> "the western fossil fuel field in Turkmenistan, on the Caspian coast, leaked 2.6m tonnes of methane in 2022. The eastern field emitted 1.8m tonnes. Together, the two fields released emissions equivalent to 366m tonnes of CO2, more than the UK’s annual emissions"
> "Most of the facilities leaking the methane were owned by Turkmenoil, the national oil company"
Makes me wonder if we should one day have, alongside the crime against humanity, the crime against nature itself.
If that means the Global South invading countries like the US or the UK in order to stop big ecociders like Shell, Exxon, Chevron or P&G, then I’m all for it.
Unfortunately we all know that those are not the intended targets of that legislation.
So, then, how are they going to stop those supposed ecocides? Meaning, how are they going to enforce those regulations on countries that are not following them?
More to the point, and putting ecocide and genocide in a similar ballpark, doesn’t anyone remember Rwanda anymore? Or Srebrenica? (this latter labeled technically as a massacre). Does anyone believe that those atrocities could have been stopped by “harsh words” alone? Or by economic sanctions? They weren’t.
Enforcement in this case means imposition of force, which in an inter-state situation means invasion or, at the very least, a military attack (see Kosovo in ‘99, technically not an invasion).
Maybe more carrot than stick makes sense here as law enforcement doesn't really work for an authoritarian state. If there was enough financial incentive to lower emissions and keep them lower, I'm sure the Turkmenistan government would. Unfortunately (according to TFA) they are more allied to Russia and China which take a hands-off approach at best.
If you adjust by per capita - then all the energy producing countries are top - but then they are emitting for other people - Turkmenistan isn't producing all that energy for domestic consumption.
Easy to point fingers.
It's the consumers, not the producers per se that are the problem.
> Turkmenistan isn't producing all that energy for domestic consumption
> It's the consumers, not the producers per se that are the problem.
Irrespective of which party is the proximate cause of energy extraction in Turkmenistan, the large volume leakage of methane according to the article is not an inevitable byproduct of oil drilling. What’s more, the incremental costs of controlling methane emissions are tiny. And finally, consumers couldn’t go re-light methane flares at the drill sites even if they wanted to.
In other words, Turkmen Oil is fucking up and not doing basic methane leak management.
All of the discussions around who is a larger consumer are pointless; the point is that they could be doing more, and at a very small cost to them directly.
> Unfortunately (according to TFA) they are more allied to Russia and China which take a hands-off approach at best.
I get what you're saying here, something like, "we couldn't change it if we tried" but we wouldn't even if we could. We're fighting a proxy war with Russia right now over access to fossil fuel right now. Releasing tons and tons of CO2 for the right to release more CO2 in the future.
From a purely Russian-centric point of view, is global warming even a bad thing?
Russia has huge stretches of land that are mostly useless for farming because of the cold. Not to mention the Arctic region, which they could traverse by ship if most of the ice would be molten.
Sounds complex. There are open questions as to whether those regions that open up for farming would have the soil to support it. And whether reduction in rainfall elsewhere in Russia would cancel out the gains. They have already benefited from current warming.
Nope. At first, you gotta fix that genocidal warmongering colonists reputation.
You don't assume that the relationships between the West and the Global South is a clean slate, right?
EDIT: And here come the downvotes from the bubble-people. Does the fact that Africa and the Middle East distrust the West surprise anyone, really? Can I maybe refer anyone to President Macron's recent struggles with Africa, or the fact that people in the Middle East aren't really thankful for dronestike politics?
I didn't downvote, but I think a financial incentive would outweigh any moral outrage from Turkmenistan's ruling members. Russia is certainly willing to engage in proxy wars as much as western nations. China seems to be building up military power, (still a fraction of the US) but doesn't seem to be so interested in inciting conflict (yet).
I agree that western nations could take a page out of China's book and look to having more of a presence in developing and underdeveloped nations, including financing and building infrastructure, but hopefully without seeking leverage (e.g., Sri Lanka.. though the incompetent government only has themselves to blame).
What the heck does same-sex marriage have to do with "crimes against nature"?
Note, that same-sex relationships exist /throughout/ nature and marriage itself is not "natural".
Being a major cause of climate change does not only affect humanity, but future generations and all life on Earth as well. It is an order of magnitude worse than genocide.
When a single entity is responsible for it, because of negligence or malice, the punishment should be more draconian than if it "only" caused harm to humanity.
The dismissal of environmentalists as "lol eat bugs" is really fucking sad, to me. It's like you're delighted that this happened because you get a chance to wind up some people you dislike.
I mean whatever we say here or believe doesn't change what happened in Turkmenistan, it's just sad to be reminded what kind of hurdles exist when talking about making the world a little bit better :-/
> The dismissal of environmentalists as "lol eat bugs" is really fucking sad, to me.
I don't see it as a dismissal of real environmentalists, more a laugh at the hypocrite corporatist ruling class who take their private jets and mega yachts to conferences where they pat one another on the back and tell everybody else to eat bugs. Them, and the army of sycophants and apologists who they've fooled.
