this post was submitted on 04 Apr 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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Trains Are Cleaner Than Planes, Right? The surprising carbon footprint of an Amtrak trip across America. (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 7 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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The big difference is of course that you can electrify trains, as has happened in much of Europe and Asia, but not for most of Amtrak

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[–] sonori 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The problem with electrification however is that while it on average half’s an railroads operating costs, it takes significant upfront investment. Given most of Amtrak runs over fright railroads, and even if it didn’t fright is by far the larger source of carbon, you need to convince said fright railways to make the upfront investment.

Since they are currently in a state of self described ‘managed decline’ as Wall Street and private equity loot the old giants for everything they can, we probably arn’t going to see much progress on that front until Conrail 2, nationalization repairs the US rail system after private companies messed it up round four.

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

or you just nationalize the railways

[–] sonori 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Um yes, that’s what I said it would take?

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 2 points 7 months ago

Conrail was taken over by the US government to be privatized as quickly as possible. That is really not the kind of nationalization you want for a railway. It is basically just government support for the private sector.