The western world, and Americans in particular, have made a big mess. Seems like we should focus on cleaning up our own mess before asking other people to stop their much-newer, much-smaller messmaking.
Who is proposing "not going after China?"
What do you think the fix is? Because the only 'solution' seems to be adding more and more taxes to the average Joe whilst endless e-waste/junk gets shipped over from China via AliExpress/Temu day to day.
On the order of 100-200 trillion USD. Which is roughly 100-200% of global yearly GDP. Or 2-5% of yearly GDP until 2050. This could well be provided by printing money at all the federal reserve banks.
This investment will likely bring in a positive return on investment because it reduces the negative climate impacts.
Without such investments the downstream costs in climate change adaptation will be very expensive
At the same time, China is by far the biggest creator of renewable energy [3].
[1]: https://www.wri.org/insights/charts-explain-per-capita-green...
There is a demographic conflict of interest between those who will be alive in 2050 and those who will not. The long-term gains are difficult to deny. The short-term costs, however, will be massive.
We have no idea how to quantify the short-term effects. But increase the CO2 concentration in an insolated gas and its temperature will go up.
TL;DR is three major factors:
1. The agencies that are doing the estimates are _very_ bad at exponential development curves (cough cough IEA estimating solar [2])
2. Unfortunately much of the developing world's economy is not growing as fast as we previously thought it would (similar thing happening with birthrates)
3. Many costs are absolute and _not_ marginal, which is just wrong IMO. We are going to need the energy either way, we should be talking about the "green premium" (as far as it exists), not how much it'll cost to generate XX TWH of energy
[1]: https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2024/11/14/th...
[2]: https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2024/11/14/th...
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/impacts-climate-change-o...
See also:
https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/d...
For example, consider ocean acidification.
Also consider the number of tipping points and positive feedback loops that exist. How close are we to those?
If you read Drawdown, you'll see that it doesn't cost money to stop climate change, it saves money.
That being said, it's a difficult topic to discuss rationally. Part of the issue is deciding on what your baseline is. Looking at the last 200 years tells a pretty limited view. Consider around 100,000 years ago when global temperatures were similar [1].
That raises some questions about what caused that spike but, more importantly, what caused it to lower. You can say "an ice age" but what really triggers an ice age?
My point here is that doomsday predictions of Venus-like runaway inflation I think are both unrealistic and unhelpful in actually motivating people about an otherwise very real problem. We really have no idea of the mechanics in place.
But like I say, we're going to do absolutely nothing about it anyway.
[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/analysis-is-it-actually...
The default would be to assume the scientific consensus is correct, then being evidence/reasons to show when it's not.
But anyway, I don't believe half the numbers out there.
To cut emissions, we need to kill materialism, consumption economy and most importantly tell people that they should choose between what's good for them (eating a burger to make them happy) or the planet (not bringing the equivalent pollution of driving an SUV 50 miles+ by eating something much less polluting than beef).
Governments will keep chasing the kind of changes that can only make more money, not less.
That's why mass media is so keen to blame everything on your mom ("boomers"), along with immigrants, robots, woke mind viruses, etc.
Not disagreeing that there should be a lot more funding of climate change reducing endeavors, I just don't think that GDP should/could be an anchor to base that on.
There are 8.2 billion humans, so about 140tCO2/person left on average. If we assume that we get to net zero by 2050, that means the average person can emit about 5.4tCO2/person/year from today to 2050 (hitting 0tCO2/person/year in 2050). This is what emissions look like currently [2]
Top 5 countries > 10m population
Saudi Arabia 22.1t
United Arab Emirates 21.6t
Australia 14.5t
United States 14.3t
Canada 14.0t
Some others
China 8.4t
Europe 6.7t
World average 4.7t
Lower-middle-income countries of 1.6t
Low-income countries 0.3t
[1] Page 82 https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
from open ai: The power required to raise the temperature of all the Earth's water by 1°C in one second would be 5.57 × 10¹⁸ megawatts.
That’s a moral statement not a factual one. To cut emissions, we need to do exactly that. Pricing in externalities (yes it means less beef but that’s not the same thing as an end to the world as we know it) and investing in cleaner means of production is enough. Most of the people pushing for large societal changes are doing it because it was their goal from the start and they are using climate change as a mean to an end.
what is this reasoning? an invading army is coming, i won't try to stop it, let's just lie down and die. this focus on personal convenience combined with a lack of a will to live isn't just deadly, it's pathetic.
even if you fail, resisting against the darkness is one big part of what dignifies humanity.
Assuming there is validity to the numbers (and no new source of energy), it means you need to reduce GDP by 2-5% yearly until 2050. But GDP and money is a "sliding" scale so it might mean something different by next year.
> Saudi Arabia 18.2 t
> Australia 15.0 t
These are all pretty low population though so net CO2 from these countries is not the largest.
In terms of per capita, what drives this? These places are hot, is it the 24/7 Air conditioning running?
Using a world average target number and then presenting a list that leads with world outliers is misleading. This is the kind of statistical sleight of hand that climate skeptics seize upon to dismiss arguments.
The world average is currently under the target number:
> World average 4.7t
I think you meant to imply that the CO2 emissions of poor countries were going to catch up to other countries, but I don’t think it’s that simple. The global rollout of solar power, battery storage, and cheap EVs is exceeding expectations, for example.
I don’t want to downplay the severity of the situation, but I don’t think this type of fatalistic doomerism is helping. In my experience with people from different walks of life, it’s this type of doomerism that turns them off of the topic entirely.
Is that the cost for the duct tape needed to plug the airvents of data centers all over the world? The whole AI hype is driving energy consumption through the roof and when you see the companies behind the hype eye having their own nuclear power plants you know they are going to outscale cities housing millions in waste heat production.
What use it is to ponder about what has triggered an ice age in the past, when that mechanism can’t possibly counteract what’s happening now?
It’s like thinking about starting blood pressure medication when you’re having a heart attack right now.
In coming decades, I fully expect to see people blaming renewable energy and carbon tax for whatever new climate disaster we end up with. Hopefully we could ignore them, in the same way adults stop entertaining toddlers when shit happens.
- potential collapse of maritime currents that lead to relatively mild climates in Britain
- triggering of multiple irreversible climate tipping points (arctic ice sheet)
- more common and much more devastating extreme weather events (warmer air can carry more water)
- the aforementioned weather results in infrastructure damage and lack of food within big parts of the world. Waves of migration
- median sea level rise of more than a meter means extremes will be much higher, a big part of the human population lives next to the sea
And much more — this was the absolute minimum and we surpassed it faster than expected.
In my experience, it’s the prospect of having to give up expected or dreamed about large homes, large vehicles, non seasonal/local fruits and vegetables, cheap electronics, and vacations involving flights.
At some point we will find a series of bottlenecks. But up to a 30% reduction (with ~100% clean electricity) it's obviously clear, and it looks doable up to ~90% (electricity, transportation, heating, and some industry converted).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Annual_C...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/Annual_C...
And no, I won't be around by 2050.
Do you account for unpredictable, but climate changing, events like solar flare activity and volcanic activity, which also can contribute?
FYI, I edited list with latest numbers after your comment.
> Estimated global data centre electricity consumption in 2022 was 240-340 TWh1, or around 1-1.3% of global final electricity demand. This excludes energy used for cryptocurrency mining, which was estimated to be around 110 TWh in 2022, accounting for 0.4% of annual global electricity demand.
You're hearing about the potential for a Gigwatt site, but a Gigwatt full out is less than 10 TWh per year (8960 hours/year). These things make the news, but they're pretty efficient electrically. The question is whether they have utility.
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and...
If you turn off your gas generator and replace it with solar + batteries, you will spend the entire cost of solar + batteries plus the decommissioning cost of gas (that may be negative if you can sell some parts) to go back to exactly the same point you were before.
So, no the cost is only marginal if you accept you will follow the depreciation curve of you infrastructure. And that's way too slow to reach the goal.
Doomerism is the reaction to our utter failure to even pretend to try. It did not cause that failure. Nor are people looking at the data and going, "yeah, I ought to do something, but people on Hacker News were gloomy so I'm going to buy a bigger SUV instead." EVs and solar and suchlike are much, much, much too little and much, much, much too late.
Doomerism doesn't help, except in the extremely limited sense of helping someone express their frustration. But it also isn't hurting because we'd be doing exactly the same nothing if they were cheerful.
Making these changes are investments with real payoff in the near term.
The real impediment is that fossil fuels have made some people incredibly rich, and they are actively fighting these changes to protect their income.
Australia 14.5t
United States 14.3t
Canada 14.0t
Large amounts of particulate in the air (for example from a volcano) would probably cause global cooling since it blocks out the sun.
Arguing to your neighbor why they should recycle their plastic water bottle can at most make an infinitesimal difference.
Creating a legal responsibility for Coca Cola to clean up the billions of plastic bottles it produces annually, on the other hand, could change the world.
US+China+Europe+Australia have cumulatively emitted 70% of all historical emissions. They are still 3x the world average and the estimated target. That's why they are on the list.
China is there because it is a common villain in these discussion. The low-(middle)-income countries are, in my opinion, never going to emit much more than they do now. They will never contribute to the problem but will feel all the effects.
And for those we have viable solutions that either do not lower subjective quality of living or even improve it, but they are not sufficiently implemented by enough people.
Telling folks to stop eating beef now is compounding the problem by making people just give up.
We should first address the things that we have viable solutions for instead of loosing public support by insisting on reducing emissions in areas where there are no good solutions yet and some sort of asceticism seems to be in order.
Of course you need to spend money and energy (specially energy, everything in the universe is energy), but the solution is not to stop moving. We need to use energy and resources in order to switch to better technologies.
And no, air pollution isn't just a problem in places like India and China, it kills over 100,000 Americans a year and costs society $886 billion. [2]
The evidence of anthropogenic global warming existing is extraordinarily strong [3] [4], but you're right, even if somehow 97% of climate scientists with studies published on the matter from 1991 to 2011 and 99% of them from 2012 to 2020 were wrong (in addition to NASA, The European Space Agency, NOAA, the World Meteorological Organization, and the national academy of science (or equivalent organization) of basically every country that has one), it'd still be worth avoiding millions of deaths a year and having established independent energy security.
