futatorius

@futatorius@lemm.ee

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futatorius ,

This is likely to become an issue with climate modeling as well, as interested parties attempt to poison the discourse with fake analysis and phony effects models. Perhaps, with the banks, the Fed should require the use of open, peer-reviewed models and reject the use of any closed-source model.

futatorius ,

They could also read The Monkey Wrench Gang and start taking direct action against the real perpetrators and their assets rather than random soft targets.

futatorius ,

There is no one universally right way to do activism.

There are, however, many ways that are demonstrably wrong.

If you're acting in a way that gives rise to credible speculation that you're secretly funded by Big Oil, maybe it's worth considering the possibility that you're a counterproductive cosplaying fool.

We need a diversity of tactics.

Running unarmed at a machine-gun nest is a tactic. But a diversity of tactics is only a good thing when those tactics actually work.

The New Climate Denial Is Based on These Six Terms | The new obstructionist approach doesn’t say global warming isn’t happening. Instead, it argues we don’t need to phase out oil and gas. ( newrepublic.com )

Archived copies of the article: archive.today web.archive.org ghostarchive.org

futatorius ,

So they've moved past denial to bargaining?

futatorius ,

They're all about immanentizing the eschaton.

futatorius ,

It'd be interesting to know how much of that is a mercantilist attempt to capture market share in other countries (i.e., dumping) and how much is reflective of a sincere effort by the Chinese government to address the climate crisis.

I suspect it's the former, since alongside China's renewables investment, China's emissions of greenhouse gases continue to grow, as does its consumption of coal.

futatorius ,

One of the low-hanging fruit in combating climate change is to shut down all the golf courses.

futatorius ,

Millennials, if there's anything an old guy can do to help...?

maugendre , to Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
@maugendre@hachyderm.io avatar

Xi is pushing climate, study shows

Enabling climate acceleration are economic sectors such as land use, China coal, Saudi Aramco, Coal India, Gazprom (Russia), National Iranian Oil — in that order.
Since 2021, China coal sends more carbon in the air than NATO equities and Arab states combined. The China coal sector is increasing capacity and is delivering 12.7 GtCOe in 2024.

The results are published at: http://data.yt/projections/2024-results.html @climate

Following the Paris Agreement, countries should aim for minus two percent of carbon-equivalent release, year on year. Instead activities ensure steady growth. The more carbon they already output, the more they grow. Notably, the amount of coal extracted in China not only forces the Greenhouse Effect more than the production from animals. The situation is much worse: China extracts coal at an ever increasing rate. (Since 2016.) From 2020, Xi Jinping had secured coal growth of 1%/year. China mined less coal when it worked on the Paris Agreement (signed in 2015). In other times, since 1999, they produce ever more emissions each year than the previous year. The trend remains at doubling delivery in two decades. The present document is part of the "Greenhouse Forcing" project and is available to re-use if under the CC BY-SA licence
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    • futatorius ,

    This is a situation where the conclusion you can draw is based on the metric you choose. If you instead choose GHG per unit GDP, they're far worse than the US. That's a measure that's less diluted by their vast population.

    futatorius ,

    Stopping emissions at source and improving energy efficiency should be the top priorities. The laws of thermodynamics and atmospheric physics are strongly unfavorable towards after-the-fact cleanup attempts. Every large-scale engineering project has side-effects, and one of such massive proportions is likely to have proportionately massive side-effects.

    Geoengineering has also been used by polluters as an excuse to continue polluting. This isn't a problem with the proposed solutions, but more with the political use to which those solutions are put.

    futatorius ,

    I'm an engineer, so I don't agree with the despair, but also believe that what we'll have is a number of partial and not entirely satisfactory solutions that mitigate the problem but don't fully solve it. And we'll adapt because we have to. But it's foolish to underestimate the intertia of the present way of doing things. It's going to be a long slog, and the legacy indstries are going to fight and foot-drag until they're driven out of business.

    futatorius ,

    Yead, I agree. I'd rather take a half-step forward than two steps back. A full step would be nicer yet, but we can't let the best be the enemy of the almost good enough.

    futatorius ,

    Individual action's nice. It won't be nearly enough. We need to organize and to overcome massive resistance.

    futatorius ,

    Markets don't wait for official announcements. They tend to react to facts, unlike politicians, since their money's at risk.

    futatorius ,

    That's the joy of nonlinearities. Every new threshold opens up a qualitatively new world of suckage.

    futatorius ,

    That, and many later buses, have left the station.

    futatorius ,

    I'm increasingly convinced that Just Stop Oil is paid by the oil companies to discredit pro-environment protest.

    futatorius ,

    Cheap stunts, when what's needed is direct action.

    futatorius ,

    Spain is also super hot.

    Parts of Spain are hot. Coastal areas are mostly mild. Galicia's climate is nearly British. The hottest bits (such as the Extremadura) are thinly populated. But rather than standing up energy-intensive infrastructure, it'd make more sense to invest in storage, or to export the energy to other countries that don't get so much sun.

    or in worst case run a few bitcoin servers

    There is no worst case that bad. We should be putting a forceful halt to squandering of energy on dodgy get-rich-quick schemes.

    futatorius ,

    What's the basis of the lawsuit, that they're entitled to continue earning profit by killing us all?

