8 years
What I’m saying. They’re not going to do it. They probably literally can’t – in the sense that if they tried they would instantly lose the power to continue.
National plans to cut carbon fall far short of what’s needed to avert dangerous climate change, according to the UN Environment Programme.
Their Emissions Gap report says country pledges will fail to keep the global temperature under 1.5C this century.
The Unep analysis suggests the world is on course to warm around 2.7C with hugely destructive impacts.
But that’s in the future. We don’t do future.
The report finds that when added together, the plans cut greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 by around 7.5% compared to the previous pledges made five years ago.
This is nowhere near enough to keep the 1.5C temperature threshold within sight, say the scientists who compiled the study.
To keep 1.5C alive would require 55% cuts by the same 2030 date. That means the current plans would need to have seven times the level of ambition to remain under that limit.
“To stand a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5C, we have eight years to almost halve greenhouse gas emissions: eight years to make the plans, put in place the policies, implement them and ultimately deliver the cuts,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of Unep.
Do you see that happening? I don’t. If people won’t even stop sitting in their parked cars with the engines running for hours, what’s going to stop them getting on planes and cruise ships? What’s going to stop them commuting to work by car? What’s going to stop them moving to Phoenix or Miami?
People do that?! What’s the point of that? To keep the air conditioning on?
The question is not ‘will it get worse before it gets better?’ It is rather ‘how much worse does it have to get?’
Or even more apropos, what’s to stop them from buying more and more? Our entire economy and society is predicated upon the idea of growth and people buying More Stuff. But all that stuff requires shipping and air freight and manufacture etc. and it’s just not going to go down in eight years, much less halve. We live in a society of self-delusion, where people will put a plastic bag in the recycling bin and pat themselves on the back while individually consuming resources at a daily rate that would keep entire villages afloat in a previous era. It’s not necessarily the fault of the individuals, though: the structure of this society seems to be fine-tuned to hide the costs from the individuals. I mean, people in the West still think that solar power is “green” and “renewable” because they don’t have to live in the regions of China that have been ecologically destroyed by mining and magnet/panel manufacture. Out of sight = out of mind, it seems; until we in the West are suffering from the effects of climate change on a larger basis than a storm flooding some homes in Houston, society as a whole will keep cruising along at its same headlong pace towards destruction, I think.
GW @ 1 – I really don’t know. I suppose sometimes it’s to keep the AC on, and sometimes the heat, but they do it just as much when neither is particularly necessary. Sackbut tells us one reason is to charge a phone. It’s an ever-growing fad in my neighborhood, and it drives me nuts.
In cities like mine? Nothing. There is no other option, because we have no mass transit, nothing is in walking distance (which isn’t literally true, unless you won’t walk a couple of blocks; I walk to the grocery store and the pharmacy all the time). I am in the same state – I wanted to buy a house within walking distance of work. Trouble is, there is nowhere to live within walking distance, unless I were to move into the coal-fired power plant to the east or the Nascar range to the west.
So I took the next best step – I tried to carpool. When I moved here, half our academic faculty lived within four blocks of me. (The rest of them lived a gadzillion miles away and commuted for more than an hour each way, and felt superior because they didn’t live in Hastings like us uncool and conformist people. I felt superior to them when the ice storm our first year here knocked out everyone’s power…except Hastings. Our power plant manager was one of the highest paid public employees in the state, and he was determined to earn it). The answer to carpool? “Oh, I have a weird schedule”. They arrived at work at the exact same time I did; they left at the same time. We’re teachers; we set our own schedules. (Or at least we did until about four years ago when micromanaging reached a new high…or should that be a new low?)
Oh, and mention getting mass transit? That’s Communist. That’s Biden’s agenda. That’s anti-American.
Oh, yes, we can’t subsidize mass transit. Make the poor folks pay for that.
Also, don’t you dare build any toll roads.
And then scream bloody murder about how you don’t get anything for your taxes, you pay everything as you go, and you are such a self-made asshole that you’ve never taken any handouts.
On the internet.
Keeping an engine running to warm a car or charge a mobile phone is like using a bulldozer to swat a fly.
That’s what I think, but there are a LOT of people around here who think otherwise.
At work we’ve got a clique of weirdos who at end of shift drive all their massive (CLEAN) pickups so that they’re all nose to nose and leave them running with their lights on while they all smoke in front of them for no apparent reason. Does having the engine on even charge the battery? I was pretty sure an alternator got its juice from the wheels turning.
Ugh what IS that? Is it like parading around because you have a fabulous new jacket or something? Only more destructive?