1. https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj-2023-077784
2. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1816102116
Nothing is going to turn that tide meaningfully.
I'd like to know how anyone with an ounce of reality thinks we're going to reduce emissions substantially faster than we already are.
Rome wasn't built in a day.
> Guess what's going to happen and who is going to suffer, despite not doing anything.
Low income countries also don’t have good tracking or data. I’ve seen lots of practices in developing countries that are really damaging environmentally (GHGs and other things) that probably don’t get reported or tracked anywhere, because they’re so local (things like illegal refineries, manufacturing operations with no waste disposal, stubble burning, etc). But they exist. In part those damaging practices are here because of globalism (economic pressure) and changing lifestyles, so it’s not their fault. But my point is we probably just need a global reduction in luxury and quality of life ultimately.
For every ton of CO2 that the west has reduced in the past decade China has produced three tons of CO2.[1]
We need another breakthrough on the scale of the Haber process.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?country=OWID_WRL~Hi...
> Humans have caused 1.5 °C of long-term global warming according to new estimates
First sentence of the article:
> humans may have already caused 1.5 °C of global warming
Replacing high CO2 intensity activities (burning coal) with lesser intensive tasks (e.g. burning gas or renewables) is the key.
Solar and other renewables counteract their Co2 expenditure after 1-2 years.
Plus the human population will soon be drastically contracting anyway.
Abandoning the only system since the birth of humanity to bring prosperity to billions in favour of one which has repeatedly be an utter failure, systematically lead to totalitarianism and is responsible for millions of death might not be the wisest choice especially when it’s pushed by people who think they should be amongst the rulers due to their moral superiority.
It would change the world in a sense of Coca Cola either going bankrupt, or shrinking to the point of irrelevance, succumbing to competitive pressure of corporations that aren't forced to do such cleanups.
Edit: Do better, HN. Explain why you disagree. This argument is a delusional meme, as if people were not the primary consumers of corporations' products. Corporations are reactionary at best and believing there's 0% responsibility on the consumer is a 5 year old child mentality.
China sees this as an opportunity and delivering on it. Meanwhile majority of Americans voted for Trump, the sentiment is anti climate change and 'drill baby drill!'.
The cheaper Solar and batteries become, the more they get deployed. Like we solved hole in the Ozone, I'm optimistic we'll transition to a net zero energy future but pessimistic that US may get left behind and it'll be too late for many of the industries to compete with China. We are too short term focused.
As long as it has value to people - it is real.
Meaning, as long as you can use it to buy things. And that is what people care about.
That stops the moment, people don't believe in the currency anymore. Then they will either use a different currency they do trust - or go back to trade little pieces of gold.
One example is air traffic. If you don't consume an available flight, then you don't actually help the climate, because somebody else will buy the seat at a lower price. This is just market economics. To reduce flying the society already has put Carbon credits out there for airlines to buy if they want to fly from A to B. These credits reflect the cost which society puts on flying currently.
Depends on what you mean by "ounce of reality".
In reality, there's little that can be currently done mainly because of political policy. That's unlikely to change.
But, assuming policy could be changed, then there is actually quite a bit that could reduce emissions substantially much faster. Carbon taxes, better policies around railways (perhaps nationalizing and expanding ala india), more subsidies for renewable generation and battery production (perhaps funded by carbon taxes?). Stronger regulations on private vehicles (perhaps ban personal private ownership of large trucks and suvs?). But also trade deals and modernization efforts/investments with lagging countries to help them develop carbon free economies.
Now, I don't think policy change is likely. I do however think there are quiet a few policies that could significantly drive change faster than it is already going.
But the Carbon Tax credits/handling shows that we aren’t grown up enough to handle taxes properly.
I recall the report mentioned that societies already spend more in GDP per year to adapt to climate change (e.g. building more AC units) than it would cost to mitigate climate change.
With emphasis on "One".
There's 8 billion of us; our diets have varied environmental impacts; and collectively agriculture is, though not the biggest problem, a big enough problem that we can't solve climate change without also fixing it.
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
Also, the problem with framing it as the fault of corporations, is that the corporations do what they do in response to demand.
And the laws come with costs: this is a perennial issue during elections and "over-regulation" has been the battle cry of UK and US conservatives for as long as I've been paying attention to politics — so sure, if I was world dictator I could make it happen (and build a global power grid for green energy, we don't even need superconductors for that), but that's not the world we live in.
Making a convincing reason for consumers to demand different things, or for business to choose sustainability just because it's cheaper, or shifting the Overton Window so the relevant laws aren't just a political football, that's hard.
Note that I'm not saying that we shouldn't reduce polution, or build more green energy. Nuclear, solar, wind - all of the above, please. Let's just not turn this into a religion about which you can't ask any questions for fear of being burned at the stake, and to which any sacrifice is worthwhile and you're a heretic if you suggest otherwise. Science must be questioned, otherwise it's not science.
It doesnt give any indication about the level of debasement of currency to accomplish it to that scale, to pay for what? to whom?
and even if you identified some answers to those questions, this is where the disagreements are, ranging from cordial disagreement to outright denial of a problem
but most of it comes down to who is paying, for what, why are we paying, will it change anything, and how do we make a return on it
Whoops. Maybe the scientific consensus should be listened to more often, and the fringe less often.
This is a really bad statement.
Reason 3:
This year China installed more renewables than the rest of the world combined [1]. In China, 50% of new cars are electric. Their per/person emissions is much less than USA. Meanwhile, we are putting up tariffs on Chinese EVs, etc.
Instead of blaming them, realise that they are taking climate change seriously and we are not.
Reason 2:
Look at your graph, ‘we’ have like 15% reduction in CO2. You could divide by any growing economy and the result is the same, because we suck at ‘our job’.
Reason 1;
Lastly, we outsourced our emissions by moving production to China and then importing the products. That’s not much of achievement.
[1] https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/china-continues-to-le...
Yes, there are uncertainties in these numbers, and it is quite unfortunate that OWID does not state them. However, I don't think the uncertainties are that high. Emissions from fossil fuel burning or agriculture are most of global emissions (>90%) and are quite easy to track in bulk.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption...
Even if the ASHP lasted forever, required no maintenance ever, and you had to buy a new gas boiler every 10 years, it would literally never make economic sense even if there weren't $2500 incentives on the gas boiler, but the movement on electric rates is definitely in the wrong direction if one wishes to displace natural gas with electricity (even at 400% efficiency).
Every year that things stay like this is pushing back the likely time to next re-evaluation for that property by another 20 years.
So it’s fine. We’ll tech our way out of this without them. If we don’t, we die. So be it.
"Climate change denialism is a natural state of mind"
We as apelike animals just did not optimize for thinking globally. We optimized for the local here and now and the immediate future.
"Fire burns, fire warm, fire good. More firewood we need!".
Doomerism leads people to go ahead and buy a ridiculous gas hog SUV they don't need because why not, we're all gonna die. Doomerism means we should cancel all our green and next-generation nuclear development because it doesn't matter. We're all gonna die.
Look up the Moore's law like progress of solar, wind, and batteries. Look up how much renewable energy we're adding, the uptake rate for EVs, etc. We are not doing enough but we are not doing nothing.
The previous poster is right. The global average is below the threshold and the global average is the only number that matters re: physics. Physics doesn't care about politics. The goal now must be to keep chipping away at those higher numbers in developed economies and to make sure the developing world gets renewable and nuclear energy before they decide to industrialize with coal like China did.
Either that or at least make sure we're cutting emissions in mature economies as fast or faster than developing economy emissions are increasing so the average does not exceed the limit.
And I think why we're having such a hard time with "climate denialism" is because we're not really presenting arguments against the underlying argument.
GDP measures the total production of an economy. That is mostly equivalent to energy_consumption * p_efficiency.
Investing in new technologies that increase efficiency has always been a good decision. Maybe you can improve solar panels by a further 5% and batteries by 10%?
Realistically, energy_consumption will need to decrease, but that isn't actually that terrible.
You said we need to have 5.4tCO2/person/year on average across the world. You then presented a table that shows that we are in fact _under_ this target (4.7t). In your follow-up comment you claim that the lower-income countries are "never going to emit much more than they do now". So by your argument the world average will probably stay below the 5.4t goal and we're on target.
1) I have no reason to think the carbon intensity per calorie would change
2) it doesn't take much overeating per day to build up, so I'd assume semaglutide based weight reduction reduces calorie intake by about 25% per day unless someone gives me a study (can't find myself as search results biased to news not science)
and 3) all agriculture combined is about 12% of emissions
multiply together and that would be about 3% of global emissions, which is a start, but not sufficient — we need to target 99.9% for long term sustainability
I wouldn't be surprised if China overtakes the US completely in science and technology with the way things are going.
Some areas will see higher averages than 1.5 C. Some areas, even if only seeing an average increase of 1.5 C or thereabouts, will see more extreme temperatures exceeding past record highs and lows by several degrees Celsius.
I agree if you opine that the high income countries won't adequately do it, and the low/middle income countries have bigger problems, but it is a choice (and mainly our choice, if I'm not mistaken about HN's predominant NA+EU demographic)
I'm not sure most high-income people (globally speaking, so like the richest ~billion) are consciously making that choice, or at minimum aren't aware of the cost-benefit situation. Pretending there is no choice doesn't seem like the right way to go about this, considering that every euro spent on prevention significantly outweighs adaptation options
"If we assume that we get to net zero by 2050,"...
It’s both. We need corporations to emit less, and they are the biggest emitters, and they do what they do for two reasons:
1. They are permitted to. Yes, government needs to intervene and prevent some of the things they do.
2. People keep giving them money, rewarding their bad behavior and providing them the means and motive to keep doing it.
We need the populace to want to make change, by voting for legislators that pass laws limiting corporations and by voting with their wallets. These usually go hand in hand.
