When man first walked on the moon, the carbon dioxide concentration in Earth’s atmosphere was 325 parts per million (ppm).
By 9/11, it was 369 ppm, and when COVID-19 shut down normal life in 2020, it had shot up to 414 parts ppm.
This week, our planet hit the highest levels ever directly recorded: 430 parts per million.
“This problem is not going away, and we’re moving further and further into uncharted territory, and almost certainly, very dangerous territory.”
Right now, China is the problem. Historically it’s been the USA, but right now it’s China.
The upcoming problem is India.
More specifically the problem is coal. China and India are ramping up their usage of coal whilst the rest of the world is phasing it out.
Yes, those countries are also building clean sources of power, but coal is about 55% of their primary energy each. 80% of Chinas primary energy comes from fossil fuels and 90% of India’s. Their rate of new coal outstrips their use of wind and solar.
The earth cannot support the huge populations of these countries unless they are powered by something other than coal. Even oil and gas would be a huge improvement. These two governments hold all the power on this issue.
The problem is these numbers are based on the country of origin of emissions and don’t take into account the demand/consumption that is driving those emissions. China is a huge exporter and the US is a major importer of Chinese goods. US consumption is driving a lot of China’s emissions
By not being a manufacturing economy, we’re able to offset the appearance of our emissions when the data is tracked this way
China is the one choosing coal to fuel it’s exports. It’s the government that has to change policy.
This is one place where tariffs are reasonable policy. Coal costs less than renewables but has a higher environmental cost. Products made using coal energy cost less because of this externalization/excess environmental cost. Tariff can be set to account for the environmental cost making goods produced with renewables price competitive with those produced with coal.
Yup. Also the whole reason China produces the majority of the rare earths isn’t because there’s some cave that only exists in China they come from. It’s because processing rare earths involves toxic waste and it’s cheaper to do it when you’re willing to just dump the toxic waste on the ground, which is what they do in China.
Environmentally motivated tariffs makes a lot of sense, if companies aren’t gaining a competitive edge by being environmentally irresponsible, they will start being more responsible. Trying to appeal to the morals of corporations isn’t going to get anywhere, there needs to be a financial incentive for them to do things right.
Does the USA still lead in per capita emissions?
Yes, but it’s coming down. Also, it doesn’t really matter.
Fact is, the planet doesn’t care about per-capita. It cares about absolute tonnes of CO2. When 3 billion are increasing the burning of coal, 350 million reducing their coal use isn’t really significant.
There have been five previous mass extinction events (that we have evidence of) and the planet and life are still here. Planet doesn’t care at all.
Per capita does matter because non-USA citizens are not going to voluntarily accept having a lower standard of living so USA citizens can keep their higher standard. If the Chinese population consumed as much resources per capita as the USA it would take four planet earths to sustain us.
Yeah the attitude of “let China fix this” is really annoying. Don’t people want to be the world leaders in fixing a global problem?
Also “just let China fix this” means only China will have all of the skill experience with the technology that we’ll all be using in the future. Why would you want that? It’s just laziness plain and simple.
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Just an extra 35% since 1960. WCGW? /s
When was the last year co2 didn’t get worse ?
2020 since the pandemic shut everything down. There was a one year respite.
Basically at this point the only thing that might make things go down would be something on the scale of covid but deadlier that would make the ultra wealthy scared enough to keep things shut down long term.
Before that it was the 2008 financial crisis.
I wonder if Trump’s tariff chaos is causing enough economic shrinkage to bring another year of slight slow down.
We really need to decouple economic activity from CO2 emissions or we’re just left hoping for the global economy to be in peril.
Ironically tariffs on Imports would be good for cutting global emissions. But people will starve and economy collapse.
Yeah, I rather reduce emissions without people starving, but radical environmental laws are apparently a no go… radical tariffs on the other hand… all good?
The “let them eat CO2” policy. Yeah, it’s insane, global warming is a solvable problem. We have the technology needed already, we’re just lacking in a willingness to change. The powers that be are going all in on stagnation while facing a crisis.
Welcome to the post-developed world, folks. Hope you made good use of that free fossil energy to make the world a special place for every living being on the planet…
— from The Newsroom
I thought this was from “don’t look up,” but they respected him too much for that.
:'(
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We need lemmy instances with less censorship.
You can talk about murdering Russian troops all day on here, but don’t you dare suggest capital punishment for defence contractors that are literally destroying the entire planet. Clown levels of moderation.
Wouldn’t the shareholders, who profit far more off any company than any CEO be a better target? Of taxation and eventual deposition (taxing them out of existence), of course, I do not care about violence.
I mean yeah, get the shareholders too. Taxing them out of existence would be fine too, but you’re absolutely bonkers levels of insane if you think they’d let that happen without at least the threat of violence. Like there is absolutely zero historical precedence of that working anywhere ever.
Well I dimly remember after the 30 year war (? It was a long time ago I learned about this, could have been the restoration after the Napoleonic wars) the church gave up vast swathes of Land in exchange for a set amount of dividends from the state.
But given that was after a drawn out tumultuous war, so I see your point.
Yeah, exactly. The war was the violence. It was a war.
Why him?
Evil as fuck defence corporations seem like a good place to start to me.
Take out the oil industry, and all defence contractors and every military can no longer function.
That would be the dream my man
This is depressing
The last thermal maximum had rain forests at the poles and it was estimated that carbon was being emitted far more slowly. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ldLBoErAhz4
Rain forest at the poles? What did the North Pole look like at that time?
We aren’t totally sure. Rainforest isn’t the correct term but it was probably lush and green. The evidence we had is vegetation on Antarctica approx 90 million years ago. That also has the caveat that 90 million years ago, Antarctica was further north and didn’t intersect the south pole. North Pole today is an ice sheet, so probably was a thinner ice sheet back then too.
