Uplifting News

The chart for anyone who doesn’t want to visit Axios:

Ignoring that this chart is designed to minimize the scale of the problem, it doesn’t convey “progress being made on climate change” to me, rather “we’re still making things worse, but marginal progress might be realized in the future so long as no big emitters reverse course on policy”.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. The dip during Covid actually gives me hope. Hope that climate change will soon enforce upon us a systemic collapse on such a scale that we have no choice but to transform our society into one focused on community and wellbeing.

I would love for us to fix climate change while not maintaining the same horrible systems that led to it.

30 gt of co2 is the new aspirational net 0 :(. That is still 3ppm per year increase. Feedbacks likely to make it worse.

The cynic in me says way too much of this is simply natural gas being less expensive, with no environmental motivation. And even worse that it doesn’t account for methane leaks

Who was projecting that global energy related CO2 emissions would increase from 34 gigatons to 50 gigatons between 2014 and 2040? Was that a reasonable projection? What was it based on? Is this evidence of "progress" or inaccurate projecting into the future?

I can project that the murder rate will increase 50% between now and 2050, and then when the murder rate only goes up 10% I can say, "omg, we've made such great progress on the murder rate," even though it still went up, because it didn't go up as much as I projected it would. But was my projection likely or even feasible in the first place?

So, things are still getting worse but will somehow magically start to turn better in five years. So all is ok.

The headline and graph are pretty misleading imo. The declining projection seems to indicate some kind of regression. Those are yearly emissions though. As soon as we use up earths CO2-budget, which is pretty soon, everything above 0 will have devastating consequences and they will worsen with every single day that the graph stays above 0. The headline stating "progress made" is also misleading in the way that it makes it seem as if we are somehow weakening climate change, but its just that we are accelerating climate change at a slightly lower rate than predicted. Also, if we take into consideration the predicted consequences of those enormous (predicted) emissions and compare them to current predicted consequences of the much lower emissions, we are still worse off than we thought we were. Its highly likely that we still underestimate the consequences of climate change.

Being a doomer about climate change doesn't help. We need to be realistic and take action in everything we do. People who think their actions do not make a difference are a part of the problem. Corporations hold a lot of blame, but also take some personal responsibility, you'll feel better by doing your part. How hard is it to not eat beef?

To solve climate change, we need two fundamental beliefs:

• There is an urgent problem
• We are capable of taking meaningful action

This graph proves that we can take meaningful action. That proof is essential to our success.

I don’t understand the people who insist that while there is an urgent problem, we have never done anything to address it, we’re currently doing nothing to address, and we will never do anything to address it.

What is the point of that belief?

Perhaps the certainty of failure is more comforting than the vulnerability of working towards a success that isn’t guaranteed.

I can see covid in that graph!

What I'm seeing:

The current trajectory is a downward trend, i.e. we are slowly going backwards (thanks to the orange turd)

We are WAYYYY behind the targets that we should be at and planned to be.

Not sure what's positive about that.