this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
58 points (98.3% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5053 readers
395 users here now
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:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The problem is we set a target of "net zero" by <in 2 decades>. So naturally companies will do it the cheapest way that requires the least changes to their business.
We don't need "net zero" we need "as closest to total zero as possible".
If the carbon is properly sequestered after capture, and the energy use is accounted for in emissions, wouldn't net zero be just as good as zero? It's almost always going to be way more expensive to take the carbon back out of the atmosphere than to not emit it in the first place, so I'd think you'd get mostly the same effect.
"net zero" refers to continuing to emit greenhouse gases and fixing the problem some other way. Carbon capture, carbon credits, whatever.
Zero means actually stopping the emissions in the first place.
Except that net zero is mostly being used as an excuse to keep going with your business, emitting away while paying lip service to the idea of reducing emissions in ways that may or may not actually offset the continued emissions.
The first thing we need to do is make carbon credits illegal all around the world.