this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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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.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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First cars, now trucks: Biden takes aim at tailpipe pollution | The EPA rule could prompt pushback from the truck industry, which has fought a rapid transition away from diesel-powered vehicles (wapo.st)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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Yet EPA officials said the rule will not mandate the adoption of a particular zero-emission technology. Rather, it will require manufacturers to reduce emissions by choosing from several cleaner technologies, including electric trucks, hybrid trucks and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.

For comparison, The New York Times coverage

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[–] admiralteal@kbin.social 8 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Man if only we could take most of the major truck routes and turn them into low-emission, low-congestion corridors using comparably minimal labor. Hell, we could make it so they don't need to carry any power onboard at all, whether fossil or battery, by just making it so they could be directly connected to a wire on these corridors. We could chain up dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of trucks into giant mega-trucks that only took a handful of people to operate if we really thought hard about how to do it.

[–] Onihikage@beehaw.org 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Trucks and trains serve different purposes. If you want to get a mountain of stuff from the shipyard to distribution centers, trains are a great way to do that. If you want to get stuff from the distribution center to individual stores within a 200-mile radius, now you're talking trucks, and a lot of their destinations will be much closer than 200 miles, meaning even plug-in hybrid trucks would often be able to make trips without using any fuel.

[–] admiralteal@kbin.social 4 points 7 months ago

Agreed, trucks and trains serve different purposes.

And in the US, most of those train purposes are served by trucks.

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 2 points 7 months ago

I mean, that sounds like it would be really hard to keep them all properly aligned - perhaps we could somehow modify the roads to keep them centered mechanically

[–] fishos@lemmy.world -5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It's almost like we already do that but the last miles must be done by trucks because not everywhere is suitable for a train track coming right to your back door.

If you're gonna be snarky, at least be right.

[–] admiralteal@kbin.social 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Trucks move almost twice the value of freight in the US as trains. We basically only move gravel, coal, tanks full of chemicals, and other bullshit cargo that is so extraordinarily low-value that the economics of it can ONLY make sense with trains. Just compare how much cargo leaves our major ports on trucks vs on trains -- this is a FIRST mile problem and yet for nearly all commercial goods, it most likely gets unloaded from a cargo ship and onto a truck to be delivered to a logistics hub where it will be broken down into more trucks.

We don't even attempt to move goods to the last mile by train. Major logistics hubs and mfgs are mostly not even rail-connected because they just don't give a shit (in no small part because of how utterly incompetent our rail operators are), and how MASSIVELY subsidized trucks are by way of the incredibly cheap, huge highway network that we spend orders of magnitude more on than rail.

You're just making shit up based on feelings.