Well, it's a continuous spectrum of outcomes. We might have missed the "nice and livable planet without having to change much", but we're not at "Mars climate" yet.
My city banned single-use plastic bags. For a couple years they went away. Then they came back and are now 10x thicker so they can be marketed as reusable.
This is how I feel about these "reusable" bags too.
If you sell them at a checkout, you aren't making people adjust to remember to bring bags. You're just making them spend more to buy single use bags.
They definitely are accumulating enough in my house that I'm contemplating using them as bin liners, which is stupid.
But I'm probably not gonna change.
Besides, even if I brought my bags 100% of the time when I went to the store, if I ever order my groceries to be delivered, which I do when I'm super busy at work or too sick to go to the store, they seem to arrive packed into as many reusable bags as humanly possible.
So anyways, yet another thing that we should be leaning on companies to fix but individuals are being blamed for.
Paper bags would have been better but not profitable enough compared to selling "reusable" bags at the checkout line.
"plastic" is not the issue, "plastic" disposal is the issue.
"Plastic" is just too good on the $/weight/resilience ratio. Also, efficient containers like plastics (as in light and thin) reduce a lot the energy needed to transport.
And no matter what we do here with plastics, it won't matter without proper trade regulations. It will happen as it did with labour, third world countries will just pick up our share.
Third world countries use more fossil fuels, and have way worse waste management, and they don't seem to plan on improving those just like labour is cheap. Their rulers want it that way to keep on competing on price in exportations.
Without trade regulations that try to upstream some environmental regulation, all the local rules are useless
what a nice thing, instead of a plastic straw that we know how to recycle, we get "paper" with microplastics or some other new non-recycleble composite anyway.
The issue with plastics is our logistics for waste management, the common plastics are incredibly useful, but because we are shit at managing waste we are replacing plastics everywhere with worse materials that register as "evil" for the general.
You can sell "no plastic" as green, or "bio degradable": Replace a plastic with something that is not plastic even though it's still less useful and non recycleable and you can call your product "green".
Or say that it's biodegradable, which nowadays anything that doesn't take decades to decompose classifies, so you can have all the nasty stuff, including the very famous "micro plastics" in there and be green.
There are so many rich kids in their "first world problems" that are activists and speak in conferences, that you can go to some in theory "respectable" climate conference and one talk be all about the evils of microplastic and the other about how we should use decomposable plastic (yeah, guess what it decomposes to?).
The whole Green conversation is controlled by either privileged activists that clearly do not have a related STEM degree, or marketing/campaign departments calling anything "green"/good for the environment, pure manipulation.
We've done a lot more than nothing. Just yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35965186. There were 10 million EV's sold in 2022, and that value is increasing by about 50% a year.
The rate of increase in CO2 emissions is now negative. If it stays negative, that means that soon annual CO2 emissions will start decreasing.
More concretely, we're on track for 3 - 4 degrees of warming. Way too much, but if we didn't do anything, we'd be hitting 6 or more degrees of warming.
I am unsure how to respond to your comment: on one hand you contend that we are doing something, on the other you accept that emissions are too high and growing...
We've been "about" to do something for decades now. A Cynic might suspect the only reason the rate of increase has fallen is Covid (since the last figures are 2021/2022). And even with that, the problem is (a) getting worse and (b) getting worse rapidly. It's just that the 2nd differential has fallen. Like if we were driving off a cliff, but stopped accelerating, we'd still be going rapidly in the wrong direction...
The second derivative went very slightly negative in 2015, well before COVID.
The narrative pushed by many is that we need some sort of deus ex machina to save us -- nuclear or hydrogen or the overthrow of capitalism or killing off 90% of the world's population or something.
That's BS. We know what the problem is, we know how to fix it and we are fixing it, just too slowly. No magic solution, just a lot of hard work. Keep doing what we're doing, but do more of it, and faster.
I disagree I am afraid. We DO need a very large change.
