> In a reversal, the [EPA] plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limits, and not the monetary value of saving human lives, documents show.
Industry is perfectly capable of calculating its own costs, and advocating for its own motivated self-interest, thank you very much. This is not a bug we need to fix.
The purpose of agencies like the EPA is to "see the [Pareto optimal] forest for the trees" and counterbalance industry's [Nash equilibrium] profit motive.
Otherwise let's just rename it the Shareholder Protection Agency, because that's all it would be.
Well, they very successfully advocated for their interests, and now the administration they helped install handed the EPA over to them. Maybe they should rename the EPA to Environment Destruction Agency, same as they renamed the Department of Defense to Department of War...
It depends. If you're someone like, say, Trump, then truly nothing matters because you're far too old to care. You can pretty much burn the whole world down and suffer zero consequences.
This is one of the biggest downsides to letting the most old, and "wise", among us run the show. They have no incentive to help future generation or even current generations.
All that power has to come from somewhere. The idea that all this AI is powered by “green” energy and unicorn farts is just a bunch of PR puffery from tech companies trying to divert attention from the environmental damage they’re causing.
The uncomfortable truth is that AI is the biggest setback on our path to energy sustainability we’ve seen in a generation.
It is, but degrowth is an election losing proposition. Any talk like this needs to be transparently non-hostile to demand for political purposes. The solution should be something like requiring them to build nuclear or renewable energy, or tax them and put the money into a subsidy fund for clean energy.
By the time a nuclear plant comes online, Renewables have incrementally added 400 gigawatts. Granted, nukes generate 4 to 8 times more energy, but solar can significantly improve crop yields and soil health. They also make it easy to raise sheep and cattle. It's a good thing I like lamb (yum).
I favor public education, but let's not kid ourselves, there is not a polity on earth where degrowth would get more than 20% support. It's a weird social media echo chamber artefact that will exclusively sabotage efforts to decarbonize.
In a sane election system, 20% gives a party a significant position in the government that influences the coalition and drives some of the future decisions. Just not in the two-party circus.
> In a sane election system, 20% gives a party a significant position in the government that influences the coalition and drives some of the future decisions. Just not in the two-party circus.
There is no consensus among political scientists that either a two-party system or a multi-party/coalition system is inherently “better.” Each design produces different trade-offs in representation, stability, accountability, and policy outcomes.
...or everyone else decides to marginalize that 20% party and allies with the far right instead (I don't want to defend the US system, but proportional representation is not a panacea either).
> there is not a polity on earth where degrowth would get more than 20% support
Eh, I'm not so sure about that. Sustainability politics is mainstream in Europe in a way it isn't in the US. Aside from ethical concerns, a lot of people over here see climate change as a very real economic threat (likely to cause them material economic harm within their lifetimes).
You're probably right that a general degrowth strategy wouldn't ever be popular, but I bet a policy that say restricted AI and cryptocurrency with the aim of reducing electricity prices would be.
> You're probably right that a general degrowth strategy wouldn't ever be popular, but I bet a policy that say restricted AI and cryptocurrency with the aim of reducing electricity prices would be.
That's arbitrary. If you went back in time before AI and crypto, which industries would you pick to constrain growth or development of?
Is it whatever the latest industry is that is driving incremental emissions? If so, I don't know that it is a compelling mental model, because that is a degrowth mindset.
Intentionally reducing quality of life in the short term will never win elections, no matter how educated a populace is. The best strategy to reduce consumption that seems to be working is allowing below replacement total fertility rates.
>> But then you get an aging population and all the problems that that brings with it.
> Only for a generation (mostly \s but entirely true).
That's not accurate. The problems of population aging are not confined to a single generation. They are structural and persistent, unless the underlying institutions adapt.
Aging is a continuing demographic process, not a single event. Once a society enters sustained low fertility and longer life expectancy, each cohort is smaller than the one before it. Each cohort also lives longer. That means that today's workers support more retirees. Tomorrow's workers will support even more, unless something changes.
It can feel (but isn't) like a single generation problem if major structural changes happen like: raising retirement age in line with life expectancy, shifting pensions to funded, large-scale immigration, major productivity gains from technology, or cultural shifts to high fertility.
> Once a society enters sustained low fertility and longer life expectancy, each cohort is smaller than the one before it.
I mean, unless fertility completely collapses (to like less than 0.5) then it'll mostly be a single generation problem. Regardless of any future changes, the current generation (my kids etc) will be supporting a much larger older cohort, with problems arising from that. I am one of 4 siblings, have two kids, and as long as both of them have two kids, no more problems arise (obviously extrapolating to the population).
There's some amount of irreducible demand for kids so I'd be surprised to see TFR continue to decline on a generational basis. Mind you, I could be wrong (or alternatively, we could see a massive increase in TFR like we did post WW2).
Yep, someone was bragging recently they used 13B tokens last year. At 8mg CO2/token that's ~100t of CO2. Consumption of 5 households (or 200 NYC-London flights) just for vibe coding!
Thank you for acknowledging the elephant in the room. I've literally seen people on HN argue that AI's increased power demand isn't bad for climate goals, because the money will encourage renewables.
It's astounding how people don't see it, even when it's the invisible hand of the market that's choking them to death.
It's that the majority of AI deployments are happening in a country which has a has had very poor renewable adoption and is now actively sabotaging renewable projects with an active opposition to climate goals because a particular group wants to protect their existing revenue.
Renewables are cheap and highly profitable, and money talks - even in the US, as can be seen in Texas. But it's hard to fight against your government when they want to force you to buy their rich friends' fossil fuels instead...
This is a pretty gross mis characterization of what’s happening. There’s been a lot written about the fluff that is a lot of these AI company “purchases” of “green” energy. In practice there’s no way to get that power from (insert middle of nowhere location with green energy plant) to (insert location of AI datacenter) so to actually power the data center the utility is forced to power on some clunky old coal plant to keep the chips powered.
The AI company is issuing press releases saying how they bought all this clean power but in practice they just forced some old clunky power plants back online to meet their demand.
What your are describing is purchasing certificates from renewable energy vendors, which while technically a small investment (more money to the renewable energy vendor → renewable business growth → more renewable energy projects) has very little to do with renewable energy projects like those I was talking about.
It is technically possible for the AI companies to decide to become self-sufficient or enter into the energy production market if things tilt far enough in favor of that, but it is somewhat unlikely and unexpected.
Big renewable projects are run by electricity producers, not consumers, and they are the ones being actively sabotaged in all sorts of ways.
"At BigGridCo we're proud to switch AI to 100% renewable power. On paper we just send all the dirty power to (scoffs) pesky houses and industry, leaving the clean power for AI."
Nuclear power works too, it’s clean and low carbon impact.
Can Microsoft and Google not afford to build a battery factory or nuclear power plant? Are they broke or something?
Why is the solution to scarcity of supply to bend over backwards and roll back regulations? The scarcity of supply itself should be a hint to society to stop supporting unfettered growth. Or maybe these mega-corporations need to get over it and pay fair market value for the projects they want to build.
Why do we have to breathe coal power emissions so that we can have one more ChatGPT wrapper nobody asked for?
Again it's a supply chain problem. Regardless of how much cash you have, you can't just order a new battery factory or nuclear power plant and have it up and producing in a couple years. We have eviscerated our supply chains for those things and no matter how much money we throw at the problem now it's going to take decades to reindustrialize. Rome wasn't built in a day.
If the concern is over externalities such as CO2 emissions and other types of pollution then sure, let's tax those directly. That will help accelerate solutions through free market mechanisms.
> Nuclear power works too, it’s clean and low carbon impact.
You want an AI company to invest in a project that takes decades to complete? What are the chances they're around when it completes and what powers their datacenters while that takes place
Just to be pedantic: The median construction time is 7 years. With very slow planning, it is a decade, not decades. It can be done faster though.
