I know that a lot of people feel helpless because it's the big corporations that are emitting, but companies only emit CO2 if consumers pay them to do so.
Buying everything consciously, whether its food, appliances, housing, or a ticket to some performance, will make the world better.
This is a pretty good idea but it needs a lot of people doing it.
We're in the process of moving home and putting everything into boxes makes one realize how much crap one has bought unnecessarily.
We're on a relatively special case in that we've only recently moved (18 months ago) so we actually have stuff that has never been used in our current house. A lot of this stuff has been donated to charity and some tossed but still my gf wants to take some stuff that hasn't been used in at least 18 months to the new house.
I am excluding Tools and camping gear from the list. The former for obvious reasons, the latter due to having recently had a baby we've not been camping for a bit, YMMV
The problem is that the current society and economic system are "forcing" us to buy/have more and more thing on cheaper prices at any environmental costs.
I would also like to add that some countries could contribute more by offering public transit infrastructure (like, at all - looking at you "deep south of the United States", where cities don't have any transit systems, whatsoever) and encouraging/subsidising/what-have-you of far more rail use than plane use.
Essentially, you're never going to drive car use down (and, thereby, fossil fuel use), if there are no viable alternatives than using a car and the poorest areas can't afford to "catch-up" to the electic vehicle trend[s].
Yes, the effect might be miniscule, compared to the output of CO^2 by businesses, but every little bit helps - when deforestation continues in the Amazon (e.g.: "the world's lungs") and we're not planting enough trees (anywhere) to counter-act that.
From the very same link you provided (fetched via WebArchive[0], as FAO seems down right now):
>However, deforestation is the second-leading cause of climate change after burning fossil fuels and accounts for nearly 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions — more than the world’s entire transport sector.
How can we be doing "not that bad" and it be the second-leading cause? These do not equate.
Make sure your assets are shielded from the consequences. I'm a strong believer in voting with legs.
For example - it's insane how the Miami real estate prices ignore what's going on (they even have a cheerful name - "sunny day floods"): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MIXRNSA
Just sell it already! There's nothing good waiting for Miami, the city will die. Rent if you really want to stay till it blows up.
Of course for the worst case scenario (hundreds of millions of refugees from dried up / flooded places) no assets management strategy will help, as this will be a world-war impact event.
The flooding that is (was?) occurring in Miami was largely the result of a poorly designed rain-drain system, one which was installed with little to no back-flow prevention. This new system, which was put in place into allow rainwater to flow into the ocean more easily and so prevent flash flooding, unfortunately also allowed the ocean to easily flow back into the streets when conditions were right and so caused tidal flooding instead.
This was all covered in detail in the press at the time the problem first started occurring, and of course it made everyone involved look really bad. But then someone came up with "climate change" as the cause instead, so now the guilty parties had something to hide behind. The press had a field day with it, too, using it as "proof" of dangerously rising sea levels.
The attempted solution here (which is why I said "was?") was to install drainage pumps much like the type you find in New Orleans, because apparently going back and adding the proper back-flow prevention devices was going to be too involved and too expensive. But, of course, just as soon as those pumps were activated people started complaining about how they were polluting the ocean. In fact, they probably aren't putting anything into the ocean that wasn't already going there eventually anyway; they just made the situation more obvious.
New Orleans is itself in a rapidly deteriorating state. I lived there for over 30 years, and it has gotten progressively worse and worse over time.
There are now frequent periods where you have to boil your water before you can use it, and it floods in a hard rain which didn't really happen 10 years ago.
I guess what I am saying is I don't believe you, and most of New Orleans going into the ocean as well.
New Orleans and Miami will just slowly deteriorate over time and people will stop investing in these places because it isn't worth the flood risks. Eventually New Orleans will really just be a tourist destination. The French Quarter and probably some of uptown around St. Charles will survive unless things get really bad.
> I guess what I am saying is I don't believe you, and most of New Orleans going into the ocean as well.
And why not? You could, you know, lift a finger and go check out for yourself the relevant local news reports about the current and past situation, but you have to go back a few years now to see how it all actually got started.
And pretty much all of coastal Louisiana is naturally subsiding (sinking) anyway. (The same is true for Texas, BTW, including much of its interior.) Flood control projects built on the Mississippi River over the past century have made the problem far more readily apparent today than it would otherwise be.
You do realize New Orleans has always been under water, right? The reason it flooded is because the local government didn't bother managing the levees and floodwalls properly.
Which time are you talking about when it flooded? It flooded on mother's day this year during just a hard rain because all the pumps are failing because the cities infrastructure is falling apart.
New Orleans has been losing its natural protection of the wet lands and barrier islands for decades, exacerbated by the oil companies digging trenches in the wetlands to speed up their demise.
Louisiana has been losing land for a long time, and it is concealed in maps by the local government.
In the last 80 years louisiana has lost 1900 square miles of land to the ocean.