I know there are people who vote for legislators/laws that limit consumption, who don’t make any effort to limit consumption themselves, but I don’t think there’s that many. People generally don’t want laws that change the way they are living, they want laws that make other people live the way they are living.
We don’t need to shame people for consumption, that isn’t helpful, but writing off personal responsibility is also unhelpful.
But I don't think societies elites (the highest educated portion of the population) has taken the same perspective. I think they've instead chosen to approach humanity (themselves excepted of course) as evil, greedy stupid and belligerent and have taken a hostile attitude to most human and human endeavours (especially commercial ones)
Wanting to do something about climate change is great. Salivating over human suffering or insulting or looking down on people outside of your elite circle for not doing or caring more...
Whatever it is I think it's an even bigger problem than climate change. The rhetoric of the climate movement is disturbing. We can't progress as a species when a large portion of a our species hates us, looks down on us, and wants thd worst for us
When did the climate change movement become the anti human movement? is this just a politically correct way of attacking poor and less educated people
For the most part, burning fossil fuels is leading to both air pollution and GHG emissions. Sometimes you can in theory choose an option that leads to less global warming than the status quo but is worse for human health (e.g. burning biomass for energy instead of natural gas, or using diesel instead of gasoline engines), but usually there's an another option where you can reduce both undesirable outcomes (wind, solar, hydro or nuclear energy, electric vehicles, etc.)
Even from an economic standpoint I can't think of too many scenarios where clean energy isn't the better option long-term. An EV will have a higher up-front cost but definitely will be cheaper than a diesel vehicle across it's lifetime, and most areas I imagine solar or wind would be cheaper than biomass. Freight ships are the only thing in 2024 where I think we don't have an option that's better in both regards and cheaper -- there we do have to choose between more global warming or more particulate matter harmful for human health. But I think that's the exception more than the rule for human activities.
1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cleaned-up-shippi...
You have to look before the ice period, that’s what OP refers to as long term.
https://scitechdaily.com/66-million-years-of-earths-climate-...
China's annual CO2 emmissions have been exponentially increasing for the last 50 years and are currently nearly three times as high as the US's and continuing to exponentially increase. There has been zero decrease in emissions over the last 50 years, only increase.
The US's annual CO2 emissions have been linearly decreasing every year for the last 20 years and is now a third of China's.
How is your conclusion to this that China is taking it seriously and the US isn't? https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-metrics
But the tech is there just not the political will or finances as it hurts economies and people's chances of winning elections.
China is likely to hit it's peak oil because of ev's and peak coal in the next 2-3 years because of renewables and batteries. Although China is mostly going electric for economic and energy security reasons it will be interesting to see what happens when it is no longer using carbon based energy for it's growth.
You have to make up your mind, if you are concerned about real resources or fictional ones.
If we want to optimise for real resources we would round up all the people who’s job is to destroy real resources, like casino pit bosses and the managers of Prada and fast fashion that destroy clothing to create artificial scarcity.
And we would kick them out in the rain to do tree planting.
Climate change threatens a lot more than 5% of real reseouces - in fact what happens when the Middle East and American Midwest runs out of underground water reserves?
What nobody talks about is there’s not enough oil and natural gas left to miss 2C by much. At current consumption rates we run out of both in ~50-60 years. Coal isn’t competitive with renewables and as soon as we stop pumping hydrocarbons the associated influx of Methane also stops. So we’re almost guaranteed to miss 2.5C of global warming, and stopping at 2C is likely.
So congratulations humanity, all that money spent on R&D instead of directly cutting emissions without any solid alternatives actually worked!
> There are twenty-five of these distinct warming-cooling oscillations (Dansgaard 1984) which are now commonly referred to as Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles, or D-O cycles. One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C (Huber et al. 2006). Furthermore, the cooling occurred much more gradually, giving these events a saw-tooth shape in climate records from most of the Northern Hemisphere (Figure 1).
The last time I brought this up, someone said (paraphrased) "that's only over Greenland". Yeah, the place they did measurements. Do you really think a change in air temperature of 8-15C over decades is repeatedly localized in just one place?
[1]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...
There is nothing wrong with this behavior. I will vote today for everyone to curb consumption, but I see no reason to make the sacrifice alone.
We have to throw everything into the race. But how to do this with the current inner workings of our societies? How to overcome greed? What about the power of (social) media? Why do we have Netflix and so on? How can we make people spend their time solving climate crisis, saving our planet earth?
Methane is between 30 and 200 times more dangerous than CO2 and a single cow produces 200 pounds of it per year.
Another fun fact: the mass of all cattle on the planet is higher than all other animals combined. All of them from cats to rhinos and wild horses.
> Telling folks to stop eating beef now is compounding the problem by making people just give up.
That's exactly my point: the real issues aren't related to government policies related to just focusing on CO2 emissions from energy but how much and what we consume.
What we eat, by far, is the element that most impacts the planet. By far. The others, besides using more public transport are very small.
But nobody wants to hear or face it because it implies how we live and eat.
Hell a single cotton shirt requires 2000 liters of fresh water, a scarce resource, I don't see as much arguments about how we consume but plenty of neverending EV and electricity gaslighting.
It's much simpler to point at vague problems
Cars are still petrol but we've gone from 50k km / year to 10k km / year most made in a tiny 1 litre car (the other is a Prius). We don't have enough solar to cover that and the electric mix here is carbon intensive enough that we're better off using the petrol car until it needs replacing before switching to electric.
Hopefully at some point America will start taking their emissions seriously; it's crazy that you guys are so inefficient.
It will be necessary to lower demand for fossil fuel enough that new prospecting becomes unprofitable. This will happen eventually due to the physics of oil drilling.
If you consider the amount of energy contributed to the world economy from fossil fuels, there is no clear path how to market alternatives in quantities that can make fossil fuels obsolete.
A more realistic scenario for around 2050 is that coal-power increases while oil for personal transportation is replaced by batteries due to high oil price.
Oh, I agree, I'm not against eliminating anything, but a pollution sort of tax I would be perfectly fine with.
Like eggs taxed more than tomatoes, poultry more than eggs, pig more than poultry, etc, etc.
But it has to be taxed enough to make some dent in it.
Of course it is hurting. If we really want people to change then we need to understand human psychology.
We need to create hope and not fear. Ask Kamala how fearmongering worked for her.
Energy investments are some 3% of the GDP, diverting those is an almost complete non-brainier. But we'd need to get about as much from other places.
Prove me please that you are able to read them not just tell some ignorant bs or I will not bother giving you that links. I'll wait for at least writing down the full set of rules by which it is possible to persuade you that the study is valid. Can it be a pdf on arxiv or Elsevier publication, or yellowpaper publication or anonymous blogpost? Do you have some requirements about who is (not) allowed to fund the scientists? What climate scientists do you respect, at least three persons? How do you understand "entropy" word in the context of climate?
Real world reductions (or increases) won't follow a linear path. Global population is also increasing. The number is just a rough estimate to show which countries are dropping the ball.
It included a moderate amount of money as stimulus to commercial companies which manufacture clean(? clean-er?) tech.
The Biden administration has also "balanced" this by allowing for massive amounts of further drilling for fossil fuels.
And even without the "balancing" - this is not remotely like an actual plan to convert the US to near-zero-emission energy production, in the immediate future, which is what's actually necessary.
Trump just won an election in a very large part because -- and I quote -- "Prices are high!"
People were talking about gas prices, food prices, etc...
Any politician that would raise prices deliberately for any reason will be immediately voted out and replaced by literally anybody that doesn't do so, even someone like Trump.
The evidence for this should be fresh in your collective minds right now.
Well according to your own data which shows the average comfortably below the target number, nothing will happen and nobody will suffer?
- Millions who died in Covid
- Vaccines in general
- "The election was stolen"
- Wind turbines are killing the whales [1];
- "There's a migrant crime wave"
And so on.
As long as the cost of climate change can be shifted to the Global South, by force when necessary, it will continue. It's sobering how cruel people can be, particularly in groups, if they feel like their way of life is threatened, or even when they might theoretically be slightly inconvenienced, as demonstrated by the recent protests in Kayesville, UT over providing warming centers for people in need when the weather gets too cold [2].
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66928305
[2]: https://ksltv.com/705578/kaysville-homeowners-show-up-in-lar...
"Now that we have succeeded in capturing the natural climate variability, we can see that the projected anthropogenic warming will be much greater than that.”
That does not seem to support your claim of "natural rise".
If you reduce your consumption the cost of oil will fall towards the cost of production and middle/low income countries would consume it.
The only way someone in a high income country can prevent this is to buy oil and permanently bury it.
So, the world average is currently below the ration, and thus as long as we're actually headed for that net zero we're going to be in reasonably good shape?
>Guess what's going to happen and who is going to suffer, despite not doing anything.
Oh, this is actually about calling people bad because of what country they live in, never mind where the innovation is going to come from that would actually make net zero possible (assuming it actually is).
Carry on, then, I guess.
Russia is not far behind that top 5 list, at 12.5t/person/year, by the way.
Meanwhile the number of infants globally peaked around 2013-2017 and according to revised estimates overall population will peak late this century reaching 10.4bln - largely in countries with a small carbon footprint anyway.
We're going to blow past that 2°C target and millions will die due to extreme weather, but I firmly believe life on Earth and our species will survive, especially now that the "business as usual" scenario is considered highly unlikely due to how differently e.g. China's coal usage changed compared to projections.
US/Canada/Australia have the worlds highest emissions per capita, except oil states like Kuwait. They have no moral high ground to lecture anyone about climate change.
If you disagree that we should consider population size when we compare emissions, I am open to that idea.
In that case we can make similarly absurd comparisons, between USA and Slovakia.
It is only thanks to China that we have affordable batteries and solar panels at all. And without China there would be no hope of green energy transition whatsoever
Transport is also about a quarter. So Canada can indeed cut emissions in half with present day tech by fixing these two sectors. Still a long way to go.
Also note that Estonia is at 7.3t, Finland 5.6t, Sweden 3.5t (Sweden was 8.6t in 1980). So climate is not really an excuse. It is just politics.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...