Our power consumption won't be going down, and it generally wouldn't be the AI company itself running the project but the electricity companies that earn money supplying power that see dollar signs in all that extra electricity consumption.
Even if the AI companies all die, our global electricity consumption will keep going up margins will be better than the retired plants, so it's a good investment regardless.
I think you should look up actual construction times on reactors in developed countries. Be VERY happy if you can do it in less than 15 years.
> Even if the AI companies all die, our global electricity consumption will keep going up margins will be better than the retired plants, so it's a good investment regardless
If the company putting up the money goes bankrupt, what happens to the project? Maybe it's picked up by someone else?
I think AI companies should try to make it to 2030, my guess is at least a few of them won't make it. Don't commit to projects that won't even complete in the 2030s
I think you should look that up. I was even being conservative: Korea and China seems to be managing consistently around the 6 year time scale, while Japan has done it in less than four years from construction start till operation.
Granted, the US would have to import professionals to do it at that speed, and politicians will of course try to hinder the process with endless bureaucracy as their sponsors would rather sell fossil fuels...
> If the company putting up the money goes bankrupt, what happens to the project?
If people didn't start such medium-length projects out of fear of hypothetical future bankruptcy, there would never have been any infrastructure projects. Investors do not worry about them going bankrupt, they worry about losing momentum and would generally rather light money on fire than stagnate. We live in a time where business people start space programs out of bloody boredom.
However, what happens in these cases is just that other investors flock the carcass and takes over for cheap, allowing them to reap the benefits without having to have footed the whole bill themselves. Bankruptcy is not closure for a company, but a restructuring often under new ownership.
The only realistic scenario where such project would be dropped is if the world situation changed enough such that it would no longer be considered profitable to complete, such as due to other technology massively leapfrogging it to the point where investing in that from scratch is better than continuing investment, or demand being entirely gone such that the finished plant would be unproductive. Otherwise the project would at most change hands until it was operational.
(Particular AI companies making it to 2030 is not really that important when it is electricity producers making these investments and running these projects to earn money from AI companies, EV charging, heatpumps, etc.)
Google/MS/Meta will be around, probably. The other AI companies? Certainly not all of them.
I wouldn't rule out the current expenditure on AI to be a risk to the big players either. They're putting so much money in this. And with all the off balance sheet tricks that are happening now it'll be hard to know the real exposure.
It's the same song as with crypto. Just as silly as then - of course many people will burn whatever is the cheapest fuel right now, even if they maybe invest in something else in the future. But the total goes up anyway.
I don't like the social harms related to AI but I think the energy is a silly emphasis. No one has ever thought twice about any heavy industry or absurdist garbage for consumers, home heating, etc.
If we were on track for everything else a serious uptake of AI might have put us barely off track.. But this is like blaming the wafer thin mint for the fat guy exploding.
We can power it all and then some with renewable and nuclear energy. We elected a regime openly hostile to that and openly pro fossil fuel. Like they literally ran on burning more coal, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we are burning more coal.
AI doesn’t matter. If it’s not AI it’ll be EVs. Or if you’re pro immigration (as I am) then what do you think letting more people into the country does for power demand? It’s something like 5kW averaged out over 24/7 per head. That’s probably conservative when you do a full accounting of all demand per head. Every new immigrant is probably equivalent to a rack of GPUs.
Degrowth is political fantasy. It will establish a populist backlash every time. Or are you going to line up to be the first to become poorer?
I look at that stuff as a very privileged fantasy. Only the rich can romanticize poverty. The people who fantasize about green back to the land scenarios are usually wealthy middle or upper class people in developed nations who have zero first hand experience of what that actually means outside the Avatar films.
I think it's still worthwhile, though. AI, given its current trajectory, will be able to help immensely with science and engineering challenges. Degrowth isn't a recipe for sustainable reduction of CO2 emissions.
This is broadly more PR puffery. We don’t need some magic AI model to tell us how to cut emissions. We just need to execute things we already know work.
Pumping even more CO2 into the air hoping the magic box spits out a solution to remove the CO2 from the air doesn't seem like a sustainable recipe either.
The big engineering challenges right now are electrifying everything (which means convincing people that it's the right thing to do and that gas powered vehicles belong to the trashbin of history, amongst others) and banning production of "virgin" plastic items, especially single use items (which also required a whole lot of convincing).
Most of that is convincing is done in the exact opposite direction with... you guessed it... AI.
I'm a huge green energy supporter, but the data belies the headline. These types of headlines are often leverage to discredit the transition.
1. US emissions didn't jump. See the first chart. The 2.4% increase easily falls within 1 standard deviation of typical changes. In that line, US emissions have remained flat since 2019.
2. The caption over that chart uses more neutral language "U.S. greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2025" instead of jumped. Which is it?
3. The 2.4% increase in emissions matches 2.4% increase in energy use nationwide.
4. The title is structured to make it sound like coal power is primarily causal of the emissions increase even though that's clearly not the case.
Unrelated point: Coal quite literally poisons the air. Why are activists so fixated on the abstract specter of climate change to convert others? I'm pretty sure we could win over lots of MAHA types with that framing.
Searching online, it seems to be comparing to coal miners specifically, not the industry as a whole. In any case, what conclusions are you drawing from this?
Not OP, but I have heard the comparison used when discussing jobs. There tends to be rhetoric in the US that transitioning away from coal and oil will lead to large job losses, so this is an anecdote disproving it.
I mean, assuming it's true, the obvious conclusion would be that there should be reasonable limits on what is done to save such a small industry. Looks like there are 40-45k people employed in coal mining in the US, depending on who you ask. _Even if there was no downside to keeping it going_, that would probably only be worth modest government action to keep it on life support; it's simply not a big industry.
I'm not American so perhaps I'm completely out of the loop, but is the justification for coal usage in the US to do with jobs? I thought it's more about climate change denial & costs (& stick it to the leftists).
I mean, it's definitely caught up with climate change denial, but a lot of the _justification_ for supporting what is increasingly an economically unviable industry is jobs.
(It wasn't even solar or wind or nuclear that killed coal. Really, it was _gas_; the writing was on the wall for the industry some time ago.)
When entire industries are automated, and one CEO can mine and sell millions of tons just by clicking buttons on a computer, it raises the question what incentive governments have to protect that industry.
There is no longer the "voters don't want to lose their jobs" argument. Now it becomes purely a "these guys pay lots of taxes" argument - but with most big companies being very efficient at tax planning, a huge mine might pay next to no taxes too. Then it becomes politically far easier to ignore them, and eventually maybe shut them down on a whim, eg. to appease green voters.
There is no such logic going on in the political calculus. It’s a fallacious call to a past where an uneducated man could get a good job in the mines, and by fallacious implication the entire ecosystem of work for uneducated men, that existed 50 years ago and does not now. It’s a symbol of something lost to “liberal” political ideology - something people who have never worked in a mine but also feel disenfranchised can get behind. There is no real belief coal is coming back into style, no one anywhere wants a coal plant operating near them and even if we built more, no one else on earth would buy our excess coal. It’s a canard and a red herring to distract disenfranchised under employed under educated and under skilled Americans, just like the anti-immigrant agenda, and all the other fallacies the modern conservative movement is built around. The goal isn’t to solve a single actual structural problem - it’s to appeal emotionally with things that sound like they could solve problems, despite the fact they wouldn’t if implemented and would make many other things worse.
There was once a time the conservative movement was built on pragmatic rationalism, and people keep looking for it in modern rhetoric. But it’s become built on fallacious populism recently as a short term way to grab power, then overwhelm the system to “rig” it towards their favored people. It’s not about conservatives or liberals, ideology or political goals are the foil. The goal is the appropriation of power and the blocking of democratic change in favor of cronyism.
So there’s no point in trying to find a rational explanation for the policy. There is none in the policy itself. It only exists to garner enough votes to do what’s happening in real time with the goal that with enough shenanigans voting won’t matter next time.
