this post was submitted on 28 Oct 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.

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[–] [email protected] 93 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

Warning: Unpopular opinion coming up

This is a ridiculous metric. They measure carbon emissions not just by what the billionaires are consuming, but by what their investments (businesses, factories, etc) are producing. This is akin to the world blaming China for their grossly inflated per capita emissions, while conveniently ignoring that it's actually being consumed by other countries and it's just shifting numbers around.

There are plenty of legit reasons to hate billionaires, there's really no need to be making up new questionable ones that can be torn apart.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You got a point. However, billionaires are still extremely horrible for the environment. Just owning a private get and regularly using it emits probably more carbon than the average person.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago

Oh yes, no argument there. That's my entire point, in fact.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Your first point is pretty good.

Although your argument about China is very wrong.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I think that's a really good point to be fair. Would be interested to see what it was on a consumption basis - like other people are pointing out, the lifestyle of the ultra rich is definitely pretty carbon intensive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

It makes some sense to approportion to them the share of the negative externalities of their businesses that matches the share of the revenue they get as profit from those businesses (since the business has to have a higher level of activity to generate profit that it would to merelly break even).

However for the reason you pointed out it doesn't make sense to assigned to them the responsibility for the negative externalities of creating wealth which they did not themselves capture even if they own the businesses that did that wealth creation.

Of course, things can be quite a lot more complex than this - for example, if a billionaire choses to go with a disproportionally more poluting process in their business to get a small increase in profit, doesn't he or she have responsability for that extra polution which goes well beyond merelly the extra profit they got? - but as a rule of thumb it makes sense that people's responsability for the polution in wealth creation activities is proportional to how much of that created wealth ends up in their hands.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Thats actually an insane metric. Like I try to be conscious and clean, but even I polute far more than I should. Then these dudes are doing that over and over every hour and a half? What the fuck?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Anyway, here's your shitty paper straw

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Paper straws are fine for many use cases, but man those agave compostable straws are just like plastic.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Paper straws are only good for drugs

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Nahhhh my coke gets all caught up in the pores. Glass, metal, or plastic is the only way. But one normal plastic straw makes for three actual toot straws at a party.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 6 months ago (1 children)

We should burn billionaires for fuel to reduce our carbon footprints.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

But aren't people carbon based? We should just compost them instead.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 6 months ago (3 children)

If you check out elonjet on mastodon it shows his fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.

Tons of co2 per flight. Thousands of gallons of fuel.

To go 15 minutes away.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 6 months ago (2 children)
15 mile (13 NM) flight from KEDC to AUS

~ 85 gallons (322 liters). 
~ 571 lbs (259 kg) of jet fuel used. 
~ $477 cost of fuel. 
~ 0.8991 tons of CO2 emissions.

15 miles.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Now do the other hop skip and jump flights.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

What about a barrel roll?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Reddit would probably ban me for what I think should happen to him, but thank goodness we are on Lemm.ee and the fediverse doesn’t seem to like him.

How many liters of fuel can be produced by pressing Elon?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Georgism makes most sense when applied to pollution. Determining prices is the only question.

Now if you employ georgism anyway, maybe it would make sense in other contexts, no?

I'm still trying to sell libertarianism to folks in the Interwebs, yah, just like Jehova's witnesses do.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Yea but it's on us for not recycling or not setting our thermostats to 85° or leaving the lights on or having the audacity to leave electronics in standby or leaving a charger plugged in or driving too much! /s

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago

And we are billed unreasonably for using that energy too. My electric has skyrocketed in the last few years. Meanwhile the business customers have stayed relatively the same. Electric companies need to bill businesses way more and give citizens a break.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

85°?!?

Look at mister moneypants here with his sauna

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Air conditioner, not heat

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

... 72f is normal (22c)

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Then they guilt blame poor people for having children

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

We are past that situation where growing populations were the problem, it's the opposite now.

Even %%% India will have shrinking population.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Where is Robespierre when you need him

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

You know they beheaded many more usual folks not careful enough that nobles, right?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

If dairy and beef cows produce significant quantities of greenhouse gas, and the rich also produce significant quantities of greenhouse gas, does that make them edible too?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

They're just measuring the increase in the amount of methane in the room when Elon speaks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

That's a lot of chili