this post was submitted on 17 Feb 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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[–] astraeus@programming.dev 26 points 9 months ago

Not to mention they’re tremendously dangerous for everyone who isn’t inside. The fear of dying in a car crash meets the illusion of safety, when it’s being forced to ride or drive in a car that puts your safety at risk to begin with.

[–] invertedspear@lemm.ee 25 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The US government of yesteryear recognized a problem, so they drew up legislation intended to improve fuel efficiency, and thus reduce emissions. But they recognized that certain trades required large vehicles that could never be that efficient. So they built in a loophole for vehicles over a certain size not counting towards the requirements being placed manufacturers. Manufacturers being the crafty hogs they are realized if they just increased the size of everything they wouldn’t have to follow any of the rules. Now you have a company like Ford that only has one actual car ( a muscle car at that) in its lineup. Everything else are trucks suvs and crossovers.

The government of today could rewrite these rules to make the loophole require business licenses or something else, but half of them refuse to see there’s a problem at all, and half of what’s left are in the pocket of the problem makers.

[–] Poggervania@kbin.social 23 points 9 months ago

What’s more interesting is that if you go overseas and look at the same brands, you can see companies like Ford and BMW selling station wagons and normal-sized cars without a single truck, if any, available for purchase.

Not Just Bikes has a great video on this.

[–] n3m37h@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 9 months ago

But what about my truck that is 65 tonnes of American Pride?

[–] whoisearth@lemmy.ca 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Challenging this. Maybe the problem is the constant appetite to change your car every year? Maybe if there was a push to have consumers keep the same car for 10 years (I've had mine 11 now) it would be overall better for the environment. I'd argue the biggest impact on the environment around automobiles is the energy taken to create it, not to use it once it exists. This is what worries me with the push to electric. Perhaps we shouldn't be pushing people to continue the same model of disposable vehicles except now they're electric. Maybe we should stop people treating vehicles like they're disposable.

This is my same belief with phones, computers, etc.

We have an underlying problem with how we treat things as disposable.

[–] Mataresian@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 9 months ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but most of times when they dispose of a vehicle they sell it someone else to use right? So the only waste for that person be the rapid loss in car value after buying it new. Or are a lot of these cars ending in the dump?