The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable

You make it sound like you proved I was wrong... somehow? I never said "0% of the world is informed and votes accordingly". I said that the majority isn't and doesn't.

Sure, once you realise you personally aren't able to change that, you can move to the next thing that makes you feel good (in this case working on "green tech", if I understand correctly). Some people go live in a hut in the woods.

Doesn't change the fact that the people is the government, and can generally vote for change. But they don't, for many reasons, including "they actually spend very little time thinking about those things". I would argue that most people spend vastly more time saying that the government is stupid than actually getting informed on problems and what it would take to solve them.

Glueing to the streets and alike?

I never found that to be helpful. Preventing chopping down forests to open new coal strip mining on the other hand .. I would be with you.

The dude engaged in more climate action than any previous president. The Inflation Reduction Act was a huge clean energy manufacturing bill. This is established fact that isn’t even really disputed from what I can tell.

Remember those EV subsidies that disappeared under Trump’s second term? Yeah, those did more to curb fossil fuel consumption than just about anything else the government could have done with direct action. Transportation accounts for 28% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The US is wildly car-dependent. The government should be practically forcing US auto buyers into EVs through EV incentives and gas taxes.

I got educated in public schools. I was given all the tools needed to get informed and understand the problems well enough to... well at least not vote for extremists.

Saying "it's not the people's fault, it's the government that actively prevents them" is wrong in my experience. Even when the public education is good enough, extremism rises as soon as life becomes harder.

Eating a hamburger or driving a car is not the problem at an individual level.

These companies are: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/revealed... Going to bet not much has changed since 2019.

You can't vegan hamburger your way to terminating those enterprises. You can tax, regulate and ban them though; and use the revenue to help society adjust.

First, you apparently do know candidates like that, so...

Second, the reason we don't have candidates like that is because the candidates who get elected are the ones who do what they are doing now. Extremists get elected by being extreme, and they are because the people vote for them. If the people voted for consensual candidates trying to get the people together to find solutions, then we would have more of those. People in the US voted twice for Trump, no wonder all the other candidates are looking more and more like him. You get what you vote for.

> The people are stupid because they are poorly educated and distracted by entertainment; they are poorly educated and distracted by entertainment because policy makers prefer passive consumers to active citizens;

I don't know why people are stupid, but one thing I know for sure is that there are enough resources out there for them to inform themselves. And most people in Western democracies are educated, so they are capable of getting informed. They just... don't do it. Laziness maybe?

There is no easy solution. If you think that installing solar and wind farm is "a solution", then... you misunderstand the size of the problem.

> What are you actually proposing?

Get informed, work your way towards accepting how bad it actually is, and then work your way towards accepting that life will get more complicated and that we have to work together to try to keep is a bearable as possible.

As long as people will be adversarial (like you are here, criticising green parties for no reason, I don't even vote for them) we'll be screwed. As long as people will go in the streets because "life is getting harder", we'll be screwed.

The only solution we have is to work together. And even if we do (we probably won't, but let's be optimistic), our life will get more complicated. That's why I say that the first step is to accept that. We won't solve the problem while being in denial.

Hard disagree here. Having a PhD only says you got hired for a PhD and spent years doing stuff. Doesn't make your opinion better than a scientific consensus. Having a Nobel Prize means that you won the lottery when you chose your field of research (if you were lucky enough to have a choice there). There is a famous "regression to the mean" with Nobel Prizes who then have a tendency to be confidently wrong for the rest of their life.

Not saying that PhDs and Nobel Prizes are worth nothing of course. What I'm saying is that science is about consensus. It's okay to believe that the consensus is wrong and to try to prove it, but until you manage to do it, you have to admit that the consensus is the best theory we have.

> This is not to take a position but to point out that they can hardly be idiots; if you think they are, this needs to be made plain.

I don't think they are. I think people tend to misunderstand how science works.

If the vast majority of scientists in a field agree on something, and few disagree, that's perfectly normal. Now when you take one scientist from the minority, realise that they are not stupid, and conclude from there that it would be rational to believe that the large consensus is wrong... then you are doing it wrong.

In other words, a scientist could say "you should believe the consensus about global warming, but my research is about trying to prove them wrong. Until them I have failed, given that the consensus is what it is, and therefore you should not base your survival on my ideas". Of course they won't, and in all fairness it shouldn't be their job to say that. We really just need people to understand how science works, and stop thinking that they can select the one study they like and say "it's true, I choose to believe this one".

