this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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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: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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Car tires shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment. Urgent action is needed (phys.org)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Electric cars are not THE solution.

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[–] grue 37 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Yet another example of how pretty much every problem is, at its heart, a zoning problem:

  • Microplastics? Too much driving, because trip origins and destinations are too far apart to be walkable.
  • Greenhouse gas emissions from cars? Too much driving because not enough walkability.
  • Greenhouse gas emissions from housing? Poor efficiency because too many single-family homes exposed on all sides instead of high-density housing with shared walls.
  • Greenhouse gas emissions from concrete production? Using way more of it than we really need to build huge amounts of unnecessary parking (and much wider streets than we'd need for bikes + transit + only delivery vehicles).
  • High housing prices? Not enough housing density.
  • Obesity? Sedentary lifestyles, i.e., not enough gym of life.
  • Racism? Redlining.
  • Wealth inequality? (Among other things), protecting rich landowners from market forces by eliminating competition from multifamily developers that would build out the land to its highest and best use.

See also, this video: The Housing Crisis is the Everything Crisis. He almost gets it, but fails to connect that very last dot, which is that the housing crisis is itself caused by bad, density-restricting zoning!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

but if more people were walking, they would all be run over by tiny men in Dodge Ram250s