this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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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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Amazon said it effectively got all of the electricity it used last year from sources that did not produce greenhouse gas emissions. Some experts have faulted the company’s calculations. (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 4 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] Ranvier@sopuli.xyz 31 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

As a result, to achieve 100 percent clean energy — at least on paper — companies often buy what are known as renewable energy certificates, or RECs, from a solar or wind farm owner. By buying enough credits to match or exceed the energy its operations use, a company could make the claim that its business is powered entirely by clean energy.

“That’s what we do, buy RECs for projects that are not yet operational,” Ms. Hurst said.

In a report published by the Amazon employee group after the company’s announcement, the workers said their research concluded that after deducting Amazon’s use of credits, the real investment in clean energy was just a fraction of what was publicized.

“Buying a bunch of RECs doesn’t help anything,” Ms. Stokes said. “You just have to be investing in real projects.”

Kind of the main punchline of the article. It's indulgences again

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yep. In the early days of transferable renewable energy credits, they were very much hoped to result in additional renewable energy construction, but it became clear within a few years that they don't have that impact.

[–] snooggums@midwest.social 7 points 4 months ago

They were an intentional lie by industry, just like post consumer plastic recycling.

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

There's a whole bunch of those in Alberta (Canada), the biggest solar farm in the province is owned by Amazon if I'm not mistaken.

With local laws you can't prevent someone from exploiting petrol found on your lot but you can't allow a company to install wind turbines on your lot...