Global Carbon Emissions From Fossil Fuels To Hit Record High (theguardian.com) 70
WindBourne shares a report: Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels reached record levels again in 2023, as experts warned that the projected rate of warming had not improved over the past two years. The world is on track to have burned more coal, oil and gas in 2023 than it did in 2022, according to a report by the Global Carbon Project, pumping 1.1% more planet-heating carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a time when emissions must plummet to stop extreme weather from growing more violent.
The finding comes as world leaders meet in Dubai for the fraught Cop28 climate summit. In a separate report published on Tuesday, Climate Action Tracker (CAT) raised its projections slightly for future warming above the estimates it made at a conference in Glasgow two years ago. As carbon clogs the atmosphere, trapping sunlight and baking the planet, the climate is growing more hostile to human life. The growth in CO2 emissions had slowed substantially over the past decade, the Global Carbon Project found, but the amount emitted each year had continued to rise. It projected that total CO2 emissions in 2023 would reach a record high of 40.9 gigatons. If the world continued to emit CO2 at that rate, the international team of more than 120 scientists found, it would burn through the remaining carbon budget for a half-chance of keeping global heating to 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial temperatures in just seven years. In 15 years, the scientists estimated, the budget for 1.7C would be gone too.
The finding comes as world leaders meet in Dubai for the fraught Cop28 climate summit. In a separate report published on Tuesday, Climate Action Tracker (CAT) raised its projections slightly for future warming above the estimates it made at a conference in Glasgow two years ago. As carbon clogs the atmosphere, trapping sunlight and baking the planet, the climate is growing more hostile to human life. The growth in CO2 emissions had slowed substantially over the past decade, the Global Carbon Project found, but the amount emitted each year had continued to rise. It projected that total CO2 emissions in 2023 would reach a record high of 40.9 gigatons. If the world continued to emit CO2 at that rate, the international team of more than 120 scientists found, it would burn through the remaining carbon budget for a half-chance of keeping global heating to 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial temperatures in just seven years. In 15 years, the scientists estimated, the budget for 1.7C would be gone too.
Wait until next year (Score:3)
the best is still to come
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Are tickets already available?
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Sold out.
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Damn scalpers.
Canada is helping (Score:5, Funny)
Canada is doing it's part. It increased euthanasia by 30% over the previous year. They're now averaging 36 deaths a day.
Aside from the one time release of carbon from the decomposing body this will nullify their carbon footprint in the long term.
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Re:Canada is helping (Score:4, Funny)
Nope. That's just for a few terminally ill people who would likely die within a few years regardless. We're more than shoring up our declining population because, like most capitalist economies, we have an insane economic dependence on eternal population growth.
We also have our own version of Texas, which is currently fighting to prevent CO2 reduction in this country.
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Nope. That's just for a few terminally ill people who would likely die within a few years regardless.
I believe OP is referring to assisted suicide cases not covid cases as you're suggesting.
Anyone that was terminally ill obviously already died from covid or will die from the massively deadly disease covid. Unless you're suggesting covid is so benign that it couldn't finish off a terminal ill patient on their death bed.
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I was also referring to assisted suicide - the MAID program.
Not sure why you'd think I was referring to COVID given the context.
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I got confused when you said a few. Because people believe a lot of people died from covid but only a few people died from MAID. But in numerical terms more people have died from MAID than COVID in Canada.
I guess people should update their descriptions to: only a few of people died from covid and a lot of people died from MAID.
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The important difference being that MAID is a choice, COVID isn't.
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We also have our own version of Texas, which is currently fighting to prevent CO2 reduction in this country.
It’s ok, you can say the A word in here.
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You say that like MAID is a bad thing. I don't think it is. :)
We're all gonna f*cking die ... (Score:1)
... and the deciders still aren't willing to face and tell the truth. And get started with hard cutbacks on our wasteful lifestyle. It's a shame, really. Next year I'll be looking into relocating closer to the artic or antarctic. Southern Patagonia / Terra del Fuego, Norway and Greenland are on my shortlist. Not that im going to move right away, but in a few years knowning my options might come in Handy when the female matter hits the rotary air impeller.
