Biden says global warming topping 1.5 degrees in the next 10 to 20 years is scarier than nuclear war

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.

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.

Or we can work to stop things that are existential crises.

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.

Gotta nuke something

If it's good enough for Superman, it's good enough for me.

we should nuke the sun

ok, how

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 need most of the West and the upper classes of China to reduce their consumption of meat and animal products substantially.

That's something that requires an act of Congress rather than Biden.. And with the current House makeup, extremely unlikely.

Not exactly. Most references to 1.5C are about the long term average hitting that level, not an individual year.

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

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.

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.

IDK, climate-fueled illnesses — tied to hotter temperatures, and swifter passage of pathogens and toxins. Continuing pandemics would be no treat.

The scariness multiplied by the probability of it happening maybe...

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.

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?

In that it is definitely happening and will be equally destructive if steps aren't taken to prevent it, albeit over a longer timeframe.

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

May I remind you global thermonuclear war is bad for the environment?

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.

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.

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.

Nobody is suggesting that the US suddenly and instantly stop extracting, but that it be phased out in conjunction with getting rid of the need for oil in the first place.

The Saudi royal family has an alternative at this point, which is to live off their sovereign wealth fund, which owns stocks and bonds outside the country. They are also sitting on several million barrels/day in reserve extraction capacity, and could pretty easily crash oil prices if they felt like it.

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

The technological landscape that developing countries have today is very different from what it was a century ago. Wind and solar power are cheap in a way that they weren't then, so there's the possibility of a green industrialization, where they don't have to go down the road the US and Europe and China did.