Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Tuesday, July 25, 2023

How About Some Good News?

 The US' CO2 emission per capita are now as low as they have been since WWI. Now, because there are way more Americans, that means America is producing more CO2 today than they did in 1914, but it's a telling metric for the increased use of renewable and conservation efforts. Globally, we could be approaching "peak carbon emissions". Now, because there's no such thing as unalloyed good news, this does not mean an imminent end to the climate crisis. We are still pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, and what's already up there isn't going away anytime soon.

What's more, this increase in energy efficiency and carbon neutral energy has not come with the trade-off in growth that Republicans keep yammering about. The US economy is kicking ass.

We still have a ways to go on carbon reduction - both in reducing what we produce and pulling what's already there out of the atmosphere. It kills me that in the midst of a very real crisis, two of the most efficient and promising forms of electrical generation - nuclear and geothermal - aren't being leveraged to create an overabundance of electricity. Abundant carbon-free electricity can be used to create hydrogen which can be used in industrial processes and power machines that can pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.

It's going to be hard to turn the ship around, but it's not impossible and too often climate doomerism actually creates a lack of motivation.

No comments: