this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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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.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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The pledge was born out of shareholder activism — and was withdrawn as regulators crack down on greenwashing.

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[–] [email protected] 89 points 1 week ago (4 children)

It's almost like corporations are run by vacuous sociopathic immoral criminals, whose sole goal is the acquisition of wealth.

Regulations with teeth are a requirement for preventing corporate criminals from succeeding, and ensuring a level playing field, competition, and market success; otherwise the immoral and unethical have an inherent advantage, because crime pays and morality is expensive.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The scary thing here is that the pledges came out of shareholder activism. If the corporation will not do what the shareholders ask of it, then who is calling the shots?

We often hear that CEOs have no choice but to put profits ahead of morals because they are obliged to deliver profits to the shareholders. We can see here, that they're prepared to act against the wishes of the shareholders, so that excuse is clearly untrue.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

i been sick of that "a ceo's only responsibility to shareholders" line. just like i been sick of people saying in america that corporations are legally required to maximize profits for the shareholders. this lets greedy oligarch fucks off the hook for their evils by portraying it as inevitable.

before reagan, one of the primary functions of government was holding greedy fucks accountable. reagan introduced alignment. from him on, government has been run by and for greedy oligarchs who just want to make themselves rich, everyone else, including the shareholders, be damned. our last chance to start reversing that process through elections was probably in 2000 when we didn't elect gore. we've been doomed ever since to someone like the next president.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

we did elect gore, he didn't have the heart to fight for it

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