this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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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:

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago (3 children)

No. Both vehicles are absolute trash for the environment. Just because it's an EV does not mean it is suddenly environmentally friendly. The stupid stainless steel alone uses up idiotic amounts of energy to produce and in the end it is still a several ton heavy vehicle instead of some form of micro car.

And no, no one really uses this or an ICE truck in a way that would require them to have one. Even people who haul shit in the back would usually do with a more sensible roofed vehicle, but that would be less "cool".

All of those big cars can and should be a target. If we go with individual motor traffic, then we should use vehicles that are as compact and basic as possible.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Elon is also supporting right wing authoritarians who want to dismantle climate protections and promote coal, oil, and gas.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

And no, no one really uses this or an ICE truck in a way that would require them to have one. Even people who haul shit in the back would usually do with a more sensible roofed vehicle, but that would be less "cool".

Wait, no one has a legitimate use case for a truck? Like transporting building materials and tools? Large furniture and appliances? People who live along an unpaved mountain road, or work somewhere similarly remote, like forestry? Towing fifth-wheel trailers? When it snows here, I'm stuck at home until someone with a truck comes by to plow... They have large dedicated snowplows for the highways and stuff, but for out-of-the-way residential streets, the city contracts private pickup truck owners with their own plows. I'm glad they're around.

Like don't get me wrong-- The majority of truck owners pretty much never do these things, and it's an extremely wasteful vanity display for them. That's bad. Most people who buy Cybertrucks will not be doing truck stuff with them. That's bad too.

But I think some people have a good reason to own a truck.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

We're talking about less than 1% here. And yes, most of even your examples do not require a pickup truck, or even your own hauler. Just look at other countries. People transporting tools? They have little vans or nowadays even cargo bikes. This whole pickup truck thing is very much an US fetish.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Almost all use cases for yank tanks and monster utes would be better served by some other vehicle. Large furniture and appliances? A van. Unpaved mountain road (sure...let's just pretend that that's actually a significant enough market to be worth derailing the conversation to talk about)? A 4WD. Transporting building materials and tools? Either a real truck or a more traditional ute. Or even a bakfiets if they're just doing minor home repairs.

Are there use cases where yank tanks are truly the best option? Yeah probably. But they are so vanishingly small that they're never worth talking about.