That does not mean we will get one. I actually think we will just adapt (as best as we are able). Remember: the change required is a matter of physics and economics. That change being politically or morally unacceptable would not make it any less necessary.
But by your own admission we have do everything we are willing to do (and had a pandemic), and barely touched the 2nd differential. That's the opposite of progress (it's continued progress in the wrong direction). At this rate, we will still be decades from sustainable emissions long after I am dead (and the earth has warmed beyond liveability)
In the EU, the politicians either bought into the new age BS in an hopeless move to gather votes for the more honest ones or straight up got money from Russia to turn a blind eye for the others.
Nuclear is not the only option and far from sufficient unless you want a nuclear reactor in your cellar heating your home and would like billions of Ford Nucleons on the street.
We could also have taken action decades back without nuclear. That we didn't isn't the fault of either the pro or the anti-nuclear lobby. Both are insignificant compared to the pro-fossil lobby.
Since you are focused on fossil fuels you can take a stand and avoid any products that are derived from Fossil fuels like non-EV vehicles, Grid based electricity, Plastics, lipsticks, deodorants, fossil fuel based medicines and medical devices, lubricant, waxes, tar for roads, nylon, polyester etc
I am sure you will set an example for all of us to follow by cutting yourself of Fossil Fuel based products completely.
I just suggested Nuclear as it could have been a viable option.
And saved Humanity to an extent till we figured out a solution.
But, Good ideas don't stand the test of silly American politics.
Do keep us updated about your journey avoiding Fossil-fuel products.
Why are you reacting like this? It is generally agreed upon that climate change is bad. Stopping the use of fossil fuels is the only way to stop it from getting worse. I really don't care how we do, I just want it done. It's too late to start with nuclear now, so it's a bit silly to discuss what we could've done sixty years ago.
Because taking an extreme position saying Fossil Fuels are bad and stop using them is the best solution doesn't work.
Sure, they are bad. But as of today the products derived from fossil fuels are irreplaceable.
Like the list of products I listed earlier.
Unless of course, entire society is willing to give up on these products to save the world.
Sadly, that's not ever going to happen. People and society work towards short term benefits.
The challenge with saving the environment is people get stuck in these 'my way or the highway' solutions.
No space for any middle ground.
No compromise.
Every possible solution gets an opposition.
Because there is probably no perfect solution. Yet.
Nuclear was not the only solution. It 'could have' helped.
So can solar, wind and whatever.
We can still start working on implementing solutions that improve things.
But we get stuck on asking for the impossible, and if that doesn't get done, we don't consider any other solution.
Whenever work starts on something, you will get a news article having an issue with that and suggesting something altogether different.
All noise. No results.
Buddy, there is no room for compromise. Either we stop emitting CO2 soon or the climate is fucked beyond recognition. There is no middle ground. Obviously to way to stop emitting CO2 is not to ask everyone to live in mud huts and do subsistence agriculture from now on. Literally nobody proposes that.
>Either we stop emitting CO2 soon or the climate is fucked beyond recognition.
Most would agree with this. Even school kids tell us that we should do this.
The question to be answered is the 'How' ?
Please do enlighten me, how do you propose to stop using fossil fuel without giving up on energy needs of billions and derivative products like plastics and other things which are essential to humanity ?
Since last 4-5 comments you are saying that we should stop using Fossil Fuels.
Great. Please explain the path forward.
Notice the fusion reactor in the sky? It provides us with essentially unlimited energy. We can synthesize all the hydrocarbons we need from water and carbon dioxide with it.
Schrodingers Eco-Activist: All powerful internationally when it comes to stopping nuclear, completely impotent at stopping basically any CO2e source or other pollution...
Fine as in trying the warm waters of the tropical beach Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station? Or fine as in the memorial of the country once known as the Netherlands?
