I'm posting this because it's a good comprehensive overview of the question. Most similar articles give a superficial overview with two or three ideas. However, climate change is not a simple issue where you can just change a thing or two to fix it; it requires deep changes in most aspects of life. And this change has to happen right now.
I don't think individuals require deep change in order to solve climate change. Most sources of emissions when broken down by industry ultimately just point back to the energy generation.
The only deep change that an individual can do that will make an actual impact is going vegan. Adding solar panels to your roof is not a drastic change, in fact in Australia it makes good economic sense. Driving an electric car is not a radically different experience to driving an ICE car. Telecommuting and working more days from home is, for many people, a desirable change to the way we work.
Once coal and then gas has been eliminated, 99% of new model cars are electric and lab grown beef matches the taste and texture a real cow the problem will be 80% solved. All of this can be achieved without a single person needing to change their lifestyle.
"High-impact beef producers create 105kg of CO2 equivalents and use 370m2 of land per 100 grams of protein, a huge 12 and 50 times greater than low-impact beef producers. Low-impact beans, peas, and other plant-based proteins can create just 0.3kg of CO2 equivalents (including all processing, packaging, and transport), and use just 1m2 of land per 100 grams of protein."
Shows Vegan and Ovo-Lacto Vegetarian neck and neck.
As another poster pointed out, in many areas living a pure vegan diet is far WORSE for the environment as you have to expend considerable CO2 getting the correct foodstuffs there.
There's also the open question about many countries where the land is only suitable for pasture as it's not arable.
I think this would be pretty difficult to study since there isn't "one" vegan diet. It differs radically depending on where someone is and what they choose to eat and the complexity of food distribution. On the surface removing meat, diary and eggs from your diet is definitely better for the environment and you can easily find scientific studies to back this up. I find the problems start to arise when you take into account what kind of fats and proteins vegans are supplementing with, eg a vegan living in Scandinavia that's buying imported avocados from South America is probably having a considerable environmental impact by doing so.
Exactly - which is why I take offence to people insisting it's a panacea. For some people in some regions it may very well be, but it's not for all, and trying to sell it that way is a little disingenuous.
Cheap clean energy is indeed the core problem. With enough energy even inefficient processes like creating synthetic high energy fuels to condense more energy in to less weight for air travel are possible.
Short term: Build MODERN, waste reducing, nuclear (fission) plants. If proliferation is a concern, require the military be hired to protect them and the logs/supervision open to the public with short delay.
Long term: I like the 3001 / Gundam OO / generic scifi solution. Solar collectors. Point lots of solar energy at a focal location and do useful things with it.
Without going full vegan, you can already reduce the meat consumption and also switching from red meat to poultry meat. We overeat meat and it is both bad for our body and our environment.
I think it is also important to get an education on how we have ended up in a society where these meat products are considered normal.
I was 'born vegetarian' and I struggled to eat meat. I tried my hardest and genuinely believed that if I did not eat meat like everyone else then I would end up physically weak, without a fully developed brain etc. I endured eating burgers in the belief that they were really good for me.
I never learned to cook the stuff and got over my fears of not eating meat. Laziness really, not wanting to have the hygiene problems of a contaminated kitchen. A few meat food scares (BSE) helped me to take the easy route (for me) of living without eating meat. Haven't died of a lack of B12 yet and I know plants don't have any need for B12 but we do.
Anyway, I have had time since the days of teenage fear to think more positively about what I do and do not eat. There are notable athletes, thinkers and Hollywood stars that are strictly vegetarian. My meat eating friends only seem to know of Hitler as being famous for being vegetarian but I know not everything in this world is black and white, just because Hitler didn't eat burgers doesn't mean that I should.
Now role models are all well and good, however, the history of food is far more fascinating and I really like understanding how we got here.
The Chicken Tax is what got me to do my own thinking on the history of food. My grandmother was the last generation to remember when chickens were not what you ate every day. There was a time - not so long ago - when people saved up to eat a chicken based meal, this would be Christmas or a birthday, as a treat. Chicken is now wolfed down as part of a sandwich, sat at the desk, not savoured or enjoyed in some special ritual as per seventy years ago. The farmers in the USA changed the game to the intensive farming we have for chickens, the Chicken Tax that petrol heads know of was the gateway for me to learn that story.
Eggs were not a year round product, there was Easter and maybe a 'second brood' later in the year. So even eggs - a substitute for meat - are not actually what we think they are, we have forgotten the seasonal aspect.
Then there is the the cow. For most of mankind's history with the cow the cow was a beast of burden with added milk. You didn't eat your cows in times gone past when a cow was more like a domestic appliance, for pulling the plough. Only if there was plague and famine would you want to eat the cow. Doing so meant harsh times.
The Dutch invented a new harness for the horse in the 17th century that enabled horses to pull the plough. This put the cow out of work so there was a change on the farm. At around the same time the guy that inspired Darwin and did all the selective breeding made cows into the beef product every burger scoffer so enjoys. The cows that pulled the plough were nearer goat sized, albeit podgy goat sized, hey were not these giant things we have today, stuffed with corn and killed before the diseases from their corn fed diet kill them.
Then there are the sheep. I grew up in an area where wool was what mattered. I have studied the local history and absent from it is any mention of eating lamb or mutton. The products that were shipped out of the area were wool, more wool and more wool. The world was getting clothed not fed.
Clearly our ancestors had many uses for the animals they lived with and every scrap went to 'good' use. Unless you were lord of the manor then game was off the table too. People were not at all well nourished with the chemicals we sprinkle on the land today - doors in old houses are only 5 foot 6 inches tall, they didn't need them to cater for 6' tall people.
I think it is really important to understand a little bit about how we got here and why it is that we think we need beef. The ethics of the slaughterhouse is divisive, an in-depth appreciation of history is not. Really we have been conned into believing so much of the modern life, tricked into believing we...
Glad you like it. There is no book on the subject, but all the best history is 'oral tradition', particularly regarding the food chain, right?
This is my own pet thesis, there is fact rather than myth that backs up the story. You can truly enjoy the fact checking though. For instance have a look at pastoral scenes painted by the grand masters of old. Cows are smaller, a lot smaller, and these are not errors in painting to scale. Children can reach out to cows without them the cow towering above. The history is right there in paintings that you probably had no interest in the first time you saw them and decided not to major in 'Art History'.
Same with the Chicken Tax related part of this 'thesis', along the way you can learn how the VW camper van became a thing - it was a tax workaround to put seats in the van so it wouldn't be a 'van'.
We also imagine Darwin started from a blank canvas, really that was not the case at all. Not trying to dismiss his work, but he was standing on the shoulders of giants too.
He was the chap who turned cows from beasts of burden to beef. His work was what Darwin wrote about to 'prove there is a god'. Yeah.
Also check out the humble turnip. The turnip made the British Agricultural Revolution possible, without the turnip there would not have been the British Empire as we know it. The turnip was a crop that could be fed to livestock, planted in the 'fallow' year it nitrogen fixed the soil making it good to go for other crops. Nowadays the turnip is just a Blackadder joke.
The Moldboard Plough was another part of the puzzle, the Chinese had this first, the Dutch copied it and they got it hooked up to horses. I don't have a handy reference for that, particularly how the harness worked. There is plenty to study though, Jethro Tull being an interesting chap for the 'seed drill' that ended this random scattering nonsense.
Dutch Golden Age paintings have the clues to the story in them, I have my 18 month old niece to help me research this, although she can't talk she is good at pointing at cows, in art and in fields. She goes 'Maggie Simpson' on me at times, I would not have spotted unusually small cows in paintings without her help and would not have gone down the rabbit hole of working out the why questions without her promptings.
So much of the politics of food is based on belief and opinion. Various diets are nonsense. I don't want another religion, I just want to understand. History gives the answers. And art history that has bored me to date comes to life when I am looking at paintings for things like how people ate, how big various animals are and what 'tech' was used on the farm. There is no longer a need to aesthetically decide if a painting is pretty or not, I find so much more in what I see when it is for this type of personal research.
Forgot to mention sheep - in the part of the West Country (UK) that I know the lucky mix of fortune that made the area prosperous included Fullers Earth, used to get wool nice and clean from grease etc. There were export restrictions on Fuller's Earth, so precious it was! The final product - cloth - ended up in those red uniforms that the British Army conquered the world with. The Cotswolds also had a lot of rain and very steep hills. So waterwheels and canals were part of the story. Plus the wonders of capitalism, with cottage industry making way for bigger mills and eventual decline...
I owe a great deal of thanks to some old people who are not here any more for taking the time to show me the relevant industrial archaeology. A retired gentleman who I used to deliver newspapers to as a teenager took the time to take me to local places so I could draw things for school history projects. In today's 'stranger danger&#x...
This is really a very good infographic - The biggest way we can impact climate change as individuals is to have fewer children. Yet, in most discussions I've seen, we talk about hybrid cars and vegetarian diet!
Then, truly, you live to benefit some other people's children. Basically you are a monk. Monks also known for not making the difference in all that removing sin business.
It's difficult to persuade people to have fewer children, since the people alive today generally inherit the trait of wanting children.
Further to that, I'm not sure it's a good idea anyway in many cases if you're worried about sustainability of the human race and our current lives - if we all stopped having children, society would pretty much collapse. Who's going to look after us when we're old? Clearly we don't all need to have 12 children, but 0 won't work either.
That's the cumulative effect of all your children's descendants. Good news - if you convince your child to make one fewer transatlantic flight, and to pass this knowledge on to all their children, then you are allowed to have kids without people making you feel bad.
I always roll my eyes when Idiocracy is brought up in this context. It has this old smell of eugenics, as people who take the premise seriously misunderstand the role of education and vastly overestimate genetics.
If you are unhappy with the level of education of the public, then try to work on that instead of feeling encouraged to spread your superior genes.
I recommend Carl Zimmer's latest book "She Has Her Mother's Laugh" for a look at the past and the present through the prism of heredity.
Hybrids typically run the engine at or close to peak efficiency all the time, which more than makes up for transmission losses. In contrast, traditional ICE-only powered vehicles have to run the engine at a range of speeds, some of which are considerably less efficient.
>> Why does “replace typical car with hybrid” help at all? Does regenerative braking save that much energy?
At least in my plug-in hybrid I get statistics on that. I have driven it 80% on electricity with average fuel consumption of 2.0 l/100km the 16 months I have owned it, that include 2 longer trips of 700km with average fuel consumption of 4.0 l/100km and some charging problems last winter. The car have 200hp, so would have been a lot more if not hybrid.
I find that hard to believe. So you're saying that Prius, despite being more complicated (as it needs to route both internal combustion and electric power to the wheels), has an electric motor/transmission more efficient than Tesla and internal combustion engine more efficient than power plants? The only way I think that's possible is if weight is taken into account, Prius seems to be a bit smaller and thus possibly lighter than Model S...
Well, yeah, that's basically equivalent to saying that you'd save money by running an internal combustion engine at home, rather than buying electricity from the grid. Sounds unlikely - although there are potential savings to be had if you take into account the heat generated, which is lost from the powerplant but a household could use it for heating - check out mCHP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_combined_heat_and_power
But I imagine that fuel is the vast majority of the cost, at least operational cost... and the initial investment is also at least to some extent dependent on the resources used (energy, matter).
I think this is possible if the Tesla’s electricity is coming from burning coal, which produces ~double the CO2 emissions per unit energy compared with gas. (Though this seems annoying to actually calculate, so I haven’t.)
You would not be looking at efficiency from a energy/$ perspective, which is what industry power generators care about, but rather energy/ton of CO2, which they rarely care about.
Yes, it does -- why else would the endurance racing world be embracing hybrid technology? A hybrid car has won Lemans for the last 5 years.
At least with the Prius-style hybrids, though, regenerative braking isn't the only advantage:
* The engine is an Atkinson cycle, which has better thermal efficiency than a typical Otto cycle engine.
* The electric motor is providing torque off the line, so there is no need for a torque converter (which reduces efficiency).
* The engine can be completely shut off when cruising at low speeds.
* The power split device (PSD) is more reliable than a traditional transmission, reducing maintenance costs over the lifetime of the vehicle. (it is much less labor intensive to replace the battery than to service the transmission)
The advantages add up when driving around town, but at highway speeds, a 3-cylinder or small 4-cylinder non-hybrid will often have better gas mileage.
> Yes, it does -- why else would the endurance racing world be embracing hybrid technology? A hybrid car has won Lemans for the last 5 years.
While I agree with your sentiment, I think it's dishonest to not mention the fact that diesels were absolutely dominating until the rules were changed in hybrids' favour a few years back.
This is a good illustration. People should look at it not only from their personal POV, but in terms of general policies regarding population size...
There are parts of the world (for example, Africa) where population has been increasing ridiculously fast for decades and the estimates are that this will continue. A lot of this is thanks to the financial support from the West.
When there's news that the population of Japan is decreasing people talk about it as if it's a catastrophe. But Japan is very densely populated right now and I think they'll be fine either way (maybe some short term economic struggles, but they won't go extinct).
These topics can be politically taboo, but they shouldn't be. These issues are too important and long term effects can be catastrophic for the environment and the general quality of life on Earth.
> There are parts of the world (for example, Africa) where population has been increasing ridiculously [...]
Africa is big, so it's a very coarse way of narrowing down a location. Population pressure is a multiplier, so people in poor countries with few cars and a diet that does not depend on cross-country transport of food have a smaller impact on environment than fewer people accustomed to a more expensive life style.
> When there's news that the population of Japan is decreasing people talk about it as if it's a catastrophe.
An aging or decreasing population can be a catastrophe, but not because of environmental effects; the concerns are of a social nature, as a shrinking population usually means a reduction in essential services. The one child policy that was active for years in China has left a characteristic mark on the demographics, leading to a small population of young people supporting a large population of old people.
> 8. Should I think about how many children I have (or don’t have)? ...
> Nicholas’s study concluded that having fewer children is the best way to reduce your contribution to climate change, with almost 60 tonnes of CO2 avoided per year. But this result has been contentious – and it leads to other questions. ...
> And we could ask if having children is necessarily a bad thing for solving climate change: our challenges may mean we will need more problem-solvers in future generations, not fewer.
Way to make the quantitative answer on this question ambiguous when it is clear that unless your kids will work or donate much more than average to climate change, they will add to the problem.
Just be honest and admit that this possible solution (fewer kids!) conflicts with your ideology.
It's also way too late to be banking on "future generations". Every credible report signals that either the adult generation in power today takes immediate action to curb climate change, or the effects will be catastrophic and, in most cases, irreversible. The recent UN report says we need to cut emissions worldwide by 50% by 2030. Your 11 year old child will not fix the climate.
All this warm-fuzzy nonsense about leaving the solution to "future problem solvers" is how we got here.
> The world can respond in three ways to signals that resource use and pollution emissions have gone beyond their sustainable limits. One way is to disguise, deny, or confuse the signals. Generally this takes the form of efforts to shift costs to those who are far away in space and time.
> A second way is to alleviate the pressures from limits by employ- ing technical or economic fixes. [...] These approaches, however, will not eliminate the causes of these pressures.
> The third way is to work on the underlying causes, to recognize that the socioeconomic system has overshot its limits, is headed toward collapse, and therefore seek to change the structure of the system.
Leaving the hard decisions to "future problem solvers" is exactly response #1, "shift costs to those who are far away in space and time", i.e. future generations.
Just be honest and admit that this possible solution (fewer kids!) conflicts with your ideology or your reader’s
The planet’s population has doubled in my lifetime alone, and I may see it double again, and it could be pure coincidence that all the warning signs clearly track the human population (CO2 levels, sea temperature etc etc) but maybe, just maybe, there is some causation there...?
We could all have nice things if, a few billion people ago, everyone had decided to reproduce at replenishment rate only.
You mean like distributing contraception in places like Africa? There's been a huge push for it in recent years and until your comment I don't think I've ever heard it described as "un-PC".
This article's quality is higher than many others on the same topic and that's a pleasant surprise.
That being said, I can't help being reminded about German language lessons I had ~10 years ago where the teacher was preaching that we must all ditch electric kettles for the sake of the planet. I asked her how is this going to help -- even if 100_00 people do it today -- if corporations are happy to let toxic waste seep into the ocean and lobby to never close coal plants. And we're talking thousands of tons a day. She wasn't pleased that I attacked her agenda.
