"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

-Jonas Salk

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Look to Sweden

Ray Pierrehumbert:

How to decarbonize? Look to Sweden
 Bringing global warming to a halt requires that worldwide net emissions of carbon dioxide be brought to essentially zero; the sooner this occurs, the less warming our descendants for the next 1000 years and more will need to adapt to. The widespread fear that the actions needed to bring this about conflict with economic growth is a major impediment to efforts to protect the climate. But much of this fear is pointless, and the magnitude of the task – while great – is no greater than the challenges that human ingenuity has surmounted in the past. To light the way forward, we need to examine success stories where nations have greatly reduced their carbon dioxide emissions while simultaneously maintaining vigorous growth in their standard of living; a prime example is Sweden.  
More at the link.

2 comments:

William M. Connolley said...

> The problem is not too much capitalism, but rather too little... Sweden is not socialist...

As Timmy has been trying to tell people for quite some time now. But the left is not keen to listen.

Gravityloss said...

Sweden has recently shut down a lot of manufacturing industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kockums_Crane

Sweden is also geographically and demographically fortunate with a huge amount of hydropower in the north, compared to the size of the population. They have also built a lot of nuclear power plants in the seventies and eighties.

It will be a lot harder in small flat countries with high population and less wind. New nuclear is facing a lot of opposition, and building is financially risky because of less projects in general.