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Incremental change can be hard to notice; I believe that more than enough people can, will and are getting serious about climate change. It's always worth buil
by jka 6y ago
Incremental change can be hard to notice; I believe that more than enough people can, will and are getting serious about climate change. It's always worth building more momentum.
CO2 output reduced[1] by over 35% in the UK between 1990-2017, and that demonstrates that real, impactful change can accumulate thanks to simultaneous improvements in multiple areas. The linked reference includes a Jupyter notebook with Python analysis code and original data sources for anyone curious.
The UK isn't alone in this - many other European countries and the US also reduced CO2 emissions between 2005-2015[2].
The UN Environment Programme produces yearly 'gap reports' such as this one[3] from 2019 that provide assessments of worldwide progress on greenhouse gas emissions relative to countries' commitments via the Paris Agreement.
It's still a difficult battle and some people won't care to help for various reasons; some benign, some selfish or ignorant.
In my opinion much of the capability to improve requires strong, well-informed political leadership who are able and willing to encourage and improve energy efficiency.
Since we have good tools to collect and analyze information nowadays, I believe that in the years to come it'll become increasingly apparent which groups have been working earnestly to tackle climate change and which groups have been impeding progress.
[1] - https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-uks-co2-emissions-have-fallen-38-since-1990 https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-uks-co2-emissio...
[2] - https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/climate-change-co2-emissions-fall-in-18-countries-with-strong-policies-study-finds-1.5032468 https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/climate-change-co2-emissi...
[3] - https://www.unenvironment.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2019 https://www.unenvironment.org/resources/emissions-gap-report...