this post was submitted on 25 Apr 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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

There are some indicators that Chinese coal consumption might have peaked a couple months back. Not definite yet, but a very real possibility

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Chinese coal is so much more complicated than people give it credit for.

Provincial leaders don't want to risk looking bad by having to import electricity from other provinces so they build coal plants then have hilariously low usage rates. They're basically building coal peaker plants comma but the overall Chinese economy/party wants them to be building solar and other renewable tech because China is the manufacturer of that tech.

The result is that they're building more power plants that have increasingly low utilization rates. Declining utilization rates even as they build more of them. Basically because of stupid internal politics. Again, they're using coal as peaker plants. Which is unimaginable to someone versed in US energy policy but that's because we forget that the capital cost of construction largely doesn't matter in China.

The far larger concern with Chinese coal is not their domestic policy, it's their foreign industrial policy - it's the outside markets they're getting hooked on coal.

Long-term it's a problem that will take care of itself ignoring climate catastrophe. Because, again China builds the renewable tech. They want the world buying from the long term. And I guess they see some short-term Merit in unloading bargain coal but they're going to make a lot more selling PV. The issue is that we don't have time to wait for that long-term.

Ironically the best policy to curtail Chinese coal is almost exactly what the US is doing - heavy investments in renewables. Hit those prices with learning curves to make fossils even less competitive than they already are. Make it so even the bargain tech doesn't make sense for those developing nations to use.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Why doesn't the Chinese federal government just ban new coal developments?