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It's difficult to get China and India off coal because they're doing most of the world's manufacturing and some processes are currently impossible without it. But 'we' exported manufacturing to Asia and 'we' buy the products the coal is used for. 'We' don't get to wriggle out of responsibility by pretending that a couple of low and middle income countries are somehow responsible for 'our' excessive consumption.

But since we’ll never get China and India off of coal, I guess we have to do something.

This is a bad and uninformed take.

Per person, emissions in both China and India are still substantially lower than almost all developed countries. India’s per person emissions are less than one-quarter of the global average, and roughly one-tenth of those of the US. Close to a quarter of all carbon emissions come from manufacturing products which are exported and consumed in other countries. Textiles and clothes exported from India and south Asia account for over 4% of global emissions.
Labelling India and China as the chief villains of COP26 is a convenient narrative. The financial aid which rich countries promised yet failed to deliver as part of the Paris Agreement signed in 2015 was supposed to help developing countries dump coal for cleaner sources of energy. And while the world berated India and China for weakening the Glasgow Climate Pact’s coal resolution, few questioned the fossil fuel projects being floated in developed nations, like the UK’s Cambo oilfield and the Line 3 oil pipeline between Canada and the US.

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And that's without even going back to look at imperialism and its impacts on those countries, and why they're now having to play catch up with the west (who not only did our fair share of polluting during our own industrial revolutions, but still continue to do so pretty much freely), mostly to provide for the west.

This, like the overpopulation myth, are nothing more than racist distractions created by the rich and powerful to get us to blame "others" rather than look for who is really at fault - them (Edit to clarify: and by them I mean all obscenely rich and the governments they control, faux communists included).

China's usage of coal is huge, but it's proportiojn has dropped from 75+% in 1990 to around 55%. It's slow progress - it may accelerate. The problem is the rest of the world exports so much of its manufacturing requirements to China.

Western countries are just as guilty, if not more. We contributed terribly for several hundred years, and still today net carbon use is still increasing in developed countries. It's just not increasing quite as much as before.

Not emitting is not that easy. We are in a transition period at the moment. Electric vehicles are here but we don't have all the infrastructure needed to support them. Let alone the fact that battery tech is not developing as fast as we need it to.

Right now liquid fuels still have the advantage of greater energy density. If we could move to hydrogen fuels that would be cool, and we could repurpose existing petroleum facilities.

But who knows which way the tech is going to go. The only sure thing is that we are in for a wild ride one way or the other.

Yep, it takes about 30 years to see the effects, what we're dealing with right now is the 1993 emissions, if we stopped using all fossil fuels right this instant things would continue to get worse well into the 2050s.

The original plot of the movie was that humans were not an energy source but the computing substrate; that all those brains were networked together as a meat-based platform for the AIs to run on, which is why Neo was able to change reality in the Matrix, because he was able to override the programming for the chunk running on him at any given time, just by thinking it.

But the fucking mouthbreathers they got in for their focus groups didn't get the concept, so they had to rewrite it, demoting humans to freaking lemon-batteries and making a mockery of the whole thing.

Yes I'm bitter.

I think it's a combination of hubris and desperation. Hubris because it could still go very wrong and serve us a frozen extinction instead of a boiling one. Desperation because those who acknowledge what's happening know that something probably needs to be done to not only stop but reverse this but the corporations might be more likely to burn it all down protecting their interests than cooperate.

The "easy" solutions will likely lead to war and might not even help anything at this point. The promising technologies still need to be scaled up (also in a way that makes sure we don't overshoot the cooling targets or remove so much CO2 that plants die out).

The more I think of it, the more I like this desperate idea. If it does work too well, we can always just send more rockets to move whatever it is out of the way. Which we should have built and ready to go shortly after the blocker is deployed. Preferably sitting in orbit to minimize the chances of it screwing up if desperately needed.

Hmm sunlight is also a carbon reducer since it drives photosynthesis. But desperate times...