this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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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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Greta Thunberg pulls out of Edinburgh Book Festival over 'greenwashing' (www.bbc.com)
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[–] GoodEye8@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago

Actually it isn't. Capitalism isn't interested in cheap energy. Capitalism is interest in cheap profits and so far there's no other energy source as profitable as oil.

Capitalism has actually fought against green energy, even after knowing the possible effects of continued reliance on fossil fuels. This site has a good summary of what Exxon and other oil companies knew and what exxon decided to do. The short gist is that back in 1970 got the first pretty definitive conclusion that CO2 emissions are a concern and they spend another 10-15 years researching the outcomes, finding out that it's an ecological catastrophe and it ends with a memo from an Exxon spokesperson more or less saying that Exxon's strategy will be to emphasize the uncertainty of the same scientific conclusion they spent almost 2 decades researching. Here's literally the one of Exxons top lobbyist confirming that they did aggressively fight the science and the early efforts to prove climate change.

The only reason we're now seeing a shift towards green energy isn't because of capitalism, but because government regulations finally understanding that oil companies (capitalism) has effectively played them like a fiddle for whatever short-term profits. It's government regulations and subsidies that are now forcing capitalism towards green energy. Capitalism has little to nothing to do with turning green energy cheaper, instead it has tried to keep us from shifting to green energy for as long as it could simply because it was more profitable to stick with fossil fuel.