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.
but....... biden signed more oil drilling contracts than trump did.
can it survive another bullshit neolib puppet? we need progressives, not corporate lib shills.
DISCLAIMER FOR THE PEOPLE THAT DON’T UNDERSTAND YOU CAN AND SHOULD CRITICIZE YOUR OWN PARTY WITHOUT SUPPORTING THE OTHER: I AM NOT A REPUBLICAN.
Can’t survive another Biden term either. It’s the planet or capitalism and the people in charge would rather kill us all than end capitalism.
What he's been able to do has been limited by the most conservative Democrat whose vote was needed to pass legislation.
Get a better congress along with a Biden reelection, and it puts us into the we-stand-a-chance range
Correct me if I'm wrong but their military is a huge polluter, and I don't see that as being something either side would change due to the politics around fucking with the military, so it's even more of a problem on top of the already massive problem that is capitalism
Biden has started going down the road of electricifying the military. But of course, slimming down the military is the kind of holy cow neither mainstream party would touch. We are seeing a quasi-worldwide military push anyway, which is unsurprising in the wider context of missing global climate action.
I was referring to burn pits that I've vaguely heard of, feel like they'd still be a pretty large problem
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.
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.
As someone who isn't from that country, the climate can't survive more USA, who's running it doesn't seem to make much difference.
(Not that they're the only country causing this global disaster of course, just the one highlighted in this post)
From another outsiders perspective the difference seems to be that the Democrats invest in green technologies, whereas the Republicans do not. Both support fossil fuels thou.
Pretty much that. It's a nice thing that I have electric vehicles running from my roof and renewables and an extremely energy efficient house with a heatpump while millions of US citizens cool down what are basically cardboard boxes to comfy temperatures in summer while driving their personal trucks to the next supermarket 30km away.
The climate is just not going to survive period. Democrats also don't have the will to do anything on this topic.
The climate will be fine, we however, are fucked.
Humans survive better than most animals. What do you think the world will look like if not even the apex species will survive?
I don't think anyone questions that humans will survive. It's just unlikely that the complex global supply chain that gives us complex tools like microchips etc will survive. And may be massive famine etc after just a few harvest failure, or after the grain can't go down the rivers to the sea any more. Naturally not for the very rich, you can probably buy a bag of rice at a price. It's not survival that's at stake, its civilization and all that.
I'm sure some bacteria and virus will survive the Venus like conditions for a short while
Earth will be fine, it's a giant rock. The climate and anything alive is fucked
My fellow Americans, Tuesday is an election day. Get off your asses and vote. I will be making a post Tuesday.
The climate will be just fine (give or take a few tens of thousands of years). It's us and all complex organisms above a certain size that are fucked.
Can't make any assumptions one way or another. We're dealing with positive feedback loops, so even if humans all get Thanos-snapped out of existence RIGHT NOW putting a full stop to emissions, pollution, etc, the environment will continue to worsen on its own because of the downward spirals we've set into motion.
The question is how long those feedback loops can go until they're broken naturally; or if they even can be broken naturally.
We may well have set our planet on a warming path that ends with it being molten, or one that sheds our atmosphere into space.
So... things might fix themselves after we go extinct; or it'll get worse until even the most resilient of extremophiles can't carry on, and Earth becomes another lifeless rock floating in space.
/shrug
That's true. We couldve pulled a Venus, which would suck massive donkey balls.
This is the correct answer