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Anthropogenic climate change denial is entering a territory where it's not just illogical, it's straight-up delusional. Even oil companies accept it and have been studying it for decades (even if their public policy is denial).
Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
221–230 of 397 posts
Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think your own values are coming through pretty clearly. Understandably, telling a parent they shouldnt have had kids is bound to strike a nerve. Having kids is great. Having kids is also the worst single thing you can do for the environment. Both can be true, and having kids definitely doesn't make someone bad. However putting kids on a pedestal is silly. If we push our civilization above earths sustainable carryi…
> Having kids is also the worst single thing you can do for the environment. No, just no. You can't show that. You don't understand environmentalism. You're just a Malthusian. It's an assertion that human existence is incompatible with the environment, and that's a completely unacceptable proposition, because it defines "environmentalism" as "extinction." Reducing the population by half will, at best, reduce emission…
Is it possible that cutting emissions in half would stop climate change (after some time)? There is a tolerable level of emissions. I vaguely remember that it's half what we're at.
Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
You really had to throw veganism into the mix there…?
I think that convincing people to go vegan is one of the least plausible ways to combat climate change, but livestock are responsible for 10-20% of greenhouse gas emissions: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...
There is much lower-hanging fruit than demanding people alter their diets.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/31/turkmeni...
Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
How exactly would that make a dent? CO2 sources: - Electricity + heat production ~40–42% - Industry + manufacturing ~20–22% - Road transport ~12–13% - Deforestation & land-use change ~10% - Direct fuel use in buildings ~5–6% - Aviation ~2–3% - Shipping ~2–3% - Rail, pipelines & other transport ~1% - Flaring / other energy & industrial sources ~2–4% I'm guessing the private jets is what you're hinting at? Aviation abo…
The top 10% richest humans emit about half of all emissions. Decile 10 (richest): ~48% Decile 9: ~15% Decile 8: ~10% Decile 7: ~8% Decile 6: ~6% Deciles 1 through 5 combined: ~12%, so about 1 to 3% each I wouldn't necessarily focus on it, but it's something good for your mental model of how to solve the challenge. The reason I say I wouldn't focus on it is I'm coming around to the idea that "carbon footprint" is effe…
The figures aren't based on real measurements of what every person actually emits, they're based on a model that allocates consumption-based CO2 emissions across income groups.
Regardless of that, I agree that making useful policy changes is important, replacing some plastic straws won't make a huge change, but getting rid of coal will.
Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#225Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative. The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect. This only stops it. Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture indus…
Direct Air Capture at any meaningful scale is predicated on mining billions of tons of refined minerals. The environmental impact of that would be so enormous that it will never be allowed to happen, never mind the severe resource crunch.
Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not going to lie, and this is not meant as an insult, but I could not comprehend what a single sentence here is trying to say.
They're saying "I can see logical ways we can deal with this but the common folk are afraid of technology and change"
More like "it's not socially acceptable to discuss alternatives to orthodoxy", but yes.
Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
The technology-will-save-us mentality is part of the reason we are here. We live in a society that doesn't do anything unless it makes money for some set of decrepit old men. We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition) but people made money doing the opposite. And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US. So…
No it isn't, the idea that strict vegan diets would have stoped climate change is just nonsense. Run the numbers. "Strict vegan diets" is the attitude of US activists telling the developing world that they need to change their behavior before the US activist is willing to accept driving less or adopting dense urban infill housing. "Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's…
> Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.
no, it has not
Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#228anybody still grinding out a 9-5 for a trust fund baby at this point is wasting their life.
billionaires, boomers, decrepit old men, and o&g industry have fucked future generations and humanity.
Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#229It's hard to have people use data in these types of conversations, so I'll just link two charts. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re... Notice which countries are going down. Notice which countries are going up.
Hey, quick question, who does virtually all manufacturing for US and Canadian and EU citizens? And why is the rise of Chinas emissions so coincidentally timed to the fall of those countries'?
I didn't go into the study, but looking at all the little text blurbs about the numbers, I don't see anything about if a US citizen purchasing a product that's made in China counts as US emission, as it obviously should.
Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it isn't, the idea that strict vegan diets would have stoped climate change is just nonsense. Run the numbers. "Strict vegan diets" is the attitude of US activists telling the developing world that they need to change their behavior before the US activist is willing to accept driving less or adopting dense urban infill housing. "Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's…
> "Making money" is the incentive system of society. Then explain voluntary work or all the people risking their lives for other people they don’t even know. Human society existed before money. And nobody said that a vegan diet would have stopped climates change, they said strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition. Just picking one and say that would help is a na…
I push back heartily on anybody bringing up "strict vegan diets" because it is itself a massive straw man, one that mostly promotes inaction and idleness. Michael Mann's 2021 book, and all the interviews around that time, are probably far more effective than I could be at explaining why it's such a bad idea to bring up "strict vegan diets"
Making money is not the only incentive system in society, but it is overwhelmingly the one that controls emissions. Another key one is regulations around housing, which require lots of driving, that's been built deep into our entire land use, and can not be changed on the time scale necessary for climate action.
Moreover, "making money" is the incentive system in all the world's big carbon emitting economies that controls decisions, from China to the US. Sometimes those incentive systems are based on the costs of technology, sometimes they are based on rules that governments make (e.g. China setting the price for energy capacity markets too high, resulting in buliding lots of coal electricity plants that sit mostly idle...)
As somebody who spends almost all of my political effort trying to get ground based mass transit and dense development, I often advocate for them on climate grounds, but only because climate grounds are convincing politically here. They are rounding errors on climate action, in practice, because new development over the course of the next two decades, the crucial two decades of climate cation, will only be a tiny fraction of our built environment.
There's only one true method for climate action: stop extracting fossil fuels to run soceity, and change all industrial processes that emit carbon to neutral methods, and make agriculture carbon neutral or ideally carbon negative. Strict vegan diets helps with deforestation in Brazil, for those that get meat from Brazil, for example. But the plains of the US used to be covered with bison, before they were slaughtered and replaced with cattle. We need to look at the overall ecosystem, where everything is going.
Talking about "strict vegan diets" when they are not needed is merely a recipe for keeping people from adopting far easier, far more effective, and far more necessary action.