I was afraid that the new administration would follow through on its promise to increase American coal use and extraction. Fortunately, it has not.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/coal.php

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/westmoreland-chapter-11-mar...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mission-coal-bankruptcy-marks-5...

I was under the impression that we've "done well" because natural gas generation has come online like crazy and proves more economical than coal and INCIDENTALLY cleaner to burn.

I'm not sure how long (absent intelligent policy) til we hit peak natural gas and the balance naturally shifts back towards dirty energy sources.

I.e. policy helps, but economics had as much to do with it

Even with a lot of political will to increase coal, the economics won't permit it. Natural gas, and now renewables in many circumstances, are the clear economic winners.

And the reason it was falling is natural gas / hydraulic fracking, which emits far less carbon for the energy produced.

The EPA can lay claim to many environmental successes, but this isn't one of them.

The main reason it is falling is because of natural gas substituting for coal in the power sector and that will continue to happen due to the low prices for natural gas.

That's just angsting about short term partisan politics. The trends remain positive for the longer term. Don't let whatever Trump says this week blind you to the long term.

It seems obvious to me that this is unrealistic - that we're not going to do the cuts that we "need"; People will not get worried enough to take the steps necessary to avert it, it's simply not going to happen, and it's wishful thinking to expect that people will change their behaviour so much before they have immediate first-hand horrible effects (and those effects won't happen before it's too late). If that is our plan, then why not just wish for rainbow-farting unicorns to fix our ecosystem, it's just as likely to happen but more effective? Everything we know about people's psychology, social structures and politics seems to indicate that if the global population will be given a choice between those reductions and a slow-motion catastrophe, they'll pick policies that result in this catastrophe. Such reductions won't be made unilaterally or willingly, they might happen only if enforced with extreme violence (i.e. short-term threats instead of long-term horrible expectations) but no one sufficiently powerful seems willing to fight internal unrest or threaten international wars to enforce drastic measures for the sake of preventing climate change.

So we have to start with an assumption that emission cuts of the required scale are not going to happen (or, at least, are not going to happen soon enough), and look for more realistic alternatives than convincing 7 billion people to voluntarily downshift their lifestyle by 2050. Large scale carbon sequestration is one such alternative option.

But that UN report is based on predictions we know with 100% certainty to be incorrect. That's politics, not science. Science says "learn to do math before telling everyone the world is ending".

There isn’t. There won’t be. Fair warning, this is a cynical, but honest comment, and it’s not defeatist, but acceptance of our collective nature.

I’ve roughly gauged most of our species moves on climate accurately so far.

I bet that We are going to go full bore on geo engineering. It’s the perfect eco-poli-socio fix, and is a perfect storm to fill a lot of our mental blind spots.

Geo engineering is jobs, and economic spending. It’s great PR, and it’s a BIG moonshot style project, so the optics are stupendous. Which politician wouldn’t like to say “we secured billions in funding for jobs protecting our environment, by creating factories that absorb carbon from the air”

It doesn’t even have to work, for people to sell it.

Create a military industrial complex style system with geo engineering at its root, and soon humanity will be performing biospheric surgery.

There’s a specific vein of cynical realism, that acknowledges both humanities ingenuity and it’s emtrapment to its darker natures.

We will stick to a carbon positive economy, because no one can turn around and tell the world “its over, the good days are gone, and now when we price environmental costs to everything, the markets will tank.”

Too many goods are cheap because externalities aren’t priced in. A price rise in plastic costs will end product lines and packaging.

This will push people to alternatives which are worse (paper takes more water than plastic, and decays causing eventual spoilage and replacement.)