Or did you mean to do something differently?
There has been a lot of debate over AC use. Everyone chiming in only discusses runtime energy use.
The biggest issue is mining and manufacturing, and the moving of all the materials, parts, and such.
Every AC has sheathed wires and circuit boards.
Every airplane, car, phone, network router, refrigerator... same expansive mess creation.
Gamers complaining about disc less games despite that problem pipeline and waste.
Complaining about RAM prices despite the problem pipeline.
No one is focused on the lag effects, externalities, of billions using up an endless supply of technologies and dumping airplane smog in the atmosphere. Etc, etc, etc
Thermodynamics makes it pretty clear that energy is not gone just hanging out in the atmosphere.
Thermodynamics means we may be fucked even if we slow down; that energy in the atmosphere can only go from atmosphere into oceans, glaciers, and permafrost. There's a lot of potential energy in the Earth to release as it absorbs the heat already in the atmosphere
Tbf the issue is the user-hostile parameters of buying a diskless game. Most people would be happy to download their games if they could back them up to a thumb drive and never get locked out of them and sell the game when they’re done with it.
Seems deeply tangential, but it’s not. Blaming people for wanting a physical thing because the alternative is being further abused by a corporation - that’s a miss. Be mad at game platforms for not offering real ownership in whatever the most climate-friendly way possible. Be mad at governments for not forcing companies to cost in the negative externalities of their business.
FairTax is regressive and does nothing to stop a trillionaire from launching dick rockets to nowhere. Each rocket and launch using more resources than a poor person will their entire life.
So you oppose green tax policy on the grounds that it isn't punitive enough against rich people? A rich person living a miserly life would pay little in taxes, I see no problem with that.
I assume that you are alluding to someone specific with the rocket launching trillionaire quip. That would be the same person who helped make electric vehicles viable and also helped develop reusable rockets, far greener than one time use ones, no?
Though, I do recognise that having one regressive tax wouldn't necessarily make the entire tax-and-transfers system regressive (or even more regressive, if that tax money is spent).
But regarding your second statement. The actual problem is the greenhouse effect of CO2 and Methane in the atmosphere which traps the suns energy in our atmosphere heating up oceans, ice and landmass. The heat we produce is negligible compared to the energy the sun sends every day. The greenhouse gases are the problem. And you are right, pulling away that blanket so that more heat can dissipate into space will take a looong time (growing trees) or cost an insane amount of (clean) energy, reversing the chemical processes of burning oil, gas and coal.
But without more info, that seems like a pretty awful assumption. A lot of the stuff we export are services and high value goods that I would think have a relatively low "emissions to value" ratio compared to the lower value manufactured goods we import.
I don't know why you think that, pretty much everything we buy devolves to energy in some form or another.
And, when you look at actual data, e.g. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33812, that is exactly what you see.
Co2 parts per million are a stock, like the level of water in a bathtub. Annual emissions are a flow, like how strongly the water is flowing in.
The tub is fuller than ever before AND filling at the fastest rate ever.
The problem is that carbon energy is useful. So unless something globally beats almost all use cases then somewhere marginally it will be worth burning vs not burning it.
They do increase in rate as you said (for now).
If your stat had any sense then atmospheric carbon levels would rapidly plunge in a few centuries without humans burning carbon. They plainly don't do that.
You are right the the ocean is the largest carbon sink, and it has the negative side effect of acidifying.
If we do what we do now, what the UN IPCC is focusing on, which is lowering CO2 in the west to bring CO2 usage up everywhere else. China, India, and Africa and South Africa (hopefully) in the future then we've not just achieved nothing, we've made things worse.
It seems to me if oil keeps being dug up what we do on the usage side just does not matter unless everyone agrees to lower the total, because someone will use it. By the way, CO2 will keep increasing if we burn more than about 18 mbd (0.03% of what we use now).
This means nothing will matter unless you get US, Norway, Russia, China, and the Middle East to comply. And by comply I don't mean lowering the oil pumping, but stopping 100% (yes, technically 99.97% or more). That includes the oil they pump for their own use.
And obviously I realize this argument doesn't work. We cannot proceed along this way, it's not reasonable towards so many people, who have the right to life, an economy and energy. So we'll have to find an entirely different way to deal with these changes.
Markets are powerful. No real solution other than making market competitive alternatives such that the desire to dig up oil is simply lost. This may or may not be feasible.
However, every other sector has been rather flat in terms of emissions since the 90s. When you account for the fact that a large amount of industries have moved to China and other developing countries, the fact that emissions from industries have been flat, means that the overall consumption has gone up.
If you account for the emissions that we’ve offshored, we’d not be looking so good.
Because they outsource their dirty work. To get a true picture of US/EU emissions you need to factor in the factories in Asia that are producing their consumer goods, as well as the global transport network that supports this.