@epistasis

In response to this point, which is frequently brought up:

> The chart I linked is CO2 accounting based on consumption, not US production, it takes into account Chinese emissions for US consumption.

While it is certainly the case that measuring consumption is much better than measuring production, it fails to account for a lot emissions.

For example in the manufacture of solar PV, the solar panels themselves are counted, but since the companies manufacturing and processing the silicon need for these are in China selling to other Chinese companies, that is not counted even though all those fossil fuels used are used exclusively for the benefit of American companies.

That doesn't even address the issue of US companies bringing in capital for various foreign investments. If VCs make money in a Chinese company and then reinvest in your startup that money in our economy was generated with fossil fuels.

The best proxy to GHG emissions is still dollars, both on individual and nation state levels.

> Will you admit that we have cleaner energy sources ready to deploy that will replace fossil fuels, if we choose to do so?

This is not an issue of willing. "Green" energy has only been used to supplement fossil fuel usage.

Year over year global usage of every fossil fuel, of every source of energy for that matter has continue to increase: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...

Renewables are feeding a greater part of our electrical grid in the US but are still a tiny part of our energy budget: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/charts/Ene...

We are building renewables as fast as we can and it's not enough because so far it's not replacing anything.

The only way to reduced GHG emission is to reduce fossil fuel usage, immediately. We've made tremendous expansion of renewable energy and it has not touched fossil fuel usage. If we stop fossil fuel usage today, or drastically reduce it, we will experience incredible global economic pangs.

> nihilism is as bad as denialism

There is an important form of Nihilism that many existentialists talk about which is the nihilism of pretending your action had meaning. Putting on a tie and going to work, pretending that work is real and meaningful when you know that ultimately your life is meaningless.

There's a great irony that if everyone collectively agreed we are doomed, our economic activity and emissions would likely also cool down. Our frenzied consumer activity is driven by an ideology that says tomorrow will always be better. If we let go of that we likely would live more relaxed lives in the developed world.

And, again, all I am saying is the only way to reduce GHG is to globally reduce emissions and we are not doing that at all. You can claim that the US is somehow separate from China's emissions, but you can see a global dip in emissions in 2008. I can think of no better experiment on the interconnected nature of emissions than to see how a housing crisis in the US becomes a global economic down turn which sees the most promising drop in emissions we have ever seen.

Arguably the only other solution is accelerationism, where we push economic systems to collapse faster... which is maybe what you're really going for.