US CO2 emissions in 2007 peaked at 6,016 million metric tons before consistently falling since down to 4,807 in 2023.
Per capita numbers are even better, but everyone assumes its from imports seemingly ignoring the massive reduction in coal use and vastly improved efficiency of just about everything. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1049662/fossil-us-carbon...
Private companies are now getting their own nuclear power stations to power AI. We can't get new nuclear power for public use, but private for profit initiatives? Absolutely.
Encouraging a small minority of HN users to not have an additional child won't move the needle.
It'll likely just remove a person capable of some level of critical thinking from the population pool.
It's hard to tell the poorer countries that they should stay poor so as to keep the world under budget, but using fossil fuels for many of them is the only to become not poor in a reasonable timeframe with their existing resources.
Just considering the welfare of their own citizens and their own resources their best path will often be a rapid increase in fossil fuels to get to a reasonable level of wealth and then start emphasizing renewables.
Since it is unlikely that the existing wealthy countries can reduce emissions enough to keep the world under budget as the developing countries follow the aforementioned path, we probably need the wealthy countries to help out the poorer countries to try to speed things up so they go through the fossil fuel phase faster.
“Now that we have succeeded in capturing the natural climate variability, we can see that the projected anthropogenic warming will be much greater than that.”
"For the past 3 million years, Earth’s climate has been in an Icehouse state characterized by alternating glacial and interglacial periods. Modern humans evolved during this time, but greenhouse gas emissions and other human activities are now driving the planet toward the Warmhouse and Hothouse climate states not seen since the Eocene epoch, which ended about 34 million years ago."
Please read the article you're linking. Unless this is an awkwardly executed joke that I'm missing?
At current prices. As prices go up new sources of fuel become economical and the cycle continues. Not to mention that methane emissions from agriculture are a significant contributor as well (30% from cows) so just removing hydrocarbons doesn’t solve that problem.
It seems like an unrealistic bet that hydrocarbon-based emissions drop to 0 just because you think we’ll run out of fuel in 50 years. Does that mean airplanes stop flying in 50 years? No one is making these bets in the marketplace alongside you for good reason. And remember, consumption grows quite a bit year over year so you’re looking at a much shorter time frame if your prediction were to be true.
> A continuous record of the past 66 million years shows natural climate variability due to changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun is much smaller than projected future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions.
There are examples that would show me wrong, like plastic grocery bag bans. But on the other hand, there haven’t been very many such bans, and banning plastic bags is a relatively minor inconvenience, and does very little to slow climate change.
Few people are doubting that. The issue is that
> millions will die due to extreme weather
and due to climate-related wars, and life in general will become less pleasant. Just breathing air with higher CO2 concentration already isn’t that great.
Developing nations will continue to increase individual CO2 usage as their economies improve.
People want to live a modern western lifestyle, and that requires more energy.
Realistically the world is going to generate far more energy, not reduce energy usage/production.
Moving to solar and nuclear is the only likely solution that will result in reduced CO2 volume.
Maybe they'll do decades-long investments to set up new oil infrastructure after we've moved away from it, but even then: it isn't a 1:1 exchange. What we reduce doesn't simply pop back up elsewhere because, evidenced by our moving away in this scenario, there's economical alternatives. Even if it came back 100% in another country a few decades later, buying time really does help us here because we can take more and more preventative and adaptative measures. It won't prevent any and all issues, but a +3°C world in 2200 is still vastly better (and more predictable) than a +5°C world from accelerated oil use
Rather than buying and re-burying oil, you're probably getting a higher ROI (lower climate change adaptation costs) by spending those euros (that you'd otherwise spend on burying oil) on helping everyone (including oneself) not produce greenhouse gasses
If you think about it, that's disrespectful towards people living there; they are not noble savages.
They are people just like you and me who are just a little bit behind in the development curve and they will surely want to have all the goodies that we have and emit all the greenhouse gasses associated with that lifestyle.
Countries who are currently high emitters but also applying active measures to curb it must be praised instead of pointing fingers. The political will to improve things is fragile and people can easily vote for populists that will easily exploit resistance towards guilt shaming.
1. Spending Wisely: Invest in technologies that work and also do not introduce more problems.
2. Trusting Who Spends: Governments or others must use funds on solving the issue (not just giving money to cronies).
3. Global Cooperation: Countries working together (does Russia who sees warming as helpful comply).
4. Dealing With Inflation: The plan should address the inflation it causes, as it will raise living costs for people already struggling.
5. Better Use of Funds: Proving this use of funds is better than spending on other global issues.
My understanding is that the climate will change independently of human activity. For example, we know that there was an Ice Age and it was not ended by human activity but rather natural processes. So the climate has been known to change historically without human involvement.
So here is where I'm looking for clarification: I thought the "controversy" over climate change was the degree to which human activity is accelerating a natural process of warming?
Said differently, the planet is warming by itself, but humans pumping hydrocarbons and other things into the atmosphere is speeding up that process. But the cause is not solely because of human activity.
Thanks in advance for thoughtful responses, I'm really just trying to learn here.
I mean, it _could_, if you set up a market structure to incentivize it. CAISO (California) has done this, and now solar and storage costs are plummeting and associated industries are booming as the solar+storage solution starts outcompeting other forms of energy production.
Heck, solar+storage is even booming in ERCOT (Texas), which has no specific market incentives for it. Their spot market swings so wildly that storage makes money on power arbitrage and transmission easing.
I just got back from a off-grid island here in New Zealand - 20 years ago, generators were everywhere and as soon as it got dark you'd hear nothing but the buzzing of running them all around you. Now there is solar everywhere and it's completely silent.
https://actualfreedom.com.au/sundry/factsandgroupthink/globa...
Yea, the climate change narrative is highly overblown, but it will take a few more years before the overtone window shifts for larger swaths of people in power to accept it.
Warming is one aspect of climate change, but we'll likely see cascading effects in the system.
---
For example, as global temperatures rise we are seeing that AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation), and as a result the Gulf Stream, are "slowing down". [1]
This could result in EU cooling down.
The clathrate gun hypothesis suggests that large releases of methane could cause abrupt climate shifts due to methane’s strong greenhouse effect. [2]
---
Its likely developing nations and their citizens will increase CO2 usage as they move towards a more western lifestyle.
That means there will be an increasing amount of energy production and usage.
Ideally we generate more with solar and nuclear.
Decreasing energy production and consumption is not a real solution.
---
That‘s a surprisingly small amount of water. Just a typical shower uses 150 liters and all it does is keeping you clean for a day. On the other hand a cotton shirt can last many years.
Are you saying the water is lost or destroyed or permanently polluted? This is, of course, not the case either.
The linked article also mentions a way less aggressive timeline, which means there's less of "tear out existing equipment and replace with renewable" going on, which raises costs. Moreover, the argument isn't that there's no such costs, only that they're being overestimated.
Arguably it provided bugger all actual physical good for society in return for its consumption. It got some fat cats rich and employed a half dozen humans. It consumed insane amounts of resources.
Your consumption is nothing compared to these ends of industry, they just try and make you think it does. Industrial industries worldwide need drastic changes.
Why not?
A 5 passenger vehicle can be 1200kg or 3000kg but both offer almost the same utility. A diet of mostly-plants can be just as delicious as one with a lot of beef. Building a house closer to work can be just as useful as building one a long ways away (more, actually).
Well… ok I guess I won’t stress about it too much since I can’t change it? I was already powerless but now effort is futile.
I’d like a real straw I guess
I do kinda feel like a responsible leader, that should be elected anyway for reasons other than intended climate policy, should also have the guts to put a topic on the table that means scary change for a massive decrease in worldsuck on a timescale we're comfortable estimating the broad effects for
Few people are going to give up their modern convinces so their great grandchildren will have better lives. This behavior is everywhere. Few people give up, say, their excess capital to reduce suffering in developing countries, or eating meat for the benefits of the animals that suffer to produce it.
I've gone to enough city council meetings in the last two decades advocating for exactly the things that would incentivize GHG reductions while increasing some quality of life (everything from urbanism, to walkability, to dutch-style cycle infrastructure, to expanded train systems, to general electrification). The number of people who won't even try an induction range because they view a gas range as important to their identity is astounding. Most people are against repurposing any public streets for transportation alternatives, even in the most left-wing cities, much less the absurdity of actually proposing anyone should actually give up their car.
It is also small in terms of the extent of expenditure needed for such a conversion of the US energy production system. A cost estimate from 2019 suggested somewhere between $4.5T - $5.7T over the whole period:
* https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/cost-of...
* https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/renewable-us-gr...
so $400B - even if we could assume that all goes directly to achieving the goal, which it does not - is under 10%:
We use oil because it’s cheap not because it’s the only possible solution. It’s not that we’re going to run out 100% year X, it’s that as economies of scale end priced inherently spike. Gas stations can scale down to 1940’s levels by having most of them close, but giant fuel refineries, pipelines, etc need scale to be worth the maintenance.
Source? Other than media articles repeating "due to the war in Ukraine"
Assuming you are talking about the USA, supposedly the USA is a net /exporter/ of grains [0]
[0] Not loading for me but https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic... . Copilot said "The United States is a net grain exporter. According to the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS), the U.S. typically exports more agricultural goods, including grains, than it imports1. In fiscal year 2023, the value of U.S. agricultural exports was $178.7 billion, despite a decline from the previous year. Grains and feeds are among the leading U.S. agricultural exports"
Moreover, there's no physiological impact whatsoever until you drop several percent.
I strongly disagree – as a person who's eaten vegan for over a year, tried all the fancy meat alternatives, and has gone back because a good grass-fed steak is just 10x more delicious.
To actually solve the problem we need to:
* Decrease carbon emissions to zero
* Get the excess carbon out of the atmosphere
* Do so while maintaining people alive and not in a state of revolt or starvation
With no energy we collapse. Merely decreasing carbon use by diminishing energy doesn't solve the problem. It just makes it get worse less quickly. It's like not having a job and budgeting more carefully while drawing down your savings. Sensible to be sure but the real solution is enabling us to have abundant energy from non carbon sources and putting atmospheric carbon back into the ground.
