Readit NewsAviation accounts for about 2.5% of global CO² emissions.
https://ourworldindata.org/global-aviation-emissions
Rapidly ramping down fossil fuel based air travel will have approximately no effect on climate.
It's not wrong exactly. Light can be transmitted wirelessly. Optical cables aren't even usually called "wires". It just sounds odd.
Ethernet cable, figure eight cable, power cable, telephone cable, HDMI cable, audio cable, coaxial cable, optical cable.
We'll send modern civilization off a cliff before we do it, but it isn't like we don't know the solution.
Taxing the wealthy does one thing very well: transfer money from the hands of the wealthy, who are notoriously good at managing their wealth, in to the hands of politicians and bureaucrats who are notoriously bad at managing other peoples money.
Taxing large emitters does still past the cost down to the consumer. Someone certainly has to pay eventually. Perhaps youre too cynical to believe humans now are willing to do so. I don’t think youre right, but it’s certainly an opinion those less optimistic share :) and there is plenty of current evidence to bring hopes down.
Alas I’d like to die knowing I tried and cared instead of contributing to the apathy of the situation.
And some people believe increasing the cost of energy is a solution to anything.
I'd say it's pretty far-fetched to imagine humans caring about things 7 generations into the future, let alone 3e7 generations.
> By the time the Sun goes red giant, we may well have found a way to alter the orbit of Earth. By the time the Sun goes supernova, we may be able to move to another star. Who knows.
We already know how to meaningfully alter Earth's orbit over such timescales[0], the sun won't go super-nova anyway (too small)[1], and we know what it would take to increase its lifetime by a few orders of magnitude even if organising ourselves on the numerical and time scales required is beyond us[2].
But even maximally extending the lifespan of Sol would take us to perhaps 100 trillion years if we're very lucky, and that's if we actually engage in the exact kind of long-term thinking that people currently criticise the Longtermism movement for even daring to consider.
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0102126
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova#Core_collapse
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting#Stellar_husbandry
A business that sells solar with battery backup would know the current product range.
I’m only really familiar with industrial kit tupicalled used in data centres.
A business that sells solar with battery backup would know the current product range.
I’m only really familiar with industrial kit tupicalled used in data centres.
All of transport sector emissions makes up 20%. The other subsectors are decarbonising, but there's no tech solution in sight for air travel in the needed timeframe. And air travel is growing alarmingly quickly (doubled between 2006 and 2019).
All the individual slices of the pie we can tackle are pretty small, aviation is one of the bigger ones. We can't keep subdividing and then concluding for each one that it's too small to matter.
In 1990, one passenger-kilometer would emit 357 grams of CO2. By 2019, this had more than halved to 157 grams.