If we can't reach 1.5°C then we should try to reach 1.6°C. If we can't reach that then 1.7°C. Ultimately: It doesn't matter whether we can reach 1.5°C, because everything we try helps making things better.
Aiming for 1.5C, then missing it and then continuously failing on 1.6C, 1.7C, 1.8C etc. is akin to a fat person missing their goal of 200lbs, and then telling themselves in front of the mirror every extra 10lb - "I'm going to stop eating junk food today! No, really, this is the day!"
It's a cognitive failure to adequately process signals that the real physical world is sending to you. Or measurements that you take from the real world.
We _should_ be making things better, yes. But setting an arbitrary goal isn't helpful.
You know what would be helpful? Just giving ever person who's considering a solar project a much larger tax break than currently exists. Expand community solar programs for medium-size installations up to 2MW. Subsidize energy storage installations to complement that installed solar.
Anyone who's advocating for targeting an ambitious goal is missing the point completely. If that was helpful, why not just say we're targeting 0C?
In fact, let's target -1C and shoot extra energy into space. We might even discover some cool tech this way.
If we're already going to have to heavily adapt our living arrangements to account for extreme climate change, at what point does 0.1° not matter? 5.0° vs 5.1°? 10.0° vs 10.1°?
Our kids, who will shoulder far more of the effects of this than us, didn't get to choose this. This is their inheritance, generations of neglect for the environment and rampant profiteering culminating in a climate catastrophe.
I'd add that all our models include some form of carbon removal, which is still within the realm of fiction in any meaningful capacity.
So not only do our children inherit the mess, but our most optimistic scenarios all include our children being the ones to invent some sort of miracle tech.
Meanwhile we're mostly sitting on our asses and not even a global pandemic could convince us to make any sort of meaningful change.
We will live long enough for some of these hens to come home to roost.
Kids judge their parents on their inability to change when it matters, and when you’re old and infirm and “kids” are taking care of you, you’re gonna be in for a bad time.
Our kids will also inherit all of the amazing technologies and scientific advances that were developed as a result of cheap, abundant energy. It is a tradeoff and climate change is a solvable problem.
It’s easy and comforting to spout predictions of the apocalypse, but realistically speaking, things will be okay.
How is it "generations of neglect" if we didn't even really know about global warming until the 80s? Maybe you can label the last decade or two as reckless but hard for me to get on board with such a long time scale when broad awareness is so recent.
Hopefully the kids will realize the only retribution they’re going to get involves sending everybody that caused this into a wood chipper that shoots out directly into a fire.
They’ll probably never find the attention span to do so. But I can hope.
It is like an imminent impact with your car. Whether you can still make it or not - you want to break as hard as possible to make the impact, if it cannot be avoided, the least violent you still can manage.
We are already at 1.2° C. This is despite the fact that the El Niño index is negative. There is over 50% chance that we will experience a year in the next five years where the average temperature is > 1.5° C above the pre-industrial average.
This is dire. I think we need to admit defeat, and declare a climate failure. Our goal going forward should be to do everything that keeps the temperature as possible. So far the goal of 1.5° C seems like it is taking us to 3-4° C by the end of the century, 3-4° C is basically an end of the world scenario.
Two of the biggest (non industrial) CO2 emitters are heating and transportation.
One of the lowest hanging fruits would be reducing CO2 emitting car use, using a massive capital expenditure to enable lower emitting public transit and cycling to enable people to drive less.
It's endlessly frustrating that even those polices, where are relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things are apparently too impossible for our political leadership.
Sequestration only starts making sense when we have basically unlimited green energy to throw at it. I know some moments have excess green energy already but you're not going to build a huge plant and run it only 2 hours a day.
The amount of natural resources needed to build enough plants to make it more than a drop in the bucket is also going to require significant mining operations and other big polluters. It's a nice idea but science fiction for now, at least at a scale that is actually effective at countering climate change.
And even if we had unlimited energy and materials the inertia of greenhouse emissions (the CO2 heating us now was emitted decades ago) building it at scale will come too late to avert a crisis.
It's still much easier and more efficient to avoid emitting the carbon we still do than to try and capture it back. Though even that will come too late really.
This is going to sound kind of cynical, but the primary mechanism of democratic — popular — feedback, in most countries around the world, is embarrassment. In the West, embarrassment means you lose elections; in less democratic countries, it may mean you get forced from power by other means.
So the optimal climate target should maximize the utility of this embarrassment. It should not be too achievable, or countries will slack off, but it should not be obviously impossible, or that will be an excuse to give up. The carrot must always dangle just far enough in front of the horse.
The point of 1.5 C as a target isn't that we meet it, but that we try to. If we could meet the target, we'd do even worse, and say "close enough", but that's no good.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with American politics, but embarrassment is not a factor for roughly half our politicians. They can literally be child predators, why would their base care if they're destroying the environment future generations, even if they believed it?
The priority should be on protecting the biosphere, not on reaching arbitrary quantitative goals. The planet has adapted to much bigger temperature changes in the past, and will do so again, as long as humans stay out of the way. Staying out of the way means occupying less space, and particularly freeing up migratory corridors.
The "miracle" would be admitting that technology can't get us out of every predicament we throw ourselves into, and disabusing ourselves of the notion that anything - the economy, civilization, human population - can grow infinitely on a finite planet without complete catastrophe. Admitting any one of those three things is anathema, though, so we comfort ourselves with pipe dreams of carbon sequestration, dyson spheres, and sending out probes to mine all our resources from the asteroid belt.
A recent piece in The Economist argued that China is doing more to combat global warming than is any other nation, and if America is going to do better then we'll have to become more like China. I agree on both points. And I think that will be the outcome eventually.
China is building a huge amount of renewable power and shipping tech to the world. But they're also burning a phenomenal amount of coal: so much so that they alone may determine whether we survive this next few decades.
> China is doing more to combat global warming than is any other nation
If this is happening, and no reason to doubt that, it is easier for a Nation like China to do this than say the US. Why, Xi can say "Build more windmills now in ..." and it will happen.
In the US, the 'in' is important, people will fight any development with in 10 miles of where they live. So it takes over 10 years for just the plan to be finalized. For a good example see:
> China is doing more to combat global warming than is any other nation
What?