I have a pretty strong suspicion that the average person who holds this discourse does not support political actions against global warming even when they would hamper big corporations and rich people (eg carbon taxes, cap-and-trade policies, closing coal plants, pre-planned ICE vehicle bans in 10 years, etc).
The last person who gave me this spiel said it right after suggesting I take the place from france to canada, and got mad I suggested they install an electric stove instead of a gas one.
I don't quite understand what you're saying here. Somebody told you to eat bugs and you suggested they get rid of their gas stove for some reason. I don't quite see how it addresses what I or the original poster wrote.
For what it's worth, it's perfectly possible to be disillusioned and angry at the ruling class and their policies and their hypocrisy and profiteering at the expense of the environment, while also wishing for real uncorrupted environmental action. Some people are sick of it all and have given up on it. I place a lot more blame on the people who soured their attitudes.
It could be that this was the intent behind that comment. However I usually see "they want you to eat bugs" as a scaremongering tactic, when in reality the "they" in question just want some pretty uncontroversial stuff like decent public transport.
It's possible, but I don't think that would be assuming good faith or having a charitable interpretation of a comment.
FWIW I more often see the "eat the bugs" meme in response to obscenely rich elites and politicians advocating policies that require sacrifice from commoners.
I dont dismiss environmentalists, only their ineffective ideas, I happen to like clean water and air and think environmentalists are necessary check against corporate carelessness.
Most people trying to solve a problem would focus their efforts on the low hanging fruit, in an attempt to have the largest impact in the shortest amount of time.
But instead the focus is on petty targets that are simply annoying or unsightly, we ban plastic straws and bags, gas stoves and lawn mowers, loud engines, run farmers out business for using fertilizer to feed ourselves and a growing population, only to find out theres an extra UKs worth methane being pumped into the air because someone cant be bothered to find a crescent wrench and tighten some pipes.
If the world ends it wont be because living creatures fart too much, it will because of idiocy (low yield ideas), laziness (this oil field), hypocrisy (the rich on their jets eating steak), and being more concerned with trying to appear to be accomplishing something rather than actually accomplishing it.
It seems like you've confused 'environmentalists' with various corporate greenwashing campaigns.
Banning plastic bags was sensible, it just didn't go far enough. Banning plastic straws was sensible, but replacing them with PFAS paper was evil.
Do you think it was natural how much corporate media attention the plastic straw thing got? Do you think it's natural how little attention Coke get in the media for their plastic waste? Do you think environmentalists are unaware of this?
The main point you seem to be missing is that there are a small number of individuals making a lot of money from the "low hanging fruit" problems remaining unsolved. You're pointing fingers at an artificial straw-man, one created by PR teams those wealthy people hired.
I don't mean this to sound too confrontational; it sounds like our opinions mostly overlap. I just really dislike seeing environmentalists get tarred with a straw brush.
In what way was the plastic bags sensible? We replaced recycled and sugar cane bags with awful cotton bags while instead importing garbage bags from China. The sale of imported plastic bags skyrocketed.
The issue is with how the garbage system works. You need to put your tampons, condoms, diapers, etc. into something at home for the garbage truck to pick them up. If you don't solve the issue, people will just continue to the next solution. Maybe cotton bags that are absolutely terrible for the environment.
In the way that the number of trees I've seen covered in plastic bags has dropped > 99%. Seeing 5 or 6 plastic bags at once blowing in the wind, down > 99%. In the way that microplastics is a bad thing, and reducing the amount of them is good.
> We replaced recycled and sugar cane bags with awful cotton bags
What proportion of those plastic bags we banned were "recycled and sugar cane bags"?
And that's not what your initial argument was. I'd have liked to see them replaced with hemp, myself, but I'd rather see a cotton bag degrading peacefully than a plastic bag leeching random nasty shit everywhere.
>The sale of imported plastic bags skyrocketed.
Did it "skyrocket" to more than the number of bags we were producing before? No, not anywhere. In South Australia, for example, 400 million fewer plastic bags were used.
Plastic bag bans are total catnip for libertarians, particularly that large subset funded by fossil fuels.
There is nothing they hate more than widely popular and successful regulations to reduce fossil fuel use. So repeated attempts to discredit them are made.
> Seeing 5 or 6 plastic bags at once blowing in the wind, down > 99%.
I've never seen that. There's no trash on the ground where I live. I hope you picked it up.
> What proportion of those plastic bags we banned were "recycled and sugar cane bags"?
I have no numbers but probably 80+ percent considering all food chains and the biggest retail stores had made the change many years ago. That's where most of the bags were coming from. The ones you used multiple times when purchasing food, before using it as a garbage bag.
> Did it "skyrocket" to more than the number of bags we were producing before?
