US tariffs come into effect today. As someone who cares about the environment and stays an optimist, I have been thinking about the many possible environmental benefits that could come from these tariffs.

1. It will make people less wasteful. No more low quality off brand planned obsolescence junk from China. People will no longer overspend on Temu and related places. People will be buying and exchanging much more secondhand items. Thrift stores and secondhand markets will become more widespread. Instead of throwing stuff away, there will be more jobs for restoration and item repair. Items will be reused instead of replaced. Food will not be wasted as much and people will be much smarter with their spending habits.

2. Increased recycling. Companies that used to rely on outsourced and imported materials will now have to rely on domestic recycled materials. Paper and plastic will have tons of usable materials to recycle. Not to mention all the other stuff that can be recycled into something else. Local craftsmen and upcycling industries becoming more widespread?

I could be right or wrong, and I would really like your input!

https://www.wesh.com/article/csu-2025-hurricane-season-forecast/64377212

I work with a small electric company in a Western state. We need baseload 24-7 power - solar, wind, and energy efficiency can only get us so far without radically increasing electric rates; batteries are expensive and buy you 2-6 hours, not 10-12 hours at high cost; nuclear isn't happening for at least 10-20 years (and if it does will be supply limited)...natural gas is the only economically feasible option available to us right now.

What about geothermal? We would love to buy geothermal, but it is a nascent industry. There is a lot of project development risk in both the technology, transmission access, and financing.

Big geothermal projects are limited and the ones that we (us and multiple other utilities) start discussions with end up ghosting us because they can get more money from California utilities.

But California already has pretty clean electricity per kilowatt-hour. For the dollars they spend to get to 100% carbon-free, they are paying a lot to reduce a little.

They are sucking away supply-limited geothermal from other more carbon intensive states surrounding them. For the same dollars they spend to get to the gold standard, other states could reduce 2-3x as much carbon by improving the back and middle of the electric company pack.

They obviously can't subsidize our carbon free power plants (even if it is more carbon and economically efficient) but if they at least stopped buying geothermal, it would lower geothermal project demand and open up supply to the rest of us, lowering project prices and overall emissions.

Batteries are a more decentralized technology that don't have the same geographic and transmission requirements. California could continue down that path, improving the technology and lowering prices with increased demand and resulting expanded manufacturing (like they did with solar panels) without the same impacts to other utilities...

My two cents...reactions?

Anything?

Excerpts from the article (link below):

“We now expect a 3°C world,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote earlier this month, citing “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts.”

Morgan Stanley’s climate forecast was tucked into a mundane research report on the future of air conditioning stocks, which it provided to clients on March 17. A 3 degree warming scenario, the analysts determined, could more than double the growth rate of the $235 billion cooling market every year, from 3 percent to 7 percent until 2030.

JPMorgan, the world’s most valuable bank, has been describing to investors how it evaluates climate risks in a detailed report published annually since 2022.* At that time and in subsequent reports, the bank said it vets investments using “baseline” scenarios that assume global warming of 2.7 degrees to more than 3 degrees by the end of this century.

“These guys are not making assumptions out of the blue,” he said. “They are following the science.”

(The article is flush with links to sources.)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-banks-quietly-prepare-for-catastrophic-climate-change/

This is all a bit absurd. Air conditioner manufacturer’s profits may initially increase, but what the report fails to mention is the sharp decline when our socioeconomic system begins to collapse, electricity costs escalate, and bills go unpaid. Who can afford electricity when you’re struggling to buy enough food?

The report is a lie. It’s just telling people what they want to hear.

Can we hope technology will save us? Can sustainable energy systems scale up fast enough to produce enough?

So I’m doing some research for a sci-fi idea that’s been playing around in the back of my head, and one of the major thoughts for my worldbuilding was considering what sort of climate our distant descendants might be looking at, starting at least 1000 years into the future or further.

