So if all world leaders collectively agreed to put aside their differences, ditch capitalism and mobilise their entire populations to actively work to reduce emissions tomorrow we might stand a slim chance of preventing the worst case scenario...
So existential dread and weed it is.
Is that from that Paul movie?
yep.
As an individual the single most important thing you can do is vote for leaders who will make the necessary policy changes to make a difference, assuming you live in a country where this is possible. You can try to lower your own carbon footprint, and that is laudable, but the only way to change this is with strict regulation of fossil fuels and investment in renewable energy and that requires collective action.
Speaking of policy changes, IMO the best thing you can do as an individual is lobby your local government for zoning reform to increase density and walkablity. Because it's local your influence can actually be significant, and zoning is by far the most transformative improvement we could make, dwarfing the impact of switching to EVs and whatnot.
assassinate the top 1%.
If each of us able bodied where to go and collect scalps of the top 1% we'd have a fighting chance.
Do what you can to stop feeding the petroleum products industry. They use the money you give them to literally fuel this crisis.
If you own your home, check into federal, state, and local rebates for these things:
Adding to these good suggestions: shop at thrift stores.
And if you have time: volunteer at a thrift store.
We wont.
That is reality, it doesn't matter if the entire world turn off fossil fuel usage permanently this instant, there is allready far too much greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere to reverse course, we might get to delay the inevitable a decade or so, but shit is comming.
Focus on income inequality and the rest will also get addressed. Cutting out meat is good, but that doesn't matter when Elon musk decides to jet from SFO to San Jose because he doesn't like traffic.
He should have his own car on the CalTrain. Would be much cooler and less polluting.
I know people here shit on individual action, but avoiding beef and driving are the two big ones
Not having kids is also huge
This is the biggest reduction to your possible carbon footprint. I'm glad I have been successful with this step.
And, please, raise a kid or three to pass that along. Just don't produce them.
Very pessimistic view here. I believe we have already passed the point of no return with human emissions. The worst of climate change will now happen faster and sooner than it naturally would. It's just a matter of mitigating the disaster imo.
Nothing. There is literally nothing you can do.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/the-carbon-brief-profile-china/
"China is the world’s largest annual greenhouse gas emitter.
In 2020, it emitted 12.3bn tonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2e), amounting to 27% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the CAIT database maintained by the World Resources Institute (WRI). This includes emissions from land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF).
. . .
It is a “non-Annex I” party to the convention, meaning it is not obligated to contribute climate finance and was not required to make binding emissions cuts under the Kyoto Protocol."
Nothing changes until China changes.
Way to put the blame on China when all of the Occident delocalized production over there. Every rich country needs to change, and they also need to help emerging countries to develop sustainably too. We spent centuries destroying the environment for growth and now we're on top, we can't tell these countries not to do everything we did because it's not sustainable.
Agreed on the "not much you can do on an individual level" though. We need to change the way we consume and live but it's peanuts compared to what needs to change for mega corpos and countries.
Yeah, I'd like to see emissions attributed to the places where products end up, not where they're produced.
You can find data on recycling where "being shipped to another country to be recycled" counts as being recycled I believe. Also you can find estimates of historical emissions by country since the industrial revolution. China is the current leader of emissions but I believe the US is top of all time, closely followed by Europe. I'll try to find some data when I have a moment.
Edit: Historical emissions
TIL the antonym to orient
Given that China has ~18% of the world’s population, it’s not super shocking that they produce 27% of emissions (especially given how much manufacturing has been outsourced there).
By comparison, the US has less than 5% of the world population and produces ~11% of emissions, with only Saudi Arabia being higher in per person emissions.
And here come the finger pointing Ameritards trying to deflect their own responsibilities after polluting the planet for the last century and still refusing to drop red meat & cars and moving vast amounts of their production capabilities to China. If you advocate for China not to develop their rural shitheap regions, then you should also advocate for actual de-growth in the US, significantly lowering your own living standards.
How about we do that per capita, Cowboy ?
Can we, like... Put a lid on China? Like a big dome or something?
US emissions per capita are double that of china . So where do you want your dome ?
We can have more than 1 dome.
Domes for everyone!
Miniature American flags for others.
My husband once said "we're not killing the planet, we're just rearranging it in a way that is not conducive to human life". I think about that when I feel hopeless, we're just a blip on a bigger radar, and we need to drop the main character syndrome that the world dies when we do.
Also though, scalp the 1%.
Get rid of capitalism. Which, we won't.
Degrowth until we live within planetary bounds accomplished with cultural evolution and ending capitalism is the only thing that could actually work.
All other proposed solutions fail to address the fundamental unsustainability of our way of life and could only hope to slightly slow our demise.
Adapt to it as best we can. Minimize your use of fossil fuels, particularly Natural Gas(Methane). Get some books on farming to understand a worst case need to live off grid.
We're past the point that we can go back. The glaciers on Antarctica and Greenland are in a self-sustaning melt cycle at this point.
Natural gas ads are popping up again, pretending to be the "clean" fossil fuel. It doesn't surprise me that they try this shit, but it does infuriate me.
Societal collapse.
A long and rough collapse, followed by a slow rebuilding of a much smaller but much more unified global society.
Can we have a quick collapse? If the world is going to catch on fire there's a few people I want to be sure are still alive when the consequences of their actions happen.
Are you the head of a major international corporation? If not, there's nothing meaningful you can do.
nuke the sun
It's as easy as stop reproducing.
So, ummm... Welp.
Damn.
Or reproduce more, but be selective such that our descendents are adapted to the new conditions.
Destroy the supply chain. It's surprisingly fragile, and if it fell over it might even be impossible to rebuild. For instance, energy production has a whole bunch of dependencies on mining, which requires large amounts of energy - and all the infrastructure requires constant maintenance, which requires all the infrastructure.
One swift kick in the nadgers and the whole system goes down in a tangled heap, with all your tools at the bottom.
Large-scale industry would be crippled out of existence for a very long time, possibly forever - and maybe the oceans wouldn't end up boiling.
There are plenty of chokepoints in the system, where a small disruption could have disastrous effects. Just look what one ship screwed up by getting temporarily stuck in a canal for a couple of weeks. If a nation or two set their mind to it, they could throw a spanner or three in the works that would rip the whole engine apart.
The human cost would be utterly devastating, of course. Billions would die, and the knock-on effects would just accelerate the decline.
But the way things are going, they're all going to die anyway, and take the rest of the planet down with them. This way seems less-worse, and we get to play The Last Of Us irl.
I die, and for the first time, know true peace.
Some seem to be concerned enough by it that they might threaten secession (forming new nations that will do something about it) if their nation won't do anything. And nations tend to hate secession.
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