Yes. In the past you bought a recycled plastic bag, used it a couple of times and then disposed it with the garbage such as tampons. Now you buy rolls of imported plastic bags and use them for garbage but since there's no incitament to buy fewer, you stock up when its cheap. With the added benefit that you also have to buy cotton bags that are absolutely terrible for the environment.
As a result, the change is being rolled back this year by the government. Everyone have deemed it to be a major failure.
You are bringing up petty unsightly targets yourself. Aviation produces less than 2.5% of greenhouse gas emissions. Rich people and their jets don't even register in the scheme of things.
But they are the messengers, yet cant be bothered with any of this themselves, the only suggestions they ever have are what the rest of us can do to offset their life styles. Next Davos meeting online? Haha, oh you (adjusts monocle)... practice what you preach.
Or you can pretend some investor or politician somewhere doesnt rub elbows directly or indirectly with the companies that do the shit in the article. They control everything on the planet, business and politics, stuff like this article is just what comes to light. It could be fixed with a fucking phone call, but they might have to pay some overtime, which hits the bottom line, and they wont lose a nickel to back up their bullshit because their 14th bathroom needs a new gold shitter and those things are expensive.
Its more cost effective for me to chip my tooth on a metal straw or stop eating altogether.
Gates "guilty pleasure" is collecting private jets
> But they are the messengers, yet cant be bothered with any of this themselves, the only suggestions they ever have are what the rest of us can do to offset their life styles
Who is this "they"? The only rich rich person I can think of that actively advocates for policies combatting climate change, and isn't a "celebrity" type of rich person (e.g. footballer or actor/musician) is Bill Gates. Most other rich rich people, à la Arnault, Musk, Bezos flat out don't care and don't pretend they do. They spend their billions on whatever tickles their fancy, consequences be damned. As to why I exclude celebrities, it's because PR and their brand is a big part of what they are.
Attacking caveman cultists is not a dismissal of environmentalism.
There is an enormous distinction between pure waste or negligence such as what we see here, and genuine activity that benefits people.
If I were leaving my windows open with the AC/heating on full blast, or burning plastic in my garden - sure, that's not cool.
But going after genuine things with utility (eating meat, driving, having children, etc) is the quickest way to get me to completely ignore what you're saying.
These changes don't make the world better. They would make my life significantly worse, whilst potentially very slightly improving the lives of people who are ascetic.
Making the world a little bit better is an extremely noble goal, but it’s just really hard to respect environmentalists when they’re celebrating shutting down nuclear power plants even though coal plants will take up the slack, or telling me that I should stop eating beef and drinking milk because of the cow methane meanwhile they had no idea my entire country’s bovine population was basically a rounding error because Turkmenistan let the pilot light go out at a mining site. It feels like trying to respect Dilbert’s boss.
Don't forget about outsourcing loads of your production to China, and then claiming your own country is about to meet its carbon goals. Works for Europe.
No "at least" about it. China has horrible carbon emission intensity of production. More than twice as bad as countries like USA, India, Japan, and more than 3 times as bad as cleaner ones. Not to mention all the other environmental problems they have.
I will: per-capita is a terrible and compromised metric to use because it bears no relationship to the environmental cost of carbon, and it creates perverse incentives for regimes to maximize population and reduce living standards in order to maintain and increase their carbon emissions.
China's per-capita emissions aren't even great. Worse than many advanced economies.
It's hypocritical of Americans to complain about China's emissions, while spewing almost twice as much per person.
It's disingenuous to complain that per capita emissions are irrelevant, as if every 8 Americans deserve to emit as much as fourteen Chinese people. That's the actual ratio.
And all this bluster, while China exports nearly twice as many manufactured goods.
If we're talking about countries environmental cost, then we'll have to talk about America's role sabotaging climate accords, or selling the world on PFAs, or the petrodollar, or our relationship with dictators that have lots of oil, or invading countries and then securing the oil fields within days, and so on, etc.
Let's try to keep our feet on the ground here, even if we've no leg to stand on.
That didn't address what I wrote even if I was American, which I'm not.
While we're off on this wild tangent though, do you feel the same way about the hypocrisy of the ruling class. Do you think Barack Obama, Al Gore, Bill Gates, et al have "no right to complain" about emissions generated by us commoners?
Would that be a reasonable response for everybody, whenever a politician or elite says emissions need to be reduced? Stamp their feet and say no, because we deserve to emit as much as you do?
So tired of western folk (as usual) being so full of themselves only because they had pushed almost all of the nasty production outside of their countries and get to flex stats how supposedly good they are.
How about instead we maybe count individual carbon footprint by the consumption? (Oops)
Everyone who talks about China’s “horrible” emissions always avoids referencing cumulative, per capita, or, even worse, cumulative per capita numbers because they really interfere with the desired narrative.
I’m no longer moved by the linguistic arms race to describe the outputs of unproven computer models in ever more extreme terms. Are you educated on Chinese policy in this area?
It's not about China.
You don't even realize how you look, do you?
Do you understand that everyone around the world remembers how western countries pioneered globalization and pushed all the nasty production to third-world countries, so that they don't get their white hand dirty?
