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The case for climate optimism.
Last thread I got in a discussion about global warming and I got a few responses that encouraged me to turn it into a top level post, in the hopes of brightening the day of some doomers and maybe convincing some skeptics of the reality of global warming. Now I don't expect there to be many climate skeptics here but I did get one person seemingly heavily implying it last time so lets quickly go over the basic logic of global warming.
Most people who dispute global warming typically deny the existence of greenhouse gases. Point two is just indisputable and three just follows if one and two are true. Disputing the existence of greenhouse gases is really your only avenue of attack. I'll gladly defend point one of anyone disputes it in the comments but I won't belabor the point here.
Before getting into the meat of my argument I do want to give the skeptics their due. Climate activists often make incredibly misleading arguments they think will promote climate activism but once people find out they've been mislead it just sows distrust in the entire field. Probably the most infuriating one is fossil fuel subsidies. You'll see the claim going around that governments spend 7 trillion dollars subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. But once you look into the numbers you see that the vast majority of these 'subsidies' are not from governments spending money but actually from governments failing to tax externalities. Now, I realize that economists do call these things implicit subsidies but climate activists rarely mention the implicit part and regardless this is not what anyone else uses the term subsidy to mean. Not only does this misleading stat sow distrust in climate activism but it also misdirects it. Most climate activists take it as it's face meaning and think governments are pointlessly shoveling cash into fossil fuels for no reason and all they have to do is to stop that. I hate this argument and wish it would stop being made. Sadly with even wikipedia's own article burying the lede on it I doubt I'll stop hearing it anytime soon.
Okay, so I've been waffling for a bit, what exactly is my argument? I fully believe that by 2030 global warming will be largely solved and by 2040 the issue will be essentially forgotten like the hole in the ozone layer. Now, if you haven't been keeping up with the clean energy and EV industry this might be a very surprising claim, global warming fixed in 4 years? Too good to be true! However I have what I think are good reasons for believing this. First thing to note is what most of our oil goes towards. About 85% goes towards making fuels of some kind and a good chunk of the remaining 15% goes towards things that don't get converted to CO2 like plastics and lubrication. As you might expect from the previous number, the vast majority of CO2 emissions also come from energy.
This chart I linked actually massively understates the how much global warming is caused by energy emissions because I'm fairly certain most of the agriculture and forestry slice on that pie is bullshit but I already gave the skeptics their due so I won't go into it.So, since the vast majority of global warming is caused by burning fossil fuels for energy, either for transportation or electricity, then to fix global warming you'd have to get both transport and electricity off of fossil fuels. I am therefore happy to report that significant and rapid progress is being made on both fronts. For EVs last year about a quarter of all new cars sold were EVs, while the full stats for 2026 aren't in yet
for some reasonthe preliminary numbers are putting it at about a third. It looks pretty clear to me that EV adoption is a standard industry S-curve and we're hitting the nearly vertical section of it. Oh and before you ask, yes, it is mostly full EVs, not hybrids. Even if it were to end here this would already take a substantial chunk out of our CO2 emissions, since 100% of ICEVs emit CO2citation neededbut already about 40% of our electricity is clean.But speaking of electricity, how has that been going? Pretty well actually, the share of global electricity thats renewable has nearly doubled in since the great recession, even nuclear is having a renaissance, and the rate of growth only seems to be accelerating. All the increase in electricity has come from clean sources, indeed the total amount of fossil fuel electricity is now declining. Why? Mainly thanks to the growth of solar and wind which is mainly thanks to the plummeting price of wind and solar. It's gotten so cheap that developing countries are skipping coal and gas and going straight to solar and wind. Not just are the share percentages similar to EVs but they now seem to be even be growing at similar rates!
You only need to extrapolate these curves out to see that by 2030 the vast majority of cars will be electric and we'll be approaching majority clean energy. All we must do to fix global warming is to keep on the path we're going down.
So, if global warming is mostly solved then what will there be for climate activists to do? Perhaps they'll try to find some other catastrophe to panic about like @JTarrou said, maybe AI. However, notice I said only mostly solved. Transport and energy is huge but theres still going to be a few tough holdouts that'll be difficult to decarbonize. Air travel is the big one, unless solid state batteries pan out in which case it'd be easy, with concrete, steel and nitrogen fertilizer being most of the rest. The latter three are particularly vexing problems but with a ~90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions we'll have plenty of time to figure them out. Regardless of any caveats I hope you dear reader learned something from all this and perhaps even made the future seem a little less bleak for you.
In somewhat related news, Ezra Klein had a climate guy on his podcast recently that also painted a fairly bright picture. Which I agree with not only because I don't think anyone has proven to me global warming is bad, but also because I always expected this trend and that we could reverse CO2 levels with ease if we just cut regulations and grew the economy.
And that is what also saddened me about Ezra's guest. Despite being optimistic, he was delusional. Saying that if only we had followed Jimmy Carter's plan in 1978 we'd already have a full EV fleet and solar powering our grid. My guy, we are talking about technologies that have been heavily subsidized for decades, and as a result were over-invested in, and still were failing. Its only when the rest of tech caught up have these things been economical. Alas this is the way of the environmentalist. Take credit for things not earned, lay blame where you caused the issue. Such is politics I suppose.
Alas, I do thing we could probably already be able to suck carbon from the air for essentially free (if needed, which I dont think is proven) if we just eliminated the EPA and most state equivalents.
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