How do we actually get out of this climate disaster?
It’s April and I am sweating like crazy, it fucking sucks, but it also got me wondering what can I do? There is so much conflicting advice out there, even if I tell others about this, when they ask for a solution what do I tell?
So if all world leaders collectively agreed to put aside their differences, ditch capitalism and mobilise their entire populations to actively work to reduce emissions tomorrow we might stand a slim chance of preventing the worst case scenario...
As an individual the single most important thing you can do is vote for leaders who will make the necessary policy changes to make a difference, assuming you live in a country where this is possible. You can try to lower your own carbon footprint, and that is laudable, but the only way to change this is with strict regulation of fossil fuels and investment in renewable energy and that requires collective action.
Speaking of policy changes, IMO the best thing you can do as an individual is lobby your local government for zoning reform to increase density and walkablity. Because it's local your influence can actually be significant, and zoning is by far the most transformative improvement we could make, dwarfing the impact of switching to EVs and whatnot.
LOL so you really think?
You really, really believe that we are going to listen when somebody claims to know "the only way"??
The most effective thing you can do is try and influence local, state, and federal policies that will reduce emissions.
I've made several changes in my life, but I know in the grand scheme of things it won't have any effect.
Do what you can to stop feeding the petroleum products industry. They use the money you give them to literally fuel this crisis.
If you own your home, check into federal, state, and local rebates for these things:
Adding to these good suggestions: shop at thrift stores.
And if you have time: volunteer at a thrift store.
assassinate the top 1%.
If each of us able bodied where to go and collect scalps of the top 1% we'd have a fighting chance.
We wont.
That is reality, it doesn't matter if the entire world turn off fossil fuel usage permanently this instant, there is allready far too much greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere to reverse course, we might get to delay the inevitable a decade or so, but shit is comming.
It's weird how 'not giving up' got us penicillin and earthquake warnings, so I'd hope we do a little more than "we won't. Oh well."
We are making progress down paths that could shorten the correction after all the CO² and methane is removed from the atmosphere, and it seems important to explore the potential -- as many as we can, actually, as science often fails.
comming
I may need a translation. Related to comms, like in communications?
comming
It's a typo of coming. As in the word "come" or "to arrive".
I guess we could build a gigantic airconditioner and solve the problem that way....
It boils down to cash.
Companies can make money off penicillin. Governments can readily allocate funds to visible, common disasters.
Disasters that have been a century in the making and require whole nations to change the way they do things for an observable result decades down the line is almost impossible to get money for. Our shortsightedness is our downfall
CO²
I may need a translation. CO² like in E = mc²? What is the square of oxygen?
Focus on income inequality and the rest will also get addressed. Cutting out meat is good, but that doesn't matter when Elon musk decides to jet from SFO to San Jose because he doesn't like traffic.
He should have his own car on the CalTrain. Would be much cooler and less polluting.
Very pessimistic view here. I believe we have already passed the point of no return with human emissions. The worst of climate change will now happen faster and sooner than it naturally would. It's just a matter of mitigating the disaster imo.
Adapt to it as best we can. Minimize your use of fossil fuels, particularly Natural Gas(Methane). Get some books on farming to understand a worst case need to live off grid.
We're past the point that we can go back. The glaciers on Antarctica and Greenland are in a self-sustaning melt cycle at this point.
Natural gas ads are popping up again, pretending to be the "clean" fossil fuel. It doesn't surprise me that they try this shit, but it does infuriate me.
My husband once said "we're not killing the planet, we're just rearranging it in a way that is not conducive to human life". I think about that when I feel hopeless, we're just a blip on a bigger radar, and we need to drop the main character syndrome that the world dies when we do.
Also though, scalp the 1%.
As individuals, nothing. And if you do whilst countries like China, the US and Russia continue to pollute on a massive scale, you're being taken for a fool.
Societal collapse.
A long and rough collapse, followed by a slow rebuilding of a much smaller but much more unified global society.
Can we have a quick collapse? If the world is going to catch on fire there's a few people I want to be sure are still alive when the consequences of their actions happen.
Get rid of capitalism. Which, we won't.
Degrowth until we live within planetary bounds accomplished with cultural evolution and ending capitalism is the only thing that could actually work.
All other proposed solutions fail to address the fundamental unsustainability of our way of life and could only hope to slightly slow our demise.
I know people here shit on individual action, but avoiding beef and driving are the two big ones
Not having kids is also huge
This is the biggest reduction to your possible carbon footprint. I'm glad I have been successful with this step.
And, please, raise a kid or three to pass that along. Just don't produce them.
I shit in a bucket and recycle it into my own food, does that count as making a difference?