In many cases the best solution would be to retrofit the existing facilities and leverage the transmission infrastructure that is already in place. Retrofit doesn't necessarily mean we continue to burn coal, but it might. Without the aid of a time machine, continuing to burn coal (or even restarting a plant) for a limited period of time may have less incremental impact than other options.
I understand the urge to tear these facilities down, but if we actually care about the environment a more nuanced path is probably ideal.
That sucks. Coal is the worst IMHO. In NC there have been a number of times that fly ash lakes flooded into rivers, full of wonderful things like mercury.
I used to worry about stuff like this and the climate in general. Thanks to Trump, not anymore though. I now worry about WW3 and the collapse of civilization instead.
While we arguably are at a brink of WW3 today considering the invasion of Ukraine, China rattling sabres like never before towards Taiwan, Trump being hungry for Greenland, internal strife in Iran, the actions of Israel… I bet that the next major flareup will be directly attributable to climate change such as a large drought affecting multiple nations.
i feel the fact coal is so often considered separately from oil and gas to be very suspicious. Cant help but feel demonizing coal is plays into the interests of petro states.
Obviously we should be moving to green energy, but coal provides energy independence and doesnt fund horrid regimes..
a Coal plant seems way better for world peace than LNG plant
the cost savings could be put to developing green energy faster
There is evidence that coal has worse environmental impact than other fossil fuels. For one, burning gas produces CO2 and water, whereas burning coal results in just CO2 (+ soot and other pollutants). Another is that (open) coal mines have devastating effects on large land areas.
So yes, best leave all fossil fuels where they are, but coal is especially bad.
I have a personal vendetta against coal in particular because of the way it destroys the entire communities and towns. Coal got an early head start in environmentalism villainy because it has immediate and very visible environmental impacts in the process of getting it out of the ground.
Laughably, neither can wind in fact, and there’s still plenty of open question on if wind is even net positive at all.
The only reason tech like that spears to work is because of partial investment. Unfortunately wind comes at tremendous cost and destruction of natural landscapes, enormous maintenance, and piles of carbon fiber waste.
Coal share of energy likely peaked for China in 2025, even as overall energy usage increased - almost all that increase has come from renewables, which China is of course doubling down upon. China is on trend to become an electrostate, USA on trend to regress on energy infrastructure which will power the next 100 hundred years
Yes, in part because the US outsourced a lot of their industry to China since. The US is still one of the principal per capita emitters, they need to cut emissions by two thirds to catch up with Europe and in half to reach China.
No denying US increased crude oil production from 5 to 13 million barrels per day and lng from 50 to 112 billion cubic feed per day. It just so happens PRC widget exports count as PRC emissions but US fossil exports don't count as US emissions. If they did US would be emitting roughly the same as 2005 or 30% higher, depending on if you believe industry or climate scientists. Industry claims lng is cleaner than displaced coal. Scientist claim lng leaks substantially higher than industry admits.
This is a fair criticism of per capita US emissions.
> a lot of CO2 there comes from US outsourcing energy-intensive production
This is not a reasonable indictment of US per capita emissions. China chooses to manufacture for the US and the world. Consumption, by the US, but importantly, also the rest of the world would be less if China didn't do cheap manufacturing at scale.
~15% of PRC emissions are attributed to exports. On the other hand 0% of US oil and lng exports are attributed to US emissions. Entire shale revolution is literal energy intensive production, it's just attributed to importers not exporters in accounting. In another world, emission accounting would be territorial - renewables would be credited to producer, carbon would be taxed to extractor.
Reasonable framing is PRC is emitting a lot simply because it has 4x people, exports are not substantial contributor, with caveat their population is declining. US is emitting more than what accounting shows, while also adding more increasing pop with higher per capita emissions. Probably not reasonable to criticize countries for population growth, but pretty fair to point out US (and other fossil exporters) should have exports count towards emissions, conversely, PRC renewable exports should be credited.
Instead they're being punished for producing the panel that saves other people emissions. For comparison US exported ~5 billion BOE / barrels of oil equivalent per year, PRC exported 0.5 BOE in solar, which translates to displacing 15 billion BOE assuming 30 year life span. In real world, PRC renewable exports is displacing 3x more emission than US fossil exports generate. That 15b BOE is larger than PRC emissions via exports, i.e. for all intents and purpose PRC export is now (substantial) net carbon sink, it's a global decarbonization utility. Meanwhile US chooses to be export fossil to the world.
I'm trying, but really struggling, to understand your logic of anchoring on land area.
Can you explain why you think that's a better metric than per capita? Is it because there are climate-changing emissions that are NOT driven by humans (e.g. seasonal wildfires, volcanic eruptions, etc.)? Or is it something else?
The amount of emissions that the planet can take (a that is the real crux of the problem) is what its ecosystems can offset.
It’s very hard to calculate exactly how much the ecosystem inside a country borders can offset, but a good enough metric is its landmass.
Sure, countries like Morrocos will win with this metric and countries like Brasil will lose. But in the end, it’s much better than rewarding what is actually a problem (for climate) like if it was some virtue: high birth rates.
> It’s very hard to calculate exactly how much the ecosystem inside a country borders can offset, but a good enough metric is its landmass.
I think this is a flawed basis, because weather patterns, sea rise, etc. don't honor country borders. Only highly localized pollution is somewhat "constrained", but country borders are even porous to that.
So I still don't know that it is an effective incentive to find a better balance. Per capita also has its problems, like penalizing less-developed countries from developing their societies, industries.
My point is that people tend to turn emissions into a pissing contest about which country is emitting more, and it always becomes a debate of total emission vs. per capita, because it's ultimately a political issue.
What I'm saying is that total emissions are what matter for climate change.
Total emissions matter on a global scale. To know approximately how much each nation ought to adjust their emissions we need to look at per capita adjusted for imports/exports for products and services consumed locally but created remotely.
Climate doesn't care about climate change, humans do. Only worthwhile metric is what geopolitics agree on, right now that's per capita emissions even though it's lenient vs historic emitters.
The traditional HN solution for Climate Change: If they only had more babies in the USA, their CO2 per capita emissions would fall and we would save the planet!
These 5th column arguments, are just appaling. USA (and EU, if we finally wake up and smell the coffee) don't have to pay for Asian high birthrates.
If a country has the same area as another, I expect that country to stick to the same total emissions.
China doesn't have to pay for it's high birthrates in the past? Well, then the West doesn't have to pay for their inovation and productivity in the past as well.
while even people born in Asian countries like me would like to go back 3-4 generations and forcefully reduce birthrates, it is not a problem as simple as it seems.
By that logic Canada, Australia, NZ, and arguably even US are settled places and should not be counted.
I do agree that every goalpost can be moved by drawing the boundary as you wish, but surely the fact that developed countries enjoyed a good standard of living for 100+ years and contributed more for a long time counts for something
Sure, in the end, we must always find a way to blame western societies while we give a blank check for China (and other bad actors) to continue doing whatever they are doing...
This was never about saving the planet, it was always about destroying our socio-economic system. Look how the tune changed in Brazil when Lula came into power: they never burned so much rainforest, but now it's fine, becasue socialists are in power.
China and India coal usage dropped for the first time in 52 years[1].
It's also silly to look at anything other than per-capita metrics. If China arbitrarily splits in half or expands, the per-capita metric remains invariant to the historical luck factor behind why national borders are the way they are.
No, it's because of renewables. Share of oil in total energy consumption hasn't increased since the sanctions, while wind and solar have been consistently increasing. Coal is down (again, as a share of total energy consumption).
China is trying to eliminate oil because of the Malacca Dilemma. The US and allies control the seas as part of containment policy. The US also has the Middle East on lockdown, every gulf country in particular. China has a little base in Djibouti and influence over a collapsing IRGC I guess, but not enough to secure any routes. China only has land-based power projection in Eurasia which exerts some limited but insufficient control over land corridors. This is the real incentive behind China's renewables and electrification efforts. That it also addresses global warming is a very welcome side-effect.