You don't get to greenwash yourselves just because stuff you consume gets produced somewhere else, got it?
But hey, I have an idea! If you insist on being no less virtuous then Mother Teresa, how about this proposal: we shut down all of the outsourced production for US and Europe. Just think of it, this would be a huge optimization: it's the smallest part of the world that consumes the most.
And people there are clearly eager to be heroes and show us how to take care of climate - let's help them finally put their money where their mouth is. It's a win-win!
You are the one trying to shift the narrative. I said nothing about per capita or not. I said emission intensity of production. That is a better metric IMO because it doesn't incentivize environmentally destructive population increase or excuse total emissions. It's basically the carbon efficiency of creating value.
Has it occurred to you that most other places make barely any manufactured goods at all compared to China? Particularly basic materials like steel. How do you factor that into your calculations? The US will look pretty good on your chosen metric because our primary exports are soybeans, credit, and IP.
But it doesn’t matter regardless because any attempt to impose authoritarian climate measures on China will send the West into economic crisis, one way or another.
> Has it occurred to you that most other places make barely any manufactured goods at all compared to China? Particularly basic materials like steel. How do you factor that into your calculations?
China looks terrible compared to almost all other significant economies. When fundamentals like electricity production are much dirtier, you don't need to look much further downstream.
> But it doesn’t matter regardless
What "doesn't matter"?
> because any attempt to impose authoritarian climate measures on China will send the West into economic crisis, one way or another.
International terms of trade can not be "authoritarian", by definition. That's an ironic misunderstanding: if you want authoritarian look no further than the communist dictatorship ruling the country.
I believe the OP is referring to historical contribution to climate change by different countries. There's an article about this on Our World In Data:
Who has contributed most to global CO2 emissions?
>> There’s not only significant variability in how much CO2 countries emit across the world today. There are also large differences in how much each has emitted in the past. Who has contributed most to global CO2 since 1750?
The graph at the top of the article makes it clear that, historically, the regions that have contributed the most to climate change (to make it plain: the countries directly responsible for it) are the US and the EU countries. The US alone has contributed as much CO2 as all Asian countries together.
That doesn't mean Asia will suffer less than anyone else from a changing climate, but pointing the finger at China as the biggest polluter is kind of missing the point, and probably an attempt to deflect responsibility to avoid doing what must be done (edit: not by you, obviously).
Production emissions are dwarfed by lifetime CO2 emissions of fossil fuel vehicles, which need to be off the road as soon as possible. The quickest way to do that is with small, cheap cars that don't require bottleneck resources like cobalt and nickel.
I wish we had countries with efficient, clean production practices building small EVs using scalable production techniques like China, but give the choice between BYD's approach and that of your average US automakers, I think BYD's approach is better. (Maybe South Korea is a contender for being a legitimate competitor to China. I don't think they've done much with LFP batteries as far as I know, but it looks like LG chem is working on LFP plants though so maybe that'll change.)
It’s likely that the majority of EV production globally will shift to LFP in the coming years. Mostly due to cost but also the significant lifecycle and safety advantages of LFP.
NMC will remain dominant in high end, performance models but LFP will be the mainstream.
I wouldn't be that surprised if LFP batteries were approaching half of all EV battery production now.
I agree LFPs are currently the right chemistry for mass-production vehicles. NMC is for luxury cars, or use cases with special requirements (e.g. better cold weather performance).
I expect LFP will eventually be superseded by some other technology. Though it's possible they'le be superseded by something that's a direct improvement on LFP rather than something completely new.
LFP market share was reported to be 31% by the end of 2022 (up from 11% in 2020), with BYD and Tesla accounting for 68% of all LFP vehicles sold globally.
I would guess more than 50% of the extra generation needed to charge cars has come from gas: marginal increases in gas generation. Marginal (where extra MWh come from) generation matters, not overall generation sources.
In 2019, natural gas had the largest share (38 percent) in U.S. electricity generation, coal had the second-largest share (23 percent), and nuclear had the third largest (20 percent).
For example https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116632119 “We apply our estimates to an analysis of the Biden administration’s target of having electric vehicles make up 50% of new vehicle purchases by 2030. We find that, without significant and concurrent changes to the electricity sector far more substantial than those over the last decade, the increase in electricity emissions is likely to offset more than half the emission reductions from having fewer gasoline-powered vehicles.”
No way around it. We already have some form of ecofascism by forcing companies to adhere to environmental regulations, for no other reason besides “the environment must be protected”. Getting a military involved is just the last resort when all other warnings fail.
Oh yeah, the multinationals are so afraid of regulations from the captured state which further entrench their existing monopolies. They’re so afraid of the military being dispatched from the centers of international finance to suppress and seize potential threats in developing countries. All in the name of “the planet”.
All of forms of fascism, ecofascism is one I could agree with.
We're way past the point of having to be tolerant of people polluting Earth, air and sea.
