Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout
pubs.acs.org
pubs.acs.org
Along some particularly leaky production paths methane emissions are so great that the impact is greater than coal over 100 year timescale. For example, some parts of NM Permian have a 9% (!) leakage rate. When combusted methane releases about half the amount of CO2 that coal does. The eGHG potential of methane is 20x CO2 over 100 year timescale, so you have to add 180% to the total GHG potential, making it 40% worse than coal w/o even considering other leakage along the pipeline.
https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/methane-leaks-are-f...
Its fine to assert that a single number doesn't capture the nuances of the situation. But we have to keep in mind that
1) the heat trapped by the methane stays trapped even after it has decayed
2) methane concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing significantly faster than co2
3) the more methane in the atmosphere the slower its rate of decay
Not really. It would be present, but not trapped. Absent other factors, that would mean earth is above its equilibrium temperature and would cool once methane loss permits it to radiate heat more effectively. Either that or it shoots us in the face with a clathrate gun. There's really only one way to find out.
2) In terms of impact on climate the difference from 1990 to 2024 is mostly from CO2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#/media/Fil...
3) It’s nonlinear, increasing methane concentrations also benefit methane scavenging bacteria which should increase the rate of breakdown as concentrations increase. OH only lasts around 1 second in the atmosphere so in theory it should be depleted by increasing atmospheric methane, but methane is only one of several things it reacts with so the difference is minimal without orders of magnitude change in Methane.
Finding the optimal amount of regulation seems difficult. It seems like too blunt an instrument. Incentives are no substitute for technical people who want to do what's right.
The incentives are all messed up. We should do some combination of making these jobs more attractive and making those relatively extractive jobs less attractive.
Commercial enterprises at least can face some competition! But with infrastructure like last-mile gas pipelines, it's tricky, and the companies end up being local monopolies. Hence the trouble: a monopoly has very different incentives than a company actually competing on the market.
It just got worse as they passed more and more of it into investor pockets.
Isn't both ends of a pipe metered? Even if not every pope is metered, at the very least there should be metering at the point of bulk purchase (eg. from a LNG ship) to the end user (gas meter at a home). How hard is it to compare how much is put into the pipe vs how much comes out?
But you are right that regulation is the answer, although personally I think direct leak detection is more realistic than measuring gas flows accurately in a system that's already built around low accuracy metering.
Its easy to say that anything is 'too expensive' when the regulatory bar is set so low that it doesn't exist.
Edit: And current turbine and aperture flow meters cost hundreds.
> Even if not every pope is metered, at the very least there should be metering at the point of bulk purchase (eg. from a LNG ship) to the end user (gas meter at a home).
Presumably that would be good news if you could reduce the emissions to the level they thought they were.
• About 149,714 short-haul flights, or
• About 37,429 long-haul flights.Weird use of segmented flight lengths as a comparator
From what I read, we can expect a 1 degree increase if we release somewhere in the ballpark of 100 billion tons of CO2. Using those figures, 3.93 megatons is 0.0000393 degrees.
As a point of comparison, humans release roughly 40 gigatons of CO2 per year; 3.93 megatons is 0.0098% of that.
As another point of comparison, around 550 gigatons of CO2 is released (and absorbed) by the planet "naturally". 3.93 megatons is 0.0007% of that.
So we are currently within 20% of what the planet does naturally, which seems not that bad actually.
So in reality, the important thing is we're going from a delta of 0 gigatons of CO2 per year, to a delta of +40 gigatons of CO2 per year.
The amount of methane they leak is estimated to be gigantic, but without full coverage we'll never know.
What do you think will happen next? What will happen is Brazil will start planning for it, and then they'll be fine. There will be an adjustment period, and then, life goes on.
Like literally it’s already too expensive to keep doing it without a massive funnel of taxpayer money into peoples beach houses. It’s literally only viable to keep doing that by leeching off the largesse of the taxpayer and other homeowners in less dangerous locales.
Florida also has the additional problem that it’s literally built on karst topology, it’s limestone riddled with tunnels and sinkholes so water comes right up under it, you can’t even pump the cities dry like the Netherlands.