The west is working hard at lowering it's emissions, but all that work is getting undone because China's emissions aren't slowing down. Coal is incredibly cheap when there's no carbon tax or emission standards. One of the many reasons it's cheaper to manufacture in China and why North Americans and Europeans can't compete [0]. Comparing the US[1] and China[2], the US has:
- Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%)
- A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%)
Meanwhile for the same period China has had
- a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)
- 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007
So it is possible to drastically reduce our carbon footprint thanks to innovation and smarter power generation.
Time to add tariffs on goods produced by states who made the decision of going all-in on polluting power generation, and potentially apply immigration quotas to citizens of these countries.
At least as far as I understand it today (leaving this comment in the hope that folks can help me expand my understanding)
Life on earth is not stable. We are in the final death throes of this planet. Roughly 75% of life on earth is behind us. Life has been here for 4Bn years and we have about 500m left[1] until our carbon cycles grind to a halt due to the earth moving outside of the habitable zone and all life on earth starts it’s final, and ultimate, extinction event.
This pending extinction event is not human made. It was coming regardless of whether humans evolved on this planet.
From everything I can tell, there is no making it through, let alone coming back from, this impending extinction event without “technology” that decouples life from the carbon cycles on this planet.
In 4.2bn years life on this planet has printed exactly one golden ticket for escaping that fate: humans.
We’ve done some bad things along the way to industrialization processes that can produce the technology necessary to get life off this rock - and to artificially sustain life on this rock as it becomes unsuitable for life.
But I’m not confident that the bad stuff we have done is sufficient to condemn our species and disqualify us as a suitable steward for this planet. Primarily because there is no alternative, there is no species in “second place” that I’d trust to evolve a civilization capable of getting life off this planet in the time we have left.
The eco-movements (outside of whole earth) have lost me. The calls for an immediate suspension of industrial processes, or the sentiment that life on earth would be better off if humans didn’t evolve to be what we are today, seems misplaced.
Without humans, and without our recent attempts to escape this planet, all life on earth is doomed to complete extinction.
It seems like we are in a critical several hundred year window where humans need to appreciate both that we are accelerating the end of the Holocene, a climate that was critical for the development of our civilizations, and do our best to slow that process already under way.
At the same time, we need to maintain the civilization that’s setting life on earth on an escape trajectory.
If we toss the baby with the bathwater we doom all life on earth to guaranteed extinction.
It seems to me to be incredibly arrogant to be reasoning starting from humanity as saviors of life in 500 million years.
And to say that that somehow means that the eco-movements (many of which are focused on the keeping us alive for the next few thousand years) are flawed seems wrong.
The focus put on silly Greenpeace actions and fights about nuclear in the media is part of a somewhat intentional strategy to paint all environmentalists as wrongheaded or stupid.
Before the sun goes red we need to understand and categorize the interactions of life on earth, preferably including extinct animals as much as possible, and using that knowledge, we need to attempt to recreate it elsewhere. 2000 years ago the earth was covered with tribes and nations that had an intuitive understanding of these things, built on analogy and language. Even dredging that level of understanding up would help us today. Investigating the observations contained in that folk wisdom is often how science works. We haven’t been doing the work because industrial Ag and transportation have their own solutions which sound more appealing (as is often the case, doing the wrong thing feels easier and more fun).
I’m guessing you’re getting downvoted for not expanding on:
> Life has been here for 4Bn years and we have about 500m left until our carbon cycles grind to a halt and all life on earth starts it’s final, and ultimate, extinction event.
500m is a lot of time even evolutionarily. Dinosaurs were around 245m-66m years ago. There very well may be another animal/civilization in the next 500m years that has a decent shot at escaping from earth.
This particular extinction is indeed man made. Oil companies knew of their impact and role in the seventies and close to not just suppress their knowledge but in fact funded disinformation campaigns.
See https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...
There won't be a miracle. The best and most scalable carbon sequestration is still growing trees without them rotting, but that takes generations to have an effect, assuming overproduction of CO2 stops right away.
But at this point we've passed the point of no return; probably years ago, with permafrost, ice caps and glaciers melting and all the effects that has. I don't think any CO2 measures now will help anymore.
For all of the shellacking the fossil fuel industry gets (rightfully so), they have signalled several times that they are willing to transition to lower productions and higher prices and even into green energy. In 2016 oil companies spent the least amount on oil discovery in over 70 years!
It was only after extreme political pressure that oil companies were basically forced into re-expanding capacity again.
They might have signaled one thing via press releases, PR campaigns, token donations to activists or whatever.......but let's be completely clear - their lobbying dollars and large campaign donations haven't gone to politicians promoting green energy nor to politicians who want to transition away from oil.
On a longer time scale, let's see where the bulk of their lobbying budgets go (to a particular party or sect within a given party), or the initiatives their lobbyist friends have been tasked with passing or defeating.
My guess is that when push comes to shove, the oil companies are not friendly to green energy.
I mean, let's not overrate the lobbying of the Oil and Gas industry. They don't even crack the top 5 sources of lobbying dollars in the US. They are there right alongside lobbyists for solar and wind and nuclear and etc. (And let's also not set aside that most of the oil extracted in the world is not done by private companies but by government ventures).
And again, their lobbying is a drop in the bucket as to their actual discovery expenditures.
I don't think it's a helpful narrative that oil companies are hell bent on forcing oil down our throats unwillingly. Sure, they will do whatever to make a buck, but they would gladly switch to green energy if they thought it was more profitable. We have even seen this when Exxon (briefly) was the number one spender on solar R&D in the world.
I think people see the lobbying and underrate the extent that it's a two-way street. Politicians NEED low oil prices. Voters WANT low oil prices. And to a certain extent, oil companies have all the cards because of the demand.
The power of the oil industry comes not through their lobbying, but mainly from the fact that $5.00 gas will get politicians voted out of office, and they all know it.
I mean, even if we were at peak oil that would still give us a still a ton of carbon left to extract.
I would honestly give up on the concept of peak oil thought. If for no other reason than the fracking revolution may have alone doubled the available fossil fuels.