Right. But what if you've been told that wall is in ten feet, but you go eleven feet and hit nothing. Then you're told, no just three more feet and you'll hit the wall and you go four and hit nothing.
Then your told, well it's less of a wall and more of a curb and it's in five feet. You go ten feet and still hit nothing.
When the wall was ten feet away, the wall was "nothing changes", ca 0° warming. Then the wall was 1° warming, then 1.5°, ... We're still accelerating towards 3-5° warming. Coral reefs for example are already doomed, there is nothing we can do to save them. A degree or two more and highly populated areas will become either too hot to live or too dry for agriculture. Then the wars for water and land start.
No, coral reefs are not fine. Rising water temperature will kill coral over the next decades. We already emitted enough CO2 to raise temperatures beyond what coral can tolerate. The current state of the reef has nothing to do with it.
Easy to write in front of a computer probably from a first world country with enough money not being affected in a way that this threatens your life, ey?
But hey who cares that this is not globally true?
I'm also having the opinion that I prefer to have it slightly less good but making sure kids and their kids (it's only two generations ahead) have a better outcome.
Reality is everyone wants to save the environment, no one wants to sacrifice for it.
They justify their indulgence in consumerism and wastage by saying they bought something eco friendly.
I have been saying to my friends for at least 15 years that if they really cared about the environment flushing the toilete using drinkable water and having two showers a day was probably the most stupid thing people could do to not save it.
I've been called names for the past 15 years, until influencers started advocating for cooking pasta using cold water to save energy or selling your old clothes on vinted to make their life longer and everyone is now on board with all that stupid sh*t.
I believe we mostly deserve what's happening and that it's not as bad as it looks, if people won't come out better from this, than we'll have proof that extinction is the solution.
Except the majority of the people on the planet did not contribute in a meaningful way and maybe it's time we put them in charge, instead of us.
We clearly failed when it actually mattered.
OTOH I also strongly believe it's not in human nature to sacrifice, we are good at adapting and that's what we'll do, we'll live in a worse environment for our life but we'll survive and we'll be mostly content nonetheless.
If I had actually had the power to make necessary changes, I would. I hold governments, legacy industries and an “establishment” shareholder class responsible for not being able to make sacrifices. My discussion isn’t going to change anything, increasing extreme weather events might, but so far it seems mostly business as usual.
Not sure how they come up with the numbers for tourism. 100,000 flights a day, every day of the year add up to 2-2.5% of emissions for example.
I suppose if you take a gas powered taxi, stay in a hotel that gets energy from fossil fuels, buy souvenirs that are made in factories that use fossil fuels, …
Are you getting the point?
If you don’t take a trip and stay home with the heat and lights on, drive your gas car, buy other things from other factories powered by fossil fuel, …
Fix the root of the problem and many of the issues go away.
Then we can stop having these stupid conversations. As was explained half a century ago when the world population was half of today’s 8 billion: “sacrificing won’t fix the problem”
This goes directly against the prevailing policy frameworks of western governments, as well as the current media zeitgeist, which the majority of the population has bought into.
So, I don't think anything like deglobalizaton is possible unless populist leaders have a comeback.
Western leaders then are in a state of contradiction "Climate change is an existential threat, yet we must continue the frictionless global movement of goods and people"
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[ 44.1 ms ] story [ 3267 ms ] threadhttps://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/global-tempera...
There is no solution in sight for us - it's way too late.
If you sell them at a checkout, you aren't making people adjust to remember to bring bags. You're just making them spend more to buy single use bags.
They definitely are accumulating enough in my house that I'm contemplating using them as bin liners, which is stupid.
But I'm probably not gonna change.
Besides, even if I brought my bags 100% of the time when I went to the store, if I ever order my groceries to be delivered, which I do when I'm super busy at work or too sick to go to the store, they seem to arrive packed into as many reusable bags as humanly possible.
So anyways, yet another thing that we should be leaning on companies to fix but individuals are being blamed for.
