this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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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.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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U.S. Seeks to Boost Nuclear Power After Decades of Inertia | Measures moving through Congress to encourage new reactors are receiving broad bipartisan support (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Nuclear is bad. We need to invest in renewables.

It's better to explain your reasoning a bit more. If you want expensive electricity prices, choose nuclear. If you want something which will only be built if the government takes all the risk, choose nuclear.

It's a bit strange to go for nuclear while ignoring that any energy company will not build it on their own. Only if all the risk and possible cost overruns are on the government.

Renewables are way cheaper. And there are cheaper solutions to solve volatility of renewables.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

For my own country, which seems intent on investing in nuclear energy like with small modular reactors, the plan makes no sense. We don't have proven uranium or plutonium reserves, much less the capability to mine and refine it. Then there's how to store nuclear waste indefinitely, even if nuclear disaster is not a problem. Nuclear is just a bad problem all around and it should be left in the past.

If nuclear fusion energy is solved, I might support it, but only under conditions of communism, otherwise the harvesting the power of the atom would only mean more labor exploitation and valorization under a capitalist mode of production.