I’m beginning to suspect peak oil was never an actual prediction, and more of a statement—or rather a lie—that we would naturally wean of fossil fuels in a couple of years as production would slow. I’m beginning to think peak oil was always a ruse so that the fossil fuel industry could delay climate actions for another couple of decades (and doom us all in a climate disaster while they were at it).
The difference is due to US transitioning to shale oil. Current known deposits are effectively infinite.
Look at planned capital investments for fossil fuel energy. Especially power generation. It needs to be zero, yet the industry (and finance) is still full steam ahead.
For decades now in Canada companies have been endlessly lobbying the government to allow for more expansion of pipelines to enable more production and more growth.
There is nothing new that has changed their approach.
Look at the political strain that develops when gasoline prices increase in the US and Canada. Loads of people start demanding cheaper gas and expect the government to step in and ensure low-ish gas prices.
The gas tax hasn't budged since 1993 despite really needing it, largely because of the backlash politicians would get for making gasoline more expensive.
Uh, there was literally a White House speech in 2022 on the subject. "You should be using these record-breaking profits to increase production and refining" - words from the president himself. This ended up kicking off a months long negotiation to convince oil and gas companies to increase domestic production.
For the Canadian industry I think you are underrating how much of a hand the government of Alberta themselves are playing in this. This has been an economic development project for them and things like the Keystone pipeline have been spearheaded by the government to get access to the global market as a way of attracting investment from the oil and gas industry.
climate change isn't a problem of science it is a problem of oppression. It is an unjust decision by the power elites to continue the status quo while hoping some silly valley hoohaw is going to come up with a silver bullet but if not who cares, got mine. It is about stealing from present and future generations. It is about stealing from the poor, people of color who will be displaced by rising sea levels. It is about stealing from the plants and animals we share this planet with that are currently going through a massive extinction event.
Emissions rise as a function of demand, mainly from east Asia, particularly China (holding demand constant, emissions would otherwise lower, since combustion technology grows more efficient over time). The homegrown demand rises because we are padding our numbers with immigration to boost GDP (enriching the wealthy, primarily), and newcomers adopt the same carbon footprint as the rest of us, through consumption. They want houses, vehicles, electricity, gadgets, delicious and convenient food too.
The argument has been made that it's inhumane to demand that developing countries (e.g. in Africa, or BRIC) opt to lower their fossil fuel consumption, restraining themselves from improving their quality of life over time. I agree. We benefited, so should they. If it were possible for them to catch up purely on green tech, they would.
Only a fraction of fossil fuel use is actually for generating electricity. The other uses are currently non-abatable, until technology improves. Other uses include blast furnaces for cement and coke, steel-making, creating ammonia, creating plastics. On the electricity front, things are still a mess.
a third of the co2 produced comes from electricity. Rich nations could subsidize GDP growth in developing nations by building nuclear and renewables there. These countries will accelerate the demise of humanity if they burn coal instead. They don't have the right to do it. Neither did developed nations but they already did it. We do not have the right to determine the fate of the planet that we share with all other living things.
Teddy Roosevelt said, “We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation.”
We must conserve and protect this planet. Even if that means doing so from other humans.
How is it reductive? Literally speaking, climate change will most impact the people who benefited the least from the burning of fossil fuels. Those are the people who come from poor and hot countries in the global south and near the equator, who have historically burned far less fossil fuels per-capita, but nevertheless will be harmed the most per-capita given their climates are already precarious. Then, when the consequences boil over in a few decades and their countries become too hot to be healthily habitable, they will be banned from migrating to colder, richer countries by those countries' local conservatives, who will lobby government to restrict or ban immigration intake. What a sick and hypocritical situation that will be. Those rich and cold countries' wealth was generated by the fossil fuels that were burned that put those poor people in the global south in that awful predicament to begin with, and now they'll be stuck there to deal with the consequences that they didn't primarily create. It's a world-scale theft of opportunity, wealth and life.
One eye-opening fact I recently learned is that fossil fuel infrastructure being built today is expected to have a three-decade lifespan, after completion of its construction. So every time you hear about a new pipeline, drilling project, or refinery being built you know that the people sitting in the rooms authorizing billions of dollars being allocated to the project all believe it will safely be operating and producing profit 35 years from now; they wouldn't invest otherwise. This is what business as usual looks like. Every new fossil energy project is incompatible with a world that takes climate change seriously. Money talks.
Do you believe we'll ever stop using fossil fuels in the "near" term? Just about every single product nowadays has some piece of plastic in it, including new EVs, which require fossil fuels to manufacture. There are plenty of lubricants to run the machinery in the factories that manufacture those products, including the renewable energy sources, which (again) require fossil fuels to manufacture.
Getting people to switch cars may be a part of reducing the dependency, but still contributes to the use. It'll be a long road that includes getting down to the minutia, like stopping girls from wearing makeup, before you can entirely remove fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels will not go away for at least a few more generations, because they are far too beneficial and there are no replacements for the myriad of uses they have today.
Plastics, lubricants, and any other hydrocarbon derived products can be synthesized starting from carbon dioxide, water, and electricity. For example, the most common plastic monomers (ethylene and propylene) are readily synthesized from methanol via the so-called "methanol to olefins" process. Methanol itself has been synthesized commercially since the 1920s [1]. The methanol-to-olefins process is already commercialized in China [2], albeit with methanol derived from coal rather than from clean feedstocks.
The other 84% is just burned for energy. "Entirely" removing fossil fuels won't happen for a very long time if ever, but that's not a barrier to slashing CO2 emissions from fossil combustion.
> Every new fossil energy project is incompatible with a world that takes climate change seriously. Money talks.
This depends on more information. It’s unlikely we’ll be using zero fossil fuels in 35 years. So the goal is to reduce over time, so a new project today could be replacing an old project going offline.
Or perhaps the project has a transition path to do something else.
I don’t think these are pedantic clarifications as things aren’t fatalistic. Investors are rational and while money talks it doesn’t mean that all the billions put into these projects isn’t a waste in climate terms.
Fossil fuel investment has been climbing year-over-year. Fossil fuel companies aren't replacing existing infrastructure to taper out usage of fossil fuels. They are introducing and expanding with new infrastructure.
