With the CORVID-19 shutdown of China, greenhouse gas emissions has reduced right? Do we know how that that affected the environment?
I have done some searching, but not found anything. I know that the satellites have shown that China isn't dumping tons of coal burning crap in the air.
Has the overall amount of CO2 in the atmosphere gone down in any conceivable way at all?
Is it too soon to know?
IIRC the area in and around Wuhan (extending now to most of China) has seen the near elimination of smog. The skies and clearer then they've been for the last 50 years. It won't last, though. As soon as it's safe to come out the smog factories (fixed and mobile) will smother everyone again.
To answer the question about co2 in the atmosphere. I expect that the amount of co2 hasn't gone done.
Co2 stays in the atmosphere for 125 years on average. Co2 pumped into the atmosphere in 1895 is now just leaving the atmosphere. So we only see the concentration of co2 actually drop if we pump less co2 into the atmosphere as we pumped in in 1895. As we are emitting way more than back in 1895 the China dip might show up as a slight break in the upward trend.
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Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
There's a LOT going on in that image. I think the best condensed explanation is that even though the carbon cycle moves way more carbon around (the little balanced arrows) than humans add (the big arrows), the +2 gigaton net imbalance is all human.
Here's a bit easier to follow look at what the Chinese manufacturing slowdown is doing to atmospheric CO2 concentrations:
The TL;DR is that even with China's slowdown, CO2 is still increasing and year-to-date 2020 has seen more increase than the last two years. This needle does not move abruptly.
CO2 emitted = CO2 taken from the atmosphere + CO2 stored in the atmosphere and sea + error
Roughly.
Yup This. Basically - emitters and sinks, uptake and down-take from Earth's atmosphere, based on what the report claims (if I've read it correctly) is the best current available model.
Um, isn't it saying that the +2 imbalance is actually a lack of data and/or understanding of the details?
No. Its the measure of the difference between sources and sinks. +2 is the rate of atmospheric increase. A budget imbalance of zero implies you spend as much as you produce
Arrows up are inputs into the atmosphere, arrows down are outputs into various carbon sinks. Small arrows are natural sources and sinks, big arrows are things caused by humans directly (fossil fuel burning) or indirectly (oceanic uptake increase is at least partially due to algae and plankton blooms caused by warming and CO2 levels). If you add everything up from all sources and sinks, the outcome is +2 gigatons per year, which is what's being added to the atmosphere.
The part that kind of looks like a line graph is a cross section of land, not a graph. The colors on it correspond to the categories of sources/sinks.
Circles are relative sizes of individual sources within the categories represented by the arrows.
It's not a very good graphic. Really it's four not very good graphics overlayed on each other in a single image.
No.. the +2 is carbon that we don't know where it is going.
There's already 18 accounted for being absorbed into the atmosphere.
... Although why they're even showing the +2 is beyond me.
The error bars are already there.
Like fossil CO2: 35 (33-37)
What's the point of showing the difference in the input/output budget if the error on one measurement could double the discrepancy or make it go away altogether?
L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
With all the bickering happening in DC about relief for the pandemic, the EPA decided that it's now suspending enforcement of following the rules.
I don't know about you all, but I like to breathe clean air and drink clean water. I guess that's only me.
It's not behind a paywall, but here's the article in the spoiler with the tweets removed:
The Environmental Protection Agency, headed by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, announced on Thursday a sweeping and indefinite suspension of environmental rules amid the worsening coronavirus pandemic, a move green groups warned gives the fossil fuel industry a "green light to pollute with impunity."
Under the new policy (pdf), which the EPA insisted is temporary while providing no timeframe, big polluters will effectively be trusted to regulate themselves and will not be punished for failing to comply with reporting rules and other requirements. The order—applied retroactively beginning March 13, 2020—requests that companies "act responsibly" to avoid violations.
Critics, such as youth climate leader Greta Thunberg, accused the Trump administration of exploiting the coronavirus crisis to advance its longstanding goal of drastically rolling back environmental protections.
"The EPA uses this global pandemic to create loopholes for destroying the environment," tweeted Thunberg. "This is a schoolbook example for what we need to start looking out for."
Cynthia Giles, former head of the EPA's Office of Enforcement under the Obama administration, told The Hill that the new policy is "essentially a nationwide waiver of environmental rules for the indefinite future."