With >300 AQIs in most highly-populated areas, dirty water from rivers almost all of which are hazardously polluted, combined with a tropical climate that's already hot enough to kill thousands of people from heatstroke alone in summers - pollution-related misery in US and Europe isn't anywhere close enough to that in India. It just doesn't get called out because Indians have bigger existential concerns (many of which go directly against climate-friendliness).
....until the migrations.
- a noticeable and rapid dip in emissions has proven to be viable due to COVID lockdowns
- Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced Europe and the US to accelerate plans to diversify energy generation away from natural gas
- China’s insanely rapid growth in green energy production domestically
It seems like 2022 CO2 levels are near 2019 CO2 levels[1], which is impressive.
Imagine if you had $1,000,0000 in your bank account and were spending $100,000 per year, except one year you spent $95,000. That's 2020.
This methane news is on top of CO2 as it has its own added impact. Proper optimism that we can do it first requires taking stock of where we actually are. So far we haven't actually displaced any carbon energy and we are at the all time highest levels of both annually emissions and also CO2 in the atmosphere.
Chart of total CO2 concentration over time: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
2020 was a 5% dip in the pace of the increase. It's like someone gained ten pounds in 2019, 9.5 pounds in 2020, and 10 pounds in 2021. CO2 emissions are analogous to a total gain, so a 5% one off cut isn't very meaningful.
It's even worse, because there's positive feedback loops we've probably unlocked (mainly artic and tropical methane).
So it's more like every year you put $100K on a credit card with high interest rate with continually compounding interest.*
Even if we stopped spending tomorrow, the debt will continue to grow exponentially.
*And the card is owned by a mob boss that will blow your brains out when your debt exceeds your bank balance.
In that, the world is certainly not going to end, and maybe it's helpful to look at some data that trends positive in order to inspire hope. But we are committed now to living in a world that will be radically different and less pleasant for a lot of people. How fast these trends improve will determine the scope and magnitude of degraded pleasentness.
Regardless of any change, more extreme weather events more frequently will become more normal. The socioeconomic impacts that are likely to be the most jarring in the global north will probably surface from migration pressure as people from the global south are displaced due to heat and sea level rise.
It is optimistic to think that we'll be on track for 2 degrees of warming, let alone 1.5. At this point, the quiet part just starting to be said out loud is that we'll never hit 1.5. We'll probably never achieve any semblance of the paris agreement goals.
And even as we approach 2 degrees, 2050 looks hotter and more extreme than anything humans have ever experienced in the past.
Probably one of the only short term options between now and 2100 will be solar radiation management -- a largely untested tech that is surely a terrible outcome.
I'm just summarizing the latest IPCC synthesis report [1]. Adding a bit of editorialization in perceived outcomes. One of the most conservative organizations on earth, their assessment is bleak: systems are already permanently damaged, and they're likely to become more so in the near-to-distant future.
My goal is not to make anyone reading despondent. I just think these kind of short snipes of perceived positive trends bury the reality of the situation that we are living through.
If the goal is to assure us that the world's not going to end, it's quite a low bar to set. And there's quite a gradient of suffering between.
Committed?
We will have extra energy for carbon capture on the next decade. This is a problem we can solve. Not before it gets worse, but we can stop it from being permanent.
That is, direct air carbon capture means investing an amount on the order of the value of the existing fossile fuel infrastructure to spend energy to achieve nothing of value (except offsetting the damage we caused by not switching to renewables earlier).
It's a complete nonstarter. Only a vehicle used by the fossile industry to delay the transition.
But I guess, no, that's impossible!
Regarding energy transitions and carbon capture:
> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.
I personally care more about avoiding millions dying of starvation but you do you. I understand that said millions being mostly in Nigeria and India make some in the west care less about them that cute animals, but still.
One day, maybe not so long in future as many may think, our descendants will judge us as primitive barbaric savages. And they will be mostly right.
"According to the IPCC’s Working Group III report, carbon capture is one of the least-effective, most-expensive climate change mitigation options on Earth."