> One eye-opening fact I recently learned is that fossil fuel infrastructure being built today is expected to have a three-decade lifespan
Same thing goes for innovation. For instance, the first nuclear power plants are from the 50s. 70 years later nuclear energy powers only 10% of electricity in the world (and electricity provides only a fraction of our energy needs).
Net zero means that the over-all result is zero. There will still be fossil fuel operations ongoing after net zero is achieved, until the economics of it don't make sense anymore. For projects that were already in the works, this makes sense. Those are already financed on the order of decades and planned long in advance.
As I said, money talks. I'd like to share a chart I saw a couple months ago that stopped me dead in my tracks. It was in the Bloomberg NEF Energy Transition Investment Trends 2023 report, which you can get emailed to you by filling out a form here: https://about.bnef.com/energy-transition-investment/
First of all, you are wrong. There are new fossil fuel projects in North America and Europe as well (though Europe is building significantly less than North America).
Second of all, why does that matter? Increased CO2 in the atmosphere will heat the climate everywhere (albeit not evenly). The fossil fuel market is global, meaning these projects are overwhelmingly built and profited by publicly traded international fossil fuel companies. (just like the rising temperature) The money to be made is distributed everywhere on the globe (albeit more in some areas than others), regardless of where these new projects are located.
No, the climate disaster is a global crisis, and needs to be handled globally. If we were serious about minimizing the harm of climate change (and we should be; but we aren’t) than green infrastructure would be paid for by the wealthy countries even when it is rolled out in the poorer, where the rich countries won’t see any of the benefits (other then you know, saving the world from impeding doom).
And they still burn much less per-capita, so what's your point? Everyone should decarbonize quickly, but especially those wealthy countries that burn the most per-capita today, and who have burned the most historically and therefore benefited the most from the resulting wealth accumulation. And these wealthy countries should be sending truckloads of money to poor countries to help them with their decarbonization efforts, as recompense for their far outsized role in creating this problem to begin with.
Not true, but don't let facts get in the way of your kneejerk racism.
> The U.S. is leading in global LNG supply growth with an additional 5.9 million tonnes of capacity in 2022, for a total of 80 mtpa.
> Norway saw the second-largest growth in LNG supply, with an additional 2.8 million tonnes of capacity. Malaysia and Qatar were close behind, with 2.4 million tonnes and 2.3 million tonnes of capacity growth in 2022, respectively.
Any indication that those who control the world's wealth won't voluntarily solve this problem implies that direct action, struggle, and hardship are required of us personally if we want a future worth living in. This is not a nice thought and it is understandable people want to look away.
The dramatic shift in its new “Energy Security Scenarios” is not explicitly acknowledged, but, as Carbon Brief’s analysis shows, is hidden in plain sight.
And even that is not admitting a truth, but kind of "haggling" about how bad things are, because even 0 growth in fossil fuel use does not get us < 1.5 celsius increase.
Does anyone have recommendations for good reading on this subject? What this means for combustion engines as a whole? I am trying to imagine where the push for clean energy will lead. I am fully on team green but I think the switch happened too late.
I feel like there is a future where you have a large percent of the population (at least in the US) where EVs are too expensive to afford the monthly payment/up front payment to switch but gas prices rise to a point where they can't afford to fill their tank anymore either. People will always say "just use public transit" but most cities in the US have a barely managing system if they even have one.
Best reading recommendation would be to look at climate change projections from NOAA or similar organizations for where you live or want to live, assume those will be true within some +-, and then base your decisions off of that. There doesn't seem to be a substantial downside to getting it wrong if bad scenarios don't occur but if they do occur you'll want to have gotten it right.
> People will always say "just use public transit" but most cities in the US have a barely managing system if they even have one.
If only we could possibly do something about that....
but yea, EVs on the whole are better than ICE in this context, but 1-1 replacement schemes are a very bad idea and don't really address the underlying problems we face on climate change and other problems (social division, obesity, premature death, etc.); we need to stop driving everywhere.
Unfortunately subtractive solutions (which are almost always better) such as building a little bit closer together (nobody is taking your SFH away), allowing businesses to operate near homes, and building sidewalks don't sell cars, don't fill transportation department budgets and justify jobs, don't win elections, and don't increase GDP. Some big multi-million dollar project that brings "300 new manufacturing jobs" gets the headline and gets the funding, even though building a few sidewalks and converting surface parking lot into businesses bring even more economic activity.
Thanks for the response! I will definitely dive into that.
> even though building a few sidewalks and converting surface parking lot into businesses bring even more economic activity.
I will say, I think we are seeing a bit of movement this direction. The work-from-home boom from Covid has shows that living at the office isn't the dream it used to be. People are beginning to see the benefits of local community and business as not just the economic impact but the freedom that that proximity can provide.
Right, but, to a large extent, Americans love the burbs and you are not going to be able to get them to vote for their demise, no matter how many benefits you can see .
You’re right that EVs are not enough to solve this. We also need to significantly reduce the amount of traveling in all cars, electric or not.
The good news is that there are fast and cheap solutions that cities can implement nearly overnight. Cities like Paris showed in recent years that “pop-up” bike lanes can be installed very quickly, and significantly increase travel by bicycle.
Many cities also have a bus system, which would also be positively transformed with just painting some bus lanes on existing roads.
The short term fixes support the longer term changes (enabling walkable communities, allowing more efficient compact housing, etc.) that we also need to be adopting as fast as possible.
> We also need to significantly reduce the amount of traveling in all cars, electric or not.
I agree with the idea of this but in saying this you are forgetting about ~20% of the US populace that lives in rural areas.[1] I personally live ~1 hour from the nearest city. The area I live in has no access to high-speed internet to enable remote work, and the cost of driving to the city for a good paying job is still money ahead than taking a low paying job closer by. I also know I am not the only one of my neighbors in this boat.
This goes back to my original point, I think we have made the change too late. Sure we can implement solutions in cities with relative speed but the type of large scale changes that it would take to help areas, like where I'm at, will be too late by the time they are finished.
it's always possible to improve public transport, and it could happen fast if people would get their priorities straight; more options are car sharing and concentrating on more dense areas with walkable and cyclable infrastructure (keyword 15 minute cities).
Perhaps not exactly what you're looking for in terms of potential solutions, but it's an honest and sobering account of where we're at without any undue sensationalization.
