this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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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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Opinion | Relax, Electric Vehicles Really Are the Best Choice for the Climate (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 10 months ago by silence7 to c/climate
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We got the first to replace our 10-year-old, gas-powered Subaru, and after only two years of driving, the E.V. has created fewer emissions over its lifetime than if we had kept the old car. It will take our second E.V. only four years to create fewer emissions over its lifetime than the 2005 hybrid Prius it replaced. That’s counting the production of the batteries and the emissions from charging the E.V.s, and the emissions payback time will only continue to drop as more emissions-free wind and solar power comes onto the grid and battery technology improves.

The author of course did not look at having one less car, and substituting an ebike or mass transit for part of their driving, which would have lowered emissions by a larger amount.

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[–] sonori@beehaw.org 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What makes you so sure that the author didn’t look at having one less car, or lives in a place where mass transit even exists? I mean there’s currently half a foot of snow and ice on the road in front of my house, you can’t exactly expect everyone to bike though that. The whole point of EVs is that they are completely compatible with our existing infrastructure and don’t require the forcable resettlement of hundreds of millions of people to dense cities during an, amitidly artificially created, housing crisis.

Mass transit would be great if everyone had it, but they don’t, and no ones really trying to do so now. To say nothing of the fact it generally takes about ten years to complete even a new light rail line in this country and we don’t have ten years to maybe reduce emissions. If mass transit is better than driving, and that’s not hard because driving sucks, then people will take mass transit.

Sorry if this comes off as argumentative, but assuming what works for you works for everyone and the only reason that they wouldn’t do it is because they can’t think of it is rather silly.

[–] silence7 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They didn't talk about it as even an option.

[–] sonori@beehaw.org 1 points 10 months ago

Of course they didn’t, they were talking about their own experiences, and if the have the options the average american has then they wouldn’t have any local transit to even compare it to. It’s an opinion piece for the New York Times on EVs, not an exhaustive comparison of all possible transit modes.