this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
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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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Energy efficiency of active travel (walking, cycling, ebike) compared to an electric car (slrpnk.net)
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

numbers are just cursory googles so they may be off, e.g. "carbon footprint of a burger" (~3.2kg CO2 per) followed by "calories in a big mac" (590)

The majority of the calories in a burger come from the bun and condiments, so it's pretty far from a "stupid" amount of meat - As sad as it is, the average american eats 12.2oz of meat a day, and a big mac only has 3.2oz

Food production (particularly beef and rice) are among the worlds largest sources for methane (a worse GHG) - also usually fossil fuels burned by production/transportation is generally factored into these estimates

Regardless, the point i was poorly making is that this infographic sucks because it makes a false equivalency between "energy efficiency" and "good for the environment". As I noted - biking is substantially more energy efficient than driving an ICE (~21x; 800 vs 16680), but after adjusting for the carbon footprint of food, that 21x becomes somewhere in the range of ~1-9x depending on diet. I suspect this graphic doesn't list ICEs because they weight half as much and likely come in at a higher efficiency (despite being better for the environment) - which of course goes against the narrative it's trying to present