How many centuries after a full switchover to (for example) nuclear energy would we expect to see Earth’s climate stabilize into a new status quo and what might that look like once it does? One of my first temptations was to look back at the later Mesozoic Era (maybe the Cretaceous when the continents were closer to their current configuration than at the start?) as a template for a what a fully stabilized world without polar ice caps might look like from a climate standpoint, but is that accurate? What are the similarities and differences I might expect between this future era and prior warmest periods in Earth’s history?

Additionally, assuming human civilization either maintains or redevelops technology and continues to refine it after the climate does reach a new stable status quo, can you think of any issues significant enough that they might genetically alter themselves to deal with, that you and I from the modern era might have difficulties with? For example, would O2 or CO2 amounts be different enough to alter our breathing? UV reaching the surface? Increased heatstroke risks in large areas of the world?

I’m just wondering this because I think a lot of stories underestimate how long could take our technology to potentially accomplish some science-fiction staples, and by the time it happens it seems realistic we will have undergone a climate shift and possibly seen it start to restabilize in a different form than we know it today.

Why is the chemistry of the atmosphere considered the problem, when the issue is the change in wave-length of the suns radiation once it hits the earth?

I mean, the ideal is that we DON'T affect the atmosphere. But if we increased the reflectivity of the earth, so preventing the formation of infra-red, wouldn't this reduce the net heating effect?

Anyone know if SEDAC data got purged. As it appears on my end it did but just want to see if anyone knows for sure. BG: I have developed several water centric climate models that use actual data, rest servers, etc for raw inputs. All my rpc projections dbs are good but the beauty of what I developed is it links rpc scenarios to ssp projections.

Anyways. The token permissions I used to use via earth data no longer work and the earth data site now says “you aren’t authorized to view this site” despite being a fully vetted and approved user. As a workaround I tried going directly through the CIESN site at Columbia and it says there’s no longer support for SEDAC updates but says nothing about archived SEDAC data. The support chats and lines no longer work / aren’t in service. WTF?

Anyway I’m hoping I’m just being a putz but my intuition is telling me it got purged by Shittler since…

1.) Columbia 2.) includes climate data and spousal abuse data 3.) probably includes some evidence of a certain billionaire who looks like Ursula from the little mermaid embezzling federal money while claiming to improve efficiency.

Just wanted to put in a plug for Maine. Specifically Northern Maine. We get plenty of rain, the snow is decreasing. Rich farmland, lots of forest that are wet, not fire prone.

Kind of a hidden gem for remote tech workers as the houses are cheap with really fast/reliable internet. We are also close to Canada.

Really would not want to be anywhere else with this warmer, drier climate. Really one of the best spots in the northern tier.

My anti-renewable friend sent me these links.

https://energybadboys.substack.com/p/chris-wright-is-right-keep-the-coal

https://energybadboys.substack.com/p/how-to-destroy-the-myth-of-cheap

I know there’s a reading list and I plan on using some of those resources, but I’m working on an essay for my English Class, and she requires a couple different type of media resources cited. So does anyone have a good podcast episode, movie or documentary/series, that specifically talks about a cause of Climate change and its effects that I could use as research material?? Anything helps thanks!!

My company treats Lakes with toxic Blue Green Algae (Cyanobacteria). We are looking for a new test project that would be completely financed by us. This product has been tried and tested in many regions around the world and the company is 10+ years mature. We are exploring sufficient ways to capture carbon during our remediation process.

We would like to work on a private lake and potentially have a carbon credit project be a part of it as well. if you, or someone you know has a lake or pond that needs treatment, I'd love to speak with you and see if its a right fit. US lakes only for now. Happy to answer any questions regarding the process.

Some say we can expect another 1.5 to 2 billion souls to join us on this planet over the next 60-80 years, which is a cause for alarm since we already wildly exceed our CO2 emissions quota.

I've been looking at emissions data recently and had an interesting realization: Most future population growth will be in poorly developed regions of the world with very low per capita CO2 emissions, meaning they will have minimal impact in our future CO2 footprint.

