Humanity consumes each year ever increasing amount of fossil fuels and releases them as CO2 into the atmosphere. Increasing global mean near-surface temperature is only one of the many consequences.
This is true, but since you always need a bit of hope in all the bad news, worth noting that if you focus solely on electricity generation, the fossil fuels from generation decreased last year. That’s the first time it’s happened when demand increased as normal (ie if we disregard things like covid which decreased fossil fuel use by suppressing demand). Electricity use went up as normal, but renewables went up faster, cutting out the normal fossil fuel increases. Whilst this isn’t quite going to be a guaranteed every year thing yet, it’s going to happen more and more, and in a few years we can expect to see the last year where fossil fuel use for electricity goes up, followed by an inevitable decline.
Of course there’s a lot of other uses of fossil fuels than just electricity, so we’re still using more each year and probably will for a while yet, but it’s still a major milestone and a change in how the world works that can be celebrated, especially given so many things are switching towards electricity as a basis at the same time.
We are fixing the problem too slowly, but the ball is rolling faster and faster now, signs a promising that we will eventually fix it, now the question is how much damage will be done before we get there rather than whether we’ll get there.
Earths atmosphere doesn't react to our celebrations, it reacts to our emissions.
The error is to concentrate only on electricity generation, because nothing is gained by increasing share of electricity generated by renewables, if the total CO2 emission don't decrease. It's quite possible that use of fossil fuels will shift from electricity generation to other uses, as we can already see in China with coal-to-gas and chemicals boom. Will we see more gasoline, diesel production from coal?
Humanity consumes each year ever increasing amount of fossil fuels and releases them as CO2 into the atmosphere. Increasing global mean near-surface temperature is only one of the many consequences.
https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels
https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/earths-climate-swings-incr...
This is true, but since you always need a bit of hope in all the bad news, worth noting that if you focus solely on electricity generation, the fossil fuels from generation decreased last year. That’s the first time it’s happened when demand increased as normal (ie if we disregard things like covid which decreased fossil fuel use by suppressing demand). Electricity use went up as normal, but renewables went up faster, cutting out the normal fossil fuel increases. Whilst this isn’t quite going to be a guaranteed every year thing yet, it’s going to happen more and more, and in a few years we can expect to see the last year where fossil fuel use for electricity goes up, followed by an inevitable decline.
Of course there’s a lot of other uses of fossil fuels than just electricity, so we’re still using more each year and probably will for a while yet, but it’s still a major milestone and a change in how the world works that can be celebrated, especially given so many things are switching towards electricity as a basis at the same time.
We are fixing the problem too slowly, but the ball is rolling faster and faster now, signs a promising that we will eventually fix it, now the question is how much damage will be done before we get there rather than whether we’ll get there.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...
Earths atmosphere doesn't react to our celebrations, it reacts to our emissions.
The error is to concentrate only on electricity generation, because nothing is gained by increasing share of electricity generated by renewables, if the total CO2 emission don't decrease. It's quite possible that use of fossil fuels will shift from electricity generation to other uses, as we can already see in China with coal-to-gas and chemicals boom. Will we see more gasoline, diesel production from coal?
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/chines...
We need world-wide carbon pricing, not only talks at UN COPs.
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