this post was submitted on 05 Aug 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.

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Heat pumps are expensive. What if billionaires bought them for everyone? (grist.org)
submitted 3 months ago by jeffw@lemmy.world to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] Redex68@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

This is a genuine economics question, but would these kinds of things ever even work? In the sense that, billionaires hold a lot of money, yes, but they never use a vast majority of it. That effectively means that money doesn't exist. Just pumping money into something doesn't create people and resources out of which you can create products.

If we were to redistribute wealth equally, how much would that actually help people (other than land and housing since that would definitely help enormously)? Sure some of the production capacity would stop going to producing some of the extremely expensive and resource intensive products such as yachts and the like, but it's not like rich people are buying 100s of ACs just for themselves. Shifting all of that production capacity to other goods I don't feel like is going to lead to that many more consumer products for regular people.

My point (and my actual question/thought) is that it would definitely help a lot of people a lot, but I feel like by how much is overstated, and I feel like the percentage of wealth that the 1% holds doesn't really matter as much as how the wealth in the rest of society is distributed (i.e. if the 1% were twice as rich but the other 99% had their wealth equally distributed, then that would almost be the same as if all of society had its wealth distributed equally)

Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not focusing on the part about whether it's okay or moral for there to be people that are so much richer, I'm just talking about the practical consequences.