this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world.  About 1C of total warming.  Second chart:  about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability.  Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases.  About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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[–] federalreverse@feddit.org 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

As if. The biomass/corn ethanol/HVO/"zero waste" (because we burn it)/... grift(s) will continue for at least another decade.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's fairly expensive to generate electricity by burning stuff, even biomass. A decent wind, solar, and storage rollout will displace most of it quite cheaply.

The corn ethanol thing is likely to continue in the US as long as we're still burning gasoline in cars.

[–] federalreverse@feddit.org 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

The massive limiting factor for wind/solar/storage is still capex. Biomass is often labeled sustainable, thus often profits from subsidies, and has low capex. It has high opex and allows for high levels of centralization — which is exactly the kind of business power companies know.

Fwiw, our local utility (mid-sized German town) is currently investing in "green" wood-burning and waste-burning facilities for district heating. It's obvious that none if this is sustainable even as a business because there's simply not enough wood waste in the 200-odd km radius they want to use. There's also not enough household waste in the region for the waste facility. They do it anyway, partly because they're incredibly scared of heat pump economics.

[–] Womble@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Waste burning at least seems to make sense, if its not burnt its only going to go into landfill and emit methane.

[–] federalreverse@feddit.org 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Except, the plant is sized to burn around 8x the amount of household waste produced in the city and regionally, there already are enough waste-burning plants for the current amount of household waste, making this a bet on a foreseeable race to the bottom.

[–] Womble@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Well yes, that is dumb!

[–] Cort@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

That's actually fine if the landfill has methane extraction systems. The methane can be used to generate electricity