this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
137 points (98.6% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5186 readers
418 users here now

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.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
137
Commonwealth Bank stops lending to fossil fuel companies without genuine emissions plan (www.abc.net.au)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
5 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

In short:

Australia's largest mortgage lender is no longer offering money to fossil fuel companies that are not aligned with the Paris Agreement.

The bank announced the new direction in its latest climate report, published on the same day it posted close to $10 billion in full-year net profit.

What's next?

The spotlight is now on the other big banks with a finance deal of about $750 million for oil and gas giant Santos on the table.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What is a genuine emmisions plan? Of course fossil fuel companies are opposed to the Paris Agreement. Even the ones that claim to be aligned with it. They're structure is fundamentally against anything other than the exponential increase in oil and gas consumption.

The industry could have gotten behind clean energy decades ago. Instead they chose to continue extracting a material that - without a shadow of a doubt - we will run out of. What an insane business model.

Remember a decade ago when the US was decreed 'the Saudi Arabia of natural gas'? They cooked up this wonderful term for the methane. Every pundit and politician from coast to coast called it a bridge fuel over and over again. Then instead of a bridge, they went and built a ramp that isn't levelling off, never mind declining.

Imagine if a couple generations ago, Exxon decided to pivot to solar and wind. With the financial resources available to that one company, we might have had panels at 40% efficiency by now. Maybe turbines at 50-60%. Who knows, if the industry as a whole put in the leg work, we may have been off oil and gas entirely today.

The fossil fuel industry has an expiry date. If we aren't sufficiently prepared, the impact of running out of an energy supply will be devastating.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

For a fossil fuel firm, it would look like a binding commitment to leave a large chunk of their reserves in the ground and a plan to end extraction over a couple decades while returning profits to shareholders in the meantime

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I agree. In the long term, it would make sense to leave as much as you can so you have it for more useful purposes in the future. Medical applications perhaps, or rocket fuel to get materials to the moon would be cool. Who wouldn't want to see us get a moon base?