this post was submitted on 27 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.
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For better or worse (definitely worse), we're going to stroll right into the horrors that global warming is going to give us. We won't start making necessary changes until it's way way past any tipping points.
The people that care have no power. The people in power are driven by capitalist profit motives.
If you're a sci-fi nerd like me we can hope aliens or a true AGI will take over and save us lol. Short of that I have no confidence, mad max dystopia by 2100 or sooner.
It doesn't take aliens or a true AGI; it takes stopping fossil fuel use, ending deforestation, and phasing out a few trace chemicals. Do that, and we end the rising temperatures
Making that happen is a matter of seizing power from those who profit from the current system of extraction and burning.
Well yeah but...
Even if tomorrow we start really working on getting the CO2 levels down (protip: we won't), humanity will be spending half their world energy budget for the next 50-100 years at least to get CO2 levels back to what they should be (pre industrialized levels). Even if we go for something more semi reasonable, say pre 1980 levels, we'll still be spending half our entire world energy budget on this for like a decade. This ain't an easy problem
No not easy. It's way cheaper to avoid making it worse than it is to try and put things back the way they were.
The next generations after us are facing shit storms. This all boils down to thermodynamics. We took energy at the cost of generating CO2. Taking that CO2 back, aggregating, filtering, converting, storing... Add in losses (be generous and take 50% conversion rates), we will need multiple times all the energy we took over the last two centuries to take all that CO2 out.
When I said decades of spending half our energy budget, I was very VERY generous. Reality is that we might have to be doing that for centuries, maybe.