this post was submitted on 16 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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Beef produces 85 kg CO2e per kg of food. Tofu produces 2.9 kg CO2e per kg of food. (ourworldindata.org)
submitted 7 months ago by testeronious@lemmy.world to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[โ€“] RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

So you're saying it's easier to get an entire population to dramatically reduce their rates of procreation than to give up some of the meat in their diets? Not sure I buy it

[โ€“] mojo_raisin@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

Yep, not only procreation but consumption and waste as well, and actually both have evidence of them happening.

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/09/995172945/u-s-birthrate-drops-to-lowest-level-in-four-decades

https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/28/auf-wiedersehen-schnitzel-meat-consumption-hits-record-low-in-germany

What I'm really saying, is that if a solution depends on everybody becoming a good person and doing the right things forever into the future, it's a non-starter. How are you going to ensure nobody eats meat? Gonna have global enforcement? What's the punishment? Humans are hard-wired to crave meat, that isn't going away and telling people not to eat meat is akin to telling people not to have sex.

Instead, if the economic system and the culture changes then the motivation to do certain things changes. Maybe our culture changes so that getting married and having kids is no longer the expected route and you don't become the weird aunt/uncle for doing so, happening already. Maybe flexitarianism becomes more popular and reduces damage and cruelty from animal agriculture without expecting radical shifts in ancestral diets?

I'm not sure how old you are, I'm nearly 50 and trans and I've seen massive cultural change and that's really the key to changing the world. For example, I'm a trans woman, when I transitioned 20 years ago it was viewed as absolutely bonkers by everyone around me, and that was in California. I lost most of my family and friends and had no right to employment or housing. Now, it's common and though there are outspoken right wingers, liberals are like "oh, you want to be girl, sure, also the state protects your right to employment and housing".