this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
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Thanks for an example of the numbers. And to point out, the entirety of the world's production of electricity is still over 60% from fossil fuels, so using that energy to undo emissions is ideally a wash, and realistically still an increase. And that's if we turned all of the energy to carbon removal from everything else, which would never happen.
Well yes, but isn't the point to use progressively less fossil fuels - net zero implies we get to a point where we stop making things worse.
From there, then we can start making things better.
Net zero is simply where the emissions we still are emitting are being countered by "something" to have a flatline of human sourced emissions total. Likely the same magic that the IPCC is still counting on, carbon removal tech. It's almost 2024 now and we're starting to see the accumulation of the damage we've done, mainly because things like the oceans have hidden it for so long and are now failing. Time is up.
We absolutely need to reduce fossil fuel use NOW, and as much as possible each year. The damage that will do to our society might be a price no one is willing to pay though, we're very heavily dependent on it, more and more each year. Just a linear decrease means in five years we better be down to 30 gigatons annual emissions, and five more down to 20 gigatons. There isn't a way to do that and keep our modern society (and the up and coming third world industrial countries).
Discussing a Catch-22 situation can become heated, because people don't want the problems pointed out to them without some answers to consider. I'm sorry I don't have any to give. Any that I've ever seen or been presented with are always false hopes, it's a big mess we humans have created.