So alright, I know we all can do better, individuals included. That's unequivocally true.
But let's not ignore the fact that the biggest fault lies in organizations that are happy to pay people to whisper stuff in the ears of the people with power.
Climate change is real and the more we delay the solution, the more urgent and extreme the measures to swing it around will become. And that means to start breaking the warm and cozy positions that many corporations are in -- and enjoy the lack of supervision of.
As the article mentions, individuals can do something about corporate pollution:
- Buy less stuff. Corporations produce waste because we buy their stuff. Get the stuff you still buy from more environmentally-friendly companies, if possible.
- Political action. Corporations need to be regulated and that can only happen through political action. Lobbies may have a lot of power, but in the end, it's the citizens who vote.
This is becoming harder and harder with time. Believe me, I would love to buy my kitchen stove, washing machine, refrigerator, aspirator, air conditioner and vacuum cleaner from a local manufacturer. But there are none. How many household brands do really exist and how many are actually known and bought by almost everyone?
Additionally, even if you are an idealist who wants to be the change they want to see, you will still need a bunch of tech gadgets to connect with the world and try to change it -- like a good smartphone and laptop that don't suck. Not every $100 piece of trash will do the job. And the cheaper tech might have actually had much more negative impact on the planet's CO2 footprint.
It's very complex and thus no black-and-white solutions exist.
Some corps like Apple and Samsung seem hellbent on testing the customers' patience with higher prices every year and it will definitely bite them back at one point. That much is true.
> Political action.
Never in my life, not once, have I seen citizens voting actually change anything of significance in a country. Have you? And we're talking less than 10 years here. "These things take time" seems pretty shallow and empty as a justification for things not happening.
I live in Eastern Europe, where drastic social changes only happen if the politicians see a crowd with pitchworks and torches at the town hall. Literally.
People around here are just realists because no significant changes ever comes before people get that fed up. Civil discourse and constructive discussion has so far netted us nothing but dossiers and people landing on dissident lists. This happens to this day.
It's easy to write us off Eastern Europeans as "complaining just for fun" though. Many do but when you get to the bottom of it, real change happens extremely rare. And that's a valid argument and a historical background to have.
But regular-complainers and realistic-no-BS-folk often get conflated by external observers -- to my despair.
Yes, everyone seems to forget how those social changes were brought about: large unionised workforces that threatened strikes that would topple the economy, or mass protests and civil disobedience on similarly threatening scales. Of course, it's much nicer for those in power to have us believe that voting is all you need.
If you are really dedicated you can buy used equipment that will substantially lower the impact of production of new goods. Older appliances might break more and require more maintenance but are repairable for the most part. Additionally you can get pretty good deals on last years tech that is still pretty cool.
Oh I agree but the last year's tech is also from the big brands, no? While the CO2-reductions / reduce-corporations-influence argument usually tells you to buy locally sourced stuff.
I'd very much like to but there really are no such local vendors. :(
>Never in my life, not once, have I seen citizens voting actually change anything of significance in a country
Do you mean in the US?
Examples that spring to mind in other countries are: gay marriage equality (Australia), independence (East Timor, plus probably others... Scotland and New Caledonia rejected independence by plebiscite), conscription (Austria), abortion (Ireland), migrant intake (Hungary) etc... and of course Brexit.
I am from Eastern Europe. Here nothing ever changes politically-wise. The politicians expend a lot of PR effort to make things look like they are changing but they don't and it's pretty visible even for the not very well educated population.
Believe me, I would love to buy my kitchen stove, washing machine, refrigerator, aspirator, air conditioner and vacuum cleaner from a local manufacturer.
I gave up my car more than a decade ago. I haven't owned a vacuum cleaner in years. I live in a cheap rental with a wood floor. We strictly enforce taking shoes off just inside the front door to prevent dirt from being tracked in so we don't have to clean as much.
I currently live in a hundred year old building that doesn't have air conditioning. I'm interested in buying a home. Once I get a home, I will likely do what I can to use passive solar approaches to keeping the place comfortable with a minimum of electricity year round.
Passive solar design relies heavily on things like insulation and thermal mass. It tends to produce higher comfort levels than forced air heat while being cheaper in the long run.
Unfortunately, passive solar works best when it is incorporated at the design stage of a building. There are limits to how much you can retrofit a building with it.
I don't assume that the culture we have currently is the one we will have in the future. I have spent some years working to design the kind of life I want rather than just accepting that the way my life was is all that will ever be.
I own a lot less than I used to. I have a higher quality of life. For one thing, my life is no longer being consumed by cleaning and maintaining a giant pile of possessions, so I have more time for having a life.
I do part of these things already but (1) it's a gradual process, (2) I have a ton of other issues to deal with first so I cannot religiously purse lesser CO2 footprint (like personal health; it takes precedence over other venues), and (3) I am asked to trust other organizations -- f.ex. that throwing away stuff in certain trash cans helps the planet (which I don't mind at all; surely it makes some difference).
I agree that owning less things equals more peace of mind. But I am not quite there yet, I am still in a very active and hectic phase of my life where I am gradually correcting a ton of past mistakes. I do aim to have less in time. I came to feel the increased stress from more possessions.
What I am saying is -- thanks for the insight. I am on the same road but not quite so far ahead as yourself.
I'm on this path because of health issues, not specifically looking to shrink my footprint. That's more like a dude effect.
Most rentals in the US have wall to wall carpeting, which I loathe. I'm so thrilled to be in a rental with a wood floor. That's tough to find in America, especially on a tight budget.
When I gave up having a vacuum cleaner, we were in an apartment with wall to wall carpeting. It's horrifying stuff and we felt better with giving up the vacuum cleaner and finding other methods to try to keep the place tolerably clean. I've since seen articles that indicate studies show that vacuuming actually spreads germs. It may pick up visible dirt, but it makes germ control worse. That's a bigger issue for us than visible dirt. We concluded vacuuming was a health hazard years before I saw articles about such studies.
So, what I'm saying is my current situation is basically a dream come true after years and years of wanting something like this. It took a long time and a lot of little choices along the way and a lot of awkward stages where we decided "We are simply not doing X anymore. Period. Because X just doesn't work." before we had any idea what we would do instead. And then we would scramble and come up with imperfect and frustrating alternatives and muddle through.
But it did get gradually better.
Tossing that out there in hopes that it helps you with the path forward. The road ahead may not look like a road at all. You may not see it until you look back on it.
The first point speaks to the "reduce" in the phrase "reduce, reuse, recycle". It's not so important where your washing machine was made, more important how you make use of it - e.g., do you run it at 40 degrees or 30? Etc. Other examples are using dryers when you could just hang things out to dry.
> This is becoming harder and harder with time. Believe me, I would love to buy my kitchen stove, washing machine, refrigerator, aspirator, air conditioner and vacuum cleaner from a local manufacturer. But there are none. How many household brands do really exist and how many are actually known and bought by almost everyone?
Buy used, it's totally worth it!
> Never in my life, not once, have I seen citizens voting actually change anything of significance in a country. Have you? And we're talking less than 10 years here. "These things take time" seems pretty shallow and empty as a justification for things not happening.
Start local. National politics is a distraction anyway; it's your city and state politics that matter. Our town, through a popular measure, banned fracking in the city limits. We got sued and the ban was struck down by the supreme court, but now we pay oil companies to stay out of the city limits. It's money the town spends because its citizens want to stay healthy.
"Start local" is... actually a very solid and sensible advice. I've heard no small amount of people saying that they did make a difference in their city -- which indeed gives me hope.
Individuals have huge power over pollution in general and corporate pollution in particular.
Individuals are in the end the drivers of corporate actions because they are the consumers.
It's not necessarily about buying less stuff but about changing your daily actions and about buying only products you consider environmentally friendly.
Corporations will produce what sells. We decide what sells through our individual choices and actions.
Edit:
We can also make it quite plain to corporations: For example, why not ask coffee shops/takeaways how they plan to pack our order before we actually order then walk away if we don't like the answer? If many people start to do that I'm sure things will change fast.
Ugh, I once read a booklet that had the same premise of the article. One of the suggested solutions: use less soap when doing the dishes, to preserve packaging.
As I mention in a different comment, individual action is important. However, there is a large difference in effectiveness, and promoting obviously ineffective ones isn't going to convince people to do the ones that are likely to be effective.
This particular instance was too amateurish and small-scale for that to be the case. But of course, the author might have been influenced by those lobby groups indirectly.
This is critically important, but the mindset of the population need to change for it to be effective. If everyone have the same mindset, things will start to change.
Imagine doing a simple thing like reducing your shower time by 25% or reduce your TV watching time by 25%. With enough people doing it, its impact will be significant.
I think that's the primary reason why individual action is important: because it achieves the mindset change. Or at least, is a prime motivator in changing other people's mindsets.
Individual action can have an effect, but those are bad suggestions that will have negligible effect unless adopted almost universally.
Things like driving less, flying less, eating less meat and buying/throwing away less stuff are things where individual actions can actually make a difference.
Watching less TV doesn't accomplish anything other making you feel like you are taking action. If you want to make a small change that will actually accomplish something, try taking public transportation or biking to work one day a week or eating vegetarian one day a week.
It's always a good idea to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
Do you need to use that much soap? Do you need to keep the lights on everywhere? Do you need to use a tumble-dryer or could you let your clothes air dry instead? Do you need that shiny new phone or is your current one good for another couple of years?
Yes, all of these are absolutely small things individually, but put together and done by many people, it does make a difference.
A big thing you can do individually is to Buy Less Stuff. Be happy with the TV you have, don't change your wardrobe just because of fickle changing fashion nonsense, don't replace stuff that works just fine. Break the cycle of consumerism. Don't support the polluting corporations.
The very biggest thing you can do is to be politically active. Vote for pro-environment politicians and parties, be part of political initiatives.
As a broader principle: sure, Do The Little Things, if only to create an environment that shows people that climate change is considered important by many people.
That's not what this advice was, though; the advice was specifically to use less soap when doing the dishes.
Off-topic but what's wrong with electrical kettles? was her position to not boil water or to use a different kind of kettle? My Kitchen has electric range so I doubt using a non-electric kettle on it would be any more efficient.
The main argument against them was along the veins of that it draws big amounts of wattage in an initial burst and that we must use "slower" and thus allegedly more sustainable tech.
Which is ridiculuous because every electrician will tell you that your home-grade fuses and the switchboard of your house/block handle such loads quite well without much additional strain on... anything, really.
I quickly wrote her off as a virtue signaller back then.
For better or worse this is standard practice for how most people get their beliefs about pretty much everything. Some people are more discerning in who they believe and others more skeptical but a lot of people will just add random fact to their knowledge base because they heard it from someone they know.
Well, you could make a point that if everyone has powerful appliances at home then the network has to be robust enough to handle quick changes in power needed. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup
So, in a sense, boiling water with gas has less externalities.
EDIT: You can of course also argue, if we can't have powerful appliances why bother with electricity at all. I'm just saying it's not an issue that can be so easily dismissed
The problem with the "TV pickup" is the synchronicity of the use, not the power of the device. Kettles used throughout the day won't have that problem.
The TV pickup problem, while valid, unjustly shifts the blame.
The regular citizens have put the work to buy the TV device, and continue to put the work daily so they can pay the power and cable bills.
What else would you have them do? They work hard and maybe the TV is their way to unwind. Why, again, is the citizens' fault for putting the work needed to buy their entertainment device and then making them feel guilty for using it?
I pay electrical bills. In my eyes I do my part of the bargain, the rest is their problem -- that's what we pay for, to get a stable service while they sort out the details. A fair business transaction.
Well, electric kettles are sort of a problem for british energy system which had someone watching BBC 1 and 2 for a decade (IIRC) in the evenings so they could handle peaks in a national grid at the very first minute of pauses between shows.
As I mentioned in another sibling comment here -- that's not my problem. I pay my bills and the rest is for them to figure out. I work, I buy my tech fairly, I don't see what else I could do.
I am not a law regulator, I am not a technician, I am not an environmentalist. I buy tech because it helps me save time and effort in my busy day. It's the corps and the governments responsibility to make sure the tech is eco-friendly, not mine.
I wasn't saying that electric kettles are making any noticeble impact on environment (imo), just that they could be a problem in certain circumstances.
> that my car doesn't do 70mph in 20mph school zones * that my gun doesn't go off when I'm pointing it at someone innocent etc.*
Why such a huge strawman?
> Have some personal responsibility and seek out eco-friendly tech to buy.
I do have personal responsibility. I work, I don't dodge taxes, I buy stuff with my own money. I try and research but most of what we hit on the internet are PR pieces. But I won't research for 1 month something that I might need tomorrow.
I know what are they worried about. But us the citizens keep our end of the bargain: we pay the bills. I am not limiting my usage of a very convenient tech like an electric kettle because they want us to pay AND to think about not straining the tech they have with the money we paid.
I mean seriously, how far will the guilt-tripping of citizens go? When will it stop?
There's nothing wrong with electric kettles, in fact they're probably the most energy-efficient way of boiling water.
I've taken to boiling the required amount of water in the kettle when I boil rice or anything similar. It's much faster, too.
It's also a good idea to boil a full kettle once in a while, and pour the remaining boiling water you don't need down the drain. It helps break up fat deposits and kills bacteria that cause bad-smelling drains, and the environmental impact is much less than using drain cleaner. And for the love of your drains, don't pour grease in there!
I'd argue the idea of doing something is a strong one. If people become engaged, if they start thinking about the environment on a daily basis then that is already progress in itself. If that means starting with a kettle sure that's probably not an improvement in itself but I'd say the thought counts.
People who take/propose such small steps might later start thinking about other means to improve their footprint on the planet that have a bigger impact. They might start to identify themselves as people who care about the environment. They might start spreading the idea to other people. And one day maybe they will say hey I ditched an electric kettle and made a compromise and what did you do, what are the big corps doing?
So I hope you engaged the teacher in a positive tone and proposed how we can all have an even bigger impact.
> Have no illusions. To achieve our goal of getting off fossil fuels, these
reductions in demand and increases in supply must be big. Don’t be distracted
by the myth that “every little helps.” If everyone does a little, we’ll
achieve only a little. We must do a lot. What’s required are big changes in
demand and in supply.
I share your frustration with people who claim it's out own responsibility to change our habits and come up with things like limiting your showers and turning off the lights when you leave the room, but flying less or not owning a car (if realistic in the country you live in) is a completely different ball game and can actually make an huge impact of enough people do it. Of course it's also up to governments to make these couches financially attractive by for example cutting tax breaks for aviation fuel (https://www.aef.org.uk/issues/economics/taxation/).
Individual actions are definitely a start, but yeah it sounds like almost nothing compared to corporations (or even governments, responsible for so many unnecessary plane travels).
Is there some data on the actual scale of individual vs corporate pollution / climate-changing faults? Hard to measure, I guess.
There's a fallacy with this type of thinking. It's something to the effect that "the big bad wolf is causing the trouble, therefore, I'm powerless to do anything" The reason corporations do what they do is because they are providing a service to millions of customers at the lowest cost and the highest profits for them. We, consumers, like to shift all the blame to someone else, it lets us continue as we have without guilt. We need to feel we are powerless so we don't feel bad about not doing anything about the problem. The fix can come from the producers or the consumers or both. Saying that consumers are powerless just continues the inaction until the fix is forced onto all of us by nature.
Reducing power consumption and reducing the number of items we buy and eventually throw away is a start. Pushing politicians to make the hard choices is also part of the fix. But saying someone else has all the power, therefore, I can't do anything or I saying I can only do a little therefore I won't bother is not.
I, and many others, can definitely do a lot -- but other people have done the math and concluded that we don't amount for anything but a blip in statistics. There is a link in this thread giving the same perspective as well.
I'd like the world to start attacking the source of issues top-to-bottom and not bottom-to-top.
Can the citizens help? Absolutely. Will they amount for much unless corporations start taking action? No.
I'm not throwing away my PC, or MacBook, or iPhone, or iPad, or 35" 144Hz display that consumes 200W. I actually need them and they actually help me live a better life.
But sure, I do use less napkins compared to 5 years ago. And I don't have a car (which is insane to have when you live in the center of a city anyway).
You'll have to clarify what do you have in mind with your question though.
Corporations cannot change anything on their own if they operate in capitalistic economy. They are doing exactly what's expected of them to maximize the profit.