If the individual is shamed for throwing cigarette butts on the floor, executives of oil companies, knowingly releasing tons of methane in the atmosphere need to be launched into the Sun itself. Not get a slap on the wrist and go scot-free.
Burning the fuel simply would be even better solution.
Or with the computing power, you could do more useful stuff: training AI, simulating protein folding, predicting weather.
Yes, that's possible (and which Crusoe Energy does too), but bitcoin is "the best" i.e. the easiest and probably the most profitable solution. There are additional challenges for general purpose data centers or GPU clusters, which limit their practicability in these conditions.
It's also the most useless for humanity. We are takling about a protocol where you must waste the most ressource in order to validate a transaction and get paid for it.
It's not used to validate transactions; it's used to protect the transaction from double-spending, i.e. to protect the property from theft.
It's impossible to protect private property without a cost.
Usually, private property is protected with laws and guns, but not everyone has access to these, or they come bundled with various external costs, or they fail to provide protection. Which is why Bitcoin is useful.
It's always been there. 20 years ago my father went for business in Turkmenistan, and all this was already in place. This country is one of the biggest producer of fossil fuel, it's an ultra-dictatorship, and has strong commercial partnerships with France. It's very well known.
So why is there sudden medias coverage of this?
I'm now doubting more and more that the politicians and medias really care about any environmental issue and that, like terrorism and pedophilia, it's used to motivate another agenda.
The problem is, unlike terrorism and pedophilia, climate change is an urgent issue that affects every single human in the world, so I really want this to be a genuine concern.
But some part of me now always wonder if somebody, somewhere, is not preparing us to invade Turkmenistan 2 years from now.
Media coverage of methane leaks is going up because:
a) progress on various other sources (e.g. coal) means remaining issues move up the priority list
b) new satellite measurement techniques let us pinpoint blame, rather than do back of the envelope calculations based on educated guesses and global averages, which were bad enough but less actionable.
2023-05-09: The Guardian publishes the follow-up submitted to HN here.
Lots of long-running situations are like this, constantly getting reported on at a level below most people's awareness threshold, and then when you stumble across one such report, it suddenly feels like a flood. See also the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
No one here talking about the US being right behind, despite being an alleged democracy, with regulatory frameworks in place (supposedly), orders of magnitude more money invested in fossil fuel extraction, a much larger population, free press, etc. ?
I'm not trying to assign blame (if anything, all other top comments do, one of them is talking about putting Turkmen on trial for crimes against humanity). I'm looking at the emissions and see Turkmenistan and the US are clear leaders on the methane leaks problem. And this place is full of US readers, therefore I believe it's worth discussing.
Any and all methane emissions must be stopped, including in the US, where all US citizens reading me should use their democratic power, write to their representants by e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever to try and change the situation. Turkmenistan is a poor country with rampant corruption and therefore it's harder to hold it to the same standards as a developed one.
Ya. Reducing methane emissions in the USA isn't trivial either. Before these satelites provided independent verification, our oversight regiment was mostly self minitoring and reporting. That worked as well as you can guess.
Why doesn't the plume sometimes ignite? I know methane is lighter than air so it would rise straight up, subject to winds. Seems like an electrostatic spark from say dust in the air would happen once in a while and ignite the plume. Or some kid launching a bottle rocket on a day with sideways winds. Maybe the gas concentration quickly becomes too low to ignite?
Sure, go tell the people in Turkmenistan that they should pay more taxes to pay for the installation to flare or plug that hole. And hope that nobody on the supply chain will sell critical components in order to buy nice things for their children.
Oh, and btw they don't really fly that much. Not sure which people you meant. ;)
126 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] thread> "Most of the facilities leaking the methane were owned by Turkmenoil, the national oil company"
Makes me wonder if we should one day have, alongside the crime against humanity, the crime against nature itself.
Unfortunately we all know that those are not the intended targets of that legislation.
More to the point, and putting ecocide and genocide in a similar ballpark, doesn’t anyone remember Rwanda anymore? Or Srebrenica? (this latter labeled technically as a massacre). Does anyone believe that those atrocities could have been stopped by “harsh words” alone? Or by economic sanctions? They weren’t.
Enforcement in this case means imposition of force, which in an inter-state situation means invasion or, at the very least, a military attack (see Kosovo in ‘99, technically not an invasion).
I personally think it should be one instrument on the table as a matter of last resort, mainly for the purpose of deterrence.
This is a popular assumption, but it is not true. At least, definitely not now:
US and Europe invading multiple countries and international community being chill about it had set a strong enough precedent.
C'mon, NATO had recently updated its doctrines to allow it warfare over climate - we have all the preconditions for fun stuff.
( China followed by US, and India ).
If you adjust by per capita - then all the energy producing countries are top - but then they are emitting for other people - Turkmenistan isn't producing all that energy for domestic consumption.
Easy to point fingers.
It's the consumers, not the producers per se that are the problem.
