What can be done to prevent more dangerous heatwaves in Europe?
Does Europe need to plant more trees in it’s cities?
It appears that Europe does many things right for sustainability and climate change - public transit over cars, recycling, reducing carbon footprint better compared to other parts of the world. Of course all communities can do better at reducing their carbon footprint - Is this America’s fault with their carbon footprint that Europe is suffering? America has their cars, and simply cranks up their Air conditioners when it’s hot.
What else is there to do? I thought China had success improving their renewable energy output, even though they are still polluters, is it the actions of China and the USA causing misery in Europe? How do we help Europeans suffering and prevent this from happening again?
I was under the impression that Europe’s current carbon footprint was lower than much of the world.
Nuclear energy is an interesting discussion. I’ve heard the suggestion that it’s one good alternative specifically for now until communities and countries can get better renewable energy alternatives. But people can be so weary due to the low but real risk that things have gone wrong in the past.
Current? Maybe. Since the 1750s? Nope.
Nuclear power is also a stop gap solution if you ask me. It isn’t clean. It creates highly toxic waste products that nobody wants to keep stored for centuries in their backyard, just not a lot of CO2. That gets waved away a lot like it isn’t an issue. It’s better than burning gas, oil, or coal. It’s not better than renewables in my opinion. And nuclear needs a reliable cooling chain for its survival and all the people unfortunate enough to live close by. That’s normally done with water that happens to flow by the plant. If the increasing heat dries out these rivers, you’ll get a slightly more stretched out version of Fukushima.
The problem is batteries. If we could have batteries that store the sun and wind energy for when sun and wind are on a break, we’d be set. We don’t have that. The tech isn’t there yet. And we’d probably empoverish all the countries who are unfortunate enough to have the necessary rare earths in the ground in the process. We’re fucked in more ways than one.