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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:

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Why personal climate action matters – according to experts (theconversation.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Your choices do not exist in a vacuum. Earth is an interconnected community of living and non-living things says ethicist Patrick Effiong Ben of the University of Manchester. African philosophers like Jonathan Chimakonam and Aïda Terblanché-Greeff have a helpful concept for thinking through the weightiness of your decisions: complementarity.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

I get the argument he’s making, but the comparison between individual emissions, even when taken in large groups, and corporate emissions are so lopsided that these arguments always strike me as underhanded false equivalencies.

For example, Google emitted 14.31 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2023, while an individual American averaged around 13.8 metric tons of carbon dioxide during the same time period. That’s more than an order of magnitude if I’m doing my math right. Sure, individuals can always do better, but even collective action won’t come close to a single corporation’s emissions. Lay the blame where it actually belongs.

[–] spidermanchild 0 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

How many times did you ping Google servers today? AI bullshit aside, this is still on us for using all of their services. Yes they need to find a way to deliver their services sustainably but it's our job to regulate them and force the issue and not just hope corpos do the right thing (they won't).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Google, and most of today's tech bros designed their infrastructure to be wasteful and cloud-based. They very well could have designed it with a focus on decentralized equipment that does not need to be running all the time.

Beyond Google searches, just think how much power is wasted in the entire cloud compute pipeline these days, using a mobile device as an example:

Power to run cell towers, that today consume thousands of watts of power even when idle, and in countries like the US where carriers do not colocate on the same physical hardware, 3x to 6x that.
Power to run the data link to the cell towers,
Power to run the infrastructure on the Internet to link that connection to whatever cloud service you use.
Power to run the datacenter servers and cooling systems that handle your request.
All of the above is turned on whether you are using it or not.
Going on, power consumed on your consumption device.
All the advertising, tracking, and telemetry-gathering that every program on your device, web browser, web sites, services, and operating system perform, eating your battery faster and causing you to have to use more power to recharge more frequently, which also limits the life of your non-removable battery in your compute device.
All the bandwidth and power consumed with apps being set to auto update, and developers following CI/CD models "because it's hip" but really because it's a great way to reset and manipulate reviews on app stores, so apps are pointlessly updated almost daily despite having no significant changes, and your flash is worn, your battery is consumed, more power is consumed across the entire stack, every time this happens.
In the reverse, apps don't take advantage of I'll call it "predatory" caching (even though this would also lead to flash wear) to do something like, "they're watching episode 1 of a show, whenever I use Internet bandwidth, I'll also download the next three episodes at the same time to minimize collective power use." Doing so will use *some *more power, but overall if designed "smart" enough, it would effectively reduce power and bandwidth consumption at inopportune times.
Oh, and for all this infrastructure, the energy consumed maintaining, repairing, and upgrading this entire stack by humans, electricity, water, and fuel.
Probably other stuff I forgot.

[–] spidermanchild 2 points 2 weeks ago

These are some really great points. This to me is a reflection of our (in particular US) view that energy is something unlimited and cheap. The idea that we might simply do less or optimize to anything other than profit is laughable to most folks, so efficiency barely enters the conversation except as a means to profit further in some niche cases after the fact. The organizational changes required to correct the issues you identified seem truly insurmountable, unfortunately, but you're absolutely right.

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