alt Hacker NewsMeanwhile governments are electing to either do nothing or actively make the problem worse (particularly in the case of the US — expanding fossil fuel extraction, pushing data center build out and attacking renewables like wind).
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The US isn't expanding fossil fuel extraction, its quite the opposite. They're funding the modernization of existing plants in order to take older plants offline:
June 2026: New coal-fired plants in Anchorage, Alaska, and Mt. Storm, West Virginia, would total 2.85 GW. They would be the first new U.S. coal plants to come online since 2013.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doe-announces-850m-moderniz...
Meanwhile in China (from 2023):
China permitted more coal power plants last year than any time in the last seven years, according to a new report released this week. It's the equivalent of about two new coal power plants per week. The report by energy data organizations Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air finds the country quadrupled the amount of new coal power approvals in 2022 compared to 2021.
"Everybody else is moving away from coal and China seems to be stepping on the gas," she says. "We saw that China has six times as much plants starting construction as the rest of the world combined."
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
Meanwhile in India (2026):
India plans to increase its coal production by nearly 100m tonnes to 1.15bn tonnes in the 2025-26 fiscal year to help meet the country’s rising demand for electricity to support economic growth and contend with heatwaves, which have become more severe and more frequent because of the climate crisis.
The planned increases come despite signs that the world is beginning to turn its back on coal in favour of renewable electricity, Global Energy Monitor said.
The US could switch every ICE vehicle to EV's and install solar and wind turbines in every inch of the country and it won't combat what's going on in China, India and other developing countries that rely on coal for cheap energy.
Solar energy is the fastest growing source of energy in the US. That's because it's also the cheapest source of energy. So markets are working.
https://abcnews.com/US/solar-generates-energy-coal-us-1st-ti...
"Solar and storage provided 90% of all new power added in the U.S." is mind blowing. How about we give the US credit for this?
Fossil fuel extraction is not the problem. The problem is fossil fuel usage. Given the world consumes fossil fuel I prefer they use American fossil fuel vs. Russian or Saudi fossil fuels. I don't understand why we are dwelling on the wrong metric here. Also consider the US has just removed a sh~tload of fossil fuels from the world economy. How about some extra credits there?
Similarly data centers are going to get built somewhere. If they're already built I'd rather they are built in places like the US.
Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem. This is already happening with solar. Where I would be critical about US policy is that I think they are introducing more tariffs on imported solar panels. This might fit into governments make things worse and hopefully everyone regardless of their political affiliation can push back on this specific item.
The world all going to act together stronger than the markets is not going to happen. You can argue that is unfortunate but it's also where we are.
This is the very definition of the Tragedy of the Commons. Without everyone committing to common limits, it is folly for anyone to.
And FWIW, I don't buy the "but the countries that bred like rabbits for the past few decades are owed their due reserved quota". Having a massive population isn't something you need to be rewarded for, not to mention that the math doesn't even make sense. For China and India to get their "per quota" backlog, we're basically so firmly in self destruction territory that it makes no sense for anyone else to even bother.
This has been aided by the fact that energy has been heavily politicized. Fossil fuels are 'murican and renewables are woke. It's horrifying.
Data centers use no more than 1.5% of electricity globally[1], and a long LLM query uses only a little more than 5 minutes of general laptop use ~3x the energy of running an LED light for 5 minutes.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...