https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/08/un-report-calls-for-phasing-out-of-fossil-fuels-as-paris-climate-goals-being-missed
Governments failing to cut emissions fast enough to meet Paris agreement goals and avoid disaster, major report says
I think we’ve already demonstrated our willingness to change, which is to say, we’ve already demonstrated how unwilling we are, as a whole, to change.
Isn’t much else to it. We will act too late, too little, and we will have some extremely hard times to endure at some point.
My only regret is that I will have brought children to this world to eat the consequences… 😩
When you say "we", what I hear is "conservatives". Normal people are willing to change. Conservatives are not. And since they protect the billionaire class, we are all stuck.
Conservatives are killing us. They know this and mock us for being upset about it.
Sorry, gonna hard disagree there.
The first off-ramp we had to get off of fossil fuels was nuclear energy. It wasn't the conservatives who blocked that exit.
If nuclear energy buildup in the 1990s had followed the trend of the 1970s and 1980s, we could have kept CO2 below 400 ppm.
The three groups who conspired against that decarbonization were: the coal lobby, anti-nuclear activists and labour unions (because coal unions were strong back then).
Only one of those groups were the rich conservatives.
Only delusional people thing the Democrats actually want to help them. They're all crooked, the Republicans are just more open about it.
I don't even think its fair to blame it all in conservatives. Our governments are failing us as a whole
Our government in the U.S. has been some flavor of conservative this whole time. Neo-liberals are conservatives. They are smarter and better dressed, but they are still just conservatives who serve the ultra-wealthy.
If we want progress, we need progressives.
If we want progress we need to get corruption out of government. Nothing will change no matter who is in office until that happens
So... remove conservatives then. Corruption is a conservative trait. Neo-liberals are conservatives, so they should be removed with them.
What the total fuck are you talking about? Conservatives aren't the "victims" of corruption. They are the ones engaging in corruption. They are the ones who benefit from it.
Defending conservatives is fucking grotesque. Stop. They neither need nor want your defense.
Isn't that tautological?
I will hit this wall if I continue to speed at it with 100 km/h...
Protip: if you're taking Viagra and the erection lasts more than four hours, it's vitally important to seek medical attention; an everlasting erection is a ticket to losing your genitals.
We're doing a lot more than nothing, but renewables aren't yet growing fast enough to cause fossil fuel use to decline globally.
Every time we had a new energy source, we just added it to the mix. We always had to activly cut the usage of the old one to cause a decline. So renewables just can not grown fast enough to cause a decline in fossil fuels. They however can replace them, if we cut them in a smart way.
That's not really true at all. Significant parts of the world have managed substitutions in recent decades, in particular the decline of coal use in the US and EU looks like replacement, rather than "adding to the mix" on a regional level, and neither part of the world is exporting coal to the places that are burning it.
What we do is a choice, not some inevitability of adding new energy sources to the mix.
this seems incredible to me. especially given the co2 emission-equivalency with the deforestation of the amazon. i haven't clicked the link, but do you know whether that calculation takes deforestation into account?
Yeah, deforestation is a much smaller impact thing at this point than fossil fuels. Big enough to matter, but only a bit of the overall problem.
Based on multiple lines of evidence using interhemispheric gradients of CO2 concentrations, isotopes, and inventory data, it is unequivocal that the growth in CO2 in the atmosphere since 1750 (see Section TS.2.2) is due to the direct emissions from human activities. The combustion of fossil fuels and land-use change for the period 1750–2019 resulted in the release of 700 ± 75 PgC (likely range, 1 PgC = 1015 g of carbon) to the atmosphere, of which about 41% ± 11% remains in the atmosphere today (high confidence). Of the total anthropogenic CO2 emissions, the combustion of fossil fuels was responsible for about 64% ± 15%, growing to an 86% ± 14% contribution over the past 10 years. The remainder resulted from land-use change.
And CO2 is big enough that this means that fossil fuels are the biggest piece of the problem:
The US is a net exporter of coal and since 2007, when gas really started to grow, coal imports have fallen and exports have somewhat increased. The good part is mining it in the US is just too expensive, so mines do close down, but it is not a clear win. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/imports-and-exports.php https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked?country=~USA
As for the EU, there is a working emissions trading system, which limits emissions, so there is active cutting of fossil fuels and coal is the easiest to replace.
Overall US coal extraction has dropped sharply in recent years
The EU did better, with an earlier peak.
CO² taxes for oil wells/fracking and refineries?
Would make research on alternatives to plastic & co more interesting too.