by somenameforme | 2026-01-28 13:25:59+00:00
The capacity factor means you're also adding less energy than it might seem. Here is a nice graph of CO2 levels [1]. There's a breakdown by country a bit lower. The trend for CO2 levels remains quite sharp. And China is not the only factor. Asia, especially India, Africa, and many other places are due for ever greater levels of development and industrialization. For instance India has 1.4 billion people yet just 60% of the emissions of Europe. The entirety of Africa has less than 33% the emissions of Europe! These figures are not sustainable.

However, I am not that concerned about it, also as a family man. There's a finite amount of fossil fuels in the world, they will run out eventually, and become economically unfeasible long before that. So even if we do absolutely nothing, the world will likely be economically forced to start transitioning away, likely on a timeframe that is within our lives. Arguably it's already happening with places in the Mideast aggressively seeking to diversify their economies. In any case CO2 levels when dinos roamed the Earth and the oceans were full of life, were upwards of 1200ppm owing to natural processes. We're not going to hit anywhere near that even if we burn everything - in other words there's no scenario where we become Venus, or anything even remotely like it. Some places will become more hospitable, some will become less, optimal places for growing crops (and/or different types of crops) will shift, and overall there will be a lot more greenery. It's a pretty dumb experiment, but it'll be fine.

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On free healthcare - if we are speaking hypothetically of genuinely free health care at comparable quality then obviously everybody's going to want it. The problem is that those 'political objections' are pretty tough in this case. Obviously it won't be free - it'd be paid through taxes, and the government has already shown itself in a relationship with the healthcare industry where they are, at the minimum, uninterested in reigning in healthcare costs, and government operated systems invariably balloon costs.

Outside of free likely becoming quite expensive, there's also the issue of quality and availability. Countries that have had experience running 'free' healthcare systems for decades are increasingly running into problems in modern times with declining economic growth, declining fertility, increasing health issues (obesity, psychological, etc), and so on. Even Scandiland is seeing increasing trends towards privatization in healthcare, and that's with a vastly more appropriate population for such - much less corruption, healthier, preexisting high taxes, fewer social divisions, fewer people seeking to abuse the systems in place, etc. It is still working for them, but I'm not sure if it's indefinitely sustainable at current fertility/economic trends.

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And yeah, I definitely knew you weren't "woke" since they in general seem completely incapable of having a good old debate/discussion! I think the fear of 'wrongthink' makes people accept things that they wouldn't otherwise rationally accept which makes them unable to competently defend their views when speaking somebody of a different worldview.

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions