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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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The memes of the climate
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Okay. I just want to slam on the brakes here, just a little.... Just a little slam.
There's a LOT of personal blame going around in these comments. As if everyone who ever had burned any fossil fuels ever is somehow personally responsible for everything that's currently happening.
Here's some news, we've been burning shit for more than a millennia. People, in and of themselves, don't require so much heat and energy to create a problem. At least not individually. As a whole, small problem. Individually, microscopic problem at most.
Everyone seems to have fallen into this trap of everyone being personally responsible for the climate change. The vast majority of the issue is companies. Everyone wants to point at trucks and delivery vehicles and whatnot as major contributors when they do talk about contributions from companies, and you're still way off base. It's not even the air traffic that's the problem. It's the fucking boats. Nobody thinks about it, because nobody sees it. Either the boats are off at sea, or they're docked in some yard, away from your vision. 90% of the time, they're sailing. When they're sailing, they're operating the motors 24/7. Each ship, when operating, will consume more fuel in an hour than any one person would use in a year.
Since it's mostly unregulated international waters, who are they reporting any of that shit to? So they don't.
Yes. Climate change is real. Yes, we, personally, should be doing what we can to curb it. The fact is, if all of us did everything possible (switching to all renewable power, using EVs and all renewable powered appliances, etc) it would barely make a dent. All of the "personal responsibility" arguments are just a smokescreen from the big, very guilty corporations, to victim blame the public into turning on eachother so they can continue to destroy the environment unchecked. Based on these comments, they're succeeding.
I'm not saying to not be mad. Be mad, get angry. Just be mad at the right people here. I'm not evil because I drive my 1.5L 4cyl sedan to the grocery once a week, and have a natural gas water heater. Sure, I should change that, and I'm sure I will be changing that when I can, but I'm not the problem. The greenhouse gasses I emit over my lifetime won't offset the emissions of transport ships in a single year.
Just.... Be mad at the right people. Stop making people feel bad for being given bad options because the automotive industry actively and knowingly rejected electric vehicles due to how deep they were with the oil industry. So people had to buy internal combustion vehicles because there literally was no other option at the time. I've had my car since 2014. In 2014, the model S (the only model at the time), was $70k USD to start. I didn't have $70k USD to spend on a car (I still don't). I spent less than one-quarter of that price on my vehicle, and I was barely able to afford it over a 5 year finance. Yet, based on these comments, I should be ashamed that I can't afford a BEV? Or that I live too far from everything that I can't ride a bike or something?
Come on people. You know who is really at fault here. Let's just be angry at the right people.
Shiping represents about 10% of the 25% of global carbon emissions from transportation, so 2.5%, similar to aviation. Yes, it's a problem but it's not the boogeyman you seem to think it is.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport
100% this.
The problem isn’t X. Or Y. Or W.
The problem is A+B+C+D+E+F+G+H+I+J+K+L+M+N+O+P+Q+R+S+T+U+V+W+X+Y+Z+A1+B1 … etc.
We need to change everything. Everything needs a reduction. AND we need to build massive nuclear CO2 extraction facilities that generate synthetic fuels for the places where we need energy density, seeded with carbon captured from the few places where we still release.
And we can do it. It won’t even be that expensive, certainly not as expensive as we fear, once we get going.
But we lack the will. Things need to get a lot worse before we will get our asses in gear.
What will actually happen is the rich people will get choice land in the areas still stable. The rest of us will be fighting for scraps and erecting shanty towns.
My point is less regarding the fact that it's a big boogeyman... The point I'm trying to hit on here is that everyone is focused on personal responsibility with their own CO2 emissions and entire sectors have made zero progress, and they're left completely out of the conversation.
We're not going to solve the problem with a single solution. Its simply too large of an issue for that. We also can't be entirely complacent on any factor. While consumer vehicles are a nontrivial contribution, it's the same for global shipping; while there's still a lot to do with personal vehicles before we're on the right track, it seems to me that there's been zero effort from global logistics to curb their diesel engine vessels on the open seas.
In addition to this, I'm always curious where the data for sites like the one you linked, actually comes from, not because I think it's wrong, but because I'm wondering if it's incomplete. It's easy to simply ask each country for their emissions numbers, do a bit of addition and call it a day, but does that include emissions created in international waters? I don't know. Do you?
Again, I'm not doubting the numbers, I'm just wondering if companies have tried to find loopholes to hide their emissions... And it's 100% the companies that would do it too.
There are lots of folks working on maritime (and aviation) decarbonization, it's not being ignored. It's just harder than decarbonozing other sectors because they can't just electrify like you and I can do with our cars and homes. The solution is likely to be synthetic fuels of some sort, ammonia, hydrogen, biodiesel, etc. We're seeing sails come back, there have been innovation hull designs, etc. You could even call tarrifs a partial solution here because building locally reduces shipping needs. It's just not as cheap/easy as installing solar panels/wind/batteries though. We need policy to drive change here, which puts it on a different level than the personal responsibility measures. I absolutely agree we need to do all of the above though.
As to the source, I don't know but it's cited in government records everywhere. They have a good handle of how much fuel is produced everywhere, we know exactly what ships exist and where they go in real time globally, we know how efficient they are, so it doesn't seem nebulous enough to me to have any real doubt in. NASA can probably track all their emissions from space too.
These are good points. I always thought hydrogen fuel cells had a good application in vessels like this, but I don't have any power over what's decided there.
Thank you for the engagement. I think for the most part we just agreed that problems exist.
Getting rid of dirty boat fuel is likely the reason why we see this sudden rise in temperature: https://lemmy.world/comment/10570999