"It tells companies across the country that they will not face enforcement even if they emit unlawful air and water pollution in violation of environmental laws, so long as they claim that those failures are in some way 'caused' by the virus pandemic," said Giles. "And it allows them an out on monitoring too, so we may never know how bad the violating pollution was."
The EPA's order, for which the oil industry aggressively lobbied, represents the latest effort by the Trump administration to usethe coronavirus pandemic to advance right-wing policies that would likely not be permitted—or would at least face greater scrutiny—under normal circumstances.
As Common Dreams reported last week, the White House is advancing an assault on public-sector unions, xenophobic border policies, and other objectives amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has officially infected more than 85,000 people in the United States as of Friday morning.
With all the bickering happening in DC about relief for the pandemic, the EPA decided that it's now suspending enforcement of following the rules.
I don't know about you all, but I like to breathe clean air and drink clean water. I guess that's only me.
It's not behind a paywall, but here's the article in the spoiler with the tweets removed:
The Environmental Protection Agency, headed by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, announced on Thursday a sweeping and indefinite suspension of environmental rules amid the worsening coronavirus pandemic, a move green groups warned gives the fossil fuel industry a "green light to pollute with impunity."
Under the new policy (pdf), which the EPA insisted is temporary while providing no timeframe, big polluters will effectively be trusted to regulate themselves and will not be punished for failing to comply with reporting rules and other requirements. The order—applied retroactively beginning March 13, 2020—requests that companies "act responsibly" to avoid violations.
Critics, such as youth climate leader Greta Thunberg, accused the Trump administration of exploiting the coronavirus crisis to advance its longstanding goal of drastically rolling back environmental protections.
"The EPA uses this global pandemic to create loopholes for destroying the environment," tweeted Thunberg. "This is a schoolbook example for what we need to start looking out for."
Cynthia Giles, former head of the EPA's Office of Enforcement under the Obama administration, told The Hill that the new policy is "essentially a nationwide waiver of environmental rules for the indefinite future."
"It tells companies across the country that they will not face enforcement even if they emit unlawful air and water pollution in violation of environmental laws, so long as they claim that those failures are in some way 'caused' by the virus pandemic," said Giles. "And it allows them an out on monitoring too, so we may never know how bad the violating pollution was."
The EPA's order, for which the oil industry aggressively lobbied, represents the latest effort by the Trump administration to usethe coronavirus pandemic to advance right-wing policies that would likely not be permitted—or would at least face greater scrutiny—under normal circumstances.
As Common Dreams reported last week, the White House is advancing an assault on public-sector unions, xenophobic border policies, and other objectives amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has officially infected more than 85,000 people in the United States as of Friday morning.
Went and looked at the actual memorandum. Their reasoning seems perfectly logical to me given the situation we're facing:
At the EPA, we are cognizant of potential worker shortages due to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the travel and social distancing restrictions imposed by both governments and corporations or recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to limit the spread of COVID-19. The consequences of the pandemic may affect facility operations and the availability of key staff and contractors and the ability of laboratories to timely analyze samples and provide results. As a result, there may be constraints on the ability of a facility or laboratory to carry out certain activities required by our federal environmental permits, regulations, and statutes. These consequences may affect reporting obligations and milestones set forth in settlements and consent decrees. Finally, these consequences may affect the ability of an operation to meet enforceable limitations on air emissions and water discharges, requirements for the management of hazardous waste, or requirements to ensure and provide safe drinking water. These are very distinct situations that the EPA plans to manage differently, as described below.
They don't want companies to turn off production entirely if said companies aren't able to comply due to shelter-at-home restrictions and etc. Doesn't apply to superfund or RCRA CA enforcement. Doesn't apply to imported products such as pesticides. Also lays out that if companies do not comply they need to identify the nature, dates, and how COVID-19 was the cause of noncompliance. Authorized states may require difference enforcement. If settlement agreements are affected then reporting parties need to use the enforceable language in the settlement agreement laying out notifying procedures.
This issue really intersects with the economy thread, but I'll make the point here. Basically they don't want the economy to hurt more if industries have to turn off production because they can't comply with enforcement mechanisms requiring people to staff a location. I'm skeptical of the Trump administration here given their previous track record, but this seems entirely reasonable for the current conditions we're in.
My takeaway from the temporary drop in observed CO2 levels in China is that we have a clear demonstration that there is human influence on CO2 levels and that we can control them to be less severe.
