On Friday, the globe hit 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees) above pre-industrial levels for the first time in recorded history

  • dangblingus@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I mean, over the years I’ve heavily reduced my meat intake, am super conscientious about transportation (haven’t flown in a decade, keep my revs low when I drive, and try to get all my errands done in efficient ways as to minimize gas usage), turn off lights, ration my hot water usage, don’t eat out at wasteful restaurants, buy “ugly” produce from the grocery store, promote renewable energy solutions whenever possible, compost, recycle, and create extremely little garbage. Yet, at my work, several of our AC generators that we use to power the facility use more oil in one day than my car does in its entire lifetime. Several handfuls of billionaires and their families emit the same amount of carbon as the poorest 66% of humanity. Seems to me, if we want to solve climate change, we have to get rid of the biggest polluters first, then transition to clean energy.

  • metaStatic@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    no one wanted to be held accountable for the triage so we let everyone bleed out, safe in the knowledge there was nothing we could have done.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Wealthy nations are making progress, but too little and they’re starting from a bad place.

      Poor nations are busily repeating the industrialization process that made the wealthy nations wealthy. Anyone want to tell them they don’t have the right to do so?

      I wonder if the window of opportunity on geoengineering is also closing. Because this emissions reduction thing isn’t going anywhere.

      “But there are risks with geoengineering! We don’t know what might happen!” So: let’s get testing and find out, the way we do with everything else. Doing nothing on this spells certain doom. I’ll take an unknown quantity over certain doom.

  • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I wonder if I’ll be alive for the moment everyone goes from “This is bullshit and I’m going to ignore it” to “Oh no who could have seen this coming?”

    • PizzaMan@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Some people will never admit anything is happening. They’ll just blame everything on something else.

      We are already seeing the effects of climate change. If they were going to admit it, they would have done so already.

    • agitatedpotato@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There are constant cycles of ‘fuck around’ and ‘find out’ that are naturally occurring, pay too close attention and you’ll see more than you want to. Like 5g conspiracies were always fucking dumb, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t hear almost nothing serious about them after someone decided to try and bomb a city block over it.

  • naturalgasbad@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    The fact is that this was a conscious choice, even recently. The switch to natural gas that everyone is touting is one that is designed to cause higher short-term emissions.

    Methane is really bad over a 20-year time frame and only really lets natural gas equal coal over a 100-year period (assuming typical fugitive emissions rates). The transition from coal to natural gas is accelerating the rate at which we boil ourselves alive.

    • Magrath@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Methane is burned at the point of use and produces carbon dioxide. Ideally there is no methane released in to the environment.

      • naturalgasbad@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Methane leaks

        Something like 3-10% of all methane production leaks. Methane is about 80x worse than CO2 over a 20-year period.

        • Magrath@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Oh it does for sure. At least in Canada there are government regulations requiring inspections by 3rd parties to check for leaks with some sort of thermal camera. I’m not familiar with the technology to check for leaks but I’ve had to fix the leaks before and it’s taken seriously and well documented.

  • Tikiporch@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This will disproportionately effect the poor and developing countries, so the thinking of elites and super rich is that there’s still plenty of time to rectify the situation.

  • Boomkop3@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    Yes but they’re paying for an already protected forest to be protected, so it balances out right?

    Fortunately the EU is making that kinda advertisement illegal

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I’ve been day saying this for the past two years now, humanity is fucked, and soon.

    The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is a direct result from the energy we took from burning fossil fuels. To get all that CO2 out were going to have to wait Millenia for earth to do it (that is, if it still can) or spend that same amount of energy to get the CO2 out.

    To put that into something understandable: we’re going to have to spend ALL the energy we produced over the last two centuries on too of the energy we need for ourselves to be able to get CO2 back to preindustrial levels. Basically, for the next two to four centuries were going to have to spend at least 50% of our world energy budget to scrubbing CO2 and NONE of that energy is allowed to generate CO2. Actually, NOTHING from humanity can generate CO2 to reach that. If we continue spewing CO2 then you can double that number.

    To put that into perspective, adding all required work and infrastructure, energy -all energy- will become 3-4 times as expensive for the next few centuries

    People will not understand the issue and will not want to pay more, rich people will not want to foot the bill even though they could, so we won’t do anything and things will get worse and worse until we all die.

    One possible alternative might be spraying sulphuric acid into the atmosphere, that might buy us a few valuable years while we fix shit but what will happen is that we’ll just spray the crap out of it and call that a solution while we continue to spray CO2 into the atmosphere like there literally is no tomorrow for humanity

    We’re fucked

  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    You mean pledging to eventually tackle the problem 20-30 years down the road and doing nothing about it in the meantime hasn’t solved the problem?! I’m shocked! 🤯

    Every time I hear “carbon neutral by 2050” I’m always thinking yeah like it’ll fucking matter at that point, Honda (or whomever).

  • The Snark Urge@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The dismaying reality is that it is driven by the wealthy. I got rid of my car, I shop local, and everything in the home is low emissions. No reduction in my personal life can ever offset the way they live.

    • sic_1@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      But I drive my car less, that should do it! /s

      This is the reason we’re should focus out efforts to make a ruckus and force decision makers to enforce carbon neutrality BY NEXT YEAR instead of by next century. Of course that won’t happen but that would be the reasonable way.

        • SCB@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Most species on earth will be dead in any situation that wipes out humanity.

          • Nudding@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Hopefully another super predator doesn’t evolve and create its own extinction event 😵

          • Nudding@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Maybe when I see the magical communist revolution where humanity doesn’t destroy itself I’ll be a believer, but until then, I think humanity as a whole is a destructive force for bad.

            • SkySyrup@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              I don’t really think communism in the extreme version is currently a solution, but there is a simpler solution for now for the ultra-rich if you tax them for a large amount of money proportional to the income let’s say 100% after 10 million per year you quickly fix (I guess bandaid-patch) a big problem with capitalism.

          • OurTragicUniverse@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Don’t blame the symptom for the disease.

            Capitalism didn’t just pop up out of a vacuum to fuck humanity over, we invented it and have continuously supported it to do so.

            • SkySyrup@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              Yes, we did invent it. However, that was done by a small group of people that have been in power for generations, and kept it difficult to change to a better system.

              What I’m trying to say is that I think most people probably don’t find it very fair that someone like Bezos can just be so ridiculously rich.

              Maybe we can change this.

              • OurTragicUniverse@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                You really think that’s going to happen? Lmao. Yeah sure, and next we’ll have world peace and end poverty.

                Greedy, easily corruptable and prone to violent authoritarianism- describes like 85% of our species now and throughout recorded history.

                Stop nice-washing humanity and wake the fuck up. You’re not going to end capitalism, too many people benefit from it to let you.

                • SkySyrup@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  If we just give up, then there is a 0% chance. If we try, then the chance of succession isn’t zero. We have to try to be optimistic. Yes, the world is fucked, but hey, giving up is just accepting that and allowing it.