Huh? Who has China invaded this year? And the USA?

Run your statements though an evidence filter first.

Merkel did after Fukoshima and with broad public support.

In Switzerland, the people can actually collect signatures and then vote to add articles to their Constitution. So they are very much in control. Check what they have voted in the last few years. When you ask the people, they actually don't give a shit about the climate problem. Then they say the problem is the government (not sure if they say that in Switzerland though).

The current government was elected by the people. Twice.

> are the ones driving elections

Are you saying that the people did not have a choice not to vote for Trump? Both times?

That's only true up to a point (see: efficiency, the length of logistics chains & so on). For the remainder, GHG footprint only holds for fossil-dependent economies.

Move to renewables & you're literally decoupling energy use from GHG emissions.

Ocean Conservancy has annual reports that include statistics from trash cleanup projects. The 2026 report[1] has a "global top items collected" list that covers 1986 to 2026; straws (& stirrers) are 5th at about 16 million items collected. Drinks bottles are number 3 at nearly 27 million. Cigarette butts are top (65 million)

Looking back at the report from the year 2000[2] as a comparison (this one lists numbers just for the year 2000 cleanup projects), straws are number 10 out of 12, cigarettes are still top, various other plastic items (not all of which are classified) are above straws.

[1] https://oceanconservancy.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/2026... [2] https://oceanconservancy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/2000...

I'm not one for pedantic corrections but I feel like this one's important

You have heard of photosynthesis?

The trend is interesting too: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?tab=line&count...

> nd are building the shit that you buy off of amazon.

So not buying Chinese made stuff on Amazon would help.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...

There's still complications e.g if the "dirty" electricity is being used to power an EV or a heat pump then it's reducing GHG compared with directly fossil fueled alternatives.

It might not seem like it if you live under a broken political system that can ignore what people want and so that doesn't translate into action.

When you point this out people say, "well it's not as important as cost of living or health or migrants from hot countries or getting out of wars in the middle east" despite it helping with all of those too.

Saying it is simply a "branding failure" is about as accurate as saying "planning failure" is why around 80% of Ukrainians lost power in 2024.

This is not true, it's fossil fuel propaganda that has been very successful. The overwhelming majority of people are concerned about the climate but assume that they are in the minority. See https://ourworldindata.org/climate-change-support for example.

"Fight pollution" is the old approach, it doesn't work as well because greenhouse gases are generally invisible and cause no noticeable short-term impacts, and because in the US the industry has been successful in distorting the law such that greenhouse gases do not legally count as pollutants.

China continues to expand coal and fossil-fuel capacity—adding roughly 20 GW of coal power in early 2026 and seeing fossil emissions tick up 2% in Q1 2026—even as it leads the world in building massive amounts of solar, wind, and electric-vehicle infrastructure.

The stated goal is.

2030 Goals: China aims to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030, bring non-fossil fuels to 25% of total energy consumption, and peak coal and oil usage.

But that 25% is of a growing energy pool which means the co2 production will keep increasing and increasing as the total power generation grows.

If they double the power production but still keep 25% of it in carbon based they have doubled the co2 production.

Which is literally OPs point.

Like in my country there is a big election every 4 years and you have state elections in between. So any government needs to constantly appease the people to stay in power and do anything. It’s basically impossible for them to make and more importantly realise any plans that go beyond that 4/5 year timeframe.

And to solve something like climate change we would need to think in decades or centuries.

so better to just live in SF or certain areas of the midwest

where climate change won’t affect me

I don't know a single person that isn't aware of the issue, it's just a significant portion of them think it is outright fake or they just otherwise don't care because they see it as a lame thing to care about. How does one fix that side of things? It seems a major impediment to any progress.

The split seems mostly generational; my parents and other parents around their age seem to not really care (there are still dinner table debates about whether Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was a scam or not), but as my other-millennial friends are becoming parents, the vast majority of them do care, because this issue has been so front-of-mind for people my age. We're hyperaware of the fact that my country has more wildfires, milder winters, and hotter summers than it did when we all were growing up.

(There may be selection bias at play here; while I don't go out of my way to avoid them, I don't have many friends who deny the issue of climate change).

