Microblog Memes

Doesn't look that way to me, given that the change has been pretty smooth and shows up on specific regions and adjusting for outliers and inflation (and matches the rise in median income).

More importantly, it's not incompatible with global inequality on the rise. Different stats measure different things.

Renewable energy beating expectations is the opposite of greenwashing, it specifically compares actual generated renewable energy against previous projections. If you want to poke holes into it for the sake of... denying anything good has ever happened, I guess? you should instead point out at how disproportionately that growth is driven by China.

And again, that's perfectly compatible with CO2 emissions going up. Different stats, different things.

but I'd wager that it was mostly because the really poor country got a bit better off.

That's what happened. The bimodal world income distribution has become unimodal as the working class of East Asia has seen a lot of improvement. Inequality in the first world went up since a lot of working class jobs left their countries while the wealthy were able to get richer.

Hey, I'll take poor countries getting a bit better off before any benefits to any American any day. That's good news, so point made.

As for "beat expectations", I was going off a specific study showing multiple official forecasts and how far behind actuals they all were, but unfortunately I don't have it handy.

But the data is the data, so here's another example from an Australian blog post: https://evcricketenergy.wordpress.com/2025/01/02/2030-renewables-in-australia-forecast-2024-update/

And some data on renewable generation overtaking fossil fuels in the EU: https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2024/09/Report_Wind-and-solar-overtake-EU-fossil-fuels-in-the-first-half-of-2024.pdf

I don't know why people look at this as such a binary. Climate change isn't an on-off switch. This has to happen regardless. Faster is better than slower. Climate catastrophe or not, we need to figure this out, it's about how bad things get before we do and how much extra work and impact we have to deal with from going over certain thresholds. Going over 1.5 doesn't mean we can give up now, we still have to get the renewable transition done, even if now we also have to deal with a bunch of humanitarian crises that wouldn't have happened had we transitioned sooner.

Cool, but that's unrelated. We need the energy transition to happen anyway. Energy consumption is still climbing regardless, so we still need to move things over to renewables on top of whatever other actions we take. When it comes to climate stuff people tend to want a silver bullet or claim that anything short of that is useless, which I find kind of infuriatingly counterproductive.

Also, data centre power consumption has been up on aggregate on a very smooth curve since the 2000s. AI or no, those things have been burning through an increasing amount of energy over time. They need to generate that energy from clean sources in any case, which requires a faster energy transition.

Incidentally, I don't know if AI datacenters have "erased all gains". I don't have a direct comparison handy, but the numbers I see around for those two things seem an order of magnitude apart. If you have good sources I'd love to take a look, though.