It's pretty hopeless. I used to think we'd adjust in time, but that was when the decline looked more linear (or at least I thought it looked more linear).
Of the many people who I know who are seriously concerned re climate change, I'd say 2 have taken truly meaningful steps .
It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but still own two cars, never take public transport, eat meat daily, live in big houses, and buy buy buy.
If you think climate change is a serious issue. If you're concerned that scientists are now talking about the low single-digit years we have to change. If you have kids. Why the *@#! aren't you taking drastic change?
It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but still own two cars, never take public transport, eat meat daily, live in big houses, and buy buy buy.
Well, suppose all the people who want to be green go ahead and cut back to one car, go vegetarian, live in a smaller house, etc. etc. Maybe if everyone is really dedicated, we could all cut our emissions in half. So then what? We're still all emitting way more CO2 than the planet can absorb; climate change would still happen, it'd just be happening a bit more slowly.
We're not going to realistically solve this problem by all making personal sacrifices, because even in the best case, where everyone chips in, it's only enough to slow the bleeding. If we really want to truly solve this mess, we need to promote truly sustainable technologies that scale well and appeal to everyone.
Don't put solar panels on your house out of a personal sense of guilt about your own emissions, put them on your house because it grows the market for solar, stimulates research into better panels, and helps push forward the economies of scale that are needed to make renewables cost competitive with fossil fuels. Don't buy an electric car because you want to pollute less, buy an electric car because you want to fund the continued technological improvements of electric cars in general.
We're all focusing way too much on merely slowing down the death of the planet when we should be focusing on fixing the problem altogether. Don't aim for a slower death, aim for a faster transition to carbon-neutral. If we all feel that the planet is doomed anyway, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it's a lot harder to motivate ourselves to try and fix a problem that feels unfixable.
>>Don't put solar panels on your house out of a personal sense of guilt about your own emissions, put them on your house because it grows the market for solar, stimulates research into better panels, and helps push forward the economies of scale that are needed to make renewables cost competitive with fossil fuels
Or don't live in a house in the suburbs. Opt for medium or high-density residential areas, which are far more efficient in terms of both land and utility use.
They are, but they're also frequently far more expensive, and downright unaffordable to many people compared to much larger homes in more rural areas. In the big city near me, a little condo in a high-rise can easily cost $400k. But a couple hours away from the city I can buy a house for $50k or $75k. People who have no hope of earning enough money for a $400k condo (even though jobs in the city usually pay a little more) can frequently afford one of those rural properties.
It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but still own two cars, never take public transport, eat meat daily, live in big houses, and buy buy buy.
Given the evidence of all of recorded history and archaeological evidence, how is the denial of economics any better than climate change denial? We have many, many examples of environmental changes combined with misaligned incentives bringing about the end of many civilizations.
As another HN commenter on this post noted, you can't overturn people's incentives through moralizing about some abstract fear. Even when pursuing an obvious course of justice, Gandhi knew that you must align with people's day to day incentives. It does no one good to rail against the stupidity of the masses and the greed of corporations. We need to figure out how to align everyone's incentives.
you can't, in the short term. There are no good long-term solutions that are not going to cause some acute pain in the short term. Deep down everyone knows this, and the increasing viciousness of politics is, under the surface debates, a fight over who is going to have to bear that pain and to what degree.
> "It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green."
We see time and time again that laws are required to achieve massive rapid change and reduce the economic impact of that change.
In 1974 one could have spent thousands on a custom installed catalytic converter. That "green" person would have experienced a great financial burden and see no measurable impact on air quality. It would have been a foolish decision. That's why we need laws and that is why the handful of climate change deniers, that have a disproportionate influence on policy, are so dangerous.
This is why I'm so concerned about the trend that SUV sales are outpacing Sedan sales. Whereas sedans used to be the "default" car a decade ago, SUVs are now taking their place [0].
All things being equal, a smaller car (sedan) should get better MPG than a larger car (SUV) [1].
And yet it seems that people's efforts to reduce their environmental footprint is focused on recycling a plastic cup here and there [2].
A very general trend over the past few decades shows us that the price of gas / gallon has increased. So Americans' response to this is: I need to buy a bigger car? A pollution tax would certainly help but is far too big of a thing to accomplish in the short-term.
