this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
8 points (78.6% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5316 readers
294 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:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
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
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
saved you a long read - it’s “sustainable aviation fuel.”
Yeah, you can produce that, in small quantities. Get rid of the need for fossil fuels for ground transport, and a big chunk of the corn and soy crops that are currently blended into gasoline and diesel respectively can be used as aviation fuel. It's not a bad way to do it.
corn
soy
While there are hungry people, we shouldn't be growing crops just to set fire to them
the US produces a massive surplus of corn (questionable government subsidies), only a tiny portion “sweet corn” (not shown on upper graph) is ever meant for the table
the VAST majority of US corn is relatively inedible “feed corn” meant for agricultural feed lots (blue bars, “Feed and residual use”) and industrial chemical manufacturing – ethanol (orange bars, “Alcohol for fuel use”), and fertilizers, food additives, etc. (gray bars, “Other food, seed, and industrial use”)
EDIT: check out Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) to get an idea of how dependent US is on industrial corn
Bio fuels are definitely an issue in that regard (and if SAF becomes a thing it can rapidly spin out of control). However, so far the far bigger issue here is the meat industry. Go vegan, save lives, save rainforest.
Meat isn't that much bigger than biofuels at this point. In the US, there's something like equal split of corn consumption and 3:2 meat:bioful on soy.
Mind you, the biofuels don't kick out as much methane, so they've got a more limited climate impact.