Paper bags would have been better but not profitable enough compared to selling "reusable" bags at the checkout line.
"Plastic" is just too good on the $/weight/resilience ratio. Also, efficient containers like plastics (as in light and thin) reduce a lot the energy needed to transport.
And no matter what we do here with plastics, it won't matter without proper trade regulations. It will happen as it did with labour, third world countries will just pick up our share.
Third world countries use more fossil fuels, and have way worse waste management, and they don't seem to plan on improving those just like labour is cheap. Their rulers want it that way to keep on competing on price in exportations.
Without trade regulations that try to upstream some environmental regulation, all the local rules are useless
what a nice thing, instead of a plastic straw that we know how to recycle, we get "paper" with microplastics or some other new non-recycleble composite anyway.
The issue with plastics is our logistics for waste management, the common plastics are incredibly useful, but because we are shit at managing waste we are replacing plastics everywhere with worse materials that register as "evil" for the general.
You can sell "no plastic" as green, or "bio degradable": Replace a plastic with something that is not plastic even though it's still less useful and non recycleable and you can call your product "green". Or say that it's biodegradable, which nowadays anything that doesn't take decades to decompose classifies, so you can have all the nasty stuff, including the very famous "micro plastics" in there and be green.
There are so many rich kids in their "first world problems" that are activists and speak in conferences, that you can go to some in theory "respectable" climate conference and one talk be all about the evils of microplastic and the other about how we should use decomposable plastic (yeah, guess what it decomposes to?).
The whole Green conversation is controlled by either privileged activists that clearly do not have a related STEM degree, or marketing/campaign departments calling anything "green"/good for the environment, pure manipulation.
The rate of increase in CO2 emissions is now negative. If it stays negative, that means that soon annual CO2 emissions will start decreasing.
More concretely, we're on track for 3 - 4 degrees of warming. Way too much, but if we didn't do anything, we'd be hitting 6 or more degrees of warming.
We've been "about" to do something for decades now. A Cynic might suspect the only reason the rate of increase has fallen is Covid (since the last figures are 2021/2022). And even with that, the problem is (a) getting worse and (b) getting worse rapidly. It's just that the 2nd differential has fallen. Like if we were driving off a cliff, but stopped accelerating, we'd still be going rapidly in the wrong direction...
The narrative pushed by many is that we need some sort of deus ex machina to save us -- nuclear or hydrogen or the overthrow of capitalism or killing off 90% of the world's population or something.
That's BS. We know what the problem is, we know how to fix it and we are fixing it, just too slowly. No magic solution, just a lot of hard work. Keep doing what we're doing, but do more of it, and faster.
That does not mean we will get one. I actually think we will just adapt (as best as we are able). Remember: the change required is a matter of physics and economics. That change being politically or morally unacceptable would not make it any less necessary.
But by your own admission we have do everything we are willing to do (and had a pandemic), and barely touched the 2nd differential. That's the opposite of progress (it's continued progress in the wrong direction). At this rate, we will still be decades from sustainable emissions long after I am dead (and the earth has warmed beyond liveability)
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/population-g....
At present it still seems that we are doing very little relative to the risks and costs. Far less than seems prudent.
There are 1.5 billion cars in the world, and people keep them for over 10 years on average.
1.5C is inevitable this decade, and we’ve known about the problem for half a century.
I’d say we haven’t done much.
In the US?
But Greenpeace and other eco activists were outright against Nuclear.
Now we are still depending on Coal and Fossil Fuels.
So much for saving the environment.
What have they done about going Nuclear ? https://environmentalprogress.org/the-war-on-nuclear
I said we could have taken action decades back when we had the Nuclear technology.
Not sure why you think one needs a Nuclear Reactor in their house.
Anyways, I guess Nuclear sceptics know best. And thus, here we are winning over Global Warming.
I am sure you will set an example for all of us to follow by cutting yourself of Fossil Fuel based products completely.
