Global warming is dangerously close to spiralling out of control, a U.N. climate panel said in a landmark report Monday....U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres described the report as a "code red for humanity". "The alarm bells are deafening," he said in a statement. "This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet."
Greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. energy industry are on track to surge the most in more than three decades as utilities increasingly turn to coal to power the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Carbon emissions will swell 7% this year to 4.89 billion metric tons, according to government data released Tuesday, the biggest increase since at least 1990.
Welcome to the world of h. sapiens.
I mean what part of "keep it in the ground" is hard to understand? Yikes.
No part.
However near-term interest overrides longer-term thinking. We remain and always will be simply over-clocked chimpanzees with the biological time-horizon baked into unconscious of chimpanzees. That is the reality, neither Lefty nor Righty intellectualizing and philosophical dreaming will ever change in any relevant time scale.
So Kevin - you personally - what are you prepared to do to lower your carbon footprint? Solar panels? Electric car? Electric heat?
A valid question, but as has been pointed out frequently, individual actions will not be nearly sufficient. There must also be collective action, eg, large-scale investment in renewable electrical generation, modernization of electrical transmission and distribution, production and distribution of non-fossil automotive fuels, large efficiency improvements in common technologies (electric lights, heating and cooling, etc.), and so on. These things can’t happen just from individual initiative, however benign or motivated.
Got it. But. it comes down to individual decisions, as well as governmental ones. So what am *I* supposed to do? I have natural gas heat and gasoline vehicles. Also, I eat meat. To help in my small way, what should I do? Install solar panels, get an electric vehicle, convert to electric heat (powered by solar panels, so maybe I'll need a whole house battery). And eat less meat.
If, say, 50% of the population does that, how much does that buy us?
Kevin, chime in here any time...
Try the Impossible meat substitute. And vote for politicians who take this seriously.
The latter, always have. The former, yeah, f
or hamburgers it's OK.
About a 20% reduction iirc.
Also note: solar panels make the surrounding air even hotter.
Don’t have kids. Why must the population of h. sapiens continue to increase over time? Why can’t it drop back to what it was 100 years ago? If climate change is the catastrophe predicted, then population will self correct via flood, famine, drought, fires, wars, etc. Young people will, perhaps, respond to this change in circumstances by having fewer children in 2100. As it stands today, the people living in Africa are the ones driving the climate bus off the cliff with exploding population and migration to Europe, Asia, and elsewhere where they will consume resources and generate emissions as we do today.
I should reduce my standard of living so Africans can have lots of kids? No thanks.
The UN expects Africa’s population to double by 2050 and double again by 2100 to 4.3 billion people.
“Why can’t it drop back to what it was 100 years ago?”
Historically, whenever that has happened in a country - a loss of population so great that a century’s worth of growth is wiped out - it usually doesn’t lead to great living standards for the remaining people in that country. North Korea has basically had no population growth for half a century and - with the exception of a small handful - they lead horrifying daily lives.
It’s fine if you don’t mind hunting for grass every day to make soup or dying at 38 from a lack of medical supplies. But most of us don’t want our living standards to go down as we age… so we’d like the population (and resulting economy) to grow.
And so it shall grow. Until, of course, the climate makes that impossible. And then it will shrink.
If living standards require ever increasing population then those living standards are unsustainable.
Welcome to Capitalism 101
And which “ism” has demonstrated sustainability?
Welcome to Human Nature 101. Capitalism has f-all to do with it.
The Soviets and the Chinese non-capitalist economics (Chinese pre reforms) were staggeringly wasteful in natural / climate resource terms.
It's idiotic Leftist knee-jerking to blame Capitalism (as equally idiotic for the Right to blame socialism).
They do not. Living standards require ever increasing efficiency of production - which now in developed world is trending to using less-and-less labour which can and will accelerate.
However, near-term population shocks of course are destructive - like any near-term shock. There is no reason however to see North Korea as The Model / Template however.
Insofar as Europe and Developed Asia are all trending to negative population change purely from social-economic changes (less than replacement level births) it is perfectly plausible glide path to gradual population decline with AI and automation picking up the slack (if efficiencies continue to be achieved). Contra predictions, Japan is not being impoverished for example.
This is even the case in middle income countries (MENA, LatAm, most of developing Asia ex-India).
Excepting SS Africa most of the world is on a clear trend to flat or negative population change (less-than-replacement level births). SSAfrica however if they don't change their path.... well... that looks rather awful.
Not true. The basic tenet of capitalism is "Be wealthier tomorrow than you are today." And if you look back at yesterday to see that you are not richer today than yesterday, you are a failure. The acquisition of wealth supersedes all other goals, and allows for injuring others -- including destroying the environment.
Read the second news article in the original post. ("...as utilities increasingly turn to coal to power the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.) It's about the growth of wealth, despite the expected damage that will cause. Capitalism has become too much of a good thing.
“I should reduce my standard of living so Africans can have lots of kids?”
Thanks for not reproducing your racism in another generation.
If the population were doubling in Australia the same comment would apply. It has nothing to do with race.