The problem isn't only mismanagement. That is just one of many problems that are causing failing infrastructure throughout the city.
What the poster above said about Miami is probably somewhat true, in that mismanagement is one of the issues of why Miami is flooding as well. But it isn't the only problem and it isn't even the main issue these cities are facing.
It will only become more expensive to maintain these flood protections in the future, and create more opportunities for greater corruption as well.
You have to be loud and get in the faces of your politicians. Be a single-issue climate voter, go protest, sit-in at legislators offices, jam up their phone lines.
Individuals can do very little, aside from reducing one's ecological footprint.
The key thing is to work with your neighbors, friends, and community to build on the movements that are already working to make politicians and countries change. This must be a collective effort.
Just a ground swell at the local level, cities all around the world are calling climate emergencies including all the main cities in New Zealand. The NZ government will have to follow suit.
Bigger cities are following too including New York and Sydney today.
But I think that by the time the government start making changes, it will be too late, as it is too late now.
Like humanity must have a dramatic change - from top to bottom. The system is against the world
We live in a finite world consuming like it is infinite
Every action counts, but it will be hard and it must be super reinforced by law
Well, depending on where you are you can also vote for the local green party. If you're in a proportional election system then that the bigger the green voting block is the better. If you're in a country with a first-past-the-post electoral system like the US, UK, or Australia then things are much tougher and you should also be campaigning for electoral reform to make your country more democratic.
The UK had a referendum on introducing a different voting system and there was no change as the general view seemed to be that "first past the post" gave strong governments.
Yeah, I wouldn't call the current British government strong but I would call the past six NZ governments strong. Each of those governments have been made up of at least three parties working together.
The Australian electoral system is first past the post too and is similarly as chaotic as the UK.
The increasing of the global temperature is really dangerous and humanity seems to do nothing.
It is like a human body if its temperature changes a few Celsius degree from its normal temperature, it is the fever.
If the person has a fever and it increases a few degrees, it might mean the death of the person. We are killing The Planet, it is a Climate Crisis.
It is obviously not the case that 'humanity seems to do nothing'.
The United Nations have the IPCC working on the issue and their reports influence national policy in many countries. There are the Kyoto and Paris agreements that are based on the details from the IPCC reports. Is the world doing enough? No, I don't think countries are doing enough, but to say humanity seems to do nothing is patently ridiculous.
I don't think any nation, not one, will meet Paris commitments. Paris was broadly thought to be far from enough at the time it was signed, and science has moved on markedly since then. IPCC reports are the most optimistic interpretation as necessarily they take a most conservative view on every study. IPCC are all government appointed after all. G20 fossil subsidies just went up, again. Why does fossil need any subsidy, anywhere in the world, given how much profit has come from fossil fuel for a century or two?
That seems pretty near to nothing to me. Let's say "nothing substantive" then.
Emissions are still rising when they should be falling since the Rio summit in 1992. You know, back when we still had a chance of saving the coral reefs and the penguins. Right now it looks like we started triggering the melting of the permafrost, which, once it gets going, will make all efforts we can make totally nil.
Whatever humanity is doing, it's got little to do with preventing the climate catastrophe. Remember that the total amount of GHG emissions in the atmosphere is what counts. We're not even getting the second derivative to go in the right direction.
The Paris agreement was known since the beginning to be insufficient to meet their own targets. And I believe the US has pulled out of that? We’re seriously behind where we need to be. So yes we’re not doing literally nothing, but perhaps we’re doing nothing that would actually stop climate change from causing catastrophic damage to earth.
People on HN hate it when you say we have to change our whole society to deal with this problem. I agree with you though. I don’t think we’re willing to do what is necessary to avoid serious catastrophe. We’ve done a good job demonstrating that for 50+ years so far.
> People on HN hate it when you say we have to change our whole society to deal with this problem.
We obviously don't have to change our whole society to deal with that problem.
1) I've been told that renewable are now grid competitive in cost and the power system is switching over to them naturally.
2) At any point we could go nuclear - even the most pessimistic anti-nuclear activist would have to admit that the risks from nuclear power are localised and that the raw volume of pollution rounds to 0 compared to what we do now.
It would take a couple of breakthroughs in battery technology to solve the transport problem and the whole thing might get solved in the background without much more serious effort. Most people wouldn't even notice.
You'd be surprised how much anti-nuclear activists would disagree with your second point. I'm sure I know a couple that would rather watch the world burn than vote for someone that will build a single reactor.
I think once an issue like that becomes a left/right black/white thing all logic just goes straight out the window. You can't even say the word nuclear without hearing a cacophony of statements about the price of nuclear vs renewables, as if those claims don't need any actual numbers to go along with them.
No it wouldn't. The assumptions made in that video are ridiculous.
You don't need to have storage for all your solar; you turn other sources off when you have excess supply. Or you can switch them off simply by covering them. Batteries are not the only form of storage. Hydro exists and is in use already. You are allowed to import electricity. There are other renewables besides solar and wind. etc etc etc...