What a shitshow the human lack of eco awareness is.
* fecal matter (Score:2)
F*cking autocorrect.
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You sounds like a leftist cuck. So why not kill two birds with one stone.
Go to Ukraine and fight against the Russians. When you're inevitably captured they'll send you to a camp in Siberia that will surely be a tropical paradise within your lifetime.
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You should show us how it's done. Start by cutting your carbon footprint by not using any electricity - including your computer to post here - or driving a car or using any manufactured goods. Go live in the woods, naked until you can kill something and tan its hide with your own urine, hunting dinner with sharp stick.
Until you're willing to do that, you're exactly the kind of hypocrite you complain about.
We already know how it's done. (Score:2)
You should show us how it's done.
We already know how it's done. People with basic brain functions and people waaay smarter than us - such as Elon Musk - have said it already: Stop subsidizing carbon emissions and price in the eco-balance of all goods and services as tax. Not all at once of course, but over the next few years up to 100%. Adjust regularly by an independent expert committee. Voila, problem solved.
It's really that easy. We could go focus on damage control immediately. Which we will have to do
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Experts? Independent experts, I assume?
Okey dokey!
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Experts like Al Gore, who literally told us we have to shiver in the dark taking cold showers - while flying around on his private jet - paid for with family tobacco money - to meet with other experts who fly around on their private jets, and living in mansions (not the plural) that have electric bills more than the average American's yearly income.
Yeah, those experts.
(And anybody who takes Elon Musk seriously should - literally - be institutionalized for their own safety.)
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Whoosh! Right past the troll's head.
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I had the thought lately, which would really support Tesla, of course:
Impose a new tax on new ICE sales. Something like this:
It's $100 for your basic 4 cylinder engined car. Price scales up with more cylinders/lower MPG. Unlike so many other cases, DO NOT give exemptions for larger vehicles because they're used "commercially", so basically, take away the advantages trucks and big SUVs have regulation wise.
Straight hybrids pay like half the fee.
PHEVs aren't charged.
Insert a bunch of rules to even out and
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Impose a new tax on new ICE sales.
If only it were that simple.
There is no taxation without representation in the USA. I seem to recall a war fought over that. If there's taxes imposed without the agreement of the public then expect another war.
I just watched a YouTube video on how used EV prices are dropping. This is because new EVs are so much improved from old technology that people see more value in new than old. This might be a good thing, or not so good. If dealers can't get rid of their stock of EVs then they aren't going to keep
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There is no taxation without representation in the USA. I seem to recall a war fought over that. If there's taxes imposed without the agreement of the public then expect another war.
Uh, dude, this would be something put in place by the federal government. 'Everybody' gets to vote for their representation there. No war.
Plus, well, the cheapest new cars are $17k, $100 would be a 0.6% price increase.
Average new car price is $48k, even if we figure the bigger motor raises the tax to $200, that's 0.4%.
I just watched a YouTube video on how used EV prices are dropping. This is because new EVs are so much improved from old technology that people see more value in new than old.
Makes sense. Remember, at one point new cars were expected to last less than 5 years, and now we're up to over 20. Same deal with computers, cell phones, and even TVs.
And yes, I figure tha
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I assume you meant a sharp stick that fell naturally from a tree, not one he cut down.
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No no no. Remember that one of the fundamental tenants of climate change is that things get worse everywhere. There is no place on Earth that is even just a little bit better off.
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No no no. Remember that one of the fundamental tenants of climate change is that things get worse everywhere. There is no place on Earth that is even just a little bit better off.
