this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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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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Because the solution is not something we can throw money at and expect a fast cure. Even cancer has the hope of a treatment that works in months to years. Climate change requires changing nearly everything about how we generate energy and requires us to find novel ways to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. This latter bit can have money thrown at it, but without the former it's pointless. It'd be a cancer treatment while the patient huffs burning asbestos.
The difficulty in treating coupled with the fact that climate change is a slow process that wreaks havoc over years to decades means the short-term-focused economies and markets largely try to adapt to long-term changes instead of solving the issues. When you're only concerned with a few fiscal quarters at a time, why would you think on the scale of decades?
About 70% of new electric generation is non-emitting already. It's actually not that big a change to go to 100%
So yes, we can do it on a scale of decades
and electricity only makes up 28% of ghg emissions globally.
We're also seeing a big shift to heat pumps for space heating, electrification of transport, and even the beginnings of steel reduced by using hydrogen made with electrolysis instead of using coal. So a lot of things are happening, but not yet on the scale and pace we need.
The elephant in the room still exists, all the added CO2. I applaud change, and fast moving even more, but it needs to be faster
Not only CO2 but also Methan. It is 84 times more harmful in the first 20 years. But it is degrading on its own with a half-live of 7-12 years in the atmosphere. Methan makes up 20 to 30% of the human made GHG. Change to a plant based diet can reduce the emissions by 40%.
It is one of the few things we can change on our own very fast and does not need additional technological solutions to have a big impact.
and the warmer it gets, the more we'll see methane hydrates bubbling up to the surface and adding gigatons more to the problem. vicious cycle.
I can't see anything going wrong with this
Should have started it on the scale of decades 40 years ago when scientists were saying we had 40 years to fix it. Too late now, we're in the beginning of the apocalypse.
We're at a point where it's too late to avoid all impact, but we've got a very real choice about exactly how much impact we do see. There's a big difference between 1.5°C and 2°C and more.
1.5c by 2030s? lol, we'll have 1.6c in the next couple of years. it's bonkers. literally.
Yes, didn't I just read that we hit 1.5C already this year?
Only for parts of the year.
We will officially hit 1.5c once the average temperature of that year is 1.5 degrees hotter than pre industrial baseline
Thanks. Please propagatw this fact more.
I hear and read it too often that people are falling into devastation mode and say, back up, we lost, its over.
However its a difference in being "over" which is 2.5 - 4.5 degrees or above.
There was this moment after 9/11 when Tom Daschle proposed a 'Manhattan Project for Green Energy' to get us off foreign energy and help avoid climate change. Imagine if Al Gore had been president at the time, what might have happened. This was 20 years ago! But instead we (extremely questionably) got W. Bush and endless wars and 'drill baby drill'. Such a knife's edge for history and we came off the wrong side of it...