"Even today, some projects already operating around the world have not been as successful as planned. In Australia, the CCS project run by Chevron has not yet made its Gorgon project meet its target of 80% carbon dioxide capture.
A recent report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) on two Norwegian projects that store carbon dioxide under the seabed called into question the long-term viability of CCS."
"There are currently 42 operational commercial CCS and CCUS projects across the world with the capacity to store 49 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to the Global CCS Institute, which tracks the industry. That is about 0.13% of the world’s roughly 37 billion metric tons of annual energy and industry-related carbon dioxide emissions."
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/03/20/opinion/carbon-c...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/01/is-carbo...
Maybe it's time to put a billion or two into testing all these untested techs then.
Are you running for president of the US? What do you think would happen to either candidate if they made this central their platform in today's political environment?
Spoiler: rich old people will not suffer, if anything, they'll just stop moving to Florida and Arizona.
I am not saying it will be easy to build it, or cheap, or without any drawbacks, but...
It is physically possible to generate energy by cooling the planet.
Its cold in space, its cold up there. To run a heat engine you need 2 temperature baths at different temperatures.
Lets take for the higher temperature our surface temperature, and for the lower temperature the temperature at or slightly above the tropopause (say 11 km above surface, somewhere between polar and equatorial regions).
At that height temperatures might be say -50 deg C.
Now consider the following engineering challenge: a buoyant vessel holds taut ~12 km "atmosphere elevator", made of SCG (single crystal graphene). Along such cables could be suspended chimneys made of light fabric, or perhaps pipes conveying coolant up and down, ...
As a thought exercise: suppose the hook floating in the tropopause/bottom of stratosphere is used to heave up and down buckets of water (the same number of buckes going up and down, so apart from friction this transport costs no energy (think of a pulley).
as the water travels up it freezes, giving off heat at a higher layer, closer to dark cold space where it would end up anyway eventually, as the ice is lowered it absorbs heat from the lower layers. If the water/ice buckets were insulated, and only brought in thermal contact at the top or bottom of the structure, then it would dump the heat at the top only, above the CO2 and water blanket where it can more easily escape to space, and it would absorb heat only at the bottom. This means we could run a heat engine at the surface generating energy, without proliferation concerns (because when we do it its for energy, but when others do it it must be for weapons, or for gaining experience requisite for weapons)...
It's been "last month" for the last 12 months at least. Basically, we've hit the J curve.
The "extraordinarily significant events" you cite amount to little more than a guy who jumped off a bridge thinking: "you know, I think I've changed my mind".
(And yet, we just bought $700 of seedlings and I spent my birthday, and many other days planting them. It's not a pointless exercise, it will improve things in my little corner, but it won't materially affect anything either).
Unfortunately, yes, even after we hit a plateau of emissions, we’re going to see effects.
The important bit is that, yes, we are seeing changes, and yes, we are seeing dreadful environment effects, we’re making progress to slow this down.
We’re fortunate that the last few years gave us excuses to shift policy that otherwise would’ve had us keep going down this path for another decade+.
I would certainly hope those pushing the “doomerism” takes in this thread do not work for any AI companies, cloud computing, NVIDIA, or other organization responsible for insane datacenter power growth this past year.
funny how that never gets brought up in articles about RTO mandates
But the things to do to try to avert looming disaster are the same things to do to be a better person in times of no crisis.
Be kind and loving, develop compassion. That's pretty much it.
The point is not to make it or not. Entropy is the enemy and it will win in the end. So what? No one here gets out alive. The point is to be a better person, to help others, to make things better.
If we are going to make it we will make it though love and compassion.
If we don't make it, then at least we didn't waste the time we had.
I fundamentally and vociferously disagree. The point is to ensure sapience and intelligence survive the heat death of the universe.
Anyway, intelligence without love is less than pointless.
Humans aren't likely to die out directly, although scenarios where it all seems a bit pointless and the remaining few million humans stop reproducing are plausible.
If we want to be alright, we'll probably want to start reducing the cattle headcount.
You know that the extinction rate of species (which includes animals) is running at approximately 200 per day.
