this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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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.

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

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[–] BarrierWithAshes@kbin.social -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'll believe it when I see it.

[–] RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you living under a rock? The IRA impacts are everywhere. For my home I was able to leverage a tax credit last year for installing an EV charger.

There's rebates on EVs, home efficiency upgrades, solar, batteries, electric (+heat pump) water heaters, etc. etc. etc.

There's also tons of money on the table for businesses pursuing cleaner energy, etc.

[–] BarrierWithAshes@kbin.social -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm not American. Stuff Biden does seldom reaches here. I just have to go with whatever I hear when I enter the country. I was under the impression fxck-all was happening, and that China was the only one seriously making progress on their green goals. Lord knows Europe's been slow af.

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 8 points 1 year ago

Per capita CO2 emissions in 2021:

Country Emissions per capita
USA 14.86
China 8.05
EU 6.28
World 4.69

Change in % since 2011:

Country Change in %
USA -15.92
China 14.59
EU -17.00
World -3.73

In other words Europe is pretty fast in reducing emissions, from a higher then global average. China was well below global average and has increased emissions by a lot. Seriously the EU has some pretty good laws to reducing emissions and is besides Latin America one of the regions with the best relation between quality of life to emissions. France and Spain even have per capita emissions close to the global average.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The estimates from before passage looked like this: REPEAT project estimate of greenhouse gas emissions with and without the IRA.  Shows a sharp cut in emissions as a result

And per this article, we're likely doing better than the pre-passage estimates.

China by contrast has had increasing emissions over the past several years:

Graph showing China's CO2 emissions by year

Those increases by China are used by opponents of climate action to argue that it's not worth doing anything, when every country needs to get to the same emisisons: zero or less.

[–] BarrierWithAshes@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Was actually not aware that emissions have gone down. Much more used to the US not doing anything or actively screwing people over (such as the arrest of Donziger) but at least it's going down.

Those increases by China are used by opponents of climate action to argue that it’s not worth doing anything,
Hate that too.

China has been doing thins to curb emissions and generally fix the environment like the Gobi tree wall. Course there's plenty more that could be doing but I digress.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It is; things could be worse than they are. The problem is that both absolute and per-capita emissions are going up, to the point where China crossed over to be the largest emitter on a national-total basis, and we're at the point where they need to be going down.