This is assuming that the dissonance is hurting more than the renunciation. People are already quite good at ignoring dissonances. And the causal effects are so removed from daily experience that often there isn’t that great of a dissonance in the first place.
Likely Trump voters are about the least likely to be receptive to terms like "solidarity/class consciousness", and implying that they're rubes that can't think for themselves is the exact sort of rhetoric that caused the Democrats to lose the election.
Also, you can't look at the entire budget, entitlements like Medicare and Social Security dwarf everything else, you need to look at the discretionary part.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-does-land-warm-up...
That was true before recent developments in exploitation and conversion. Canada had proven oil reserves of 5 billion barrels in 2002, but by 2005 it had proven reserves of 180 billion barrels because the Alberta oil sands became viable. South America now has far more oil than the Middle East - it's oil that wasn't considered economically recoverable until about a decade ago. Over recent years, we have discovered far more oil and gas than we've burned. Coal doesn't have much of a future as an energy source for electricity generation, but it might have a future as a feedstock for synthetic liquid fuels.
We're probably going to leave most of those hydrocarbons in the ground, but only because of the huge progress that has been made in renewable energy technologies. If that progress stalls or there are big breakthroughs in hydrocarbon technology, then there's still a real risk of substantially exceeding 2C. We have reason to be optimistic, but not complacent.
There's already a massive shift in the hospitality industry with paper straws and bio-decompositable cutlery, saving the world from a tremendous amount of plastic.
Estimate is COVID in 2020 cost 3.4% of GDP (source: https://www.statista.com/topics/6139/covid-19-impact-on-the-...)
We are talking about one new COVID (2020 style), every single year for 25 years. That is significant enough to not spontaneously do it.
https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/tobacco....
Long term, smoking rates have fallen 73% among adults, from 42.6% in 1965 to 11.6% in 2022.
Over the last five years, smoking rates have fallen 17% among adults, from 14.0% in 2017.It’s not about “the dissonance is painful, so they seek to correct it by not voting for reduced consumption”.
It’s “voting to reduce consumption takes effort, in knowing what to vote for and in actually casting a vote, and people are unlikely to put in that effort if they are not putting in any effort elsewhere”.
“Dissonance” was a poor choice of words for what I was trying to communicate.
What would you have liked to have seen?
And out of curiosity, what should be the response to the 700k heart disease, 600k cancer, 227k accidental, 165k stroke, 147k respiratory and 101k diabetes deaths each year in the USA? (N.B. COVID sits at 186k in 2023)
Let's be honest here, a lot of these 5 passenger vehicles carry only the driver 90% of the times. For that use specifically it can be replaced with a 30 kg e-bike or scooter.
Think about the illegal immigration hawks talking about how people will cross the borders and start raping and pillaging everything in their path. When that of course turns out to be false, people dismiss their position entirely rather than look at actual issues.
First, we're talking about trend lines on the order of less than +1C per human lifetime. Recently, there was some buzz here in Toronto about some day or other having been the hottest that-calendar-day in a very long time, and near the record since measurements started 200 years ago. But if you look at that scatter plot, what you see is that yes, the trend line goes up by perhaps 2C over that period, but the year-to-year variation is on the order of 20C. And the difference between the average daily highs in the hottest and coldest months here is about 27C, to which you can add about another 8C for intra-day variation from high to low. Month by month, the recorded extremes of heat range 12-20C above the averages, and record lows plunge 13-27C below averages for daily minimums. All in all, a temperature range of over 73C has been observed here.
Regardless of the consequences scientists expect as a result, a couple of degrees of warming since the Industrial Revolution (with some more effectively priced in for the future) is mere noise against that backdrop. Humans are simply not sensitive to that rate of change; nor can they be expected to realize the effects intuitively given that they're adapted to dealing with such great natural variation in temperature. So they have to know the science to get there. The result is not intuitive. If it were, there would have been no need to do the science in the first place.
Almost no humans are equipped to replicate the science themselves - there are huge barriers in every category: awareness, willingness, time, resources and knowledge (of scientific methods, of research methods, perhaps even of how to use more sophisticated equipment than just thermometers). So they have to trust the authorities that present the science to them.
Trust in authority is not natural for humans - it has to be socialized into them. This is especially the case for humans born and raised in a democracy, and especially when the authority in question is implying a need for lifestyle changes that seem like they would cause lower overall quality of life. If that trust were natural, North American schools could actually focus on education.
Climate change is a coordination problem. In a coordination problem, treating non-cooperators as opponents - especially by implying that they've been brainwashed by some other party, thus denying them agency - is an incredibly shortsighted and counterproductive move. Especially when it comes with such openly tribalistic framing (i.e. citing as evidence some partisan bias in lobbying by specific businesses).
In short: people don't believe you because you don't show them things they can see for themselves, and you frame yourself as someone who wants them to sacrifice themselves for a greater good that you don't make legible to them. Warning about the threat of impending doom is not presenting a legible "greater good". If that worked, everyone who lives in Christian-majority countries would be an evangelical.
The meat industry doesn't hold excessive amounts of cattle for fun. They do it because the average Joe pays them to do it.
These industries don't just happen to exist. They exist because the average Joe wants them to exist.
If the average Joe stopped buying meat, stopped shopping on Temu and stopped buying palm oil, these industries would cease to exist within days.
But the average Joes wants them to exist. The average Joe decides, every single day, over and over again, that he wants these industires to destroy the climate.
Oh but it's just so convenient and cheap to shop on Temu.
I think this is a more marketable concern than CO2 as without O2 most know that you can’t live.
This is needlessly roundabout (especially considering that the oil starts buried). One could simply scale down production (by regulation).
But I agree, it's something that'd have to be delicately done. Ideally phased in over time.
I also agree, probably wouldn't be fast enough, just faster to significantly faster than what we are currently doing.
https://jabberwocking.com/elon-musk-knows-nothing-about-gove...
It is impossible to cut government expenses as much as Musk claims. It was akin to Trump claiming he would replace the ACA with something better or that Mexico would pay for the wall.
"The secret plan I'm hiding behind my back" is not a plan at all.
But Americans do drive everywhere, and that's 48% of all transport emissions (just cars, not even counting trucks, with that it's more like 73% for all road transport). So yeah. Nobody gives a fuck.
Why would this be relevant? The airport itself represents quite a bit of land area (thus, a significant distance to any heat sources that could be considered "the rest of the city"), and much of that was already paved the entire time.
* Value moral superiority and "being right" over results.
* Broadly think that people who categorically disagree with them are stupid and just need to be educated about the truth.
* Believe that the mere existence of climate change implies that we have to do everything they say to combat it.
* As a group are largely incapable of knowing when they're being put on and baited.
So say hypothetically you "deny climate change." But of course you don't outright deny it, you say that there's no evidence. The discussion shifts away from what the proper response to climate change is to whether it even exists. In public discussions you can dismiss any argument with "well it doesn't even exist." They will then proceed to spinlock boiling the oceans with the energy expenditure trying to prove it exists— "surely this next piece of evidence will be undeniable and I'll have them cornered!"
But that couldn't possibly work, right?
If folks go vegan, go full vegan and accept permanent change in your life, not some desperate half-assed attempts to change as little as possible, which don't seem to work. That's valid for any diet, or any other change in life.
Ie I eat beef steaks maybe once a year. I can really appreciate them, but its just not something that I feel should be part of my frequent diet, can prepare tons of other tasty stuff that are lighter on meat. Control a bit your emotions and understand where they come from, and you can be happy as a clam with any diet.
this flies in the face of a lifetime of experience talking about immigration with family who lives in a southern border state...
We can make anything up. Why not stick to the facts, as we know them, and reasonable projections?
There is no reasonable projection for any fuel other than fossil fuel to maintain the sort of flying we do now.
I use much less energy here in the Netherlands than I did in California and my quality of life is much higher.
The hope is that whatever the developed world has settled on by 2050 to achieve net zero, lower-income countries will be able to switch to directly instead of going through a phase of fossil fuel consumption. China was too early; India for example might see a much healthier trajectory. The association of greenhouse gasses with the lifestyle of the richest countries is hoped to be only incidental.
Governments have clearly failed, and several corporations have won their plays to become more rich and influential anyway in many countries.
I don't doubt that humans will continue to survive on this planet if all the worst predictions come true. Many other species won't be so lucky, which is a shame. We have all the technology and power to be caretakers for our home but we just trash it anyway.
Of course we should all do what we can. (I eat less meat than I used to, and don't drive.)
We've got spectrographs that can look at that radiation to see which radiation is not balanced. We can see that what is happening is radiation coming in at wavelengths that the atmosphere doesn't block heats things which reradiate much of that energy as infrared which the atmosphere blocks.
Thanks to spectroscopy we know that it is CO₂ in the atmosphere that is largely responsible for this blocking.
We know that the increase in CO₂ levels over the last couple of hundred years is largely from fossil fuels rather than things like decaying vegetation, forest fires, animal respiration and flatulence, or volcanic gases because of isotope ratios in atmospheric CO₂.
CO₂ from living things or recently living things contains ¹⁴C. CO₂ from fossil fuels and volcanoes does not contain ¹⁴C. CO₂ from volcanoes contains a higher ratio of ¹³C to ¹²C than the ratio in atmospheric CO₂. CO₂ from fossil fuels contains a lower ratio of ¹³C to ¹²C than the ratio in atmospheric CO₂.
That allows scientists to look at the isotope ratios in the atmosphere and figure out how much of the CO₂ there came from fossil fuels and how much came from volcanoes. The result is that most of the increase is from fossil fuels.
As a sanity check that result also matches well with the amount of CO₂ that we'd expect to have been released based on the amount of known fossil fuel use.
So no, it is not a natural rise.
Yes. See this comment [1] for an explanation of how we know that humans are largely responsible.
Unless you are deeply involved in battery technology, your prediction seems overly pessimistic.
Not suggesting the article below is in any way conclusive but just one of many that turn up on a basic google search.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/passenger-electric-planes-be...
