this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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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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A Reality Check on Our ‘Energy Transition’ (thetyee.ca)
submitted 3 days ago by Sunshine@lemmy.ca to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] sonori@beehaw.org 14 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Obligatory note that if you think moving to renewables is difficult and thusly unlikely, than degrowth is straight up not happening until civilization collapses. Like pure degrowth is a straight up harder, less supported, and less likely to happen option than expanding the renewable build out that has been replacing fossil generation in many countries.

Both decarbonization by moving things like heating and transport to electricity and the increased occurrences of extreme weather due to climate change inherently result in more electricity demand, and if people are apparently unwilling to cheaper energy than why do you thing they will instead choose to go without?

Moreover, this argument neglects the fact that over the last ten years overall emissions in both the US and EU have been steadily, if far to slowly, falling, which means that fossil fuels are demonstrably being replaced, and why even among the managers of BP and Shell the discussion is not are they going to be replaced by solar and wind but rather can they drag the process out to fifty years instead of twenty years and how much can they export to the third world before that happens.

This is also why said companies are moving from ‘climate change isn’t real’ to ‘it is real but there is just nothing you can do about it so please stop replacing us’.

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Degrowth is also based on the fallacy that economic activity has a constant or at least near-constant energy intensiveness. But real-life economies already vary by at least an order of magnitude in energy consumed per unit GDP. So as long as energy intensiveness declines faster than the population grows, it's still a net win.

And just to keep things in perspective, there's also a lot of false narratives about how population reductions are inevitably a bad thing. The underlying reason is that some of the measures of economic performance are proportional to population. But those are the wrong measures to be looking at if you want to know how life is for the average (median) person.

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

US greenhouse gas emissions fell by a bit over 5% between 1990 - 2023. At this rate it has to be obvious that just deploying renewables is just not going to be enough, to prevent a collpase due to a climat crisis. Nearly all degrowthers are argueing for a massive rollout of green technolgies but since it is not enough, cutting energy consumption has to be on the table to reduce fossil fuel consumption quickly. Obviously degrowth and pushing for green technologies is much harder, but it is the only somewhat realistic way to prevent a massive collapse.

[–] BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 8 points 2 days ago

The US based emissions fell by 5% since 1990 because a lot of the manufacturing industry has been delocalized to China.

If you look at the emissions adjusted for trade the US is emitting more CO2 now than in 1990

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

[–] sonori@beehaw.org 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Which also means we’re down 17 percent since the peak in 2005, most of which has come from electrical generation despite the article’s insistence that renewables did not and fundamentally could not replace any fossil fueled generation.

No one is saying that just deploying renewables is going to solve anything, but rather that a massive rollout of green technologies is going to result in a massive increase in electricity demand as everything from heat pumps and EVs to rail electrification and industrial production involves replacing everything we currently do with fossil fuels with electricity.

As this article in particular is saying over and over again that we cannot generate enough clean electricity to power even our current grid and thusly must shrink our electric demand, it is arguing not for an massive rollout of green technologies but rather that we massively reduce demand for things like heating and cooling our homes or transporting food long distances.

I am saying that not only is this far harder to achieve than rolling out green technologies, but directly at odds with a world full of lethal heat waves and extreme weather destroying crops and supply chains.

I am not debating ‘degrowth’ as a whole, but rather the explicit position this author takes that it’s fundamentally impossible to replace fossil fuels so the only approach can be to somehow eliminate demand for food, transport, heating, etc…

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Which also means we’re down 17 percent since the peak in 2005, most of which has come from electrical generation despite the article’s insistence that renewables did not and fundamentally could not replace any fossil fueled generation.

So 1% per year. We need it to fall much faster. A somewhat decent goal would be halving emissions by 2030. Also having a 2005 peak is just a disgrace for the US.

As this article in particular is saying over and over again that we cannot generate enough clean electricity to power even our current grid

So far fossil fuel electricity generation is still growing. Also it is one person and the article is quoting. The rest tend to talk about energy and that is much more then electricity.

I am saying that not only is this far harder to achieve than rolling out green technologies, but directly at odds with a world full of lethal heat waves and extreme weather destroying crops and supply chains.

So far the we had the highest ghg emissions in 2024. Hopefully they peak this year, but that has been forecasted before. The reality is that low carbon sources make up less then a fithed of global energy consumption. So far the growth is extremely slow. Mainly due to massive growth of fossil fuels. With current pledges we are going to a 2.6C world and that is if pledges are meet. Trump is moving out of the Paris Climate Agreement, which means the rest of the world has to cut even harder and later the US as well. There is just no way to make those kinds of cuts, without either letting people starve or go for a decent degrowth strategy.

