this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
79 points (100.0% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5279 readers
856 users here now

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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
silence7
79
Southern Company is promoting “propaganda” disguised as research | The utility is laundering strategic messaging about the energy transition through a partnership with The Atlantic's marketing team. (www.exxonknews.org)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by silence7 to c/climate
7 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] silence7 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

It's worse than that even — the regulator that would be able to punish them, the Georgia Public Service Commission, has had its elections canceled. This leaves Republicans who are bought out by the utility in charge.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

I'd never really looked into how the PSC elections worked until now and holy shit, that's downright sadistic on multiple levels!

Let me see if I've got it straight:

  • Candidates for PSC seats must live within particular geographic districts, but the voting for those seats is at-large (the whole state votes).
  • That means that the metro Atlanta district gets both Democrat and Republican candidates (because the metro has a liberal majority, but also still has enough conservatives to put up a good fight), while the other four districts are mostly rural and much more homogeneously conservative, so whatever Democrats they scrounge up to run are less likely to be serious and competitive.
  • The at-large voting means even a slim Republican statewide majority gives them all five seats. Meanwhile, although the same would be nominally true for the Democrats, the afore-mentioned weaker candidate pool in the rural districts would make it harder to achieve, even when they miraculously manage get enough turnout to win district 3. That's because Republicans tend to just vote straight ticket, while Democrats are more likely to abstain from down-ballot races that they don't have an informed opinion about.

That's already 100% unjust bullshit even before considering the point you made (that they've slow-walked the court case for two elections running, manufacturing an excuse not to even bother holding a vote and just letting the Republicans keep serving expired terms instead).