this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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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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Team Trump tries to spread the crazy abroad | This week's gambit: Africa should rely on...coal. (billmckibben.substack.com)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Context:

[US Energy Secretary] Mr. Wright said Africa simply needed more energy of all kinds, including and even especially coal, one of the most polluting fossil fuels.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

A meme repeated in Africa is "US and British come to lecture us. China builds hospitals". Legalizing bribery is a path for US privatization of energy boondoggles on the continent. Bribes always cheapest way to corrupt economics.

Africa has fantastic solar resources, but more importantly, does not have established monopolies that make home/community solar expensive in US. The cost of a western built coal plant, and electricity transmission/distribution in Africa is high. Importing coal also higher there due to less infrastructure. Coal prices rose to extortionist levels from war on Russia, and extortionist LNG prices in Europe.

Even if you want to build a utility scale power plant in Africa, solar and batteries are cheaper than coal, and dependence on coal/fossil fuel supplies and price fluctuations. African grid reliability is poor largely because fuel supplies are already unreliable. Trump/US saying that Africa selling cocoa and coffee that no one else can grow is taking advantage of US with upcoming tariffs, would make it clear corruption to submit more strongly to US. The decolonization of Africa moves that have taken place the last 2 years as the west devolves to irrelevance, is not something that will likely be reversed... depending on those bribery levels.