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

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399 points gmays | 2 comments | 17 Nov 24 18:49 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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oezi ◴[17 Nov 24 19:06 UTC] No.42166179[source]▶
Looking into the numbers a couple if months ago I was surprised how little it costs to stop climate change.

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

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epolanski ◴[17 Nov 24 19:17 UTC] No.42166295[source]▶
If you're referring to he economist one, I've read it too, and I think it would be much cheaper.

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.

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quonn ◴[17 Nov 24 19:48 UTC] No.42166563[source]▶
About half of CO2 emissions are electricity, heating and transport. Not beef.

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.

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epolanski ◴[17 Nov 24 20:36 UTC] No.42166995[source]▶
> About half of CO2 emissions are electricity, heating and transport. Not beef.

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

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1. quonn ◴[17 Nov 24 21:09 UTC] No.42167278{3}[source]▶
> Hell a single cotton shirt requires 2000 liters of fresh water

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.

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2. epolanski ◴[18 Nov 24 01:00 UTC] No.42168754[source]▶
It's not a small amount of water by any means and it's just one of the various polluting factors in its production. The average young american buys an average 10 shirts per year and this number keeps increasing.

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.