hey, how do you cope with people saying we only have a small amount of time left to stop the worst effects of climate change? no matter how hopeful and ok i am, that always sends me back into a spiral :(
A few different ways
1. The biggest one is that I do math. Because renewable energy is growing exponentially
Up until basically 2021 to now, all of the climate change models were based on the idea that our ability to handle climate change will grow linearly. But that's wrong: it's growing exponentially, most of all in the green energy sector. And we're finally starting to see proof of this - and that it's going to keep going.
And many types of climate change mitigation serve as multipliers for other types. Like building a big combo in a video game.
Change has been rapidly accelerating and I genuinely believe that it's going to happen much faster than anyone is currently predicting
2. A lot of the most exciting and groundbreaking things happening around climate change are happening in developing nations, so they're not on most people's radars.
But they will expand, as developing nations are widely undergoing a massive boom in infrastructure, development, and quality of life - and as they collaborate and communicate with each other in doing so
3. Every country, state, city, province, town, nonprofit, community, and movement is basically its own test case
We're going to figure out the best ways to handle things in a remarkably quick amount of time, because everyone is trying out solutions at once. Instead of doing 100 different studies on solutions in order, we get try out 100 (more like 10,000) different versions of different solutions simultaneously, and then figure out which ones worked best and why. The spread of solutions becomes infinitely faster, especially as more and more of the world gets access to the internet and other key infrastructure
4. There's a very real chance that many of the impacts of climate change will be reversible
Yeah, you read that right.
Will it take a while? Yes. But we're mostly talking a few decades to a few centuries, which is NOTHING in geological history terms.
We have more proof than ever of just how resilient nature is. Major rivers are being restored from dried up or dead to thriving ecosystems in under a decade. Life bounces back so fast when we let it.
I know there's a lot of skepticism about carbon capture and carbon removal. That's reasonable, some of those projects are definitely bs (mostly the ones run by gas companies, involving carbon credits, and/or trying to pump CO2 thousands of feet underground)
But there's very real potential for carbon removal through restoring ecosystems and regenerative agriculture
The research into carbon removal has also just exploded in the past three years, so there are almost certainly more and better technologies to come
There's also some promising developments in industrial carbon removal, especially this process of harvesting atmospheric CO2 and other air pollution to make baking soda and other industrially useful chemicals
As we take carbon out of the air in larger amounts, less heat will be trapped in the atmosphere
If less heat is trapped in the atmosphere, then the planet will start to cool down
If the planet starts to cool down, a lot of things will stabilize again. And they'll probably start to stabilize pretty quickly
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Previous similar drops in emissions were due to periods of economic stagnation or recession--this is the first significant drop in emissions that has coincided with GDP growth.
The majority of this decline is due to changes in energy use and generation. Coal demand has dropped nearly to 1900s levels, while use of renewables grows significantly--for the first time renewables accounted for half of the energy generated in "advanced economies" included in this analysis.
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"China is on track to double its wind and solar energy capacity and hit its 2030 clean energy targets five years early, a new report has found.
The country is expected to produce 1,200 gigwatts of solar and wind power by 2025 if all prospective plants are built and commissioned, according to the study from the non profit Global Energy Monitor.
Solar capacity in China is now greater than the rest of the world combined. Its onshore and offshore wind capacity has doubled since 2017, and is roughly equal to the combined total of the other top seven countries, according to the report.
Dorothy Mei, project manager at Global Energy Monitor, said China’s surge in solar and wind capacity was “jaw-dropping.”
The country’s renewable energy boom is the result of a combination of incentives and regulations, according to the report. China pledged in 2020 to become carbon neutral by 2060...
China’s reliance on coal poses a significant challenge to global green energy targets, but the pace of wind and solar development is a positive sign, Byford Tsang, senior policy adviser at climate think tank E3G told CNN.
“China is rapidly and successfully scaling up its deployment of renewable power and has become the largest investor into renewables globally. This is both a cause and consequence of rapidly falling costs of renewable energy as compared to coal power,” he said.
Tsang hopes that relative cheapness of renewable energy will persuade China to kick its coal habit."
-via CNN, June 29, 2023
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