Also China has invested a lot into liquid fuel production from coal. With latest process improvements the relevant cost is like 80-90 USD per barrel. So in few years they will be mostly independent from oil and natural gas imports.
Re: China, see: [1] which goes into some detail. There's also various IEA energy reports which anticipated a fall for India and China after the fall in every other country (save, apparently the US which is bucking the trend).
China is also getting coal from Russia at rock bottom prices. Coal is no longer cost efficient source but for a big country like China shifting away will take time.
If you take life long CO2 emissions they have a fat margin before getting to US levels. And they've manufacturing 75% of the gadgets you buy in the west
Why do I get the feeling that if the answer is that they're polluting more as well, parent will argue that makes it OK for the US, as if we should be following their lead. But if the answer is they're making progress on lowering emissions, he'll argue the opposite?
"The researchers identified two main reasons for the uptick. U.S. electricity demand grew at an unusually fast pace, driven in part by an expansion of power-hungry data centers for artificial intelligence. To meet that demand, electric utilities burned about 13 percent more coal last year than they did in 2024.
...
...the researchers said Mr. Trump’s policies would take time to have an effect and they mostly weren’t responsible for last year’s rise in emissions."
> At the same time, colder winter temperatures led many buildings and homes to burn more natural gas and fuel oil for heating last year.
Which none of "shut down the AI DC's", "stop burning coal", or "build more wind & solar" would do squat about.
Maybe we should be looking at boring, pragmatic programs to improve the heating energy efficiency of the worst (say) 5% of America's buildings & homes?
We were doing that through efficiency-focused rebates and incentives that the current administration decided are not worth continuing. Instead they're "unleashing American energy" and deregulating any emissions-producing industry they can.
> ...the current administration decided are not worth continuing...
At least in my part of the US, there are also "state", "county", "city", and "township" governments, which can do such things. They don't have magically unlimited competence and funding - but Washington has never had those either.
OOPS: I forgot school systems, community colleges, and public universities. Those generally control their own infrastructure, and have a lot of it. And the community colleges often have Trades programs - which can boost the workforce you need to replace energy wasting old furnaces, windows, and such.
Otherwise - maybe ask somebody who's spent a decade or few in interest groups or politics, about the whole "if you want to get anything done, you gotta focus your efforts" concept.
This has to be the 4th or 5th time I’ve shared this link on HN. Sadly the WH made it very clear that they do not care about the real cost of coal. Here they proudly shout about “beautiful clean coal.” Anyone who believes this ridiculous rebranding of coal really should not be making decisions on it, and those who know better but repeat it are even worse: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...
We’re moving backwards. They actually think we want to work in coal mines again by the hundreds of thousands.
We have cheaper energy than coal even without renewables. Subsidizing end of life coal plants that were reasonably going to be shut down isn't cheap and honestly it doesn't seem very dependable, build some natural gas plants or something.
Cheap? Depends on how you look at it. What about treating all those respiratory illnesses caused by burning coal? Is that accounted for in the price of the electricity as well?
And we represent 0.1% of the population at best. Not really sustainable.
We are destroying the planet and we will come to regret this on our death beds. If anyone doubts that, go for a walk in nature and appreciate how incredible our ecosystems are, and how lucky we are to have that biodiversity, not AI agents.
Edit: I see you edited your comment from 'I have gotten gotten tremendous value from AI agents' to 'The US has gotten tremendous value from AI agents'. But the general point still applies.
Fair point - yet the very official US stance is to reduce regulation and what not. If it was the sarcasm, it'd be the "US population". I could contribute 'tremendous' for obvious reasons but still.
That would likely the 1st time to miss sarcasm... need few more words not the '/s' (I never use /s)
https://archive.ph/bOoNL
Sadly related:
> In a reversal, the [EPA] plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limits, and not the monetary value of saving human lives, documents show.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/climate/trump-epa-air-pol...
Industry is perfectly capable of calculating its own costs, and advocating for its own motivated self-interest, thank you very much. This is not a bug we need to fix.
The purpose of agencies like the EPA is to "see the [Pareto optimal] forest for the trees" and counterbalance industry's [Nash equilibrium] profit motive.
Otherwise let's just rename it the Shareholder Protection Agency, because that's all it would be.
Well, they very successfully advocated for their interests, and now the administration they helped install handed the EPA over to them. Maybe they should rename the EPA to Environment Destruction Agency, same as they renamed the Department of Defense to Department of War...
Funny cause in the long run shareholders are just as effed as the rest of us, so this is not protection
In the long run, we're all dead. So shareholders might suffer the same fate, but they're more comfortable before we all drown.
Their comfort is hollow and false
It depends. If you're someone like, say, Trump, then truly nothing matters because you're far too old to care. You can pretty much burn the whole world down and suffer zero consequences.
This is one of the biggest downsides to letting the most old, and "wise", among us run the show. They have no incentive to help future generation or even current generations.
If they can afford the oxygen tanks, their comfort is slightly better than the rest of us. It's what makes America great again!
You're right. I should've said "Short-term Thinker Protection Agency."
The old truism remains true today. A society becomes great when old men plant trees to cast shade they will never sit in.
AI is partly to blame here.
All that power has to come from somewhere. The idea that all this AI is powered by “green” energy and unicorn farts is just a bunch of PR puffery from tech companies trying to divert attention from the environmental damage they’re causing.
The uncomfortable truth is that AI is the biggest setback on our path to energy sustainability we’ve seen in a generation.
Wrong.
Energy usage goes up for all societies, no matter how efficient we make things to be.
Our living standard goes up with more electricity (EVs for example require more energy, as would more electrification of things).
The real problem is no investment in alternative sources like Nuclear.
We've had this debate before and the usual renewable only crowd only see as far as today's usage to say what we 'need'.
It is, but degrowth is an election losing proposition. Any talk like this needs to be transparently non-hostile to demand for political purposes. The solution should be something like requiring them to build nuclear or renewable energy, or tax them and put the money into a subsidy fund for clean energy.
> The solution should be something like requiring them to build nuclear or renewable energy,
That's happening without regulations, though, isn't it? It's been making headlines for the last few months.
For instance:
- Meta https://carboncredits.com/meta-signs-three-nuclear-deals-of-...
- Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos_Power?utm_source=chatgp...
- Microsoft https://www.jamasoftware.com/blog/2025/10/14/tech-giants-tur...
- Amazon https://spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-powered-data-center?utm_so...
If anything, it seems to me that AI is revitalizing nuclear energy investments, which I think is a good thing. Wouldn't you agree?
It takes approximately 5 to 10 years to bring a nuclear plant online. Clean energy is growing at an average of 40GW a year for the next 10 years. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65964
By the time a nuclear plant comes online, Renewables have incrementally added 400 gigawatts. Granted, nukes generate 4 to 8 times more energy, but solar can significantly improve crop yields and soil health. They also make it easy to raise sheep and cattle. It's a good thing I like lamb (yum).
There is a real need for education of the masses. Not destroying the planet should win elections, not lose them.
I favor public education, but let's not kid ourselves, there is not a polity on earth where degrowth would get more than 20% support. It's a weird social media echo chamber artefact that will exclusively sabotage efforts to decarbonize.
In a sane election system, 20% gives a party a significant position in the government that influences the coalition and drives some of the future decisions. Just not in the two-party circus.
> In a sane election system, 20% gives a party a significant position in the government that influences the coalition and drives some of the future decisions. Just not in the two-party circus.
There is no consensus among political scientists that either a two-party system or a multi-party/coalition system is inherently “better.” Each design produces different trade-offs in representation, stability, accountability, and policy outcomes.
...or everyone else decides to marginalize that 20% party and allies with the far right instead (I don't want to defend the US system, but proportional representation is not a panacea either).
There's a lot to gain from just efficiency it doesn't have to be degrowth.
But forever growth also isn't sustainable. No matter how productive we are, the planet would still not survive.