I imagine if we were willing to spend 2 to 5% of global GDP on fighting climate change, we'd also be cutting those subsidies. So in that scenario we'd be reducing government deficits and reducing the rate at which we print money, not increasing it.
1. https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...
Even for people who don’t have the space or capital to install their own solar, this will happen writ large as the US builds out utility scale solar, wind and storage.
I don't understand your point. This isn't a question where we have to extrapolate from this one study - you can look at similar measurements done in other places and answer this question once and for all.
Instead, you simply declare the hypothesis wrong, because...? You don't bring up an argument, you just ask whether others really think that.
Of all proposed political policies, "degrowth" is the standout for being the most ludicrous ask of developing countries. A lot of people don't like hearing it, but human quality of life on a global scale is measured in energy consumption. Trying to convince anyone to accept a lower quality of life, especially people who were subsistence farmers a generation ago, is a losing proposition.
It's not working, so it's fairy tale. Is there evidence that it's really an effective plan to save lives and money caused by climate change?
> People were never going to accept, nor IMO should they have, a massive reduction in their living standards.
The first is just a claim - people accept hardship all the time for one purpose or another (such as wars). Also, what is so sacrosanct about their living standards?
Also, the liability of climate change is already on the balance sheet - and the massive reduction is coming, due to climate change. Just think of all the dead people, all the people who lose their property, all the poverty.
It's like saying, 'I won't suffer a massive reduction in my spending in order to pay my mortgage.' You already have the liability; that sentence doesn't mean anything.
The question is, given that reality, what will you do? Make up fairy tales about fairy godparents giving you magic wands to solve you problem?
We only have a day.
> I'd like to know how anyone with an ounce of reality thinks we're going to reduce emissions substantially faster than we already are.
The problem is political. The idea that politics is fixed, unchangeable, is obviously false. For example, look at the radical changes since 2015.
We're already way ahead of you. Check out developed country birth rates.
Is there a source for this? If you're referencing LCOE, remember that does not account for storage costs for intermittent power sources (wind, solar) so it's an incredibly misleading number.
Sure .. we can see this kind of "stutter" in dynamic environments all the time, vortexes "pulsing" in stream water for example.
The "rapid warming" followed by "slow cooling" pattern speaks to a lower tempreture being the long term natural stable temp. for the local region duringthat much longer period .. but interrupted by a pulsing in the climatic cell stability that routinely brings warmth in from the equatorial zone - likely via water currents, possibly via air currents.
Such things can happen during stable global mean land|sea energy levels as that's literally just an average of the activity of all the cells across the planet.
https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/doctors-smoking/more...
> “If you plot global temperatures against the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, they both fall on a remarkably straight line, much straighter than current theory would predict,” said Dr Jarvis. “That line tells you not only how much the Earth has warmed since pre-industrial times, but also how much of that warming can be blamed on human activity.”
How can a straight line tell us anything more than a mere correlation between the two measures, without any hint about which is the cause and which is the effect?
United States: 1.67 live births per woman (2022)
European Union: 1.46 live births per woman (2022)
It's even worse after covid.
However, Niger has 6.4 per woman.
I don't even think a massive reduction is necessary, though. Just stop driving, and your carbon footprint shrinks massively. I bike everywhere, and I don't consider it a sacrifice at all. Obviously, there still needs to be commensurate increases in funding for public transit to match the decrease in driving, but most people would still save money by not having to buy gas anymore. Really, I think that living an eco-friendly life would mean improving life, not worsening it.
I run my apartment on LEDs I haven’t changed in 4 years and I max out at 100W. When I was a child, that was the power of one fairly bright living room reading light
Real median wages have gone up more than inflation has over the last few years. It's just not evenly distributed.
Batteries are fine for ocean shipping on a ~50 year timescale, and that basically covers burning fossil fuels. Using it as a feedstock for plastics etc is a non issue for climate change.
* Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act: investments in public transit and infrastructure, promoting sustainable transportation and reducing emissions.
* Methane Emissions Reduction: EPA introduced regulations to curb methane emissions from the oil and gas industry
* Hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) Phase-Down: EPA issued a final rule to reduce HFC production and consumption by 85% over 15 years
* Rejoining the Paris Agreement
* Climate Finance Pledge: the administration pledged to increase international climate finance to over $11 billion annually by 2024
* National Climate Task Force: established to coordinate a whole-of-government approach to tackling the climate crisis, aiming for net-zero emissions by 2050.
Anyway, I would say that "La propriete, c'est le vol" [1], so not much sentiment for the taxed. It _is_ a problem that US tax burden lies mostly on workers and very little of it on the rich and the larger corporations.
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_propriété,_c'est_le_vol_!
We'll probably find other interesting geo-engineering techniques over time, but it is very unwise to bank on future solutions. Many things, like nuclear fusion, have been "just around the corner" for years and years.
Climate change is accelerating at a rapid pace. Go look at a chart of CO2 emissions over time. I think people default to thinking we're in some stable or slow state, when we're far from it. We're not just increasing CO2 emissions, we're increasing the rate of emissions. Debt (tech, financial or otherwise) when you have a path to pay it off is a useful tool, but taking climate debt with no known good solution is very unwise.
I think asserting it is a coordination problem is just a self-serving excuse for defection. It’s not as if we can’t switch if not everyone switches all at once. We just don’t want to go through the frictional costs of switching if others defect.
General power production is currently 25% of total, we can fix that with hydro, wind, solar, nuclear. Plans are clear, they need to be put into action.
Agriculture is another 25% which will be a candidate for reduction once there's something more energy dense than diesel available to run every tractor and combine harvester in the world (currently looking like never). EV tractors are in the golf cart stage of usefulness. Not something we can realistically reduce by much if you want to continue eating food.
Home emissions are only 6-8%, but we can easily drive that to zero with induction cookers and ban of fuel oil heating, subsidizing heat pumps and district heating.
Of the 14% that is transport, cars can go EV and vans/trucks for city last mile delivery. Semi trucks should be replaced as much as possible by electric trains (good luck building that much rail though). On the other hand planes can't even ditch leaded fuel for piston engines yet, they're so far behind. Electric planes are a 1 hour flight time joke, hydrogen use is nonexistent. Sea shipping can go battery electric as well although it would be incredibly expensive.
How much we can cut down in the 20% that's emitted by industry is a good question that I have little insight into. I presume some chemical processes inherently release CO2, but there is a lot that can likely be done.
Unfortunately it’s all part of the same tragedy of the commons and coordination problem.
We've let blatant lies and science denial get way too far. We currently have people completely detached from reality running our nation states, and we have droves of people who will believe them when they say the sky is green. From a sociopolitical perspective, it's bad.
It's very appropriate to pull out "X is only Y% of emissions" when there are vastly larger targets we should be concerning ourselves with. Admitting where the problem actually lies doesn't absolve individuals of all responsibly or prevent individuals from making smarter choices. Very few people need a truck or SUV and we'd all be better off with fewer of them on the road, but it's that's the last thing we should be worried about when it comes to meaningfully addressing climate change.
The days of letting companies do whatever the fuck they want and doing nothing to steer their incentives in the right direction are gone. It doesn't work, end of. We need to nudge them to do the right thing, and the only thing humans care about is money.
You can simply add a tax at entry to match your own carbon tax until evening rules are added into trade deals. The fact that such a tax is not in place in neither the USA nor the EU is proof enough to me that neither is serious about stopping global warming.
It's not a neck and neck race, what has happened is one region drains its aquifers first and then silently raids the other's ...
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...
* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-company-fondomonte-arizon...
Greenland Glaciers have the surface area of Texas while being multiple kilometres thick. It alone is enough to cause sea-level rise of multiple metres. Also, melt water ingress into the Labrador sea might stop AMOC downwelling and could stop the gulf stream. All this would be irreversible during many human lifetimes.
I think back to when better lights were hitting the market. People would regularly scold folks for having their current lights on too long. "Just turn your lights out to save energy" was a common view. It was comically misguided, though. Modern lights use a laughably low amount of energy.
Same goes for a lot. People love to complain that things don't last as long. Ignoring that energy use is plummeting on things. It is still largely valid that you should not replace a car on a whim. I think justifying my 2000 truck is getting harder every year.
Granted, to your point, seeing Buttigieg have to defend encouraging electric vehicles was frustrating.
To that end, I'll push it is less shame that is needed, but more accountability. Especially at the leadership level.
Anyway, to your earlier point, I’m very much in favor of more resources into fighting climate change than what has been put into it, but I don’t think that what is needed is anywhere near what is considered acceptable by most, and given that, I’m quite happy with what this administration was able to put forth. Of course it’s a compromise.
Science failed all of us miserably during this recent pandemic, but instead of us learning from that experience we continue down the path of "you stupid people should listen to science! The end is near!". We're not listening anymore, that's for sure, as scientists have lost their legitimacy at shaping public policy that affects hundreds of millions to billions of people.
"People farming" aren't expending fuel for personal use (save that which they are consuming for personal use) they're expending fuel on behalf of some {X} number of people who consume the produce.
We have farmers here (I kid you not) who live in a rural town centre and ride electric bikes to their work place, 4 thousand acre farms, upon which they operate giant machines for turning, seeding, and harvesting (and others for fire control, etc).
Personal fossil fuel usage should be reduced, it's just wasteful and counter productive, production fossil fuel usage needs to be made moe and more efficient an replaced to whatever degree possible (Agbots are a booming field).
Oil in place comes to a much larger number, but we’re past the point where this oil is a net positive from an energy perspective. It’s a carbon intensive battery not a fuel source.
One of the biggest disasters ever, the draining of the sea of Aral (back then shared across 7 countries) has been caused by the insane water needs of cotton farming in Uzbekistan.
So yes, not only the water there has been lost forever, and millions have been impacted in their health, livelihood, farming, etc, and all for what? Shoving $5 t-shirts for the fast fashion industry?
The cotton industry is actually very harmful for the planet, not just in central asia, but those are the many insanely huge problems that people don't want to talk about, because got forbid we stop shoving our closets with low quality junk fast fashion that we quickly forget exists.