Many of us are also tracking the second- and third-order effects of these things; crop failures, droughts, and the migration and public services strain that come as a result of this; most frustrating is that the biggest voter blocs won't enact policy that's responsive to this, so when the inevitable (mass, climate-change-driven migration) grows over the coming decades, we'll be unprepared, and we'll either be overwhelmed by the movement of people, or complicit in one of the greatest humanitarian crises in history (and very possibly both).

They are NOT, and the trend is pointing downwards. That is the demographic shift, which many call demographic catastrofe.

When the Amish said that modern technology destroys the family they weren't envisioning a climate catastrophe being the thing that destroyed the family.

I recently travelled to the primary old-order region of my country, where I hadn't been in about a decade, and all the horses in the fields I remember have now been replaced by tractors. Let's be real: They don't fear climate change any more than the average Joe does, possibly less having less exposure to the science and messaging. All they have ever feared was families being broken apart by the kids leaving for the big city lights.

As long as you got money, you can afford to "save on CO2" and buy a prius or whatnot. The thing is, we can't really avoid making things that are bad for the environment without making everything expensive. You can ban a product, like oil or fosil fuels, but you are banning the best solution - which is often also the cheapest. If it wasn't the best/cheapest, then why would you need to ban it, people would not be using it.

Climate politics eventually raises cost of living. If we could lower cost of living AND save the environment we would be already doing it.

So all the measures to save the climate will inevitable impact the lowest income households the most. Which is - and here we close the circle - the young, working population. The retired one have the wealth and assets, as established earlier.

From what I have seen its more linked to affluence of countries than anything else.

Potential climate catastrophe scenarios where rapidly rising sea levels submerge many inhabited areas and various knock-on effects disrupt the food chain, even in those scenarios the planet is fine on geological timescales. What's not fine is human civilization, on human timescales. And I think this is what gets inadvertently hidden behind planet-saving rhetoric. If the worst case scenarios are "only" about billions of people dying due to resource scarcity and conflicts over said resources, this is something to be avoided.

I see a parallel with global nuclear war. Such a war would probably not end the species, there would be groups of survivors here and there. But human civilization as we know it would be over, with the global population being back to what it was in the hunter-gatherer era.

You are right that they don't have a democracy because the people are unable to truly organize without the powers that be at the top putting an end to any movements, but the people in the remaining 2/3s of the world never bother to take time to organize either, so the democracy they do have is really only a belief, something theoretical, and they if they ever decided to exercise it in the future may find out that they weren't actually under democracy after all.

Maybe it will fail. There's no guarantee.

I'm not saying volunteering isn't helping to create a better world, but there seems to be a disconnect in the logic.

That's commendable, but also does not fix the structural incentives for raising cattle to sell meat.

It improves your individual health, which is good. Just don't fool yourself into thinking you're fixing thr former.

> the only solution is to make hella money (billions+) so we can control incentives.

How naive.

When you get there you will be beholden to the same incentives of any billionaire. You, too, will be raping the world at that point.

The system is not bad because billionaires are inherently bad people. A well-intentioned billionaire will be incentivized to be as destructive as their peers by the structure in place.

Government: "We need to sacrifice"

Populists: "No one will take/tax our gas-guzzling trucks and our beef! Make this country great again!"

Voters: "Fuck off government, put the populists in power instead!"

Buy all the things from me, don't worry about my dirty powered factories.

(Also, investment to decarbonize things like cement are not going to happen if fossils stay cheap.)

This is one reason why they tried to limit emissions and climate change, because it triggers runaway effects like in this case forest fires, droughts, floods, melting of glaciers, polar caps and permafrost, ocean flows, etc. These are all climate change effects.

I'm a pessimist and think it was already too late when the Paris Agreement was put in place. Already too late when Al Gore did his thing in the 2000s.

I expect a major revision after India's census concludes next year.

We really don't know how many people there are in the world - some countries (mainly in Africa) hadn't had a census in years.

We might merge consciousness and live in an ethereal medium, we might insert ourselves in a simulation and keep our physical bodies neatly healthy organized and packed where 20 Bln is not a problem at all, we might collectively (or AI do it for us) decide to reduce human pop to 1 Bln or less on Earth and terraform other planets.

Call me crazy, but if you described our world to someone some hundreds years ago, theyd think the same. Crazyness is a requirement for a correct prediction of the future. There are ALWAYS status quo changes based on revolutionary magic-like technologies that results in significant changes.

