this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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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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Why can't we just quit cows? (grist.org)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Also not trying to support the industry as well, and just adding onto the explanation. Historically, the animal processing industry in the US always wanted to use up as much of the animal as they could for profit, much like American cheese is a derived byproduct of cheese making that they found out they could sell as "cheese".

In a weird way, it's insanely efficient and "green" use of the whole animal, but also unfortunately, it has led to many downstream industries being dependent upon the upstream industry. Replacing the upstream industry would cause cost increases in myriad downstream industries.

In a country like America, that always looks for excuses to raise cost to the end-buyer and never lower it, it would cause an inflationary effect that would hurt the lives of millions. (Again, not excusing the behavior, proper regulation would be the answer here.)

Just look at how insulin in America became a grift in the last decade even though it was a patent-neutral product designed to always be cheap that states are now having to forcibly price-fix just so people can live. (Or epinephrine.)

Downstream beef products example list:

  • Insulin
  • Leather
  • Glue
  • Soap
  • Ink
  • Gelatin
  • Fire Extinguisher Foam

Neutral sauce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_(animal_products)

Probably not neutral sauce: https://arizonabeefblog.com/2019/03/01/cattle-byproducts/

Welcome to the Capitalist Third World!

Edit: formatting.