this post was submitted on 16 Oct 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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Everyone loves rooftop solar panels. But there’s a problem. One of the most popular methods to cut your household’s carbon footprint may be a mixed bag. (wapo.st)
submitted 1 month ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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I think that what's not in this article, but needs to be, is that rooftop solar in the rest of the world costs about 1/4 what it does in the US. Getting US prices down to where they are elsewhere would do wonders for closing this big gap.

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[–] treefrog@lemm.ee 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

The article is basically about economies of scale.

Large solar farms are much cheaper to set up per kilowatt hour of electricity produced than home-based solar panels.

But large solar farms are generally owned by corporations.

So the issue isn't solar but again capitalism. If we had a socialized or cooperative solar farm people could invest in, rather than putting panels on their homes, we would all be better off and get our solar for cheaper.

Of course, we could just socialize the electric companies. And considering the climate crisis is an emergency (hurricanes for example), it would be within the powers of the federal government in the United States to do this.

But, the fossil fuel industry would throw a fit, and we'd see somebody like President Trump get elected because campaign donations are really what tend to determine our elections.

So, the first step should really be socializing the fossil fuel industry. And then smaller electric companies.

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 6 points 1 month ago

Part of the problem in the US is that residential solar installers have been allowed to run scams and provide no customer support. NPR did a great podcast on it: The Dark Side of Rooftop Solar

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 month ago

It's not just that; residential rooftop in the US is about 4x the cost of doing it in other countries, and would be cost-competitive with utility-scale if it was as cheap as it is elsewhere.