So we’ve reached “bargaining”. Good to know.
We will do literally anything to avoid changing our ways huh
Next month:
Europe considers sacrificing babies to Satan
I was reading about how carbon capture from the air is going to be a trillion dollar industry. Just SMH. It’s so much easier to not emit than it is to recapture. But since we’ll never get China and India off of coal, I guess we have to do something.
It’s difficult to get China and India off coal because they’re doing most of the world’s manufacturing and some processes are currently impossible without it. But ‘we’ exported manufacturing to Asia and ‘we’ buy the products the coal is used for. ‘We’ don’t get to wriggle out of responsibility by pretending that a couple of low and middle income countries are somehow responsible for ‘our’ excessive consumption.
Yeah, we can 100% blame ‘outsourcing to China’ for that fuckup. Actually, we can kinda blame greedy shareholders.
But since we’ll never get China and India off of coal, I guess we have to do something.
This is a bad and uninformed take.
Per person, emissions in both China and India are still substantially lower than almost all developed countries. India’s per person emissions are less than one-quarter of the global average, and roughly one-tenth of those of the US. Close to a quarter of all carbon emissions come from manufacturing products which are exported and consumed in other countries. Textiles and clothes exported from India and south Asia account for over 4% of global emissions.
Labelling India and China as the chief villains of COP26 is a convenient narrative. The financial aid which rich countries promised yet failed to deliver as part of the Paris Agreement signed in 2015 was supposed to help developing countries dump coal for cleaner sources of energy. And while the world berated India and China for weakening the Glasgow Climate Pact’s coal resolution, few questioned the fossil fuel projects being floated in developed nations, like the UK’s Cambo oilfield and the Line 3 oil pipeline between Canada and the US.
And that’s without even going back to look at imperialism and its impacts on those countries, and why they’re now having to play catch up with the west (who not only did our fair share of polluting during our own industrial revolutions, but still continue to do so pretty much freely), mostly to provide for the west.
This, like the overpopulation myth, are nothing more than racist distractions created by the rich and powerful to get us to blame “others” rather than look for who is really at fault - them (Edit to clarify: and by them I mean all obscenely rich and the governments they control, faux communists included).
Whenever someone says “we’ll never get China off coal” I just pretend I read “we’ll never get the west off oil”. Saves me a lot of irritation.
You may be surprised to learn that I totally agree with you. In my extremely brief statement I did not treat the nuances of this issue. I think the developing world has every moral right to pursue the same industrialization path as western nations have. I believe our world economy is driving their coal usage. I believe they are still relatively small as a contributor on a per capita basis.
However I also believe that they have less ability to transition to renewables and I expect them to pursue their right to lift their populations out of poverty. And so: we’re never going to get them off coal. With their huge populations, they will inevitably be top contributors as this process progresses. Therefore, we need to focus on mitigations as well as renewables, since this massive set of emissions appears to be non negotiable, and in fact we’d be hypocrites to try, as you point out. I would consider active mitigations the moral obligation of the developed world, and in fact that’s where air capture efforts are mainly occurring.
This isn’t racism, and playing that card in the face of these simple facts is a great way to get nowhere with the issue.
I’ll let your comment stand. I agree with what you said. What I said also happens to be true. I didn’t cast any shade on them.
China’s usage of coal is huge, but it’s proportiojn has dropped from 75+% in 1990 to around 55%. It’s slow progress - it may accelerate. The problem is the rest of the world exports so much of its manufacturing requirements to China.
Western countries are just as guilty, if not more. We contributed terribly for several hundred years, and still today net carbon use is still increasing in developed countries. It’s just not increasing quite as much as before.
I totally agree. I made a very short and unqualified comment about the developing world’s inevitable contribution to climate change and I’ve been getting hung out to dry all day as an uneducated racist imperialist who doesn’t understand how much the west has contributed. I definitely DO. And there’s no changing the developed world’s past but I think we have the wealth and technology to transition to renewable energy and really lower emissions. I don’t think that developing nations have that ability necessarily and that’s all I meant to say. I think that no matter what the developing world does there is a huge load of carbon coming from developing nations, who have every right to industrialize and lift their people out of poverty. There’s no blame in that. It’s just a fact. So here in the west we might want to think about active capture in addition to reduction because we’ll likely need both. If western nations did all the harm up until now then it seems fair for us to shoulder the burden of active capture. My very brief comment didn’t properly address all these nuances, and I’ve been getting all kinds of hate for blaming climate change on developing countries, which I did not say and do not think. I guess it’s good to see people vigorously setting the record straight.
