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 5 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 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Ya, personally i’m in favor of turning all the class 1s into a subdivision of the post office. It is after all a well established government agency used to handling absurdly complex national and international logistics and parcel routing while maintaining buisness friendly reliability.

Maybe that way it would even take longer to reach the inevitable point where after having spent absurd amounts of taxpayer money fixing what private industry broke Congress sells a major railroad off to their friends at a small fraction of its value for the fourth time.

Seriously though, we need electrification and for the railroads to actually take single cars again instead of forcing everything to go by truck if we are serious about decarbonizing north american fright and industry. Some more route realignment, corner shaving, and track speed improvements along our existing Amtrack routes would also be a welcome investment. We’re getting some, but nowhere near as much as we should be.

[–] nbailey@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 months ago

It was called Conrail. And it was beautiful.