It tells us that everything we’ve done so far is an ineffective approach, and therefore not really a big deal and to do anything useful we need a radical rethink. I think I envy your faith that scaling up our best approaches yet can resolve our predicament, though I’m not quite sure.
From the linked study:
between 1998 and 2022 across 41 countries from six continents […] total emission reductions between 0.6 billion and 1.8 billion metric tonnes CO2.
Oof, it very much reads like that’s total over 24 years, rather than per year. Global emissions being over 37 billion tonnes last year and rising, if my quick googling is to be believed.
a small fraction had a big impact
I wonder what glowing words would be left to describe a hypothetical situation where we were actually making things better, rather than just making them worse fractionally more slowly.
Are you claiming that solar panels have a positive co2 footprint?
Wait, are you claiming they don’t? (assuming you mean a positive CO₂ footprint means net emission of CO₂).
Solar panels absolutely don’t reduce CO₂. They make things worse more slowly, just as electric cars do, but they’re still making things worse. They are most certainly not carbon neutral, let alone permanently capturing CO₂. They’re an energy multiplier, which is less bad than using the energy without the multiplier, but it isn’t a net positive.
Which I think is probably the crux of OPs point.
Edit: WTF, where are OP’s messages? They weren’t abusive from my memory, they were quite the opposite of climate-crisis-denying. They were perhaps hyperbolic and absolutist, but I from my memory of them there was no reason to remove them.
England and Wales has eight, which is a little skimpy, and they’re not mandatory. So the 28 might not necessarily include those days.
The UK used to be 20, and national holidays would have to come out of the 20, but then they raised it to 28.
The UK is 28, not 20
So many people just can’t understand this. In dense city streets your journey times are usually decided by how long you spend waiting in queues and barely affected at all by your top speed. Which is why you can get around a city by bike faster than by car, even though few transportation riders cruise at much more than ~16mph/25kph on the flat.
I used to think that people just hadn’t thought this through and realized it, but I’ve had a few online discussions where it’s clear some people are just flat out incapable of understanding that when there’s congestion, speeding to a traffic queue most often just means a longer wait in the queue, not a shorter journey time.
Life in the UK isn’t until death either. 16.5 years on average.
Well all conventional air conditioners are strictly heat pumps, but when we say heat pump everyone usually means bi-directional heat pumps - ones that can provide heating as well as cooling. My Amazon results are not that and I was recently reading about them coming to market starting at $2k.
Where? My $300 U shaped window AC is modern quiet, tidy and efficient, but I was reading about window heat pumps being $2-3k.
Yeah, why can’t they just quietly trudge towards our own extinction with resignation like the rest of us, instead of making a fuss.
We’re not in the Anthropocene because the next epoch hasn’t taken shape yet. What humanity has done is create a transition from the holocene to whatever epoch will come next, the nature of which is unknown though we can predict some aspects. The idea that this right now is the new geological epoch is absurd hubristic misunderstanding of what a geological epoch is.
It’s not an epoch any more than the crash that totaled your car is your new car.
So what, does the comment I replied to make sense to people? It has many upvotes but to me seems complete nonsense.
More neutral for me, bad for you. Frequent crashing and injury is not normal.
I would never tolerate falling down regularly. Studded tires work extremely well. I ride through blizzard and on ice and slush without any trouble. The only time I went down due to ice was riding on a frozen puddle where my tires gripped the ice but the ice didn’t grip the ground under it. That was a decade ago.
Breaking a wrist or collarbone (or worse) happens far too easily to just accept routine crashing.
Bicyclists scrape their knees and bruise their arms all the time, especially if you also use it in winter and fall
I’ve commuted by bike for decades and I have no idea what you’re talking about. How? What causes arm bruises or scraped knees?
Wut?
I know why they did it, as I said. It’s obvious. But it doesn’t really pay off in practice.
I have to say this is always my thought when I see those signs. “Road work ends” would convey what they mean in normal English.
Similarly the strange US habit of text on the ground being written bottom to top. I get what they intended, but I don’t get why, then they first saw the effect, they didn’t laugh and realize it didn’t work. There’s a road lane near me that says “BUSES NO” “TRUCKS NO” and I always picture someone disciplining a naughty bus.
I’m not seeing what the translator did wrong.
Not to mention an emissions decline means we’re still making things worse, but not quite so quickly.
Obviously the path to making things better would have to pass through here, but just as people thinking electric cars are a solution rather than more of the problem, the delusion that this is winning is also part of the problem.