Unless you mean the vast majority of animals in the sense of numbers of individual animals, instead of diversity of species, then maybe you're right: the vast majority will be fine as the biomass of domestic animals now outweight the biomass of every other species.
The good news is, while we may not be able to prevent climate change, we are not powerless against it.
The Dutch know how to win the fight against sea level rise.
Middle Eastern architecture knows how to keep people cool even with >50°C air temperatures.
The Canadians know how to winterize an electric grid.
Sure, we may not have the optimal strategy for addressing some threats, like wildfires, right now, but the point is, we are not alone, and we are not helpless.
Countless human lives can be saved if we're willing to work together.
China and India emit significantly less CO2 per capita than Western Europe and the US [0] - and that's ignoring the fact they do all of our manufacturing.
[0] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
On the other hand, there's no reason to think that an increase in the number of countries is a valid excuse to increase emissions.
It's true that if a country splits into two countries, that doesn't give them a right to emit more collectively. However, it does mean that each country now has little control over what the other one does, and less ability to actually solve the collective problem we want solving, which was the objective here.
I’m not sure how better to dice up emissions then by consumption per person, and by that measure the US is clearly emitting the most
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
Conversely China is doing the most about emissions
> China commissioned as much solar PV as the entire world did in 2022, while its wind additions also grew by 66% year-on-year.
https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2023/executive-summar...
But why do you want to "slice up" emissions at all, if you're interested in reducing them? The problem is a big load of gas. So identify the biggest emitters (in total volume) with the most control over it. Don't say "oh San Marino, you're a really greedy country, with all your tax haven shenanigans and conspicuous consumption and more cars than people, you're the problem", because they really aren't. They may be really awful, but that wasn't the question and isn't something it's viable to fix, nor are they capable of helping more than minutely, unlike a giant authoritarian state with giant emissions, capable of helping a lot. And perhaps, as you point out, already doing so.
Yep. And their coal plants are less and less needed. They are essentially becoming peakers (in the same manner as many modern gas plants) for when the sun don't shine and the wind stops blowing. But in terms of the biggest producers of coal, Australia punches above its weight, but rarely does anyone single it out in these discussions. They also are the second biggest per-capita consumers in terms of CO2 emissions.
Our (Australia's) fuckwit right-wing politicians love to blame climate change on China and the USA, because their absolute emissions are way higher than ours and "we emit less than 1% of the world's emissions" so us taking the first step is pointless (says THEM).
Also, because our coal is relatively clean they say that stopping coal mining would actually make emissions worse, because then everyone would just switch to much more polluting foreign coal.
Every American in this thread who says "<China/India> have the most emissions, they need to reduce their CO2 output" needs to understand that the same logic can be and is used against them to justify us doing fuck-all about the climate. Stop enabling our fuckwits!
I'd say that per capita emissions is a reasonable measure of scoring how much a country and its people are doing to make climate change worse (or better). And, while not perfectly so, it does a reasonable job as being an actionable metric for how sustainable a country's standard of living is. "America (14.4 t/cap/yr) should try to be more like Japan (8.6 t/cap/yr)" is a reasonable take on how the US can reduce its per-capita emissions, and what changes might take it there. "America (4.8 Gt/yr) should try to be more like the United Arab Emirates (220 Mt/yr)" ends up being rather bad advice.
And while the standard of living in Iceland is quite nice, I doubt that there's any practical way that either China or the United States could reduce their emissions to that level (3.5 Mt/yr) in the short term without millions of people starving to death in the process. It wouldn't be realistic or fair for Iceland to demand that the US cut its emissions to Icelandic levels on an absolute basis (but very fair and reasonable to demand that the US cut to Icelandic levels on a per-capita basis).
In terms of how much responsibility a government has, well... certainly governments that govern more people do have more leverage, and with larger total emissions, there are more opportunities to cut. But if there is any non-zero level that we may consider an acceptable emissions target, surely this level should be proportional to a country's population. And when it comes to international agreements, it's reasonable to ask China and India to make cuts, and it's very reasonable for China and India to say "OK we'll make cuts, but we expect small rich countries like Canada to pull their weight, and if they don't, we won't either".