If you change your lifestyle significantly, you are not just a blip in statistics. Your actions rub off on other people, your vote supports the right people, and with enough time you help the right mindset to prevail.
Besides, presuming you are not climate change skeptic, what other rational choice do you have?
The only truly effective thing I do is to hold on to tech for as long as it's viable -- to send the message that I'm not okay with planned obsolescence.
But no, I'm not gonna go out of my way to religiously pursue smaller CO2 footprint at all costs. I try to make small differences but anything that severely inconveniences me is a no-no and always will be.
At least I'm not pretending for the sake of feeling good about myself.
> We, consumers, like to shift all the blame to someone else,
An analogue: committing a crime is punishable, inciting it in some cases may be. It is the companies who dig up fossil fuels and use them --- "consumers told me to do it" is not an excuse that absolves from responsibility. Those trading in fossil fuels do what they do on their own accord, for financial gain, and hence carry the responsibility.
As long as all the world requires increasingly more energy, there will be political support and policies which allow the extraction of fossil fuels. This is the situation we have now. The companies digging up fossil fuel would go out of business if there was no demand for fossil fuels.
The problem is that the change in behaviour that this demands is great: ever thought about selling your car? or paying twice as much for a new electric car?
Go further: ever thought about turning off your computers and not carrying a smartphone that requires charging every day? The internet and related hardware consume an ever-increasing percentage of total electrical output. We could just turn it all off if we were serious about climate change. Nothing really bad would happen. Seriously.
In the UK, to fully charge an iPhone twice a day for a year takes £0.70 of electricity annually; the average 3- or 4-bedroom home uses £500+ of electricity a year.
Anyone who has told you smartphones are a significant consumer of power doesn't know what they're talking about.
I always find the below statement interesting because it is 2,000 years old. But it shows that even 2,000 years ago, the tendency of the human species to destroy the planet was already clear:
"But the nations became wrathful, and your own wrath came, and the appointed time came...to bring to ruin those ruining the earth." -- Revelation 11:18
It's interesting that the human tendency to "ruin the earth" is still a problem 2,000 years later.
Given that scientists are now saying we're close to the point of no return on climate change, I don't have much confidence humans are going to turn this around...
If this problem was listed in a 2,000 year old book, and we're still "ruining the earth" in 2018, I'm not convinced humans as a species are going to have a sudden change of heart in the next 10 years...
these little actions count; changing consumption patterns creates a signal to the market and to politics. a community of practice concerned about the environment, once set in motion, makes it easier to estimate the political gains of passing new laws, like stricter waste disposal standards.
A dedicated minority that genuinely cares about an issues can shift the agenda, even when the majority is largely undecided. When I invite 3 vegans and 7 omnivores to a party, food will be vegan (similar point by N N Taleb). I hope this works out just as well with political parties..
If people were not so stuck up on individual action, that would be some progress towards solving climate change. One of the big obstacles is admitting that we need collective action to solve this worldwide problem.
Would ee propose individual action when less dangerous situations occur in society? Say, a bank run is imminent. Does individual action work? Does the government broadcast it on the 8 o'clock news and do the people stay at home or do they run down the bank nonetheless? We do not propose individual action on other matters but we expect individual action to work on climate change.
While the title isn't very clear, the article mentions collective actions as well. Political action also stems from individuals and should of course be part of our actions against climate change.
Do you think there's anyone promoting individual action who'd be against collective action? Or could a small individual action be a gateway to participating in collective action?
There are many people who seem to enjoy the aesthetics of consumerist-oriented environmental action but are horrified by the idea of mass protest, civil disobedience, worker's strikes, etc.
Sure, you're not going to get them to do any of those things. You would still need to get them to vote in line with these principles. The question is also: how do you convince those who are prepared to take action to do so?
Many are prepared to take action and actively do so. They are subsequently vilified by politicians and media for not falling in line and voting or taking other acceptable (and ineffective) actions.
Strikes and large protests are not encouraged in mainstream discourse and the principles they represent are not available as an option to vote for.
> we expect individual action to work on climate change.
Don't regulations come into play? In the EU, inefficient light bulbs have been phased out [0]
In France, we have free energy market since 2010 [1], with some players [2] focusing on green energy, etc.
Diesel & gas (for cars) prices are sky-rocketting (taxes !! [3]). Not cool for people who don't have the choice to keep using their old cars (students, unemployed, etc.) but the goal is to make combustion-engine cars so expensive they become unattractive.
[0] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-09-368_en.htm : On 18 March 2008, the Commission adopted a regulation on non-directional household lamps which would replace inefficient incandescent bulbs by more efficient alternatives (...) between 2009 and 2012.
Banks can be shut down to prevent bank runs, but only temporarily. You can't just close the bank down or heavily restrict withdrawals forever without significant negative consequences. Fighting climate change is not a short term proposition.
Even if you are totally correct, it's irrelevant unless (A) you can maintain democratic support for such collective actions, or (B) you get rid of democracy.
In the US at least, even the democrats don't propose climate regulation strong enough to have a measurable impact on the climate over ten years. People will absolutely resist the moment energy prices go up notably, which will be necessary to measurably affect climate.
The problem isn't that collective action needs to be taken, it's that sufficient collective action won't sufficiently be supported by voters. That's why Democrats aren't proposing it, and that's the actual hurdle that needs to be overcome.
> The problem isn't that collective action needs to be taken, it's that sufficient collective action won't sufficiently be supported by voters. That's why Democrats aren't proposing it
I think there are other reasons why Democrats don't propose strong climate regulation, such as the large donations they receive from people in fossil fuel.
There is already very strong democratic support for collective actions. Think of all the climate marches, the protests and occupation of DAPL, anti-fracking movements, etc. People who strongly support collective actions way outnumber the people who oppose it. It's just that those who oppose it have all the political and economic power in our society.
The Liberals in power are collaborating with Conservatives and killing collective action solutions by engaging with respectability politics. One is not allowed to protest except for at very specific times and in ways that are chosen by those in power to be acceptable. Any protest that gets too rowdy is decried by both sides. The only other way you are allowed to resist climate change is by buying the expensive stuff in the green packaging rather than the other stuff.
Respectfully I think that's a very rosy view. I think if gas prices or home energy costs double, the proposal is dead on arrival regardless of campaign contributions or climate marches.
I think people will say they support collective actions right up until those collective actions actually affect their lifestyle. That's why even a lot of democratic policy efforts have been geared toward subsidies instead of reducing use. Much of the populace genuinely is OK with someone else's money being spent on solar, wind, and EV credits. When it means they can't afford to fly for their annual vacation, it's a different story.
> 9. But if I eat less meat or take fewer flights, that’s just me – how much of a difference can that really make?
>
> Actually, it’s not just you. Social scientists have found that when one person makes a sustainability-oriented decision, other people do too.
This is the thing that still gives me hope. Try to do good, and people will notice - and, without so much as telling others to something, they will emulate you to some extent. At least, that's what I've anecdotally observed.
The other side of this is important as well: you don't necessarily need to be a leader in everything that can be improved. However, if you see someone taking the lead, being the first follower can get a movement going, and is less effort than leading the change to boot.
Anecdotal, but I went vegan 3 years ago and in those 3 years, quite a few of my very close friends went vegan or vegetarian as well. It really does give me a lot of hope.
Even my parents started eating meat a lot less, basically only for big events and startet using oat milk for their coffee!
Are you and they using honey or white sugar from farmed sugarcanes? For the environment sake I wish that vegan diet would include honey as it has a big net-positive effect on the environment compared to farmed sugarcanes by not causing eutrophication or water pollution, and helps with pollination both for wild forests and agriculture.
While I'm with you on the issue of honey vs. sugar, it's not quite so simple... Where's that honey coming from?
Locally harvested? Great! But likely not the bulk of supply.
Supermarket honey? Transported from Goodness Knows Where -- very likely China or Chile, where the bees are intensively fed... (you guessed it!) sugar! That's why the honey is so flavourless, not to mention the Carbon footprint of all those honey-kilometres.
Bees are almost as intensively farmed as anything else, and, while the effects and outcomes are nowhere near as severe as other forms of intensive husbandry, the honey is not necessarily the pure and innocent product you might think it is.
Locally harvested is the only good option, but I would like to comment that when food is bought at lowest offer then you are likely to pay carbon-kilometres regardless if its corn, avocado, olive oil or what have you. Cheapest product in a global economy means that transportation cost is simply part of the competition to press prices down, and food prices has almost not moved at all in the last 50 years.
But for honey in particular I would say its is even more important to buy locally. It is better, safer, and better for the environment. Mixed honey has none of the unique taste that specific environments can create (my personal favorite is pollen from mixed coniferous forest, preferable with a gps coordinate to the hive). Imported mixed honey also share the same problem that plague olive oil, which is food fraud. Because honey is expensive it often get mixed with cheaper syrups or worse stuff. From a ecological perspective it is also good if the colonies are in areas that need pollination, which locally harvested usually are. Bonus points if its a small business by someone personally invested in it.
As for costs, the difference in prices from cheapest to expensive locally produced ones is normally for me about $1-2 dollar per jar. It such a small increase that just the security against food fraud is worth it (assuming you trust the local producer).
> Bees are almost as intensively farmed as anything else, and, while the effects and outcomes are nowhere near as severe as other forms of intensive husbandry, the honey is not necessarily the pure and innocent product you might think it is.
Thankyou for pointing this out. I say the same about almond milk and other products hyped by vegans that are pollinated by bees. The commercial beekeeping industry is horrific. Part of the reason wild bee colonies are collapsing is because of the diseases cultivated by commercial colonies.
I'm a backyard beekeeper myself and can say with at least some authority that there's nothing at all "vegan" or "moral" or "natural" about the way these commercial operations treat the bees and the environment.
Really? We have to be sympathetic to mindless insects now? For instance, folks raise millions of crickets in my state for flour and protein - we eat them - but the bees deserve special empathy because they're not free-range or something?
I understand folks like bees, see them in a kindly light. But they're little automatons with maybe a neuron or two total. If we raised them, crushed them and ate them, it'd be no different from how we treat other insects.
And why is one bee more important than the other? Not sure diseases are 'cultivated' by anyone - they are unfortunate wherever they occur. Again, not sure what the idea is.
Well, the point as I understand it is that it will eventually lead to the extinction of all/most bees - and plenty of other species, perhaps including humans.
The scale is my assumption, but the point appears clear to me.
Everytime I have seen a article or documentary on the subject the primary cause of wild bee colonies collapsing it is pesticides and herbicides, commonly used in for example sugarcane plantations.
Would you say that the average bee farming is causing more harm to wild bees than the average sugarcane farmer?
That's one thing I've noticed in my environment: the number of vegetarians has exploded, there actually are several vegans now, and there is nobody loudly proclaiming how much they love meat and how they could never give that up. Likewise, nobody is claiming about activist vegans - which is probably due to the also relevant factor that none of the vegans and almost none of the vegetarians are activist. They're just setting an example, are willing to discuss it if you bring it up, and that's it.
Why is this the side of the ledger to work on? http://carbon.ycombinator.com/ seems like a much more effective means of mitigating the issues.
The worst things that could happen to the environment would actually be whatever happens that results in a surprise cold spell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age was such a period.
If there is a cold snap, that will likely mean MORE coal burnt in Europe, which will put greater amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, and when the cold period ends, even worse greenhouse affects.
There is virtually no situation in which carbon removal will be anything other than a net gain. We need to start removing carbon ASAP, irrespective of whether or not we can, collectively as a world of 7+Billion, reduce emissions.
The carbon removal side of the ledger is the one I think we can make meaningfully changes in fastest and with the least controversy.
the delusion that millions, if not billions of people are going to undergo what amounts to a spiritual revolution that directly goes against the highly pervasive & manipulative social conditioning that surrounds nearly every aspect of their lives is more absurd than even the most grandiose technological panacea.
consumers can't even exercise the self restraint not to consume themselves to death.
that doesn't fix the systemic causes of the mess we're in -- population growth, and environmental impact per person.
climate change isn't the problem, it's the second major global-scale symptom of the problem (the first one was the ozone layer). it's highly concerning! but suppose we manage to slow or reverse or mitigate climate change, at great expense, without addressing the underlying problem --- then we're going to have less resources to address the next global issue:
Expecting some kind of mass-shift in lifestyle in the population at large isn't going to work, because not enough people are going to do it. I think the best thing to do is to advocate for solar, wind, nuclear and hydro power.
Personally I think we should be building more nuclear power plants as well as deploying giant battery storage facilities to store energy from wind and solar.
We should also start taxing carbon emissions. So advocating political change to achieve collective action seems like the only feasible way to do anything effective to me.
Yes, but not without developping the alternatives. For example, in France, the government decided to raise the taxes on gas and especially diesel — but at the same time, the small train lines are being shut down, so people living in the country aren't to happy.
It doesn't take that many people to shift a society to a different behavior.. We used to slave and human-zoos not that long ago and everybody was like, that won't change soon.
Have you thought about going vegetarian yourself?
i selfishly don't want to take the necessary individual action where my personal cost-benefit analysis comes out negative.
for example, i could become a vegan. if i did so, the net benefit to humanity would be positive. but i don't want to, as i'd have to privately pay the cost (no more delicious chicken) while the benefits (in terms of reduced global cumulative greenhouse gas emissions) are spread across the billions of the rest of you.
however, i really want you all to take individual action to limit your greenhouse emissions so i can benefit. go vegan, have fewer children, get your economies to install carbon taxes. yes please, i'd love the lot of you to do that.
i'm very willing to trade you something of value in return for you making lifestyle changes that don't locally benefit you.
how do we make this kind of trade happen? how do we make this kind of collective agreement to change behaviour happen faster?
There is a simple answer, really, but you won't like it.
"i'm very willing to trade you something of value in return for you making lifestyle changes that don't locally benefit you"
If it's true, then you can make the next small step. For example, for every vegan you have as a friend you can decide to eat less meat. Or for every friend without a car, you can take a bus once in a while. And so on.
That would be a valuable gift to these people, who decided to selflessly take the first step.
FYI, Veganism isn't about reducing your carbon footprint or living healthily, those things are an added bonus.
Being vegan means saying no to cruelty towards other sentient and intelligent beings and enslaving them for our culinary pleasure purposes.
So having a friend who is vegan wouldn't really eliminate cruelty towards chickens for example, as your craving for delicious chicken would still require chickens to be slaughtered, i.e. Is cruelty ok, so you can continue to experience culinary pleasures?
Tough questions...
Edit: mainly referring to factory farming and large scale meat industry, where most of the meat we consume comes from.
I don't have a single friend or even. aquaintence who would do any of the top 3 things long the list of 148 most impactful things an individual can do
they were
1. have one less kid.
I can maybe imagine a friend choosing not to have 3 but I can't imagine someone wanting 2 to go to 1 or someone wanting 1 to go to 0 for this reason
2. go carless
Sone friends live in a city that supports a carless lifestyle and already live carless but I can't imagine a single person I know giving up their car or moving somewhere they don't need it for for purpose of helping the environment
3. don't travel
zero friends would give this up. even the most eco "aware"
If the alternative was just as comfortable and fast, I would be the first to throw away my car. I have zero ego attachments to such objects, I am after their comfort and practical value.
I throw away stuff in designated trash cans but beyond that I don't see how I can help further.
And I don't mind effort, at all. I go the extra mile at home to use less kitchen paper. I use less chemicals to clean around the house. I reuse phone and tablet chargers, and headphones. I don't buy new computers often (current PC is 8 years old now).
I try and be disciplined. But I am no sewage treatment plant, or a plastic/metal melting foundry so I do what I can but not sure I am helping at all.
I think many people misunderstand me in my bigger comment in this post: I try and help but (1) there's a line beyond which you are slaving yourself to supposed improvements you cannot see and so it becomes not worth it, and (2) I am asked to trust other organizations that if I throw away stuff in special areas then I am helping the planet. I don't mind #2 -- it's better than nothing. But I can and do mind #1 here and there.
It's not such an unreasonable stance as many make it look.
Doesn't seem too bad to me with a bike and a city giving priority to bikes. Surely less convenient than using a car, but I guess you get used to it.
Like you are used to do it in something like 25 minutes with a car, even though there could be near-instant methods of travel available (it's science fiction but still to the point: when you don't have (or don't have any more, for some time) a better alternative, you can overlook many inconveniences).
