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[-] sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago

I think it's much more important what the big economies do that don't have that option: Europe, China, India, Africa.

It's worth pointing out that China in particular uses an enormous amount of coal.

Electrification is good, as both a bridge to cleaner energy and as a way to reduce dispersed pollution from many different fossil fuel sources (like almost every vehicle on the road). But electrification is only one step that needs to happen. The other is to decarbonize the grid itself.

So China burns more coal than anyone else in the world (with India at the number 2 spot), and is dramatically increasing its renewable power generation, but the overall increase in overall energy and their strategic interest in energy security and energy independence has them continuing to not only mine coal, but to continue constructing new coal power plants, and to slow down the actual decommissioning of old coal plants.

So although disruption to the global oil market will cause most countries to rely less on fossil fuels, the countries with domestic production of fossil fuels (Chinese coal, American oil) won't feel the pressure as much.

[-] manxu@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago

Very true. There, we can only hope the realization comes in that modern renewables are cheaper than even local fossil fuels.

this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
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Climate

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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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