And when that happens, per-capita emissions is the only sensible way to gauge if those countries are pulling their weight.
There are, after all, a lot of countries, and while the top four (China, US, India, Russia) emit 57% of the total, the rest emit the other 43% of that total, with no single country among them emitting over 2.9%. Even cutting China, the US, India, and Russia's emissions to zero would only cut global emissions in about half, and that's really still not enough to solve the problem, so the little countries will have to pitch in.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/population-and-demograp...
It seems that many people in the comments are set on demonizing the country. For this I think better points to raise are the ethnic cleansing of the Uyghur 'reeducation' program, or the usurping of peaceful autonomous neighbors like Tibet and Hong Kong (maybe Taiwan later). But none of this has anything to do with obligations around CO2 emissions, which they are addressing more than any country on the planet, as I've commented elsewhere:
India has also decreased extreme poverty, down to 2% in 2023. At $3.20/day, they declined to 21%. At $5.50, they are at 81%. Most people are poor, but less poor than they were.
Any estimate of how much that constitutes? Like if US and EU had to produce themselves all the stuff they now get from China, how would their CO2 emissions change?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-co2-embedded-in-tra...
Trade adjusted emissions per capita
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-ghg-emissions?...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
We can play semantic games with per-capita consumption, but the fact of the matter remains that even if the entirety of the planet, except China and India, went 100% carbon neutral overnight, it would still be impossible to avoid hitting catastrophic climate change thresholds due to GHG emissions from those two countries alone.
They are both countries home to a rapidly rising broad middle class, and that middle class is going to want to enjoy the spoils of materialistic consumerism (the true root cause of human-induced climate change) just as much as our grandparents did, our parents did, and we do.
Of all the countries China is doing the most to curb its emissions.
> Global annual renewable capacity additions increased by almost 50% to nearly 510 gigawatts (GW) in 2023, the fastest growth rate in the past two decades. [..] In 2023, China commissioned as much solar PV as the entire world did in 2022, while its wind additions also grew by 66% year-on-year. Globally, solar PV alone accounted for three-quarters of renewable capacity additions worldwide.
https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2023/executive-summar...
The western world is shifting away from China to India and the rest of Asia for manufacturing, so I think the desire for cheaper products and ‘national security’ are going to increase emissions somewhat. But even still, with the glut of renewables, and soon the glut of batteries, emissions free energy is going to be the cheapest option for manufacturing anyway
False. They have good green PR to justify other governments funneling taxpayer money via subsidies but meanwhile they are building the most coal plants than any country and this has been only ramping up in recent years with more new fossil fuel power plants being approved year on year.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-responsible-for-95-of-new-...
As I've explained in another comment, adding power stations and capacity doesn't mean running 100% all year. China is using coal as peakers much like other countries use gas for this purpose. Given that China is also installing the most energy storage, it's not long (at current growth, less than 10 years) before these plants are only used in emergency situations.
> literally no one uses coal as peaker ever
While these plants might be strained by having to adjust their output, they don’t need to have a long lifespan. On the current growth curve, 10 years max and batteries have taken over.
As for China building things that are redundant, look at the ghost cities. Their local governments are incentivized to hit quotas, and it ends up with useless crap being built
I linked to sources about the number of coal plants being built before (eg https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-responsible-for-95-of-new-...), it's not controversial data.
You claimed "they are peaking plants". This is obviously wrong (how many peaking coal power plants are anywhere in the world, I'd be surprised if there's even one) and you have not provided any sources.
At any rate, the data plainly shows that the percentage share of renewable electricity in China is going up. I've never denied that coal plants are being built in China, but the data shows that China is using renewables in preference to other sources of energy, with a very clear and sustained growth rate.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-renewab...
And if you're still unconvinced, this article by Hannah Ritchie details the phenomenon much better than I can regurgitate it here.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants
And that's it from me. Feel free to have the last word.
They ban coal burning in houses and they move plants out of big cities where tourists go but they still build more and more plants. "oh but they'll use them less surely and burn less coal" would be great but sounds rosy
> using renewables in preference to other sources of energy, with a very clear and sustained growth rate.