If you want to have at least a mild change of doing some sort of future prediction you can check predictions about our current time from people in the past and you'll see the mistakes they make, most people nowadays keep making. Using current technology and ways of thinking, as if they would stay the same just used in different ways, not thinking enough out of the box and allowing themselves to be more imaginative. Fix that, and you'll make wild predictions but also some of them which will be much closer to the truth than any status quo linear evolving incremental improving technology based prediction.

1. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-coal-power-ri...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJPxWu0qqiQ

Could we please stop with this strawman (sorry pun) topic of paper straws? Nobody claims that they solve the problems and they have just become this distracting meme that ridicules all efforts at environmental protection. Yes plastic straws are bad, no they are not among the top-10 problems humanity needs to address and yes the topic has been blown out of proportion just to make fun of things. If you care, do you not realize that every time you bring this up you are doing us all a disservice?

So, please, let's drop it and focus on actual issues of regulatory approaches to climate change instead.

Sanitation service is expensive. It's an under valued historical victory in rich countries.

Of course companies respond to demand. That’s why we need governments with militaries to give them a second consideration to respond to.

This is on corporations. They use millions upon millions of gallons of water, they use entire cities-worth of electricity, and they break environmental regulations with wanton disregard.

This idea that personal responsibility is standing between us and a clean planet is also, by the way, a primary strategy of these criminals.

But yeah without her, definitely.

That's not what I said. People are choosing not to have children for lots of reasons. One of the benefits is that they end up having much less impact on the climate; that's not saying it's the reason they're doing it.

The only judgement I make is people who have children and have no regard for the environment. I think those people are risking their children's long term welfare. That's a dick move. If you have kids you have a moral obligation to try to make sure the planet they live on in adulthood isn't fucked.

For these people, what does the future has to offer anyway? Why do think people are not having babies anymore?

If you live day by day, and that is all you can afford, what kind of future you think people going to try and cultivate?

how much do they care about the hardships of currently existing strangers, beyond sending thoughts and prayers on reddit?

just consider how preciously few Westerners had gone to die in Ukraine over the past 5 years, despite the deafening cacophony of virtue signaling on the Internet.

but I'm talking about living without heating or cooling, subsisting on gruel, owning nothing und being happy, and all the other thing the young global leaders insist we must do to save the planet. and I don't think it's fair to ask that of people who have no reason to care what happens in 100 years.

Also, infra? Poor people just call it their yard.

an internet's worth of bacon jokes imply the answer.

Also brings people 'closer' to the animals and makes it more likely that meat regains its ritualistic role in society, as opposed to being a consumer product. This should reduce consumption, boost appreciation, bring communities that little bit closer, etc.

Once in a while an extreme case will get in the news and someone will correct their own size but that is where generally you'll see people defending their own corruption.

One kilo of beef is roughly equal to 8 kilos of pork, 10 kilos of chicken, and 20 kilos of tofu in CO₂ emissions.

One is co-production of other materials -- wool is another desirable material.

Another is optimizing land use. Some land isn't suitable for row crop agriculture, but can sustain grazing. There's also land we're irrigating for row crop agriculture right now from aquifers we really shouldn't be; converting it back to grassland and grazing on it would let us recapture some of the lost calories.

Then there's un-optimizing the food chain. From a food-per-acre standpoint we should be primarily subsisting on soy and whichever of corn, potatoes or rice grows best in the local soy & climate. Even if we are going all in on minimizing land usage, however, we don't want to produce exactly as much food as we need, because crops fail and famines are bad. You can aim to overproduce a little year to year and maintain a surplus of storage to cover the bad years, but you can't just cover the average bad year. You need to cover the worst years possible happening several years in a row, you need to be covering once-in-millennia bad luck. So you need to overproduce enough that you don't expect some of it to ever be consumed by humans.

So you need something to do with the extra corn you produce, besides feed it to people, that you can rapidly cut back on in case if crop failures to return food back to the supply. One option is ethanol, and another is livestock -- feed your surplus grains to livestock, and then eat them instead. If you have crop failures, you cull the herds, which frees up their feed stocks for human consumption, as well as adding the extra meat calories to the supply. (And this even happens somewhat automatically with market forces -- farmers are always arbitraging grain prices against meat prices, and a spike in grain prices will lead them to sell off livestock as they become less profitable, which will in turn depress meat prices further.)

Anecdotally, my sister in law has been vegetarian for over a decade and just recently been diagnosed with anemia.