Kevin Drum opines about climate change. He wishes to absolve corporations of any sort of blame for climate change, because all these fossil fuel guzzling and burning products and infrastructure were built because people wanted them. Give me a break. I very much doubt that people said they wanted high-fuel-consumption vehicles, to pick just one example. They were made to believe, through the magic of marketing, that larger vehicles were more useful. In some cases, to be honest, they really are, but not always. And the magic of marketing didn’t call much attention to the fuel consumption. Yes, people are unwilling to give up something they’ve grown to enjoy and find useful, and the alternatives presented require personal sacrifice, but that could easily be offset by corporate sacrifice. Make the fuel-efficient or smaller or electric vehicles extremely inexpensive, for instance. I don’t agree in the least that the things done by corporations are simply due to customer demand.
Are you thinking of regenerative braking in all-electric vehicles? I presume the weird clique are driving hybrids, in which case they are charging their batteries by running the engines. New cars have ‘daylight running lights’ which can never be turned off while the ignition is turned on.
Definitely *not* hybrids… So who knows?
After a bit of searching:
The engine and the alternator run slowly when the car is idling. Running a power-intensive feature like AC will drain the battery faster during idle than while driving. Some (most?) cars do not allow use of AC while the engine is completely off. The alternator is powered by a belt going to the engine crankshaft. So, no, it’s not the wheels, it’s the engine the make the alternator work, and the engine running faster (such as while driving) while make the alternator produce more power and battery charge.
One article that might be helpful:
https://blog.nationwide.com/what-is-an-alternator/
The main thing the gigantic cars are useful for is keeping you from being squashed like a bug if a gigantic car hits you. They create their own usefulness by being so fucking dangerous to everyone else. Genius marketing ploy! Not so great for that whole “we’re destroying the planet” thing.
I use my largish car for transporting a largish group of people around, or for carrying largish things. We prefer driving the smaller car for most tasks. It has nothing to do with wanting to be a menace. Sure, some people are eager to be an imposing menace, but others have purely utilitarian reasons for owning larger vehicles.
Using an idling car to charge a phone is a poor way to charge a phone, but sometimes it’s the way that’s available and most convenient. I can’t imagine doing that for hours, but a few minutes, sure. If there were convenient and ubiquitous cell phone charging stations in shopping centers, that would help, but such things don’t exist, at least in my area.
The air conditioning is not a battery draining system, it runs off of a compressor that is also belt driven off of the engine and does not function unless the engine is running, the fan that blows into the cabin uses a fair amount of electricity, and that will run with the engine off, but neither will reduce the battery charge if the engine is at idle. A modern alternator will keep the battery at full charge even if every electrical accessory is running as long as the engine is running. Police and other emergency vehicles with many added electrical accessories like lights, radios, etc. usually have dual batteries and sometimes high capacity or dual alternators to keep up with the load.
The biggest reason I don’t idle my car is that it gets zero m.p.g. at idle. I like to keep track of that sort of thing.
Sackbut – no, I didn’t say it’s about wanting to be a menace, I said the cars are dangerous, which creates an incentive to buy ones at least equally dangerous for the sake of safety. A marketing arms race. Cars don’t have to be huge bulgy gas-guzzling SUVs to hold more than 2 people or a couple of grocery bags.
I was driving my employer’s Mini this afternoon to take Cooper to the beach for frolics, and a guy in an SUV behind me (and then beside and then in front of me) was driving like a lunatic – tailgating and so nearly rear-ending me because the car in front of me made some bizarre unpredictable move, and then aggressively passing me then lurching into a u-turn (illegal of course) and smoking away. His car was very big and tank-like. Cars like that are like cocaine to assholes of that type.
Ophelia, I knew what you meant, and I phrased my response badly. Wanting cars that are at least as much of a menace as other cars on the road, that’s what I was going for. I know you were thinking of defense rather than offense. I do know people who have chosen vehicles with that kind of justification, and it’s strange to me.
I don’t like the big hulking vehicles, either, including some varieties of pickup truck. But some vehicles that are classed as SUVs or pickup trucks are very practical vehicles for carrying a family of six (not the pickup truck for that use!) or a load of lawn and garden equipment and supplies. If I didn’t need to do those things, and I lived in a high density urban area, I can’t imagine I’d even consider a larger car; the smaller vehicle is just fine.
twiliter #20
Thanks for the clarification. I should perhaps have waited for someone who actually knows cars to reply. All I know about cars I learned in a community ed class taught by Click (or was he Clack?) in the 80s.
Understood.
I kind of miss my family’s ancient blue Plymouth station wagon.
