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Why Is the Oil Industry Still Thriving?
(www.splinter.com)
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:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
The alternative, parts of the world will be uninhabitable. Always gotta think about the economy... no matter how many people this is going to kill, or how much biodiversity we lose along the way.
Is there any point of loss where we will say the economy isn't important anymore, or do we have to be experiencing the loss already?
The problem is crashing the economy will kill a lot of people right now, no need to wait or come up with a better solution
If you look at it on a case-by-case basis, it's harder to catastrophize. Would the world economy collapse if petroleum-derived food additives vanished? No. Plastic bags? No. The vast volumes of cheap plastic packaging? No. Shipping? That'll take a while. Fertilizers? Partial substitution can happen immediately, but a full changeover will take years. And so on through the list. You can rack and stack each case by its social value, how hard it will be to eliminate or replace, and the lead time needed to transition. Beyond that it's engineering, planning and politics.