When man first walked on the moon, the carbon dioxide concentration in Earth’s atmosphere was 325 parts per million (ppm).
By 9/11, it was 369 ppm, and when COVID-19 shut down normal life in 2020, it had shot up to 414 parts ppm.
This week, our planet hit the highest levels ever directly recorded: 430 parts per million.
“This problem is not going away, and we’re moving further and further into uncharted territory, and almost certainly, very dangerous territory.”
Right now, China is the problem. Historically it’s been the USA, but right now it’s China.
The upcoming problem is India.
More specifically the problem is coal. China and India are ramping up their usage of coal whilst the rest of the world is phasing it out.
Yes, those countries are also building clean sources of power, but coal is about 55% of their primary energy each. 80% of Chinas primary energy comes from fossil fuels and 90% of India’s. Their rate of new coal outstrips their use of wind and solar.
The earth cannot support the huge populations of these countries unless they are powered by something other than coal. Even oil and gas would be a huge improvement. These two governments hold all the power on this issue.
The problem is these numbers are based on the country of origin of emissions and don’t take into account the demand/consumption that is driving those emissions. China is a huge exporter and the US is a major importer of Chinese goods. US consumption is driving a lot of China’s emissions
By not being a manufacturing economy, we’re able to offset the appearance of our emissions when the data is tracked this way
Does the USA still lead in per capita emissions?
When was the last year co2 didn’t get worse ?
2020 since the pandemic shut everything down. There was a one year respite.
Basically at this point the only thing that might make things go down would be something on the scale of covid but deadlier that would make the ultra wealthy scared enough to keep things shut down long term.
Before that it was the 2008 financial crisis.
I wonder if Trump’s tariff chaos is causing enough economic shrinkage to bring another year of slight slow down.
We really need to decouple economic activity from CO2 emissions or we’re just left hoping for the global economy to be in peril.
Ironically tariffs on Imports would be good for cutting global emissions. But people will starve and economy collapse.
Just an extra 35% since 1960. WCGW? /s
Welcome to the post-developed world, folks. Hope you made good use of that free fossil energy to make the world a special place for every living being on the planet…
— from The Newsroom
I thought this was from “don’t look up,” but they respected him too much for that.
:'(
This is depressing
Removed by mod
We need lemmy instances with less censorship.
Wouldn’t the shareholders, who profit far more off any company than any CEO be a better target? Of taxation and eventual deposition (taxing them out of existence), of course, I do not care about violence.
I mean yeah, get the shareholders too. Taxing them out of existence would be fine too, but you’re absolutely bonkers levels of insane if you think they’d let that happen without at least the threat of violence. Like there is absolutely zero historical precedence of that working anywhere ever.
Well I dimly remember after the 30 year war (? It was a long time ago I learned about this, could have been the restoration after the Napoleonic wars) the church gave up vast swathes of Land in exchange for a set amount of dividends from the state.
But given that was after a drawn out tumultuous war, so I see your point.
Why him?
Evil as fuck defence corporations seem like a good place to start to me.
Take out the oil industry, and all defence contractors and every military can no longer function.
The last thermal maximum had rain forests at the poles and it was estimated that carbon was being emitted far more slowly. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ldLBoErAhz4
Rain forest at the poles? What did the North Pole look like at that time?
We aren’t totally sure. Rainforest isn’t the correct term but it was probably lush and green. The evidence we had is vegetation on Antarctica approx 90 million years ago. That also has the caveat that 90 million years ago, Antarctica was further north and didn’t intersect the south pole. North Pole today is an ice sheet, so probably was a thinner ice sheet back then too.
