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Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

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Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#981
post #707
post #621

Just. Tax. It. We have warmed the earth because we love comfort and money. We will never stop loving those things. So instead let's use the same systems to fix this (or at least slow things down). As an individual my largest carbon impact is air travel. I like to go places, it's one of the main things I work to afford. Every single plane ticket I take should have a tax which is used to offset or capture the carbon em…

> Every single plane ticket I take should have a tax which is used to offset or capture the carbon emissions of my flight. I will pay it. So what you're saying is that it won't change your behavior. Why don't you just donate $1000 or whatever to a charity? (I dunno, maybe you already do). I don't mean to attack you, but encoded in your very language is the exact problem. No one is willing to change their own behavior…

Actually I do personally offset my personal carbon footprint by taxing myself, via Klima: https://klima.com/

However that's not an efficient way for 8 billion people to get out of this problem.

Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#982
post #814
post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this take a lot, and it’s kind of misinformed. The primary drawbacks of nuclear are: 1) incredible slow to build. A typical plant takes ~20 years from decision to productionized 2) extremely expensive, with a massively frontloaded cost. By contrast, solar and wind are fast to install and now cheaper. > wind power can be zero at some parts of the day There are a few solutions to this actually. First, having a mo…

> long-duration battery solutions This isn't practical everywhere, but on the island of El Hierro (Canary Islands) there is a wind-and-battery solution in the form of a wind-pumped hydro-electric station. In effect there is a big pool of water acting as a battery and the wind turbine "charges" it. When I ran across it on a trip to the island I was really impressed. Very original solution! https://www.researchgate.net…

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Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#983
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual action won’t solve this problem. We need to leave the fossil fuels in the ground, which means switching energy sources, which is not something individuals have much influence on. Reducing energy use at the individual level is good, but insufficient if the energy used comes from fossil fuels. I’m not sure we need to switch lifestyles that much, but we will need to radically change energy production. There h…

> Individual action won’t solve this problem. We need to leave the fossil fuels in the ground, which means switching energy sources, which is not something individuals have much influence on. The covid shutdown should have put this myth to bed forever. Hundreds of millions stuck at home and no longer commuting took a massive dent out of carbon emissions and sent shock waves through the oil industry. Individual action…

We're all going to "individually" beg our bosses to let us work from home after the pandemic lol.

Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#985

If anyone actually believed it was "code red for humanity" they'd be pushing nuclear power. There is zero chance of moving off carbon energy sources without causing catastrophic mayhem, unless we use massive amounts of nuclear. For instance, the last 4 years my state has averaged 37% production of total possible installed wind generation capacity. This is a very windy state which is in the top 2 for installed wind ca…

It's not about "belief" ... short termism is what will do for humanity.

Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#986
post #447
post #360

If there is anything covid has taught me its that collective action isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality. Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side and pour the money into carbon capture technology in the private space through investment and perhaps some sort of bounty program (you get $x for each ton you…

Believe it or not, western countries have reduced carbon emissions over the last ~15 years, in both absolute and per capita terms (despite a growing population). The only countries that are growing their carbon emissions are developing countries; mainly China, India and Russia. China is particularly troubling since they make up 28% of all emissions (US is 15%) and they have both a growing population and growing emiss…

believe it or not, this is a WHOLE WORLD problem.

A "western country" can not "conveniently" cut their carbon emissions, and still buy shit manufactured overseas, and pretend everything is hunkey-dorey.

Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#987
post #866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxation of carbon totally works. British Columbia has a $50/tonne tax, which increases the cost of unleaded gas by about CAD $0.996/L and natural gas by $0.0882/m^3 [1] Revenue from the tax goes into the government's general revenue, which allows BC to have among the lowest rate of income tax of any province in Canada. Meanwhile, BC has the highest rate of electrical vehicle purchasing in North America [2]. One stud…

The lower income tax actually offsets the premium I pay to live here vs other provinces. Or at least that's how it worked out when I had a job last March. The rent keeps coming, but the money ain't.

You’ll be poor, but happy.

Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#990

For all the carbon capture that the Devonian/Carboniferous period did over 100 million years, humanity undid a large part of it in 150 or so years. And now to preserve human civilisation in some form, the most direct way is probably to rebuild that carbon sink within a much shorter time. Much shorter than 150 years, not 100 million. Current carbon emissions are over 10 billion tonnes per year, so the capture speed wi…

I've thought about it myself and the best answer that comes to mind is clear-cutting entire forests, tossing that biomass down a mineshaft, and replanting to start the process over again. All this talk of planting trees removes atmospheric carbon, but until it's out of the system entirely we're one forest fire away from wiping out decades of carbon removal.

Yep, my favorite currently as well: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...

10 Gigatonnes a year at a stable rate with an initial large bonus amount for the first decade or so. More if you bury more than the core logs. Burial isn't as bad as needing old mineshafts either, a small, deep pit something like 25m square is enough to bury 1km square of logged materials.

There are still issues with this proposal such as the potential for land degradation and biodiversity loss but good potential for mitigating these things as well. The main sells to me are that a) all the tech to get started today exist and are widely deployed and b) it results in carbon being re-interred in a fairly direct reversal of what we've been doing to dig it out.

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