3 ms·

>That's why we need political action. Where? Political action int he U.S. or Europe doesn't do much to China and telling China "sorry, you can't have cheap ele

>That's why we need political action. Where? Political action int he U.S. or Europe doesn't do much to China and telling China "sorry, you can't have cheap electricity, your people don't get to have a lifestyle like ours as a result" isn't likely to make the Chinese go "oh, ok, we'll stop growing our middle class and go back to a basic village lifestyle to save the rest of you". Unless we miraculously convert to a global government then reducing emissions just isn't likely to happen. Reduce in one place and it'll continue to increase in a few others. The fact of the matter is, the only realistic solution out of this is a majority of the world's population goes "Ok we'll only drive to work/school/the grocery, we'll never take travelling vacations unless we walk or bicycle there, we'll stop eating all meat, we'll give up plastic packaging and we won't replace our electronics when they wear out". Otherwise we have to hope and pray that a fleet of alien trade ships show up on orbit and are like "If you give us syndication rights to the galactic hegemony for Everybody Loves Raymond and I Love Lucy we'll go ahead and install a thousand of our zero point modules around the planet and tie them into your local grids to solve your energy needs. If you give us the syndication rights to The Simpsons we'll give you a few thousand of these solid state devices that attract carbon out of the air causing it to solidify into inert bricks that you can then fill your pit mines with". We're seriously in that sort of state. You either outlaw electricity from fossil fuels in every country in the world or you hope for a true miracle. Even if someone figures out cold fusion today and can start churning out the first power plants in January, replacing the 60,000~ power plants in the world it would take decades at best to replace them and making the concrete for pouring the foundations alone would create an insane amount of CO2 not to mention all of the structural steel. Short of ET intervention, the best we can hope is that developing nations stop building fossil fuel power plants and that people start leaving coastal cities and building better designed, more eco-friendly, more distributed, with equally dispersed permaculture centers, with rail lines in grids to provide for efficient transportation of people and goods, cities far inland.

ClumsyPilot 7y ago
Firstly see my comment above, China and india take climate change more seriously than any US government ever did and invest more than anyone else in renewables. Secondly,you are kind of right, the IPCC already has calculated that to keep the rise to 1.5C is only possible if we invest in negative emissions, that is pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. This is never discussed in out brain-dead media, as obvious it is much more expensive to pull carbon out of the air than not to emit it in the first place.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  >China and india take climate change more seriously China is adding millions of new drivers to the roads, in fossil-fuel powered vehicles with fossil fuel (and tree) derived tires, annually. What about the fact that China is actively constructing hundreds of coal power plants? Or the fact their middle-class is rapidly growing which will mean more energy demands (which will mean more fossil fuel consumption) and more consumer goods (more plastics, from fossil fuels)? >Since the early 2000s, China's middle class has been among the fastest growing in the world, swelling from 29 million in 1999 (2 percent of population) to roughly 531 million in 2013 (39 percent of population). https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/ https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/ China has hundreds of millions of people that will, presumably, continue to be added to their middle class resulting in more cars, more electricity, more gadgets, more plastics, etc. Unless China says "no, only the people that have stuff now can have stuff" they're going to consume more fossil fuels, construct more things with concrete, etc.

ClumsyPilot 7y ago

Firstly see my comment above, China and india take climate change more seriously than any US government ever did and invest more than anyone else in renewables. Secondly,you are kind of right, the IPCC already has calculated that to keep the rise to 1.5C is only possible if we invest in negative emissions, that is pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. This is never discussed in out brain-dead media, as obvious it is much more expensive to pull carbon out of the air than not to emit it in the first place.

ryanmercer 7y ago
>China and india take climate change more seriously China is adding millions of new drivers to the roads, in fossil-fuel powered vehicles with fossil fuel (and tree) derived tires, annually. What about the fact that China is actively constructing hundreds of coal power plants? Or the fact their middle-class is rapidly growing which will mean more energy demands (which will mean more fossil fuel consumption) and more consumer goods (more plastics, from fossil fuels)? >Since the early 2000s, China's middle class has been among the fastest growing in the world, swelling from 29 million in 1999 (2 percent of population) to roughly 531 million in 2013 (39 percent of population). https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/ https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/ China has hundreds of millions of people that will, presumably, continue to be added to their middle class resulting in more cars, more electricity, more gadgets, more plastics, etc. Unless China says "no, only the people that have stuff now can have stuff" they're going to consume more fossil fuels, construct more things with concrete, etc.