this post was submitted on 07 Dec 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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Carbon pricing would raise trillions needed to tackle climate crisis, says IMF | Traditionally unpopular carbon taxes could be achieved with regulatory compliance, IMF head tells Cop 28 (www.theguardian.com)
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[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 3 points 11 months ago

The important part to add here is that a carbon tax is still a tax, which pays for stuff like streets, schools and all sorts of other government services. So it is not money wasted. It also hits rich people harder then poor ones.

Then about carbon credits, they are traded, but that is part of the idea. Basically the supply is supposed to limited. For badly designed schemes that might not be the case due to too easy offsets, but for example the EU scheme has no offsets. The problem a lot of green technologies have is that they are more expensive then fossil fuels, if you exclude damages caused by fossil fuels. So if a carbon credit costs more then that difference people will choose the green process. By having this trade freely and force a large part of an economy to have to buy them for emissions, the idea is the cheapest green alternatives are adopted first and emissions go down that way. Then the number of credits and permitted emissions go down and the next green alternative gets adopted and so forth until you do not have any fossil fuels left anymore. The problem is that a lot of green technologies are not cheap. So there is potential to really hurt the poor with it. However it is a good way of having a controlled phase out of fossil fuels and with subsidies you can support the poors green transition.