Catastrophic change looms as Earth nears climate ‘tipping points’, report says
Catastrophic change looms as Earth nears climate ‘tipping points’, report says
Polar ice, coral reefs and other Earth systems could cross irrevocable thresholds soon, but urgent action could stave off the worst effects.
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My realizations over the years:
Even if we make our cars less carbon-polluting by 25%, if we end up driving more, we could still end up polluting more.
Even if the western nations pollute less, developing nations will still pollute a lot more and will get us to tipping points anyway, albeit perhaps slightly slower.
Global warming effects are scary, but what's worse is global cooling and Ice Age. Once the ocean's balance is messed up by diluted salinity due to melted ice caps, who knows where this can go.
Developing nations need electricity and primary energy growth. They need it to pull people out of poverty, and guarantee basic human needs like food, water, shelter as well as basic human desires like education, employment, and transportation. Western countries should be using their immense economic power to make renewable sources of energy the more cost-effective solution. They're not.
China is on track to hit peak oil (this year) and peak coal (next year). This is due to their EV adoption rate (~40% and growing fast) and their solar panel installation rate (this year, more than the entire sum of all US solar panels). China dominates the supply chain: they make up more than half of all battery exports and more than 80% of all solar panels exports worldwide. In less than a decade, China has drove down the cost of EVs to parity with ICE vehicles ($10000/car) and drove down the cost of solar to be less than that of traditional fossil fuels.
The West could have done the same. Instead, we kept jacking off our O&G producers and giving them billions of dollars in subsidies while solidifying the advantage of established car and solar companies rather than driving innovation from competition.
should
Haha! You believe in morality!
It's not even a morality problem, it's a question of growing your economy by developing emerging industries
Your word "should" implies a moral judgement.
It's not that simple to electrify with renewable. We'd need to mine wayyyy more copper for wiring. We'd need to produce wayyy more rubber for insulated coatings of all those wires. We'd need wayyy more transformers. And if every garage in America has a car charging in it, then we'll need wayyy more batteries and We'd have a lot more load on our electric infrastructure. In the end, we'd still need fossil fuel infrastructure to account for when the sun's not shining and wind isn't blowing.
And yet, China this year deployed more solar panels than the US in it's entire history.
That's great for them, I hope it was worth it in the end. And that would work great in a desert and southern California, but it won't work to well in most of the USA due to weather.
Solar panels are so obscenely cheap that their profitability curve works in a ton of weather conditions you wouldn't expect.
The fact that it's so expensive in the US is entirely decoupled from their manufacturing cost.
Then why is it over $35k to get them installed on a house's roof? And still I'd need to be plugged into the grid.
The costs in the US are completely fucked. Partially because of tariffs on imports, partially because of bullshit regulations that protect the large existing players, and partially because American workers are just, frankly, less efficient.
Speaking from experience since I looked into it, there's scammers peddling solar panels and overall, from a financial point of view, they are just a bad deal - Too much cost, with little upside with extra risk. In addition it certainly does not increase home values at all.
However, in southern California and deserts, it would make sense to get solar since the sun shines more.
Also wind turbine industry needs to start making recyclable blades cuz used blades take up a lot of space in landfills.
Even if the western nations pollute less, developing nations will still pollute a lot more and will get us to tipping points anyway, albeit perhaps slightly slower.
Ehh, it's worth noting that developing nations tend to pollute a lot less per capita. And as they develop they can transition to cleaner forms of energy, as they gain the economic ability to do so.
Pointing at developing nations is a convenient excuse for developed nations to avoid taking the actions we need to take.
We should be subsidizing renewables in developing countries so that they never have a reason to use fossil fuels in the first place.
…but where will BP or Shell make their billions then?
Also: things like blue ammonia and blue hydrogen are far more polluting than oil even diesel fuel, yet those ghouls managed to greenwash it into appearing better.
My thing is what we are seeing with coal. This should be a no brainer but its use is still increasing!!!
Even if the western nations pollute less, developing nations will still pollute a lot more
But that's still less bad than if the western nations don't pollute less.
Plus the more advanced nations can develop the technologies and techniques that all countries can implement for the benefit of all of us.
If there is the political will.
.
Giving up isn't the answer, no matter how overwhelming the problem looks. Because the alternative is a very unpleasant march towards extinction.
March towards extinction
You're being overdramatic, there won't be total extinction... just the vast majority of the world population living in misery and slowly dying.
It sounds so very much more desirable when you put it like that...
Starving to death is one of the worst ways you can die!