That record ? CO2 levels at their highest in millions of years and still growing faster than ever.
thank you for declickbaiting the title.
I feel like we are gonna have to tech ourselves outta this one, there is no chance to stop it.
Tech obeys economics, and economics says polluting but cheaper is better.
Economics actually says it’s far cheaper overall to stop polluting right now than trying to mitigate it in the distant future. But that goes against the short-termism our economic indicators are built around. The line must go up, and shareholders need their maximized profit next quarter. Meanwhile pollution will only become more of a problem the further away in the future you look. And that sounds like a problem for future us.
Why I feel Stratospheric Aerosol Injection will be the route to go, yes stop pollution now is better long term, but no one wants to pay the price if there is a chance someone else will. So we might as well put on a bandage to the festering wound and continue using our carbon based energy like a still addicted junkie.
Up until a profitable solution starts making an appearance why would powerful selfish people make sacrifices
This is the second time I saw this suggestion in the wild, and I from now on I will label every such comment as lubing us up before someone actually does this.
The thing is, have you ever been to a coal mine. I am in the mining industry and have done multiple visits to coal mines, the magnitude of carbon they dig up, through underground or the cheaper dragline is jaw dropping if you realise that is going into the atmosphere. Like we have an exclusive club called a millionaires club for supervisors who in their section of the coal mine can extract more than a million tonnes in a year, they are greatly rewarded. This is excluding oil or petroleum products.
To counter this you need to put the same or more carbon back into the ground, what technology do we have that can do it economically or even scalable, carbon capture is a gimmick in my opinion to give stupid people hope that there is an easy answer that is just around the corner. Maybe I have lost hope but my belief is that the carbon put into the atmosphere will not be extracted by humans, but will after 100s of years be absorbed into the ocean only if we stop our current emissions. Should we in the mean time lose our ice poles, glaciers and ocean currents, have heat destroy the fauna and flora while we do nothing. We have engineered this hot climate, can engineer it to be colder while we get our shit together.
My country is the only developing country to be on target of meeting our Paris climate accord targets, how thanks to government corruption that led to the unavailability of our power stations where we have for years have rolling blackouts, or loadshedding as we call it. Fucks up our economy not having enough electricity, but great for the environment. I know there are green solutions to help alleviate our problems but our government has vested coal interests. So the best we can do is put solar power systems in our own homes
It’s absolutely maddening that this is the current state of affairs.
We know we drove off the cliff, we know we need to do everything we can to mitigate the fall, and yet we keep acting like nothing is happening.
Stop the economy, put everything into housing and feeding people, while building renewables and research into other measures.
Instead we will cut our leg after shooting the foot. Without even thinking about slowing down. Fuck me.
Do more with less!
As in, you get a lesser salary, while *I* get more!
The dangers of geoengineering cannot be overstated, and we have a good chance of dying from the results of deliberately fucking with the climate as we do from our centuries of inadvertent fucking with the climate.
Not saying that we shouldn’t if we have no choice, but people need to understand that this is NOT a good option we’re left with and our species needs to really take notice how close we are to ending our time here due to lack of forethought or care.
Ironically, because we are too stupid a species to put willingly pit ourselves through any austerity on a large scale. No one is will accept less than they have it seems, even though the only people who would actually need to downgrade their lives are the ultra wealthy. It doesn’t make it any easier though because they hold all the power. And they use their propaganda power to tell us to change our lifestyle choices, while they flaunt their own wealth. They tell us to choose more expensive “eco-friendly” or “ethical” options most of us can’t afford, and so are encouraged to feel guilty for failing to buy. And they buy them of course, but then still drive million dollar cars and own multiple multimillion dollar mansions.
We’ve really got to find a way to stop fucking over ourselves like this. And we’ve got to do it by somehow getting the richest people and organizations of the world on board. Violent revolution has rarely worked long term, and it’s slipping further and further away as security technology gets more powerful. Nevermind drones and the inevitable rise of autonomous weapons systems. The “rabble” will never have access to these ordinances. So we’ve got to get in their heads. Trick them into doing the right thing enough to see that as the challenge to which their should commit their wealth.
“This May, atmospheric CO2 levels hit 427 parts per million, or ppm, an almost 3 ppm increase since last May (annually CO2 levels peak in May, due to natural global fluctuations). What’s more, combining the increases since 2022 results in the largest two-year CO2 leap on record.”
So even thought more is being done now than ever before in human history to curb CO2 output, the levels are rising faster now than they ever have? Kinda seems like all the “green” shit we’ve been paying more for doesn’t do anything.
This comment has antivaxxer energy.