IMO What we're consistently failing to see is that necessity is the mother of invention. Mankind has summoned seemingly unfathomable ingenuity and effort in response to dire need. It seems it will be Gen Alpha/Beta who will have their "ww2 moment" but in response to existential threat from Environmental and second order societal collapse.
Likely changes will include mass adoption of nuclear (potentially including Fusion or Thorium based), Carbon (and other gas) sequestration, Biodomes (to deal with a toxic environment), etc.
It clearly wont be the end of mankind, just mankind as we currently experience it.
>It clearly wont be the end of mankind, just mankind as we currently experience it.
Cold comfort if the new experience will be an economic crash and global food shortage. And you're assuming that, once things are terrible enough that political and economic powers can no longer ignore climate change, there will still be available solutions to have something better than a life of war and hunger.
Cities have fallen to disasters throughout history (easy example is Pompeii). Cultures vanish. The only reason anyone's still around to talk about it is because natural disasters, wars, and human errors have largely been localized. Climate change won't be.
What happens when we can't find a solution. In a lot of ways we're lucky b/c every major problem that has come along we more or less have found a solution to. I suspect climate change may be a little different. Not sure if you saw the movie Up but the basic plot is an asteroid is going to crash into earth. They devise a mechanism to blow it up but it doesn't work and everyone dies. Not everyone is going to die from climate change but it's very possible we don't "solve" it and life as we know it is fundamentally altered.
At the moment I don't buy the trade off for EVs. They take a lot of carbon to make since most of the chain of mining through construction is still consuming fossil fuels and buying energy from the grid is still quite carbon intensive.
You can save more money and be more helpful with solar on your roof especially in the warm areas of the US. At some point hopefully the carbon cost of the vehicles will come down and they will make more sense, they just don't save enough currently compared to a Solar array which typically pays back its carbon cost in about 90 days a vehicle is more like 5 years.
* Not possible on non-level terrain (although e-bikes are sometimes an option).
* Potentially dangerous in some places because of traffic.
* Some places will not be accessible by bike due to various physical obstacles
* Requires some level of physical health (although you don't have to be fit to ride a bike)
but still, it's a decent solution for many of those towns without a public transport system. And if you can get your municipal authorities to support it, you can address the second and third points above.
For that to happen, living in a dense urban area needs to be much less expensive than living out in the middle of nowhere. The average income in Mississippi is around $25k / year. I'm not sure what the distribution curve looks like, but I'd guess 2/3 of the population make at least $20k / year. Cities should be designed so that a person can live a good life on $20k / year in a city.
And how do you propose to get produce if all the farmers move away? Saying "people should move to more dense areas" creates a whole other swath of problems to fix.
Combustion engines are an inferior tech, so they'll get replaced everywhere they can be.
I also think we could have been a decade ahead on this transition, if not more, but I think you'll still also be suprised at how quickly EVs totally replace ICE cars, even if you live in some poorly run area of the globe.
EVs already have lower TCO and leasing companies are keen to loan you the upfront difference and let you pay it back month by month instead of spending it on gas and use the more reliable EV as collateral, reducing financing risk and cost.
They'll continue to do that as the upfront price drops below ICE too.
It would be nice if the US moved to a healthier, more walkable lifestyle, but if they do insist on continuing that form of slow suicide, it'll only make the transition faster. EVs make more monetary sense the longer you drive, due to lower fuel costs.
I am a complete and absolute cynic on climate policies and outcomes, but battery technology is still having ridiculous breakthroughs day by day.
Ultimately if the base price of a vehicle increases the financial instruments to make them affordable in the face of regulatory disincentives for ICEs will appear.
With China building 7 new coal plants everyday and cruise ships emitting more than all ICE cars combined I think the answer is either fusion or we just plant more and more trees.
We should plant more trees for sure!
Not because of carbon, but because of covering the soil.
Check back to garden of eden documentary.
Covering the soil is the solution to end hungry!
Why? Watch the documentary.
Public transport is impossible in most US cities. By impossible, I mean so uneconomical that it cannot happen at scale. The geography is not there.
Even in the UK, a tiny island, public transport works well in large cities like London and Manchester, sort of okay but a faff in the suburbs of those cities and smaller cities, marginally as something for tourists in small towns, and for the rest of the country there's nothing.
Almost everywhere in the US has less density than a small town in the UK. In most suburbs just getting to the end of your road is going to be 10 minutes walk. It would mean half of the country abandoning their homes and rebuilding, which I imagine would end up higher carbon than just using the ICE cars.
The geography's fine, it's the zoning that destroyed it. You don't need to have your entire country be oceans of parking with a few buildings sprinkled in the middle.
I'm actually not so sure, especially if you use buses. The problem is its inconvenient, and if you have a car you take that instead of a bus, so no one takes the bus, which makes it hard to justify the bus and frequent schedules.
Our small suburban city of 15k actually has free bus service up and down our main stroad. Everyone is probably within a 15 minute walk to it. But it's aimed mostly at school kids, so the hours are very sparse during certain times of the day. E.g. when schools tend to get out it's every 10 minutes, but outside of those hours its every hour or so.
A lot of it is cultural too. My wife lived in Santa Monica, and she would drive for 1 hour to go 2 miles rather than walk or bike, and this behavior was common among her friends.
I live a 10 minute walk to school. My neighbors still drive their kids to school. There's no (good) excuse for that.
It's certainly an improvement that now they speak with partial evidence and admittance, compared to paying for "climate change hoax" campaigning.
In context, the heating we had now already caused massive destruction in polar, in whales, in shallow sea, in mosquitos, in plagues, in desertification. Thus any decrease is welcome. We are not having quota to spare. We're trying to pay a subprime mortgage made before.
Kudos to Shell for admitting that, but the question is how in the world they are able to function and sell stuff? Grid company can switch to renewable comfortably, but Shell found its way in digging ground.
I guess they at least will make the shift to natural gas as that stuff ain't that terrible compared to petroleum, and they can still sell petroleum for plastic.
Readit News
Barring any miracle in carbon sequestration technology anyway. I hope we get a miracle.