People would not care and would ditch cars if the time and comfort were the same. If the comfort factor is not there though, I feel most wouldn't part with their cars.
Hi I'm Rudy, nice to meet you! Now you have one :)
On a more serious note:
1. have one less kid.
I really don't like how this one is worded, I always read it as "get rid of one of your kids". Though, except going from 1 to 0, it's not that bad. I definitely wanted more than one, but I can settle with the one I have.
2. go carless
You get used to it. I even lived in small cities (~30k inhabitants) and while it's harder when your city isn't supporting a carless lifestyle (never lived in any that does that, sadly), it's definitely doable.
3. don't travel
Maybe a bit extreme to give it up entirely. But you can still travel less, do it with more eco-friendly travel options (carpooling, etc.) or go to destinations which do not require planes. I guess it depends on where you live, but in Europe there's definitely lots of wonderful places I can go to with a low carbon impact.
But I still am responsible for a lot more carbon emission than I should. I'm taking it slow (changing food habits, etc.) but there's still domains in which I am really bad (using too much tech, ordering things online..).
This is exactly why I think offsets are a better short-term solution. Don't travel is too big of an ask even for the "eco aware". Would they pay an extra 17 cents to offset their driving that day or $3 for a flight across the US? It is shockingly cheap and much easier to say yes to that change. It isn't as direct as just not traveling in the first place, but will get much more adoption.
I'm working on an app to make a personal travel offset pledge and track your impact publicly. If anyone is interested in keeping in the loop on progress: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/pledge-balance
- Die. In large numbers. Preferably people from the developped world.
- The planet may maybe be able to afford half a billion developped world people.
There is a link to a Bill Gates blog post in the thread, look at it : agriculture (feeding people) is 25% of the CO2 budget, manufacturing+housing is 27%. Basically reducing these means reducing the population. That's the reason why having one less child is the biggest contribution you can do, short of dying.
I agree this article isn't as terrible as average. Going vegetarian and cycling to work once a week might make you feel good but it ain't gonna make a difference. It's a political problem. It needs a political solution.
Agitate and vote for the most left-wing party you can (that has a realistic chance of winning/influencing an election). Campaign for them to institute a ban on fossil fuels. Protest. Climb smokestacks. Make headlines. Break the law. If you work in the media, subvert their agenda as much as possible. Capitalism is crisis.
Of course, the BBC would never state these things. But given how little has been achieved in the last 40 years by playing by the rules, at this point they are obviously necessary, if not sufficient.
You are completely right, going vegetarian or even vegan plus cycling won't fix all problems.
But it would be a start, what do you think?
So why don't do it still aditionally, instead of just waiting for others to change?
> Agitate and vote for the most left-wing party you can
What's that got to do with the price of fish? The main left parties in my area still harp on about the coalmines. Then you have the Greens who are anti-nuclear, anti-Gm, anti-everything who seem to spend most of their time now involved in infighting over trans nonsense.
I'm so happy that the factor reducing meat consumption is mentioned...
By going vegan, vegetarian or just (really) reducing one owns meat consumption is a major factor where you can start like today.
Also fewer cows, pigs and chicken slaughtered in your name ^^^
It is hard for many, and I might expect to get some comments of disaprovel.
Before that, pleasae watch Melanie Joy Authentic food choices on youtube for an clearer understanding where I might be comming form. Thank you so much :)
> Nicholas’s study concluded that having fewer children is the best way to reduce your contribution to climate change
Environmentalism as a philosophy isn't all that coherent, and this suggestion in point 8 really encapsulates the heart of my problems with it. If we are saving the planet "for" someone else, who are they? If we are saving the planet for ourselves, do minor actions of deprivation make sense? The extreme logical extension of the philosophy in point 8 that isn't "if I care about the future, and if all life is equal, I should remove myself from the gene pool and build a society that doesn't value the environment".
Taking a practical view that we want to preserve the world for, say, 3 generations into the future, answers like nuclear starting 30 years ago make a lot of sense.
The resolve to this apparent paradox is easy. You can like the civilization on this planet yet not care one iota about the gene pool (of course you have to care about it to the extent needed to reproduce humans, on which the civilization relies for the foreseeable future, but no more than that).
Let me give you an analogy. Is teaching meaningless? I mean, why do it, when you're not going to be around when people you teach will run things. You're trying to give advice to someone else, without being sure that they will follow it when you're not around.
So, I posit, not having kids and working on resolving climate change is useful, just like it is useful to teach or do your job properly to be an example for further generations doing that job.
> Is teaching meaningless? I mean, why do it, when you're not going to be around when people you teach will run things.
You might be underestimating how much personal benefit a selfish materialist can wring out of teaching people things.
I, for example, love teaching people basically anything I know. To the point where I'm probably unhelpful. There have been numerous instances where there is a skill gap between me and someone else that I have closed and benefited greatly from closing. Usually this is in academic and workplace settings, but I suspect most parents would also see this dynamic. It also works socially when they return the favour and find some interesting idea for me in return at a later time.
If they don't follow my advice, that is often even better for me in the medium-long term because it suggests my advice is bad and I get an opportunity to correct my mistakes and misconceptions.
One of the most fortunate outcomes of the modern era is the more you want to maximise your own material success, the more advantage you can get from maximising the ability and resources available to those around you. I've been led to believe that a sample of most serious leadership groups will pick up an unusually high concentration of clever sociopaths - I suspect at least some of them will be excellent leaders because they figured this little factoid out.
The scenario is extremely different from someone asking me to give up driving because someone else will hypothetically benefit. As an interesting anecdata, I gave up driving because of economic and safety concerns, which are far more convincing to me personally.
If you insist upon cherry-picking an incoherent viewpoint from a basic principle: "I wish to live", I suppose one could concur with your premise.
See:
1) I, myself, my spawn, any reasonable proxy for me. a human?
2) Wish, desire, seek, want.
3) to live, life. continuance. reproduction, etc.
See, we are currently trashing the entire ball we live on:
1) too many of us. We did a good job at the whole "Go forth and multiply" thing. (talk about an incoherent philosophy: how about "the underpinnings of our civilization" for 2 points.)
resulting in:
A) loss of biodiversity. We killed the other animals
B) a HUGE footprint (land area) required for making our STUFF
C) hubris. we think OUR STUFF and OUR ECONOMY (read: make-believe silly nonsense we pretend is real) is more important than LIFE itself! The hacker news crowd is extremely guilty of this, as many people live in a simulated screen reality so much that they forgot about the wetware underpinnings of LIFE. your life.
2)We have no sense of collective responsibility, no sense of collective existence at all. It's not the squirrels fault that you can't understand why sustaining life on earth might be a worthy goal.
Collectively speaking, humanity is a dud. We didn't manage to organize anything with regards to our collective selves. We just ignorantly pursue selfish aims because some 18th century English "economist" (phlebotomist?) told us about "invisible hands"...
Maybe you should devote your vast brainpower to explaining the coherence involved in justifying industry and human "civilization" thus far?
> If we are saving the planet "for" someone else, who are they?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, but there are billions of people in the world already, and another few billions that will be born in the next little bit regardless of our individual actions. Do those not matter much? Does it have to be something "of your own" in order to make it worthwhile?
> The extreme logical extension of the philosophy in point 8 that isn't "if I care about the future, and if all life is equal, I should remove myself from the gene pool and build a society that doesn't value the environment".
I don't quite see how you arrive from "I remove myself from the gene pool" at "build a society that doesn't value the environment". Is it because you don't have someone to raise and tech who will carry your values forward? If so, then there's a good alternative: Teach someone else, be a mentor, get your message out to other people who are not your dependents. Sure they may not adopt your philosophy entirely, but then again, even one's own kids will make up their own mind and you're only one of many influences.
Moreover, by influencing people who already exist out there, you'll make a direct (hopefully positive) impact compared to the baseline of you not being involved in any way in the first place. If you have a kid to "build a society that values the environment", it'll be a net win for the environment if (a) your kid offsets its natural carbon impact by dedicating a significant effort to climate action, (b) same goes for any of their descendants, and (c) they make up for the time that you could have spent on climate action instead of raising your kid, such as mentoring or getting involved in politics. Building a society that values the environment isn't worth much if the outcome is still a net negative.
I feel that "continuing my legacy" is a widespread desire among hopeful parents. It's important to recognise that if your legacy is mainly to raise a child without making much of a direct contribution otherwise (because raising a child is a heck ton of work) then it's not unlikely for your kid to do the same. How long do we want to pass down the baton until one of those descendants makes a sizeable contribution by themselves? And how many lives will have been created, producing carbon and love and all, in order to get there?
I think there's a great deal of power to multiplying one's own efforts and get others to carry on one's torch, but really, having kids is by far not the only way to do this.
When ranking different actions one can take to limit pollution I also like to include actions which has a net-positive effects. There are so many small things which might not be the cheapest or cultural popular but they do directly help the environment.
A concrete step we have taken with my girlfriend over the past few months is buying second-hand items. It's crazy how much you save, and to know you have not contributed to creating more stuff.
There is an awesome campaign in France right now, encouraging this kind of behaviour : https://riendeneuf.org
We've been doing the same thing, and it's great. We've also taken more time to sell unused items, even if they're only worth $10-$20. I look at it as a more effective form of recycling.
That's a really big thing, in the scope of individual action. If you buy less new stuff, less stuff needs to be produced and less environmental impact happens.
Nobody needs a brand new coffee table, when there are plenty of perfectly decent ones for sale second-hand.
Science is never settled, already there they start the misinformation which is being used so often these days.
These kind of articles are so misguided yet people are so hysterical they actually think the individual can do things.
There is nothing individuals can do that would actually help besides creating solutions to the ever changing consequences of the world we live in. Even if we by some magical event could stop all co2 emissions the climate would still change we would still need to move or fortify against changing sealevels for example.
But right now everyone is coming up with all sorts of irrational solutions to a problem that havent been properly defined and even if it was going to be as catastrophic as some have built themselves up to believe, flying less is going to have no useful effect.
Only way out of this is through the very technology that have created the cars, products etc. to begin with. The genie is out of the bottle and cant be let back in again unfortunately.
> Science is never settled, already there they start the misinformation
Science is never settled, but arrives at increasingly accurate approximations of reality. If climate science's best approximation is doom, the rational collective response is not ignorance, but simultaneously to explore and exploit (address) the problem. Exploration by better modeling of the climate, and exploitation by pursuing known best solutions to the problem. To use a personal example of a complex system, if a person should show signs of cancer, or a virulent disease, even if medicinal knowledge is not sufficiently advanced to flawlessly diagnose the symptom, drastic action even under imperfect information is very reasonable.
In the case that drastic corrections were not necessary with respect to the climate, this nevertheless furthers the global society's resilience and response for when such drastic correction is needed.
> These kind of articles are so misguided yet people are so hysterical they actually think the individual can do things.
Without contending whether or not 'the individual can do things', the article does not give me that impression. Whereas indeed the article advocates individuals to change their individual behavior, the article is written for an audience of many. When advocacy articles like these acquire a sufficiently large megaphone, like the BBC, they cause significant collective action.
> But right now everyone is coming up with all sorts of irrational solutions to a problem that havent been properly defined and even if it was going to be as catastrophic as some have built themselves up to believe, flying less is going to have no useful effect.
The problem is the recent increase in global temperature corresponding to the recent increase in greenhouse gas production. To use the personal analogy, the elimination of mutated cells causing the tumors.
> Only way out of this is through the very technology that have created the cars, products etc. to begin with.
I think that this is a very irrational or ignorant notion. Collective action plays a very important part in very many big problems. For example, the abolition of slavery and women' suffrage are made possible (in the former case) by technology, but collective action was needed to enable these events.
Some people echo the irrational notion you seem to express that that just because individual action is useless then so is collective action, and so therefore the individual action should not be pursued. But this is clearly not the case, since collective action happens. If it seems that most big changes are performed by organizations and institutions and not individuals, this nevertheless does not negate the thesis that collective action effects changes, since sufficiently developed and mature collective action tends to organize when able, so that they are more self-sustaining.
"Science is never settled, but arrives at increasingly accurate approximations of reality."
Not necessarily and that's certainly not settled. Kuhns paradigms is another way to think about it than Poppers idea of building knowledge as bricks that create a house. I am not convinced knowledge works the way we normally think about it.
Furthermore "climate science" is not actually following the scientific principles as it's not falsifiable for obvious reasons.
"Climate science" is metascience in the sense that it builds on and interprets data which has its own set of issues besides the issues with data modeling.
There are plenty of examples of mistakes, false predictions, cheating with the data etc. that anyone who wants to have an opinion on this should be really really really careful how much we actually can demonstrate vs. how much is speculated. Just taking it on faith that the scientific community is in agreement about a lot of the details is simply misguided.
There are plenty of theories around natural fluctuations even big ones like this (and bigger) so the trick IMO is not discussion whether humans are affecting it as we can't change that and will not change that, in fact, if we did it probably would lead to more death than the consequences of flooding and it certainly will lead to more poor people without any means to deal with the ever-changing climate.
You and others seem to be of the impression that nature is fundamentally friendly and safe towards us and we are destroying it, my position is that nature is fundamentally hostile and dangerous and that we are using technology to be safer from it. Yes, that has consequences but I take those any day compared to becoming paralyzed by trying to solve a problem that is many times more complex than any other things we have ever solved before. CopX is a great example of just how little our global initiatives help.
Flying less, eating less meat isn't the solution to the problem, more actual science, engineering and entrepreneurship and making people richer so they start caring about their close environment is.
> Furthermore "climate science" is not actually following the scientific principles as it's not falsifiable for obvious reasons.
>"Climate science" is metascience in the sense that it builds on and interprets data which has its own set of issues besides the issues with data modeling.
Yes, findings about climate are not reproducible in the straight and narrow sense of the scientific method, but there are methods to reason about these findings. Consider the utility of epidemiology, and how it informs medicine and health policies.
> There are plenty of examples of mistakes, false predictions, cheating with the data etc. that anyone who wants to have an opinion on this should be really really really careful how much we actually can demonstrate vs. how much is speculated. Just taking it on faith that the scientific community is in agreement about a lot of the details is simply misguided.
I take it that there is a broad consensus that climate change is man-made and that carbon emissions are very likely a huge driver of it. Many scientific professional organizations have issued statements about it. Many governments see the need to at least pay lip service to it.
> Kuhns paradigms
No, paradigm shifts help develop new and more accurate theory, but old theories still hold. Newtonian mechanics doesn't become obsolete even if a more accurate quantum picture has been developed. Even the primitive, less precise, yet intuitive Aristotelian notion of motion can be useful in many contexts, e.g. game physics that need to enable an unreal amount of control yet feel psychologically natural.
> in fact, if we did it probably would lead to more death than the consequences of flooding and it certainly will lead to more poor people without any means to deal with the ever-changing climate.
I don't see how the thrust of this statement is consistent with the immediate statement before
> IMO is not discussion whether humans are affecting it as we can't change that and will not change that,
> nature is fundamentally friendly and safe towards us and we are destroying it, my position is that nature is fundamentally hostile and dangerous and that we are using technology to be safer from it
I don't see how any general disposition of nature towards human society has any relevance toward my claim that solutions toward climate change must include an aspect that is not just technological products and services.
> Flying less, eating less meat isn't the solution to the problem, more actual science, engineering and entrepreneurship and making people richer so they start caring about their close environment is.
> Flying less, eating less meat isn't the solution to the problem.
I contend that they can be an important part of the solution to the problem. If it becomes sufficiently socially unacceptable, these activities will see a significant decrease. Many citizens already considers many activities taboo and immoral due to the influence of their society; online fraud, adultery, taking more than their fair share of an obvious common good when they don't need it; it is possible to frame excessive air travel or meat consumption as immoral.
> more actual science, engineering and entrepreneurship and making people richer so they start caring about their close environment is.
Similarly, I contend that collective agitation is important to enable the means that you cite. "more actual science, engineering and entrepreneurship" is enabled by voting for governments interested in funding research. The availability of science is enabled by the collective action of researchers and sponsors advocating for open access. The success and feasibility of entrepreneurship is enabled by voting for governments interested in limiting monopolies and anti-competitive behavior. The collective signaling of consumers that they are ready for alternatives encourage the establishment of businesses to cater to these alternatives, and to cater to them more efficien...
"Yes, findings about climate are not reproducible in the straight and narrow sense of the scientific method"
Full stop.