I disagree. Assumptions made in the video are realistic. You kinda need battery storage for your solar/wind.
Other sources can be hard/impossible to stop.
Batteries are the only form of storage that's scalable. Hydro exist, but you can't expect to just add another hydroelectric dam, whenever your solar overwhelms your current capacity. Hell even storing gravitational energy probably requires frankly massive amounts of development.
You are allowed to import/export electricity, but the assumption is others will have similar power sources, no? When there is the excess sun in one area, it's either going to be excess in nearby areas (because day happens nearby at the same time). Sure, you want to export to countries without sun, but the loses are probably going to be huge (loses mean infrastructure is stressed additionally).
What other renewable resources?
- Hydro? Destructive for the environment kills migrating fish, ruins ecosystems and not available everywhere.
- Geothermal? Only available at a few places can possibly lead to earthquakes.
> I disagree. Assumptions made in the video are realistic.
Nope, they're the opposite of realistic because they disagree with reality.
> You kinda need battery storage for your solar/wind.
You kinda don't. Here in Scotland, we've gone from around 15% renewables in 2007 to 70% in 2017. We closed our last coal station in 2016. Guess how many battery storage facilities we have? None. There are plans to build one in the near future. And yet we have a perfectly fine and consistent electricity supply. When reality disagrees with your theory, it's your theory that's wrong.
The other obvious renewable in California would be tidal.
Oh, and you can get rid of all your hydro when you no longer have any need for water. I swear sometimes people forget what dams are actually used for.
> Nope, they're the opposite of realistic because they disagree with reality.
Or, your premises are different. From what I see Scotland derives like 90% of its power from Wind, which is possible its unique property. Another thing to take into consideration is that California has a larger population than Scotland.
But overall I get what you are saying. I still suspect going 100% renewable won't be feasible for most countries.
2. Even if nuclear were not controversial, it cannot be deployed quick enough. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080304100413.h...
I recall seeing a calculation that it would require us to turn on a new nuclear power plant every day for the next several decades. That's obviously not going to happen, when countries are currently decommissioning nuclear plants.
> the whole thing might get solved in the background without much more serious effort. Most people wouldn't even notice.
Frankly, this is a ridiculous and dangerous assumption. Globally, we have a limited carbon budget remaining in order to prevent catastrophic warming. That means we must be decreasing emissions on the order of at least 10% per year until we're at zero emissions, and then continue taking carbon out of the atmosphere. Such a scale requires massive transformation across all sectors of society.
> I've been told that renewable are now grid competitive in cost and the power system is switching over to them naturally.
These are more lies and half-truths, for the most part. Wind and solar as always quoted on a "nameplate" basis - how much power they can theoretically produce under ideal conditions. But most don't produce anywhere near that, on average, and I suspect that many can't even make their "nameplate" promises either. Add in the fact that they will have to have more traditional power plants as backup for when they fail to produce, and actual costs are easily a multiple of what is currently being quoted, perhaps a relatively high multiple at that.
Greed seems to be the primary engine driving humanity as a whole.
IMO the most viable path forward is to find some overlap between our desire to obtain and consume more, and the pressing need to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Maybe if we find a way to make carbon capture super lucrative or something?
It's really easy to implement a carbon tax. And it solves the problem. But what politicians want is more power grabs, not solutions. All of our wars on poverty, drugs, terror etc are intended this way. They are wars on people. This is the same. These people dont give a fuck about you. That's rarely ever been the case.
Every president has been essentially increasing taxes in the sense that they are raising spending, and spending increases are tax increases. People just dont want their gas prices to go up. Their fine with ignoring a financial catostrophe for the next generation which is the national debt. They are also very happy to soap box and advertise that they care about the next generation by talking nonsense about global warming.
You don’t need more taxes (on net) at all. You just do a carbon tax and distribute all the money equally. Rational people would reduce their spending on items that put a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Ideally nobody pays the tax at all. That’s the whole point of it.
On a millennium scale level an increase in global temperatures has been occurring for about 15,000 years (give or take), since the start of the last interglacial. On a century scale level temperatures have been increasing for about 150 years, since the end of the Little Ice Age. On a decadal level temperatures have been increasing since the great "Global Cooling" scare of the 1970s.
So it should be no surprise, then, that right now temps may be a bit on the warm side, comparatively speaking. This situation might be quite inconvenient for us, though.
I think that sexual education is super important at early ages, it should be a mandatory class in all schools, at least people should know what is sex, how to prevent unwanted pregnancy, which one are the contraception methods, sexually transmitted diseases, etc.
But also, there has to be easy access to economic and effective contraception methods
Also, 19% of pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) in 2014 ended in abortion. Approximately 926,200 abortions were performed in 2014, down 12% from 1.06 million in 2011.