My takeaway from the temporary drop in observed CO2 levels in China is that we have a clear demonstration that there is human influence on CO2 levels and that we can control them to be less severe.
Going to be a pedant for a sec.
We haven't measured a drop in CO2 emissions in China, we've estimated them due to power demand reductions and other (visible) pollutant reductions.
Fun fact: lot of international organizations (and domestic ones worth anything) use satellite imagery of pollutant levels as a proxy for economic activity in China since no one can trust any numbers coming out of that country. They tend to be pretty accurate in ex-post analysis.
Worth mentioning that even with the lockdown, March has again been a record setter, up almost 5ppm from last year and up a full ppm since February.
The biggest CO2 producers aren't the same as the biggest smog and nitrogenous pollution producers, they're otherwise clean power generation. Those usually go hand in hand as increases and decreases in industry require proportional increase in utility. But the lockdown isn't symmetrical between the easily tracked pollution and CO2 in the way a recession usually is.
That green new deal could be more of a new deal than it was meant. The last new deal used idle labor to pave the continent, lay roads sewers and utilities to facilitate decades of building and economic growth, ignoring short term economic viability just to force dollars through the system and set the stage for an unprecedented recovery. This one could do the same with wind farms and solar panels instead of asphalt and sewer ditches.
A damn lot of our roads haven't been properly fixed since the WPA laid them down, either, but I'm ok with foregoing either while a hypothetical WPA2 could do more long term good elsewhere.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Sweden has just shut down their last coal power plant two years ahead of schedule. The next day, Austria shut down its last coal plant.
Other countries in Europe (Germany excepting) are also planning on shutting down their coal plants in the next few years, and coal plants in the US might just end up shutting down anyway due to the SARS2 pandemic. Coal's more expensive than about anything else in most parts of the country, there's a major drop in demand for electricity right now with the shutdowns, and wind and solar produced more energy than coal in three days this April so far. There's a coal glut, and plants are running at a loss, probably hoping Trump will keep bailing them out. But then again, the executives might just pocket that bailout and then shut the plants down anyway. We'll see.
Sweden has just shut down their last coal power plant two years ahead of schedule. The next day, Austria shut down its last coal plant.
Other countries in Europe (Germany excepting) are also planning on shutting down their coal plants in the next few years, and coal plants in the US might just end up shutting down anyway due to the SARS2 pandemic. Coal's more expensive than about anything else in most parts of the country, there's a major drop in demand for electricity right now with the shutdowns, and wind and solar produced more energy than coal in three days this April so far. There's a coal glut, and plants are running at a loss, probably hoping Trump will keep bailing them out. But then again, the executives might just pocket that bailout and then shut the plants down anyway. We'll see.
Hell, I'll take it.
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L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
Oh hey! It's been a while since last we had some news:
Okay, that is a MUCH higher dip than the 5.5% I saw reported last month. So that's good news, at least.
There is bad news: Atmospheric levels are still rising. They didn't set a record for net monthly increase again in April at least but this still isn't enough to change the direction, a year of this would buy us about 3 months on projections.
This sounds like it makes fighting climate change out to be entirely hopeless. While we could be a little more shut down considering the states that are re-opening, for the most part we're as shut down as you can get without having people starving to death. Just how much would we have to stop living to actually have an impact?
We can live as much as we want as long as we cut down on the fossil fuels. Switch as much transportation as possible to be electric and switch the grid to zero emission sources. Doing stuff the same old way but just doing less of it isn't going to work.
Actually making the switch is enough of an emissions hit that you'll damage the oceans, and probably the temperature, beyond repair. We need to pair any transition with degrowth of the suburbs and rural areas to stand a chance, our lifestyle is killing us.
Wait what? The CO2 equivalent usage for EVs is better than gasoline on average and only loses to it if you limit it to EVs charging from the dirtiest possible grids, like Germany's lignite coal plants. Cradle to grave comparisons of EVs also have them coming out ahead. There is no universe in which switching to EVs is more catastrophic than the status quo.
Wait what? The CO2 equivalent usage for EVs is better than gasoline on average and only loses to it if you limit it to EVs charging from the dirtiest possible grids, like Germany's lignite coal plants. Cradle to grave comparisons of EVs also have them coming out ahead. There is no universe in which switching to EVs is more catastrophic than the status quo.