It’s dumb lazy ass thinking. Yeah we have been increasing green energy but CO2 output has also increased dramatically and has always been underreported. Stopping green energy is completely backwards. We need a hell of a lot more of it.
Problem is, we’re ADDING shit. While building solar panels, we’re also still building coal plants, bigger cars, consuming ever more from the other side of the planet.
We need to de globalize our economies. And even politically, it would not be a bad thing with the ever more power of China.
Problem is, it’s gonna cut either in billionairs benefits…
So won’t be done before it’s too late.
If we weren’t doing any of the “green shit” that we’ve been working in for decades we’d probably be a decade further down the catastrophe hole than we are.
This chart on Wikipedia sums it up neatly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption#/media/File:Global_Energy_Consumption.svg
You can see that from 2000 to 2021, renewable energy usage grew faster than any other type. However, coal, oil, and gas usage still grew, by a lot (with a couple recent dips that don’t appear to constitute a trend yet). Overall energy usage is increasing and that is unlikely to change. For now we’re merely slowing the growth of fossil fuel usage. Slowing down is not the same as reversing course.
So yeah, it’s true that “more is being done now than ever before”, but we’re operating from a baseline of nearly zero from 40 years ago. It’s easy to grow in proportional terms when you’re tiny to begin with.
Out of all the comments here, this is the only one to bring data and a legitimate argument, so I commend you.
You’re right, we are still growing overall energy usage and the balance is not being picked up solely by alternative energy. But that’s not really my point.
We keep hearing about this climate change topic in ways that put the responsibility on the general consumer, but clearly that is not solving the issue. Maybe the issue is that the type of alternatives we are picking aren’t actually working. Maybe the issue isn’t how people get to work but how they’re entirely reliant one getting the things they need to survive being supplied through unsustainable means.
I’ve had people shame me for driving a gas powered car but the reality is my Corolla puts out next to nothing compared to the shear volume it takes to get me a solar powered phone charger off of Amazon. Think about food and clothes and shelter. How much pollution does it take to fill a wardrobe. People need to think about things other than basic transportation. Bicycles aren’t going to make the planet greener.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. Deflecting the blame to consumers is a misinformation tactic by corporations and governments. That doesn’t mean consumers can’t or shouldn’t take action on their own, of course – just that we also need to hold corporations and governments accountable. There are things that need to be done at a personal level and things that need to be done at an institutional level. Individual behavior influences institutional behavior, and vice-versa.
Take bottled water, for example. We ship fucking water across the country in plastic bottles when it is verifiably no better than the tap water in any reasonably-maintained system. Is it the consumers’ fault for buying it, the corporations’ fault for being completely amoral, or the government’s fault for allowing these ass-backwards incentives to exist and persist in the first place, and failing to provide sufficient alternatives? My choice to avoid bottled water whenever humanly possible in no way absolves these instutions of their failures and corruption that have made it a global problem.
Maybe the issue isn’t how people get to work but how they’re entirely reliant one getting the things they need to survive being supplied through unsustainable means.
That is unquestionably the bigger problem, yes.
We really do need to reduce car usage, but that’s not something that’s easily done by individuals when the cities they live in were designed to be unsustainably car-centric. We’ve spent about a century accumulating infrastructure debt and there’s no quick fix there. For me personally, I would not want to in a city that wasn’t walkable and bikeable, and I don’t ever want to drive if I can avoid it, but there aren’t enough cities like that in the world for everyone to do that. I do what I can in the hope that I will contribute to reaching critical mass. And this strategy is working to a degree – there’s a lot more attention given to city infrastructure today than there was even 10 years ago. There is political pressure locally to redesign cities to be more sustainable, driven by passionate grass-roots efforts. I always promote and vote for transportation alternatives in local elections, which is always a highly divisive topic because oil addiction is pervasive, deep-rooted, and in some places even lionized.
The same argument can be made for a lot of eco-friendly lifestyle choices, like vegetarianism. I’m not a strict vegetarian, but it’s really not hard to cut the vast majority of meat out of my diet. I understand that for some people that’s not viable, and we don’t have the infrastructure for everyone to go veg overnight anyway. So no judgment. It’s a drop in the bucket, to be sure, but hey, a drop is better than nothing.
On a larger scale, we have a huge problem with our economic structure. We’ve chased efficiency year after year, decade after decade, and now we’re so gosh-darned efficient that we have little redundancy or resiliency, wealth is hyper-concentrated, and local economies just bleed resources into the void. What would it take to feed a major city without importing food by truck and ship? It’s hard to imagine. It would require change at many levels of society, from the personal to the global.
