this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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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.

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Private jets are awful for the climate. It’s time to tax the rich who fly in them | US Senator Edward J Markey (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 1 year ago by silence7 to c/climate
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[–] khepri@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm all for taxing and regulating the hell out of these totally unneeded luxuries, but air travel is 2% of global emissions, and private jets are 2% of that. They are a pure luxury, and so are a good target for emissions reduction, but this would be just one of hundreds of similarly-sized initiatives needed to move the needle at this point. It's also not a "soft target" since we'd have to take something away from the rich that they like, which costs a lot of time and political capital that then can't be used elsewhere, perhaps to greater impact.

[–] silence7 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Political capital is more like muscle than a one-shot battery: it gets stronger when you use it in ways that have public support.

[–] khepri@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Point well taken, but I'd say getting the US Congress to agree to things that inconvenience the rich might be an exception. I really wish we could get the ball rolling on that in a self-sustaining, self-amplifying way that compounded to larger and larger changes and more and more public support. But that just isn't how my government has worked in my lifetime in my experience.