Sackbut, I can agree about the usefulness. I wouldn’t own one, but I use the school SUV to haul around students for field work. But I will point out that my parents brought five kids, two adults, a cat, and a dog from Maine to Oklahoma without an SUV (which is good, because there were no SUVs yet…my mother always wanted a van but never got one). In those days, the back seat had a continuous seat which would hold at least three; four if you were small (and we were). The SUVs sometimes do, but I’ve seen ones with miles of expanse between the seats, enough space to transport an elephant and his food.
Vans strike me as more efficient ways to move people, but they are not as cool. And SUVs were built on a truck chassis because smaller trucks were exempt from some of the mileage and environmental laws.
And whether people buy them to be assholes or not, there is something about driving one of those things that makes people feel invulnerable…and apparently not care about any other damn person on the street. My little car gets caught between two of those, and it’s worse than being caught between two semis (but with less wind problems). Semis are much more likely to follow road rules than SUVs.
Re: car wars, I definitely noticed a huge difference between driving my old Subaru wagon and my current Prius. Even here in my liberal PNW, the Prius is looked down-upon and people drive extremely aggressively next to me. I don’t ever recall being tailgated in my old International Harvester Scout II truck, but every asshole with a Ford F250 thinks that he can ride up my tailpipe when I’m driving the same speed on the same roads with my Prius. I’ll soon enough be selling the Prius in order to get something more truck-like (for gardening purposes such as hauling compost, not because I dislike the Prius), so I’m hoping that behavior from them will change.
#18
The Simpsons got a few things right. Here’s their take.
The Prius just looks off… Now the CR-Z is just awesome. Too bad a) some dumb kid totaled mine in December and b) they stopped making them and now have an artificially high price so now I’m stuck with a POS Hyundai Accent.
I own a Mitsubishi Magna that is about 20 years old, and built like a Sherman tank: the swan song of the Australian car industry. It has had the odd body dent inflicted on it by sundry inferior drivers in parking areas: none of them are my own work. I check them periodically for rust and treat them with paint-on rust-converter if they show any. Mechanically, it is A1.
Other motorists tend to give me a wide berth, and they mind their manners. It has saved me heaps of money, too; well, at least its market value. A cop a while back pulled me over for not coming to a full halt at a ‘STOP’ sign before proceeding. But as I got out of the car to reason with him, he looked at me and then at the car, and put his book away. “Poor old bugger; a ticket would probably send him broke” was written all over his face, and was his obvious conclusion. He gave me a lecture and sent me on my way.
As I am also in the cattle business, my other vehicle is a diesel SUV with a thumping great no-nonsense bullbar on the front. People respect that, too. My next car will probably be a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle) when the price comes down to somethng that Jane Austen would call ‘agreeable.’
What a thread of petrolheads.
I have never owned a car, live in a city with good public transport and walk and cycle everywhere. I get heavy stuff delivered. I would ban private cars from urban spaces altogether if I were a dictator, and you would then see cities re-designed so you wouldn’t need to get about in a private capsule. My particular hatred is supermarket car parks, where great masses of land is given over to these emitting horrors (and don’t think electric vehicles will save you, car junkies) and private front gardens paved over to park yet another lump of metal which should be given over to growing plants. One reason for flooding is urban paving which does not soak up rain fall.
Another hatred is the presumption of car drivers that they have a right to dump their private property on the highway. Any efforts to get these stolen spaces for stationary vehicles replaced with cycle lanes gets the same reaction as disenfranchisement – the howl of the outraged privileged.
However be comforted – it is politically difficult for local authorities to do anything about the domination of the automobilists. Near me is one of the main arteries from the suburbs to the city centre, a wide, flat road (in a hilly city) where the Council decided it would be a good idea to put in a cycle lane. This was back in 2014. There was huge opposition with cries that this would be the death of the shopping street (i.e. the traders wouldn’t be able to park, illegally, in loading zones) and the leader of this movement put out leaflets showing post-apocalyptic views of a boarded up wasteland. The Council officials at the community council meetings were met with barrages of abuse – this from the professional classes who live in this area, parts of which are the most expensive streets in Scotland. Boards showing the proposed “place-making” of the area were vandalised.
The opposition obfuscated and obstructed, and with the tortuous consultation process, managed to drag this out up to government level. The politicians had to compromise a little. It will be built in 2023, though it will not be a particularly good piece of infrastructure because of the compromises.
If you worked out the amount of time/efffort/campaigning to get a few miles of cycle lane it comes to be about 4 hours per inch. That is with politicians on side.