It has taken about 100 years to create this problem.
We can start to solve it, maybe today, or maybe tomorrow, but it won't go away within a single election period...
It's as easy as stop reproducing.
So, ummm... Welp.
Damn.
Or reproduce more, but be selective such that our descendents are adapted to the new conditions.
Are you the head of a major international corporation? If not, there's nothing meaningful you can do.
If you're a world leader fishing for ideas then you could try using regulatory bodies, alternatives incentives, and monetary policies to do the following: disincentivising plastic import/manufacturing, disincentivising meat consumption, disincentivising car ownership/road-expansion, disincentivising pets, disincentivising power consumption and fossil fuels, and finally funding education and promoting smaller families with less children (these last two things are intrinsically linked). You also have to come to an agreement to do all of these things alongside other nations, because if your nation stops producing as many cows and pigs then some impoverished nation will just crank up their own production to fill the market gap.
Basically, we would only use a third as much agricultural land to live on if we didn't eat meat. With less people that would use even less land with an added bonus of lower emissions by a massive amount per person in developed nation because of lower fuel cost and power consumption. You can lower emissions even more by investing heavily into more efficient modes of transport like railways and buses, in many cases making towns and cities as well as large distance travel doable on foot without a car. We know that educated people, particularly women, lead to lower population growth: which is a good thing, because less emissions and more efficiency. Basically two techniques are being deployed in this example: lower emissions per person and lower number of persons.
Will this fix the damage we've done to the atmosphere and the planet? No, more complex solutions would need to be employed for individual problems like atmospheric methane to ensure our planet continues to be livable for the next century, but we know for a fact that even slightly lowered human activity has a huge beneficial impact because we saw those beneficial effects firsthand during the pandemic.
But wtf do I know, I'm a banjo. You're a world leader. Visit some Universities, talk to experts on panels, and figure it out.
Some seem to be concerned enough by it that they might threaten secession (forming new nations that will do something about it) if their nation won't do anything. And nations tend to hate secession.
nuke the sun
You can hope that billions of people choose to act against their own self-interest in a way that has never happened before or you can move somewhere with a cooler climate.
I die, and for the first time, know true peace.
Nothing. There is literally nothing you can do.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/the-carbon-brief-profile-china/
"China is the world’s largest annual greenhouse gas emitter.
In 2020, it emitted 12.3bn tonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2e), amounting to 27% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the CAIT database maintained by the World Resources Institute (WRI). This includes emissions from land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF).
. . .
It is a “non-Annex I” party to the convention, meaning it is not obligated to contribute climate finance and was not required to make binding emissions cuts under the Kyoto Protocol."
Nothing changes until China changes.
Way to put the blame on China when all of the Occident delocalized production over there. Every rich country needs to change, and they also need to help emerging countries to develop sustainably too. We spent centuries destroying the environment for growth and now we're on top, we can't tell these countries not to do everything we did because it's not sustainable.
Agreed on the "not much you can do on an individual level" though. We need to change the way we consume and live but it's peanuts compared to what needs to change for mega corpos and countries.
How about we do that per capita, Cowboy ?
Given that China has ~18% of the world’s population, it’s not super shocking that they produce 27% of emissions (especially given how much manufacturing has been outsourced there).
By comparison, the US has less than 5% of the world population and produces ~11% of emissions, with only Saudi Arabia being higher in per person emissions.
And here come the finger pointing Ameritards trying to deflect their own responsibilities after polluting the planet for the last century and still refusing to drop red meat & cars and moving vast amounts of their production capabilities to China. If you advocate for China not to develop their rural shitheap regions, then you should also advocate for actual de-growth in the US, significantly lowering your own living standards.
Destroy the supply chain. It's surprisingly fragile, and if it fell over it might even be impossible to rebuild. For instance, energy production has a whole bunch of dependencies on mining, which requires large amounts of energy - and all the infrastructure requires constant maintenance, which requires all the infrastructure.
One swift kick in the nadgers and the whole system goes down in a tangled heap, with all your tools at the bottom.
Large-scale industry would be crippled out of existence for a very long time, possibly forever - and maybe the oceans wouldn't end up boiling.
There are plenty of chokepoints in the system, where a small disruption could have disastrous effects. Just look what one ship screwed up by getting temporarily stuck in a canal for a couple of weeks. If a nation or two set their mind to it, they could throw a spanner or three in the works that would rip the whole engine apart.
The human cost would be utterly devastating, of course. Billions would die, and the knock-on effects would just accelerate the decline.
But the way things are going, they're all going to die anyway, and take the rest of the planet down with them. This way seems less-worse, and we get to play The Last Of Us irl.
At this point? Nuclear war.