    Trump vows to ‘drill, baby, drill’ despite rally attendees wilting in extreme heat | Supporters hospitalized following rallies in Las Vegas and Phoenix, where temperatures have broken records ( www.theguardian.com )

    I'll note that heat stroke victims in Phoenix are more likely to survive this year than in the past due to ambulances stocking body bags full of ice.

    futatorius ,

    Wow, this would have been too implausible to be an Onion story.

    futatorius ,

    There's no reason to extend use of oil by 84 years. There are strong reasons to terminate its use as soon as we can.

    futatorius ,

    Meanwhile, in London, congestion pricing and the expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) were a big issue in the mayoral election, with most pundits predicting that it would lead to incumbent mayor Sadiq Khan losing his job. But instead, he won by a wider margin than in the previous election. And, rather comically, it wasn't Sadiq's policy in the first place, it had been put in place by Boris Johnson when he was mayor.

    Evidence in London so far is that the current ULEZ has saved lives and reduced hospitalisations due to respiratory problems, and that congestion charging has not had adverse economic impacts, while improving quality of life. But there are still plenty of people who want to play the victim, and I'm sure that in NYC, they're louder.

    https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/environment-and-climate-change/pollution-and-air-quality/ultra-low-emission-zone-ulez-london/ulez-facts

    futatorius ,

    A word of caution: there is not a constant relationship between carbon emissions (or energy use, for that matter) and GDP. Some economies are far more efficient than others. Some of the most efficient countries are among the wealthiest. So at very least, it is not inevitable that improvements in energy efficiency will mean reductions in GDP, and it certainly doesn't make sense to assume that a reduction in growth will lead to a corresponding reduction in energy use or greenhouse gas emissions.

    futatorius ,

    And we absolutely worked in a bipartisan manner towards balancing the budget until Reagan.

    Balancing the budget is profoundly foolish fiscal policy. Long evidence has shown that countercyclical fiscal policy (running deficits during recessions; paying them down during times of growth) is far more effective. It is imbecilic to cut government spending during recessions when the need for government services is greatest, and it exacerbates economic downturns by removing liquidity from the economy at a time when it's already short.

    futatorius ,

    So while fiscal and social conservatism are the public rallying cries, they aren’t actually much in line with fascism.

    Social conservatism is, at best, fascist-adjacent. Singling out social minorities for harassment and legal persecution is very closely akin to fascist scapegoating.

    futatorius ,

    I just hope it doesn't reach the point where certain Western nations are forced to invade oil-producing countries to permanently disable oil production there.

    futatorius ,

    Ecocide should get you a life sentence.

    futatorius ,

    There are times when letting nature take its course is the only reasonable course of action.

    futatorius ,

    Cutting subsidies to existing fossil fuel projects would be a good start.

    futatorius ,

    First thought I had reading that article was "soil salinity."

    futatorius ,

    Once you know the side effects of something, if you continue doing it, that's intentional. So I don't think that distinction makes much of a difference.

    futatorius ,

    Well, they've pulled the plug on it. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/us/alameda-cloud-brightening-climate-change.html

    futatorius ,

    Coal-rolling as a political philosophy. How sociopathic.

    Energy buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check ( www.theregister.com )

    With a few SMR projects built and operational at this point, and more plants under development, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) concludes in a report that SMRs are "still too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky to play a significant role in transitioning away from fossil fuels."

    futatorius ,

    So, we should choose an unproven and uneconomic technology (SMR) in favor of a technology that is growing rapidly, is becoming increasingly affordable, and is still improving? At very least, it seems like the tradeoff might be more complex than throwing all our eggs into the SMR basket.

    futatorius ,

    Excellent point, but we should also consider how much data center utilization is due to wasteful, zero-value-added activities such as crypto mining, which should be banned.

    futatorius ,

    I wouldn't go that far, but it's fair to say that small nuclear is unproven, both in terms of operational reliability and safety, and also in terms of its economic viability. The economic viability of large nuclear generation plants is also questionable, once you remove all the explicit and implicit subsidies that have kept the industry alive since its start.

    futatorius ,

    Investment risk is a category of risk. How's that "double-dipping?"

    futatorius ,

    He and Farage are snake-oil salesmen. No, immigrants are not to blame for the UK's economic malaise. Brexit was a shitshow that caused severe harm, rather than leading us to a golden age. their climate positions are nothing but fossil-fuel company lies. Nothing Tice and Farage are promoting is going to do anyone any good except a few rich bad actors.

    futatorius ,

    Newsom was a Feinstein protege. He's a centrist who does some progressive things because he has to in order to get elected in a progressive state. In national office, I suspect he'd be politically positioned similarly to Obama and Biden, though probably with more showmanship.

    futatorius ,

    There's no need to require that, as long as server farms (and other big energy users) pay the full cost (including environmental externalities) of their energy use.

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