What Biden has done is to cut the issuance of drilling leases to the minimum required by law, pass the Inflation Reduction Act, enact a regulation to force vehicle electrification, and similarly force fossil fuels out of most power plants.
What Biden has not done: stop issuing drilling permits or impose export restrictions on fossil fuels. The former has some serious limits because of how the courts treat the right to drill as a property right once you hold a drilling lease, and the latter is simply untested.
Biden literally just cancelled oil and gas leases less than a week ago. I agree he hasn’t done enough, but there is some validity to the old statement that perfection is often the enemy of good.
Our left wing party is still opening new coal and gas mines so be thankful for whatever progress you get I say.
perfection is often the enemy of good.
I whole heartedly agree. Things don’t change overnight. We can’t rebuild hundreds of cities to eliminate car dependency by next Wednesday.
What we can change rapidly is behavior. It isn’t hard to convince someone to eat less beef when alternatives are cheaper. It isn’t hard to convince people that buying one nice 30 dollar shirt that looks better, feels better, and lasts for many years is cheaper than 2 20 dollar shirts that fade and unravel at the seems in a year.
We can’t expect everyone to junk their canyoneros tomorrow. We can convince them to harass city officials into put bollards up on the bike lanes because more bikes is less traffic that they have to sit in.
I’m not sure who would downvote your comment. All sensible approaches to improving the state of things.
Seriously he couldn’t pass the Build Back Better plan but then the Inflation Reduction Act provides a potentially unlimited amount of incentives/subsidies for green energy.
Painting him as “just a moderate” on this issue is some centrist level bullshit, OP. He’s clearly giving oil, gas, and military convenient wins so they don’t ruin the world before the next US election. Yes, the oil barons have more political power than a sifnificant amount of voters.
Even by your linked article’s admission, that was kind of inconsequential:
The 2017 GOP tax bill opened a small part of the pristine wildlife refuge for drilling, a measure championed by Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican. But it was never developed or drilled – or came close to doing so. Haaland suspended the leases in June 2021, and some major oil companies, including Chevron, canceled their leases in the area the following year.
However, the 2017 tax law mandates leasing in ANWR, meaning the Biden administration will have to launch a new leasing process and hold another lease sale by the end of 2024, albeit likely with tighter environmental provisions.
So the companies had the permits for 4 years and never did anything with them, to the point where Chevron cancelled their own leases. And the leases will be auctioned off again next year.
Meanwhile the Biden administration is granting applications for permits to drill on public and trial lands at a pace faster than the Trump administration at the same point. From the start of their administrations through March 27, Biden approved 7,118 permits and Trump 7,051, The Washington Post reported.
About the permit approvals, the Bureau of Land Management has said the bureau has taken a “balanced approach to energy development and management of our nation’s public lands.”
So yeah, while I think Biden is the most progressive president since FDR, his record on oil drilling isn’t so great.
Edit: fix the order of some quotes.
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There is, of course, the possibility of geoengineering with sulfur dioxide. Sort of a nuclear winter without the nuclear. It’s the same mechanism by which nuclear would and volcanoes do cause climate cooling. Not very safe but it may be in our emergency bag of tricks.
Wasn’t there a proposal to do something similar by using ships to blast saltwater into the air? All the cloud coverage and reflected sunlight, none of the acid rain.
I think that’s actually relatively low-risk to do as well (as far as experimental geoengineering goes). A significant portion of the warming in the North Atlantic has been attributed to lack of sulfur emissions due to changes in requirements for container ship fuels. Should be able to get a similar effect with just water with the effects being understood well in advance.
@spaduf @I_Has_A_Hat I’d be much more confident in this if ANY government decided to spend money on it. Most of them won’t spend money on bike lanes!
What is safe? Seems like everything we do is toxic and dangerous
I don’t think that’s ever been in serious doubt; the same simulation mechanisms used to produce climate modeling were used to figure out that nuclear winter is an issue in the first place. It’s just that most people would prefer to address global warming without mass murder.
So just nuke Antarctica. No one dies except some penguins, global warming ended. And they said it was hard /s
That doesn’t actually work. Nuclear winter is caused by the stuff which gets mixed up with the blast. Hit Antarctica and all you get is water.
On top of that, it’s where air descends from the stratosphere, so whatever particulates you do generate probably won’t achive worldwide distribution at significant concentrations
All you get is water but it’s not just water.
Water in the admosphere is an extremely strong (but short lived) greenhouse gas.
And while it was hit, it could also be irradiated. While a nuclear blast has less radiation impact than a nuclear plant burning, throwing many nuclear bombs in one place may have other impacts. Contaminated water can be assimilated by living things. And while in the body, it can do damage.
There’s also more freshwater in Antarctica than in the rest of the world. Quite a waste, and enough of it to contaminate every source across the planet.
Nuclear winter is about as likely as a solution to global warming though.
We just have to learn the hard way don’t we?
As an elementary school teacher, “the hard way” is the overwhelming choice of kids. I don’t think it changes that much when they grow into adults.