And this is the most important misconception which most people don't understand. They actually think the science is settled and that it's provable through the scientific process.
It's not not by any stretch.
The problem is that this discussion, even the one we are having right now is mostly a politically based discussion not a scientific based one and yet non-scientists, people who have never even looked at the claims they support, will shame you for being a climate-denier for even suggesting it's not as simple as claimed.
The claims are much more extreme than what the science support.
"I take it that there is a broad consensus that climate change is man-made and that carbon emissions are very likely a huge driver of it. Many scientific professional organizations have issued statements about it. Many governments see the need to at least pay lip service to it."
But that's not what you actually find. The 97% concensus actually include the socalled climate deniers, think about that for a while.
You can't expect people to just buy something on faith when you can't actually prove your theory. Even if they are wrong, even if the claim about the consensus was right you can't actually expect them to just take it on faith, the very opposition of what science is based on.
Science does not actually build on consensus it builds on falsification if you don't have falsification you have something else and much less precise than science, yet it's sold as if it's not and as long as this is not acknowledged you will not be able to have a rational discussion let alone solution. You don't even have agreement about what the problem will be, only a set of potential outcomes which is what you do in scenario planning. It's not science. Geologists are scientists and can measure but the people interpreting the date ads a layer of abstraction, interpretation and errors that's so large that it's actually antiscientific to use the "science says" argument.
There IS disagreement, not even about whether the climate is changing but what it means and how much.
If you don't think many climate scientists play lip-service to their donors (the politicians) then you haven't looked close enough.
So there are all sorts of reasons not to just take anything by these organisations even if you agree that there is a problem and that the climate is changing. In other words you don't have to become a climate catastrophist just because you agree that climate is always going to be challenge to humans.
"No, paradigm shifts help develop new and more accurate theory, but old theories still hold. Newtonian mechanics doesn't become obsolete even if a more accurate quantum picture has been developed. Even the primitive, less precise, yet intuitive Aristotelian notion of motion can be useful in many contexts, e.g. game physics that need to enable an unreal amount of control yet feel psychologically natural."
No old theories don't still hold. They are still useful in limated scope but they don't hold as complete theories which means that things that might look like one thing isn't actually what it looks like.
In Newtons world speed of gravity is infinite, in einsteins it's not, in quantum physics non-locality “disproves” the speed of light as the most fundamental force.
Three different paradigms the two latter btw both proven to the extent we can prove things but fundamentally contradictory.
In other words, Newton + Einstein + Bohr accumulates but there are fundmaental shifts that completely changes the reality they are trying to explain.
"I don't see how the thrust of this statement is consistent with the immediate statement before"
What is it that you don't see? Are you going for a gotcha momement or are you actually trying to understand wha...
> So there are all sorts of reasons not to just take anything by these organisations even if you agree that there is a problem and that the climate is changing. In other words you don't have to become a climate catastrophist just because you agree that climate is always going to be challenge to humans.
Nevertheless, these climate claims are consistent with what I know to be true: that ecologies collapse when there is a great change in temperature (even when geology is similar), that carbon is a greenhouse gas, that we are emitting it at an unprecedented scale, and that carbon in the biosphere is conserved. I haven't seen a compelling model that assumes otherwise that does not predict the existence of a system that we haven't yet observed. One has to make a risk-cost decision either way on imperfect information, and I think the more consistent and conservative theory and its associated greater costs is the more optimal decision.
> Old theories don't still hold
> They are still useful in limated scope
On the other hand, it is usually more likely that phenomena predicted after a paradigm shift have more limited application, due to the principle that more inaccessible phenomena are more difficult to exploit. Even with the paradigm shift, it only gives us more accurate predictions about phenomena that we already have, agreeing with it to a large degree in most human-experience aspects. Consider that quantum mechanics see less application than newtonian mechanics. The old theory still holds in most situations indeed, whereas quantum theory requires an intractable amount of computation to obtain predictions. Quantum chemistry see less application than traditional models of chemistry. Similarly, any new findings on climate change solutions are very likely to be tougher to exploit than current solutions. So I do not think it is rational to wait for a technological hail mary.
> you have to live by that framing then it all falls apart. You have hundreds of millions of people if not billions who would do anything to become just a fraction as rich as you and me and do not care one ounce about their climate footprint and what you consider immoral
I think I have given sufficient examples that disagree with what you are saying. With respect to less prosperous communities, it is often the case that they have a more collectivistic mindset and community and in fact live under more taboos. Consider superstitions, rituals, and religious dietary restrictions. Also consider the case of British society a couple centuries ago, where the aspirational class lived more prudishly than the upper class or the lower class, based on a certain idealistic gentility.
> That's actually not even close to true which China is a pretty clear example of.
I don't know which aspect of the Chinese economy you are referring to. The electronics part, where there is no lack of signal from the countries it exports to, or its investment in green tech, in which case we may consider the Govt. one disproportionately strong actor in collective signalling.
What you know to be true yes, just don't call it science.
"I think I have given sufficient examples that disagree with what you are saying."
You haven't given a single one. You are talking about people who are already rich and can afford to moralize over what food they put in their mouth. That's a very different kind of people than I talk about.
"I don't know which aspect of the Chinese economy you are referring to. The electronics part, where there is no lack of signal from the countries it exports to, or its investment in green tech, in which case we may consider the Govt. one disproportionately strong actor in collective signalling."
I am talking about the fact that the chinese market isn't free and open yet does very well.
> What you know to be true yes, just don't call it science.
It is science; basic chemistry tells you that carbon is conserved give or take a few nuclear reactions.
> You are talking about people who are already rich and can afford to moralize over what food they put in their mouth. That's a very different kind of people than I talk about.
I address that in the same paragraph
>> With respect to less prosperous communities, it is often the case that they have a more collectivistic mindset and community and in fact live under more taboos. Consider superstitions, rituals, and religious dietary restrictions.
> I am talking about the fact that the chinese market isn't free and open yet does very well.
Thanks for clarifying, in part, but I still don't see how this is an argument against to my notion of collective action being an essential component of technological development.
On the one hand, I think individual action is quite useless to stop climate change. Too many people still do too many things that have a more negative impact. For example, SUVs is still a fast-growing car segment (the fastest?). The number of SUVs in Germany (where I live) have significantly increased over the years. People want their fat cars.
On the other hand, if more and more people demand certain things, for example organic food, then it causes companies and politics to change their behavior. If nobody wants microplastic-free soap and shampoo, nothing will change. If 50 people per day ask in a supermarket for microplastic-free soap and shampoo, management might notice.
But then: One big supermarket chain in Germany (REWE) ditched plastic bags altogether for paper bags and reusable cotton bags. I don't know what caused this – customers asking for it, politics, or some marketing guy with a "go green" mission. But obviously, this has a much larger impact on the environment than educating the masses about "reusing their shopping bags".
In a way, "saving the enviroment" is something that starts on an individual level, but the real useful stuff is actually implemented through politics, laws, and ultimately corporations chaning their behavior (or forcing a certain behavior on the masses, like REWE did).
Edit: The question now is: What can I do to make political changes happen on an individual level? Is it really my behavior that changes anything? Or can I have more leverage in any other way?
Whatever REWE did is certainly working to keep me as a customer. The amount of plastic I buy with my groceries is ludicrous, every measure to reduce this amount is highly welcome.
> 8. Should I think about how many children I have (or don’t have)?
Maybe the worst point of the whole article, here is my point of view : educated and people aware of environment change have fewer kids, people with the opposite way of thinking have more kids and have the same education. We create a world where the people who don't care outnumber those who care, since the most praised government system is Democracy the power goes to the number.
Path to idiocracy (great message for a comedy movie).
You are getting awfully close to eugenics. That points not only at the moral problem with your willingness to sort human life into desirable/undesirable. It also offers a clue as to the accuracy of this mechanism: If these fascists one hundred years ago were making the exact same prediction you are making, and yet the world today is not overrun by these supposedly reproduction-happy Untermenschen... then maybe it just doesn't work like that?
More specifically: this fear is based on observed heritability of traits like intelligence, and also social status etc. While these are indeed hereditary, they quickly dissipate when considering more than a single generation.
Whilst this article has some points of merit, its premise infuriates me.
Shifting the blame to the consumer and shielding corporates is toxic. The Carbon Majors report last year illustrated pretty clearly that 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.
Me going vegan and not using straws isn't going to save the planet.
242 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadThe only deep change that an individual can do that will make an actual impact is going vegan. Adding solar panels to your roof is not a drastic change, in fact in Australia it makes good economic sense. Driving an electric car is not a radically different experience to driving an ICE car. Telecommuting and working more days from home is, for many people, a desirable change to the way we work.
Once coal and then gas has been eliminated, 99% of new model cars are electric and lab grown beef matches the taste and texture a real cow the problem will be 80% solved. All of this can be achieved without a single person needing to change their lifestyle.
"High-impact beef producers create 105kg of CO2 equivalents and use 370m2 of land per 100 grams of protein, a huge 12 and 50 times greater than low-impact beef producers. Low-impact beans, peas, and other plant-based proteins can create just 0.3kg of CO2 equivalents (including all processing, packaging, and transport), and use just 1m2 of land per 100 grams of protein."
Shows Vegan and Ovo-Lacto Vegetarian neck and neck.
As another poster pointed out, in many areas living a pure vegan diet is far WORSE for the environment as you have to expend considerable CO2 getting the correct foodstuffs there.
There's also the open question about many countries where the land is only suitable for pasture as it's not arable.
I keep seeing this bandied about but it really feels like people pushing their ideology as the answer to whatever question was asked.
Short term: Build MODERN, waste reducing, nuclear (fission) plants. If proliferation is a concern, require the military be hired to protect them and the logs/supervision open to the public with short delay.
Long term: I like the 3001 / Gundam OO / generic scifi solution. Solar collectors. Point lots of solar energy at a focal location and do useful things with it.
I was 'born vegetarian' and I struggled to eat meat. I tried my hardest and genuinely believed that if I did not eat meat like everyone else then I would end up physically weak, without a fully developed brain etc. I endured eating burgers in the belief that they were really good for me.
I never learned to cook the stuff and got over my fears of not eating meat. Laziness really, not wanting to have the hygiene problems of a contaminated kitchen. A few meat food scares (BSE) helped me to take the easy route (for me) of living without eating meat. Haven't died of a lack of B12 yet and I know plants don't have any need for B12 but we do.
Anyway, I have had time since the days of teenage fear to think more positively about what I do and do not eat. There are notable athletes, thinkers and Hollywood stars that are strictly vegetarian. My meat eating friends only seem to know of Hitler as being famous for being vegetarian but I know not everything in this world is black and white, just because Hitler didn't eat burgers doesn't mean that I should.
Now role models are all well and good, however, the history of food is far more fascinating and I really like understanding how we got here.
The Chicken Tax is what got me to do my own thinking on the history of food. My grandmother was the last generation to remember when chickens were not what you ate every day. There was a time - not so long ago - when people saved up to eat a chicken based meal, this would be Christmas or a birthday, as a treat. Chicken is now wolfed down as part of a sandwich, sat at the desk, not savoured or enjoyed in some special ritual as per seventy years ago. The farmers in the USA changed the game to the intensive farming we have for chickens, the Chicken Tax that petrol heads know of was the gateway for me to learn that story.
Eggs were not a year round product, there was Easter and maybe a 'second brood' later in the year. So even eggs - a substitute for meat - are not actually what we think they are, we have forgotten the seasonal aspect.
Then there is the the cow. For most of mankind's history with the cow the cow was a beast of burden with added milk. You didn't eat your cows in times gone past when a cow was more like a domestic appliance, for pulling the plough. Only if there was plague and famine would you want to eat the cow. Doing so meant harsh times.
The Dutch invented a new harness for the horse in the 17th century that enabled horses to pull the plough. This put the cow out of work so there was a change on the farm. At around the same time the guy that inspired Darwin and did all the selective breeding made cows into the beef product every burger scoffer so enjoys. The cows that pulled the plough were nearer goat sized, albeit podgy goat sized, hey were not these giant things we have today, stuffed with corn and killed before the diseases from their corn fed diet kill them.
Then there are the sheep. I grew up in an area where wool was what mattered. I have studied the local history and absent from it is any mention of eating lamb or mutton. The products that were shipped out of the area were wool, more wool and more wool. The world was getting clothed not fed.
Clearly our ancestors had many uses for the animals they lived with and every scrap went to 'good' use. Unless you were lord of the manor then game was off the table too. People were not at all well nourished with the chemicals we sprinkle on the land today - doors in old houses are only 5 foot 6 inches tall, they didn't need them to cater for 6' tall people.
I think it is really important to understand a little bit about how we got here and why it is that we think we need beef. The ethics of the slaughterhouse is divisive, an in-depth appreciation of history is not. Really we have been conned into believing so much of the modern life, tricked into believing we...
This is my own pet thesis, there is fact rather than myth that backs up the story. You can truly enjoy the fact checking though. For instance have a look at pastoral scenes painted by the grand masters of old. Cows are smaller, a lot smaller, and these are not errors in painting to scale. Children can reach out to cows without them the cow towering above. The history is right there in paintings that you probably had no interest in the first time you saw them and decided not to major in 'Art History'.
Same with the Chicken Tax related part of this 'thesis', along the way you can learn how the VW camper van became a thing - it was a tax workaround to put seats in the van so it wouldn't be a 'van'.
We also imagine Darwin started from a blank canvas, really that was not the case at all. Not trying to dismiss his work, but he was standing on the shoulders of giants too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bakewell_(agriculturali...
He was the chap who turned cows from beasts of burden to beef. His work was what Darwin wrote about to 'prove there is a god'. Yeah.
Also check out the humble turnip. The turnip made the British Agricultural Revolution possible, without the turnip there would not have been the British Empire as we know it. The turnip was a crop that could be fed to livestock, planted in the 'fallow' year it nitrogen fixed the soil making it good to go for other crops. Nowadays the turnip is just a Blackadder joke.
The Moldboard Plough was another part of the puzzle, the Chinese had this first, the Dutch copied it and they got it hooked up to horses. I don't have a handy reference for that, particularly how the harness worked. There is plenty to study though, Jethro Tull being an interesting chap for the 'seed drill' that ended this random scattering nonsense.
Dutch Golden Age paintings have the clues to the story in them, I have my 18 month old niece to help me research this, although she can't talk she is good at pointing at cows, in art and in fields. She goes 'Maggie Simpson' on me at times, I would not have spotted unusually small cows in paintings without her help and would not have gone down the rabbit hole of working out the why questions without her promptings.
So much of the politics of food is based on belief and opinion. Various diets are nonsense. I don't want another religion, I just want to understand. History gives the answers. And art history that has bored me to date comes to life when I am looking at paintings for things like how people ate, how big various animals are and what 'tech' was used on the farm. There is no longer a need to aesthetically decide if a painting is pretty or not, I find so much more in what I see when it is for this type of personal research.
Forgot to mention sheep - in the part of the West Country (UK) that I know the lucky mix of fortune that made the area prosperous included Fullers Earth, used to get wool nice and clean from grease etc. There were export restrictions on Fuller's Earth, so precious it was! The final product - cloth - ended up in those red uniforms that the British Army conquered the world with. The Cotswolds also had a lot of rain and very steep hills. So waterwheels and canals were part of the story. Plus the wonders of capitalism, with cottage industry making way for bigger mills and eventual decline...
I owe a great deal of thanks to some old people who are not here any more for taking the time to show me the relevant industrial archaeology. A retired gentleman who I used to deliver newspapers to as a teenager took the time to take me to local places so I could draw things for school history projects. In today's 'stranger danger&#x...
The goal of combating climate change is to make the planet more liveable. You don't achieve that by not living.
It's not some moral game of attribution of blame, it's just maths. Fewer people produce less CO2.
That, or we end as species. Guess what? Worst case of global warming, mankind extermination. "Best" case, also mankind extermination.
Talk about premature optimisation!
Further to that, I'm not sure it's a good idea anyway in many cases if you're worried about sustainability of the human race and our current lives - if we all stopped having children, society would pretty much collapse. Who's going to look after us when we're old? Clearly we don't all need to have 12 children, but 0 won't work either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N9nVLXMhPc
If you are unhappy with the level of education of the public, then try to work on that instead of feeling encouraged to spread your superior genes.
