Climate Change

50 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030?

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50 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030? 🌎 ♨️

The other day I posted an NPR article that mentioned that many activists are pushing for a 50 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, a goal that the UN has described as mandatory to prevent a severe economic disruption, which seems inevitable.

The decisions we make now will determine the course of the next 30 years and beyond:  emissions must fall by half by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions no later than 2050 to reach the 1.5 Celsius goal.

Science is clear:  if we fail to meet these goals, the disruption to economies, societies and people caused by COVID-19 will pale in comparison to what the climate crisis holds in store.

And so, our shared responsibility is equally clear: redouble our efforts to recover from the economic and social crisis and get on track to achieve the SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals] and build a sustainable, inclusive and resilient future.

… The thing is that’s an absolutely absurd goal !

Nine years is a tiny time period, something that most adults will admit passes in blink of an eye.

There is no way we can reduce emissions by that level in nine years, because things just take much longer then that. Few people who buy a gasoline-powered car in 2021 are planning to discard it less than in nine years. Public transit authorities are required to keep diesel-powered buses purchased with federal funding for 12-years or reimburse federal funds for purchase of the bus. So they are required to keep buses bought in 2019 on the road through 2031. People who have purchased gas furnaces and water heaters in past year expect to use them for many more years, and power plants have a lifespan rated in decades – often 50 or more years.

Even if we could force people to throw away all of their existing equipment prematurely, the electrified alternatives aren’t always drop-in replacements. While electric drives with IGBTs and inverter-motors are a vast improvement over a decade or two ago, and electric cars make sense for many consumers today, there are still many advantages to gas-powered motors like quick fueling and longer trips between refills. And most power plants, which burn fossil fuels, are almost certain to be burning the same fossil fuels in nine years from now. Solar is great, but it’s going to be a reach for government to force every homeowner, landlord, and business owner to install panels and supporting infrastructure immediately on their buildings.

Change can happen quickly, as we saw in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic with lockdowns and work-from-home that changed life dramatically for nearly every American. But those changes were unpopular, widely resisted and did not last for any significant length of time. COVID-19 was unique, as it came upon the country quickly, served as a strong “focusing event” that gave politicians for a brief period of time unprecedented powers.  Climate change is unlikely to have any such “focusing event”, even as it slowly drowns our cities, melts the ice caps, burns the west, floods the east, culls whole species and ecosystems, and indefinitely change our planet for good or bad.

The truth is we are going to blow right through any climate goals, and it’s going to be real bad.

How Fast Can Emissions Fall? : NPR

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Biden’s New Climate Goal: How Fast Can Emissions Fall? : NPR

Next week, President Biden will announce a number that could shape the rest of his presidency: a new goal to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

The announcement marks the country's renewed commitment to the Paris accord, the international climate change agreement that former President Donald Trump withdrew from. Environmental groups, scientists and major business leaders are urging the Biden administration to cut emissions 50% by 2030, as compared to 2005 levels.

That target lines up with scientific assessments of the reductions needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. To limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, emissions need to drop to net-zero by 2050. Above that and sea levels rise to extreme heights, heat waves get more intense, and hurricanes and wildfires become even more destructive.

A 50% cut would not be the world's most aggressive target, but it would put the U.S. among the four most ambitious countries. Going back to 1850, the U.S. has pumped more emissions into the atmosphere cumulatively than any other nation.

Still, achieving that target by 2030 won't be simple, requiring both political buy-in and a sweeping deployment of cleaner cars and clean energy sources.

I bet America could cut violent crime by 50 percent too if we enacted enough laws, expanded police powers enough, and built enough jails. Would that be good public policy? That's debatable, but certainly violent crime is a very bad thing.

Prepping and Climate Change

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People ask what I think the biggest danger that we should prepping for these days. I think the answer is quite clear — climate change 🌎 and declining fossil fuel energy.o⛽

People seem think the fossil fuel party can go on forever, consuming even greater amounts of a limited resource each year on grounds that they keep discovering new sources of fossil fuels and better ways to extract it for less money. But we know growth isn’t unlimited, especially for a limited resource. 📉 Carbon, in form of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, may be abundant but by no means is it unlimited. Most geologists will admit we are scraping the bottom of the barrel,🛢 even though mankind has gotten better at turning the bottom of barrel into useful sources of energy and fossil-based products.

