this post was submitted on 06 Nov 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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[–] Owljfien@iusearchlinux.fyi 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I was referring to burn pits that I've vaguely heard of, feel like they'd still be a pretty large problem

[–] federalreverse@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago

There's more important issues than burn pits tbh:

The Department of Defense uses 4,600,000,000 US gallons (1.7×1010 L) of fuel annually, an average of 12,600,000 US gallons (48,000,000 L) of fuel per day. A large Army division may use about 6,000 US gallons (23,000 L) per day. According to the 2005 CIA World Factbook, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 34th in the world in average daily oil use, coming in just behind Iraq and just ahead of Sweden.

Wikipedia

[–] sonori@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

We don’t actually abandon our allies that often. Maybe only once a decade or so.

More of the problem comes from the US military being say the third largest consumer of desel in the US, coming in after only two railroads. While reducing fuel useage is important from a climate standpoint, it also comes with major tactical and strategic benefits given how much logistics it takes to ship fuel around the world to an active war zone where the enemy tends to like to blow up your fuel trucks and depos. Given the nature of 19year old drivers dealing with large truck fueled on someone else’s dime just hybrids that shut down the eingine when idle would probably save hundreds of millions in taxpayer money a month.

Aircraft fuel is a bit more of a trick, but while fuels make from atmospheric carbon are more expensive, compared to the cost of the planes and cost of maintaining thouse planes it’s not all that bad and could theoretically allow for some proformance benefits if they’re ever willing to give up on also being able to use traditional jet A in an emergency.

Politically while a strong military has traditionally been a bipartisan issue, and reducing fuel useage strengthens the military, nowadays the MAGA crowd is more concerned with screwing over any part of the military they perceive as “woke”. See also trying to ban trans people from it and the refusal to take care of any promotions until they ban service members from traveling to get abortions, becuse why would you not want your soldiers to be indisposed for a year or more after getting raped for a kid they don’t want.

In short, keep Republicans away from congress and the White House and things will probably sort themselves out in time. Keep Shell and BP away from DC and it will sort itself out far quicker.