YHK - yet another hacker news clone

It says the report "finds that clean energy growth is not yet fast enough for a durable decline in global fossil CO2 emissions" and quotes the report's lead as “A decline in fossil CO2 emissions is encouraging, but a reduction driven partly by geopolitical shocks is not a sustainable climate solution.”

The most optimistic note was “If further acceleration of clean technology deployment can be supported through time, a sustained peak and decline in global CO2 emissions could be a few years away.”

I think we shouldn't mix (1) negative events in the world which impact CO2 emissions (covid, Ukraine war, Iran war etc.), (2) with "normal" events such as population decline in polluting countries, (3) with an actual coordinated and effective action against global warming.

(1) and (2) can have a large impact on CO2 emissions. (3) is more difficult to notice.

The United States was a couple feet from an actual coup dude.

is it intentional hyperbole and you mean something else, or are you making exactly this kind of claim?

because there are many many caveats to add here (even if we go with plan that specifically governments should be doing it)

For start: land with legitimate environmental protection, land where connecting power would be ruinously expensive, area likely to be destroyed by floods and landslides or scheduled to be overbuilt and so on...

For a huge number of people it ruined their lives. Which is why it’s sensitive to this day. Like the financial bailouts there was a sense that some people benefited while others got ruined.

Bad example to invoke for “beneficial change.” If that’s the answer then it can’t be done in a democracy.

Watching the last decade of American politics has led me to absolutely despise the culture of learned helplessness and attitude of "everything is someone else's fault."

You're absolutely right about the first part. Radical change is much more straightforward. At the individual level there are absolutely things that can be done that are pretty easy Consuming less and recycling more is a huge one. But if the attitude is, "we can't or won't do it individually. We need someone to make us behave," then that's a losing culture. The last American election reassured me that indeed, even if the elite class wants something, no amount of money will override the will of the people. The people just don't want this badly enough.

Burning a refinery likely reduces emissions, because the fuel this refinery produced would be burned anyway, and the destroyed refinery will cease producing fossil fuels. So it wouldn't be a surprise if all the refineries destroyed this year in Russia and in the Middle East contributed to a reduction in CO2 emissions.