You're building them with fossil fuels in most locations and converting our entire grid would be a massive energy expenditure. Especially when you take the entire materials supply chain into account with all dirty af mining that happens in developing nations we like to not think about. Other technologies like dams and nuclear offgas a lot of greenhouse gases from the concrete they're made out of, dams also convert entire valleys of vegetation into methane and other gases. We've pushed the crisis out too far there's no way we survive without major global upheaval and adaptations to how we live. Or magic terraforming technology that doesn't exist yet.
Wait what? The CO2 equivalent usage for EVs is better than gasoline on average and only loses to it if you limit it to EVs charging from the dirtiest possible grids, like Germany's lignite coal plants. Cradle to grave comparisons of EVs also have them coming out ahead. There is no universe in which switching to EVs is more catastrophic than the status quo.
You're building them with fossil fuels in most locations and converting our entire grid would be a massive energy expenditure. Especially when you take the entire materials supply chain into account with all dirty af mining that happens in developing nations we like to not think about. Other technologies like dams and nuclear offgas a lot of greenhouse gases from the concrete they're made out of, dams also convert entire valleys of vegetation into methane and other gases. We've pushed the crisis out too far there's no way we survive without major global upheaval and adaptations to how we live. Or magic terraforming technology that doesn't exist yet.
Just to clarify: You are saying that any measures taken now (even if positive long term) will have negative consequences on the climate in the short term and thus utterly fuck us, and thus we're all going die no matter what we do?
Uplifting.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
Wait what? The CO2 equivalent usage for EVs is better than gasoline on average and only loses to it if you limit it to EVs charging from the dirtiest possible grids, like Germany's lignite coal plants. Cradle to grave comparisons of EVs also have them coming out ahead. There is no universe in which switching to EVs is more catastrophic than the status quo.
You're building them with fossil fuels in most locations and converting our entire grid would be a massive energy expenditure. Especially when you take the entire materials supply chain into account with all dirty af mining that happens in developing nations we like to not think about. Other technologies like dams and nuclear offgas a lot of greenhouse gases from the concrete they're made out of, dams also convert entire valleys of vegetation into methane and other gases. We've pushed the crisis out too far there's no way we survive without major global upheaval and adaptations to how we live. Or magic terraforming technology that doesn't exist yet.
Just to clarify: You are saying that any measures taken now (even if positive long term) will have negative consequences on the climate in the short term and thus utterly fuck us, and thus we're all going die no matter what we do?
Uplifting.
Correct. There's currently enough CO2 in the atmosphere that is going to sink into the oceans over the next ten years that it'll change the pH enough to knock out the bottom of the food chain without us coming up with carbon extraction technologies for the air (which are coming along). Building a renewable grid without degrowth will bury the needle.
But we can definitely do degrowth and we don't all have to die.
Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
edited May 2020
I think I've mentioned it in here before?
The pH problem is actually going to catch up to us sooner than the temps, at least for developed nations that aren't near the equator. It's probably been 5-6 years now since I read about how Washington oyster farmers were having to start their oyster larvae in Hawaii because the water had gotten too acidic up there for them to take, than fly them /back/ so they'd have the right flavor when matured.
Blade Runner 2049 was very prescient with its solar energy towers and mealworm farms. If we don't act on this we're all gonna be eating a lot more bugs.
Wait what? The CO2 equivalent usage for EVs is better than gasoline on average and only loses to it if you limit it to EVs charging from the dirtiest possible grids, like Germany's lignite coal plants. Cradle to grave comparisons of EVs also have them coming out ahead. There is no universe in which switching to EVs is more catastrophic than the status quo.
You're building them with fossil fuels in most locations and converting our entire grid would be a massive energy expenditure. Especially when you take the entire materials supply chain into account with all dirty af mining that happens in developing nations we like to not think about. Other technologies like dams and nuclear offgas a lot of greenhouse gases from the concrete they're made out of, dams also convert entire valleys of vegetation into methane and other gases. We've pushed the crisis out too far there's no way we survive without major global upheaval and adaptations to how we live. Or magic terraforming technology that doesn't exist yet.
Wait what? The CO2 equivalent usage for EVs is better than gasoline on average and only loses to it if you limit it to EVs charging from the dirtiest possible grids, like Germany's lignite coal plants. Cradle to grave comparisons of EVs also have them coming out ahead. There is no universe in which switching to EVs is more catastrophic than the status quo.
