this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Why aren’t climate-damaging subsidies on the chopping block? (livestock and cars) (slrpnk.net)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by activistPnk@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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Asking the gov to proactively shrink or limit animal products is a non-starter because there are just too many (voting) consumers who would be outraged. It would be political suicide. Same for cars. Forcing car owners out of cars would be political suicide as well.

But what I find baffling is there seems to be no chatter about the fact that the US gov gives (millions?) in subsidies to livestock farmers. And Europe gives tax breaks for “commercial” cars (mischaracterized personal cars). If the gov were to end the subsidies, there could be no reasonable complaint that the gov is interfering. Because in fact the gov would be ending their intervention.

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[–] pudcollar@lemmy.ml 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

That's all you get when you've got a system where the accumulation of political power through the accumulation of capital is aided and abetted. Agriculture is a politically powerful lobby so they get taxpayer dollars every year and lax supervision through regulatory capture.

[–] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Veg farmers fall under that same lobby though, right? So what if the feds say “you’ll get the same amount of subsidies but every year 20% of the livestock subsidies will shift to veg farmer subsidies”?

[–] pudcollar@lemmy.ml 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

They'd only say that if the vegetable farmers were offering the politicians more money.

It's the economic system of distribution that's the issue. That's why 10% of our gas is corn. Why the USDA food pyramid had 11 servings of grain. Business and government will continue to merge until we replace the capitalist government with a socialist one. Then at least we'd have a chance of government doing what voters want. As long as the government and the working class are different groups of people, people will always be looking for ineffectual patches for a broken system.