> there is not a polity on earth where degrowth would get more than 20% support
Eh, I'm not so sure about that. Sustainability politics is mainstream in Europe in a way it isn't in the US. Aside from ethical concerns, a lot of people over here see climate change as a very real economic threat (likely to cause them material economic harm within their lifetimes).
You're probably right that a general degrowth strategy wouldn't ever be popular, but I bet a policy that say restricted AI and cryptocurrency with the aim of reducing electricity prices would be.
> You're probably right that a general degrowth strategy wouldn't ever be popular, but I bet a policy that say restricted AI and cryptocurrency with the aim of reducing electricity prices would be.
That's arbitrary. If you went back in time before AI and crypto, which industries would you pick to constrain growth or development of?
Is it whatever the latest industry is that is driving incremental emissions? If so, I don't know that it is a compelling mental model, because that is a degrowth mindset.
> which industries would you pick to constrain growth or development of? Is it whatever the latest industry is that is driving incremental emissions?
My mental model is more about industries that are using a lot of resources without actually generating value comensurate with that use.
Intentionally reducing quality of life in the short term will never win elections, no matter how educated a populace is. The best strategy to reduce consumption that seems to be working is allowing below replacement total fertility rates.
But then you get an aging population and all the problems that that brings with it.
Only for a generation (mostly \s but entirely true).
>> But then you get an aging population and all the problems that that brings with it.
> Only for a generation (mostly \s but entirely true).
That's not accurate. The problems of population aging are not confined to a single generation. They are structural and persistent, unless the underlying institutions adapt.
Aging is a continuing demographic process, not a single event. Once a society enters sustained low fertility and longer life expectancy, each cohort is smaller than the one before it. Each cohort also lives longer. That means that today's workers support more retirees. Tomorrow's workers will support even more, unless something changes.
It can feel (but isn't) like a single generation problem if major structural changes happen like: raising retirement age in line with life expectancy, shifting pensions to funded, large-scale immigration, major productivity gains from technology, or cultural shifts to high fertility.
> Once a society enters sustained low fertility and longer life expectancy, each cohort is smaller than the one before it.
I mean, unless fertility completely collapses (to like less than 0.5) then it'll mostly be a single generation problem. Regardless of any future changes, the current generation (my kids etc) will be supporting a much larger older cohort, with problems arising from that. I am one of 4 siblings, have two kids, and as long as both of them have two kids, no more problems arise (obviously extrapolating to the population).
There's some amount of irreducible demand for kids so I'd be surprised to see TFR continue to decline on a generational basis. Mind you, I could be wrong (or alternatively, we could see a massive increase in TFR like we did post WW2).
Yep, someone was bragging recently they used 13B tokens last year. At 8mg CO2/token that's ~100t of CO2. Consumption of 5 households (or 200 NYC-London flights) just for vibe coding!
Thank you for acknowledging the elephant in the room. I've literally seen people on HN argue that AI's increased power demand isn't bad for climate goals, because the money will encourage renewables.
It's astounding how people don't see it, even when it's the invisible hand of the market that's choking them to death.
It's not the power demand that is the problem.
It's that the majority of AI deployments are happening in a country which has a has had very poor renewable adoption and is now actively sabotaging renewable projects with an active opposition to climate goals because a particular group wants to protect their existing revenue.
Renewables are cheap and highly profitable, and money talks - even in the US, as can be seen in Texas. But it's hard to fight against your government when they want to force you to buy their rich friends' fossil fuels instead...
This is a pretty gross mis characterization of what’s happening. There’s been a lot written about the fluff that is a lot of these AI company “purchases” of “green” energy. In practice there’s no way to get that power from (insert middle of nowhere location with green energy plant) to (insert location of AI datacenter) so to actually power the data center the utility is forced to power on some clunky old coal plant to keep the chips powered.
The AI company is issuing press releases saying how they bought all this clean power but in practice they just forced some old clunky power plants back online to meet their demand.
What your are describing is purchasing certificates from renewable energy vendors, which while technically a small investment (more money to the renewable energy vendor → renewable business growth → more renewable energy projects) has very little to do with renewable energy projects like those I was talking about.
It is technically possible for the AI companies to decide to become self-sufficient or enter into the energy production market if things tilt far enough in favor of that, but it is somewhat unlikely and unexpected.
Big renewable projects are run by electricity producers, not consumers, and they are the ones being actively sabotaged in all sorts of ways.
Exactly this. Powering all AI data centers with renewable energy is actually trivially easy.
You could even legislate it and make big tech companies responsible for providing the power themselves. One stroke of the pen resolves the issue.
If OpenAI can afford to “spend $1 trillion” on AI they can afford to build some wind/solar/battery power plants.
"At BigGridCo we're proud to switch AI to 100% renewable power. On paper we just send all the dirty power to (scoffs) pesky houses and industry, leaving the clean power for AI."
In what sense is it trivially easy? The battery supply chain is still backlogged and will be for years to come.
Nuclear power works too, it’s clean and low carbon impact.
Can Microsoft and Google not afford to build a battery factory or nuclear power plant? Are they broke or something?
Why is the solution to scarcity of supply to bend over backwards and roll back regulations? The scarcity of supply itself should be a hint to society to stop supporting unfettered growth. Or maybe these mega-corporations need to get over it and pay fair market value for the projects they want to build.
Why do we have to breathe coal power emissions so that we can have one more ChatGPT wrapper nobody asked for?
Again it's a supply chain problem. Regardless of how much cash you have, you can't just order a new battery factory or nuclear power plant and have it up and producing in a couple years. We have eviscerated our supply chains for those things and no matter how much money we throw at the problem now it's going to take decades to reindustrialize. Rome wasn't built in a day.
If the concern is over externalities such as CO2 emissions and other types of pollution then sure, let's tax those directly. That will help accelerate solutions through free market mechanisms.
> Nuclear power works too, it’s clean and low carbon impact.
You want an AI company to invest in a project that takes decades to complete? What are the chances they're around when it completes and what powers their datacenters while that takes place
Just to be pedantic: The median construction time is 7 years. With very slow planning, it is a decade, not decades. It can be done faster though.
Our power consumption won't be going down, and it generally wouldn't be the AI company itself running the project but the electricity companies that earn money supplying power that see dollar signs in all that extra electricity consumption.
Even if the AI companies all die, our global electricity consumption will keep going up margins will be better than the retired plants, so it's a good investment regardless.
I think you should look up actual construction times on reactors in developed countries. Be VERY happy if you can do it in less than 15 years.
> Even if the AI companies all die, our global electricity consumption will keep going up margins will be better than the retired plants, so it's a good investment regardless
If the company putting up the money goes bankrupt, what happens to the project? Maybe it's picked up by someone else?
I think AI companies should try to make it to 2030, my guess is at least a few of them won't make it. Don't commit to projects that won't even complete in the 2030s
I think you should look that up. I was even being conservative: Korea and China seems to be managing consistently around the 6 year time scale, while Japan has done it in less than four years from construction start till operation.
Granted, the US would have to import professionals to do it at that speed, and politicians will of course try to hinder the process with endless bureaucracy as their sponsors would rather sell fossil fuels...
> If the company putting up the money goes bankrupt, what happens to the project?
If people didn't start such medium-length projects out of fear of hypothetical future bankruptcy, there would never have been any infrastructure projects. Investors do not worry about them going bankrupt, they worry about losing momentum and would generally rather light money on fire than stagnate. We live in a time where business people start space programs out of bloody boredom.
However, what happens in these cases is just that other investors flock the carcass and takes over for cheap, allowing them to reap the benefits without having to have footed the whole bill themselves. Bankruptcy is not closure for a company, but a restructuring often under new ownership.
The only realistic scenario where such project would be dropped is if the world situation changed enough such that it would no longer be considered profitable to complete, such as due to other technology massively leapfrogging it to the point where investing in that from scratch is better than continuing investment, or demand being entirely gone such that the finished plant would be unproductive. Otherwise the project would at most change hands until it was operational.