And all of this goes back to my point. Consuming stuff is toxic for the planet, the easiest way to curb the evil impact we have on it is to at least try to understand how we could easily curb it with limiting our everyday actions.
Not only you can substitute beef for pork, pork for poultry many times and have a positive effect, you can also decide to buy better clothes that fit you better and last longer. And many other things.
It's viable to live on a farm and rarely leave it, many do and many enjoy that lifestyle.
It's viable to have shopping and personal items shipped in with larger supply deliveries and fold that personal usage into the neccessary usage for production.
FWiW I grew up on a cattle station in one of the more remote parts of the planet, no proper roads, TV, shops, etc and somehow still managed to get a good education and write a few million SLOC of mapping, geophysics, and asset managent code in the 80's and 90's.
So yes - I do think its viable ( QED ).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#Present_...
I do hope that slate lookalike solar tiles become advisable and cost-effective as I’d be happy to pay a small premium to generate and store locally.
Tar sands are an issue, as is other oil.
IMO for labor, I'd say ~80% of jobs are more or less completely worthless. Many, many industries don't produce anything at all, they just move intellectual stuff from point A to point B, slap their existence on it, and shave off a few cents for themselves.
The construction of "renewables" requires massive amounts of emissions. "Renewables" do not move us towards 'net zero', because the critical part of the NET is the removal and storage of tens of billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, every year. Forever. At least that's my non-technical understanding of what "net zero" means.
> I'd like to know how anyone with an ounce of reality thinks we're going to reduce emissions substantially faster than we already are.
For anyone with "an ounce of reality"' we aren't reducing emissions. We haven't reduced our emissions at all. It's the opposite, they've gone up every year, I believe around 50-60 % since 1990 when we agreed to reduce them.
The transition away from CO₂-emitting technologies is already underway, driven by market forces alone—solar power, for example, is now cheaper than oil. Proposing a substantial increase in global debt to further accelerate climate initiatives would need to demonstrate the following:
1. Spending Wisely: Invest in technologies that work and also do not introduce more problems.
2. Trusting Who Spends: Governments or others must use funds on solving the issue (not just giving money to cronies).
3. Global Cooperation: Countries working together (does Russia who sees warming as helpful comply).
4. Dealing With Inflation: The plan should address the inflation it causes, as it will raise living costs for people already struggling.
5. Better Use of Funds: Proving this use of funds is better than spending on other global issues.
The OP mentioned this as a symptom - "20 years ago I rarely used AC in the summer, now its on nearly every day from May to September." Increased AC use and the associated waste heat is a significant contributor to the urban heat island effect. https://news.asu.edu/content/excess-heat-air-conditioners-ca....
Well duh, that's an edge case. Obviously I don't expect literally every single person to give up driving, but most people who use this website are white collar workers, or at least people who don't need to haul things on a regular basis.
Sure, the models might be a little too doomer. That doesn't actually change anything, and for the past ~70 years the only type this type of stuff was brought up was to deny climate change.
> when it’s clearly a niche case
The entire oh but rural people is your niche case that you bought up.
For more than a decade now countries such as the US, Australia, etc have been more urban than rural. The overwhelming vast bulk of people live within urban areas.
And still some twit will counter a comment suggesting more people should walk, use lighter more efficient vehicles, etc. with a niche but what about farmers type parry.
That's weak.
Efficient solutions for the future should pay attention to distributions of people, trips, resources, etc.
Sad weak counters focus on "but some are different from the many therefore .."
One size doesn't fit all and there will be exceptions.
Activities such as tilling of fields, planting of crops, and shipment of products cause carbon dioxide emissions. Agriculture-related emissions of carbon dioxide account for around 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
> One size doesn't fit all and there will be exceptions.
There’s ”some” and then there’s 1 in 1,000 people, no that’s an edge case not a solution.
Hell, actually living on a farm is even more efficient, which is why it’s what the overwhelming majority of farmers do. You only brought it up because you found it interesting not because it was actually relevant to the discussion.
PS: Also, at least in the US if someone is living in a town that’s considered an urban area. The threshold for town is higher than the qualifications for urban area.
But when even the activists fly for vacation - then who will really reduce voluntarily? Apparently not many. I know people who take it seriously, and personally I have not taken a flight in years.
Still, the relevant point is individuals are quick to blame others, yet unwilling to change their own behavior.
Oh, so we just have to take down those evil corporations and then everything will be solved?
That is how it sounds like. Easy solution. Except - who will then produce and deliver the cheap food and products for the poor unresponsible individuals to consume?
Again, GDP measures how much money is spent within a country, if there are several intermediaries in a supply chain, the cost of products and services increases and the GDP tends to rise.
If a country change direction and leans towards nuclear energy, the GDP (that is in fact a terrible measure) will increase cause the new expenditures.
Roughly parity for LCOE once storage is added.
Battery prices continues to drop and in short order it will be flat out cheaper with storage included: https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-...
Add to that investments in the national grid and general energy efficiency it's doable: https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/100-percent-clean-electricity-...
Again, the only reason to not pursue this is to keep the fossil fuel companies profits flowing, and that isn't very compelling.
- Did these particular individuals get a chance to defend against this allegation or is it just assumed to be the whole truth? It has the ring of a convenient belief¹ that you can bring up whenever someone mentions that e.g. much less frequent flying and rarely eating beef/lamb are some large-impact things people could do. Was it actually them? Do they fly across the world regularly or are we expecting these people to live like monks consistently their whole lives, only going on holiday by bicycle and (if that exists in their country) train? Did they do, or buy, something that compensates the emissions (something one can reasonably believe to be effective, not the airline's 2€-on-checkout option)?
And even if, I'm also not going to stop flying entirely when literally everybody else here does it. I'm not the pope, even if I advocate for making things better (not trying to go for perfect, the enemy of good). Why should I sacrifice my life? I just came back from a train trip across the continent that I could also have flown or driven in individual transport (for free even, as the car I co-use has a flat fee fuel subscription). I try to do the right thing where reasonably possible, as it was in this case, but I'm not sure we should expect everyone who speaks of climate change to only ever do the right thing, especially when things like direct air capture can plausibly undo your emissions. It's cheaper not to fly than to fly and pay Climeworks to undo it, but that is an option, as is reducing the amount of flying. Both are good, both would allow you to further the anecdotal evidence that climate activists fly
¹ By which I mean a belief to justify something one wants for other reasons. The example that comes to mind is the "protip" that leaving the heater on a constant temperature is more efficient than stopping to burn fuel when you're not even home, which means you come home to a warm and cozy place so yeah sure one loves to hear/believe it and nobody sanity checks the values of how much more efficient your heater actually is when burning at a low rate as compared to the fuel saved while you're not home for 8 working hours + commute time
By not doing that, you free up quite a bit of tax money. I can't imagine it's the whole 30% but it would bring it down. Emissions tax would be another way to fund this figure at the same time as having corporations find ways to reduce emissions
They were in Bali at a tourist location. Not in the Sahel doing developement work.
Also where did I say all activists are to blame? I said I know people who don't fly at all and me who only considers flying in very rare circumstances. But true, I am not an activist.
"Do they fly across the world regularly or are we expecting these people to live like monks consistently their whole lives, only going on holiday by bicycle and (if that exists in their country) train?"
I don't think much of activists, who block other peoples daily commute with a standard car - but fly themself around the world for vacation. It does not matter how often they do it. Judging from activists, I suppose their reasoning is something like, they did so much activism blocking normal roads, that they deserve their vacation.
Well, I don't believe they help the cause, rather the opposite.
(And they were from germany btw. In europe you can easily go to lots of places by bus or train)
I don't blame you, if you are flying. But you don't block other people means of (more efficient) transport I suppose, while thinking you are righteous? That is my problem. This kind of activism. All it does is making people angry at activists and the cause.
“Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity” - Manabe & Wetherald
Not hard to find and not a bad read for those that passed high school physics and had exposure to first year university STEM coursework.
The basic notion is, well, basic - the more blankets you throw on the bed, the more heat stays trapped.
The blanket in this case is CO2 which is "transparent" to incoming light from the sun but not so transparent to heat energy radiating outwards from the land and sea surface.
The properties here are easy to demonstrate, the increase are documented, the effects followed.
A better argument is:
- We observe X is happening
- create a model of X happening
- use model of X to predict X in the future
- model of X might be or might not be flawed
- meanwhile, X is still happening in the real world
Okay? Last I checked, it's not 1988 anymore.
We are not heating up the earth.
The sun is heating up the earth.
That's occurring as we are adding 11 billion tonnes per year of additional insulation to the atmosphere. That's like throwing more blankets on the bed, trapping more heat.
This is well documented. The gas properties are understood and can be demonstrated in science labs to children. The gas sources are well understood and derive from documented fossil fuel extraction and confirmed by both isotope records and now by orbiting satellites.
> I'm glad that not all agree to that nonsense.
Physics isn't for everone.
But heat equations work regardless.
Seems to me the answer is a global plan that will actually control emissions in a cost effective way - say taxes on carbon, free trade in solar/batteries/evs and trade tariffs for countries that try to ignore that. I'd vote for that.
Failing that, me cancelling the trip to Thailand is not going to make a noticable difference, so whatever.
In the UK we mostly do dumb stuff to make our electricity almost the costliest in the world, kill industry and make no global dent in CO2. Stuff like that is why emissions have gone from 22 to 40 gt/y.
AI is made by humans, humans are biased towards existence, and if AI came to conclusion that humans should stop reproducing that would be seen as "oh, that's a dangerous AI that wants to kill human race".
It’s an inherent tradeoff, where significant emissions was required to lift them out of extreme poverty. It’s one thing to suggest developing economies shouldn’t have industrialized, but it’s unconscionable to accept the suffering that would have resulted.
Most uncertainty in temperature does not come from measured temperature (weather stations) but from temperature estimations from indirect sources. In other words, last 50 years data is pretty much all good.
Florida - also where there are $100B+ disasters every year.
America is now the Florida of the world!
