this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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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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Best technology for coal electricity capture costs $10/watt (close to new on budget nuclear plants), and only captures 65% of emissions. A better "free" climate strategy would be to put them in "backup peaker" mode for renewables and run them at far less than 35% of year.

DAC can work only if price of carbon is $300/ton ($3/gallon gasoline). Still, 100% renewables is cheapest path to avoiding those taxes, but afterwards, DAC can hope to pay for itself.

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[–] solo@slrpnk.net 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I am not really familiar with hydrogen energy. I just found this community that I will look into. Do you perhaps have some resources to share?

[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Electrolysis of Hydrogen is green if renewables power it. It is almost as automatable as battery storage. It is transportable/exportable energy that is cheaper to transport than building electric wires, even by truck. A fuel cell is a hydrogen to electricity converter that is twice as efficient in obtaining power from fuel than an ICE engine. Other than fuel, hydrogen has many critical chemical applications.

Hydrogen electrolysis is the key technology. Just make it, and figure out how to sell it later. Biden's IRA was ok for hydrogen. China is doing better as usual. Truck sized electrolysis systems makes electrolysis portable too, and could be used to chase seasonal surplus renewables. The key to 100% renewable power is having enough power every day, and so on most days have surpluses. Hydrogen is path to monetizing that surplus, in addition to displacing some energy use with backup/resilience exportable energy.

[–] solo@slrpnk.net 2 points 10 hours ago

Thank you very much for this intro!