this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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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.

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Europe’s Heat Pumps Put America’s to Shame | If switching one home to a heat pump improves energy efficiency, why not whole cities? (www.theatlantic.com)
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[–] skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Stockholm decommissioned its last coal-fired plant in 2020, and its giant heat pumps are a major supplier of heat to the city, along with power plants that burn waste and scrap wood from Sweden’s forestry industry that would otherwise be left to rot. Levihn contends that generating heat and electricity from incinerated waste is more efficient than dumping it in a landfill, although these plants still emit carbon dioxide. Stockholm Exergi is working to install carbon-capture technology in the plants in hopes of making the system net carbon negative, he told me.

"We don't use coal, we just burn waste rather than turning the wood scrap into something useful." Greenwashing at its finest. I suppose the angle is it's "almost" recycling carbon rather than releasing old buried carbon into the atmosphere?

What an odd guilt-laden non-article. It's non-trivial to install underground piping systems in neighborhoods, they then also need a source/sink of heat to power the mechanism, not every neighborhood would have that, not all topographies would support that. Cities already have centralized heating systems that have been around for decades in some building groupings.

Seems it'd make more sense to just install a house-grade heat pump on each home the next time the AC needs to be replaced and some grid-scale solar and/or wind and/or hydro and Bob's your uncle. Toss in some base-load nuclear for good measure. Build out the energy infra enough that resistance or baseboard resistance electric heat can be used for when it's too cold to use a heat pump in the meantime, and then sunset gas furnaces the next time those need to be replaced.

This avoids polluting with big diggers tearing up streets, moving dirt around, possibly destroying gas (causing methane leaks), water, power, Internet infra, and laying new asphalt. No carbon creation by building the piping systems/energy plant and avoids trucking those parts around.