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Humans have caused 1.5 °C of long-term global warming according to new estimates

(www.lancaster.ac.uk)
399 points gmays | 12 comments | 17 Nov 24 18:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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abdullahkhalids ◴[17 Nov 24 19:21 UTC] No.42166327[source]▶
The last IPCC report estimates that to limit warming to 2C, humans can only emit at most 1150 GtCO2 (at 67% likelihood) [1].

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
Guess what's going to happen and who is going to suffer, despite not doing anything.

[1] Page 82 https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-metrics

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Aurornis ◴[17 Nov 24 19:31 UTC] No.42166404[source]▶
> that means the average person can emit about 5.4tCO2/person/year from here on out. This is what emissions look like currently

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.

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jfengel ◴[17 Nov 24 19:43 UTC] No.42166512[source]▶
I believe the causation runs the other way. The IPCC was founded in 1988, when CO2 emissions were 22 gigatons per year. Nearly four decades later it's 40 gt/y, and continuing to rise.

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.

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ericd ◴[17 Nov 24 20:06 UTC] No.42166716{3}[source]▶
The comically named Inflation Reduction Act included a tremendous amount of money for scaling up clean tech manufacturing in the US, and it’s been getting deployed quickly. The DOE Loan Programs Office got something like $400B in loan authority. Overall, the IRA was probably the largest single bit of climate action the US govt has ever taken. Unfortunately, people mostly hear about that work when it becomes part of political football (Solyndra and Tesla both got money from the DOE LPO to help them scale up, and the political fallout from Solyndra was the first time most people had heard of it). But it’s happening.
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1. einpoklum ◴[17 Nov 24 20:42 UTC] No.42167042{4}[source]▶
> included a tremendous amount of money for scaling up clean tech manufacturing

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.

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2. ericd ◴[17 Nov 24 20:48 UTC] No.42167098[source]▶
$400B is moderate? Have there been other bills that have come anywhere close?
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3. einpoklum ◴[17 Nov 24 21:15 UTC] No.42167342[source]▶
Did I say moderate? I should have said small. Remember this is $400B over a 10-year period, i.e. $40B per year. The US federal budget is $6.1T per year, so not even 1% of the annual budget.

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%:

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4. ako ◴[17 Nov 24 21:16 UTC] No.42167347[source]▶
It's only 20% of what Musk thinks he can cut from the government expenses.
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5. ericd ◴[17 Nov 24 21:20 UTC] No.42167387{3}[source]▶
Where'd you get 10 years? I'm seeing "through September 2026" for the deployment of those funds. Also, it's taken them a bit to get back up to speed, since the political fallout around Solyndra basically caused them to go defunct for a decade, they've had to hire a lot of people to get back up to speed to be able to process loans.

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.

6. DFHippie ◴[17 Nov 24 21:37 UTC] No.42167538{3}[source]▶
This doesn't seem like a terribly relevant metric. See for example this critique:

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.

7. kortilla ◴[17 Nov 24 21:43 UTC] No.42167573{3}[source]▶
Funny how easy it is to trivialize spending other people’s money
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8. einpoklum ◴[17 Nov 24 23:17 UTC] No.42168229{4}[source]▶
Almost as easy as polluting other people's air.

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_!

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9. ericd ◴[18 Nov 24 00:17 UTC] No.42168547{5}[source]▶
The top 10% of earners pay ~75% of income tax in the US, income taxes at least are pretty progressive, especially when you include the standard deduction. Maybe you mean the people who live off of investments rather than high earners? But you should consider that their effective tax rate is the corp tax rate plus cap gains/dividend rate.

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.

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10. einpoklum ◴[18 Nov 24 22:42 UTC] No.42177898{6}[source]▶
Bottom line: I take back the claim that very little lies on the corporations and the rich; I should say very little (in relative and absolute terms) lies on corporations and not enough (in absolute terms) on the rich.

-------------

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.

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11. kortilla ◴[19 Nov 24 04:05 UTC] No.42180021{5}[source]▶
> Anyway, I would say that "La propriete, c'est le vol" [1], so not much sentiment for the taxed.

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.

12. ericd ◴[19 Nov 24 16:30 UTC] No.42185268{7}[source]▶
Right, it's mostly because of the large skew in incomes, and I agree that that's not a great situation. It's kind of why I scoff when people say that you can't get Americans to do farm labor for any price. I'm pretty sure you can, just not while maintaining the huge purchasing power that white collar workers have gotten for themselves, and they really don't seem to like thinking about that scenario, preferring to just pretend that it's impossible.

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.