Note that it's for electricity. How is it calculated? If it's used to power their pump based water energy storage then does it count? If it's used to heat then does it count? Does it rely on CCP provided metrics here while pollution, coal plants and fossil burning can be measured independently (just look at satellite based pollution map)
China "doing the most" to curb emissions is perfectly compatible with them "doing the most" of the actual emissions. At high enough scales, no matter what you're doing, you'll be doing "the most" of it, in both directions.
What matters at the end of the day is emissions in absolute terms.
> that middle class is going to want to enjoy the spoils of materialistic consumerism (the true root cause of human-induced climate change) just as much as our grandparents did, our parents did, and we do.
The last 3 words is key there. WE also don't want to give up those spoils. And we want to enjoy them by outsourcing their production to the cheapest places and cheapest methods, like unsafe mining of minerals done by underpaid children. But hey, it's not happening in our country, so we're fine?
If a phone is made with minerals mined using safe Western mining standards, and made by factory workers earning decent wages, and it's CO2 neutral, and so on, it'll be more expensive, and will not sell well, because as long as there's another country producing the same phone but without all those "external" costs, the consumer will say "Look, this phone has the exact same specs but is way cheaper!".
In reality it is government's choice, to go for short term riches and maintaining power or act more ethically and think long term. And consumers pay more all the time for things like "no slave labour" (idk how well it's enforced, I just say it's a value), "ethically sourced materials", "recycled", "no spying malware", blahblahblah, just look at Android vs iPhone.
On average, the "sane" choice is to go for the cheapest option, or turn a blind eye to the child labor, etc.
Sure, some people want to live ethically and minimize their emissions, but there's not enough of them.
> In reality it is government's choice, to go for short term riches and maintaining power or act more ethically and think long term.
Yeah, Macron tried to tax fuel more and there were widespread protests by "average French citizen", and he got metaphorically beaten up in the last election. The EU incumbents watered down green projects because of fear of losing to the rightwing populists. It's the sane choice for them to make, because I'd rather be governed by the somewhat sane center-right than lying manipulative populist hard-right, but the sane choice meant stepping away from the path of an ecological future. The summary is, if you try to be ethical, you get voted out of office, god bless democracy! /s
People choose option with maximum utility and it's never as simple as "cheapest" (see iPhones, "vegan cars" etc etc)
> Macron tried to tax fuel more and there were widespread protests
Many people would support the government making green choices. They are not the kinds of people who would go about ransacking streets. Most affected are probably farmers. Also, European taxes on fuel are already bigger than generally in the world, democracy is OK
> if you try to be ethical, you get voted out of office
Remember we are talking about China right?
No, but even if the US and Western Europe went net zero, that's still not enough to offset global GHG emissions coming out of China to prevent catastrophic climate change.
If you, a wealthy westerner, want to tell billions of people in China to stop enjoying middle class luxuries for the first time because it's bad for the environment, be my guest. I have no such desire.
Show me the math/source, if you want to claim this, please. US and W. Europe outsource their emissions because they buy their electronics and clothes from e.g. China and Bangladesh. What is a US/WE net zero? They stop buying Chinese product, and China stops producing them for US/WE?
Which would be great if CO2's heat trapping properties depended on the per capita emissions of their nation of origin. Unfortunately CO2 molecules don't know where they came from and can't adjust their heat trapping properties accordingly, and instead it's about absolute amounts as ppm of the atmosphere.
But there's a silver lining for China and India - which is that even small reductions in their per capita emissions cash out as massive reductions in absolute terms.
So in terms of bang for the buck per-capita wise, they are the top candidates for emissions savings.
Unless by "buck" you mean the number of decisions that need to be made, but that's hardly the limiting factor.
Country sizes are arbitrary. With your logic if China was to split into a bunch of smaller nations their emissions wouldn't matter any more? Per-capita emissions is the only reasonable way to measure.
Or to put it a different way, if all I knew were the parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere, and all you knew were per capita consumption figures, I would know when the atmosphere was truly cooked and you wouldn't.
