Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Honestly? I'm not ready to give into some kind of fatalistic view that each 0.1°C difference isn't worth fighting for.
There are a few areas where we might see huge improvement in a short amount of time. With car electrification, we saw electric cars go from something like 0% of the global market to 20% of new cars in just 10 years. Meanwhile, the decarbonization of electric grids is happening at a rapid pace, too, with solar and wind representing a huge percentage of newly installed capacity.
And some game changing technologies are right around the corner. Grid scale battery storage is turning into a significant part of managing daily demand, and might soon become an important part of managing seasonal demand. Dispatchable advanced geothermal (using the oil and gas's fracking/horizontal drilling techniques to dig new hydrothermal sources) is right around the corner. And it's not exactly imminent, but researchers are making advances in fusion power.
If energy becomes cheap enough, carbon capture for net zero fuels becomes economical, too. That opens the floodgates for trucking, maritime, and aviation uses. Excess power generation at certain times of day can be used for the less time sensitive energy consumption: treating water, manufacturing certain chemicals, charging batteries, heating and cooling some kind of thermal storage system, etc.
Plus, cynically, indoor heating is a much larger driver of fossil fuel consumption than indoor cooling, so a warming planet kinda reduces overall emissions from indoor climate control.
And the thing with all of these factors I'm naming is that these don't rely on governments to enforce sacrifices by industry or commerce. The pricing has already fallen in line so that the cleanest option is the cheapest option. Policy can nudge things, but actually engineering improvement through price signals is going to create much bigger change: you don't need the government to shut down a coal plant when the power plant simply can't produce electricity cheap enough to turn a profit.