this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
69 points (88.8% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5197 readers
708 users here now
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:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It was always completely impossible. Transportation was the biggest impediment, but it was just full of unsolvable problems. At the end of the day, the easiest way to crack hydrogen was from oil anyway. It was never intended to work. It was intended to buy time for the auto and oil industry by selling the people a fake solution.
The infrastructure investment needed to support EVs, when the electricity would come from natural gas anyway, is pretty transparently the exact same grift.
As hopeless as it feels sometimes, the US has opened two new nuclear power plants in the last 8 years and there Is broad support for new nuclear in the US.
And fusion is becoming viable at scale finally due to AI preventing spillover and runaway. Hope is late, but not lost.
Well that's great, but we solved the problem of efficiently moving people around 100 years ago and the auto industry destroyed it. EVs do not exist to save the climate, they exist to save the auto industry. That's always been the game.
Even if we do manage to actually get the electricity, where will the lithium come from? How will the charging infrastructure actually get built? None of these were ever meant to be solved, because the point of EVs has always been to push off the real changes just a little bit more.
EVs also make a lot of things worse. They're deadlier, they produce more tire microplastics, they do more damage to car infrastructure (which, uh, is HUGELY carbon intensive), and they're also hugely carbon intensive to build and ship. In terms of carbon today you're better off getting a small older ICE than a new EV.
They just make rich liberals feel better about themselves without actually needing to change their behaviour.
Hope isn't lost at all. A future that's still full of cars isn't hopeful. The hopeful thing is that we can solve all this today without any new technology simply by abolishing free parking, ending parking minimums, creating super blocks, and investing in mass transit, bike, and pedestrian Infrastructure instead of car infrastructure.
The thing that makes it hard to keep that hope going is that there are people who subscribe to /c/climate who think there will be a magic solution to climate change that lets everything go on exactly as it is without changing anything at all.