UN sounds alarm on missing climate pledges
reuters.com
reuters.com
Am I reading that right? A major pandemic shuts everything down for a period, a lot of us are still working from home, and it didn’t make any difference? Will the U. N. soon be issuing a report declaring, “We Are All Well and Truly Screwed”?
The largest greenhouse gas emissions come from these sectors:
1. 29% Transportation: (cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes)
2. 25% Electricity (Generation)
3. 23% Industry (Factories, mining, etc)
4. 13% Commercial & Residential (Waste processing and heating homes/offices)
5. 10% Agriculture (Making food, does not count carbon sinks)
The only thing that really changed for a majority of people was commuting (cars + trains) and heating residential offices. We all still needed electricity, we kept many factories running (only pausing in a few locations), and shipping was even more prevalent (especially from online delivery services).
To reduce warming we need to do one of the following:
1. Reduce the amount of CO2 we produce below the amount existing life on Earth can consume.
2. Increase the amount of CO2 life on Earth can consume (make more living things that can photosynthesize).
3. Do both.
The lower amount of commuting probably helps quite a bit but it's only a start and wasn't really in full effect in the biggest polluters for the latter half of the pandemic.
I'm not sure what the sum of all wildfires over the year were, but I can't imagine they'd make any sort of dent compared to just burning fossil fuels.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/climate/wildfire-emission...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/25/spanx-chief-...
> The chief executive and founder of the shapewear company Spanx has surprised employees with two first-class plane tickets and $10,000 each.
The idea that massive carbon emissions are a good thing has to change. I don't think it's going to.
Nothing wrong with flying from LA to SF.
Driving 400 miles gets old pretty quick. Depending on how heavy your foot is, that's ~6 hours of driving, and along one of the most boring stretches of road (I-5) imaginable. You will also need to stop and take breaks. And if you take PCH, it's 8 hours of winding road. Do that once for fun, but not twice.
In terms of cost, a one way ticket LA to SF or vice-versa is $39. You can get those at short notice. Assuming 30 mpg at whatever high speed you will be traveling, driving the 400 miles will cost you ~13 gallons, so if gas is $3 per gallon, there's no price difference between flying and driving. And in CA, gas is $4.50 now, so you'd be crazy to drive, as that trip will cost you $60 just in terms of gas.
Your time is also valuable. If you get to the airport an a hour head, then it's 1 hour at airport, 1 hour flight, 30 min getting out of plane and picking up luggage. Let's say at most 3 hours travel time, enter SFO to exit LAX.
You can buy a business class ticket for $80. Do yourself a favor and get the business class seat and watch a movie or take a nap. You will be first to board and exit, saving time.
If you value safety, flying is much safer.
Flying from SFO to LAX and back costs 0.2 Tons of CO2. That’s more than a month of your CO2 quota if we want to limit climate change to +1.5C. CO2 budget should be 2 Tons per year to reach that goal. Currently, emissions are 15 Tons per year per capita in the US.
Fortunately, I don't have a CO2 quota, nor are we going to meet any of these targets, nor is there popular support for imposing quotas.
But if you prefer to drive to LA, that's perfectly fine with me.
But easy oil will run out eventually anyway. Your children (if you have any) will live on an overheating planet, with mass climate migrations, and very high priced oil, even for things as basic as fertilizers.
People have been worrying about Peak Oil since the 70s, and none of these dire predictions have come to pass. You would think at some point they would give up on the collapse narratives, but for a minority of people these doomsday predictions have a strong appeal. Here I include both "climate collapse" as well as oil collapse, population collapse, and any other collapse narrative in the bucket. I think we lost something when we no longer have monastaries in which people whip themselves, because it clearly meets a deep psychological need.
New technologies come online to replace old tech in terms of fossil fuel extraction, more efficient uses of fossil fuels, and replacement forms of energy as we run out. Big progress is being made in all three areas at the same time, and oil remains remarkably cheap in inflation-adjusted terms. That's not to say that 100 years from now we will keep digging fuels up from the ground and burning them. Who knows what will power the future? But something will power it.
The planes will keep flying, and they will be cheaper and more frequent than today, just as some unhappy people will keep insisting that the sky is falling. The future is one of energy abundance, and constantly improving transportation technology.
All I’m saying is that if we continue at this rate of carbon emissions, even only 10years, nevermind 30years (the time to develop and scale zero emissions planes, which has barely started) the planet will definitely see changes that won’t be nice. We are talking “Areas hosting 1B people today will see unsurvivable wet-bulb temperatures more than 100 days each year”. Mass migrations won’t be pretty.
The choice we are facing for the next 20 years is: Prepare your low carbon energy transition HARD, or prepare some damn solid walls around your country.
I am disturbed by the shoulder-shrugging attitude to mass environmental devastation.
But don't worry, this will allow you to keep warning of collapse, just around the corner, for the next forty years as well. And the forty after that.
Indeed. Notably, 40 years ago an Exxon internal report predicted a 1 degree rise in global temperature due to fossil fuel use by 2020 - and here we are, 1 degree warmer. [0]
Do you appreciate how huge 1 degree is, in 40 years? The last time the Earth was this warm was 127,000 years ago. It's enough to wreck ecosystems, and has. And it's just getting started.
>pretend that there is some sort of existential crisis.
You're speaking as if the climate isn't visibly, dramatically changing; as if huge numbers of bottom-of-the-food-chain organisms like insects and phytoplankton are not declining precipitously; indeed, as if we were not in the middle of one of the largest mass extinctions in the history of the planet - on par with the times when it got hit by huge asteroids. The scientific consensus on the severity of what is happening is unanimous. Nobody knows exactly what will happen - it's too dramatic and unprecedented - but if you're not worried, you're simply in denial.
>I'm not onboard with this extremism, and neither is the majority of the population
Certainly not true in America: "A majority of Americans continue to say they see the effects of climate change in their own communities and believe that the federal government falls short in its efforts to reduce the impacts of climate change." [1]
[0] https://xkcd.com/2500/ [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/06/23/two-thirds-of...
A one-way road trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a car with 30 MPG efficiency releases 135kg of CO2 to the athmosphere [2].
The only way out of this is to tax petrol high enough to convince people to take the bus.
[1] https://curb6.com/footprint/flights/los-angeles-lax/san-fran...
[2] https://www.distance-cities.com/distance-los-angeles-ca-to-s...
And yes, I do know how many plane trips there were. That doesn't make it right, just like that fact that a lot of people smoke doesn't make that right.
There are very few human activities that don't directly or indirectly "emit carbon".
Like it or not, civilization is not going back to the horse and buggy. At least willingly.