this post was submitted on 07 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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I'll note that their definition of harms includes a lot of things besides just greenhouse gas emissions and climate impact. Full paper here

Basically makes the case that as a society, we're better off with smaller cars.

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[–] spidermanchild@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 month ago

“The harms imposed by the Rivian are three times the harms imposed by the Prius, in terms of air pollution and death from accidents,” said Hunt Allcott, a co-author and professor of global environmental policy at Stanford University. “But we are subsidizing the Rivian and not the Prius.”

EV fans have some reckoning to do. There's an argument that the carbon matters "more" than the other effects, but good luck not sounding like a psychopath saying the children gunned down by 8000lb pickup trucks with 0-60 times under 3 seconds and zero visibility are worth it for slightly lower carbon.

Meanwhile I'll keep riding my unsubsidized bicycle and not killing people. We should all have safe paths and trails to ride and communities designed for humans - that's where I'd like to see hundreds of billions go. We should absolutely also do a carbon fee and dividend (since this polls better than a "tax").

[–] Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah, tax incentives only work for those making enough money to have taxes to pay that they can get a break on. The rest of us have no way to afford an EV, so they’re relegated to luxury vehicles for virtue signaling upper middle class people. Then they double down and block the cheap EVs from being here, so now that there’s finally hope of having affordable EV transition for the masses, it’s purposefully kept out of reach for us in order to protect the margins of domestic greedy OEMs.