fuels will be expensive
- that is not a sufficient reason not to do it
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.
I mean. At least we'd still be living as a species
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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.
Higher carbon dioxide makes us dumber: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7229519/
I wonder how long before in-home CO2 extraction becomes a thing.
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.
We'll have AGI not because the AI becomes smarter but because humans become stupider.
And the AI build out will release more co2, making the crossover point even closer.
This is actually really funny to think about.
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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.
Plants are a terrible way to try to manage CO2.
House plants make too minor a difference to be worthwhile.
Opening windows is better but if you want a more energy efficient solution you should invest in a HRV/ERV
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It will be mandated by the state of California for new homes and office buildings.
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)
[1, note it is from 2016] https://medium.com/@joeljean/im-living-in-a-carbon-bubble-li... [2]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26502459/
That article really needs a pre-and post fixing his house.
I find it hard to believe that stat you provide -- seems like a bit of a shiny lure without much merit.
Maybe if CO2 PPM wasn't so high I could make sense of it.
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.
This is honestly much, much scarier than climate change. We can adapt to a changing climate but not if we're losing IQ and focus.
> 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.
Chronic exposure to CO2 levels above normal but below acute toxicity makes us dumber and more irritable.
Good job we can outsource all our thinking to an agent, now.
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.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9196888/
Essentially, this affects every person and animal on the planet.
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'm not a doctor, but I reckon it'd be same as any other case of carbon dioxide poisoning.
It makes us dumber and dumber.
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The human body has a fairly elegant regulation mechanism for handling variance in things like CO2:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr_effect
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.
i wonder how much specifically indoor co2 levels and levels in dense/industrial affect it
also is it accurate to say that the blood co2 level is mostly a snapshot of the moment blood is drawn? or is it affected by longterm environment
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.)
I remember when I first saw an oxygen bar at a mall and thinking how stupid it was. Fools and their money...
But who's laughing now?
I recently purchased a small CO₂ detector off Amazon for the house and work. So far, so good ... hovering around 450ppm.
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.
Plants grow faster (but not better) with more Co2 I wonder if this could be related to global obesity ?
There is actually a hypothesis around this, but I don't think it's really been investigated: https://www.nature.com/articles/nutd20122
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.
It's not just an assumption, there is research that shows this.
For example: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-co2-levels-ris...
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.
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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.
If we were only eating plants then there would be no obesity crisis.
You'd be amazed at what you can do to yourself with enough fried potatoes and refined sugar.
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How do you unconfound this from being inside in better sealed environments for longer periods now? Not even mentioned?
This is actually my theory on why we're behaving so stupidly right now en masse.
I'm sure there's other papers out there, but this is the first one for this post: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013232...
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.
USA (along with the rest of the western world) is a huge cumulative emitter:
https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
But a distant second in per year emissions:
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
The EU, not listed here, sits between the US and India at about 3.05 billion tonnes.
It's all up to China, which took over a huge chunk of the world's manufacturing. And all up to us, buying Chinese products.
The cumulative emissions represent the PPM increase today. So that's a very relevant statistic. I don't know why you're ignoring it.
China also reduced their emissions last year while the US increased them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292
Stop pointing fingers. Start working.
The EU isn't listed, because the EU is not a country.
Sorting the table by "per capita" is much more interesting IMHO.
Related but flagged link:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47202183
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.
Me in Europe: 5 different bins on 5 days of the week for all the different types of recycling.
Me in USA: insert John Travolta looking around meme consumer recycling is practically unheard of in large parts of the country.
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Why do the corporations pollute so much? Is it just for the love of the game?
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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.
[1] https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...