And any carbon sequestation technology will only help significantly after drastic emission cuts, not as a replacement for it.: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00953-x
Aiming for 1.5C, then missing it and then continuously failing on 1.6C, 1.7C, 1.8C etc. is akin to a fat person missing their goal of 200lbs, and then telling themselves in front of the mirror every extra 10lb - "I'm going to stop eating junk food today! No, really, this is the day!"
It's a cognitive failure to adequately process signals that the real physical world is sending to you. Or measurements that you take from the real world.
We _should_ be making things better, yes. But setting an arbitrary goal isn't helpful.
You know what would be helpful? Just giving ever person who's considering a solar project a much larger tax break than currently exists. Expand community solar programs for medium-size installations up to 2MW. Subsidize energy storage installations to complement that installed solar.
Anyone who's advocating for targeting an ambitious goal is missing the point completely. If that was helpful, why not just say we're targeting 0C?
In fact, let's target -1C and shoot extra energy into space. We might even discover some cool tech this way.
That’s part of effective goal setting. Anything else is fantasy and counterproductive.
So not only do our children inherit the mess, but our most optimistic scenarios all include our children being the ones to invent some sort of miracle tech.
Meanwhile we're mostly sitting on our asses and not even a global pandemic could convince us to make any sort of meaningful change.
Unfortunately, we are shutting these plants down instead of building more of them.
Kids judge their parents on their inability to change when it matters, and when you’re old and infirm and “kids” are taking care of you, you’re gonna be in for a bad time.
No, we didn't, just like our kids didn't.
We didn't choose shit, we took what we were given while a small minority in a minority of countries chose this.
It’s easy and comforting to spout predictions of the apocalypse, but realistically speaking, things will be okay.
Are today's kids more concerned about the environment than we were? It seems they like to consume as much as anybody else
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They’ll probably never find the attention span to do so. But I can hope.
This is dire. I think we need to admit defeat, and declare a climate failure. Our goal going forward should be to do everything that keeps the temperature as possible. So far the goal of 1.5° C seems like it is taking us to 3-4° C by the end of the century, 3-4° C is basically an end of the world scenario.
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One of the lowest hanging fruits would be reducing CO2 emitting car use, using a massive capital expenditure to enable lower emitting public transit and cycling to enable people to drive less.
It's endlessly frustrating that even those polices, where are relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things are apparently too impossible for our political leadership.
That can happen with tax code changes and land trusts.
We don't need to wait for new tech to scale up. We need to prioritize the planet.
I await my downvotes.
The amount of natural resources needed to build enough plants to make it more than a drop in the bucket is also going to require significant mining operations and other big polluters. It's a nice idea but science fiction for now, at least at a scale that is actually effective at countering climate change.
And even if we had unlimited energy and materials the inertia of greenhouse emissions (the CO2 heating us now was emitted decades ago) building it at scale will come too late to avert a crisis.
It's still much easier and more efficient to avoid emitting the carbon we still do than to try and capture it back. Though even that will come too late really.
So the optimal climate target should maximize the utility of this embarrassment. It should not be too achievable, or countries will slack off, but it should not be obviously impossible, or that will be an excuse to give up. The carrot must always dangle just far enough in front of the horse.
The point of 1.5 C as a target isn't that we meet it, but that we try to. If we could meet the target, we'd do even worse, and say "close enough", but that's no good.
If this is happening, and no reason to doubt that, it is easier for a Nation like China to do this than say the US. Why, Xi can say "Build more windmills now in ..." and it will happen.
In the US, the 'in' is important, people will fight any development with in 10 miles of where they live. So it takes over 10 years for just the plan to be finalized. For a good example see:
https://www.wcvb.com/article/nantucket-residents-lawsuit-to-...
That is just the latest suit, IIRC this has been on-going for like 10 years.
What?
The west is working hard at lowering it's emissions, but all that work is getting undone because China's emissions aren't slowing down. Coal is incredibly cheap when there's no carbon tax or emission standards. One of the many reasons it's cheaper to manufacture in China and why North Americans and Europeans can't compete [0]. Comparing the US[1] and China[2], the US has:
- Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%)
- A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%)
Meanwhile for the same period China has had
- a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)
- 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007
So it is possible to drastically reduce our carbon footprint thanks to innovation and smarter power generation.
Time to add tariffs on goods produced by states who made the decision of going all-in on polluting power generation, and potentially apply immigration quotas to citizens of these countries.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-gas-emis...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china
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At least as far as I understand it today (leaving this comment in the hope that folks can help me expand my understanding)
Life on earth is not stable. We are in the final death throes of this planet. Roughly 75% of life on earth is behind us. Life has been here for 4Bn years and we have about 500m left[1] until our carbon cycles grind to a halt due to the earth moving outside of the habitable zone and all life on earth starts it’s final, and ultimate, extinction event.
This pending extinction event is not human made. It was coming regardless of whether humans evolved on this planet.
From everything I can tell, there is no making it through, let alone coming back from, this impending extinction event without “technology” that decouples life from the carbon cycles on this planet.
In 4.2bn years life on this planet has printed exactly one golden ticket for escaping that fate: humans.
We’ve done some bad things along the way to industrialization processes that can produce the technology necessary to get life off this rock - and to artificially sustain life on this rock as it becomes unsuitable for life.
But I’m not confident that the bad stuff we have done is sufficient to condemn our species and disqualify us as a suitable steward for this planet. Primarily because there is no alternative, there is no species in “second place” that I’d trust to evolve a civilization capable of getting life off this planet in the time we have left.
The eco-movements (outside of whole earth) have lost me. The calls for an immediate suspension of industrial processes, or the sentiment that life on earth would be better off if humans didn’t evolve to be what we are today, seems misplaced.
Without humans, and without our recent attempts to escape this planet, all life on earth is doomed to complete extinction.
It seems like we are in a critical several hundred year window where humans need to appreciate both that we are accelerating the end of the Holocene, a climate that was critical for the development of our civilizations, and do our best to slow that process already under way.
At the same time, we need to maintain the civilization that’s setting life on earth on an escape trajectory.
If we toss the baby with the bathwater we doom all life on earth to guaranteed extinction.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
And to say that that somehow means that the eco-movements (many of which are focused on the keeping us alive for the next few thousand years) are flawed seems wrong.