Fossil fuels are a lot like a narcotic such as heroin. The more you heroin you shoot in your veins, the better you feel. Withdrawl is painful, it can make you awful sick. The same can be said about fossil energy – even though it’s consumption comes without the stigma of shooting heroin. 💉 More fossil fuels mean more light, more warmth, bigger and faster automobiles, airplanes, and more computing power. Fossil based energy is turned to many products that improve human productivity, warm our hearts, make life more delightful. 💡 Conservation, especially the radical levels of conservation that are going to be needed for mankind to survive have been rejected by mankind.

So what is next for our country? We are already in the distant future we talked about 20 years ago, and we are already seeing the impacts of climate change. Winters are not as cold as they were even 20 years ago. Our resilience to cold in the Northeast has diminished, people seem to struggle more with blasts of cold then in years past. 💥 Severe weather, while always happening, is getting more severe, especially along the coast lines as sea level is rising, slowly but surely. As most of our major cities are built around sea levels, and great masses of poor people live in buildings along the coast, much of the suffering so far has happened there. Even upland, nobody is left free from the impact of climate change.🌎 Snowmobiling, once a popular activity in Upstate NY is now really limited to the snow belts of Tug Hill, Western Adirondacks and areas downwind of Lake Erie, e.g. high peaks of Cattaraugus County.

Peak oil, natural gas, and coal may happen before we know it. Sure, oil and gas prices are low right now, but it’s not clear if prices will remain so low or that drilling is sustainable in the high-cost environment that exists right now. The world seems awash in oil right now, but should chaos break out in the Middle East, things could change quickly.🤷‍ Our economy is so dependent on cheap oil, cheap natural gas, and cheap coal for all forms of energy, we are going to be screwed so quickly should a tipping point be reached. Few things bite at the American Psyche like high prices at the gas station,clearly advertised at every street corner. Few things attack the American way of life then having the ability to motor around cheaply, as much as we desire. Put a high price on motoring fuels,🚙 and watch how quickly peoples lives change.

NPR

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The 2021 Hurricane Season Won’t Use Greek Letters For Storms : NPR

The 2020 hurricane season was so prolific that the National Hurricane Center used up its roster of 21 alphabetized storm names. When that happens, the government pulls in the Greek alphabet. But don't expect to see Hurricane Alpha or Beta again.

Turns out the names were Greek to a lot of people, and forecasters worried about creating confusion.

Atlantic currents seem to have started fading last century | Ars Technica

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Atlantic currents seem to have started fading last century | Ars Technica

The major currents in the Atlantic Ocean help control the climate by moving warm surface waters north and south from the equator, with colder deep water pushing back toward the equator from the poles. The presence of that warm surface water plays a key role in moderating the climate in the North Atlantic, giving places like the UK a far more moderate climate than its location—the equivalent of northern Ontario—would otherwise dictate.

But the temperature differences that drive that flow are expected to fade as our climate continues to warm. A bit over a decade ago, measurements of the currents seemed to be indicating that temperatures were dropping, suggesting that we might be seeing these predictions come to pass. But a few years later, it became clear that there was just too much year-to-year variation for us to tell.

NPR

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Climate-Driven Flood Damage Threatens Towns Across U.S. : NPR

Pastor Aaron Trigg was at home when the water arrived in Rainelle. It had been raining hard all day, filling the creeks and rivers that run through southern West Virginia. In the past, such intense downpours would last only a few hours, but this storm brought wave after wave of torrential rain. "You could hear the water up in the mountains just crashing trees," Trigg remembers. Rainelle is a small town in a steep valley. When the creek near downtown jumped its banks on the evening of June 23, 2016, the water immediately flooded into every home on Trigg's block. Trigg's house was one-story tall, so there was nowhere to escape. He took shelter on the second floor of his neighbor's house and waited as the water kept rising. As it got dark, he could hear people screaming for help. He wondered if he would survive the night. "I did a lot of praying that night," he says. "Not so much for myself, but for the people I could hear."