Severity of the California Fire

For more than 10,000 years, the average global temperature did not change by more than 1 degree Celsius. However, when humans started building fossil fuels around here. Today, global temperatures have risen about 1-degree Celsius since pre-industrial times storms have gotten more intense, wildfires are more common, and ancient glaciers are melting faster and faster. That's just one degree of warming. Without global action, the world is on track to warm at least 3 degrees Celsius by 2100. This would be catastrophic. That's why most scientists agree that we need to limit global warming to this range, between 1.5 and 2 degrees celsius. Carbon dioxide, which is emitted when we burn fossil fuels, accounts for most of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. It's the main culprit behind climate change. To limit global warming to the degree that scientists are calling for. We have to stop releasing it. We have to "decarbonize." The U.S.U.S. doesn't currently emit the most carbon dioxide of any country. However, as one of the oldest industrial powers, it emitted more carbon dioxide in total than any other country or region. So America has a big role to play in decarbonizing. How is the U.S.U.S. supposed to do that? Is it possible? If you want to get halfway there by 2030, you have to start now like actually right now. There is literary 0 time to waste. The 2020 election comes with fair stakes. If Trump is re-elected, that's the end of it. There's no chance. The probable chances for getting 2 degrees are gone. Trump has said during his presidency the following "The United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord.", Open up the coal mines, new offshore oil, and gas leasing program. President Trump does not have a climate policy. His re-election will most likely continue policies designed to boost the fossil fuel industry. They'd increase carbon emissions instead of decreasing them, and the effects would be felt globally. You can't have the world's second-biggest economy opting out, moving in the opposite direction and expect the world to get there. The other major candidate in the election does have a plan to address climate change. In particular, this part is ambitious "Ensure the U.S.U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050. Biden has been convinced and pushed to the point he's got a great climate plan. Biden's plan doesn't get into detail on exactly how the U.S.U.S. would do that. However, some people have thought about what it might look like to decarbonize by 2050. Remember that carbon emissions come from the burning of fossil fuels. This stuff Saul says that means to decarbonize, we need to follow their path, and it will usually lead to his electricity and energy and how we use it to generate it. In the U.S.U.S., the majority of which comes from two kinds of fossil fuel: Natural gas and coal. If the U.S.U.S. wants to decarbonize, it needs to stop getting electricity this way and replace it with other decarbonized systems. This means coal power plants Out!, Gas power plants Gone. All of the electricity would generate from new upcoming renewable sources. Wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, and biomass. Or nuclear energy. Decarbonizing the way we get electricity would be a huge investment. However, it would eliminate 20% of emissions. That's because electricity and energy are not the same things. That doesn't solve vehicles' emissions. It doesn't solve heating emissions from using natural gas or fuel oil in your basement. All these other parts of the economy draw their energy directly from fossil fuels. Like transportation: we use oil for fuel and commercial and residential buildings where we use gas and oil. However, there is an elegant solution to this. You decarbonize these sectors by switching their energy source by making it electric. We already have almost all of the technology we need to do it. Heat pumps, batteries, electric vehicles, Wind turbines, nuclear power plants. We know that we can work. We know we can do electric cars. We can nearly do everything for electric heat. It's all in the end just about machines, right? We have a bunch of machines that use fossil fuel energy. We need to replace them with machines that use clean electricity. So really, it just comes down to the matter of industrial capacity: How fast can you build machines? There are some things we would have a harder time decarbonizing. Air travel will solemnly requite to fossil fuels until alternative technologies get better. Things like steel and concrete are tough to manufacture without fossil fuels. However, if we decarbonize as much as possible with the technology that we have now, It would end most of the U.S.'sU.S.'s Carbon emissions. All of this would be a huge undertaking. It needs to happen fast/ All of our recorded human histories has happened with an era if relative climate stability, an era that's about to end; however, we still have control on what comes next, and the global effort that require those hinges in part on what the U.S.U.S. decides to do. Americans can decarbonize. We have the technology to do it. We have the resources. The only question is whether we want to do it or not.