Re:Ask HN: Is there any hopeful news about climate change?
by drooby on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @10:40PM
(#36980739)
It seems like we just externalized our emissions though.
The U.S's production-based emissions starts dropping at the start of the millennium, and China's starts increasing at the inverse rate. And this is the same time that China is entering the global market and their trade with us starts increasing.
It seems like our appetite for "more" and "new" does not cease.
Any efficiency gains we make, and technological advances we discover increases the space in our belly - but we are still hungry, and that void is filled soon enough.
Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 continue to rise. And it has been doing so for the past few centuries.
A few years later I noticed nobody was talking about this Kyoto Protocol anymore. It turned out innovation (in this case fracking) had caused gas to become more widely available, and since it causes lower emissions than coal, the US's emissions had fallen below the targets stipulated in the Kyoto Protocol even though it never signed, and this was achieved purely through innovation.
This gives me hope that problems we currently see as catastrophic could be similarly solved by innovation (e.g. by clean power generation becoming more economically viable than dirty methods).