Right, I'm back after the s**ttest flounce ever

Since everyone shut down that s**t show thread quite quickly and this one is actually being quite polite and civil.

First thought - your well intended question is actually buying into the false dichotomy that the climate change deniers want to push you into. That this is some kind of binary choice. We either "do net zero" or we dont. It's the wrong way to look at it. Every country is just trying to achieve a reliable, affordable and sustainable energy supply. And in the main, most countries ARE recognising that climate change is a thing and it IS affecting their decision making. Of course countries dont always pick renewable energy, because of reasons. They often have a lot of built infrastructure that runs on fossil fuels and dont want to just ditch it (transitions take time - a lot of time because energy infrastructure often has very long useful lifetimes). They sometimes have access to domestic fossil fuel resources on the cheap. They may need reliability that comes from fossil fuels - back up is definitely a needed thing. So they build a mix of stuff.

BUT - and this is a really important thing - the majority of investment in energy IS going into clean energy technology. The ratio is about 2:1.

(This is an actual fact. User Posted Link

We might look at that and wish it was 5:1, or 100:0. Maybe 2:1 is not enough. But this notion that nothing is happening is very far away from the truth. Even if it might not be happening fast enough to live within some of the UN targets.

If you can spare the time, scroll down the page of that link above, and look at spend by country/region. In particular, note that China and the US are spending a lot more on renewables than fossil fuel - yes, even the US, currently being run by massive fossil fuel advocates. You can also see that India is spending about 2x on renewables what it spends on fossil fuels.

This line that we see in the media all the time that basically tries to get us to believe that the big countries (China, US, India) have basically turned their back on "green s**t" and its therefore literally pointless us doing ANYTHING. It's just not true. It's going to take time - more time than most scientists want - but green s**t is being deployed at pace and scale everywhere.

The other thing you often see is people pointing to something that is going to be VERY hard to decarbonise and say "what about that then?". I mean, sure....that (whatever it is) IS going to be pretty difficult to decarbonise, but so what. Because that bit is super hard, why would we not do the easy and economic bits?

It's easy to believe that "net zero", as a thing, has "failed" and needs to be binned off. Those that make that argument are often closet climate change denier. But while that particular limb of the culture plays out, the global energy industry is actually just getting on with building a lot of green stuff - 2 trillion dollars worth just last year. Including in China, India and the US. As solar and storage become cheaper, at both domestic and utility scale, investment will continue to tilt towards renewable. People won't build gas/coal anymore, not because they're wokey wokesters, but because they're hard nosed business bastards.

Posted By: Under soil heating on June 23rd 2026 at 15:28:44

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