this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Why billionaire Tom Steyer argues capitalism is the best tool to fight climate change | Calling for more regulation to stop global heating, Steyer says we must stop letting people "pollute for free" (www.salon.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

He's arguing that if pollution was priced in, the market would optimize to find ways to reduce it. Which is true, except that:

  1. This regulation is never going to actually be implemented without major loopholes.
  2. The market will optimize for loopholes instead.
  3. A large amount of ways to “reduce” pollution only works on paper (e.g. carbon credits)

It's not exactly a novel idea, it makes sense in the theoretical scenario where we would have effective regulation. Which is also precisely the problem to begin with.