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Climate change won’t wait for future innovation – we need action now

nature.com

101–102 of 102 posts

Re: Climate change won’t wait for future innovation – we need action now

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> third world countries I'll stop you right there because the major producers of greenhouse gasses aren't third world countries. Historically, the majority of greenhouse gasses emitted comes from industrialized nations. > can be switched to gas cheaply and easily I highly doubt that. Gas distribution requires a fine grained pipeline infrastructure which needs constant maintenance. That's a massive upfront cost in dev…

>I'll stop you right there because the major producers of greenhouse gasses aren't third world countries. Historically, the majority of greenhouse gasses emitted comes from industrialized nations. That doesn't mean we shouldn't tackle emissions in third world countries.

I'm pointing out that reality is far more complex and fraught, and that it's naive and, yes, even presumptuous to assume that so-called "third world countries" are simply going to go along with an amorphous "we" group trying to "tackle emissions" just because "we say so".

There's a stark difference between having the facts right, and having enough credibility to be believed by everyone else that you're right.

Re: Climate change won’t wait for future innovation – we need action now

#102

The main action advocated by the author here is to increase efficiency (in insulation, appliances, food production, transportation) as a means to curb CO2 emissions and slow climate change - all very important. Lately I've been reading Saul Griffith's book "Electrify" which proposes a different tack - "simply" electrify all energy usage and let people maintain their current lifestyles exactly. Interestingly, doing so…

> b) no longer needing energy to run fossil fuel exploration, extraction, and refining processes.

It looks like current geo-politics will undo years of disinvestment in the fossil fuel production while never having met the emission cut-off goals.

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