You're also just flat-out wrong. If I encouraged 10 other people to "go green" but din't alter my own lifestyle one jot, that would have MORE impact.

That would only be true if you assume those 10 people actually take the advice and alter their lifestyle. Chances are they're just like you: They hear the advice but they don't do jack about it because they think they are too insignificant to make a change. In a situation like that, if you change your lifestyle, your actions DO have an impact. But these scenarios are completely irrelevant because of what I said earlier.

If you change, you make the same impact than if you don't do anything at all. That's my point.

My personal actions make NO difference to overall climate effects

Do you really believe that? Simple things like turning off lights when you don't need them, using low power light bulbs, not flushing the toilet unnecessarily, taking short showers, etc. These all have a larger impact than what you might expect.

I believe that PEOPLE doing these small things en masse makes a difference (though as I mentioned I do wonder how big relative to industry) but what I individually do makes no measurable difference, or what you do. It's not like vaccinations where "everyone else is vaccinated so I don't need to" is sometimes argued...

The point is that for people to make a difference, each of them has to believe that their individual actions make a difference. It's something of a dichotomy, a bit like saying "my vote won't make any difference". You're right, the election isn't going to be won by a single vote - but it's important people don't think that way otherwise collectively it all goes wrong.

A bit like the finance system - it relies entirely on people believing in it works, to work.

To be honest the greens would complain and fight against just about anything technologically progressive so as to bring us back to the stone age.

This is a great novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(science_fiction_novel)

To be honest the greens would complain and fight against just about anything technologically progressive so as to bring us back to the stone age.

My favorite is fracking. Despite the fracking experiment in the US haven proven to be very successful environmentally and economically (thanks to shale oil, oil prices have crashed and inflation is at its lowest which is benefiting everyone),

Fracking didn't cause the oil prices to crash. Saudi Arabia intentionally and almost single-handly caused the oil prices to crash (by pushing billions of gallons of cheap oil onto the market (~400 million gallons a month, if I'm googling correctly)), to intentionally punish Russia, ISIS, Iran, and the USA domestic oil market - they can hurt four (or more) enemies at one time. In this case, it happens to benefit us consumers quite nicely (Saudi Arabia doesn't have anything against the USA in general, just the Shale Oil's challenge to Saudi oil dominance).

The only way the "thanks to shale oil, oil prices have crashed" sentence works, if if you say "thanks to shale oil and other important factors, Saudi Arabia decided to crash the oil prices".

Saudi Arabia can produce oil cheaper than almost anyone else, because they have some of the most easily-accessible oil (i.e. closest to the surface) in some of the largest quantities (but not *the* most easily accessible oil - in one middle-eastern country, I forget which, the oil used to be literally pooled on the surface).

Further, Saudi Arabia is intentionally using their vast reserve of cash to subsidize some of the prices, making the oil even cheaper with Saudi Arabia taking a loss (potentially) on each barrel. USA shale oil is costly to access and the companies involved have taken on alot of debt to fund the operations, so Saudi Arabia hopes to drive those businesses into bankruptcy. Whether their gambit pays off or not, remains to be seen.

Saudi Arabia is basically shooting a gun through themselves to hit their enemies, knowing it can survive the gunshot. The question is, will it do enough damage to their enemies to actually be worth it?

A potentially smarter move on Saudi Arabia's part would've been to use their vast cash reserves to buy major portions of the shale market - but USA law might partially prohibit that. The exact nature of those laws, I'm not sure - it's not an area I've looked into before. But I do know I love seeing this cheaper gas.

But I do know I love seeing this cheaper gas.

I don't.

Cheaper gas means more people using it which means more emissions. The USA needs to stop subsidising gas and actually make it less economically viable to drive so much, or at the very least to encourage the development and use of lower emissions vehicles.

Cheaper gas means more people using it which means more emissions.

But it can also mean an allowance to move onto less effective but also much less emitting energies being used (hydrogen+oxygen combustion). Generating hydrogen with extremly cheap fuels might be done by process of CH4+H2O->3H2+CO neutrilize 2CO+O2=>2CO2 a twice CO2 per thus 6H2, energy effectivity for single CO2, but the heat generation for process would consume energy generating CO2 if it was done by fuel combustion, but on a factory site more conservable/neutralizable then in car I gess.

