Why are so many climate records breaking all at once?
From the hottest global average day, to the highest average sea surface temperature and the lowest Antarctic sea ice extent - here’s why so many climate records are breaking, all at once.
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But I need my lifted pickup truck To hAUl ThInGS. How can I go grocery shopping without a vehicle the size of a minibus? And how would other people know how strong and wealthy I am if I were to walk, ride a bike or use transit? I need a big metal box around me to protect my insecurity.
While I certainly don't want to defend the kind of asshats that insist on doing something as stupid and obnoxious as "rolling coal" I do need to point out that large swaths of the US are currently not setup in such a way that you can realistically get around without a vehicle of some kind. Massive work on public transit plus a fundamental urban planning design change needs to take place before walking, biking, or public transit is a viable way to get from point A to point B.
So until those changes are made, yes most Americans will need a electric or ICE vehicle. It doesn't need to be an inefficient pollution spewing behemoth, but it does need to be something. Really though aside from people intentionally modifying their vehicles to be less efficient and more polluting modern cars are pretty efficient and clean.
The primary vehicle contributor to both global warming and pollution isn't even cars though, it's ships by a landslide. It isn't even remotely close. Cruise ships and particularly the giant container ships used to move goods internationally are hugely inefficient and polluting with just one ship putting out in a single day the equivalent of multiple cars worth of pollution for an entire year.
The primary vehicle contributor to both global warming and pollution isn’t even cars though, it’s ships by a landslide. It isn’t even remotely close. Cruise ships and particularly the giant container ships used to move goods internationally are hugely inefficient and polluting with just one ship putting out in a single day the equivalent of multiple cars worth of pollution for an entire year.
Bullshit.
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
Road transportation: 11.9%
Shipping: 1.7%
Ocean liners are very dirty yes but they're actually very efficient compared to cars and trucks precisely because they're so massive. They move a huge amount of goods. Put the same amount of goods on trucks and you get an order of magnitude more emissions.
Oh and electricity and heating create almost twice as much ghg emissions as transportation. Which is why supporting renewables is the single most important thing anyone can do for the environment.
Not sure how you square those numbers with reports like this then: https://www.businessinsider.com/cruise-ship-air-pollution-carnival-cars-europe-study-2023-6
That wasn't the actual report I was thinking about, but its been a number of years since I saw that original report which looked at pollution of shipping vessels vs. pollution of US automobiles and found that an overwhelming majority of the pollution came from the ships.
The good news such as it is is that as pointed out in that article regulations have improved in 2020 and it's already showing reductions in ship pollution.
The article that you reference is mainly about sulphur oxide. I'm not sure how you make the leap from that to CO2. Also Business Insider is owned by the very pro oil & gas Springer who in turn is partially owned by KKR. I would say not the most credible source when it comes to environmental information.
Conflating GHG with "pollution" is a classic obfuscation tactic. They're not the same.
I mean, the meat industry produces more than both of those combined at 15%.
And that's something you can stop today right now if you want to.
I stopped two years ago, for ethical reasons though.
I also read that what is not taken into account is that the people on the cruise ships are not somewhere else - so you have hundreds of thousands of people who are not driving, heating houses, flying, or basically not doing other things that could cause emissions. Whether it has an effect or not I don't know, but it does sort of make sense.