Less-developed countries tend to have higher birth rates, and as development increases birth rates tend to fall. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-growth-rate-by-level-of-development?time=1950..2022&country=Less+Developed+Regions~More+Developed+Regions~Least+Developed+Countries
Perhaps you're unaware how--in a rerun of colonialism--the WTO, World Bank, and IMF (controlled by the US) have stalled or reversed development throughout the gobal south, generally by forcing them to become or remain extractive economies and preventing or reversing import replacement economies.
The answer to "Why can’t it drop back to what it was 100 years ago?" is simple and so obvious that I can't believe you don't already know it. In order to reduce the world population quickly enough to have an effect on climate change, three out of every four people in the world would have to be killed. Are you prepared to be one of the three, or do you selfishly and unrealistically believe that you will be the one survivor out of every four people?
I don't have a problem with it. 2 billion dying in Asia right now would help tremendously. Capitalist contraction would be next.
There's a practical problem. Those 2 billion people in Asia will resist being killed; they may even take the reasonable view that killing people from the wealthy countries of North America and Western Europe will do considerably more to reduce CO2 emissions than killing the same number of poor Asians will.
As I asked "Are you prepared to be one of the three, or do you selfishly and unrealistically believe that you will be the one survivor out of every four people?"
Sure but militarily we eould be better at killinh them than they us
I’m not suggesting the population will fall quickly. It may take 200 years or more. Given my age, I will be gone by 2050 for sure. I’m also not suggesting that this population reduction will prevent climate change. On the contrary… the reduction will occur as a result of climate change.
Don’t have kids. People not conceived or born cannot suffer. If you reproduce under these circumstances then you are responsible for massive suffering.
Reasonable extrapolations of current population trends say that human population will peak around the end of this century at about 11 or 12 billion and then begin to slowly decline.
Uh, isn't one American worth hundreds of Africans re: carbon output?
A web search suggests per-capita emissions for “Africa” were 0.8 circa 2000. Might be closer to 1.0 now but a newer figure would be good. The the per-capita American is 16 and change. So call it twenty rather than “hundreds.”
The population of “Africa” is something like 1.3 billion vs 0.33 billion “Americans” so call that four times, suggesting overall emissions then for “Africa” is one fifth. Which way the trends for each are going I have not checked lately. But it seems clear we certainly don’t want to create more “Americans” if we truly believe climate change is an existential threat to humanity. The trends factor in but it seems unlikely we want to create any more “Africans” either.
In regards to climate change, I'm glad I only have another decade or two to live.
Trump's "policies" might not have lasted long, but will do lasting damage.
That, and energy generators are threatening to close nuclear plants early, while keeping coal plants going (?), unless they get a payday to keep them open
Don't bother us. We are busy destroying the planet in order to fashion our own versions of Moai.
There needs to be an outright ban on coal production.
The downside to doing it is pretty trivial.
This how Shrillary lost West Virginia to Bernie, then Trump
Yeah, the worst coal mine in West Virginia & the Manchin family would suffer greatly.
Well then Manchin should greatly push for battery powered cars, trucks and semis.
If they had always been nongas, the situation wouldn't be nearly as bad. Transportation is the main problem.
Then you'd think he'd care his constituents were trapped in a thing like that.
Working out the problem of bringing the trivial percentage of people involved in coal mining in for a soft landing is something that could be extended to apply to a lot of people in similarly distant areas and alienated and helpless circumstances.
Forty years ago, we already knew where we were going to be today: https://xkcd.com/2500/
Yup. Predictions were eerily accurate. Climate science and scientists are the real culprits.
It’s like with the anti vaccine people: Just when humanity is about to die off, the last few will say, Allllllright. we’ll stop burning fossil fuels now.
Nope.
Sorry, but that is incorrect. Average total emissions when combined with 2020 are not running any faster than 2010-19. These articles do nothing and mislead.
There is no turn to coal either. Another lie.
Lies, damned lies and (manipulated) statistics.
Coal has been declining for 70 years.
Hey, conservatives!
Look, it's 1912!
https://i.redd.it/x3dbs9xtgrg71.jpg
Plenty of time to waste!
World wasn't burnt in a day!
Or, as I like to say, Fucking Humans.
When the going gets tough, the tough go to Italy …
In a completely unrelated (/s) story, Biden is calling on OPEC and other oil producers to crank up oil production to avoid inhibiting the economic recovery.
Biden should call for dark skins deaths.
We won't do what's needed to reverse global warming. By "we" I mean the human race. We'll continue to extract and sell every lump of coal and every drop of oil, as we continue trying to "adapt" to the ever-worsening droughts, floods, sea level rise, wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes and so on. Various justifications will be put forth, and some of them will take hold among the rubes, making it "impossible" for world leaders to do anything substantive. In the next ten years we'll blow past the 1.5°C limit, and the situation will continue to deteriorate. Eventually, as Wall Street is flooded and uncontrolled fires burn for years in the American West, Europe and Australia, geoengineering will be tried, but no one will know if it will work or what the long-term or unintended consequences might be. Probably they'll squirt some kind of reflective dust into the stratosphere, which they hope will cool the planet and allow for the use of more fossil fuel.
Maybe it'll work. I don't want to be around.
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