High emission countries/individuals are most responsible for the environmental damage, and most capable of reducing their emissions with the least impact on their living standard.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
Whether it's forced, it seems like a philosophical question about economics. Do you go to work willingly, or because you're forced to, because you want to be able to afford food, housing, and iPhone 17?
Or it's a tragedy of the commons scenario. If there's demand, and Neighboristan is able to but doesn't supply it, their citizens are forced by government to give up sources of income; meanwhile the citizens of We-Also-Build-iPhones-And-Make-Cheap-Shirts-ia are raking the money in and travelling around the world and taking selfies of their steak meals with their iPhones, and citizens of Neighboristan will get jealous and think "Why can't we do that?". And they'll either vote in a government that will allow this, or revolt.
And consumers in the West enable this behavior by wanting the cheapest bang for the buck. If China charges for CO2, your cheap Walmart toy gets more expensive, and you don't buy it, Walmart will say "we'll find a supplier in Vietnam/India/etc where there's no such CO2 fees."...
Yes, part of it is consumer choice (and yes some consumers do choose to not buy if they think it supports environmental damage or such) but it's wrong to pretend one side is the one who makes all the choices and the other side is powerless to resist because it's convenient for your argument.
> because everything's produced in the neighboring country
Unless the first country dictates neighbouring country's policies, not sure it's that relevant.
> it seems like a philosophical question about economics. Do you go to work willingly, or because you're forced to, because you want to be able to afford food, housing, and iPhone 17?
Either there's freedom of choice or not. This logic can go to "I should deceive people or dump waste into rivers or use slave labour, because market & I want to afford a new fancy yacht or invade a country". Yes, I can choose not to work or do different work that is more or less friendly to environment and I use an old iPhone.
> their citizens are forced by government to give up sources of income There's unlimited hypotheticals. Should we say we are forced to give up sources of income if they involve crime or morally wrong things that are discouraged?
> And consumers in the West enable this behavior by wanting the cheapest bang for the buck.
"Enabling" can be used to justify anything or assign any guilt. It's a bit narcissistic. It reminds me of "America started the war in Ukraine" a little.
> Or it's a tragedy of the commons scenario.
I agree there is some tragedy of the commons here.
Yes we're all susceptible to climate change effects but India, that place gets next level hot.
The major problem is equatorial heat. After a certain point of wet bulb temperature, you either die or migrate a billion people away from the equator into Europe.
Billions can't afford air conditioning. An air conditioning unit is equal to their entire annual income. You don't even have an airtight room within which you can install the AC unit. Let alone a stable electrical grid during heatwaves.
Their state capacity and wealth just isn't there to plan for the worst, either. Their civic society would sooner collapse than mobilise to solve this problem.
My intention isn't to sound chauvinist, this is just a reality of the political fragility of poorer countries, combined with the extreme difficulty of mobilising large amounts of resources to solve long-term challenges.
Air conditioning can get radically cheaper to meet market demand, and they can start making radically more money.
Other products have gone from expensive to cheap (think TVs over the last 40 years), other people have gone from poor to prosperous (think China).
Do you have a good reason why these outcomes are possible TVs and for Chinese people, but not for ACs and equatorial people?
If we get to the 3-4C warming scenarios, these countries will be terrible to live in, regardless of AC, and I won't blame them when they all try to escape to colder Europe.
In poor areas perhaps but the big Middle East countries burn more fossil fuels to power Air-Conditioning
Of all the places I’d look to for solutions Middle East isn’t one
https://satellites.pro/Kazakhstan_map#A45.338220,52.376976,1...
It is probably a pipeline leak.
(sarcasm tag)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire
This is all concerning.
> The eGHG potential of methane is 20x CO2 over 100 year timescale
It’s hard to not feel hopeless. Keep recycling your single use plastics, I guess we’ll be fine.
Methane is flared instead of released under normal conditions if it's not being captured. A blowout is very much not normal conditions.
So glad I'm installing solar this year, I'm thinking about building a car port and adding even more panels too.
Its also a big topic of research to account for methane emissions because the measured amount is larger than models are predicting from known inventories. But its not thought to be from events like this.
Not diminishing output. Just hiding. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/may/02/methane-...