- European Green Deal _was_ watered down after Exxon met with EU comissioners, specifically to prolong transport related emissions. They will likely get what they asked for. [0]
- Biomass is _not_ carbon neutral in any practical sense The payback time for carbon debt ranges from 44–104 years after clearcut, depending on forest type and assuming the land remains forest. Despite all the media spin this is just too long when we are dealing with a climate emergency with several positive feedback loops.[1]
I'm sensitive to the tone, since there's still so many climate change deniers about, but overall makes sense once they get to the point:
> The best solution is to incorporate the ‘carbon opportunity cost’ of land use into the accounting of emissions from bioenergy in all climate and energy laws. This cost can be measured simply as the carbon that could otherwise be stored by regrowing native vegetation. A superior approach would use carbon opportunity costs, as we have done here, to calculate the average carbon cost to reproduce the same food elsewhere. This approach does not require a switch to consumption-based accounting but recognizes that land use has an opportunity cost, which should be factored into the life-cycle analyses of bioenergy used by the EU.
As former ambassador of European climate policies, I felt appalled every few months while my job lasted. A seemingly insoluble problem us that for a long time all they do outsources problems via trade leading to land systems change---deforestation.
The carbon storage point made in the article is not valid for some countries in the EU, as they have more forest now that decades ago, and too much wildfire risk setting higher priorities.
typical EU playbook: outlaw it here, make headlines, outsource it en gross without caring about “internal” rules. we hold corporations like apple responsible for following rules across the supply chain, maybe it’s time we check the supply chain of the EU and US also - we subsidize electric cars built in China with local money while Chinese plants do not meet environmental standards.
One planet.
Disagree - there will be some winners and some losers for sure. However there will be a lot of good that comes out of it. There was a lot of good that came out of the ARRA grants that the US government used same should come out of this funding as long as we don't end up subsidizing poor technologies such as ethanol & hydrogen that is not carbon neutral.
An effective Green New Deal would involve powerdown of technological civilization and, more than likely, a reduction in human population.
I'm not surprised at all that our race is trying to wriggle out of paying its fucking dues. One way or another they will be paid, it's just that the longer we wait, the more interest accrues...
They have the same data, you just linked to older versions of the UN data:
> This visualization presents a big overview of the global demographic transition, based on estimates from the 2019 data release from the UN Population Division; other charts use the more recent 2022 revision, which projects slower growth than previously expected.
Half the world’s population growth will be concentrated in just nine countries: India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, the United States of America, Uganda and Indonesia (ordered by their expected contribution to total growth).
Not many of those countries have any interest in 'intentionally sacrificing to slow climate change'. They are mostly being exploited by rapacious 'green' capitalists for rare earth minerals etc as their populations explode..
Eight countries will make up over half the projected total population increase by 2050:
India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, the Philippines and Egypt.
India is expected to overtake China as the world’s most populous country next year (2023), when China’s population is expected to start declining.
(Source: United Nations Population Fund, 2022)
These places are ground zero for environmental concerns imo
Meanwhile, companies require us to come into work, commute hours, burn fossil fuels, etc.
Companies and governments talk out one side of their mouth about being green and carbon neutral, then tell people they need to burn fossil fuels to come to work, by unaffordable electric cars to be around people you don't work with in expensive to live city centers that they don't pay enough to live in, much less have a family of one or two children, and nuclear is bad.
I've stopped listening, because it's pointless, all I see is highway construction to add more lanes rather than making viable public transportation. If they really believed any of it they'd be doing something about it. I do my little bit, but having this insane nihilistic anxiety about it is far worse.
Carbon footprint per capita is a poor metric because it incentivizes nations to increase population and suppress quality of life improvements.
If you want to assign blame sure an American might be 10 time more responsible than a Pakistani, a Chinese may be twice as culpable is a French. That doesn't really solve anything though. The problem isn't the amount of CO2 in the air divided by the number of living humans.
Emissions intensity of production IMO is a better one because it promotes efficient industry without exerting the wrong incentives on population or quality of life.
The problem is total amount of emitted CO2. A large extent of it being emitted by a rather reduced fraction of the total population (rich countries).
Seems rational to exerce change of this reduced fraction. Indian or Pakistani are respecting their share in terms of emissions in order for climate increase to stay under 2 degrees. We are not, so we need to change that.
When you say "we", policy that can affect carbon emissions and even population trends to some degree are usually made on a country level. So it makes sense for highly emitting countries to reduce their emissions, not for them to be able to purchase "share" by encouraging population growth.
Pakistan and India have enormous amounts of heavy industries, Nigeria massive extraction. 'Carbon footprint' per person is somewhat irrelevant in this heavily industrialized context. Globalization has shifted unpleasant, grimmy polluting activities to these types of countries, while people sanctimoniously push mice around in the first world...
- European Green Deal _was_ watered down after Exxon met with EU comissioners, specifically to prolong transport related emissions. They will likely get what they asked for. [0]
- Biomass is _not_ carbon neutral in any practical sense The payback time for carbon debt ranges from 44–104 years after clearcut, depending on forest type and assuming the land remains forest. Despite all the media spin this is just too long when we are dealing with a climate emergency with several positive feedback loops.[1]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/06/exxonmobil-...
[1] DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aaa512