Lots to think about, as always. What's tough for me here is that you're deriding efforts to understand one's carbon footprint, yet you say the most significant contribution a person can make is to eliminate their emissions.

For several articles now, you've called out BP and the concept of carbon footprint as completely useless. Because it's imperfect? I couldn't even imagine a way to calculate one's carbon footprint perfectly. But I see absolutely nothing wrong with people thinking about their environmental impact. And again, you come to the conclusion that a person will "have gone a very long way toward helping solve climate change" by doing so...

You rightly point out our absolute dependence on fossil fuels, yet seem so certain we're going to swap all of that for renewables. Have you seen Shanghai lately? Or Dubai? Los Angeles? Dallas? There are hundreds of power-hungry cities around the world, just rapacious for dense energy. Ocean tankers crisscrossing the globe with all our stuff, 24/7. 8,000 commercial jetliners in the air above as I type this. Wars, entire developing nations, a massive agricultural industry, the US still gets 81% of its energy from oil, coal, and natural gas (and we're not even the biggest offender). We're going to swap all that for renewables?

Sure -- let's try -- let's do everything we can, get as far as we can with it. But I have strong doubts a truly significant swap to renewables will ever be within our grasp. Believing so does feel like techno-optimism, or techno-utopianism.

But really, any of these ideas -- renewables, geoengineering, carbon footprint, degrowth -- are only *wrong* or inviable when taken as the single fix. It's not going to be one thing, one solution. For one reason, there will never be the consensus as to what that fix *is*. It's going to take everything we have; it's going to be messy, and hard times, with some faring way worse than others. We're also quite likely at the beginning of deglobalization and its arguable that the green transition needs a globalized approach, so it could be even harder (see link below from world economic forum).

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/01/deglobalisation-what-you-need-to-know-wef23/