I've been contemplating a sort of "big car" tax for a number of reasons, and increased gasoline consumption / environmental impact is a key item on that list. (Non-environmental items include (1) the danger they pose to other drivers in smaller vehicles, and (2) the race-to-the-bottom condition no. 1 imposes, since more and more people will want larger vehicles when they feel threatened by the presence of large vehicles on the road, leading to a positive reinforcement cycle)
At least around here if you ask people why they, as the only person in the vehicle, drive something so big many will answer, "so, I win". The idea being that in an accident the larger vehicle will provide more protection.
Soon we will all be driving semi-tractors just so we can "win" against the largest vehicles on the road.
> A pollution tax would certainly help but is far too big of a thing to accomplish in the short-term.
There's no need for a big car tax or a pollution tax. We could just end the massive fuel subsidies we have in the US. Of course that is also unlikely to be accomplished in the short term.
Just to add a little context, people were buying huge cars back in the early years of the century (remember Hummers?). Then rising gas prices, the financial crisis, and Obama's election made that unfashionable. Now many people feel better off economically and are buying the large cars they secretly wanted anyway.
Granted some people buy gratuitously large vehicles, but for many there is a practical purpose: moving large amounts of stuff. Whether it's multiple bags of mulch, dorm room furniture, sports equipment, more than 3 kids, or just lots of luggage for a family road trip, there's definitely an advantage to a big car there. Not to mention better performance in snow depending on model.
In any case, one we get non-luxury electric SUVs the point will largely be moot.
I think people delude themselves into thinking they're purchasing an SUV to transport a lot of stuff or to travel with kids, when in reality drivers nonetheless drive alone.
Anecdotally, as I've said, SUVs have simply replaced Sedans as the "default" car on the road. And as you may know, the "default" car in America has a single driver.
> In any case, one we get non-luxury electric SUVs the point will largely be moot.
I disagree on the basis of the positive reinforcement cycle causing people to buy larger cars in the first place. From speaking to other drivers and listening to them as they think out their thought process when deciding what new car to buy, the #1 reason people want to drive an SUV is safety (which may include the point you made about performance in snow).
Not that I have anything against safety itself, but you must see the arms race that can occur from seeking safety in a larger vehicle. When other people are driving larger vehicles around you, you may feel endangered and thus buy a larger car yourself. That causes other drivers to buy larger cars in turn. No one can have "the biggest car". They only keep getting bigger.
So this notion that electric SUVs are going to save us is moot, I believe. People will still clamor for larger (now-electric) SUVs for their safety, reducing their eMPG (electric-equivalent MPG).
> I think people delude themselves into thinking they're purchasing an SUV to...travel with kids...
There has been a big change in the US that pushed many families to select SUV's and bigger cars in general: child seats became mandatory. These were rare during the 70's and earlier. They take up quite a lot of space when rear-facing (and if you use them strictly according to guidelines, they will be installed rear-facing for a very big part of their service life).
During the 70's it wasn't unusual to see families cramming groceries and shopping items in between where their children sat in the car, and anywhere else the items would fit, for that matter; you can't do that any longer, and in fact higher child safety awareness in cars even discourages that practice because of the possibility those items become missiles during an accident.
Nor is this practice recommended for where the adults sit. So a lot of families end up going with SUV's or minivans (why station wagons are not picked is another tragic story), to have enough to safely carry passengers, shopping, and sports/activity gear.
So yes, you can advocate for smaller cars, but you should be up front about the trade-off. Either more trips are made, wasting time, money and fuel, and/or safety is compromised, and/or lifestyles are drastically altered. To sell these compromises, you have to offer a benefit more compelling than "catastrophic outcome that doesn't affect you now might be averted". I'm not saying we shouldn't adopt small cars (I bike most days myself), I'm laying out the reality on the ground to convince the mass of developed world citizens to adopt them.
Well sure SUVs, even electric ones will never be the most efficient forms of transportation. But if most or all of that energy comes from carbon neutral sources that relative inefficiency doesn't hurt all that much.
