this post was submitted on 04 Jul 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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[–] wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

To be fair, the emissions from those gas turbines are far less harmful than the pollution emitted by the refinery in the area. It's still going to contain NOx and of course CO2 and it objectively will add to the total pollutants in the area. But fighting gas generators is less fruitful than fighting against the nearby processing plant that dumps aromatic hydrocarbons (benzene, toluene, xylene - all chemicals that once they enter the human body have no real biological pathway to be broken down and removed... they just bounce around and fuck up things until they cause cancer).

I've worked around these new datacenter generators. One thing that they do really well is they have huge power storage capabilities because the datacenter draw can ramp up and down by tens of megawatts in less than a second. So they have to use a combination of batteries and flywheels to buffer the increase. This means they're far more efficient than even normal grid operations.

I'd still like to see much more solar, however. But it's a red state so the higher long term cost of burning fuels and maintenance of moving parts is worth it for owning the libs.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

They're also emitting a lot of unburned natural gas, there are plans to install a lot more turbines, and it's much easier to fight something new and illegally installed than something that's been around a while. Plus, it's the NAACP fighting it, which makes sense, because the turbines are being used to power a chatbot that's tuned to be racist.

Ideally, we want to get rid of all fossil fuels, but any little place a victory is possible is a good thing.

[–] wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Eh... I've been in the room while the operators of these plants overviewed infrared cameras which spot methane leaks very clearly. They take those emissions very seriously because in this particular instance - it's fuel and they are paying for it directly. It's not like on the production or transport side where leaks are just a fact of life and are overlooked because gasses are less valuable than the liquids.

The ethics of power production has an obvious gradient. These modern modular on site gas plants are way, way less shitty than most. Not as ethical as renewables but renewables can't achieve the sudden demand changes. The best would be for the damn nazi chatbot to just not exist.

edit: nazi fuckboy musk could actually afford the huge batteries necessary for making renewables work in this case. They're really expensive but he used to fucking champion that shit before he pulled off his mask and put on his armband.

[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 2 days ago

Probably a win-win in Musk's eyes

[–] jaybone@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago

So they had permits, but only for like half of the generators. Did they now get permits for all the generators?