this post was submitted on 12 Jun 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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Why the U.S. Electric Grid Isn’t Ready for the Energy Transition | To start with, there is no single U.S. electric grid. (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 1 year ago by silence7 to c/climate
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[–] cerement 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

as a contrast, more communities (especially in Puerto Rico) are responding to disaster capitalism by developing their own microgrids – doesn’t solve the problem of interconnects (moving power between grids the article is talking about) – but at least it provides each community more resilience and they can tailor their microgrid to their particular conditions

[–] CadeJohnson 2 points 1 year ago

There are a couple of microgrids here in PR, but it is not as widespread as it should be. I think the wise folks at the utility board are about to take major action to accelerate solar though: there are billions of dollars in bonds to service and the population has dipped and the funds were not well spent and the pension fund is underfunded, so they are going to tack on a debt service fee to the utility bill to the tune of $20 - $40 per month. When they do that, I and anyone else who already has a robust solar system is likely to disconnect - dumping the debt burden on the ones who haven't got solar yet. Musical chairs but with utility bills, what could go wrong?

[–] silence7 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, microgrids have significant value for that. You need a lot more local overbuilding and storage (or tolerance for outages) if you don't have the transmission though.