You're building them with fossil fuels in most locations and converting our entire grid would be a massive energy expenditure. Especially when you take the entire materials supply chain into account with all dirty af mining that happens in developing nations we like to not think about. Other technologies like dams and nuclear offgas a lot of greenhouse gases from the concrete they're made out of, dams also convert entire valleys of vegetation into methane and other gases. We've pushed the crisis out too far there's no way we survive without major global upheaval and adaptations to how we live. Or magic terraforming technology that doesn't exist yet.
Concrete based emissions are largely one-time, and it's not like mining coal is much better even before you burn it
Honestly it's kinda hard to summarize. Most of my reading on this has been off of stuff yungneocon posts on Twitter. He's a pretty tremendous follow for this sort of thing IMO. Here's a roundup thread he did a while ago of a bunch of his source material, it's good.
Renewables are better than nuclear IIRC, but it's still a huge outpouring of fossil fuels mining and manufacturing and deploying them, and we've pushed this all so far out we're at a crisis point where we're not even sure if it's possible to recover anymore. Things are probably going to get a lot worse before they get better, if they get better, because of the lack of ability to tackle this problem as a species.
At a skim he reads very much like someone who starts with a philosophy and conclusion and shoves the science into whatever hole it takes to fit that inbuilt assumption.
If a data set has a range of 3 to 449, something is wrong. If the mean of those numbers is 66 by the median is only 13, that's a clue. If by cutting the top and bottom 10% off you get a mean of 15 and a median of 14, then that probably pegs the problem, the top data was flawed if not outright bogus.
Even including that bad data, all but one of the charts has nuclear well below the threshold, and most have it below at least some renewables.
Nuclear has some dirty steps, but uranium mining doesn't happen on any major scale unless somebody is building bombs, because pounds of it can serve for tons of coal.
Hevach on
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
Y'all none of this is an argument against transitioning to nuclear and renewables; it's just that doing so won't save us without actually cutting our energy consumption (via degrowth), and will actually accelerate things without effective carbon capture technology. It doesn't matter if such a transition would halve our output if we're building them with fossil fuels, we're still going to accelerate the oceans dying off. I skimmed that article and posted it because it seemed mostly correct based on recollection, it's astoundingly hard to come up with sources for this shit on google because there's very few comprehensive studies that put numbers to it.
Y'all none of this is an argument against transitioning to nuclear and renewables; it's just that doing so won't save us without actually cutting our energy consumption (via degrowth), and will actually accelerate things without effective carbon capture technology. It doesn't matter if such a transition would halve our output if we're building them with fossil fuels, we're still going to accelerate the oceans dying off. I skimmed that article and posted it because it seemed mostly correct based on recollection, it's astoundingly hard to come up with sources for this shit on google because there's very few comprehensive studies that put numbers to it.
Again, this is starting with the conclusion. Energy output does not matter for climate change. GHG output does. That thread, for example, proposes ripping up and replacing basically every city and suburb on the planet. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that's probably going to involve more CO2 release from the concrete alone that just building a bunch of nuclear plants.
Actually, that theexologist link does a good job putting numbers to it, the numbers just don't say what they assert. They cite aggregates of hundreds of studies in several groups, all of which have this feature of having nuclear power in this incredible factor of 100+ range but nothing else, all with the same huge mean/median skew that vanishes when dropping the outliers.
Those are good numbers. Hell, they're save the world numbers. Even with the off the bat goalpost shift of saying let's move 2030 to right stat now those are save the world numbers. Only when they take the top number on each list does that change, and like I said, you can't look at the data sets they cite the way they look at them (as indeed none of the researchers they cite do).
Posts
To answer the question about co2 in the atmosphere. I expect that the amount of co2 hasn't gone done.
Co2 stays in the atmosphere for 125 years on average. Co2 pumped into the atmosphere in 1895 is now just leaving the atmosphere. So we only see the concentration of co2 actually drop if we pump less co2 into the atmosphere as we pumped in in 1895. As we are emitting way more than back in 1895 the China dip might show up as a slight break in the upward trend.
https://public.wmo.int/en/our-mandate/climate/wmo-statement-state-of-global-climate
From: World Meteorological Organization - Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2019.
https://library.wmo.int/index.php?lvl=notice_display&id=21700
Roughly.
