Carbon emissions per capita is going down in developed countries. It's going up in developing countries. Your implication was that the current problem is the level of consumption in the richest countries. But in reality that only accounts for a small portion of the expected carbon emissions over the next century.

We don't need to "cut back" to a sustainable level. A sustainable level is whatever amount of energy we can produce without increasing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. If we built more nuclear, solar, and wind, we could sustain a much higher level of consumption than we currently are, while emitting less carbon.

You're kinda proving my point. Instead of facing reality as that would mean changes to your lifestyle, you want to keep on going as if nothing is happening and just hope technology will save us.

My argument is that your point isn't based in reality. How is changing my lifestyle going to fix the problem when most of my power consumption is fueled by renewables, while most of the carbon emissions over the next 50 years are going to come from India and China?

I'm not saying keep going as if nothing is happening. I'm saying the climate crisis is a real emergency, and the solution is to build more renewable energy and remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Because while your "power" consumption is mostly renewables (again, you arguing against something slightly different than what I write), it's a small part of your total consumption. What about all the power China uses to build the things we in the west consume? That's on your budget.

Oh, I'm all for reducing consumption of useless crap. Personally I don't buy very many things, most of my spending goes toward food and books.

I thought we were talking about energy "consumption", not consumption of material goods. However, I'm still not sure how much reducing that kind of consumption is going to help in the overall picture of the climate crisis. It's also not realistic to expect that everybody is just going to stop buying things in the next 10 years.

If you've either taken four long flights in the last year, or drive an SUV a little more than average, you're already above the average carbon footprint for the world, without any consideration of eating meat, electricity, other fuels, etc.

> Carbon emissions per capita is going down in developed countries. It's going up in developing countries.

But it's not going to go down far enough in developed countries and it is going up very rapidly in developing countries, the result of that is predictable, and in the meantime we are emitting a large multiple of the per-capita greenhouse gases compared to everybody else, who simply want to have theirs too.

We do need to 'cut back' to a sustainable level or we will be cut back. The amount of carbon in the atmosphere is already too high, it won't come down unless we cut back, as a species.

> If we built more nuclear, solar, and wind power, and invested more in carbon capture and storage, we could sustain a much higher level of consumption than we currently are, while emitting less carbon.

That can not be stated with such a degree of confidence, and smacks a bit of people saying that driving electric cars is good for the environment. It isn't, it's just slightly better than driving an ICE.