No, that's not what iit says. It's unlikely anywhere will be in touch. A few places might have a more pleasant climate but that might still be ok the context of old staple crops not growing or a town being lost to sea level rise. Maybe a new crop can grow there in 1000 years when the soil has developed. But we live in an interconnected world and even if the December weather is slightly nicer where you are in twenty years you might find that the cost of bananas has doubled and a whole load of other negative
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Yep, but its a conspiracy. The carbon sequestration tech is really effective if you read about it. With mass production we could sequester all our transport carbon for a cost of $2 a gallon. With a new energy source, be it fusion, or fission plus reduced population, you could make it all disappear. But we have this booming population, all these other problems. Anyone rich enough to keep their own air conditioned indoor food grows, and living spaces could survive in temperatures way too hot to support outdo
The lie of carbon emissions (Score:4, Insightful)
Countries are allowed to sell whatever portion of emissions they did not use to other countries, which will fill the cuota.
Hence, you are NOT reducing, you are TRAFFICKING with contamination allowance.
The conventions they do are only to waste public money in transport and a truly expensive dinner.
Also, water is wet and people avoid poverty (Score:5, Informative)
In the least sarcastic tone I can muster, let me ask the following question:
What else is to be expected? There are no practical* alternatives that replace the burning of hydrocarbon fuels for energy generation. And energy usage is necessary, thus energy generation is necessary.
*Practical is the magic word here. To displace oil and gas, an alternative must perform the same function at the same scale at roughly the same cost.
Replacing a gallon of gasoline or diesel that costs $5 with a battery that costs $5000 (in a car) or $10,000 (for space heating), but won't last a thousand full cycles and weighs ten times more (making it unsustainable for weight-sensitive applications) is not practical.
Replacing a coal or gas powerplant that runs 24/7 regardless of season, cloud cover, or wind speed with solar panels that only work during the day or wind turbines with both a minimum and a maximum usable wind speed is not practical if you need to be able to light your home at night or run your heat pump during a winter storm that blocks out the sun and blows too fast for the wind turbines to run. Unless of course the cost of replacing burst pipes in countless homes and businesses every bad winter is worth it for being green.
It's easy to scream at the sky about problems. It's also easy to pretend there are simple solutions and that it's only the designated scapegoat that stands between us and utopia. It's much much harder to be the adult and recognize that reality is not paradise and life is full of tradeoffs between different kinds of bad, not merely a Saturday morning cartoon where you get to chooose unalloyed good over unalloyed evil.
Numbers [Re:Also, water is wet and people avoi...] (Score:2)
*Practical is the magic word here. To displace oil and gas, an alternative must perform the same function at the same scale at roughly the same cost. Replacing a gallon of gasoline or diesel that costs $5 with a battery that costs $5000 (in a car) ...
Not exactly. An average American car goes through about 10,000 gallons of gasoline over its lifetime, so you will be replacing 10,000 gallons of gasoline or diesel that costs $50,000.
but won't last a thousand full cycles
If you get a thousand cycles on a battery in a car with 300 miles range, typical on electric cars these days, that's 300,000 miles between battery replacements. If the gas cars average 20 miles per gallon (typical for American passenger vehicles, averaging in the SUVs with the cars), that replaces 15,000 gallons of gasoline. A
Re: Numbers [Re:Also, water is wet and people avoi (Score:5, Informative)
The fact that the solutions aren't simple should disabuse you of the idea that it's greed and evil that's keeping them out. "Simple" effectively means "cheap" and "not simple" means "expensive" and/or not possible at scale.
Back to the car example. A typical car drives 10k miles per year and will go through maybe 150k mi before it is replaced. At 20mpg and current gas prices, that's 30k worth of gasoline.
A "300mi EV" that really lets you have 300 miles of no-kidding range will likely have at least a 100kwh battery of which you will need to recharge roughly 70kwh 500 times. In Massachusetts at least, electricity at my plug costs me about 24c/kwh, so I'll be saving about $21k on fuel vs electricity, but to do so I'll need to buy a 60k or 70k EV versus a 40k or 50k gas car.
