this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
153 points (96.4% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5186 readers
357 users here now

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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
silence7@slrpnk.net
153
Can Trump Really Slam the Brakes on Electric Vehicles? He has vowed to shred President Biden’s E.V. policies and has threatened that “You won’t be able to sell those cars.” (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 5 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
27 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

While a Trump presidency couldn’t slam the brakes on the E.V. transition, it could throw enough sand in the gears to slow it down. And that might have significant consequences for the fight to stop global warming.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] br3d@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

More people driving EVs won't make (oil-based) fuel cheaper. Every person getting off oil makes producing oil-based fuels more expensive, as the economies of scale are reduced.

Go to extremes if that helps picture it: imagine you're suddenly the only person on Earth driving an ICE car. How much would you be paying for a fill-up, which now involves finding, extracting, shipping and refining fuel just for you: more than today or less than today?

[–] fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Fuel prices halved during covid when everyone stayed home.

All the infrastructure is in place, the fuel needs to be sold.

Reduced demand will only reduce production of fuel from more expensive wells, like where the oil is more difficult to reach.

[–] spacesatan@lemm.ee 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah but nobody retired a marginally profitable fuel refinery that became unprofitable during covid because they knew demand would return soon. The effect isn't instantaneous, but all the infrastructure has operation and maintenance costs. With fewer overall consumers all the overhead has to go somewhere eventually.

[–] fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 5 months ago

eventually

Yeah, but I think you might be waiting longer than you imagine.

There might be a long tail of barely profitable wells with low output, but I suspect the vast majority of current production can sustain a significant reduction in retail price and still be more profitable than simply capping the well.

Every person that switches to an EV increases the demand for electricity and reduces the demand for fuel.