I recommend Carl Zimmer's latest book "She Has Her Mother's Laugh" for a look at the past and the present through the prism of heredity.
At least in my plug-in hybrid I get statistics on that. I have driven it 80% on electricity with average fuel consumption of 2.0 l/100km the 16 months I have owned it, that include 2 longer trips of 700km with average fuel consumption of 4.0 l/100km and some charging problems last winter. The car have 200hp, so would have been a lot more if not hybrid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RhtiPefVzM
(I also find the argument hard to believe, but I'd be interested in seeing a proper comparison)
You would not be looking at efficiency from a energy/$ perspective, which is what industry power generators care about, but rather energy/ton of CO2, which they rarely care about.
At least with the Prius-style hybrids, though, regenerative braking isn't the only advantage:
* The engine is an Atkinson cycle, which has better thermal efficiency than a typical Otto cycle engine.
* The electric motor is providing torque off the line, so there is no need for a torque converter (which reduces efficiency).
* The engine can be completely shut off when cruising at low speeds.
* The power split device (PSD) is more reliable than a traditional transmission, reducing maintenance costs over the lifetime of the vehicle. (it is much less labor intensive to replace the battery than to service the transmission)
The advantages add up when driving around town, but at highway speeds, a 3-cylinder or small 4-cylinder non-hybrid will often have better gas mileage.
While I agree with your sentiment, I think it's dishonest to not mention the fact that diesels were absolutely dominating until the rules were changed in hybrids' favour a few years back.
There is no meaningful "average" child, or average lifestyle, to base the last column on.
No, I'm not implying that we shouldn't decrease population, just pointing out energy inequality.
Also the chart severely underestimate the impact of diet.
There are parts of the world (for example, Africa) where population has been increasing ridiculously fast for decades and the estimates are that this will continue. A lot of this is thanks to the financial support from the West. When there's news that the population of Japan is decreasing people talk about it as if it's a catastrophe. But Japan is very densely populated right now and I think they'll be fine either way (maybe some short term economic struggles, but they won't go extinct).
These topics can be politically taboo, but they shouldn't be. These issues are too important and long term effects can be catastrophic for the environment and the general quality of life on Earth.
Africa is big, so it's a very coarse way of narrowing down a location. Population pressure is a multiplier, so people in poor countries with few cars and a diet that does not depend on cross-country transport of food have a smaller impact on environment than fewer people accustomed to a more expensive life style.
> When there's news that the population of Japan is decreasing people talk about it as if it's a catastrophe.
An aging or decreasing population can be a catastrophe, but not because of environmental effects; the concerns are of a social nature, as a shrinking population usually means a reduction in essential services. The one child policy that was active for years in China has left a characteristic mark on the demographics, leading to a small population of young people supporting a large population of old people.
> Nicholas’s study concluded that having fewer children is the best way to reduce your contribution to climate change, with almost 60 tonnes of CO2 avoided per year. But this result has been contentious – and it leads to other questions. ...
> And we could ask if having children is necessarily a bad thing for solving climate change: our challenges may mean we will need more problem-solvers in future generations, not fewer.
Way to make the quantitative answer on this question ambiguous when it is clear that unless your kids will work or donate much more than average to climate change, they will add to the problem.
Just be honest and admit that this possible solution (fewer kids!) conflicts with your ideology.
All this warm-fuzzy nonsense about leaving the solution to "future problem solvers" is how we got here.
> The world can respond in three ways to signals that resource use and pollution emissions have gone beyond their sustainable limits. One way is to disguise, deny, or confuse the signals. Generally this takes the form of efforts to shift costs to those who are far away in space and time.
> A second way is to alleviate the pressures from limits by employ- ing technical or economic fixes. [...] These approaches, however, will not eliminate the causes of these pressures.
> The third way is to work on the underlying causes, to recognize that the socioeconomic system has overshot its limits, is headed toward collapse, and therefore seek to change the structure of the system.
Leaving the hard decisions to "future problem solvers" is exactly response #1, "shift costs to those who are far away in space and time", i.e. future generations.
http://donellameadows.org/archives/a-synopsis-limits-to-grow...
The planet’s population has doubled in my lifetime alone, and I may see it double again, and it could be pure coincidence that all the warning signs clearly track the human population (CO2 levels, sea temperature etc etc) but maybe, just maybe, there is some causation there...?
We could all have nice things if, a few billion people ago, everyone had decided to reproduce at replenishment rate only.
That being said, I can't help being reminded about German language lessons I had ~10 years ago where the teacher was preaching that we must all ditch electric kettles for the sake of the planet. I asked her how is this going to help -- even if 100_00 people do it today -- if corporations are happy to let toxic waste seep into the ocean and lobby to never close coal plants. And we're talking thousands of tons a day. She wasn't pleased that I attacked her agenda.
So alright, I know we all can do better, individuals included. That's unequivocally true.
But let's not ignore the fact that the biggest fault lies in organizations that are happy to pay people to whisper stuff in the ears of the people with power.
Climate change is real and the more we delay the solution, the more urgent and extreme the measures to swing it around will become. And that means to start breaking the warm and cozy positions that many corporations are in -- and enjoy the lack of supervision of.
- Buy less stuff. Corporations produce waste because we buy their stuff. Get the stuff you still buy from more environmentally-friendly companies, if possible.
- Political action. Corporations need to be regulated and that can only happen through political action. Lobbies may have a lot of power, but in the end, it's the citizens who vote.
This is becoming harder and harder with time. Believe me, I would love to buy my kitchen stove, washing machine, refrigerator, aspirator, air conditioner and vacuum cleaner from a local manufacturer. But there are none. How many household brands do really exist and how many are actually known and bought by almost everyone?
Additionally, even if you are an idealist who wants to be the change they want to see, you will still need a bunch of tech gadgets to connect with the world and try to change it -- like a good smartphone and laptop that don't suck. Not every $100 piece of trash will do the job. And the cheaper tech might have actually had much more negative impact on the planet's CO2 footprint.
It's very complex and thus no black-and-white solutions exist.
Some corps like Apple and Samsung seem hellbent on testing the customers' patience with higher prices every year and it will definitely bite them back at one point. That much is true.
> Political action.
Never in my life, not once, have I seen citizens voting actually change anything of significance in a country. Have you? And we're talking less than 10 years here. "These things take time" seems pretty shallow and empty as a justification for things not happening.
I am happy for the places where it works. Not sarcastic.
People around here are just realists because no significant changes ever comes before people get that fed up. Civil discourse and constructive discussion has so far netted us nothing but dossiers and people landing on dissident lists. This happens to this day.
No need to be snarky.
Hey, do you live in Prague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestrations_of_Prague ? Don't let the czech mentality get to you, people there complain just for fun.
It's easy to write us off Eastern Europeans as "complaining just for fun" though. Many do but when you get to the bottom of it, real change happens extremely rare. And that's a valid argument and a historical background to have.
But regular-complainers and realistic-no-BS-folk often get conflated by external observers -- to my despair.
I'd very much like to but there really are no such local vendors. :(
Do you mean in the US?
Examples that spring to mind in other countries are: gay marriage equality (Australia), independence (East Timor, plus probably others... Scotland and New Caledonia rejected independence by plebiscite), conscription (Austria), abortion (Ireland), migrant intake (Hungary) etc... and of course Brexit.
I gave up my car more than a decade ago. I haven't owned a vacuum cleaner in years. I live in a cheap rental with a wood floor. We strictly enforce taking shoes off just inside the front door to prevent dirt from being tracked in so we don't have to clean as much.
I currently live in a hundred year old building that doesn't have air conditioning. I'm interested in buying a home. Once I get a home, I will likely do what I can to use passive solar approaches to keeping the place comfortable with a minimum of electricity year round.
Passive solar design relies heavily on things like insulation and thermal mass. It tends to produce higher comfort levels than forced air heat while being cheaper in the long run.
Unfortunately, passive solar works best when it is incorporated at the design stage of a building. There are limits to how much you can retrofit a building with it.
I don't assume that the culture we have currently is the one we will have in the future. I have spent some years working to design the kind of life I want rather than just accepting that the way my life was is all that will ever be.
I own a lot less than I used to. I have a higher quality of life. For one thing, my life is no longer being consumed by cleaning and maintaining a giant pile of possessions, so I have more time for having a life.
Intended as food for thought.
Best.
I do part of these things already but (1) it's a gradual process, (2) I have a ton of other issues to deal with first so I cannot religiously purse lesser CO2 footprint (like personal health; it takes precedence over other venues), and (3) I am asked to trust other organizations -- f.ex. that throwing away stuff in certain trash cans helps the planet (which I don't mind at all; surely it makes some difference).
I agree that owning less things equals more peace of mind. But I am not quite there yet, I am still in a very active and hectic phase of my life where I am gradually correcting a ton of past mistakes. I do aim to have less in time. I came to feel the increased stress from more possessions.
What I am saying is -- thanks for the insight. I am on the same road but not quite so far ahead as yourself.
I'm on this path because of health issues, not specifically looking to shrink my footprint. That's more like a dude effect.
Most rentals in the US have wall to wall carpeting, which I loathe. I'm so thrilled to be in a rental with a wood floor. That's tough to find in America, especially on a tight budget.
When I gave up having a vacuum cleaner, we were in an apartment with wall to wall carpeting. It's horrifying stuff and we felt better with giving up the vacuum cleaner and finding other methods to try to keep the place tolerably clean. I've since seen articles that indicate studies show that vacuuming actually spreads germs. It may pick up visible dirt, but it makes germ control worse. That's a bigger issue for us than visible dirt. We concluded vacuuming was a health hazard years before I saw articles about such studies.
So, what I'm saying is my current situation is basically a dream come true after years and years of wanting something like this. It took a long time and a lot of little choices along the way and a lot of awkward stages where we decided "We are simply not doing X anymore. Period. Because X just doesn't work." before we had any idea what we would do instead. And then we would scramble and come up with imperfect and frustrating alternatives and muddle through.
But it did get gradually better.
Tossing that out there in hopes that it helps you with the path forward. The road ahead may not look like a road at all. You may not see it until you look back on it.
Best.
Buy used, it's totally worth it!
> Never in my life, not once, have I seen citizens voting actually change anything of significance in a country. Have you? And we're talking less than 10 years here. "These things take time" seems pretty shallow and empty as a justification for things not happening.
Start local. National politics is a distraction anyway; it's your city and state politics that matter. Our town, through a popular measure, banned fracking in the city limits. We got sued and the ban was struck down by the supreme court, but now we pay oil companies to stay out of the city limits. It's money the town spends because its citizens want to stay healthy.
Now there's a statewide proposal on the ballot today that does a similar thing (https://ballotpedia.org/Colorado_Proposition_112,_Minimum_Di...). Our town contributed to this proposition. Political action at a local level works.
Thank you.
The citizens are easily diverted with racist flamebait issues and neofascism. Nothing will be done.
It’s capitalism.
Individuals are in the end the drivers of corporate actions because they are the consumers.
It's not necessarily about buying less stuff but about changing your daily actions and about buying only products you consider environmentally friendly.
Corporations will produce what sells. We decide what sells through our individual choices and actions.
Edit:
We can also make it quite plain to corporations: For example, why not ask coffee shops/takeaways how they plan to pack our order before we actually order then walk away if we don't like the answer? If many people start to do that I'm sure things will change fast.
As I mention in a different comment, individual action is important. However, there is a large difference in effectiveness, and promoting obviously ineffective ones isn't going to convince people to do the ones that are likely to be effective.
But you have to wonder.
Your theory seems extremely likely.
This is critically important, but the mindset of the population need to change for it to be effective. If everyone have the same mindset, things will start to change.
Imagine doing a simple thing like reducing your shower time by 25% or reduce your TV watching time by 25%. With enough people doing it, its impact will be significant.
Things like driving less, flying less, eating less meat and buying/throwing away less stuff are things where individual actions can actually make a difference.
Watching less TV doesn't accomplish anything other making you feel like you are taking action. If you want to make a small change that will actually accomplish something, try taking public transportation or biking to work one day a week or eating vegetarian one day a week.
Do you need to use that much soap? Do you need to keep the lights on everywhere? Do you need to use a tumble-dryer or could you let your clothes air dry instead? Do you need that shiny new phone or is your current one good for another couple of years?
Yes, all of these are absolutely small things individually, but put together and done by many people, it does make a difference.
A big thing you can do individually is to Buy Less Stuff. Be happy with the TV you have, don't change your wardrobe just because of fickle changing fashion nonsense, don't replace stuff that works just fine. Break the cycle of consumerism. Don't support the polluting corporations.
The very biggest thing you can do is to be politically active. Vote for pro-environment politicians and parties, be part of political initiatives.
That's not what this advice was, though; the advice was specifically to use less soap when doing the dishes.
Which is ridiculuous because every electrician will tell you that your home-grade fuses and the switchboard of your house/block handle such loads quite well without much additional strain on... anything, really.
I quickly wrote her off as a virtue signaller back then.
So, in a sense, boiling water with gas has less externalities.
EDIT: You can of course also argue, if we can't have powerful appliances why bother with electricity at all. I'm just saying it's not an issue that can be so easily dismissed
The regular citizens have put the work to buy the TV device, and continue to put the work daily so they can pay the power and cable bills.
What else would you have them do? They work hard and maybe the TV is their way to unwind. Why, again, is the citizens' fault for putting the work needed to buy their entertainment device and then making them feel guilty for using it?
I pay electrical bills. In my eyes I do my part of the bargain, the rest is their problem -- that's what we pay for, to get a stable service while they sort out the details. A fair business transaction.
Then why are you even commenting in a thread about what can you do about climate change? Let someone else figure it all out and send you a bill!
I am talking about most eco tech articles that I've seen -- they are a blatant PR propaganda and rarely informative.
I am not a law regulator, I am not a technician, I am not an environmentalist. I buy tech because it helps me save time and effort in my busy day. It's the corps and the governments responsibility to make sure the tech is eco-friendly, not mine.
* that my car doesn't do 70mph in 20mph school zones * that my gun doesn't go off when I'm pointing it at someone innocent etc.
> I buy my tech fairly, I don't see what else I could do.
Have some personal responsibility and seek out eco-friendly tech to buy.
Why such a huge strawman?
> Have some personal responsibility and seek out eco-friendly tech to buy.
I do have personal responsibility. I work, I don't dodge taxes, I buy stuff with my own money. I try and research but most of what we hit on the internet are PR pieces. But I won't research for 1 month something that I might need tomorrow.
I mean seriously, how far will the guilt-tripping of citizens go? When will it stop?
I've taken to boiling the required amount of water in the kettle when I boil rice or anything similar. It's much faster, too.
It's also a good idea to boil a full kettle once in a while, and pour the remaining boiling water you don't need down the drain. It helps break up fat deposits and kills bacteria that cause bad-smelling drains, and the environmental impact is much less than using drain cleaner. And for the love of your drains, don't pour grease in there!
People who take/propose such small steps might later start thinking about other means to improve their footprint on the planet that have a bigger impact. They might start to identify themselves as people who care about the environment. They might start spreading the idea to other people. And one day maybe they will say hey I ditched an electric kettle and made a compromise and what did you do, what are the big corps doing?
So I hope you engaged the teacher in a positive tone and proposed how we can all have an even bigger impact.
"i switch off all the bulbs and recycle all my bags. i should be able to buy that nice SUV i want"
Which effect, identifying with environmentalism or i-do-enough-ism, is stronger takes research to find out.
David MacKay
https://www.withouthotair.com/c19/page_114.shtml
Is there some data on the actual scale of individual vs corporate pollution / climate-changing faults? Hard to measure, I guess.
Reducing power consumption and reducing the number of items we buy and eventually throw away is a start. Pushing politicians to make the hard choices is also part of the fix. But saying someone else has all the power, therefore, I can't do anything or I saying I can only do a little therefore I won't bother is not.
I'd like the world to start attacking the source of issues top-to-bottom and not bottom-to-top.
Can the citizens help? Absolutely. Will they amount for much unless corporations start taking action? No.
Are you willing to?
I'm not throwing away my PC, or MacBook, or iPhone, or iPad, or 35" 144Hz display that consumes 200W. I actually need them and they actually help me live a better life.
But sure, I do use less napkins compared to 5 years ago. And I don't have a car (which is insane to have when you live in the center of a city anyway).
You'll have to clarify what do you have in mind with your question though.
