this post was submitted on 03 Mar 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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Energy efficiency of active travel (walking, cycling, ebike) compared to an electric car (slrpnk.net)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Keep in mind that although an electric bike might use more energy input than a regular road bike, it uses a much cleaner type of fuel. Even the most dirty coal power plant in the world has a significantly lower CO2 output per watt hour than the food you are eating to power a bicycle. Even if you are vegan

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

We should probably just stop eating.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Wrong.

Coal power has a CO2 intensity of ~1 g / Wh (source: IEA)

A plant based diet has a CO2 intensity of ~1 g / Wh (source: ourworldindata)

Production CO2 intensity of a bicycle is also lower than an e-bike.

Pedaling under your own power also has health benefits, which the e-bike rider would need to do additional exercise to achieve, thus increasing their total CO2 intensity further.

In short, sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up about shit you clearly don't understand.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

A plant based diet has a CO2 intensity of ~1 g / Wh

Yes, and since our metabolism is very inefficient you actually need to eat almost 4 watt hours worth of food for 1 watt hour of energy output, everything else just turns into body heat. Meanwhile ebikes have an efficiency of roughly 70-80% when accounting for charging losses and motor efficiency.