Plant provide, but less efficiently: iron, zinc, choline, calcium (some tofu provides, but depends on coagulant used), iodine.

On the flip side, plants provide fiber and numerous phytochemicals that meat, fish, and eggs lack.

If you're honest to yourself, you'll notice that plant-based nutrition is not a sustainable way to feed billions of humans on this planet, because those billions of people would rather destroy the world than have some vegans enforce their morality on them while enjoying a lifestyle that consumes orders of magnitude more energy than some third world subsistence farmer's chickens.

Republican or German butterflies (as in "butterfly effect") should not be blamed when they start a big scale avalanche on loose snow.

By using "if's" like that, I can fly.

My point is that people who vote for extremes "because it cannot be worse" couldn't be more wrong. Of course it can be worse. Instead of complaining and voting to say "I'm pissed because I think someone else should make my life easier" like a kid, people should start thinking about what's needed.

Right now, people seem to feel like "they" (anyone but themselves apparently) should prevent our life conditions from getting worse. Maybe it's time to realise that our life will get more difficult, and we as adults need to accept it and start planning for that. Not voting for the guy who says it's all the fault of foreigners and that nuclear energy will magically save us.

First, I don't care about looking smart, and even less about looking "intellectually superior".

Second, if it was obvious it would be even more tragic. But the fact is that it's not obvious at all: the solution to our big problems (energy, biodiversity loss, global warming) are complicated. Whoever says "vote for me, I have the solution" is either a liar or a moron.

Today renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history, and is reshaping the global energy system.

Germany also reduced theirs more than France since that point. And grown per capita GDP faster from a higher start.

Nuclear appears to be a distraction, it's not even visible on a graph of Germany's GHG emissions.

2 to 3 tonnes of metal and batteries to transport 75kg of meat and sit uselessly 98% of the time is not the optimal way to transport people, no matter how you look at it

And even if we did this, we would also need tens of thousands of carbon capture facilities, and the infrastructure to actually store the CO2 somewhere.

Carbon capture (from air) is just completely infeasible. It's not even remotely realistic. There is absolutely no way it will ever make a significant difference.

However, places that have 100% clean electricity are often isolated. You need to ship in all equipment, which is made elsewhere, and fly in all personnel. This quickly adds up:

https://heimildin.is/grein/24581/climeworks-capture-fails-to...

Capturing carbon from the source, like a coal power plant, is much easier. But the capture rate is only 50% on average, so a coal power plant with carbon capture is still horrible while also ridiculously expensive, so it doesn't really make sense.

We've emitted more than a trillion tons of CO2 since 1990. If we want to put just that back into the ground (pump it into old oil wells), the final storage will be several thousand cubic kilometers of high pressure CO2. Just the direct air capture will cost more than an Exawatt hour of renewable electricity (currently, humanity produces around 30 PWh of electricity per year from all sources).

You can use some tricks. Turning all agricultural waste, forestry waste and organic garbage into bio char (instead of letting it decompose on the fields or in compost facilities, which emits CO2) captures a few billion tons per year, but that's far more labor intense and requires a lot of automation work.

Second - where exactly did you get a notion that CO2 capture = "let's just continue destroying the world"? Of course every other tech should be mobilized and improved too in parallel.

Third - nuclear generation at scale is as fantastical as DACs. Please read about actual issues with real life construction of plants and about actual emissions attributed to each plant cumulatively, without greenwashing like selectively ignoring whole parts of supply chain and maintenance and decommission. I love nuclear energy btw, despite literally suffered through the worst accident in their history (I'm from Kyiv) along with my whole family. We do should construct more of them and SMRs can't come quick enough.

Fourth - there is a collective delusion that moving 100% to renewable energy would cut emissions by 50% or any other similar fantasy number. In reality the whole world energy generation is only 1/4 to 1/3 of all world emissions, and course the so called "net zero" or "carbon neutral" catchphrases are greenwashing, it is impossible. A 100% world renewable generation would only cut part of that part of global emissions. So let's say renewables reduce energy emissions by 50% or maybe even 75%. So then the non-generation emissions would decrease by only 15-20% (for example Xnew = Xold * (1 - 0.25 * 0.75) = 0.8125 * Xold or 18% decrease in other words). This is what is often ignored in a green advertisements.

> Unfortunately, even if we exceed and then bring temperature back to 1.5 degree over preindustrial, the damage has already been done.