And I don't see the safety slope going much further than Vans/Pickups/SUVs. Are people going to start demanding de-militarized MRAPs for safety purposes? I doubt it. The safety cycle you describe is driven by the original users of the vehicles. Ex: Someone buys an SUV because they do a lot of kayaking/camping. That person gets in an accient with a smaller car and totals said smaller car while the SUV has a few dents in the bumper. Some people see this on the news, freak out and buy SUVs so now all things are equal. End of cycle. The kayaker doesn't buy another, bigger SUV, or upgrade to an 18 wheeler just to compete.
I used to drive a four door sedan(Chevy Impala) and was perfectly happy with it (My then 17 year old daughter totaled it, going up against another Impala). When the time came to find it's replacement I had to meet a certain pragmatic requirement. My wife has now had six back surgeries. When her mini-van needed to be in the shop for a few days we realized that she has a substantial amount of difficulty getting out of even a large car like my Impala. We needed a second vehicle that she could basically enter/exit easily. I now drive a small'ish SUV (Kia Sorento). My Impala was probably more sturdily built, I certainly didn't feel un-safe in it.
My fiancee inherited an SUV when her parents moved back to their country of origin, and it really is much better than my compact sedan for moving furniture.
My utility trailer is far better than your SUV for hauling furniture, appliances, mulch, etc. And for the 363 days of the year that I'm not hauling anything needing that much capacity, my economy car gets far better fuel economy than your SUV while also being safer to drive because it's smaller, faster, and more agile, and doesn't roll over so easily so I can avoid accidents better.
>multiple bags of mulch, dorm room furniture, sports equipment, more than 3 kids, or just lots of luggage for a family road trip
How are these practical purposes? The mulch can stay on the lawn or you could compost it at home; moving dorm room furniture twice a year for 2-4 years does not justify a large vehicle; sports equipment sounds like an attempt to justify a few trips each year into the mountains for a trip to a Ski resort; kids make sense I feel sorry for my parents when I was a child with two siblings stuffed into a 1993 Kia Sephia during road trips, but you could also just not have kids, this is a discussion on ways to reduce climate changes effects and drivers not increase them; and if you have an occasional need for lots of luggage you can do what my parents did for the Kia and put a travel box on top.
You have to transport the mulch from the store somehow. If you've got a dozen bags, it adds up. Doing summer and winter sessions I moved in and out of dorms at least 4 times a year. My family also took 5+ hour multi-week road trips to see distant relatives when I was a kid. You'd be surprised how much luggage that can entail.
These types of things things might be occasional, maybe every few weeks at most, but to me that justifies buying the larger vehicle. It may not be the ideal solution, but that's hardly a reason not to use it.
As for not having kids... yeah no. I don't understand how anyone who wants kids can even entertain that thought. Like telling me I should just chop off an arm so my body can conserve resources.
>You have to transport the mulch from the store somehow. If you've got a dozen bags, it adds up.
See I thought you meant yard waste from your own yard to a landfill. Arguing that you need a SUV for a purchase of mulch from a store still can't be justified. Rent a vehicle for like $20 for the day. You cannot not live long enough to beat an entry level sedan and a yearly one day rental compared to even an entry level SUV, much less a full-size SUV. Heck get two entry level sedans for the price of one entry level SUV, now you can haul 8 people and your mulch, while using less gas than the full-size SUV and being able to improve your routing.
>Doing summer and winter sessions I moved in and out of dorms at least 4 times a year.
"Hey when I do this really odd exception it throws a wrench in normal plans." I really don't know what entails needing a SUV to move in and out 4 times a year. Renting a Uhaul will be cheaper than the yearly insurance premium difference between a small vehicle and a large SUV. Or if you could stand to be away from a lot of it when staying at what I assume is your parent's fully furnished house when you aren't in school you could rent a storage unit instead of dragging all your knick-knacks across the country.
>My family also took 5+ hour multi-week road trips to see distant relatives when I was a kid. You'd be surprised how much luggage that can entail.
My family did that same and we'd just attach the cargo box to the top of the vehicle and make my sister not pack 2 giant suitcases. The occasional need for lots of cargo capacity doesn't necessitate always having the capacity.
>As for not having kids... yeah no.
What about less kids? What about not having them all at the same time, i.e. you can have a little car because the kids are separated by 15+ years?
>Like telling me I should just chop off an arm so my body can conserve resources.