The focus put on silly Greenpeace actions and fights about nuclear in the media is part of a somewhat intentional strategy to paint all environmentalists as wrongheaded or stupid.
> Life has been here for 4Bn years and we have about 500m left until our carbon cycles grind to a halt and all life on earth starts it’s final, and ultimate, extinction event.
But at this point we've passed the point of no return; probably years ago, with permafrost, ice caps and glaciers melting and all the effects that has. I don't think any CO2 measures now will help anymore.
It was only after extreme political pressure that oil companies were basically forced into re-expanding capacity again.
The market is willing - the demand is weak.
On a longer time scale, let's see where the bulk of their lobbying budgets go (to a particular party or sect within a given party), or the initiatives their lobbyist friends have been tasked with passing or defeating.
My guess is that when push comes to shove, the oil companies are not friendly to green energy.
And again, their lobbying is a drop in the bucket as to their actual discovery expenditures.
I don't think it's a helpful narrative that oil companies are hell bent on forcing oil down our throats unwillingly. Sure, they will do whatever to make a buck, but they would gladly switch to green energy if they thought it was more profitable. We have even seen this when Exxon (briefly) was the number one spender on solar R&D in the world.
I think people see the lobbying and underrate the extent that it's a two-way street. Politicians NEED low oil prices. Voters WANT low oil prices. And to a certain extent, oil companies have all the cards because of the demand.
I would honestly give up on the concept of peak oil thought. If for no other reason than the fracking revolution may have alone doubled the available fossil fuels.
I’m beginning to suspect peak oil was never an actual prediction, and more of a statement—or rather a lie—that we would naturally wean of fossil fuels in a couple of years as production would slow. I’m beginning to think peak oil was always a ruse so that the fossil fuel industry could delay climate actions for another couple of decades (and doom us all in a climate disaster while they were at it).
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Look at planned capital investments for fossil fuel energy. Especially power generation. It needs to be zero, yet the industry (and finance) is still full steam ahead.
For decades now in Canada companies have been endlessly lobbying the government to allow for more expansion of pipelines to enable more production and more growth.
There is nothing new that has changed their approach.
The gas tax hasn't budged since 1993 despite really needing it, largely because of the backlash politicians would get for making gasoline more expensive.
For the Canadian industry I think you are underrating how much of a hand the government of Alberta themselves are playing in this. This has been an economic development project for them and things like the Keystone pipeline have been spearheaded by the government to get access to the global market as a way of attracting investment from the oil and gas industry.
The argument has been made that it's inhumane to demand that developing countries (e.g. in Africa, or BRIC) opt to lower their fossil fuel consumption, restraining themselves from improving their quality of life over time. I agree. We benefited, so should they. If it were possible for them to catch up purely on green tech, they would.
Only a fraction of fossil fuel use is actually for generating electricity. The other uses are currently non-abatable, until technology improves. Other uses include blast furnaces for cement and coke, steel-making, creating ammonia, creating plastics. On the electricity front, things are still a mess.
Teddy Roosevelt said, “We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation.”
We must conserve and protect this planet. Even if that means doing so from other humans.
Getting people to switch cars may be a part of reducing the dependency, but still contributes to the use. It'll be a long road that includes getting down to the minutia, like stopping girls from wearing makeup, before you can entirely remove fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels will not go away for at least a few more generations, because they are far too beneficial and there are no replacements for the myriad of uses they have today.
The vast majority of fossil fuels are used as fuel, not for producing materials/chemicals. Only 16% of oil goes to petrochemical production: https://www.statista.com/statistics/307194/top-oil-consuming...
The other 84% is just burned for energy. "Entirely" removing fossil fuels won't happen for a very long time if ever, but that's not a barrier to slashing CO2 emissions from fossil combustion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol#History
[2] https://www.chemengonline.com/methanol-to-olefins-plant-star...
This depends on more information. It’s unlikely we’ll be using zero fossil fuels in 35 years. So the goal is to reduce over time, so a new project today could be replacing an old project going offline.
Or perhaps the project has a transition path to do something else.
I don’t think these are pedantic clarifications as things aren’t fatalistic. Investors are rational and while money talks it doesn’t mean that all the billions put into these projects isn’t a waste in climate terms.
Fossil fuel investment has been climbing year-over-year. Fossil fuel companies aren't replacing existing infrastructure to taper out usage of fossil fuels. They are introducing and expanding with new infrastructure.
From the Bloomberg NEF 2023 Energy Transition Investment Trends report, which is incredible reading: https://about.bnef.com/energy-transition-investment/
Same thing goes for innovation. For instance, the first nuclear power plants are from the 50s. 70 years later nuclear energy powers only 10% of electricity in the world (and electricity provides only a fraction of our energy needs).
Since that's a bit of trouble, I've clipped this incredible chart for you here: https://i.imgur.com/OlMAKVd.png
This single chart completely inverted how I think about this problem and the leadership of western countries in world affairs generally.
Second of all, why does that matter? Increased CO2 in the atmosphere will heat the climate everywhere (albeit not evenly). The fossil fuel market is global, meaning these projects are overwhelmingly built and profited by publicly traded international fossil fuel companies. (just like the rising temperature) The money to be made is distributed everywhere on the globe (albeit more in some areas than others), regardless of where these new projects are located.
No, the climate disaster is a global crisis, and needs to be handled globally. If we were serious about minimizing the harm of climate change (and we should be; but we aren’t) than green infrastructure would be paid for by the wealthy countries even when it is rolled out in the poorer, where the rich countries won’t see any of the benefits (other then you know, saving the world from impeding doom).
> The U.S. is leading in global LNG supply growth with an additional 5.9 million tonnes of capacity in 2022, for a total of 80 mtpa.
> Norway saw the second-largest growth in LNG supply, with an additional 2.8 million tonnes of capacity. Malaysia and Qatar were close behind, with 2.4 million tonnes and 2.3 million tonnes of capacity growth in 2022, respectively.
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The dramatic shift in its new “Energy Security Scenarios” is not explicitly acknowledged, but, as Carbon Brief’s analysis shows, is hidden in plain sight.
So, no, they haven't admitted it at all.
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> People will always say "just use public transit" but most cities in the US have a barely managing system if they even have one.