Break even at best. Maybe I'd save a few hundred dollars over 15 years on gasoline-specific maintenance, but I may not considering my tire changes may cost more over 15 years for an ev.
So I go back to my point: at best an EV is break even, and in practice it is a little more expensive and sacrifices some capabilities of a gas car for some benefits which for some people makes sense but for many others does not.
Is it any surprise that gas cars still outsell EVs by a factor of something like 20?
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The fact that the solutions aren't simple should disabuse you of the idea that it's greed and evil that's keeping them out.
No. It is quite possible that solutions aren't simple, and also that greed is working to keep them out. Not sure about "evil," unless that's just a word meaning the same as "greed".
"Simple" effectively means "cheap" and "not simple" means "expensive" and/or not possible at scale.
Nope. We routinely do and make lots of things that aren't simple.
Back to the car example.
If you followed that sentence with "I admit the car example I originally gave made no sense," I'd pay attention to your new numbers.
Re: Numbers [Re:Also, water is wet and people avo (Score:2)
Nope. We routinely do and make lots of things that aren't simple
But none of them come cheap. Remember when a computer cost the equivalent of $10k in today's dollars and could barely run a spreadsheet? All the (rich) early adopters who bought those through the 70s, 80s, and 90s paid for the factories that churn out your $150 smartphone.
Nothing hard comes cheap because people don't work for free. Investments may be spread out in time or costs may be recouped in volume, but everything costs money.
Hydrocarbon fuel infrastructure has been paid for over the last 150 years. Lo
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Nope. We routinely do and make lots of things that aren't simple
But none of them come cheap. Remember when a computer cost the equivalent of $10k in today's dollars and could barely run a spreadsheet? All the (rich) early adopters who bought those through the 70s, 80s, and 90s paid for the factories that churn out your $150 smartphone.
That's not how financing of industrial production works. You don't save up to build a factory, you get a loan paid for by futuresales. If you try to finance through organic growth you get out competed and extinguished in such a rapidly changing field. You might manage expansion through organic growth if you make buggy whips
Re: Numbers [Re:Also, water is wet and people avo (Score:2)
You get a loan backed by future sales to build a factory.
You get credibility with the lender that you the IP that can run the factory by having paid for R&D or IP rights from someone else's R&D with revenue from past sales.
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Nope. We routinely do and make lots of things that aren't simple
But none of them come cheap. Remember when a computer cost the equivalent of $10k in today's dollars and could barely run a spreadsheet? All the (rich) early adopters who bought those through the 70s, 80s, and 90s paid for the factories that churn out your $150 smartphone.
You nailed it. Right now electric cars are expensive and being bought by "all the (rich) early adopters." Like calculators, they will get cheaper with market penetration.
Re: Numbers [Re:Also, water is wet and people avo (Score:2)
If battery technology has a Moore's Law equivalent, then sure. But Moore's Law applies to photolithography specifically, not just any old chemistry problem in general.
Re: Numbers [Re:Also, water is wet and people avo (Score:2)
This presupposes that battery technology can be improved deterministically by inputting money. Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong.
Maybe in 5 years time skeptics like me will be happily driving EVs that cost less, go farther, and recharge faster than the current gasoline equivalent.
Or maybe batteries have already hit the theoretical limit in capacity or production volume or whatever.
Or maybe it's somewhere in between and the moment will come in 50 years or 150 and not 5. I have no way of knowing and neit
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But none of them come cheap. Remember when a computer cost the equivalent of $10k in today's dollars and could barely run a spreadsheet? All the (rich) early adopters who bought those through the 70s, 80s, and 90s paid for the factories that churn out your $150 smartphone.
Computers benefited from increased integration from Dennard Scaling and Moore's Law which doubled the number of transistors for the same cost and energy every 18 months. There is no equivalent for batteries.