Well why did you grow that extra arm? Child bearing is relatively optional.
If you need to move more than 3 kids, you need to get a minivan. But most suburban people don't, they get the more gas-guzzling SUVs instead. Minivans can also haul a lot more cargo; SUVs are generally rather poor at that.
For most people who rarely move cargo, and don't have so many kids, a much more sensible solution is to get a small/midsize car, and use a utility trailer when you need to move things. My economy car can easily move a washing machine and dryer, or a large riding mower, something that pretty much no SUV can do, thanks to a trailer. While I'm pulling a trailer I get fuel economy similar to a midsize SUV, but it's not often I'm pulling the trailer so the rest of the time I'm getting 40mpg.
Electric SUVs will still consumer significantly more energy than electric cars. You can't change basic physics.
Depends on the SUV. Minivans are fine, I grew up riding in one. Trailers are cool if you have a car with a hitch. I'm not even sure if my sedan's even capable of having a hitch attached without some sort of bumper replacement.
Regardless, my point isn't that SUVs are the perfect solution, just that they have their uses. Could those uses be accomplished by something slightly more efficient? Maybe, but that doesn't make buying the SUV borderline criminal like some here seem to believe.
Case in point, if 10 years from now we have electric SUVs that are completely powered by solar/wind/clean energy, why do you care if it's slightly less efficient? Talk about splitting hairs...
No, it doesn't. The requirement is more than 3 kids. A small or midsize SUV has the same passenger capacity as a sedan (5: 2 in front, 3 in back), so now you're talking about a large 3-row SUV. There's no possible way a large 3-row SUV gets better efficiency than a typical minivan.
> Trailers are cool if you have a car with a hitch. I'm not even sure if my sedan's even capable of having a hitch attached without some sort of bumper replacement.
Wrong. Any normal sedan has a hitch available. Check out Curt, Hidden Hitch, Reese, etc. etrailer.com carries most makes. I'd be surprised if you could find any car other than maybe a Smart which doesn't have a hitch available. Even a Prius has a hitch available.
>Regardless, my point isn't that SUVs are the perfect solution, just that they have their uses.
No, they really don't, except for off-roading, which isn't something you need to do on a regular basis anyway unless you're some kind of far-out rural dweller (and even there, a Subaru will probably work just fine). Other vehicles can do the same job but much better. People: minivan. Cargo: 4x8 or 5x8 utility trailer. Worse, SUVs are dangerous: they're far more prone to rolling over, and can be rolled even by high winds.
>Case in point, if 10 years from now we have electric SUVs that are completely powered by solar/wind/clean energy
Why would you want something so inferior, even if you could reduce the energy requirement? And it's still never going to be that low. Electric is better, but not that much better: hundreds of millions of people driving eSUVs is still far more energy than those same people driving e-cars. You can't get around the basic laws of physics: more mass and higher wind resistance = more energy.
The system has evolved to make change very difficult. One part of this post on ZeroHedge shows you the supply chain involved with just a ketchup. 52 transport and process stages. Fifty-two.
"Just how energy inefficient the food system is can be seen in the crazy case of the Swedish tomato ketchup. Researchers at the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology analysed the production of tomato ketchup. The study considered the production of inputs to agriculture, tomato cultivation and conversion to tomato paste (in Italy), the processing and packaging of the paste and other ingredients into tomato ketchup in Sweden and the retail and storage of the final product. All this involved more than 52 transport and process stages.
The aseptic bags used to package the tomato paste were produced in the Netherlands and transported to Italy to be filled, placed in steel barrels, and then moved to Sweden. The five layered, red bottles were either produced in the UK or Sweden with materials form Japan, Italy, Belgium, the USA and Denmark. The polypropylene (PP) screw-cap of the bottle and plug, made from low density polyethylene (LDPE), was produced in Denmark and transported to Sweden. Additionally, LDPE shrink-film and corrugated cardboard were used to distribute the final product. Labels, glue and ink were not included in the analysis."
How does an individual affect change when something as basic as a bottle of ketchup is clearly part of the world that'd built itself with disregard for its impact on the planet?
Re-optimizing said supply chains in an oil constrained, and eventually oil free world seems extremely non-trivial. I wonder if we will soon have to scale up the methods (both computationally, & in human/practical industrial re-organization terms) to plot new paths and then connect them, before the graph changes so much that the potential for profit disappears.
