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Swiss voters approve net-zero climate law to accelerate the country’s shift from fossil fuels to renewable energies and reach zero emissions by 2050 (web.archive.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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It’s the first time that citizens have approved a net-zero law in a direct vote. In all, 59.1% of voters approved the government’s new climate and innovation law. The government and all major parties, except for the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, had called to vote in favour of the bill.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

It's always 20-30 years in the future.

In 2000, it was 2030.

Or to put it differently: "Let the next generation deal with it."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Still waiting to see "reducing emission by 1/3 in 10 years". I'm pretty sure that's a must for achieving neutrality by 2050. Somehow, no politician talks about that idea.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Are countries on track to meet their climate pledges?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The problem here is that many countries are just outsourcing their CO² output. If you move the factory to Asia, the CO² output doesn't show up in your country, but instead in Asia.

Another issue with the charts by the BBC is that they don't show per-capita data but instead the total amount, and the "needed for 1.5°" curve is also not adjusted per-capita but instead adjusted based on what the country is doing so far. So for example, it allows for the USA to have per-capita yearly CO² emissions of ~10t by 2030, while Kenya only gets 0.95t per capita.

Actually, they say Kenya is wildly not on track to reach the 1.5° goal, while even the incredible increase that they are projecting based on the policies curve would only put them up to 2.4t CO² per capita, compared to the 10t CO² per capita that they put as the "USA would be awesome if they managed to reduce to that level".

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well we can't start right now, X hasn't started yet and Y isn't as good as the fossil alternative. And anyway we're missing the 1.5° target so there is obviously no reason to get carbon neutral anymore ....

Still nice to see that the swiss are aware of the problem and are setting goalposts let's hope they actually get them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Almost all European (and many other) countries have set similar goals for 2000, 2020, 2035 and noch 2050, and we are all just breezing by them. On the contrary, the CO2 output has increased since 1990.

Setting goals doesn't matter if there is no plan and no punishment for not keeping it.

The current plan of basically all countries is "let's wait another 20 years and see if some magic technological solution to our problems appear". That's not planning, that's superstition.