Or we can work to stop things that are existential crises.
The sun is a nuclear furnace. Climate change IS nuclear war!
(we should nuke the sun)
Gotta nuke something
If it’s good enough for Superman, it’s good enough for me.
we should nuke the sun
ok, how
By tying nukes to rockets and sending them to the sun, duh!
If we go by night, we will even be able to see the explosion from Earth!
lol
Use a bigger star.
Of course. Climate change is happening, and will keep getting worse until all the biggest countries agree to do and actually go through with doing something substantial about it (or to fully isolate the economies of those that refuse). Nuclear war is just an idea.
It’s doubtful curbing CO2 output will put a stop to it now. We’re already seeing the beginnings of feedback loops kicking in, and with them runaway climate collapse.
We’ve got pretty clear evidence that getting emissions to zero is enough to stop the increase in average surface temperature.
Right, we need net zero emissions, no further destruction of nature, and then we can start doing something to undo what we’ve already done.
There is no undoing what we’ve done. The icecaps will soon be gone and once they are gone they are gone for good
The icecaps didn’t always exist, and they can reform. It will take a long time mind you.
Putting up a solar shade would artificially cool the Earth enough for the ice caps to refreeze.
We really ought to collect all of that meltwater and distribute it to drought-stricken regions anyway.
We need most of the West and the upper classes of China to reduce their consumption of meat and animal products substantially.
I’ve got some bad news… We’re already there.
Not exactly. Most references to 1.5C are about the long term average hitting that level, not an individual year.
Given the trend, it’s a pretty strong indicator we’re there. What is long-term in the context of a change over 10-20 years, that’s reaching a breakaway point?
You understand that when things are steadily moving in one direction, we’d need to overshoot the difference between the start of the reference period and the 1.5 degree figure by 100%(incorrectly assuming linear change - the reality is more exponential - far worse by the time it shows up)
For example - for a 1.5C change over 6 years, starting at 0C:
-
Year 0 - real temp 0, average 0
-
Year 3 - real temp 1.5, average 0.75
-
Year 6 - real temp 3, average 1.5
The year to year variation is much larger than the underlying increase. We could easily see several years with the anomaly under 1.5C before
-
Then finally start making the companies that make a win out of it pay more taxes!! Like, CO² taxes, import/export taxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_companies_by_revenue
That’s something that requires an act of Congress rather than Biden… And with the current House makeup, extremely unlikely.
Ok, i’m not american, so thanks. Still, they are supposed to be grownups, but are self-centered like children. They should go to kindergarten again, to learn compromise.
That’s what most American citizens also believe.
The next 10 or 20 years? I just read an article that hit it already and will likely do it consistently over the next several years. The next 10-20 will likely few closer to a 3.6°F (2°C) rise.
Year-to-year surface temperatures vary significantly. Look at a graph like this:
and it’s clear that we could easily have a string of years below this year’s temperature
We could but the current El Niño is supposed to be pretty significant. We also have significantly less sulfur oxide being spewed by international shipping which has a large cooling effect on the oceans. It is good that we cut down on that pollution and there are things we can replace it with that will have similar effects and are less damaging but there is currently nothing planned that would essentially replace that coming effect.
While you are correct that there is a good amount of variability in the temperature, I think it is just as likely that it will be variability the other way.
I think I know the one you’re talking about, and the headline is somewhat misleading. This comes with the disclaimer that I don’t want to downplay the severity of any of this, but it’s important to have the right context.
What’s happened is that we’ve had two months in a row with extreme temperatures. Those alone peak above +1.5C. It had been this high before, back in 2016. However, we’re not going to have an average of +1.5C of extra warming this year, or in the next few years.
It’s still bad, just not that bad.
Didn’t we just hit 1.5C today?
We’re still some years from hitting an ongoing sustained average of 1.5°C above what it was in the late 1800s. That’s what people mostly talking about when they say 1.5°C
This year will be above 1.5°C. Which means we did reach that.
What you’re talking about is the average of yearly average temperatures. But it’s not what we’re looking at. We’ve never seen earth average temperature above +1.5. And averages don’t move much. I don’t care if next year will “only” be +1.49…
Putin might save us all when he orders some confused kid to turn those keys.
May I remind you global thermonuclear war is bad for the environment?
The environment around Chernobyl is doing great without people.
It’s not bad for the inviroment it’s bad for people. The climate is coming back over time.
He won’t order it. He knows that the most likely result is that he just nukes Russia, and then gets a retaliatory strike when the world realizes he just tried to nuke someone.
Climate change is scary, but scarier than nuclear war? I dunno, man.
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Relaaaax. We’re not going to die. Most likely anyways. Our children tho… hoo boy they might have a bit of a problem on their hands
Hey so as someone who is 35 and has survived massive flooding and a heat dome, the “its not something we’ll have to worry about” line doesn’t really make sense when I think about getting old and experiencing things like dementia or limited mobility in a world at 1.75 degrees warming
Hey as someone who is most likely headed for Alzheimer’s myself, at least I won’t even know I’m living in hell on earth! Silver lining I guess… 😅
I don’t know, I’m 25 and we’re starting to feel the effect very obviously now. What makes you think it won’t be seriously affecting me in my life?
