this post was submitted on 13 Feb 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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Does recycling actually help the climate? (it's a relatively minor act, with the notable exception of metals recycling) (yaleclimateconnections.org)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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  • Myth: If you dispose of recyclables properly, they will be recycled.
  • Myth: Recycling is the best thing you can do to fight against climate change.
  • Myth: “Reduce,” “reuse,” and “recycle” are equally beneficial.
  • Myth: Anyone can recycle.
  • Reality: Recycling education could be more than just trash talk.
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

There are a lot of problems with recycling, thanks largely to laziness and capitalism.

  • Plastic recycling is largely a marketing ploy. Oil companies (after all, most plastics are made of oil) and chemical companies saw that plastic waste was a huge issue that might stop people from adopting plastic. So they created a myth that it could easily be recycled and started marketing efforts to blame consumers for waste by not recycling. They still don’t know how to recycle some plastics, if they can it’s more expensive than new, and those that are get turned into lesser quality products that usually can’t be recycled again
  • We adopted single stream recycling to make it easier, but it just leads to massive contamination, which goes to the landfill. Furthermore, we also have to put forth a lot of effort to sort what isn’t contaminated.
  • Marketing, while promoting recycling, has also encouraged “wishcycling” where non-recyclable items are put in recycling because people wish they were and figure that recyclers will find a way.

My city, after getting so much contamination, lost its contract for recycling and just tossed everything put in blue bins. They have since reintroduced it, but making it opt in and providing stickers for the bins to make it clear what is and isn’t recyclable. Contamination has gone way down.