Now this is a very small, modest attempt to get people out of cars and onto bikes for doing journeys of 3 or 4 miles to school/work/errands. Many people won’t cycle for the fairly sane reason that it is frightening to cycle among busy traffic. People pay lip-service to climate change, but they will not give up things that are both personal and society addictions. Foreign holidays, for one, and cars especially.
So there’s no chance that climate change will be reversed. Politicians don’t have the courage, or the ability to take the measures required, and the mass of the people are not going to see any sacrifice in comfort or convenience.
A big car doesn’t make anyone safer. The way that cars, even small cars are designed, is that in a collision the unibody folds and crumples, absorbing the shock of the collision. I would rather be in a small car made with a unibody than in a big car during a collision. The impact of the shock in a big car with a frame, or in a truck, is passed to the passengers. I learned this working in a body shop.
Think of an egg in an accordion, in an collision, compared to an egg in a metal box in the same collision. Also, newer, smaller cars are safer in a rollover than the older cars. It has to do with the pillars supporting the roof and the windshield. The windshield and adhesive support the roof, so that’s why you should ALWAYS replace a cracked windshield. You don’t want the windshield to crumble. (It’s also vital for front air bag deployment.)
So, buy a smaller, more efficient car. I have a Kia Niro, which is a small wagon. Works great even in the winter.
But there are things about the hybrid that I reallllly like. One is that it doesn’t idle in traffic. The engine turns off when it’s sitting and then starts up again when I hit the gas. It gets better mileage in the city than on the highway because of this. Most of the emissions are from sitting at lights and stop signs and being parked in rush hour traffic.
I’m not a great first draft writer. I see my mistakes, and need to remember to see them and correct them before I hit “send” or “enter.” I hope that post makes sense as you read it. Summary: it’s safe to buy small, fix your cracked windshield, and “yeah, hybrids” they cut down on emissions.
We really can’t do much as individuals, even if we all car pool or take mass transit where available (which is probably never in rural Nebraska,) buy recycled clothes, reuse our grocery bags, wash clothes on the quickload cycle with cold water, shower every other day instead of every day, grind our own coffee with a manual grinder, plant a little garden and eat a lot of peaches, etc as long as the big producers and emitters are going along their merry way. We should still do these things, though, because they are good things to do. But when the coal companies insist on extracting, oil companies insist on drilling deeper, and the natural gas companies insist on fracking, we are fighting an uphill battle.
What I’m saying. Individuals can’t do it and governments can’t either.
JG @ #25:
One sequential technique for dealing with tailgaters recommended to me by a revhead well above my league: 1. wait till your tailgater is himself being tailgated (and it will always be a male driver: no sexism in this revhead thread (h/t KBP @# 29) 2. shift down a gear for better acceleration; 3.check that the headlight switch is for low beam; 4. switch on headlights and at the same time tread on the accelerator, causing your car to; 5. take off.
Tailgater 1 sees your tail lights go on, and reacts as for your braking lights lighting up by hitting the brake. He is then rear-ended by Tailgater 2.
By the time those two automotive gorillas get down to sorting things out, you are a speck on the horizon.
DISCLAIMER: I have never had occasion to try this myself, mind, though I cannot see how it would be against the law provided speed limits are observed.
KBP @ #29:
I should also have mentioned above in this thread that I am a keen cyclist. In 1977, I had a rather bad skiing accident and did in my right knee, just a week or so before I was due to go on a holiday to Europe, terminating in Britain. My knee troubled me, but I travelled by public transport through Europe. On arrival in London, I bought a brand new bicycle, and had the shop set it up for me according to my own specifications. Then I took it by train up to Oban in Scotland, rode it to Fort William, caught the MacBraynes ferry across to Skye, rode it across the Coolins to Mallaig, took it on another ferry to the North end of North Uist, rode it in one day against a fierce N Atlantic headwind so strong I never got anywhere near top gear at any stage, then from the south end of South Uist I caught the ferry back to Fort William and rode it by back roads down to Holyhead in Wales. From there to Ireland, covering most of that (South only) then back to Wales, then down through the English midlands and onwards all the way to the famous Jamaica Inn in Cornwall, where I turned around and headed back to London. That took 6 weeks in all, and when I got back to London, I sold the bike for forty quid less than I had paid for it, having covered over 1,200 miles by the odometer, staying in cheap but comfortable B&Bs all the way, and with numerous adventures as well, (some hilarious.) By the time I got back to London, my knee was completely cured and has not troubled me since.
I would recommend it to anyone, though these days a medical condition confines me to riding an electric bike (when I am not hooning around as a revhead ;-). But the bicycle is the greatest aid to walking ever invented, if you ask me.