In the near term,I could see human engineers using deep learning or other computational methods for multi-scale optimization to reduce costs and carbon footprint based on locality of original sources (food/biofuels/..) In the medium term, I would bet that AI agents will exist precisely to optimize these tasks. There's hundreds of billions to be (re)-made in (re)-wiring the economy properly.
You should read Homebrew Industrial Revolution by Kevin Carson, particularly his break down of the Industrial Revolution. Mostly the IR was driven by state actors or those who could influence them such as with the UK's Enclosure Act which forced peasants to work in factories and in the US with the transcontinental railroad which was lobbied for by industrial interests on the East coast who wanted a slice of the West coast pie of regional production/consumption. Basically, everything up to this point is the result of capitalism and its owners who are protected from market forces of regional and local production/consumption which would follow more closely than what we have today where companies literally throw away brand new shoes and electronics to keep their prices high.
How is this inefficient? I definitely think that markets have the potential to be very inefficient, but do we know that the alternatives to this are any more efficient? Economies of scale often do make it more efficient for all of a particular kind of product to be produced in one location and then shipped to wherever they're needed. The fact that there are 52 steps to the process says nothing about the actual efficiency of it. It's just a play to ignorance to the fact that almost all products we enjoy go through a similarly complicated supply chain.
It's only inefficient in the sense that it expends more gas (thus leading to higher emissions) than is strictly necessary. However, I also assume that it is cheaper for food to be distributed and processed in this manner; this is usually what people mean by "efficient".
I doubt those two people have actually taken truly meaningful steps, unless they're powerful politicians, business leaders, or high up in a relevant regulatory agency.
This is the root of the problem: the actions of most individuals don't matter no matter what they are. Let's say I switch entirely to renewable energy, stop eating meat, buy local food, and do every other thing possible to reduce my footprint. Great, now I've added, what, an extra half a second to the time we have before catastrophe? It just doesn't matter.
Everyone working together is what makes a difference, of course, but that's hard. It's not just a matter of convincing everyone to act individually.
This lazy cynicism is far too commonplace, and easily countered: If a whole lot of people added their half-seconds together, it would matter a whole lot.
You either care enough to change your behavior or you don't. Don't pass your lack of courage of conviction off onto nameless "...politicians, business leaders or [those] high up in a relevant regulatory agency."
I already addressed that in the last paragraph of my comment. Yes, if a whole lot of people did it together, it would matter a lot. And if wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steak.
It takes a completely different approach to get a lot of people to take action than it does to take action myself. If I want other people to change their lives, I need to convince them to do it, or force them to do it, or come up with great new technology that allows them to do it while making their lives better, or something like that. If I want to change my own life, I need to buy different stuff, use different stuff, eat different stuff, etc. The two are essentially unrelated.
You're right, I don't care enough to change my behavior. That's because the effort/reward ratio is completely busted. The reward is indistinguishable from zero, so I'd need to care an essentially infinite amount.
It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say
they're green, but still own two cars, never take public
transport, eat meat daily, live in big houses, and buy
buy buy.
This is the classic neoliberal "individual responsibility" framing, meant to cast global warming purely as a personal moral issue, and deflect attention from regulating corporations, which burn the majority of fossil fuels. Ending corn ethanol and oil industry subsidies will do far more than guilting people to buy electric cars.
What kind of drastic change should one take? Not having kids, OK, drastic but doable. Cutting out meat, driving less, etc, OK.
But what about the rest of the production chain that assumes you're the same as everyone else (whom continues to use and depend on that production chain), which is an ocean of waste compared to what any single person can do? We can individually push the needle very slightly, but it does nothing to push the needle on our behalf within the bigger economic machine. All those wasteful international processes are pushing forward faster than ever. It's like we're bleeding out and you just recommended dabbing the wound with a string of thread.
What are some realistic things that an individual or group of individuals can do to prepare?
The energy consumption (and therefore carbon emissions) per capita in the west/US comes almost entirely from the feedback loop between single-family-detached housing and the car-or-two it takes to live in that kind of sprawled out lifestyle. Put another way, Transportation and Housing (heating & cooling) are the #1 and #2 sources of carbon emissions for suburban, exurban and rural dwellers.