Not emitting is not that easy. We are in a transition period at the moment. Electric vehicles are here but we don’t have all the infrastructure needed to support them. Let alone the fact that battery tech is not developing as fast as we need it to.
Right now liquid fuels still have the advantage of greater energy density. If we could move to hydrogen fuels that would be cool, and we could repurpose existing petroleum facilities.
But who knows which way the tech is going to go. The only sure thing is that we are in for a wild ride one way or the other.
Other problems with your post aside, you think it’s good enough to emit less but not worth it to actively invest in getting the excess carbons out? The problems they are solving overlap, but they are not the same set of problems.
The energy required to take carbon out of the atmosphere is at best, double what it took to put it in the atmosphere in the first place. There’s seriously strong economic reasons that this is a bad idea.
Emitting less is possible NOW. Removing carbon already in the air isn’t even possible yet. ClimateTown showed this in a recent vid. All efforts should be towards what’s possible and effective now rather than towards what’s really expensive, not very effective and may may be possible in the future.
Heres the reference about carbon capture, with all the graphs you need to support this fact, for arguing with people later.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10842-5
Chatterjee, S., & Huang, K. W. (2020). Unrealistic energy and materials requirement for direct air capture in deep mitigation pathways. Nature communications, 11(1), 3287.
The vast majority of pollution is from agriculture. Are you gonna quit eating meat anytime soon?
I did, and so should everyone else that claims to want to do something about the climate catastrophe.
Artificially grown meat is quickly becoming more and more viable, it’s not like it will be impossible forever to have a steak.
The entire world runs on fossil fuels.
They power the machines used to gather materials. They power the machines that move those materials around the world to be turned into goods. They power moving those goods around the world to be sold. They power moving them again once they’ve been sold. And if we’re really lucky, they won’t use any more at that point.
The electricity you use. The gas in your car. The gas you use to heat your home or cook. The gas the Amazon van uses to get stuff from the warehouse to your door. The gas used by the semi truck to move stuff from one warehouse to another. The gas used by the cargo vessel to move stuff across the sea. The gas used for the mining equipment for the raw materials to make stuff. The gas used in the machines to turn materials into stuff.
Hell, the gas used to harvest crops and move them around and keep them cool, if need be.
Yes, we can and should be working on ways to divest from fossil fuels at every opportunity, but even if everyone was perfectly on board it wouldn’t happen overnight. It’ll take a few lifetimes at best.
For sure. I 100% agree. But I am also 100% against severely economically and entropically unviable ways to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.
Inactivist baloney. The first four are under your direct control and can be changed in weeks. The fifth and sixth will change themselves within 5 years as diesel will be uncompetitive. Half of international shipping is just fossil fuels, and half of what remains is short enough range that currently commercialising battery tech is sufficient. Mining equipment is already going solar because flying diesel to remote sites is ludicrously expensive.
Most of the remaining emissions can be eliminated by the global top 10% being ever so slightly less craven and greedy, 99% of red meat is nutritionally unnecessary and accounts for the majority of agricultural emissions and crops.
We can and must get most of the way there in a decade, and the only obstacles for doing so are people like you.
- Reduction of fossil fuels
- Literally block out the sun
we’re fucked
Even if we stopped all use of fossil fuels overnight, there’s a lot of ‘baked in’ warming. This isn’t ‘instead of’ it’s ‘in addition to’ when it comes to halting warming.
Won’t help with ocean acidification. Stop using fossil fuels, leave it in the ground.
Yeah, I saw a link to a study that modeled outcomes within the next fre decades where acidification kills enough marine life and favors the reproduction of other microbes. Something about either low oxygen in the oceans and/or the atmosphere, or maybe a dangerous increase in stmospheric toxins resulting from that.
Maybe I’ll try and find it to verify.
