this post was submitted on 29 Jul 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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We compared land transport options for getting to net zero. Hands down, electric rail is the best (theconversation.com)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

Diesel trains are roughly 1/6 the emissions per ton mile compared to truck, and then electric trains might be another 1/5 the emissions of diesel. We have the infrastructure to get most of the way there already. Upgrading to Electric rail is a good strategy but it is a significant capital cost. Re-nationalizing freight rail everywhere, and making it cost-effective to ship by rail, keeping or increasing the amount of last-mile trucking jobs which are much more comfortable and stable living than OTR would be a quicker solution to reducing emissions significantly than waiting for proliferation of electric trucks, or building the catenary for electric rail.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Key message makes sense. But seems odd to use a photo of a Russian train to illustrate an article about Australia ...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

They searched for "electric train" on istockphoto and that's the first result.