We won't be able to get back to 1.5, and in fact the way it's going we're still accelerating our emissions, so it will get a lot worse.

Now, if we could get back to 1.5, it would most definitely be better than not getting back to it. So "the damage has already been done" is wrong.

If we managed to keep it at 2 instead of higher, it would most definitely be better than not keeping it at 2. So "the damage has already been done" is wrong.

If we managed to keep it at 3 instead of higher, ... you get my point.

What's happening is that we've already caused damage that will hurt, and we are now actively working towards causing more damage that will hurt more. The faster we get our shit together, the less it will hurt. There is no "it's too late, it's done". There is "it will be painful" and "it will be more painful" and "it will be a lot more painful" all the way down.

So I suspect that there will be two mostly independent trends in China (and other industrial places like that) - solar installation will grow, but coal use won't be meaningfully cut without huge HUGE help from central and foreign powers at once.

I'm not sure I'm following? A raise in temperature doesnt in itself cause any particular wildfire, drought or tsunami (just like the weight in a coin won't), but these events get more and more likely (just like losing the coin flip as the coin gets more and more unfair). This doesn't assume anything about the actual probability or trajectory we're on, if i measure my coinflips and they turn out to be 50/50 the argument is just as valid

> strong evidence

I think that pointing to 1 singular graph as "strong evidence" is a bit shallow. there are plenty of reasons to think that there are many confounding variables here.

And it's largely recovered [1]

> With current heat levels we're projected to lose upwards of 1/5th the corn harvest by 2030.

Who is projecting that? Globally we're producing 8% more corn YoY [2]. Do you expect all of the sudden in the next 5 years for 20% of that to vanish?

> I mean some of them did, like a decade ago

Which ones specifically? The Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands all still exist, and some have experienced growth [3]

> That is the group most likely to die to cold.

I think you're arguing against yourself here. Fewer people died from extreme cold because of climate change and higher average temperatures.

[1] https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co... [2] https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/production/0440000 [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02954-1

There is more than one kind of nuclear, and the fuel situation has known reserves that aren't being used because of lack of demand. Fuel costs in reactors are only a very small part of their operational costs so new mines are not the priority. We also have viable seawater extraction technologies that are waiting for appropriate demand. Past that, there are also breeder and waste-burning reactors long held-up as a vital and fuel-conserving part of a complete nuclear eco-system.

Bluntly: the nuclear build-out France achieved in the 70s, scaled globally, would solve the climate problem and position us for synthetic fuel production at a civilizational scale. Modern technologies & robotics have us on track for facilities producing low greenhouse energy for more than a century. Global shipping, transport fuels, and energy-intensive industry require high-energy inputs. WWS are wonderful, but very awkward in those domains.

The second is lack of privacy, in terms of attractiveness. 6-people-per-cabin couchette cars have sufficient capacity, but the market isn't quite there anymore.

We basically want to get as many cabins as possible in railcar (to reduce cost), but they're are comfortable and private (to increase attractiveness). With these levers, you can change the operating margin from -15%..-10% to around 10%.

You want to destroy the automotive industry in Europe so we can increase dependance on Chinese EVs?

Europe's car manufacturers need to get their shit together, but not being able to buy any car whatsoever the moment China gets their own Donald Trump is worse than cars being slightly worse and a bit more expensive for a while.

The problem is China burns coal for power on crazy scale, destroying the planet in the process.

You don't think that might account for some of their low cost of production?

So yes, I do currently think that the reality of life is that certain whole societies are in the given moment (now) more progressive than others. Or do you believe that some BRICS pseudo-union would collectively push for more green tech than EU is doing now (even though EU foreign policy actions are mostly impotent)?

Sure, maybe China will eventually take a lead in green tech policies, or maybe it even already did, though I'm not convinced so far. As soon as that happens visibly,I would gladly change my opinion and would advocate that now EU should follow more progressive lead (as long as Xi don't start WW3 for some "dvizhukha" like other demented autocrats did).

PS: and don't attribute to me stuff I didn't say, like this "we can export our Lovely Eco Friendly Culture more, the more we power it with coal and oil and gas."(c)

I'm in favor of renewables, but at the individual level (your own home). Meanwhile, the Spanish government has made several moves to ban personal electric vehicles like EUCs and electric scooters, which only pushes people back toward gas-powered vehicles.

Everything is being done wrong.