If you change your lifestyle significantly, you are not just a blip in statistics. Your actions rub off on other people, your vote supports the right people, and with enough time you help the right mindset to prevail.
Besides, presuming you are not climate change skeptic, what other rational choice do you have?
But no, I'm not gonna go out of my way to religiously pursue smaller CO2 footprint at all costs. I try to make small differences but anything that severely inconveniences me is a no-no and always will be.
At least I'm not pretending for the sake of feeling good about myself.
An analogue: committing a crime is punishable, inciting it in some cases may be. It is the companies who dig up fossil fuels and use them --- "consumers told me to do it" is not an excuse that absolves from responsibility. Those trading in fossil fuels do what they do on their own accord, for financial gain, and hence carry the responsibility.
The problem is that the change in behaviour that this demands is great: ever thought about selling your car? or paying twice as much for a new electric car?
Anyone who has told you smartphones are a significant consumer of power doesn't know what they're talking about.
"But the nations became wrathful, and your own wrath came, and the appointed time came...to bring to ruin those ruining the earth." -- Revelation 11:18
It's interesting that the human tendency to "ruin the earth" is still a problem 2,000 years later.
Given that scientists are now saying we're close to the point of no return on climate change, I don't have much confidence humans are going to turn this around...
If this problem was listed in a 2,000 year old book, and we're still "ruining the earth" in 2018, I'm not convinced humans as a species are going to have a sudden change of heart in the next 10 years...
Just saying..
A dedicated minority that genuinely cares about an issues can shift the agenda, even when the majority is largely undecided. When I invite 3 vegans and 7 omnivores to a party, food will be vegan (similar point by N N Taleb). I hope this works out just as well with political parties..
Would ee propose individual action when less dangerous situations occur in society? Say, a bank run is imminent. Does individual action work? Does the government broadcast it on the 8 o'clock news and do the people stay at home or do they run down the bank nonetheless? We do not propose individual action on other matters but we expect individual action to work on climate change.
Yes. A lobbyist who wants to avoid new legislation to control climate change, but still claim they care about it.
Strikes and large protests are not encouraged in mainstream discourse and the principles they represent are not available as an option to vote for.
Don't regulations come into play? In the EU, inefficient light bulbs have been phased out [0]
In France, we have free energy market since 2010 [1], with some players [2] focusing on green energy, etc.
Diesel & gas (for cars) prices are sky-rocketting (taxes !! [3]). Not cool for people who don't have the choice to keep using their old cars (students, unemployed, etc.) but the goal is to make combustion-engine cars so expensive they become unattractive.
[0] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-09-368_en.htm : On 18 March 2008, the Commission adopted a regulation on non-directional household lamps which would replace inefficient incandescent bulbs by more efficient alternatives (...) between 2009 and 2012.
[1] https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFT...
[2] https://ekwateur.fr/offre-electricite : I'm a happy customer
[3] https://www.zagaz.com/stats.php
Even if you are totally correct, it's irrelevant unless (A) you can maintain democratic support for such collective actions, or (B) you get rid of democracy.
In the US at least, even the democrats don't propose climate regulation strong enough to have a measurable impact on the climate over ten years. People will absolutely resist the moment energy prices go up notably, which will be necessary to measurably affect climate.
The problem isn't that collective action needs to be taken, it's that sufficient collective action won't sufficiently be supported by voters. That's why Democrats aren't proposing it, and that's the actual hurdle that needs to be overcome.
I think there are other reasons why Democrats don't propose strong climate regulation, such as the large donations they receive from people in fossil fuel.
There is already very strong democratic support for collective actions. Think of all the climate marches, the protests and occupation of DAPL, anti-fracking movements, etc. People who strongly support collective actions way outnumber the people who oppose it. It's just that those who oppose it have all the political and economic power in our society.
The Liberals in power are collaborating with Conservatives and killing collective action solutions by engaging with respectability politics. One is not allowed to protest except for at very specific times and in ways that are chosen by those in power to be acceptable. Any protest that gets too rowdy is decried by both sides. The only other way you are allowed to resist climate change is by buying the expensive stuff in the green packaging rather than the other stuff.
I think people will say they support collective actions right up until those collective actions actually affect their lifestyle. That's why even a lot of democratic policy efforts have been geared toward subsidies instead of reducing use. Much of the populace genuinely is OK with someone else's money being spent on solar, wind, and EV credits. When it means they can't afford to fly for their annual vacation, it's a different story.
This is the thing that still gives me hope. Try to do good, and people will notice - and, without so much as telling others to something, they will emulate you to some extent. At least, that's what I've anecdotally observed.
The other side of this is important as well: you don't necessarily need to be a leader in everything that can be improved. However, if you see someone taking the lead, being the first follower can get a movement going, and is less effort than leading the change to boot.
Even my parents started eating meat a lot less, basically only for big events and startet using oat milk for their coffee!
Are you and they using honey or white sugar from farmed sugarcanes? For the environment sake I wish that vegan diet would include honey as it has a big net-positive effect on the environment compared to farmed sugarcanes by not causing eutrophication or water pollution, and helps with pollination both for wild forests and agriculture.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/t...
Locally harvested? Great! But likely not the bulk of supply.
Supermarket honey? Transported from Goodness Knows Where -- very likely China or Chile, where the bees are intensively fed... (you guessed it!) sugar! That's why the honey is so flavourless, not to mention the Carbon footprint of all those honey-kilometres.
Bees are almost as intensively farmed as anything else, and, while the effects and outcomes are nowhere near as severe as other forms of intensive husbandry, the honey is not necessarily the pure and innocent product you might think it is.
But for honey in particular I would say its is even more important to buy locally. It is better, safer, and better for the environment. Mixed honey has none of the unique taste that specific environments can create (my personal favorite is pollen from mixed coniferous forest, preferable with a gps coordinate to the hive). Imported mixed honey also share the same problem that plague olive oil, which is food fraud. Because honey is expensive it often get mixed with cheaper syrups or worse stuff. From a ecological perspective it is also good if the colonies are in areas that need pollination, which locally harvested usually are. Bonus points if its a small business by someone personally invested in it.
As for costs, the difference in prices from cheapest to expensive locally produced ones is normally for me about $1-2 dollar per jar. It such a small increase that just the security against food fraud is worth it (assuming you trust the local producer).
Thankyou for pointing this out. I say the same about almond milk and other products hyped by vegans that are pollinated by bees. The commercial beekeeping industry is horrific. Part of the reason wild bee colonies are collapsing is because of the diseases cultivated by commercial colonies.
I'm a backyard beekeeper myself and can say with at least some authority that there's nothing at all "vegan" or "moral" or "natural" about the way these commercial operations treat the bees and the environment.
I understand folks like bees, see them in a kindly light. But they're little automatons with maybe a neuron or two total. If we raised them, crushed them and ate them, it'd be no different from how we treat other insects.
> Part of the reason wild bee colonies are collapsing is because of the diseases cultivated by commercial colonies.
So if another bee comes at the cost of multiple existing bees, that's a problem.
The scale is my assumption, but the point appears clear to me.
Would you say that the average bee farming is causing more harm to wild bees than the average sugarcane farmer?
If that sort of 'stigma' goes away I would imagine a lot more people would be going vegetarian/vegan.
The worst things that could happen to the environment would actually be whatever happens that results in a surprise cold spell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age was such a period.
If there is a cold snap, that will likely mean MORE coal burnt in Europe, which will put greater amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, and when the cold period ends, even worse greenhouse affects.
There is virtually no situation in which carbon removal will be anything other than a net gain. We need to start removing carbon ASAP, irrespective of whether or not we can, collectively as a world of 7+Billion, reduce emissions.
The carbon removal side of the ledger is the one I think we can make meaningfully changes in fastest and with the least controversy.
However, I think it's an important side, because it's a side that will increase support for initiatives like the ones you mention.
That's it.
climate change isn't the problem, it's the second major global-scale symptom of the problem (the first one was the ozone layer). it's highly concerning! but suppose we manage to slow or reverse or mitigate climate change, at great expense, without addressing the underlying problem --- then we're going to have less resources to address the next global issue:
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound...
Personally I think we should be building more nuclear power plants as well as deploying giant battery storage facilities to store energy from wind and solar.
We should also start taxing carbon emissions. So advocating political change to achieve collective action seems like the only feasible way to do anything effective to me.
Yes, but not without developping the alternatives. For example, in France, the government decided to raise the taxes on gas and especially diesel — but at the same time, the small train lines are being shut down, so people living in the country aren't to happy.
If they don't like it, they could try to move to a city and swap their high transportation cost for higher rent.
for example, i could become a vegan. if i did so, the net benefit to humanity would be positive. but i don't want to, as i'd have to privately pay the cost (no more delicious chicken) while the benefits (in terms of reduced global cumulative greenhouse gas emissions) are spread across the billions of the rest of you.
however, i really want you all to take individual action to limit your greenhouse emissions so i can benefit. go vegan, have fewer children, get your economies to install carbon taxes. yes please, i'd love the lot of you to do that.
i'm very willing to trade you something of value in return for you making lifestyle changes that don't locally benefit you.
how do we make this kind of trade happen? how do we make this kind of collective agreement to change behaviour happen faster?
"i'm very willing to trade you something of value in return for you making lifestyle changes that don't locally benefit you"
If it's true, then you can make the next small step. For example, for every vegan you have as a friend you can decide to eat less meat. Or for every friend without a car, you can take a bus once in a while. And so on.
That would be a valuable gift to these people, who decided to selflessly take the first step.
Being vegan means saying no to cruelty towards other sentient and intelligent beings and enslaving them for our culinary pleasure purposes.
So having a friend who is vegan wouldn't really eliminate cruelty towards chickens for example, as your craving for delicious chicken would still require chickens to be slaughtered, i.e. Is cruelty ok, so you can continue to experience culinary pleasures?
Tough questions...
Edit: mainly referring to factory farming and large scale meat industry, where most of the meat we consume comes from.
they were
1. have one less kid.
I can maybe imagine a friend choosing not to have 3 but I can't imagine someone wanting 2 to go to 1 or someone wanting 1 to go to 0 for this reason
2. go carless
Sone friends live in a city that supports a carless lifestyle and already live carless but I can't imagine a single person I know giving up their car or moving somewhere they don't need it for for purpose of helping the environment
3. don't travel
zero friends would give this up. even the most eco "aware"
e.g. hypothetically would you support a global carbon tax* priced high enough so that driving somewhere wasn't by default a sensible decision?
* supposing, hypothetically, we had some effective way of reaching such an agreement and enforcing it
And I don't mind effort, at all. I go the extra mile at home to use less kitchen paper. I use less chemicals to clean around the house. I reuse phone and tablet chargers, and headphones. I don't buy new computers often (current PC is 8 years old now).
I try and be disciplined. But I am no sewage treatment plant, or a plastic/metal melting foundry so I do what I can but not sure I am helping at all.
I think many people misunderstand me in my bigger comment in this post: I try and help but (1) there's a line beyond which you are slaving yourself to supposed improvements you cannot see and so it becomes not worth it, and (2) I am asked to trust other organizations that if I throw away stuff in special areas then I am helping the planet. I don't mind #2 -- it's better than nothing. But I can and do mind #1 here and there.
It's not such an unreasonable stance as many make it look.
Like you are used to do it in something like 25 minutes with a car, even though there could be near-instant methods of travel available (it's science fiction but still to the point: when you don't have (or don't have any more, for some time) a better alternative, you can overlook many inconveniences).
On a more serious note:
1. have one less kid.
I really don't like how this one is worded, I always read it as "get rid of one of your kids". Though, except going from 1 to 0, it's not that bad. I definitely wanted more than one, but I can settle with the one I have.
2. go carless
You get used to it. I even lived in small cities (~30k inhabitants) and while it's harder when your city isn't supporting a carless lifestyle (never lived in any that does that, sadly), it's definitely doable.
3. don't travel
Maybe a bit extreme to give it up entirely. But you can still travel less, do it with more eco-friendly travel options (carpooling, etc.) or go to destinations which do not require planes. I guess it depends on where you live, but in Europe there's definitely lots of wonderful places I can go to with a low carbon impact.
But I still am responsible for a lot more carbon emission than I should. I'm taking it slow (changing food habits, etc.) but there's still domains in which I am really bad (using too much tech, ordering things online..).
I used to travel for work, flying nearly every week. I quit, party because of the environmental concern.
A fully loaded 747 gets about 100 miles per gallon per passanger and takes a more direct route.
If you had a fuel inefficient van and four people for the same trip you’d like burn more fuel.
I'm working on an app to make a personal travel offset pledge and track your impact publicly. If anyone is interested in keeping in the loop on progress: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/pledge-balance
- Die. In large numbers. Preferably people from the developped world.
- The planet may maybe be able to afford half a billion developped world people.
There is a link to a Bill Gates blog post in the thread, look at it : agriculture (feeding people) is 25% of the CO2 budget, manufacturing+housing is 27%. Basically reducing these means reducing the population. That's the reason why having one less child is the biggest contribution you can do, short of dying.
Any volunteer ?
Agitate and vote for the most left-wing party you can (that has a realistic chance of winning/influencing an election). Campaign for them to institute a ban on fossil fuels. Protest. Climb smokestacks. Make headlines. Break the law. If you work in the media, subvert their agenda as much as possible. Capitalism is crisis.
Of course, the BBC would never state these things. But given how little has been achieved in the last 40 years by playing by the rules, at this point they are obviously necessary, if not sufficient.
What's that got to do with the price of fish? The main left parties in my area still harp on about the coalmines. Then you have the Greens who are anti-nuclear, anti-Gm, anti-everything who seem to spend most of their time now involved in infighting over trans nonsense.
http://tmrow.com/climatechange.html
Feedback is welcome!
Environmentalism as a philosophy isn't all that coherent, and this suggestion in point 8 really encapsulates the heart of my problems with it. If we are saving the planet "for" someone else, who are they? If we are saving the planet for ourselves, do minor actions of deprivation make sense? The extreme logical extension of the philosophy in point 8 that isn't "if I care about the future, and if all life is equal, I should remove myself from the gene pool and build a society that doesn't value the environment".
Taking a practical view that we want to preserve the world for, say, 3 generations into the future, answers like nuclear starting 30 years ago make a lot of sense.
Let me give you an analogy. Is teaching meaningless? I mean, why do it, when you're not going to be around when people you teach will run things. You're trying to give advice to someone else, without being sure that they will follow it when you're not around.
So, I posit, not having kids and working on resolving climate change is useful, just like it is useful to teach or do your job properly to be an example for further generations doing that job.
You might be underestimating how much personal benefit a selfish materialist can wring out of teaching people things.
I, for example, love teaching people basically anything I know. To the point where I'm probably unhelpful. There have been numerous instances where there is a skill gap between me and someone else that I have closed and benefited greatly from closing. Usually this is in academic and workplace settings, but I suspect most parents would also see this dynamic. It also works socially when they return the favour and find some interesting idea for me in return at a later time.
If they don't follow my advice, that is often even better for me in the medium-long term because it suggests my advice is bad and I get an opportunity to correct my mistakes and misconceptions.
One of the most fortunate outcomes of the modern era is the more you want to maximise your own material success, the more advantage you can get from maximising the ability and resources available to those around you. I've been led to believe that a sample of most serious leadership groups will pick up an unusually high concentration of clever sociopaths - I suspect at least some of them will be excellent leaders because they figured this little factoid out.
The scenario is extremely different from someone asking me to give up driving because someone else will hypothetically benefit. As an interesting anecdata, I gave up driving because of economic and safety concerns, which are far more convincing to me personally.
See:
1) I, myself, my spawn, any reasonable proxy for me. a human?
2) Wish, desire, seek, want.
3) to live, life. continuance. reproduction, etc.
See, we are currently trashing the entire ball we live on:
1) too many of us. We did a good job at the whole "Go forth and multiply" thing. (talk about an incoherent philosophy: how about "the underpinnings of our civilization" for 2 points.)
resulting in:
A) loss of biodiversity. We killed the other animals
B) a HUGE footprint (land area) required for making our STUFF
C) hubris. we think OUR STUFF and OUR ECONOMY (read: make-believe silly nonsense we pretend is real) is more important than LIFE itself! The hacker news crowd is extremely guilty of this, as many people live in a simulated screen reality so much that they forgot about the wetware underpinnings of LIFE. your life.