[–] sonori@beehaw.org 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

When it comes to comes to climate change, energy and electricity are largely synonymous as outside of semantics like primary energy vs useful work we need to replace fossil energy with electricity, and that is not degrowth.

Although not as fast as I would like, I also would not call the growth of renewables in the last decade extremely slow, especially when the rate of that growth has been accelerating so quickly.

Fossil fuel energy is growing because globally energy demand has been growing even faster, and this has been driven first and foremost by more equitable access to energy. While poorer nations still have far lower per capita energy demand, they do have a lot of people who want the energy to protect themselves from the effects of climate change.

This growth in demand will however will level out as the poors get acess to sufficient energy, aided in no small part by the lower overall cost of green technologies, however I and most of the energy analysis I’ve seen don’t expect the buildout of renewables to stall with it but rather rapidly eat into fossil fuel generation.

Is this happening as fast as it could be if we all worked together, no. Is it still well on its way to happening, well it arguably already has for an increasing portion of the world. This is all in direct contrast to the articles thesis that green energy cannot ever actually replace fossil fuels.

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

When it comes to comes to climate change, energy and electricity are largely synonymous as outside of semantics like primary energy vs useful work

The article clearly understands that. Otherwise a lot of the numbers would be wrong.

While poorer nations still have far lower per capita energy demand, they do have a lot of people who want the energy to protect themselves from the effects of climate change.

The best way to do that is to reduce the impact of climate change, by staying well below 2C.

Fossil fuel energy is growing because globally energy demand has been growing even faster, and this has been driven first and foremost by more equitable access to energy.

No we need to provide everybody with a good quality of life. That is not the same as current Western levels of consumption. Just as an example. The green growth way would mean replacing fossil fueled cars with EVs. The degrowth way would be to rethink city planning to allow people to walk, cycle or use public transport in that order. That actually would lower electricity consumption as well, as refining oil also requires electricity. Also it reduces the number of cars, which need to be produce requiring energy. However it still should meet everybodies need of transport. Obviously it requires changes in road layout, some large houses need to be turned into multi family to increase density. Garages turned into tiny houses, attics being converted. That ends up reducing energy consumption for temperature control as well and less space means less junk being bought.

There are more ways to do that. Mainly around sharing things(liberaries, public transport), quality gurantees so products last longer and cutting material consumption at the top(private jets, mansions and so forth).

That also comes with advantages. With less consumption, less production is needed and that means less work. So things like a four day workweek or earlier retirment would come with that as well. We still have some awesome technology allowing us to work less after all. Also bullshit jobs are just waste destroying the planet, while making peolple suffer to keep up the facade of keeping everybody in a job.

And yes it means building up infrastructure in poor countries. Clearly there is a minimal level of consumption needed for a good life. However current consumption in the rich countries is well above it.

[–] sonori@beehaw.org 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yes, the article was generally pretty clear that energy is synonymous with electricity, which is why it’s core thesis that renewables fundamentally cannot replace fossil fuel energy is such a wild assertion.

Yes we need to provide a decent quality of life, and that can be done with far less than north amarican standards of energy consumption, but the massive increase in energy consumption we’re seeing in India and China arn’t due to western levels of decadence, but rather the proliferation of things like air conditioning in places with fatal heat waves and the like.

Indeed illustratively these places are known for their abundant, frequent, and highly used mass transit systems and walkable cities. Their energy demand is still growing at an significant pace, not shrinking. As given their sheer size these are the nations which have a far larger impact on climate change, these are the places where degrowth needs to have the largest impact.

It’s also worth noting that even if you just want to apply degrowth to US cities in the method you suggested, well we know from examples like the Netherlands that it can be done and car centric cities converted into a place with just half of all residents own a car. We also know from that example that it took fifty years of dedicated government support and heavy local support to get that far. Meanwhile even L.A can take a decade and millions of dollars to not build a bus lane.

To note the obvious, we don’t have 50 years to get the US to moderately decrease emissions, and when accounting for things like construction emissions the gains are pretty small when compared to say electrifying Amaricas railroads or steel foundries.

This is not to say that things like walkable cities and such arn’t really nice things we should be doing, just that like many degrowth ideas they are both too slow to implement, to marginal an impact, and two specific to certain areas to really move the needle on weather we hit 2C, 2.5C, or 3C.

This is all of course tangential to the topic we’re actually talking about, which is wether or not electrification and building renewables is pointless when it comes to fighting climate change because they are apparently incapable of ever replacing fossil fuels.