I just suggested Nuclear as it could have been a viable option. And saved Humanity to an extent till we figured out a solution. But, Good ideas don't stand the test of silly American politics.
Do keep us updated about your journey avoiding Fossil-fuel products.
Sure, they are bad. But as of today the products derived from fossil fuels are irreplaceable. Like the list of products I listed earlier. Unless of course, entire society is willing to give up on these products to save the world. Sadly, that's not ever going to happen. People and society work towards short term benefits.
The challenge with saving the environment is people get stuck in these 'my way or the highway' solutions.
No space for any middle ground. No compromise.
Every possible solution gets an opposition. Because there is probably no perfect solution. Yet.
Nuclear was not the only solution. It 'could have' helped. So can solar, wind and whatever.
We can still start working on implementing solutions that improve things. But we get stuck on asking for the impossible, and if that doesn't get done, we don't consider any other solution.
Whenever work starts on something, you will get a news article having an issue with that and suggesting something altogether different. All noise. No results.
Most would agree with this. Even school kids tell us that we should do this. The question to be answered is the 'How' ?
Please do enlighten me, how do you propose to stop using fossil fuel without giving up on energy needs of billions and derivative products like plastics and other things which are essential to humanity ?
Since last 4-5 comments you are saying that we should stop using Fossil Fuels. Great. Please explain the path forward.
Have a good day.
I am pretty sure I haven't done anything to make things as bad as they are.
So in a way I have spent 40 years doing nothing, true, but that nothing was actually good.
What observable deterioration would you bet on?
I 100% agree our goose is cooked someday, in probably another 1,000 years and for some other reason.
- You lose you are supposed to pay me up to 1K of what will be of highly devalued currency on a crashed planet.
- You win you got a planet still running despite tearing it to pieces.
The moment climate change affects you personally will be already too late to do anything about it.
Then your told, well it's less of a wall and more of a curb and it's in five feet. You go ten feet and still hit nothing.
I guess some people will always be Charle Brown.
And yes, cities get hotter and dryer as they make ever more blacktop and dump all their rain water into the ocean.
But hey who cares that this is not globally true?
I'm also having the opinion that I prefer to have it slightly less good but making sure kids and their kids (it's only two generations ahead) have a better outcome.
https://smartdestination.travel/impact-of-climate-change-on-....
Reality is everyone wants to save the environment, no one wants to sacrifice for it. They justify their indulgence in consumerism and wastage by saying they bought something eco friendly.
Yeah, right. That's going to fix everything.
I have been saying to my friends for at least 15 years that if they really cared about the environment flushing the toilete using drinkable water and having two showers a day was probably the most stupid thing people could do to not save it.
I've been called names for the past 15 years, until influencers started advocating for cooking pasta using cold water to save energy or selling your old clothes on vinted to make their life longer and everyone is now on board with all that stupid sh*t.
I believe we mostly deserve what's happening and that it's not as bad as it looks, if people won't come out better from this, than we'll have proof that extinction is the solution.
Except the majority of the people on the planet did not contribute in a meaningful way and maybe it's time we put them in charge, instead of us.
We clearly failed when it actually mattered.
OTOH I also strongly believe it's not in human nature to sacrifice, we are good at adapting and that's what we'll do, we'll live in a worse environment for our life but we'll survive and we'll be mostly content nonetheless.
I suppose if you take a gas powered taxi, stay in a hotel that gets energy from fossil fuels, buy souvenirs that are made in factories that use fossil fuels, …
Are you getting the point?
If you don’t take a trip and stay home with the heat and lights on, drive your gas car, buy other things from other factories powered by fossil fuel, …
Fix the root of the problem and many of the issues go away.
Then we can stop having these stupid conversations. As was explained half a century ago when the world population was half of today’s 8 billion: “sacrificing won’t fix the problem”
So, I don't think anything like deglobalizaton is possible unless populist leaders have a comeback.