Irrespective of which party is the proximate cause of energy extraction in Turkmenistan, the large volume leakage of methane according to the article is not an inevitable byproduct of oil drilling. What’s more, the incremental costs of controlling methane emissions are tiny. And finally, consumers couldn’t go re-light methane flares at the drill sites even if they wanted to.
All of the discussions around who is a larger consumer are pointless; the point is that they could be doing more, and at a very small cost to them directly.
If you use consumption based accounting, Luxembourg comes out number 1, apparently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-emissions
I get what you're saying here, something like, "we couldn't change it if we tried" but we wouldn't even if we could. We're fighting a proxy war with Russia right now over access to fossil fuel right now. Releasing tons and tons of CO2 for the right to release more CO2 in the future.
Edit: probably changed to possibly. Downvoted immediately because who knows?
Sounds complex. There are open questions as to whether those regions that open up for farming would have the soil to support it. And whether reduction in rainfall elsewhere in Russia would cancel out the gains. They have already benefited from current warming.
I assure you, no one had noticed anything substantial.
Not exactly. “We just need to offer a bigger carrot than Russia does”
You don't assume that the relationships between the West and the Global South is a clean slate, right?
EDIT: And here come the downvotes from the bubble-people. Does the fact that Africa and the Middle East distrust the West surprise anyone, really? Can I maybe refer anyone to President Macron's recent struggles with Africa, or the fact that people in the Middle East aren't really thankful for dronestike politics?
I agree that western nations could take a page out of China's book and look to having more of a presence in developing and underdeveloped nations, including financing and building infrastructure, but hopefully without seeking leverage (e.g., Sri Lanka.. though the incompetent government only has themselves to blame).
Me thinks your biases and agenda is showing...
1. Basic or inherent characteristics of something. What GP is trolling about.
2. The entire global ecosystem and physical phenomena on planet Earth or the Universe at large. What I was talking about.
It's not necessarily different.
Being a major cause of climate change does not only affect humanity, but future generations and all life on Earth as well. It is an order of magnitude worse than genocide.
When a single entity is responsible for it, because of negligence or malice, the punishment should be more draconian than if it "only" caused harm to humanity.
I mean whatever we say here or believe doesn't change what happened in Turkmenistan, it's just sad to be reminded what kind of hurdles exist when talking about making the world a little bit better :-/
I don't see it as a dismissal of real environmentalists, more a laugh at the hypocrite corporatist ruling class who take their private jets and mega yachts to conferences where they pat one another on the back and tell everybody else to eat bugs. Them, and the army of sycophants and apologists who they've fooled.
The last person who gave me this spiel said it right after suggesting I take the place from france to canada, and got mad I suggested they install an electric stove instead of a gas one.
For what it's worth, it's perfectly possible to be disillusioned and angry at the ruling class and their policies and their hypocrisy and profiteering at the expense of the environment, while also wishing for real uncorrupted environmental action. Some people are sick of it all and have given up on it. I place a lot more blame on the people who soured their attitudes.
FWIW I more often see the "eat the bugs" meme in response to obscenely rich elites and politicians advocating policies that require sacrifice from commoners.
Banning plastic bags was sensible, it just didn't go far enough. Banning plastic straws was sensible, but replacing them with PFAS paper was evil.
Do you think it was natural how much corporate media attention the plastic straw thing got? Do you think it's natural how little attention Coke get in the media for their plastic waste? Do you think environmentalists are unaware of this?
The main point you seem to be missing is that there are a small number of individuals making a lot of money from the "low hanging fruit" problems remaining unsolved. You're pointing fingers at an artificial straw-man, one created by PR teams those wealthy people hired.
I don't mean this to sound too confrontational; it sounds like our opinions mostly overlap. I just really dislike seeing environmentalists get tarred with a straw brush.
In the way that the number of trees I've seen covered in plastic bags has dropped > 99%. Seeing 5 or 6 plastic bags at once blowing in the wind, down > 99%. In the way that microplastics is a bad thing, and reducing the amount of them is good.
> We replaced recycled and sugar cane bags with awful cotton bags
What proportion of those plastic bags we banned were "recycled and sugar cane bags"?
And that's not what your initial argument was. I'd have liked to see them replaced with hemp, myself, but I'd rather see a cotton bag degrading peacefully than a plastic bag leeching random nasty shit everywhere.
>The sale of imported plastic bags skyrocketed.
Did it "skyrocket" to more than the number of bags we were producing before? No, not anywhere. In South Australia, for example, 400 million fewer plastic bags were used.
There is nothing they hate more than widely popular and successful regulations to reduce fossil fuel use. So repeated attempts to discredit them are made.
https://reason.com/tag/plastic-bags/
They don't really stand up to scrutiny though:
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/do-plastic-bag-bans-work
I've never seen that. There's no trash on the ground where I live. I hope you picked it up.
> What proportion of those plastic bags we banned were "recycled and sugar cane bags"?