(Particular AI companies making it to 2030 is not really that important when it is electricity producers making these investments and running these projects to earn money from AI companies, EV charging, heatpumps, etc.)
You mean like Google and Microsoft? They won’t be around when it completes?
Google/MS/Meta will be around, probably. The other AI companies? Certainly not all of them.
I wouldn't rule out the current expenditure on AI to be a risk to the big players either. They're putting so much money in this. And with all the off balance sheet tricks that are happening now it'll be hard to know the real exposure.
That’s power that could have been used to shut off coal plants. Instead now you’ve extended their lives.
Not if your government refuses to let you build any renewable capacity.
Hence the stroke of the pen. That’s all a policy choice.
It's the same song as with crypto. Just as silly as then - of course many people will burn whatever is the cheapest fuel right now, even if they maybe invest in something else in the future. But the total goes up anyway.
As expertly put by Upton Sinclair, "it is difficult to get someone to understand, when their salary depends on them not understanding it."
I don't like the social harms related to AI but I think the energy is a silly emphasis. No one has ever thought twice about any heavy industry or absurdist garbage for consumers, home heating, etc.
If we were on track for everything else a serious uptake of AI might have put us barely off track.. But this is like blaming the wafer thin mint for the fat guy exploding.
We can power it all and then some with renewable and nuclear energy. We elected a regime openly hostile to that and openly pro fossil fuel. Like they literally ran on burning more coal, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we are burning more coal.
AI doesn’t matter. If it’s not AI it’ll be EVs. Or if you’re pro immigration (as I am) then what do you think letting more people into the country does for power demand? It’s something like 5kW averaged out over 24/7 per head. That’s probably conservative when you do a full accounting of all demand per head. Every new immigrant is probably equivalent to a rack of GPUs.
Degrowth is political fantasy. It will establish a populist backlash every time. Or are you going to line up to be the first to become poorer?
I look at that stuff as a very privileged fantasy. Only the rich can romanticize poverty. The people who fantasize about green back to the land scenarios are usually wealthy middle or upper class people in developed nations who have zero first hand experience of what that actually means outside the Avatar films.
We've had my more movement on the nuclear front than any time since 3mile island
I think it's still worthwhile, though. AI, given its current trajectory, will be able to help immensely with science and engineering challenges. Degrowth isn't a recipe for sustainable reduction of CO2 emissions.
This is broadly more PR puffery. We don’t need some magic AI model to tell us how to cut emissions. We just need to execute things we already know work.
Pumping even more CO2 into the air hoping the magic box spits out a solution to remove the CO2 from the air doesn't seem like a sustainable recipe either.
The big engineering challenges right now are electrifying everything (which means convincing people that it's the right thing to do and that gas powered vehicles belong to the trashbin of history, amongst others) and banning production of "virgin" plastic items, especially single use items (which also required a whole lot of convincing).
Most of that is convincing is done in the exact opposite direction with... you guessed it... AI.
I'm a huge green energy supporter, but the data belies the headline. These types of headlines are often leverage to discredit the transition.
1. US emissions didn't jump. See the first chart. The 2.4% increase easily falls within 1 standard deviation of typical changes. In that line, US emissions have remained flat since 2019.
2. The caption over that chart uses more neutral language "U.S. greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2025" instead of jumped. Which is it?
3. The 2.4% increase in emissions matches 2.4% increase in energy use nationwide.
4. The title is structured to make it sound like coal power is primarily causal of the emissions increase even though that's clearly not the case.
Unrelated point: Coal quite literally poisons the air. Why are activists so fixated on the abstract specter of climate change to convert others? I'm pretty sure we could win over lots of MAHA types with that framing.
I read recently that there are more people working as yoga teachers in the USA than are employed in the coal industry as a whole.
Searching online, it seems to be comparing to coal miners specifically, not the industry as a whole. In any case, what conclusions are you drawing from this?
Not OP, but I have heard the comparison used when discussing jobs. There tends to be rhetoric in the US that transitioning away from coal and oil will lead to large job losses, so this is an anecdote disproving it.
Increase coal usage does not mean increase in coal jobs.
Yes, which makes the nationwide political focus on the issue doubly odd.
Maybe all of these emissions are coming from yoga classes instead of coal mines? We've been looking in the wrong place all along.
I mean, assuming it's true, the obvious conclusion would be that there should be reasonable limits on what is done to save such a small industry. Looks like there are 40-45k people employed in coal mining in the US, depending on who you ask. _Even if there was no downside to keeping it going_, that would probably only be worth modest government action to keep it on life support; it's simply not a big industry.
I'm not American so perhaps I'm completely out of the loop, but is the justification for coal usage in the US to do with jobs? I thought it's more about climate change denial & costs (& stick it to the leftists).
I mean, it's definitely caught up with climate change denial, but a lot of the _justification_ for supporting what is increasingly an economically unviable industry is jobs.
(It wasn't even solar or wind or nuclear that killed coal. Really, it was _gas_; the writing was on the wall for the industry some time ago.)
There are more people eating sandwiches than committing school shootings. This is insightful.
Which politician is campaigning to save school shooter jobs?
The NRA kind maybe?
When entire industries are automated, and one CEO can mine and sell millions of tons just by clicking buttons on a computer, it raises the question what incentive governments have to protect that industry.
There is no longer the "voters don't want to lose their jobs" argument. Now it becomes purely a "these guys pay lots of taxes" argument - but with most big companies being very efficient at tax planning, a huge mine might pay next to no taxes too. Then it becomes politically far easier to ignore them, and eventually maybe shut them down on a whim, eg. to appease green voters.
There is no such logic going on in the political calculus. It’s a fallacious call to a past where an uneducated man could get a good job in the mines, and by fallacious implication the entire ecosystem of work for uneducated men, that existed 50 years ago and does not now. It’s a symbol of something lost to “liberal” political ideology - something people who have never worked in a mine but also feel disenfranchised can get behind. There is no real belief coal is coming back into style, no one anywhere wants a coal plant operating near them and even if we built more, no one else on earth would buy our excess coal. It’s a canard and a red herring to distract disenfranchised under employed under educated and under skilled Americans, just like the anti-immigrant agenda, and all the other fallacies the modern conservative movement is built around. The goal isn’t to solve a single actual structural problem - it’s to appeal emotionally with things that sound like they could solve problems, despite the fact they wouldn’t if implemented and would make many other things worse.
There was once a time the conservative movement was built on pragmatic rationalism, and people keep looking for it in modern rhetoric. But it’s become built on fallacious populism recently as a short term way to grab power, then overwhelm the system to “rig” it towards their favored people. It’s not about conservatives or liberals, ideology or political goals are the foil. The goal is the appropriation of power and the blocking of democratic change in favor of cronyism.
So there’s no point in trying to find a rational explanation for the policy. There is none in the policy itself. It only exists to garner enough votes to do what’s happening in real time with the goal that with enough shenanigans voting won’t matter next time.
In many cases the best solution would be to retrofit the existing facilities and leverage the transmission infrastructure that is already in place. Retrofit doesn't necessarily mean we continue to burn coal, but it might. Without the aid of a time machine, continuing to burn coal (or even restarting a plant) for a limited period of time may have less incremental impact than other options.
I understand the urge to tear these facilities down, but if we actually care about the environment a more nuanced path is probably ideal.
https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/over-100-coal...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Public_Power_Associat...
Your link is from a lobbyist for energy providers. I don't trust their opinions are biased in the public's favor.
All of those energy providers appear to be public utilities, and not privately owned.
But this should reverse again as more solar/other sources come online right?
My understanding from news is that coal is more expensive than even natural gas.
That's the exact reason it's being subsidized with tax dollars, to try and keep it competitive with other energy sources.
The current administration is actively undermining pretty much any attempt to move towards renewables.