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In the UK, there are specific off-peak home charging tariffs for EV charging. For example, Octopus Energy has a 7.5p/kWh Octopus Intelligent Go tariff that runs from 11:30pm to 5:50am overnight. This tariff allows Octopus to remotely actively control the actual charging of the EV to match EV charging demand with renewable energy generation. This maximises the utilisation of the renewerable energy generation.
In the UK new pure petrol (gasoline) cars are about 44% of new car sales. 20% of new cars are BEV. So
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At least you acknowledge that you did not factor the cost of the power.
You are ignoring the difference between a major capital investment the batter and a long term running expense the gasoline.
One of these things is not like the other. One of these things is practical for people without significant existing wealth the other isnt.
This the problem with a lot of these "green" stuff is much of it assumes massive capital investments in public and private, shared and personal infrastructure in the context of gl
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This the problem with a lot of these "green" stuff is much of it assumes massive capital investments in public and private, shared and personal infrastructure in the context of global financial system where the wealthiest nations (the ones expected to pay for all this) have not managed to run balanced budgets in 30+ years and longer than that if you factor not making the systemic investments needed for pension systems.
That capital need is a function of the size of the problem and starting too late. It's either that or accept long term recurrent costs due to harm from climatic change.
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That capital need is a function of the size of the problem and starting too late. It's either that or accept long term recurrent costs due to harm from climatic change.
And that is an economic judgement rather than a scientific one, read: completely subjective and far from universal. How big a hit to your standard of living are you willing to take to save the world? Because if you think you can just go on without a really, really big hit you are naive. And on top of that the people who are currently poor also don't want to stay poor.
Deciding which will be worse for you and yours - climate change or (new or continued) impoverishment - is a decision everyone makes ever
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At least you acknowledge that you did not factor the cost of the power. You are ignoring the difference between a major capital investment the batter and a long term running expense the gasoline. One of these things is not like the other.
I assume you're addressing this comment to RightwingNutjob, not to me, since he was the one who compared "a gallon of gasoline or diesel that costs $5 with a battery that costs $5000."
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Replacing a coal or gas powerplant that runs 24/7 regardless of season, cloud cover, or wind speed with solar panels that only work during the day or wind turbines with both a minimum and a maximum usable wind speed is not practical
And yet countries are displacing coal with such, and also gas. What you are saying won't work is already happening. Are there limits? Yea, you can't do it overnight? Will other sources such as some nuclear be requir
Carbon Credits. (Score:4, Funny)
"Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels reached record levels again in 2023..."
Gosh...it's almost as if giving Greed the ability to buy their way out of a pollution problem with "credits" did fuck-all to resolve the problem.
Who could have seen that coming? I mean other than anyone with a logical brain...
Well, at least one thing works (Score:1)
Destruction of the existence basis for human life on this planet: On track and may even come in a little early!
We need nuclear (Score:2)
Why is this news? (Score:1)
As the global population increases, we need more energy for all those people.
Assisted suicides, euthanasia, and the like, are all nice things, but they don't make any kind of useful difference.
Nuclear war, biological warfare, genocide, THOSE make a difference in fossil fuel consumption.
As Hillary Clinton said, "We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society."
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The planet's carrying capacity for modern human civilization will reduce, then we will reduce, and the problem we caused over a hundred years will resolve itself over the next few tens of thousands of years... Subject to us not continuing to make it worse, which of course is not a great bet to make.
No mention of nuclear fission? (Score:2)
In the article was a mention of efforts to increase efforts for renewable energy and energy efficiency but no mention of the agreement to increase use of nuclear fission. How is that not news? In a report on record setting CO2 emissions?
The IPCC has been publishing reports for years that without nuclear fission in the future energy mix that there will be a failure to meet CO2 emissions reduction goals. Whenever I mention this I get nonsense replies that we can't put all our eggs in the nuclear fission ba
Not news (Score:2)
You see? (Score:1)
Humanity has no future under capitalism. Capitalism's future is only ever as long as the next quarter.