Silas Loom
Hated by both sides
Capital will be an integral and essential part of the solution once there is consensus on what needs to be done.
Is there the political will to do anything on climate change?
- Thread starter danny la rouge
- Start date
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
yeh. on the greek kalends, as the emperor augustus used to say.
Silas Loom
Hated by both sides
That consensus doesn’t need to be global. China, together with client nations in the global south, is a much better bet for making serious long term investments in net zero than Europe or the US.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Interesting to hear JimW's take on this. China is currently both investing more in research into renewable energy than anyone else (a lot more) and opening new coal-fired power stations.
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
Capital would have to be. I’m not convinced they will. My feeling is that it won’t act until too late.
PTK
Paul Kegan
One of the things that occurred to me a while ago was that WHEN carbon neutrality is achieved is rather important.
Going carbon neutral when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was (for example) 400 parts per million would have been better than when it reaches (for example) 450 ppm.
Going carbon neutral will not reduce the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so it would not reverse climate change, as far as I know.
Going carbon neutral when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was (for example) 400 parts per million would have been better than when it reaches (for example) 450 ppm.
Going carbon neutral will not reduce the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so it would not reverse climate change, as far as I know.
Silas Loom
Hated by both sides
Yeah, now it’s just about keeping it to 2.5 rather than 3.5. Which is still worth doing, even if the opportunities that have been lost will be bitterly regretted.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
PTK
Paul Kegan
If "every little helps", then the current UK government is not being inactive. It is approving new wind turbines.
hash tag
Books, not bombs
Exactly. Some recycling uses heaps amount of energy.
A question I had a while back was do you leave the cap on a plastic bottle when you send it for recycling. This was prompted by something that an expert said in the guardian. In reply to the same question, the "expert" said yes, leave bottle caps on and Jenny Jones ( who I would side with ) said no, definitely leave the cap off. I sent the same email to them both.
The point is on such a miniscule level people cannot agree so there is no chance of an agreement on a bigger level.
Fwiw. We should try and avoid plastics, or should we?
JimW
支那暗杀团
They feel the need to deliver lifestyle improvements that all consume power - all the heating here has gone electric, which is better than the old way of a lot of individual houses burning solid fuels including some very dirty coal briquettes - so while they're well aware of the problem they're not going to sacrifice in the intervening until renewable can replace. Wonder how grid tech is coming on, because all the excessive hydro development out West doesn't really help as it's away from most of the population centres. Wrecks the rivers too.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
And that's maybe one thousandth of the effort required. Every rich country in the world should be dedicating a significant proportion of its GDP to this problem. Now. It should be like the Apollo Program but worldwide. Targets as far away as 2050 are useless. The politicians agreeing to them will be long gone by then. We need targets for next year, five years, ten years.
We haven't even started reducing global emissions yet. We've maybe just about reached a plateau. Maybe. All that means is that climate change may no longer be accelerating. We're perhaps warming up at a more even pace.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Interesting that short-termism like this prevails whatever the political system.
PTK
Paul Kegan
We have not reached a plateau.
"Carbon dioxide levels in May averaged 424.0 parts per million (ppm) — the fourth-largest annual increase since measurements began 65 years ago at the NOAA observatory in Mauna Loa, Hawaii."
JimW
支那暗杀团
Often think it's a tragedy that the Maoist economy didn't prevail as described in Fanshen and other works on the period. They were delivering a better material life to people who weren't asking for much, but they destroyed it through their own criminal policies and then Deng made the turn to the market and once the consumerist genie is out the bottle it's hard to turn back. Which is not to endorse the appalling environmental mistakes during the high socialist era, ploughing steppe and draining wetlands, but more those mixed communes offering a genuine chance of a different sort of economic development. Now they set their stall out as being something different but are completely subsumed by the logic of the global economic system the country is largely integrated into.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Shippou-Sensei
4:1:2.5
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
And the Apollo Program only happened because of a)Intense rivalry between the two most powerful nations in the world and b)The assassination of an incredibly charismatic and popular leader.
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Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
For context, there's about 50 million km2 of agricultural land in the world, so we're talking about turning an entire fifth of that into forests in the next 26 years.
Teams of the smartest people have figured out how to do it, but the scale of the action required is dazzling and paralysing. And every year you wait, the more you have to do
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JimW
支那暗杀团
The changes are starting to really bite and impact other than the most marginalised, so perhaps that will focus minds. This last summer with all the heat records really felt like the beginning of the end, and it made things unbearable round where the leaders live as well as fucking farmers on the margins.
2hats
Dust.
Indeed, atmospheric CO2 concentration and global CO2 emissions are related but it is considerably more complex than a proportional relationship, with higher order terms. Regarding the CO2 emissions alone, one could comfortably fit an ever growing solution within the confidence limits, right up to the present day.
Shippou-Sensei
4:1:2.5
Well we still have plenty of a) so I'll guess we need to make a start on b).
planetgeli
There's no future in England's dreaming
The first bit might sound good but hides things such as China's buying up of Laos in order to make money from Laos' hydro potential. 78 dams so far and counting (another 200+ are planned) nearly all of which are either on the Mekong or on tributaries of the Mekong, messing up people's livelihoods all the way down to Cambodia and creating food poverty for the benefit of a few.
You can't renew fishing rights or rice fields when there are no fish to fish or land to grow rice on.
So net zero at what cost?
hash tag
Books, not bombs
13 cities, 140 towns and hundred of villages were destroyed to make the 3 gorges dam. Not forgetting all the wildlife killed, all the forestry destroyed .
en.wikipedia.org
Three Gorges Dam - Wikipedia
hash tag
Books, not bombs
No contradictions here
www.theguardian.com
Revealed: Saudi Arabia’s grand plan to ‘hook’ poor countries on oil
Climate scientists say fossil fuel use needs to fall rapidly – but oil-rich kingdom is working to drive up demand
wemakeyousoundb
hopefully not gimboid
they take a long time to breed and raise
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