>undermining
:)
That sucks. Coal is the worst IMHO. In NC there have been a number of times that fly ash lakes flooded into rivers, full of wonderful things like mercury.
I used to worry about stuff like this and the climate in general. Thanks to Trump, not anymore though. I now worry about WW3 and the collapse of civilization instead.
While we arguably are at a brink of WW3 today considering the invasion of Ukraine, China rattling sabres like never before towards Taiwan, Trump being hungry for Greenland, internal strife in Iran, the actions of Israel… I bet that the next major flareup will be directly attributable to climate change such as a large drought affecting multiple nations.
You need to define major.
What of ”major” makes it ambiguous for you?
i feel the fact coal is so often considered separately from oil and gas to be very suspicious. Cant help but feel demonizing coal is plays into the interests of petro states.
Obviously we should be moving to green energy, but coal provides energy independence and doesnt fund horrid regimes..
a Coal plant seems way better for world peace than LNG plant
the cost savings could be put to developing green energy faster
There is evidence that coal has worse environmental impact than other fossil fuels. For one, burning gas produces CO2 and water, whereas burning coal results in just CO2 (+ soot and other pollutants). Another is that (open) coal mines have devastating effects on large land areas.
So yes, best leave all fossil fuels where they are, but coal is especially bad.
I have a personal vendetta against coal in particular because of the way it destroys the entire communities and towns. Coal got an early head start in environmentalism villainy because it has immediate and very visible environmental impacts in the process of getting it out of the ground.
The biggest setback is all of these companies lecturing us about being green, then sucking down power for cryptocurrency, and now LLMs.
In my mind, the only viable way out is the power density of nuclear. Datacenter should not be ordered by taxpayer subsidized energy.
> In my mind, the only viable way out is the power density of nuclear.
How adding would more expensive energy solve it? I don’t get what ”energy density” has to do with it at all?
All western schemes to build new nuclear power are enormously subsidized.
Laughably, neither can wind in fact, and there’s still plenty of open question on if wind is even net positive at all.
The only reason tech like that spears to work is because of partial investment. Unfortunately wind comes at tremendous cost and destruction of natural landscapes, enormous maintenance, and piles of carbon fiber waste.
Please give some sources. Because that is not the conclusion in the energy industry.
In the first three quarters of 2025 we added 137 TWh wind energy globally. That is not driven by subsidies or losing money.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/solar-and-wind-growt...
Is it at least clean coal?
Florida is going to be one of the first places under water.
I feel bad for the alligators.
Alligators will enjoy warmer Florida with more swamps.
They’ll probably have a decent chance!
I don't think alligators can handle sustained exposure to salt water.
And how China compares its 2024 to 2025?
US bad, China good basically.
Coal share of energy likely peaked for China in 2025, even as overall energy usage increased - almost all that increase has come from renewables, which China is of course doubling down upon. China is on trend to become an electrostate, USA on trend to regress on energy infrastructure which will power the next 100 hundred years
China 12 billion tons CO2 and steady, USA 6 billion tons CO2 and falling.
US bad, China very bad.
This kind of denial prevents any solution for global warming.
- USA emits much more per Capita
- CO2 accumulates in atmosphere, so you must account for emissions since the country industrialized
- USA sent it's polluting industries to China and buy the final products
The AA motto goes well: The first step is to admit you have a problem
No denying that US CO2 emissions down 16% since 2005
Yes, in part because the US outsourced a lot of their industry to China since. The US is still one of the principal per capita emitters, they need to cut emissions by two thirds to catch up with Europe and in half to reach China.
No denying US increased crude oil production from 5 to 13 million barrels per day and lng from 50 to 112 billion cubic feed per day. It just so happens PRC widget exports count as PRC emissions but US fossil exports don't count as US emissions. If they did US would be emitting roughly the same as 2005 or 30% higher, depending on if you believe industry or climate scientists. Industry claims lng is cleaner than displaced coal. Scientist claim lng leaks substantially higher than industry admits.
China population is 4 times of US and a lot of CO2 there comes from US outsourcing energy-intensive production.
> China population is 4 times of US
This is a fair criticism of per capita US emissions.
> a lot of CO2 there comes from US outsourcing energy-intensive production
This is not a reasonable indictment of US per capita emissions. China chooses to manufacture for the US and the world. Consumption, by the US, but importantly, also the rest of the world would be less if China didn't do cheap manufacturing at scale.
~15% of PRC emissions are attributed to exports. On the other hand 0% of US oil and lng exports are attributed to US emissions. Entire shale revolution is literal energy intensive production, it's just attributed to importers not exporters in accounting. In another world, emission accounting would be territorial - renewables would be credited to producer, carbon would be taxed to extractor.
Reasonable framing is PRC is emitting a lot simply because it has 4x people, exports are not substantial contributor, with caveat their population is declining. US is emitting more than what accounting shows, while also adding more increasing pop with higher per capita emissions. Probably not reasonable to criticize countries for population growth, but pretty fair to point out US (and other fossil exporters) should have exports count towards emissions, conversely, PRC renewable exports should be credited.
Instead they're being punished for producing the panel that saves other people emissions. For comparison US exported ~5 billion BOE / barrels of oil equivalent per year, PRC exported 0.5 BOE in solar, which translates to displacing 15 billion BOE assuming 30 year life span. In real world, PRC renewable exports is displacing 3x more emission than US fossil exports generate. That 15b BOE is larger than PRC emissions via exports, i.e. for all intents and purpose PRC export is now (substantial) net carbon sink, it's a global decarbonization utility. Meanwhile US chooses to be export fossil to the world.
Climate doesn't care about population or per capita metrics. The only metric that matters is CO2 PPM.
So all China needs to do is split in two to halve their emissions?
No, all China has to do, is to emmit the same CO2/land mass as the USA (or better, as the EU).
> CO2/land mass as the USA
I'm trying, but really struggling, to understand your logic of anchoring on land area.
Can you explain why you think that's a better metric than per capita? Is it because there are climate-changing emissions that are NOT driven by humans (e.g. seasonal wildfires, volcanic eruptions, etc.)? Or is it something else?
The amount of emissions that the planet can take (a that is the real crux of the problem) is what its ecosystems can offset.
It’s very hard to calculate exactly how much the ecosystem inside a country borders can offset, but a good enough metric is its landmass.
Sure, countries like Morrocos will win with this metric and countries like Brasil will lose. But in the end, it’s much better than rewarding what is actually a problem (for climate) like if it was some virtue: high birth rates.
Thanks for explaining your thinking.
> It’s very hard to calculate exactly how much the ecosystem inside a country borders can offset, but a good enough metric is its landmass.
I think this is a flawed basis, because weather patterns, sea rise, etc. don't honor country borders. Only highly localized pollution is somewhat "constrained", but country borders are even porous to that.
So I still don't know that it is an effective incentive to find a better balance. Per capita also has its problems, like penalizing less-developed countries from developing their societies, industries.
So if they annex Mongolia and Siberia, their emissions went massively down?
Nah.
What?
My point is that people tend to turn emissions into a pissing contest about which country is emitting more, and it always becomes a debate of total emission vs. per capita, because it's ultimately a political issue.
What I'm saying is that total emissions are what matter for climate change.
Total emissions matter on a global scale. To know approximately how much each nation ought to adjust their emissions we need to look at per capita adjusted for imports/exports for products and services consumed locally but created remotely.
You said per capita doesn’t matter.
If China split evenly into two new countries, each country’s emissions are half what China’s was.
This is why per capita matters.
Climate doesn't care about climate change, humans do. Only worthwhile metric is what geopolitics agree on, right now that's per capita emissions even though it's lenient vs historic emitters.
Great sounds like they know how they can improve. If they halve their population they'll get it down to USA levels!
The traditional HN solution for Climate Change: If they only had more babies in the USA, their CO2 per capita emissions would fall and we would save the planet!
These 5th column arguments, are just appaling. USA (and EU, if we finally wake up and smell the coffee) don't have to pay for Asian high birthrates.