It will obviously affect all of us to varying degrees. But we won’t all die. Quite a lot will die (a lot of old people and a lot of poor people, as is tradition), but we don’t get anywhere by making a Hollywood movie out of it. It’s serious enough on it’s own.
I used to believe it would be a problem for our children. But it’s happening right now. Wildfires, cyclones, heat waves, lack of water, pandemics… It’s happening right now.
Oh for sure and it seems to be happening a lot faster than even the conservative guesstimates. But I’d bet my bottom dollar that future generations are gonna have it way worse than us if we don’t change course big time.
HAHA, jokes on you, I haven’t procreated!
We’re fucked already. The question now is about how much we will be fucked and if we can survive this. See what happened in Hawaï. It happened in Europe too. Cyclones will be a lot more common too. Heat waves are already hitting several times per year in what were temperate places. Agriculture is already suffering, and with it will come famine.
It’s important to act now, because things will only get worse and it’s bad enough already.
IMHO this mostly tells us that Biden is talking about climate policy with the people around him. That’s enough to be a big deal.
Yeah, when all the Republicans in the last debate said it wasn’t real, or whatever words were used, this is a clear difference on what’s likely the most important issue for most voters.
Sadly a large chunk of voters don’t consider climate to be their top issue
Nuclear war is quick.
Climate change is slow.
Gimme the quick flash over the boiling frog deal Everytime.
If you’re lucky enough to be one of the minimal handful who actually die in the quick flash. More likely you’ll be one of the multitudes poisoned by radioactive fallout or starved by nuclear winter.
It’s not better.
I live near silos.
I’m getting vaporized. Hells yeah.
No siree, I live next to a state capitol, I’ll be just fine
I just want one of those Hawaii-style text message warnings, so I can start driving toward Boston asap
now you’re getting it
Nuclear war is obviously terrible. But it’s still somewhat localised between the warring nations.
Climate change is everywhere and will eventually be just as devastating and then quickly much worse if not resolved
It definitely is. It is far, far more cataclysmic than a nuclear war. You’ll discover that soon unfortunately.
IDK, climate-fueled illnesses — tied to hotter temperatures, and swifter passage of pathogens and toxins. Continuing pandemics would be no treat.
In that it is definitely happening and will be equally destructive if steps aren’t taken to prevent it, albeit over a longer timeframe.
I like how no one here mentioned the obvious fact that climate change disasters will only make world powers more willing to start a nuclear war. Just look at North Korea, what will happen when they have a huge famine or flood or fire or whatever and even the Kims can’t fill their bellies, what then?
Ive seen fuck all investment in solar where I’m at. Id really like to contribute labor to it, but there’s nothing.
A lot has been happening in the southwest US, including Texas.
Here in the rural Midwest there is a huge investment in wind turbines. They are everywhere you look. I think what renewable is popular depends on your region.
There are specific areas where nothing is happening. For example, Alberta has a moratorium on renewables in order to benefit the local fossil fuels industry.
Lol that is the most Alberta thing I’ve ever heard.
Where I’m at, we’re actually getting a decent amount of solar, but unfortunately the power district is building the solar fields over some remnant tallgrass prairie, probably since it’s cheaper than buying agricultural or residential land. This sucks since we’ve destroyed 98% of all the tallgrass prairie in the US, which makes it one of the most endangered biomes in the world, which is extra sucky since tallgrass prairie is one the most effective biomes at sequestering carbon, much more than even forests/woodlands.
And what he is doing to prevent it? Did the US decided to FINALLY SIGN THE FUCKING KYOTO PROTOCOL?
As I originally posted:
What Biden has done is to cut the issuance of drilling leases to the minimum required by law, pass the Inflation Reduction Act, enact a regulation to force vehicle electrification, and similarly force fossil fuels out of most power plants.
What Biden has not done: stop issuing drilling permits or impose export restrictions on fossil fuels. The former has some serious limits because of how the courts treat the right to drill as a property right once you hold a drilling lease, and the latter is simply untested.
Read the post before commenting, you doughnut
he is doing too little too late.
You’re right, he should have done more while Trump was president!
He was a senator, he is not an outsider. He have power inside his party. What historically Biden has done?
Well for one, no. Biden was not a Senator while Trump was president… But giving you the benefit of the doubt that you meant his Senate career prior to being VP.
Found some stuff on google: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/may/08/joe-biden/was-joe-biden-climate-change-pioneer-congress-hist/
And this site claims, over his 40+ year Senate career, that he made a pro-environmental vote 83% of the time: https://scorecard.lcv.org/moc/joe-biden.
Yes, League of Conservative Voters… But I don’t know that necessarily means it’s wrong. They’ve got all the votes there so I guess you can check yourself.
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