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Tired of feeling hopeless about climate change? Take a look at these charts.
(www.washingtonpost.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Hate to be a party pooper, but for me, failed attempts at trumpeting optimism are often the most pessimistic and depressing things for me.
I’m all for gritty stubbornness and all that, but a lot of these charts looked clearly like trivial “we’re doing our best!” defensiveness to me. Starting with EV sales (which I presume are mostly cars but that could be wrong) didn’t help. And the final yearly CO~2~ emissions doesn’t look promising either.
Getting people to act makes a lot of sense. But “back in my day” that was done by talking about the actual viable solutions on offer and telling people they can demand better by demanding these solutions. A vague “hey look the system is kinda working” statement strikes me as depressingly vacuous.
Am I off base here?
EV sales stats in this article do appear to be electric car sales, even though electric-assist bicycles make up the bulk of electric vehicle sales.
I'd say that they're pointing out that some of the things we are doing are starting to succeed in a meaningful way. That's a big deal, even if we haven't gotten to the point of bending the curve of atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Nothing else matters. This is the bottom line, period, full stop. We've had promises and technological developments and "positive trends" for decades now, and CO2 emissions have just continued going up and up and up. All the while, our governments continue to subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of trillions of dollars, approve record numbers of oil and gas drilling permits on public lands, and don't take any meaningful action to address climate change. I don't want to hear any more of this garbage about how we're "starting to succeed." We're like thirty years behind where we should be.
The permits thing is about the US, where the courts have held that a drilling lease is a property right, so you can't just say no to permits. So Biden cut new leases to the minimum required by law.
Getting an end to new drilling permits is going to take more votes and control of the courts than we've had.