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UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

bbc.co.uk

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Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#161

Post by luckylion »

zzzeek wrote: post #104
ElectronCharge wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar and wind have many issues. Intermittency, the need for rare earths, and low energy density leading to ecological impact are some. It’s also under-recognized that as those technologies are built out beyond a few percent of global power, supply issues will likely lead to large cost increases and potential scarcity. Then there’s the waste/recycling problem, which is worse than nuclear. I also was clear that fusion…

so your argument is "go nuclear, problem solved" ? I'm all for adding nuclear at this point but I dont know that the research supports the notion that an "all in for nuclear, done" approach would be effective.

Go all in on everything. The investments required are a joke from what I can tell.

Make the state more efficient (probably by allowing more things to be handled by private entities), and voila, there's much more than what you need.

Germany's investments into e.g. wind energy topped out at €10bn/yr. The federal budget is €500bn/yr, add to that the state, county and community budgets and it's €830bn. Even if you paid for it by tax money only, it's not a budget issue. Neither would nuclear be.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#162

Post by dudeinjapan »

zb1plus wrote: post #8

I wish humanity could discard narrow-minded nationalist/short-sighted capitalist tendencies and unite against this threat. Imagine a climate pact between the US, EU, China and India where each society placed a similar focus on pivoting to renewables and developing reliable fusion energy as the Allies devoted to winning ww2 and developing atomic weaponry. Amusingly, the end of our dependency would also resolve many ge…

Capitalism discounts the present value of far-off catastrophes. This is for good reason: if WWIII breaks out tomorrow, climate change will be a far lesser concern for humanity (and indeed, WWIII may even solve the CO2 emission problem for us!) If we've learned anything since 2020, it pure hubris to claim we know what the future holds.

When beachfront condos in Miami start flooding, the practical, obvious, cost-effective solutions to the problem (i.e. geoengineering) will look a lot more appealing.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#163

Post by Sharlin »

benj111 wrote: post #52
Yizahi wrote: post #45

1.5*C ? What kind of fictional reality are living in? We are way past 2.4*C projection and are actually on track for 2.9*C or so. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/09/cop26-se...

That's what the article says. We aren't doing enough to limit global warming to just 1.5c. we could do more a possibly limit warming to 1.5c but it becomes an ever greater challenge the longer we leave it.

At some point we have to stop talking about the 1.5° number as if it were anything but a ludicrous pipedream by now. Even ten years ago it was an entirely hypothetical "if the entire global economic system magically turned around overnight then it might be possible". Now it's "if we had a literal time machine and could go back and magically turn around the global economy overnight".

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#164

Post by Schroedingersat »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #117
Schroedingersat wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rationale for this is that only by raising the living standard of the third world can the world’s population be stabilized without a major die-off I don't see how pumping billions of tonnes of heavy metal tainted sulfuric acid into the ground water of Namibia and Niger for Uranium royalties that are lower than the cost of cleanup and then putting them into debt they can't service for power stations that can onl…

You don’t see how electrification increases living standards [1]? [1] https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.34.1.122

Yes, it increases living standards immensely. Fission reactors do not help towards this goal.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#165

Post by mellosouls »

tialaramex wrote: post #157
jameshart wrote: post #109

Let me just leave a Unicode ‘degree’ symbol here for anyone who needs one: ° (on iOS and possibly MacOS you can get one of these by pressing and holding ‘zero’ until the alternate characters appear)

This is a technical forum, you can just write K. The degrees Celsius are deliberately the same size as the Kelvin unit, but you don't need (and shouldn't write) degrees for an absolute system. We're fucked because 1.5K was already a lot, and there's still barely enough political will to avoid 3K. It is going to get bad.

Nobody's gonna believe 1.5 thousand, and plenty would read it that way. Nobody outside some science niches (technical or not) uses K for temperature.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#166

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #164
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t see how electrification increases living standards [1]? [1] https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.34.1.122

Yes, it increases living standards immensely. Fission reactors do not help towards this goal.

> Fission reactors do not help towards this goal

Of course they do. Reactors produce electricity. You don’t like how they do it. But that they electrify borders on tautology.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#168

Post by Sharlin »

anamexis wrote: post #153
Sharlin wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On macOS's US and US International layouts it's alt+0 – on many European layouts it's shift + the button below esc (eg. §).

On the US layout, alt+0 gives me º (U+00BA : MASCULINE ORDINAL INDICATOR). To get the degree sign, it's alt+shift+8 for ° (U+00B0 : DEGREE SIGN)

Oh, wow, my bad. Got confused by the similarity.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#169

Post by abeppu »

So, this challenge asks for rapid transformations of society.

The unfortunate thing is, we've shown that we can change behavior rapidly, but only if we think we think we're personally in danger, and we'll only willingly keep that transformation for a little while. Carbon emissions dropped in 2020, but it took people actually being scared into staying in their homes, and stopping whole sectors of the economy. What if the most effective climate plan is a long, deep, global depression? In addition to curbing emissions, high unemployment would reanimate the "green new deal" concept. The bad news is climate and geopolitical instability might just give us what we need.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#170

Post by jamescostian »

lapcat wrote: post #135
jamescostian wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've misunderstood my position. You mention: > that poor people are buying over and over, more so than wealthier people Not only is this a line of argument I disagree with, I even explicitly said I disagreed with it in this part of the comment you are replying to: >> I think the idea is that if more people were middle-class, we'd see consumers make better choices (personally, I don't see that happening with…

> I think you've misunderstood my position. I'm definitely confused about it now. You said: "The poorer you are, the less you can individually consume, and the more you must go for things that are cheap at the expense of other things (e.g. buying single-use goods over and over is cheaper short-term than buying something made to last)." I disagree that the part in parentheses follows logically from the part outside th…

> I disagree that the part in parentheses follows logically from the part outside the parentheses

Me too, it does not! It's the reverse, the part in parentheses is what causes the larger part. Say I want water. A case of water bottles is a lot "cheaper short-term" than a single, reusable, water bottle. That's an example of the parenthetical, I'm sure you can think of many more. Now, look at how it connects to the part of the sentence outside of the parenthetical, and directly before it: "the more you must go for things that are cheap at the expense of other things"

So for example, if I were poor enough, I'd buy cases of water instead of a water bottle, EVEN IF I knew the single use water bottle was better for the environment and a better choice long-term! Note that I do NOT assert that most or even many poor people, given more money, would switch to reusable water bottles on their own (hence the "government intervention" bit). If you're confused by the first half of that sentence, think of it this way: if I have $10 and you have $1000, which of us can buy more plastic?

> I disagree that the part in parentheses necessarily represents the economic strategy of poor people

This really isn't about poor people being the most environmentally conscious or the least environmentally conscious. It's about "this box of pads costs the cheapest so I'll buy it". Even if you imagine a tree-hugging poor person looking at a diva cup thinking "this is cheaper long-term and it's better for the environment", if they don't have the money for it, or if spending that money means not eating for quite a while, then they're not going to buy it.

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