this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

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[–] kriz@slrpnk.net 42 points 1 year ago (10 children)

i always hate this because its like...ok...but you are president now so just target it now.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 27 points 1 year ago (9 children)

A few reasons:

  • Spending significant amounts of money needs congressional support and the Republicans control one house of Congress
  • Changing laws requires not just a majority, but a 60% supermajority in the Senate
  • The US regulatory process is designed to be slow, and the EPA lost most of its staff under Trump, so they prioritized the low-hanging fruit
[–] PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.com 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also, opportunities for different policies are determined by the political cycle. Bold policies are usually done at the beginning of a term, presidential or otherwise because they know they've got the American people behind their back. They were just elected after all.

Mid-terms are usually when they focus on the economy and other things closer to normal people so that when the election roles around, what that politician did will be more salient in the voter's mind.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 0 points 1 year ago

We got a lot of that:

The Washington Post has a much more complete list

Some things got overturned in court, like the drilling permit moratorium.

Also, the mid-terms were in 2022. Getting more and better Democrats in congress plus reelecting Biden would make it possible to do a lot more.

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