Here's a bit easier to follow look at what the Chinese manufacturing slowdown is doing to atmospheric CO2 concentrations:
https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2/
https://www.co2.earth/weekly-co2
https://www.co2.earth/monthly-co2
https://www.co2.earth/annual-co2
The TL;DR is that even with China's slowdown, CO2 is still increasing and year-to-date 2020 has seen more increase than the last two years. This needle does not move abruptly.
No. Its the measure of the difference between sources and sinks. +2 is the rate of atmospheric increase. A budget imbalance of zero implies you spend as much as you produce
The part that kind of looks like a line graph is a cross section of land, not a graph. The colors on it correspond to the categories of sources/sinks.
Circles are relative sizes of individual sources within the categories represented by the arrows.
It's not a very good graphic. Really it's four not very good graphics overlayed on each other in a single image.
"How many design mistakes can you spot in this graph?"
There's already 18 accounted for being absorbed into the atmosphere.
... Although why they're even showing the +2 is beyond me.
The error bars are already there.
Like fossil CO2: 35 (33-37)
What's the point of showing the difference in the input/output budget if the error on one measurement could double the discrepancy or make it go away altogether?
I don't know about you all, but I like to breathe clean air and drink clean water. I guess that's only me.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/27/holy-crap-insane-citing-coronavirus-pandemic-epa-indefinitely-suspends-environmental
It's not behind a paywall, but here's the article in the spoiler with the tweets removed:
Under the new policy (pdf), which the EPA insisted is temporary while providing no timeframe, big polluters will effectively be trusted to regulate themselves and will not be punished for failing to comply with reporting rules and other requirements. The order—applied retroactively beginning March 13, 2020—requests that companies "act responsibly" to avoid violations.
Critics, such as youth climate leader Greta Thunberg, accused the Trump administration of exploiting the coronavirus crisis to advance its longstanding goal of drastically rolling back environmental protections.
"The EPA uses this global pandemic to create loopholes for destroying the environment," tweeted Thunberg. "This is a schoolbook example for what we need to start looking out for."
Cynthia Giles, former head of the EPA's Office of Enforcement under the Obama administration, told The Hill that the new policy is "essentially a nationwide waiver of environmental rules for the indefinite future."
"It tells companies across the country that they will not face enforcement even if they emit unlawful air and water pollution in violation of environmental laws, so long as they claim that those failures are in some way 'caused' by the virus pandemic," said Giles. "And it allows them an out on monitoring too, so we may never know how bad the violating pollution was."
The EPA's order, for which the oil industry aggressively lobbied, represents the latest effort by the Trump administration to usethe coronavirus pandemic to advance right-wing policies that would likely not be permitted—or would at least face greater scrutiny—under normal circumstances.
As Common Dreams reported last week, the White House is advancing an assault on public-sector unions, xenophobic border policies, and other objectives amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has officially infected more than 85,000 people in the United States as of Friday morning.
Went and looked at the actual memorandum. Their reasoning seems perfectly logical to me given the situation we're facing:
They don't want companies to turn off production entirely if said companies aren't able to comply due to shelter-at-home restrictions and etc. Doesn't apply to superfund or RCRA CA enforcement. Doesn't apply to imported products such as pesticides. Also lays out that if companies do not comply they need to identify the nature, dates, and how COVID-19 was the cause of noncompliance. Authorized states may require difference enforcement. If settlement agreements are affected then reporting parties need to use the enforceable language in the settlement agreement laying out notifying procedures.
This issue really intersects with the economy thread, but I'll make the point here. Basically they don't want the economy to hurt more if industries have to turn off production because they can't comply with enforcement mechanisms requiring people to staff a location. I'm skeptical of the Trump administration here given their previous track record, but this seems entirely reasonable for the current conditions we're in.
Going to be a pedant for a sec.
We haven't measured a drop in CO2 emissions in China, we've estimated them due to power demand reductions and other (visible) pollutant reductions.
The biggest CO2 producers aren't the same as the biggest smog and nitrogenous pollution producers, they're otherwise clean power generation. Those usually go hand in hand as increases and decreases in industry require proportional increase in utility. But the lockdown isn't symmetrical between the easily tracked pollution and CO2 in the way a recession usually is.
That green new deal could be more of a new deal than it was meant. The last new deal used idle labor to pave the continent, lay roads sewers and utilities to facilitate decades of building and economic growth, ignoring short term economic viability just to force dollars through the system and set the stage for an unprecedented recovery. This one could do the same with wind farms and solar panels instead of asphalt and sewer ditches.