KBPlayer, that mirrors things I usually say. If I lived in a place with mass transit, I would live like that. It appeals to me. But not biking, since my orthopedist says I can’t do that anymore (though a recumbent bike might be an option). #31 is right about rare in rural Nebraska – like, our town doesn’t even do school buses. Parents drive their kids to school, sit idling waiting for them at the end of the day, and crow about the money they save by not doing school buses (obviously flunked basic economics). This has the additional downside (or advantage, depending on your point of view) of putting mothers in the position of needing to be available when school lets out, which does not ever gibe with the end of the work day. Hurts the working woman, comforts the conservatives that make up this town.
Cars are problems not just for emissions. Mining of materials, use of rare earth metals for hybrid batteries. Most of all…the habitat loss from millions of miles of highway, millions of square miles of parking lots, and the extremely large parking garages that dominate our cities. The country has very little advantage, as road ribbons thread through every system, even protected systems. Road kill is a common phenomenon, especially when there is litter, because the litter draws some of the animals to the highway where they are more likely to be hit.
There is no easy answer, mostly because people have come to look on cars as a right, not a privilege. And because they believe they need them….and not just one. Our city passed an ordinance that you couldn’t have more than one car parked outside your property, and people went ballistic. One of my students told me he had five vehicles, and he needed every one of them. When he delineated the “needs”, it was clear all but one of them were for recreational purposes, all of which have their own environment destroying features.
When I retire, I want to live in an area with mass transit. The problem is, my husband doesn’t want to live in a big city. We’re currently in negotiations.
@Omar- re bicycles as a walking aid, yes. One of our activists was run over by a lorry when cycling and badly injured. She finds walking difficult but gets about pretty well on her cycle, including an electric cycle. Someone in my family had a stroke and can walk very little, but zips about on his adapted three-wheeled recumbent, which has been a boon for his physical and mental health, and sense of independence.
@iknlast – in the holidays the traffic is noticeably lighter because there is no school run. The school near me does pretty well with children and parents walking and cycling -there’s a nice route through the park and some quiet streets, a 20mph limit outside the school and restricted parking and stopping. A rat run which gets fast traffic is going to be closed. That’s good in my area, but it’s not typical. The percentage of children walking or cycling to school has dropped extraordinarily in the last 30 years, and as a consequence children are fatter, also more dependent and as you say, it’s an extra chore for the mothers.
I grew up in NYC. I learned to drive at a relatively advanced age; most people here in Alabama learn to drive before they finish high school, but I was well out of college (and out of NYC). NYC has good mass transit; where I live in Alabama does not. I would probably drive very little or not at all if I lived in NYC. It’s extremely difficult in some places to deal with not having a car.
It’s politically extremely difficult to promote mass transportation, even in places where it could be practical. The moneyed interests convince people of all sorts of things, but this doesn’t make money for them, so they work against it.
I am retired, and I don’t live in a place with good mass transit. I don’t think that’s in the cards. Other factors are more important, and inertia is strong.
iknklast @ 34 – is he ok with near big cities? Surrounding areas can have pretty good mass transit. That’s the case here, for instance, and the Bay Area.
iknklast @34:
The city with the best mass transit system I have ever been to is Manila, in the Philippines. It has all these little buses called ‘jeepneys’ which were originally modified jeeps left by the US forces in WW2. They run on fixed routes, and can be flagged down and ridden for whatever distance the passenger pays for, or they used to. I don’t kow what the situation is there today, but two jeepney rides: on say, N-S and the other E-W would get one from anywhere to anywhere, paying only for the distance travelled. I think that most of them were owner-operated as well. And they were as thick as flies.
Bicycles can also be dangerous in traffic. I had a close friend who was killed that way.
When I advertised a project at work to plant fruit trees and thus asked people to bring us back seeds or plantlets from their garden, out of 250 people, 1 gave 3 seeds and another one gave 6 young trees. That’s how people commit to a very easy task that would have sucked up tonnes of carbon over 20 years.
Eventually I did and do contribute to planting trees at work, currently possibly worth a commercial value exceeding several thousand bucks (and I don’t count my time).
I’m really amazed, because everywhere there is room for tree planting, even if we avoid places where trees falling are a potential risk. (Though when people argue about the cost of lumberjack I ask them about the cost of climate change).
There is room for mitigation, quite room, and actually quite mitigation. We won’t avoid the disaster, but we certainly can attenuate its strength. Now.
There isn’t even the need fro trees to grow up huge, even if we cut them down after a few year and maintain dense cover and use the wood even for composting it will still displace carbon from the atmosphere.
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