Cheaper energy now also means we can make a more cost effective transition to better and more efficient energy usage in the future. Despite what some would have you believe, solar panels and hydro plants don't just magically appear. They require energy and resources to produce, but a well designed hydro dam that we build today could hold back and control a river for thousands of years.

We just need people to actually give a damn about resource investment and thinking beyond the next six months. Kind of like the number of people who will whine and complain about government spending tax money to upgrade roads or other services and benefits that help to encourage business growth, and then complaining about why there is not business growth after there was no investment in things... (How much better would the housing and job market be if 20-35 year olds weren't swimming in student debt and therefore felt more confident about buying property or starting new businesses?)

Great news, at least for our grandchildren's generation.... Well real true efficient and clean energy might be just around the corner, thanks to German scientists' nuclear fusion break through

Saudi Arabia decided to crash the oil prices".

Indeed many factors... in addition- everyone (including Saudi Arabia) is scare of the further 'glut' impact that Iran's oil will have on the markets once sanctions are lifted and so there is a 'future downward bet' by speculators on that.

Second Saudi Arabia also refuse to bow to pressure from fellow OPEC members to join forces with Russia and reduce production (well probably Russia won't want to join forces anyway). Yeah they are pumping relentlessly to defend their market share, (and wisely so) mainly because if they do agree to cuts & quotas, they bear burden of the cuts as other members cheat on their quotas, while everyone focuses on Saudi to maintain theirs.

Also heard in some quarters that the strength of the Dollar is also significantly contributing to the crash

This would be egoistic of the bad leaderships lead at the time, I would think. Why would you do this in time your bound to fail.

The people of the future pay for the sins of the past.

I believe that PEOPLE doing these small things en masse makes a difference (though as I mentioned I do wonder how big relative to industry) but what I individually do makes no measurable difference, or what you do. It's not like vaccinations where "everyone else is vaccinated so I don't need to" is sometimes argued...

The point is that for people to make a difference, each of them has to believe that their individual actions make a difference.

However... and this is where the Greens fail, it has to be reasonable in order to have an effect. Otherwise it's just a waste of time and money.

I tossed the 2.2% number at you a few posts earlier (Germany's contribution to the worldwide CO2 exhaust). Why is Germany's CO2 production 4 times bigger than that of France? Surely not because the French are so much more eco-aware. You only need to look at how black every building in each city is (and what it looks again 2-3 years after removing the grit), or how they do recycling, as in throw plastic and paper into the same bin (or how many people actually do it).

No, it's not that, of course. It's our heavy industry which by far dominates the CO2 output.

About 4/5 of the above 2.2% is something that I cannot directly influence with my actions (and not really indirectly either) because it's done by the industry, not by me and my neighbour. So, only about 20% of those 2.2% (0.44%) are what is directly produced by our entire people, and thus are what is at most "tweakable". Arguably, you can somehow indirectly influence what's produced by the industry, but not really all too much. Plus, the deliberately fraudulent emission laws will only mean that the industry buys emission license from someone else.

Even if every single person in Germany refused to produce any CO2 at all from now onwards (which probably includes breathing), the maximum attainable global effect would be 0.44%.

Now, for the energy that I (and everybody else) privately consume. The by far, far, far greatest consumer or electricity in my household (like in the vast majority of households) is my electric stove. It consumes anywhere from 4 to 6 kilowatts while it's in use (if I turned on everything simultaneously, it'd be 11kW), and it's in use for about 2 hours per day. Unlike a lot of people, I am not even using pyrolytic cleaning on the baking oven.

The stove/oven consumes about 90% of the energy in my household. My computer (which I use for work) with periphereals and everything uses about half of what remains. Everything else (refridgerator, washing maschine, air filter, television, lights) is somewhere within the remaining 5%. If I lived in the USA, you could add air conditioning to the equation, reducing the "everything else" group to virtually nothing.

There is no easy way of making this more energy-efficient, since after all, what you want from a stove is heat (so, efficiency is kind of "zero by definition", it all goes up in heat). There is no way of doing without it either, because I have to eat. No, eating grass is not an option. Lacking installations for gas, it is also not easily possible to use something different (and even so, it would only mean more CO2, not less).

My refridgerator makes up for about 2% of my yearly energy consumption with its 94kWh. Do you really think it matters whether it's A+ or A+++? Or B+? What would the difference if it used 80kWh or 100kWh? None. Zero. As much as if someone in China drops a sack of rice.

