How bad is it going to get before we fucking stop burning fossil fuels?
Honestly, we don't even need to anymore, the only thing preventing it is cost, and any price is worth paying if we're all going to be living in a furnace in a couple of decades
The only thing preventing it is a few greedy, sick little men with a lot of power. We are destroying life on our planet for their gain, though they already have many, many times more wealth than anyone could ever need or enjoy.
And their sycophants who will carry their lies to the next generation. It's not just those that are directly responsible but also the willfully ignorant that are complicit.
we don't even need to anymore
Sorry man, that's just naive. I don't think you have any idea how dependent we are, the scale of change required.
For example, how are we to farm? Know any plants cranking out battery powered farm equipment? Know any farmers that could afford such gear?
I'm not saying we can't do more, but we're inventing and deploying green energy solutions at an astonishing rate.
Government funding can answer all those questions if the will is there. The free market will not fix climate change without heavy intervention.
As per your example, there is nothing physically preventing a battery powered tractor or combine. A government could put out subsidies for manufacturers building these vehicles, the government could then subsidise farmers buying them, and perhaps remove existing subsidy on farmers refusing to decommission their older equipment.
The literal only things where there's not a money related solution to today is long range air travel, and some very specific industrial processes that require specific plastic polymers. Literally everything else has an alternative that can be either used immediately or built relatively quickly, if we decide to spend the money.
The amount of lithium batteries that would required with our current tech is just staggering. The ingredients of a lithium battery are not smiles and sunshine and giggles.
The energy required, despite the quantity of lithium (which wouldn't be available anyway) would just surge carbon output to later reduce it decades later. We can't capitalism our way out by making more things. Stopping making everything would actually help more, but would implode the planet's societies. Throttling energy use by AI and other expensive processes would do more, now. Pushing the use of public infrastructure, even busses, would do more now. Getting people to stop using cars would do more now. Forcing employers to require jobs that don't need a physical presence to all be work from home would do more now.
And not just burning them for power/transport - a lot of this is coming from forest fires.
Which are frequently burnt just for cheap beef.
A lot of people are going to die or be displaced before anyone does anything and when they finally do something about it I fear their solution won't be accepting migrants unconditionally and trasferring all our labor into providing human necessities.
Preliminary study from one location, extrapolated globally using an AI driven data model
In 2023, the CO2 growth rate was 3.37 ± 0.11 ppm at Mauna Loa,
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.12447
Again this is very concerning and something climate scientists did not plan for however, it is a preliminary study based on an AI model.
Of course human driven climate change is the main cause of the mass extinction in the current Holocene. Any unhandled variables in our research and prediction models must be taken seriously. I'm curious to see if this work will be corroborated from other data elsewhere in the globe, especially from McMurdo station and the CRU in Iceland.
Grand
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.