this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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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.

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The problem with every country’s promise to phase out fossil fuels: Nobody is really planning for a fossil fuel phaseout (wapo.st)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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And part of the reason is that almost every country and company sees itself in a unique position: as the future last producer of fossil fuels.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Extraction is not free and most cheap conventional oil suppl has been used up or it is in politically difficult countries. Hence unconventional sources like fracking and oil sands are being used. However they are also more expensive, hence they can not compete. If the cost of production is higher then the oil price, then nobody is going to do it.

Locking up oil supply helps too, as it drives up the oil price and makes adoption of alternatives more likely.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Extraction isn't free, but it's cheap enough that we'll see too much taken out of the ground if we depend purely on existing economics. Something like half the proved reserves of oil and gas have to be left in the ground for 2C

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

The other big one is politics. Since the US has become an oil export it has started to shut down other oil exporters. First of all Venezuela, which has the biggest oil reserves in the world and is producing nearly nothing right now. Iran is a long time trouble maker and sanctions have been restarted under Trump. Since the invasion of Ukraine Russia is under sanctions as well and Western oil companies shut down cooperation. Saudi Arabia has not gotten much support after its oil refinery has been attacked by Iran a few years ago, so we know the US is not terribly interested in securing those oil reserves.

As I said a lot of the good oil is in politically difficult countries. That is about half of the worlds supply. If something goes wrong the US is basically the only country able to secure those supplies militarily. However that would be expensive and it also benefits from high prices being an oil exporter itself. With EVs there is a workable alternative for a lot of Western oil consumption.