Do you really think it makes a difference whether my hoover (which runs about 15-20 mins twice per week) has 1400W or 1200W? Do you really think we need a law for that, and that anything gets better from this? We're talking 36 vs. 31kWh. Either one is about 0.75% of my household's total consumption. Besides, making hoovers more energy-efficient means putting more neodym into them. Which is of course a great plan if you want to save the planet.

With that in mind, do you really think it makes a difference whether my lightbulbs have 80W or 20W? It sounds like "big win", but it's really insignificant.

If you try to save on something that makes up, say, 1% of every person's "badness", and people only make up 20% of a nation's "badness" at home at all, and the nation only has a very small share on the global badness, then there is nothing to be reasonably gained from turning that knob.

Even if nobody in Germany used a hoover at all any more (assuming that electricity and CO2 actually correspond 1:1, which is not the case due to nuclear/water/wind/solar), that would mean at best a 1%-of-20%-of-2.2% global reduction. That's 0.44% assuming we basically "return to the stone age". So really, how sensible is it it to limit the peak power?

On the other hand, it makes a big difference whether lightbulbs release toxic amounts of mercury or not (plus, producing them isn't exactly energy-friendly). It also makes a big difference whether a few hundred thousand tons of rare-earths extra are being produced per year (even if that happens in China, globally it's the same globally). Not so much because of the materials themselves, but because of the energy-intensive production process and the catastrophically toxic byproducts.

It is an entirely useless, stupid endeavour to try and save the world by turning knobs that have not effect. You have to turn the knob on the 50% thingies, not on the 0.01% thingies. But it is an even more stupid endeavour to invoke an even greater evil than what you had before trying to save the world.

Rather than generating "clean energy" from windwheels with neodym magnets and from solar panels and burying nuclear waste in the ground (and, failing to cover energy spikes with those very green methods, burn fossile fuels to produce electric energy), and waiting one or two decades for them to amortize the energy that was used to produce them, one should think about making use of what evil we already have without increasing it further.

For example, we use geothermal energy, which is nuclear energy if you are being honest (the heat comes from thorium decay). But this is "clean" energy even if the gradient, and thus efficiency, is abysmal for production of electric energy, and even if you have to supply considerable electric energy from the outside to produce warm water. And yeah, it's OK that an energy pump only lives like 10-15 years, still perfectly green.

On the other hand, we have a couple of hundred thousand barrels of highly radioactive material from reactors buried. Each barrel constantly produces about 20kW of heat, which is so much that they need active cooling or the metal would eventually melt. Yes, it is not very economical to use these in a nuclear reactor.

But the important detail is: We already have this waste (whether we make something of it or not), and we go through a lot of trouble trying to get rid of it. We could as well use the energy that comes out of it for free, and we could as well try to draw a bit more from it, reducing the half-life time. Even assuming that we cannot do any better than heat water from the 20kW that come out of the barrel by itself, that is easily enough to heat a dozen homes (probably more like two dozen). Mind you, the barrel produces those 20kW 24/365, that's something like 630GJ per year, and it's a hell lot better than anything you can get from geothermy, unless you kind of dig into a volcano. And you have hundred thousands of them lying around.

It's also a problem that nobody bothers even trying. Nuclear is "bad" so we are rather burying the waste than try to make something of it. Nuclear bombs turn sub-critical masses into highly critical masses (so critical that they, well... detonate like bombs) with neutron reflectors. Neutron reflector is basically another word for a steel or beryllium sphere (or graphite, and another few materials will work).

Why shouldn't something similar work for making nuclear waste a bit more active? Maybe "put it under a beryllium dome" is a bit too simplistic as a concept, and maybe that doesn't work, but maybe it does (or something different will, like put in some external energy, triggering faster decay and getting out more energy than you put in). Thing is, nobody even ever tries, because nuclear energy is the Devil.

Instead, we concentrate on "green" energies that are not so green at all, and we still burn fossile fuels to cover the gaps that the green energies leave.

And of course, thanks to the USA's fracking oil war on OPEC, oil is cheaper than it has been in decades, so people now use a lot more than they were using before. Which of course means that CO2 now goes up a lot faster than ever, and if the fossile fuel stores weren't near the end before, they are much more rapidly approaching that end now (I really don't think the stores are anywhere near "end" because Earth is so darn huge and we still have not explored most of it, it will probably only get much harder to harvest. You can never know for sure before you've hit the end... it is however certain that the faster and more inconsiderately you consume a resource, the faster you will arrive at the end).