The Data:

Nigeria (Africa's most populous country):

• Per capita CO₂ emissions have remained remarkably stable at 0.5-0.7 tons per person over the past 30 years
• Even as the population has grown substantially, per capita emissions haven't increased - in fact, they were higher in the early 1990s (0.69 tons) than in recent years (0.55 tons)

Kenya (showing more typical development patterns):

• Per capita emissions have only gradually increased from ~0.3 tons to ~0.45 tons over decades
• While total emissions have grown, this is more a function of population growth than increased consumption

For context, these figures are:

• ~1/30th of US per capita emissions
• ~1/15th of EU average emissions
• ~1/20th of China's emissions

The Bigger Picture:

50% of our future population growth is expected to be in Africa. Looking at data from Our World in Data, Africa as a whole contributes just 3-4% of global emissions despite having 17-18% of the world's population. The continent's per capita emissions peaked around 1980 at approximately 1.2 tons per person and have actually been declining in recent years to around 0.95-1 ton per person. The expected pattern of growing per capita emissions over time has just not been realized in reality.

https://i.ibb.co/Ng7dhmBW/image.png

When visualized, Africa's contribution to historical CO₂ emissions is so small it's barely visible on the same scale as global emissions.

https://i.ibb.co/1GcCbqXG/image.png

Climate Justice Implications:

What makes this particularly unjust is that Africa (17% of the world's population) is projected to suffer disproportionately from climate impacts despite contributing the least to the problem historically (4%):

• Many African nations rely heavily on rain-fed agriculture in regions with increasingly unpredictable precipitation
• High exposure to extreme heat events in already hot climates
• Limited financial resources for adaptation measures
• Food security challenges in regions already facing nutritional issues

Unrealized Potential:

Despite Africa having some of the world's best solar resources, only 2% of global solar installations are in Africa. This represents both a challenge and an opportunity - with proper investment, African nations could potentially develop with much lower emissions intensity than historical patterns would suggest.

Conclusion:

There is no climate population time bomb - reducing per capita CO2 emissions in the developed world (USA, Europe, China) is much more impactful than reducing population growth in Africa

I'm sure there are other carbon tracker platforms that exist, but I think this could be coupled with an ever evolving wiki of carbon footprint data of everyday products and tasks. Over time, the wiki would contain more data and provide more accurate, study-backed, figures. Editable by people, in the same way as Wikipedia, with sources etc.

As data entry is a laborious task, I think a lot of this can be automated with AI, i.e. by taking a picture of the product/activity and having the AI suggest what it thinks you are doing and automatically adding the task to your carbon budget. I've already done a project which tells you the carbon footprint of fruit in real time, as proof of concept, you can see it here: https://imgur.com/a/t3OCiel

In my previous job I also undertook life cycle carbon footprint studies of our products (construction products) as it was becoming more important in the industry. This involved raw materials, manufacturing, transport and end of life.

My idea would be an app where you take a picture of say your meal or a product that you're buying and it's carbon footprint is auto-populated into your budget. For a task, like using a washing machine, the CO2 impact of that task would be input into the app, say if you're washing at 30C (temperature) for 1hr. This would have to be combined with the wiki where over time users, and companies, would add the carbon footprints of their products / product use so that users can have the data. You can also have other features like detecting when you're travelling and what mode, like how Google Fit currently works.

From my research, we need a global average annual carbon footprint per capita of ~1 tonne CO2 emissions in order to hit the 1.5C limit temperature rise by 2050 of the Paris Climate Agreement. This was based on assumptions of a carbon budget of about 300b tonnes of CO2, about 10b people on the planet and about 30 years to 2050.

My other idea was to make this "instagrammable", i.e. make it something that people would want to share and post about online in the same way that people post about their healthy eating habits, meditation or fitness routines. I am sure that there are communities doing this, but I have not really seen it in the mainstream. I was also looking at coupling this with a subreddit or other forums (maybe this subreddit), I've also made r/OneTonneChallenge , where people can share their progress, tips, get inspired or get support.

I have a few ideas that I'm looking at working on. Let me know if you have any suggestions or feedback and I will likely prioritise what has the most interest. You can 'vote' for this concept here and stay up to date on any developments: https://robertswaitlists.com/idea/5