Yes, China has many problems by their rise is exemplary. Especially in being the world's factory and having such a large export surplus. Their foray into dominating steel, high speed rail, solar panels, batteries, electronics e.t.c
They seem to be making good bets on the future, while US is holding on their bets from the last century.
> Who is going to pay the equivalent of 50$/gallon when they can use an EV?
If we're going to be arguing for peak oil, let's argue for peak lithium then too. EVs are going to get more and more expensive too as we have to extract from more expensive lithium stores.
> We use oil because it’s cheap not because it’s the only possible solution
For some things sure. Aviation fuel and ship fuel notably don't have any real replacements on the horizon.
From your sibling comment:
> The cost premium of biofuels for air travel aren’t that high and the scale can meet demand for long distance flights. Fertilizer from nitrogen in the atmosphere is again cost competitive relative to that kind of increase. Batteries are fine for ocean shipping on a ~50 year timescale, and that basically covers burning fossil fuels. Using it as a feedstock for plastics etc is a non issue for climate change.
I think you're mistaken here. Biofuels for air travel are much more complex than just pricing. You've got regulatory approvals, cost of retrofitting existing engines / figuring out how to make them drop-in without needing petroleum, etc. If you're thinking that batteries are fine for ocean shipping, I'd like a sample of what you're taking because the energy demands of massive ship containers dwarf the capabilities of batteries. That's why they're talking hydrogen fuel cells and nuclear.
> It’s not that we’re going to run out 100% year X, it’s that as economies of scale end priced inherently spike. Gas stations can scale down to 1940’s levels by having most of them close, but giant fuel refineries, pipelines, etc need scale to be worth the maintenance.
Conversely, there's a huge incentive to have oil be competitively priced and avoid a total collapse of that segment. That's why you see huge resistance politically - there's no real plan put forward for how we transition to a clean energy economy for the people currently participating in the oil economy.
500 miles is nothing. The median flight distance for a commercial flight is ~2000 miles. And this is a concept plane. Certification of a plane is ~5-9 years so let's assume on the longer side since electric planes aren't really a thing. So 20% of your time budget has been spent building a replacement for a puddle jumper. There's a lot of them but the real fuel consumption happens by the large commercial jets.
In any case, that's the result of continuous improvement and progress and my point was that we cannot get there by just shaming countries that are making that incremental progress right now.
Solar aside, I am thinking about installing a battery system that time-shifts from low-rate times to high-rate times. It's almost cost effective now.
Also, there is no downside believing the earth is round.
But believing burning things causes global warming is a) way more abstract b) inconvenient, as it makes you question your luxory. For some it is apparently easier not believing it and maintain a (pseudo) clear consciousness.
I also use air quality monitors to track CO₂ levels at home and in my office. (As a side note, I think more people should pay attention to indoor carbon emissions; in many offices and fitness centers, CO₂ levels can rise to an healthy amount)
While the suggestion about printing $100T to $200T is thought-provoking and is intended to address pressing global issues, I also consider the outcomes of similar actions during COVID. The significant money printing at that time—though aimed at stabilizing the economy—contributed to inflation and widespread challenges. I think we both share a desire to find solutions that address these needs without exacerbating suffering.
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1. The fact you cited is weird to me, since the top tax brackets in the US are pretty close together, and overall, rather low:
https://www.irs.gov/filing/federal-income-tax-rates-and-brac...
but - I guess I should have accounted for the skewed distribution of income in the US... for the top 10% to pay 75% of income tax, let's do some cocktail-napkin math to see how bad this is.
So, if we have a flat tax rate, this situation would mean that the top 10% make 3x more in total than the bottom 90%, or, 27x more per capita.
Assuming the average tax rate on the bottom 90% is, say, 12%, and on the top 10% is 36%, that would mean the average income in the top decile is 9x higher than in the average in the other 9 deciles. According to this:
https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
the average and median for the bottom 90% should be about similar, meaning that the average (not median) top-decile person makes 9 x $45,000/annum = $405,000/annum. The median top-decile person makes $201,000/annum, or about 4.5x than the median person on the bottom 90%. If we were to compare with the median person over the entire population - the median top-decile person makes 4x as much as the median person overall. Ouch.
2. I was naively interpreting this:
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...
i.e. that individual income tax accounts for 51% of US federal income, while corporate income/earnings tax accounts for 4%. I mistakenly assumed that the vast majority of workers pay the majority of taxes.
I wonder, though, how that chart accounts for Capital Gains tax.
I do not believe that you are arguing in good faith, or maybe your are just not capable of doing so?
Oil is consumed, lithium isn’t. There’s plenty of lithium to electrify the world multiple times, but it’s just an element so you can literally recycle it for billions of years.
> You've got regulatory approvals, cost of retrofitting existing engines / figuring out how to make them drop-in without needing petroleum, etc
0.2% of global aviation fuel is already biofuels, the regulatory processes is already involved and we’re talking a 50+ year timeframe here there’s plenty of options without retrofitting existing aircraft.
As to boats, weight and volume are a non issue so they scale just fine into the 24,000 TEU behemoths. Upfront costs are prohibitively expensive though operating costs are presumably. That said, there’s many options, ships are one of the few cases where hydrogen is a realistic possibility.
Classic, “fuck the middle class carrying the societal tax burden, hur hur”.
The people that pollute are not the ones stuck with the tax burden. Your incentives are completely misaligned here which means costs bloat and problems don’t get solved.
Recycling lithium is typically more expensive than extracting it through mining. Recycling companies claim a recovery rate of 95-98% so certainly lithium is lost and that's ignoring that smaller batteries often don't even end up in the recycling stream. But the important bit is the cost - if it's more expensive than mining then the recovery isn't economical then either there's a government subsidy or the lithium ends up diluted in the trash stream. You'd have a point about nickle or cobalt because they're particularly valuable but lithium is not so it is effectively being consumed.
> 0.2% of global aviation fuel is already biofuels
But it's not even clear that biofuels reduce CO2 due to production, processing & transport as well as land clearing for scaling it up. [1] suggests that biofuels can actually end up emitting more CO2 than the fossil fuels they replace (for example here's an earlier study [2]). And that's ignoring the substantial scaling challenges that SAF faces on the production side. I hope it works out but the lesson with huge risky bets is that many don't pan out and all we have now is large risky bets left which makes me pessimistic we'll succeed just because we run out of oil (assuming we even do which again seems highly unlikely to me because that's not how economics works).
[1] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-should-we-measure-co2-em...
[2] https://theconversation.com/biofuels-turn-out-to-be-a-climat...
No, protesting works, when it is against something you want to stop. But if I want to convince others to stop something, obviously I cannot continue to do the same or a worse thing. I don't know a single protest that worked this way.
But protesting against chopping down a forest to do more coal mining, did worked recently in germany. That was a good and effective protest (mostly). But blocking roads? It just hurts normal people largely with no alternative of transport. I doubt a single person was convinced to help there. Rather the opposite.
As to lithium being consumed, we’re talking hundreds to thousands of years from now before mining becomes an issue, current economic issues are largely meaningless. Unlike oil, these are the early days of the lithium economy. Making a big battery pile somewhere is perfectly reasonable form of recycling.
The incentives for a government subsidies for lithium recycling are strategic. Reducing dependence on foreign imports is inherently useful, but a stockpile and battery pile serves the same basic need.
The impact of one billionare jetting around the world for fun alone, is pretty small as well.
But if all the billionares are doing it, it already adds up to a impressive number.
And if you choose to jet around the world for vacation - then this alone is pretty neglectible, too. But all the other people also doing it isn't.
And yes, there are more people in a plane. Just like in a train or bus. Yet they are way more efficient. Only very few people driver alone over 1000 km for vacation.
I need to cut meat (and food) consumption and cut reductions from our heating. Also as I do want to travel in ways which are not workable without flying (too much of the world to see).
We should look to lowering our plastic consumption, electrifying American homes, and building transportation infrastructure so walking, biking, and public transit become more viable.
But yeah, specialist doctors and white shoe lawyers can pull down 10-20x that median, so they're paying a lot of income tax. The standard deduction really dings the effective tax rate of that median earner, not so much for the doctor.
Maybe it is privilege but the fact is that lower income is correlated with more children.
Anyway, that's what my sort of point is. Much of the GDP is spent on dumb stuff like holding stocks, gold, art and Prada bags. When you divert a percentage of that to be spent on real resources it can have major effects. Kind of like how when leisure travel became affordable for regular people, suddenly air travel and cruise ships started to have an outsized effect on climate.
( For one I'm not sure that the China route of draconian forced abortions for people with more than 1 kids is ok,)
As noted in the MIT article:
> Since most natural ecosystems absorb and store carbon, while farmland in active use tends to produce it, this land use change can create more climate-warming pollution
Basically the land is changed from a carbon store to a carbon producer for biomass meaning you're no longer sequestering the carbon which is where you get extra carbon in the ecosystem even if you're not having any carbon in the transportation & production.
There’s a few forests that have stayed that way for millions of years. Go to Daintree in Australia, dig down a deep as roots go, count up the carbon in a given acre, and divide by a 180 million and you get essentially 0/year as the long term sequestration rate.
Transitions between forests and farmland basically store or release a fixed quantity per acre though it’s a slow process for deep root systems. In that context sure you can look at farming as releasing carbon because of the recent expansion of farming, but the numbers aren’t a fixed constant.
> The Lazard study looked at the “cost of firming,” which consists of building extra capacity to back up solar and wind, for example, leading to an increase in total costs. When included, the economic advantage for solar and wind over gas narrows considerably, and in some cases gas at the low end of the cost curve beats out “firm” solar and wind projects, particularly in California where costs of firming are higher.
> The headline LCOE costs look really striking for solar and wind, but when those firming costs are included, renewables “do not look as low-cost as the first LCOE figures imply,” Patiño-Echeverri said.
There doesn't need to be a fossil fuel boogeyman behind every decision to continue the status quo. Sometimes the math is the math. Hopefully that will change in the future.
Or all of it and reduce flying as well?
At least until we made serious progress in the energy sector.