I have no numbers but probably 80+ percent considering all food chains and the biggest retail stores had made the change many years ago. That's where most of the bags were coming from. The ones you used multiple times when purchasing food, before using it as a garbage bag.
> Did it "skyrocket" to more than the number of bags we were producing before?
Yes. In the past you bought a recycled plastic bag, used it a couple of times and then disposed it with the garbage such as tampons. Now you buy rolls of imported plastic bags and use them for garbage but since there's no incitament to buy fewer, you stock up when its cheap. With the added benefit that you also have to buy cotton bags that are absolutely terrible for the environment.
As a result, the change is being rolled back this year by the government. Everyone have deemed it to be a major failure.
Or you can pretend some investor or politician somewhere doesnt rub elbows directly or indirectly with the companies that do the shit in the article. They control everything on the planet, business and politics, stuff like this article is just what comes to light. It could be fixed with a fucking phone call, but they might have to pay some overtime, which hits the bottom line, and they wont lose a nickel to back up their bullshit because their 14th bathroom needs a new gold shitter and those things are expensive.
Its more cost effective for me to chip my tooth on a metal straw or stop eating altogether.
Gates "guilty pleasure" is collecting private jets
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/bill-gates-private-jets-guilty-... https://twitter.com/goddeketal/status/1655658051855065090 https://www.newsweek.com/bill-gates-defends-using-private-je...
Who is this "they"? The only rich rich person I can think of that actively advocates for policies combatting climate change, and isn't a "celebrity" type of rich person (e.g. footballer or actor/musician) is Bill Gates. Most other rich rich people, à la Arnault, Musk, Bezos flat out don't care and don't pretend they do. They spend their billions on whatever tickles their fancy, consequences be damned. As to why I exclude celebrities, it's because PR and their brand is a big part of what they are.
There is an enormous distinction between pure waste or negligence such as what we see here, and genuine activity that benefits people.
If I were leaving my windows open with the AC/heating on full blast, or burning plastic in my garden - sure, that's not cool.
But going after genuine things with utility (eating meat, driving, having children, etc) is the quickest way to get me to completely ignore what you're saying.
These changes don't make the world better. They would make my life significantly worse, whilst potentially very slightly improving the lives of people who are ascetic.
In the U.S. on the other hand, Chevy just announced they're going to stop production of the Bolt so they can focus on electric trucks.
China's per-capita emissions aren't even great. Worse than many advanced economies.
It's hypocritical of Americans to complain about China's emissions, while spewing almost twice as much per person.
It's disingenuous to complain that per capita emissions are irrelevant, as if every 8 Americans deserve to emit as much as fourteen Chinese people. That's the actual ratio.
And all this bluster, while China exports nearly twice as many manufactured goods.
If we're talking about countries environmental cost, then we'll have to talk about America's role sabotaging climate accords, or selling the world on PFAs, or the petrodollar, or our relationship with dictators that have lots of oil, or invading countries and then securing the oil fields within days, and so on, etc.
Let's try to keep our feet on the ground here, even if we've no leg to stand on.
While we're off on this wild tangent though, do you feel the same way about the hypocrisy of the ruling class. Do you think Barack Obama, Al Gore, Bill Gates, et al have "no right to complain" about emissions generated by us commoners?
Would that be a reasonable response for everybody, whenever a politician or elite says emissions need to be reduced? Stamp their feet and say no, because we deserve to emit as much as you do?
So tired of western folk (as usual) being so full of themselves only because they had pushed almost all of the nasty production outside of their countries and get to flex stats how supposedly good they are.
How about instead we maybe count individual carbon footprint by the consumption? (Oops)
If you want to cook it because it's otherwise unfair to China, fine, it's your funeral too.
Do you understand that everyone around the world remembers how western countries pioneered globalization and pushed all the nasty production to third-world countries, so that they don't get their white hand dirty?
You don't get to greenwash yourselves just because stuff you consume gets produced somewhere else, got it?
But hey, I have an idea! If you insist on being no less virtuous then Mother Teresa, how about this proposal: we shut down all of the outsourced production for US and Europe. Just think of it, this would be a huge optimization: it's the smallest part of the world that consumes the most.
And people there are clearly eager to be heroes and show us how to take care of climate - let's help them finally put their money where their mouth is. It's a win-win!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_International
Are you hearing voices? Stop assuming dichotomy and making up stuff every time someone criticizes you on practical specific things.
> western countries
> globalization
> all the nasty production
> third-world countries
> white hand
> greenwash
> stuff
> somewhere else
Practical of specific is which one of those? Your words, not mine.
It's not perfect, every situation is a bit different, but China is such a dirty outlier compared with other major economies and the world that you can't handwave it away - https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/co2-emissions...
Producing something in China versus most other places means emitting more carbon.
But it doesn’t matter regardless because any attempt to impose authoritarian climate measures on China will send the West into economic crisis, one way or another.
China looks terrible compared to almost all other significant economies. When fundamentals like electricity production are much dirtier, you don't need to look much further downstream.
