this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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I joined a community choice power provider with 100% renewable power, and my bill went down (self.climate)
submitted 5 months ago by marine_mustang to c/[email protected]
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I just got my first bill since going to a community choice power provider. Here in California, the investor owned utilities (commercial companies, not the publicly-owned utilities) act as retailers of energy. They buy power on the open market from generators, then sell it to their customers. They bill both for the cost to generate the power, and also for power delivery (which includes maintaining the grid). An option that recently became available is for a city government to join a community choice power provider, which then buys power from generators on our behalf. The utility still delivers it, so it’s not real competition, but partway there. The community choice provider then bills the utility, who passes that bill along to individual customers.

So, the generation cost went down by about 30% for power used during the day, and a few percent for power delivered at night (three different time-of-use categories). Our community choice provider has an option for 100% renewable power, which I chose, so this is a pretty tangible demonstration that renewable power really is cheaper than fossil fuels.

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[–] marine_mustang 3 points 5 months ago

Yeah, a bit long-winded of me, but California’s electric utility arrangement can be confusing for non-residents. I found the wholesale/retail analogy helpful to describe the relationship between electricity generators and the utilities. In that analogy, CCAs are like a separate buyer using the retail store space to put their own products on the shelf for us to buy.