If only we could possibly do something about that....
but yea, EVs on the whole are better than ICE in this context, but 1-1 replacement schemes are a very bad idea and don't really address the underlying problems we face on climate change and other problems (social division, obesity, premature death, etc.); we need to stop driving everywhere.
Unfortunately subtractive solutions (which are almost always better) such as building a little bit closer together (nobody is taking your SFH away), allowing businesses to operate near homes, and building sidewalks don't sell cars, don't fill transportation department budgets and justify jobs, don't win elections, and don't increase GDP. Some big multi-million dollar project that brings "300 new manufacturing jobs" gets the headline and gets the funding, even though building a few sidewalks and converting surface parking lot into businesses bring even more economic activity.
> even though building a few sidewalks and converting surface parking lot into businesses bring even more economic activity.
I will say, I think we are seeing a bit of movement this direction. The work-from-home boom from Covid has shows that living at the office isn't the dream it used to be. People are beginning to see the benefits of local community and business as not just the economic impact but the freedom that that proximity can provide.
The good news is that there are fast and cheap solutions that cities can implement nearly overnight. Cities like Paris showed in recent years that “pop-up” bike lanes can be installed very quickly, and significantly increase travel by bicycle.
Many cities also have a bus system, which would also be positively transformed with just painting some bus lanes on existing roads.
The short term fixes support the longer term changes (enabling walkable communities, allowing more efficient compact housing, etc.) that we also need to be adopting as fast as possible.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/10/13/cycling-through-covid...
I agree with the idea of this but in saying this you are forgetting about ~20% of the US populace that lives in rural areas.[1] I personally live ~1 hour from the nearest city. The area I live in has no access to high-speed internet to enable remote work, and the cost of driving to the city for a good paying job is still money ahead than taking a low paying job closer by. I also know I am not the only one of my neighbors in this boat.
This goes back to my original point, I think we have made the change too late. Sure we can implement solutions in cities with relative speed but the type of large scale changes that it would take to help areas, like where I'm at, will be too late by the time they are finished.
[1]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america...
something to watch instead of read: NotJustBikes
https://www.vox.com/authors/david-roberts
https://www.canarymedia.com/about/people/david
And he now podcasts at the site https://www.volts.wtf
https://www.lawrencemkrauss.com/single-post/the-physics-of-c...
Perhaps not exactly what you're looking for in terms of potential solutions, but it's an honest and sobering account of where we're at without any undue sensationalization.
The discussion here mirrors many of the themes in the game, and presumably the book.
Likely changes will include mass adoption of nuclear (potentially including Fusion or Thorium based), Carbon (and other gas) sequestration, Biodomes (to deal with a toxic environment), etc.
It clearly wont be the end of mankind, just mankind as we currently experience it.
Cold comfort if the new experience will be an economic crash and global food shortage. And you're assuming that, once things are terrible enough that political and economic powers can no longer ignore climate change, there will still be available solutions to have something better than a life of war and hunger.
Cities have fallen to disasters throughout history (easy example is Pompeii). Cultures vanish. The only reason anyone's still around to talk about it is because natural disasters, wars, and human errors have largely been localized. Climate change won't be.
You can save more money and be more helpful with solar on your roof especially in the warm areas of the US. At some point hopefully the carbon cost of the vehicles will come down and they will make more sense, they just don't save enough currently compared to a Solar array which typically pays back its carbon cost in about 90 days a vehicle is more like 5 years.
Yes, it's:
* Not possible on non-level terrain (although e-bikes are sometimes an option).
* Potentially dangerous in some places because of traffic.
* Some places will not be accessible by bike due to various physical obstacles
* Requires some level of physical health (although you don't have to be fit to ride a bike)
but still, it's a decent solution for many of those towns without a public transport system. And if you can get your municipal authorities to support it, you can address the second and third points above.
I also think we could have been a decade ahead on this transition, if not more, but I think you'll still also be suprised at how quickly EVs totally replace ICE cars, even if you live in some poorly run area of the globe.
EVs already have lower TCO and leasing companies are keen to loan you the upfront difference and let you pay it back month by month instead of spending it on gas and use the more reliable EV as collateral, reducing financing risk and cost.
They'll continue to do that as the upfront price drops below ICE too.
It would be nice if the US moved to a healthier, more walkable lifestyle, but if they do insist on continuing that form of slow suicide, it'll only make the transition faster. EVs make more monetary sense the longer you drive, due to lower fuel costs.
Ultimately if the base price of a vehicle increases the financial instruments to make them affordable in the face of regulatory disincentives for ICEs will appear.
Even in the UK, a tiny island, public transport works well in large cities like London and Manchester, sort of okay but a faff in the suburbs of those cities and smaller cities, marginally as something for tourists in small towns, and for the rest of the country there's nothing.
Almost everywhere in the US has less density than a small town in the UK. In most suburbs just getting to the end of your road is going to be 10 minutes walk. It would mean half of the country abandoning their homes and rebuilding, which I imagine would end up higher carbon than just using the ICE cars.
Bet you it actually wouldn't, the impact of urban sprawl is absolutely massive and continuous as compared to a one-time cost.
Our small suburban city of 15k actually has free bus service up and down our main stroad. Everyone is probably within a 15 minute walk to it. But it's aimed mostly at school kids, so the hours are very sparse during certain times of the day. E.g. when schools tend to get out it's every 10 minutes, but outside of those hours its every hour or so.
A lot of it is cultural too. My wife lived in Santa Monica, and she would drive for 1 hour to go 2 miles rather than walk or bike, and this behavior was common among her friends.
I live a 10 minute walk to school. My neighbors still drive their kids to school. There's no (good) excuse for that.
In context, the heating we had now already caused massive destruction in polar, in whales, in shallow sea, in mosquitos, in plagues, in desertification. Thus any decrease is welcome. We are not having quota to spare. We're trying to pay a subprime mortgage made before.
Kudos to Shell for admitting that, but the question is how in the world they are able to function and sell stuff? Grid company can switch to renewable comfortably, but Shell found its way in digging ground.
I guess they at least will make the shift to natural gas as that stuff ain't that terrible compared to petroleum, and they can still sell petroleum for plastic.