If you live in a 5+ unit building, do not own a car, rarely fly, sign up for your utilities low-carbon supply option, and cut out red meat, its possible to be a full order of magnitude below the american average.
http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Am...
So the #1 thing an American can do to fight climate change is be "pro-city". Move there. Encourage building/density there. Help fix the schools. Use, vote for, and demand more and better public transit.
People who insist on having a yard and several feet of air-gap between them and their neighbors are the real climate change deniers.
> So the #1 thing an American can do to fight climate change is be "pro-city". Move there. Encourage building/density there. Help fix the schools. Use, vote for, and demand more and better public transit.
This seems nearly as impossible as direct political action against climate change. Effectively, none of the current residents of cities want anyone else to move there, let alone allow more development, especially of greater density. Cities themselves seem to be pretty uniformly terrible at scaling-up to support larger populations. NYC's subways seem pretty close to crippling failure as-is.
I don't prefer revolution, but some kind of significant 'shake-up' seems pretty inevitable given the ossification of all of the relevant 'systems'.
This is another area where technology is hugely beneficial. Not everyone can move to a city, but people who drive to work could work remotely one day a week. Hell, let's make it Friday, who wouldn't like that? There are few office-type jobs that one just CAN'T do remotely at least one day a week, so you've cut a significant part of the emissions of a significant part of the American population.
And this can be instituted as an economic incentive; employers could get a tax credit or something in exchange for the proportion of work they allow employees to do remotely.
Are American cities ready to build enough housing and infrastructure to handle a collective influx of over 120,000,000 Americans currently living in suburbs and rural areas? HA! I wouldn't and actually couldn't (financially) move to a major city as it stands barring a pretty sumptuous raise or downsizing from my 2 BR apartment to a studio. Rents are ridiculous, taxes are higher, air is much more polluted, traffic is horrible, public transit is hit or miss and often unreliable. If all of that improved I might reconsider, and I'll land my flying pig on my urban apartment balcony when that happens. For all the mayors' talk about meeting the Paris accords, or as "enlightened" as many cities think they are (looking at you SanFran), many of those cities will need their own bastille day where the city zoning laws are literally torn up burned in the streets before being "pro-city" is even reasonable for anyone lower than upper-middle-class.
Complete revolution would be ideal for meaningful change but is highly unlikely. As it stands we have to adapt existing systems to be clean, or at least cleaner. That means LED light bulbs, more solar (rooftop or grid) and wind/hydro/geothermal where possible, and electric vehicles. Which is where we're heading right now. Given the current rate of expansion, I imagine suburban emissions from housing/transportation will drop drastically over the next 50 years. Meanwhile those yards are carbon sinks.
The problem with American cities is NIMBYism: existing property owners are the ones with control of the zoning and the approval for new construction. So SanFran can't replace its too-small housing with lots of high-density high-rises because the people who own the other land there don't want it.
The fix for this is to move control of zoning and construction permits to the state level.
Sadly, being "pro-city" is extremely political. Even if we could set aside people's personal preferences, I'm not sure how we start to overcome the ideological gap between urban and rural residents...
>"People who insist on having a yard and several feet of air-gap between them and their neighbors are the real climate change deniers."
Why are we the climate change deniers? What about those of us with yards that are completely edible and green and don't require our food to be hauled in from across the country? I don't think the issue is as cut-and-dry as you make it sound. I'd also recommend you look into the agricultural and food supply chain for these large dense cities.
>So the #1 thing an American can do to fight climate change is be "pro-city". Move there.
I love the idea of higher-density living, the problem is that it's simply unaffordable for a large part of the population. They can only afford houses with yards and several feet of air-gap, as you put it. How do you propose to fix this?
For example, look at Japan. In Tokyo, you can rent a small (very small) efficiency apartment for perhaps $500, according to what I hear on YouTube. A larger one big enough for a couple might be $900 or $1000. Such a place will be clean, safe, and just a few minutes' walk from the subway. Now look at NYC: there's no possible way you'll find something to rent at that price in a place that's at all safe. So telling people to "move there" is really rather asinine; are you going to pay me $1500/month so I can afford a livable apartment in Manhattan? (I'll make up the other $1000 on my own, your $1500 is a subsidy)
As long as the property owners in a municipality have all the power over building and density, we're going to have this problem.
