this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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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.

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Bill Gates Is Playing Both Sides of the Climate Crisis. (jacobin.com)
submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Bill Gates presents himself as a climate champion, but his trust has actually increased its fossil fuel investments since his divestment pledge. It's just the latest example of the billionaire appointing himself to solve problems he helps perpetuate.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Owning a stock keeps the price high though as you're restricting supply, and it looks like his trust has also bought more shares so it's increasing the demand as well.

A high stock price doesn't fund the industry directly, unless it's a smaller company that's still issuing stock which he also seems to be invested in a lot of those. It does increase the power of the industry though. If a lot of people divested from fossil fuels that would lower the value of the stock and the net worth of the principal owners. Those principal owners are currently using their money to bribe politicians into ignoring the climate crisis and to increase fossil fuel extraction. If they had less money to do that, then it'd be a lot easier to pass legislation to address climate change.

He also seems to be buying bonds in the industry as well which is more directly funding the industry. Also, a high stock price allows the companies to get more bonds at a cheaper rate, so that also helps to fund the industry.

All of this is also missing the main point of the article in that bill gates is profiting from the fossil fuel industry and has a stake in seeing it continue, while pretending he's a champion for climate change.