this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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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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Should I Turn Down the Thermostat or Overthrow the Capitalist Mode of Production? - Marxist-Humanist Initiative (marxisthumanistinitiative.org)
submitted 1 week ago by JustJack23@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Using their example of industrial heat, I think they're overstating how fucked this is in terms of technology:

Take industrial heating as an example. By some estimates, 10% of global emissions come from industrial heat, the high-intensity heat needed to produce steel, cement and other materials. Those high temperatures come from burning fossil fuels, and we don’t currently have the means of replacing those fossil fuels with alternate green sources of high heat

The thing is, for this example, we do have the technology, the catch is the cost:

In terms of production costs, one ton of steel currently costs in the order of €400, which includes about €50 required for the coal used. Replacing this coal with hydrogen would require around €180 worth of hydrogen at current best prices (€3.6/kg), which would increase the total price of a ton of steel by about one third. If the large-scale production of hydrogen drives down the price of hydrogen to €1.80/kg by 2030, the price difference between conventional steel and steel produced by green hydrogen would drop to the order of 10 %.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/641552/EPRS_BRI(2020)641552_EN.pdf

Capitalism is definitely contributing to this part of the problem, but it isn't alone. This is a switching cost, one inherent to decarbonizing industry, and so it will be a problem regardless of the economic model used (assuming the same output of steel). The rest of this article has good insights.

Obligitory: Eat the rich, down with capitalism, communism for all