Realistically, you should make communities local and more self-sufficient, like they used to be.
This idea that you have to commute 20 miles to work every day, in a personal car, is less than 100 years old. People used to grow up, live, work, and marry and raise families in their villages. Not many would travel all the time. Mozart was probably the most traveled of his time, and he probably didn't go half as many miles as the average worker today.
Make it so people can work from home. Give them an unconditional basic income so they don't have to work.
The problem is capitalism, as much as many people here don't like to hear it. Capitalism is great at what it does -- but it doesn't care about externalities. If a person runs out of food, capitalism doesn't care. If a species goes extinct, the world is turned into farms and monocultures, or the planet is polluted or resources are depleted, capitalism won't care until it's done.
Self-sufficiency is rife with its own inefficiencies.
For example, using Mozarts timeframe and attempting it place it on our current planet leads to a situation where no logical comparison can be made. He is from around 1800, there were around 900 million people at the time. You could grow enough locally to feed the population locally in most places. This is no longer true. Mass transportation of food, water, and resources for survival are currently necessary.
The problem is not capitalism, the problem is people
Pretty much every living creature goes through stages of increased resource availability -> growth -> overshooting population capacity or resource reduction -> population reduction. As we can see, overpopulation of raccoons, antelopes, and alligators isn't caused by capitalism, it is caused by the biological imperative to breed -> consume -> breed -> consume. Furthermore your willingness to blame capitalism blinds you to knowledge and an impartial view of what is occurring. Such as, most first world capitalistic countries are experiencing population stagnation. Japan, US, and western Europe all have decreasing population, until you take immigration into account. Also many non-capitalistic countries have terrible problems with pollution (Russia anyone?), thereby again rendering your premise that capitalism is the problem. Blaming the wrong thing never fixed the problem, whipping boys don't lead to solutions.
One drastic change would be to abandon capitalism and the idea of growth. Instead, we should be focusing on sustainability which is completely at odds with capitalism.
We need to start making products that are designed to last a long time as opposed to them having been built for planned obsolescence. We need to start abandoning throw away things like plastic containers. For example, Coca-Cola produces a staggering 100 billion disposalbe plastic bottles http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/coca-cola-pl... a year. We have to start moving heavy industry off fossils. We have to move away from combustion engines, and need to abandon cars in general.
The reality of the situation is that most contribution to climate change comes from industrial sources and not individuals.
What's going to happen is that majority of humanity will simply die off. If enough humans are left alive to carry on civilization, hopefully they will have learned something from that.
Re kids: I was saying if you have kids, surely that's even more reason to act.
I'm not a survivalist. No idea if you want to prepare? Move north and stock up on guns, ammo, seed, water and soil?
But, I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Well over 50% of Americans and Europeans view climate change as a threat. That's 500 million of the most affluent humans on the planet. The "economic machine", by which I assume you mean $3 bottled water, SUV, McMansions, beef, exists for them; not the other way around.
Although there might be opportunities for beach-front surf shops on tropical Baffin Island, good luck getting customers when the rest of the world has gone to hell.
Customers aren't often a concern for the subsistence farmer, although I suppose you might sell or barter any surplus - though you may be better advised to share it freely and so build goodwill.
The average person has a hard enough time with immediate issues: overeating, exercising, saving for retirement, substance dependencies. So, personal life changes as response to climate change is not something we should rely on.
Just thinking out loud here, but if the arctic somehow contains more carbon and methane than all we've released into the atmosphere (can someone explain why that is???) then can't we:
1) Coat the entire arctic with a more reflective compound, so it will not be as likely to melt under the same summer temperatures... the expense of this would be far less than the fallout later. This may interfere with some life in the arctic that depends on surface ice somehow. But considering the rest of the planet will have to adapt in the alternative scenario, I'd say this life would have to adapt. I doubt it has much effect on the rest of the world.
2) Do one of those sci-fi thingies where a compound is discovered which instantly causes a chain reaction to crystallize e.g. water at much higher temperatures than the current melting point. Salt can lower the melting point of water. Isn't there anything that can raise it? But obviously we wouldn't have enough of that compound to just inject into the ice. I've seen spontaneous crystallization of water into ice at room temperature when you hit a bottle. Maybe something like this can be done on a more permanent basis.
