Oceans hit highest temperature on record

The things that will work, but can't be done: Walk/bike instead of vehicles, no crypto and AI (tremendous hype and speculators and grifters), Lower population (religions are opposed to it), degrowth (nobody wants to live a relatively substandard life, all the stuff is for status signaling), fly less, don't eat as much beef, etc. Degrowth is the best way, but nobody can walk entire population down that path. It has to be everyone or no one will do it because its all comparison based living.

What are possible?

1) Plug-in solar and batteries: The next population boom is in Africa. Africa probably has the advantage of no legacy grid with fossil fuel interests and power plants. They can leap frog and go entirely offgrid or mini community level grids.

2) Vertical solar: Solar deployments at scale today use the legacy grid, production far away and transmission lines to bring power to cities. Solar is dirt cheap, the biggest costs now are land and transmission lines. Instead, we can do vertical solar in cities. Cover every surface. Adds ~4 hours of production every day. We already know rooftop solar works, with vertical, maybe cities can become self-sufficient.

3) EVs for energy storage. 1.8 billion vehicles in the world, if they all become EVs, they are the biggest energy storage without having to build a separate energy storage layer saving trillions of dollars. The first step is to stop buying ICE cars. It will take 20 years for the entire fleet to be electric.

Solar is growing now, but curtailment is at 20%. Storage is the bottleneck. Solar will soon hit a wall, we can't grow solar because it becomes financially unviable to add more production, curtailment will increase and prices will go a lot more negative (500 million times/year in the US).

People are going to buy cars anyway, we can't convince anyone to walk/bike, just have them buy EVs instead. This creates the storage to continue to grow solar.

Then there is a good chance we would never have moved up to a technological state that allowed us to leave the planet. We probably wouldn't also be facing blow back from digging up and burning the planets solar battery.

We knew about this all since the 1980's. Carl Sagan testified before congress in 1985 [1]. That's over 40 years ago.

Yet, we continue to burn more and fossil fuels; solar, wind, EVs, etc, non-withstanding. And right now some governments are actively spending money to work against renewable energy.

At this point I am afraid that we humans will only act when the alternative is unaffordable, when the forest is already on fire. I hope by that time it won't be too late.

Those of us who have been saying this all along won't even get the hollow satisfaction of an "I told you so!", because we'll be too busy surviving.

Vote, drive less (combustion engines), fly less, use public transportation, check your utility mix (and demand a larger renewable fraction), install solar, lobby, buy more local (where possible), consume less, support those with jobs displaced by renewables, accept some loss on your fossil stocks, ...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI

Wind produced 10% of China's electricity last year, and its share is growing at 1% per year while coal's share shrinks. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/business/china-wind-turbi...

No connection to a lake is necessary, imagine 2 locks in parallel both connected to the same low water level canal section "on the left" and both connected to the same high water level canal to the right (its not necessary to have 2 locks in parallel, its just easier to demonstrate the scheme doesn't require significant energy consumption):

Imagine one lock is currently filled to the high level, while the other is currently filled to the low level. The locks have been closed. As you let water from the high lock flow into the low lock through Archimedes screws, those screws can lift a weight, until they have equilibrated at the midpoint of the high and low water levels. But you have raised the weight and can now use that to power the draining of the lock that has only halfway sunk in level, by pumping its water to the lock that has only halfway risen. Apart from friction there is no energy consumption. Slow quasistatic transfer drives the friction energy consumption to 0. In practice you want to use an "extra" weight to attain higher pump speeds, and then recover the kinetic energy. That will consume more friction energy, but a small number of solar panels suffice, the energy is not used to lift water, but to overcome friction (haste makes waste).