this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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Climate

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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: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Cycling like the Dutch would slash the world’s carbon footprint (www.euronews.com)
submitted 17 hours ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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Dutch people cycle an average of 2.6 kilometres each per day. If this pattern was replicated worldwide, the study suggests, annual global carbon emissions would drop by 686 million tonnes.

This mammoth figure exceeds the entire carbon footprint of most countries, including the UK, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Australia.

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[–] uniquethrowagay@feddit.org 11 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

10-20 km is an easy bike commute distance if the infrastructure allows it. Especially with electric bicycles. I'd guess that most people in the US don't travel more than that for their daily routes.

[–] ToastedRavioli@midwest.social 4 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

95% of people that work in the town where I live commute from over 32km away, and many commute from 80-100km away. Some do actually do it on EBikes since we have the infrastructure for it, but the vast majority dont

In the city where I grew up, commutes are most commonly 20-30km. But there is no bike infrastructure (or reasonable metro/bus system for that matter), so its all cars.

Even in places with bike infrastructure in the US everyone is driving or taking buses for the most part. Hardly anyone lives 10 minutes biking from their job, which is probably what it would take for people to adopt biking en masse.

The town where I live now basically invented the problem, or was the earliest formal case study of it. The vast majority of people in the US do not live where they work, which is truly the underlying problem. Most people work somewhere far away from wherever they live. No place tends to pay enough for anyone to live in the same area where they work. That and also white flight from urban areas, which occurred much earlier and more commonly affects jobs that pay enough for people to live wherever they want

[–] NotEasyBeingGreen@slrpnk.net 4 points 14 hours ago

I wouldn't say easy. 20 km takes me an hour or more, although I am slow and don't have an electric bike (yet).