> But it doesn’t matter regardless
What "doesn't matter"?
> because any attempt to impose authoritarian climate measures on China will send the West into economic crisis, one way or another.
International terms of trade can not be "authoritarian", by definition. That's an ironic misunderstanding: if you want authoritarian look no further than the communist dictatorship ruling the country.
Who has contributed most to global CO2 emissions?
>> There’s not only significant variability in how much CO2 countries emit across the world today. There are also large differences in how much each has emitted in the past. Who has contributed most to global CO2 since 1750?
https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
The graph at the top of the article makes it clear that, historically, the regions that have contributed the most to climate change (to make it plain: the countries directly responsible for it) are the US and the EU countries. The US alone has contributed as much CO2 as all Asian countries together.
That doesn't mean Asia will suffer less than anyone else from a changing climate, but pointing the finger at China as the biggest polluter is kind of missing the point, and probably an attempt to deflect responsibility to avoid doing what must be done (edit: not by you, obviously).
I wish we had countries with efficient, clean production practices building small EVs using scalable production techniques like China, but give the choice between BYD's approach and that of your average US automakers, I think BYD's approach is better. (Maybe South Korea is a contender for being a legitimate competitor to China. I don't think they've done much with LFP batteries as far as I know, but it looks like LG chem is working on LFP plants though so maybe that'll change.)
NMC will remain dominant in high end, performance models but LFP will be the mainstream.
I agree LFPs are currently the right chemistry for mass-production vehicles. NMC is for luxury cars, or use cases with special requirements (e.g. better cold weather performance).
I expect LFP will eventually be superseded by some other technology. Though it's possible they'le be superseded by something that's a direct improvement on LFP rather than something completely new.
https://insideevs.com/news/628303/ev-battery-lfp-share-septe...
EU is looking to impose carbon border fees.
The looming threat of those is why China has introduced Carbon fees to their internal market.
If Turkmenistan is selling its fossil fuel to China then that GHG cost can be charged against Chinese goods being exported to EU.
Which gives China a financial incentive to lean on Turkmenistan to fix their leaks.
(Also WorldInData has figures for GHG with and without imports/exports. It generally doesn't change the big picture too much.)
In 2019, natural gas had the largest share (38 percent) in U.S. electricity generation, coal had the second-largest share (23 percent), and nuclear had the third largest (20 percent).
For example https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116632119 “We apply our estimates to an analysis of the Biden administration’s target of having electric vehicles make up 50% of new vehicle purchases by 2030. We find that, without significant and concurrent changes to the electricity sector far more substantial than those over the last decade, the increase in electricity emissions is likely to offset more than half the emission reductions from having fewer gasoline-powered vehicles.”
We're way past the point of having to be tolerant of people polluting Earth, air and sea.
If the individual is shamed for throwing cigarette butts on the floor, executives of oil companies, knowingly releasing tons of methane in the atmosphere need to be launched into the Sun itself. Not get a slap on the wrist and go scot-free.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMAG0QiGhQc
It's impossible to protect private property without a cost.
Usually, private property is protected with laws and guns, but not everyone has access to these, or they come bundled with various external costs, or they fail to provide protection. Which is why Bitcoin is useful.
It also help theft by laundering money.
So why is there sudden medias coverage of this?
I'm now doubting more and more that the politicians and medias really care about any environmental issue and that, like terrorism and pedophilia, it's used to motivate another agenda.
The problem is, unlike terrorism and pedophilia, climate change is an urgent issue that affects every single human in the world, so I really want this to be a genuine concern.
But some part of me now always wonder if somebody, somewhere, is not preparing us to invade Turkmenistan 2 years from now.
a) progress on various other sources (e.g. coal) means remaining issues move up the priority list
b) new satellite measurement techniques let us pinpoint blame, rather than do back of the envelope calculations based on educated guesses and global averages, which were bad enough but less actionable.
https://www.ghgsat.com/en/technology
2021-10-31: UN launches International Methane Emissions Observatory https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/methane-...
2022-11-11: UN announces satellite-based Methane Alert and Response System https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/un-annou...
2023-01-19: Kayrros wins contract to supply the satellite data https://www.satelliteevolution.com/post/kayrros-to-supply-un...
2023-03-06: The Guardian publishes their first(?) article about data obtained from Kayrros https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/06/revealed...
2023-05-09: The Guardian publishes the follow-up submitted to HN here.
Lots of long-running situations are like this, constantly getting reported on at a level below most people's awareness threshold, and then when you stumble across one such report, it suddenly feels like a flood. See also the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
If we survive, there'll be plenty of time to assign blame.
But right now, any and all methane emissions must be stopped, as best able.
Any and all methane emissions must be stopped, including in the US, where all US citizens reading me should use their democratic power, write to their representants by e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever to try and change the situation. Turkmenistan is a poor country with rampant corruption and therefore it's harder to hold it to the same standards as a developed one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater
Oh, and btw they don't really fly that much. Not sure which people you meant. ;)