If a country has the same area as another, I expect that country to stick to the same total emissions.
China doesn't have to pay for it's high birthrates in the past? Well, then the West doesn't have to pay for their inovation and productivity in the past as well.
while even people born in Asian countries like me would like to go back 3-4 generations and forcefully reduce birthrates, it is not a problem as simple as it seems.
By that logic Canada, Australia, NZ, and arguably even US are settled places and should not be counted.
I do agree that every goalpost can be moved by drawing the boundary as you wish, but surely the fact that developed countries enjoyed a good standard of living for 100+ years and contributed more for a long time counts for something
China is doing so while western countries delegated a lot of its manufacturing to China though.
The fact that US emissions are not going down shows that something is really really wrong there.
Europe claiming that its emissions are going down is deceptive as taking into account its share of emission in China would paint a different picture.
Sure, in the end, we must always find a way to blame western societies while we give a blank check for China (and other bad actors) to continue doing whatever they are doing...
This was never about saving the planet, it was always about destroying our socio-economic system. Look how the tune changed in Brazil when Lula came into power: they never burned so much rainforest, but now it's fine, becasue socialists are in power.
Oops, i fed a troll or an ai
He’s a troll
The issue is never the issue. The issue is always The Revolution.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292
China falling actually.
> USA 6 billion tons CO2 and falling
You're literally commenting on an article about it increasing.
ok but if you just look at the trends you'll see that actually china is flat, and america is decreasing, /on trend/
Now do cumulative over past century, then account for US consumption of goods now produced in China.
and per capita?
That's just over 10^-9 degrees Celsius per capita
Only kelvin would make sense for per capita calculations with temperature.
your right, an obvious mistake on my part, thank you for the correction :P
Try per capita
per capita?
What does it matter? Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Edit: cursory search shows a flat/falling trend.[0]
[0]https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
China and India coal usage dropped for the first time in 52 years[1].
It's also silly to look at anything other than per-capita metrics. If China arbitrarily splits in half or expands, the per-capita metric remains invariant to the historical luck factor behind why national borders are the way they are.
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
>China and India coal usage dropped for the first time in 52 years
Isn't it because they're now getting Russian oil and gas at rock bottom prices from western sanctions?
No, it's because of renewables. Share of oil in total energy consumption hasn't increased since the sanctions, while wind and solar have been consistently increasing. Coal is down (again, as a share of total energy consumption).
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-energy-source-sub?c...
gas (ofss fuel) is increasing a lot... So yeah, there is some renewables, but we're still pretty far from what is needed...
China is trying to eliminate oil because of the Malacca Dilemma. The US and allies control the seas as part of containment policy. The US also has the Middle East on lockdown, every gulf country in particular. China has a little base in Djibouti and influence over a collapsing IRGC I guess, but not enough to secure any routes. China only has land-based power projection in Eurasia which exerts some limited but insufficient control over land corridors. This is the real incentive behind China's renewables and electrification efforts. That it also addresses global warming is a very welcome side-effect.
Also China has invested a lot into liquid fuel production from coal. With latest process improvements the relevant cost is like 80-90 USD per barrel. So in few years they will be mostly independent from oil and natural gas imports.
> Malacca Dilemma.
I was unaware of this - thanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malacca_dilemma
No.
Re: China, see: [1] which goes into some detail. There's also various IEA energy reports which anticipated a fall for India and China after the fall in every other country (save, apparently the US which is bucking the trend).
China is also getting coal from Russia at rock bottom prices. Coal is no longer cost efficient source but for a big country like China shifting away will take time.
Most of the Russian Oil is refined and ironically a lot exported to Europe.
If you take life long CO2 emissions they have a fat margin before getting to US levels. And they've manufacturing 75% of the gadgets you buy in the west
There's no margin on averting the Climate Catastrophe!
Why do I get the feeling that if the answer is that they're polluting more as well, parent will argue that makes it OK for the US, as if we should be following their lead. But if the answer is they're making progress on lowering emissions, he'll argue the opposite?
China will almost certainly never reach the cumulative emissions that the US already reached in the 70s.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
2.7% lower in 2025 compared to 2024. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292
Not per capita. Absolute.
Any other questions?
Why should it be compared 2024 2025 and not 100+ years?
Why?
"The researchers identified two main reasons for the uptick. U.S. electricity demand grew at an unusually fast pace, driven in part by an expansion of power-hungry data centers for artificial intelligence. To meet that demand, electric utilities burned about 13 percent more coal last year than they did in 2024.
...
...the researchers said Mr. Trump’s policies would take time to have an effect and they mostly weren’t responsible for last year’s rise in emissions."
Pretty much ignored in comments here:
> At the same time, colder winter temperatures led many buildings and homes to burn more natural gas and fuel oil for heating last year.
Which none of "shut down the AI DC's", "stop burning coal", or "build more wind & solar" would do squat about.
Maybe we should be looking at boring, pragmatic programs to improve the heating energy efficiency of the worst (say) 5% of America's buildings & homes?
We were doing that through efficiency-focused rebates and incentives that the current administration decided are not worth continuing. Instead they're "unleashing American energy" and deregulating any emissions-producing industry they can.
> ...the current administration decided are not worth continuing...
At least in my part of the US, there are also "state", "county", "city", and "township" governments, which can do such things. They don't have magically unlimited competence and funding - but Washington has never had those either.
OOPS: I forgot school systems, community colleges, and public universities. Those generally control their own infrastructure, and have a lot of it. And the community colleges often have Trades programs - which can boost the workforce you need to replace energy wasting old furnaces, windows, and such.
Good thing the US cut incentives for homeowners to improve efficiency in their homes.
And why not both? You can criticize the Trump admin's energy policy, and advocate for thermal isolation of homes at the same time.
So long as you have infinite resources, sure.
Otherwise - maybe ask somebody who's spent a decade or few in interest groups or politics, about the whole "if you want to get anything done, you gotta focus your efforts" concept.
pound for pound ,Americas biggest import is oxygen
This has to be the 4th or 5th time I’ve shared this link on HN. Sadly the WH made it very clear that they do not care about the real cost of coal. Here they proudly shout about “beautiful clean coal.” Anyone who believes this ridiculous rebranding of coal really should not be making decisions on it, and those who know better but repeat it are even worse: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...
We’re moving backwards. They actually think we want to work in coal mines again by the hundreds of thousands.
In India and China coal emissions went down motivated by renovables
The US understands that cheap, dependable energy is vital for the economy.
We have cheaper energy than coal even without renewables. Subsidizing end of life coal plants that were reasonably going to be shut down isn't cheap and honestly it doesn't seem very dependable, build some natural gas plants or something.
Which is why it subsidized coal so it’s competitive with every other source of energy?
Cheap? Depends on how you look at it. What about treating all those respiratory illnesses caused by burning coal? Is that accounted for in the price of the electricity as well?
The US has gotten tremendous value from AI agents, so I think the trade off was worth it for 2025.
And we represent 0.1% of the population at best. Not really sustainable.
We are destroying the planet and we will come to regret this on our death beds. If anyone doubts that, go for a walk in nature and appreciate how incredible our ecosystems are, and how lucky we are to have that biodiversity, not AI agents.
Edit: I see you edited your comment from 'I have gotten gotten tremendous value from AI agents' to 'The US has gotten tremendous value from AI agents'. But the general point still applies.
I think you mean "NVIDIA and data centers have gotten enormous value".
>The US has gotten tremendous value from AI agents
Any quote on that part...
I read this with a large /s on the end...
Fair point - yet the very official US stance is to reduce regulation and what not. If it was the sarcasm, it'd be the "US population". I could contribute 'tremendous' for obvious reasons but still.
That would likely the 1st time to miss sarcasm... need few more words not the '/s' (I never use /s)
Hah, also fair point - there are plenty of people who would say this completely earnestly! :)
10 years ago nobody would have doubted that it's sarcasm.
Now...