So we've reached "bargaining". Good to know.
We will do literally anything to avoid changing our ways huh
Next month:
Europe considers sacrificing babies to Satan
I was reading about how carbon capture from the air is going to be a trillion dollar industry. Just SMH. It’s so much easier to not emit than it is to recapture. But since we’ll never get China and India off of coal, I guess we have to do something.
But since we’ll never get China and India off of coal, I guess we have to do something.
This is a bad and uninformed take.
Per person, emissions in both China and India are still substantially lower than almost all developed countries. India’s per person emissions are less than one-quarter of the global average, and roughly one-tenth of those of the US. Close to a quarter of all carbon emissions come from manufacturing products which are exported and consumed in other countries. Textiles and clothes exported from India and south Asia account for over 4% of global emissions.
Labelling India and China as the chief villains of COP26 is a convenient narrative. The financial aid which rich countries promised yet failed to deliver as part of the Paris Agreement signed in 2015 was supposed to help developing countries dump coal for cleaner sources of energy. And while the world berated India and China for weakening the Glasgow Climate Pact’s coal resolution, few questioned the fossil fuel projects being floated in developed nations, like the UK’s Cambo oilfield and the Line 3 oil pipeline between Canada and the US.
And that's without even going back to look at imperialism and its impacts on those countries, and why they're now having to play catch up with the west (who not only did our fair share of polluting during our own industrial revolutions, but still continue to do so pretty much freely), mostly to provide for the west.
This, like the overpopulation myth, are nothing more than racist distractions created by the rich and powerful to get us to blame "others" rather than look for who is really at fault - them (Edit to clarify: and by them I mean all obscenely rich and the governments they control, faux communists included).
Whenever someone says "we'll never get China off coal" I just pretend I read "we'll never get the west off oil". Saves me a lot of irritation.
It's difficult to get China and India off coal because they're doing most of the world's manufacturing and some processes are currently impossible without it. But 'we' exported manufacturing to Asia and 'we' buy the products the coal is used for. 'We' don't get to wriggle out of responsibility by pretending that a couple of low and middle income countries are somehow responsible for 'our' excessive consumption.
Yeah, we can 100% blame 'outsourcing to China' for that fuckup. Actually, we can kinda blame greedy shareholders.
What fuck up? If we were doing our own manufacturing, we'd be using the coal instead. We just wouldn't be able to blame other countries for our consumption.
China's usage of coal is huge, but it's proportiojn has dropped from 75+% in 1990 to around 55%. It's slow progress - it may accelerate. The problem is the rest of the world exports so much of its manufacturing requirements to China.
Western countries are just as guilty, if not more. We contributed terribly for several hundred years, and still today net carbon use is still increasing in developed countries. It's just not increasing quite as much as before.
Not emitting is not that easy. We are in a transition period at the moment. Electric vehicles are here but we don't have all the infrastructure needed to support them. Let alone the fact that battery tech is not developing as fast as we need it to.
Right now liquid fuels still have the advantage of greater energy density. If we could move to hydrogen fuels that would be cool, and we could repurpose existing petroleum facilities.
But who knows which way the tech is going to go. The only sure thing is that we are in for a wild ride one way or the other.
The Simpsons isn't just an animated sitcom. It's a documentary about the future:
- Reduction of fossil fuels
- Literally block out the sun
we’re fucked
Even if we stopped all use of fossil fuels overnight, there’s a lot of ‘baked in’ warming. This isn’t ‘instead of’ it’s ‘in addition to’ when it comes to halting warming.
Yep, it takes about 30 years to see the effects, what we're dealing with right now is the 1993 emissions, if we stopped using all fossil fuels right this instant things would continue to get worse well into the 2050s.
Won't help with ocean acidification. Stop using fossil fuels, leave it in the ground.
Given much of the transition to renewable energy is planned to be solar this may be counterproductive. China is rolling out monumental amounts of solar at the moment, we can't just block the sun since it's part of the solution.
Unless we block the sun with a big solar panel!
Growing evidence that governments/corporations would sooner give up seeing the goddamn sun than get off even a fraction of fossil fuel usage
Literally what happened in the Matrix.
This is the world that you know: the world as it was at the end of the 20th century. It exists now only as a part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix… We have only bits and pieces of information, but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early 21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration.
We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI: a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power, and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.
Which was really sooooo dumb. “At the time they were reliant on solar power…” as if we aren’t 🙄
I love those movies but their joke thermodynamics are simply atrocious.
The original plot of the movie was that humans were not an energy source but the computing substrate; that all those brains were networked together as a meat-based platform for the AIs to run on, which is why Neo was able to change reality in the Matrix, because he was able to override the programming for the chunk running on him at any given time, just by thinking it.
But the fucking mouthbreathers they got in for their focus groups didn't get the concept, so they had to rewrite it, demoting humans to freaking lemon-batteries and making a mockery of the whole thing.
Yes I'm bitter.
I can’t blame the focus group participants in that scenario. Maybe using brains as a computing platform is only confusing to morons (which I doubt), but that doesn’t mean they needed to leap to a flatly nonsensical alternative.
I’ve heard this one commonly suggested as a “that would have been better” but was it actually the original script? Is there a source on this?
Has no one seen The Matrix/Animatrix?!
I saw it on Futurama It's all fun and games till a tiny asteroid pachinks the side of it and it burns a hole through Kyoto, Anagram lover's Tokyo.
Truly the age of social media.
"The Sun is killing us!"
"Just block him, bro."
This is what I call a "hotfix" .
American arrogance at its best.
The EU is also thinking about the same exact measures:
This is human hubris just like how the Holocene extinction is human hubris, we don't need to pin things on any single national entity.
I think it's a combination of hubris and desperation. Hubris because it could still go very wrong and serve us a frozen extinction instead of a boiling one. Desperation because those who acknowledge what's happening know that something probably needs to be done to not only stop but reverse this but the corporations might be more likely to burn it all down protecting their interests than cooperate.
The "easy" solutions will likely lead to war and might not even help anything at this point. The promising technologies still need to be scaled up (also in a way that makes sure we don't overshoot the cooling targets or remove so much CO2 that plants die out).
The more I think of it, the more I like this desperate idea. If it does work too well, we can always just send more rockets to move whatever it is out of the way. Which we should have built and ready to go shortly after the blocker is deployed. Preferably sitting in orbit to minimize the chances of it screwing up if desperately needed.
Hmm sunlight is also a carbon reducer since it drives photosynthesis. But desperate times...
All I can think of is the last episode of the show Dinosaurs. This is the wax fruit factory and the bunch beetles all over again, except with us as the stars of our own show.
I mean this is just saying the US is open to researching the possibility. They aren't even committing to researching it.
"However, the report also clarifies that no decision has been made to "establish a comprehensive research programme focused on solar radiation modification.""
It's a very prudent decision to study it. We can determine and quantify the risks this way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yqi0FabHHs&t=1467s
Great the solar roadways of climate change fixes.
Re-engineering our space program towards space manufacturing, mineral extraction, and building permanent residences in space sufficient enough to support the people that would be needed to build and maintain space-based infrastructure like a reflector would be an undertaking I'm not sure humanity currently has the drive for.
Science and futurism YouTuber Isaac Arthur is going to love this. Giant aluminum reflectors are a huge part of future space infrastructure and he is happy to point this out quite often.
Who decides on the thermostat settings? How fast can we reverse if we dial back too far?
Has no one seen highlander 2?!
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