A damn lot of our roads haven't been properly fixed since the WPA laid them down, either, but I'm ok with foregoing either while a hypothetical WPA2 could do more long term good elsewhere.
Other countries in Europe (Germany excepting) are also planning on shutting down their coal plants in the next few years, and coal plants in the US might just end up shutting down anyway due to the SARS2 pandemic. Coal's more expensive than about anything else in most parts of the country, there's a major drop in demand for electricity right now with the shutdowns, and wind and solar produced more energy than coal in three days this April so far. There's a coal glut, and plants are running at a loss, probably hoping Trump will keep bailing them out. But then again, the executives might just pocket that bailout and then shut the plants down anyway. We'll see.
Hell, I'll take it.
A Satellite Lets Scientists See Antarctica’s Melting Like Never Before
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/climate/antarctica-ice-climate-change.html
(Sorry if it's behind a paywall)
It's looking pretty grim, and a great read I think.
Actually making the switch is enough of an emissions hit that you'll damage the oceans, and probably the temperature, beyond repair. We need to pair any transition with degrowth of the suburbs and rural areas to stand a chance, our lifestyle is killing us.
You're building them with fossil fuels in most locations and converting our entire grid would be a massive energy expenditure. Especially when you take the entire materials supply chain into account with all dirty af mining that happens in developing nations we like to not think about. Other technologies like dams and nuclear offgas a lot of greenhouse gases from the concrete they're made out of, dams also convert entire valleys of vegetation into methane and other gases. We've pushed the crisis out too far there's no way we survive without major global upheaval and adaptations to how we live. Or magic terraforming technology that doesn't exist yet.
Just to clarify: You are saying that any measures taken now (even if positive long term) will have negative consequences on the climate in the short term and thus utterly fuck us, and thus we're all going die no matter what we do?
Uplifting.
Correct. There's currently enough CO2 in the atmosphere that is going to sink into the oceans over the next ten years that it'll change the pH enough to knock out the bottom of the food chain without us coming up with carbon extraction technologies for the air (which are coming along). Building a renewable grid without degrowth will bury the needle.
But we can definitely do degrowth and we don't all have to die.
The pH problem is actually going to catch up to us sooner than the temps, at least for developed nations that aren't near the equator. It's probably been 5-6 years now since I read about how Washington oyster farmers were having to start their oyster larvae in Hawaii because the water had gotten too acidic up there for them to take, than fly them /back/ so they'd have the right flavor when matured.
Blade Runner 2049 was very prescient with its solar energy towers and mealworm farms. If we don't act on this we're all gonna be eating a lot more bugs.
https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
[citation needed]
http://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedFiles/org/WNA/Publications/Working_Group_Reports/comparison_of_lifecycle.pdf
Concrete based emissions are largely one-time, and it's not like mining coal is much better even before you burn it
Honestly it's kinda hard to summarize. Most of my reading on this has been off of stuff yungneocon posts on Twitter. He's a pretty tremendous follow for this sort of thing IMO. Here's a roundup thread he did a while ago of a bunch of his source material, it's good.
And here's a thread he did on degrowth.
More specifically, here's an article about the carbon cost of nuclear power.
https://theecologist.org/2015/feb/05/false-solution-nuclear-power-not-low-carbon
Renewables are better than nuclear IIRC, but it's still a huge outpouring of fossil fuels mining and manufacturing and deploying them, and we've pushed this all so far out we're at a crisis point where we're not even sure if it's possible to recover anymore. Things are probably going to get a lot worse before they get better, if they get better, because of the lack of ability to tackle this problem as a species.
Even including that bad data, all but one of the charts has nuclear well below the threshold, and most have it below at least some renewables.
Nuclear has some dirty steps, but uranium mining doesn't happen on any major scale unless somebody is building bombs, because pounds of it can serve for tons of coal.
Again, this is starting with the conclusion. Energy output does not matter for climate change. GHG output does. That thread, for example, proposes ripping up and replacing basically every city and suburb on the planet. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that's probably going to involve more CO2 release from the concrete alone that just building a bunch of nuclear plants.
Those are good numbers. Hell, they're save the world numbers. Even with the off the bat goalpost shift of saying let's move 2030 to right stat now those are save the world numbers. Only when they take the top number on each list does that change, and like I said, you can't look at the data sets they cite the way they look at them (as indeed none of the researchers they cite do).