2)We have no sense of collective responsibility, no sense of collective existence at all. It's not the squirrels fault that you can't understand why sustaining life on earth might be a worthy goal.
Collectively speaking, humanity is a dud. We didn't manage to organize anything with regards to our collective selves. We just ignorantly pursue selfish aims because some 18th century English "economist" (phlebotomist?) told us about "invisible hands"...
Maybe you should devote your vast brainpower to explaining the coherence involved in justifying industry and human "civilization" thus far?
They will be dead anyway in a few years, and their species also in a few MYr. Do you value their continuity more than our own?
Last time I checked, a lot of planets in our galaxy, I doubt squirrels have that much inherent value.
These are basically Malthus talks, with people suggesting to take straws who gets to live and who does not.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, but there are billions of people in the world already, and another few billions that will be born in the next little bit regardless of our individual actions. Do those not matter much? Does it have to be something "of your own" in order to make it worthwhile?
> The extreme logical extension of the philosophy in point 8 that isn't "if I care about the future, and if all life is equal, I should remove myself from the gene pool and build a society that doesn't value the environment".
I don't quite see how you arrive from "I remove myself from the gene pool" at "build a society that doesn't value the environment". Is it because you don't have someone to raise and tech who will carry your values forward? If so, then there's a good alternative: Teach someone else, be a mentor, get your message out to other people who are not your dependents. Sure they may not adopt your philosophy entirely, but then again, even one's own kids will make up their own mind and you're only one of many influences.
Moreover, by influencing people who already exist out there, you'll make a direct (hopefully positive) impact compared to the baseline of you not being involved in any way in the first place. If you have a kid to "build a society that values the environment", it'll be a net win for the environment if (a) your kid offsets its natural carbon impact by dedicating a significant effort to climate action, (b) same goes for any of their descendants, and (c) they make up for the time that you could have spent on climate action instead of raising your kid, such as mentoring or getting involved in politics. Building a society that values the environment isn't worth much if the outcome is still a net negative.
I feel that "continuing my legacy" is a widespread desire among hopeful parents. It's important to recognise that if your legacy is mainly to raise a child without making much of a direct contribution otherwise (because raising a child is a heck ton of work) then it's not unlikely for your kid to do the same. How long do we want to pass down the baton until one of those descendants makes a sizeable contribution by themselves? And how many lives will have been created, producing carbon and love and all, in order to get there?
I think there's a great deal of power to multiplying one's own efforts and get others to carry on one's torch, but really, having kids is by far not the only way to do this.
Nobody needs a brand new coffee table, when there are plenty of perfectly decent ones for sale second-hand.
These kind of articles are so misguided yet people are so hysterical they actually think the individual can do things.
There is nothing individuals can do that would actually help besides creating solutions to the ever changing consequences of the world we live in. Even if we by some magical event could stop all co2 emissions the climate would still change we would still need to move or fortify against changing sealevels for example.
But right now everyone is coming up with all sorts of irrational solutions to a problem that havent been properly defined and even if it was going to be as catastrophic as some have built themselves up to believe, flying less is going to have no useful effect.
Only way out of this is through the very technology that have created the cars, products etc. to begin with. The genie is out of the bottle and cant be let back in again unfortunately.
Science is never settled, but arrives at increasingly accurate approximations of reality. If climate science's best approximation is doom, the rational collective response is not ignorance, but simultaneously to explore and exploit (address) the problem. Exploration by better modeling of the climate, and exploitation by pursuing known best solutions to the problem. To use a personal example of a complex system, if a person should show signs of cancer, or a virulent disease, even if medicinal knowledge is not sufficiently advanced to flawlessly diagnose the symptom, drastic action even under imperfect information is very reasonable.
In the case that drastic corrections were not necessary with respect to the climate, this nevertheless furthers the global society's resilience and response for when such drastic correction is needed.
> These kind of articles are so misguided yet people are so hysterical they actually think the individual can do things.
Without contending whether or not 'the individual can do things', the article does not give me that impression. Whereas indeed the article advocates individuals to change their individual behavior, the article is written for an audience of many. When advocacy articles like these acquire a sufficiently large megaphone, like the BBC, they cause significant collective action.
> But right now everyone is coming up with all sorts of irrational solutions to a problem that havent been properly defined and even if it was going to be as catastrophic as some have built themselves up to believe, flying less is going to have no useful effect.
The problem is the recent increase in global temperature corresponding to the recent increase in greenhouse gas production. To use the personal analogy, the elimination of mutated cells causing the tumors.
> Only way out of this is through the very technology that have created the cars, products etc. to begin with.
I think that this is a very irrational or ignorant notion. Collective action plays a very important part in very many big problems. For example, the abolition of slavery and women' suffrage are made possible (in the former case) by technology, but collective action was needed to enable these events.
Some people echo the irrational notion you seem to express that that just because individual action is useless then so is collective action, and so therefore the individual action should not be pursued. But this is clearly not the case, since collective action happens. If it seems that most big changes are performed by organizations and institutions and not individuals, this nevertheless does not negate the thesis that collective action effects changes, since sufficiently developed and mature collective action tends to organize when able, so that they are more self-sustaining.
Not necessarily and that's certainly not settled. Kuhns paradigms is another way to think about it than Poppers idea of building knowledge as bricks that create a house. I am not convinced knowledge works the way we normally think about it.
Furthermore "climate science" is not actually following the scientific principles as it's not falsifiable for obvious reasons.
"Climate science" is metascience in the sense that it builds on and interprets data which has its own set of issues besides the issues with data modeling.
There are plenty of examples of mistakes, false predictions, cheating with the data etc. that anyone who wants to have an opinion on this should be really really really careful how much we actually can demonstrate vs. how much is speculated. Just taking it on faith that the scientific community is in agreement about a lot of the details is simply misguided.
There are plenty of theories around natural fluctuations even big ones like this (and bigger) so the trick IMO is not discussion whether humans are affecting it as we can't change that and will not change that, in fact, if we did it probably would lead to more death than the consequences of flooding and it certainly will lead to more poor people without any means to deal with the ever-changing climate.
You and others seem to be of the impression that nature is fundamentally friendly and safe towards us and we are destroying it, my position is that nature is fundamentally hostile and dangerous and that we are using technology to be safer from it. Yes, that has consequences but I take those any day compared to becoming paralyzed by trying to solve a problem that is many times more complex than any other things we have ever solved before. CopX is a great example of just how little our global initiatives help.
Flying less, eating less meat isn't the solution to the problem, more actual science, engineering and entrepreneurship and making people richer so they start caring about their close environment is.
>"Climate science" is metascience in the sense that it builds on and interprets data which has its own set of issues besides the issues with data modeling.
Yes, findings about climate are not reproducible in the straight and narrow sense of the scientific method, but there are methods to reason about these findings. Consider the utility of epidemiology, and how it informs medicine and health policies.
> There are plenty of examples of mistakes, false predictions, cheating with the data etc. that anyone who wants to have an opinion on this should be really really really careful how much we actually can demonstrate vs. how much is speculated. Just taking it on faith that the scientific community is in agreement about a lot of the details is simply misguided.
I take it that there is a broad consensus that climate change is man-made and that carbon emissions are very likely a huge driver of it. Many scientific professional organizations have issued statements about it. Many governments see the need to at least pay lip service to it.
> Kuhns paradigms
No, paradigm shifts help develop new and more accurate theory, but old theories still hold. Newtonian mechanics doesn't become obsolete even if a more accurate quantum picture has been developed. Even the primitive, less precise, yet intuitive Aristotelian notion of motion can be useful in many contexts, e.g. game physics that need to enable an unreal amount of control yet feel psychologically natural.
> in fact, if we did it probably would lead to more death than the consequences of flooding and it certainly will lead to more poor people without any means to deal with the ever-changing climate.
I don't see how the thrust of this statement is consistent with the immediate statement before
> IMO is not discussion whether humans are affecting it as we can't change that and will not change that,
> nature is fundamentally friendly and safe towards us and we are destroying it, my position is that nature is fundamentally hostile and dangerous and that we are using technology to be safer from it
I don't see how any general disposition of nature towards human society has any relevance toward my claim that solutions toward climate change must include an aspect that is not just technological products and services.
> Flying less, eating less meat isn't the solution to the problem, more actual science, engineering and entrepreneurship and making people richer so they start caring about their close environment is.
> Flying less, eating less meat isn't the solution to the problem.
I contend that they can be an important part of the solution to the problem. If it becomes sufficiently socially unacceptable, these activities will see a significant decrease. Many citizens already considers many activities taboo and immoral due to the influence of their society; online fraud, adultery, taking more than their fair share of an obvious common good when they don't need it; it is possible to frame excessive air travel or meat consumption as immoral.
> more actual science, engineering and entrepreneurship and making people richer so they start caring about their close environment is.
Similarly, I contend that collective agitation is important to enable the means that you cite. "more actual science, engineering and entrepreneurship" is enabled by voting for governments interested in funding research. The availability of science is enabled by the collective action of researchers and sponsors advocating for open access. The success and feasibility of entrepreneurship is enabled by voting for governments interested in limiting monopolies and anti-competitive behavior. The collective signaling of consumers that they are ready for alternatives encourage the establishment of businesses to cater to these alternatives, and to cater to them more efficien...
Full stop.
And this is the most important misconception which most people don't understand. They actually think the science is settled and that it's provable through the scientific process.
It's not not by any stretch.
The problem is that this discussion, even the one we are having right now is mostly a politically based discussion not a scientific based one and yet non-scientists, people who have never even looked at the claims they support, will shame you for being a climate-denier for even suggesting it's not as simple as claimed.
The claims are much more extreme than what the science support.
"I take it that there is a broad consensus that climate change is man-made and that carbon emissions are very likely a huge driver of it. Many scientific professional organizations have issued statements about it. Many governments see the need to at least pay lip service to it."
But that's not what you actually find. The 97% concensus actually include the socalled climate deniers, think about that for a while.
You can't expect people to just buy something on faith when you can't actually prove your theory. Even if they are wrong, even if the claim about the consensus was right you can't actually expect them to just take it on faith, the very opposition of what science is based on.
Science does not actually build on consensus it builds on falsification if you don't have falsification you have something else and much less precise than science, yet it's sold as if it's not and as long as this is not acknowledged you will not be able to have a rational discussion let alone solution. You don't even have agreement about what the problem will be, only a set of potential outcomes which is what you do in scenario planning. It's not science. Geologists are scientists and can measure but the people interpreting the date ads a layer of abstraction, interpretation and errors that's so large that it's actually antiscientific to use the "science says" argument.
There IS disagreement, not even about whether the climate is changing but what it means and how much.
If you don't think many climate scientists play lip-service to their donors (the politicians) then you haven't looked close enough.
So there are all sorts of reasons not to just take anything by these organisations even if you agree that there is a problem and that the climate is changing. In other words you don't have to become a climate catastrophist just because you agree that climate is always going to be challenge to humans.
"No, paradigm shifts help develop new and more accurate theory, but old theories still hold. Newtonian mechanics doesn't become obsolete even if a more accurate quantum picture has been developed. Even the primitive, less precise, yet intuitive Aristotelian notion of motion can be useful in many contexts, e.g. game physics that need to enable an unreal amount of control yet feel psychologically natural."
No old theories don't still hold. They are still useful in limated scope but they don't hold as complete theories which means that things that might look like one thing isn't actually what it looks like.
In Newtons world speed of gravity is infinite, in einsteins it's not, in quantum physics non-locality “disproves” the speed of light as the most fundamental force.
Three different paradigms the two latter btw both proven to the extent we can prove things but fundamentally contradictory.
In other words, Newton + Einstein + Bohr accumulates but there are fundmaental shifts that completely changes the reality they are trying to explain.
"I don't see how the thrust of this statement is consistent with the immediate statement before"
What is it that you don't see? Are you going for a gotcha momement or are you actually trying to understand wha...
Nevertheless, these climate claims are consistent with what I know to be true: that ecologies collapse when there is a great change in temperature (even when geology is similar), that carbon is a greenhouse gas, that we are emitting it at an unprecedented scale, and that carbon in the biosphere is conserved. I haven't seen a compelling model that assumes otherwise that does not predict the existence of a system that we haven't yet observed. One has to make a risk-cost decision either way on imperfect information, and I think the more consistent and conservative theory and its associated greater costs is the more optimal decision.
> Old theories don't still hold
> They are still useful in limated scope
On the other hand, it is usually more likely that phenomena predicted after a paradigm shift have more limited application, due to the principle that more inaccessible phenomena are more difficult to exploit. Even with the paradigm shift, it only gives us more accurate predictions about phenomena that we already have, agreeing with it to a large degree in most human-experience aspects. Consider that quantum mechanics see less application than newtonian mechanics. The old theory still holds in most situations indeed, whereas quantum theory requires an intractable amount of computation to obtain predictions. Quantum chemistry see less application than traditional models of chemistry. Similarly, any new findings on climate change solutions are very likely to be tougher to exploit than current solutions. So I do not think it is rational to wait for a technological hail mary.
> you have to live by that framing then it all falls apart. You have hundreds of millions of people if not billions who would do anything to become just a fraction as rich as you and me and do not care one ounce about their climate footprint and what you consider immoral
I think I have given sufficient examples that disagree with what you are saying. With respect to less prosperous communities, it is often the case that they have a more collectivistic mindset and community and in fact live under more taboos. Consider superstitions, rituals, and religious dietary restrictions. Also consider the case of British society a couple centuries ago, where the aspirational class lived more prudishly than the upper class or the lower class, based on a certain idealistic gentility.
> That's actually not even close to true which China is a pretty clear example of.
I don't know which aspect of the Chinese economy you are referring to. The electronics part, where there is no lack of signal from the countries it exports to, or its investment in green tech, in which case we may consider the Govt. one disproportionately strong actor in collective signalling.
"I think I have given sufficient examples that disagree with what you are saying."
You haven't given a single one. You are talking about people who are already rich and can afford to moralize over what food they put in their mouth. That's a very different kind of people than I talk about.
"I don't know which aspect of the Chinese economy you are referring to. The electronics part, where there is no lack of signal from the countries it exports to, or its investment in green tech, in which case we may consider the Govt. one disproportionately strong actor in collective signalling."
I am talking about the fact that the chinese market isn't free and open yet does very well.
It is science; basic chemistry tells you that carbon is conserved give or take a few nuclear reactions.
> You are talking about people who are already rich and can afford to moralize over what food they put in their mouth. That's a very different kind of people than I talk about.
I address that in the same paragraph
>> With respect to less prosperous communities, it is often the case that they have a more collectivistic mindset and community and in fact live under more taboos. Consider superstitions, rituals, and religious dietary restrictions.
> I am talking about the fact that the chinese market isn't free and open yet does very well.
Thanks for clarifying, in part, but I still don't see how this is an argument against to my notion of collective action being an essential component of technological development.
On the other hand, if more and more people demand certain things, for example organic food, then it causes companies and politics to change their behavior. If nobody wants microplastic-free soap and shampoo, nothing will change. If 50 people per day ask in a supermarket for microplastic-free soap and shampoo, management might notice.
But then: One big supermarket chain in Germany (REWE) ditched plastic bags altogether for paper bags and reusable cotton bags. I don't know what caused this – customers asking for it, politics, or some marketing guy with a "go green" mission. But obviously, this has a much larger impact on the environment than educating the masses about "reusing their shopping bags".
In a way, "saving the enviroment" is something that starts on an individual level, but the real useful stuff is actually implemented through politics, laws, and ultimately corporations chaning their behavior (or forcing a certain behavior on the masses, like REWE did).
Edit: The question now is: What can I do to make political changes happen on an individual level? Is it really my behavior that changes anything? Or can I have more leverage in any other way?
Maybe the worst point of the whole article, here is my point of view : educated and people aware of environment change have fewer kids, people with the opposite way of thinking have more kids and have the same education. We create a world where the people who don't care outnumber those who care, since the most praised government system is Democracy the power goes to the number.
Path to idiocracy (great message for a comedy movie).
More specifically: this fear is based on observed heritability of traits like intelligence, and also social status etc. While these are indeed hereditary, they quickly dissipate when considering more than a single generation.
Are you arguing that climate change denial is a genetic trait?
Shifting the blame to the consumer and shielding corporates is toxic. The Carbon Majors report last year illustrated pretty clearly that 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.
Me going vegan and not using straws isn't going to save the planet.