this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Proposed text: "All countries that are financially and culturally able shall in the near-term work to develop plans to phase through fossil fuel use in order to enhancify the prospects of reducing unabated emissions moving forward and thereby limit warming to 1.5°"
Or just set milestones and penalties for failure. Who gives a shit about out vs down the target is X tons yearly emissions by 2030. Meet it however you want, if you fail you owe this fine to disaster fund.
The argument is whether we plan to slow down how much fossil fuels we use, or plan to get rid of them entirely.
Obviously we need to eliminate them, at the very least beyond what’s directly created by capture in order to not go beyond 5c eventually, but oil company executives don’t like hearing that by definition in order for civilization to function they need to go from the most powerful unelected people on the plant to owners of a niche specialty supply company.
Ergo, it’s not realistic to stop global warming, we should just slow it down a bit until, I retire as head of head of Dubai’s national oil company, I mean until future generations are capable of not burning oil anymore.
I understand that. My point was that even using words like phase out is still giving too much weasel wording. Just set numerical targets and if countries want to try to meet them with carbon capture that is their prerogative.
if you use numerical targets it forces the companies/countries defending fossil fuels to reckon with the infeasibility of carbon capture. They will be disincentivized to do something that only gives the appearance of being helpful while not actually helping that much if they are penalized for failing.
At the end of the day all that matters is net carbon emitted comes down and eventually goes negative. it ends the endless debate about fossil fuel discontinuation. If they can make it work good for them, while the rest of us will switch to renewable.
Of course numerical targets would be best, but if they can’t even agree that they need to get rid of fossil fuels than it’s going to be hard to set thouse targets.