3) Release reflective material into the atmosphere (like in nuclear winter) to counteract the greenhouse gas effect and hope this doesn't somehow cause deadly pollution in some other way. After all, the Earth can only radiate energy into space, convection with the vacuum of space doesn't really transfer heat away much at all. But we can reflect the sun's radiation to the Earth, and limit the heating up that way.
4) Instead of reflective material, you can fly satellites into space where they cast a shadow on the Earth (assuming the sun is far enough, I haven't done the calculations, it might be possible that small satellites or gas clouds can cast a shadow on the Earth just like the moon's umbra will in August 19th this year). And in that case we can try to reflect a lot of the energy that way. Of course, they would have to be SUPER reflective and have a high surface area, or they'd heat up within a decade rendering them useless.
These are not very good gen-engineering ideas but we may be compelled to engage in gen-engineering of some kind. It will be risky, with side effects that we'll know but more worrying will be the unintended effects that we didn't predict. They more we can do to reduce our negative output, the less ham-fisted tinkering with the planet's systems we'll have to do.
There are lots of good ideas for reducing or eliminating the harm of climate change. But they're sacrilegious because people worry they might lull others into not trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I'm pretty confident we'll do something like this to fix it when it comes.
If you look at the changes of carbon emission per country, the U.S. emission has decreased in the last 20 years. China's emission has tripled in the same period:
The main reason is the growth of Chinese economy. So if you want to make real impact, help the next emerging economies to grow without incurring huge growth in emissions. For example, if you look at the per-capital carbon emission by country:
China's is half of that of US, while India's is 1/8. Imagine if the India's number grow 4 times to that of China's, any saving in the U.S. will be completely cancelled out and some. In fact, U.S. can cut its emission to 0, and India only needs to grow its number to 75% of that of China's to cancel out the U.S. improvement.
The big energy producers love this message because it results in nothing happening. The only way we will solve this problem is by attacking it at the source, by shifting taxes to carbon.
It's a tragedy of the Commons problem. I'd vote in a heart beat to make meat consumption illegal, even completely burninh the usage of fossil fuels and even to attack countries that refuse to do the same. However, if only I stop eating meat and driving my car the only thing that will happen is that my quality of life gets lowered.
> If you're concerned that scientists are now talking about the low single-digit years we have to change.
This type of alarmism does not help anyone. The "authorities" have been saying "single digit years" for decades, not "just now". The average person has seen very little change causing more denialism to spread.
This is super interesting to me, because in the Seattle bubble I live in, I feel like everyone my age has at most 1 car, often 0. Usually a small car (I have a compact prius) and drives transit the vast majority of the time. We also are very good about recycling and composting within the city.
I'd very much like my next employer to be one that is actively working toward climate solutions, and has a large leverage. Any suggestions?
Obvious choices would be Tesla (any large automaker with a serious electric program), or a political organization with sane and pragmatic environmental goals.
> It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but still own two cars, never take public transport, eat meat daily, live in big houses, and buy buy buy.
The car and the "buy, buy, buy" are the only real problems. Cut those two out and the big houses and meat aren't a big deal (or are at least workeable).
Probably the biggest thing you could do to help the environment is not buy any kind of mobile device and to run your computer into the ground.
I don't know about all meat but the deforestation for cattle ranching and feed, methane produced by the beasts themselves, and other factors seem to be fairly significant. The much greater energy requirements to light, heat, and cool big houses should not be discounted so easily either.
>The much greater energy requirements to light, heat, and cool big houses should not be discounted so easily either.
Heat and cool, yes. Light, no, not any more. Lighting is really pretty insignificant now thanks to LEDs, and getting constantly better as the older incandescents get replaced.
Of the many people who I know who are seriously concerned re climate change, I'd say 2 have taken truly meaningful steps .
It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but still own two cars, never take public transport, eat meat daily, live in big houses, and buy buy buy.
If you think climate change is a serious issue. If you're concerned that scientists are now talking about the low single-digit years we have to change. If you have kids. Why the *@#! aren't you taking drastic change?