Sweet, so what should we build to change this? Giant carbon-sucking machines, cube-sats pointed at glaciers? (planet labs is doing cool stuff in this space, including a project to count every tree on Earth every day).
Solutions welcome!
- Have fewer children
- Burn fewer fossil fuels (less driving, flying, heating, cooling, more wearing sweaters at home in winter, etc)
- Eat less meat
- Develop technologies to create energy without fossil fuels
At a higher level
- Stop associating consumption and material accumulation with happiness
- Stop targeting growth (population, GDP, etc) as solution to so many problems
- Take personal responsibility for what you do. Stop saying if others don't change my change won't make a difference. You are responsible for what you do even if others don't change.
At the top level:
- Change you beliefs and goals so that instead of asking others, you find what you can do and do it. There is overwhelming amounts of information for what you can do already on the web. If you want to act, act.
Even in developed countries the differences are stark. Qatar emits 54.7 tons of CO2 equivalent per capita, the United States 24.3 tons, Germany 12.3 tons, Switzerland 7.2 tons. A difference of almost 10x, with countries that all have similar standards of living! In a relatively undeveloped country like Burundi, the emissions are a mere 0.4 tons per capita[0]. A difference of literally 100x!
The best fix is a revenue-neutral carbon tax, with import tariffs on goods from countries that do not have such taxes (i.e. China). This internalizes the externalized costs of CO2 emissions, automatically encouraging development of more energy-efficient everything.
[0] Data from 2000, unfortunately, but the numbers have not changed in magnitude since then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...
http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
Would be cool to hear how it resonates (or not) with your perspectives.
Children are also important to us adults. We need them to indirectly take care of us when we're old by keeping the economy around us functioning and providing services and for us. Some western countries are facing potential problems with aging populations and not enough young people to support them. That's big and important. Possibly more important than global warming. There's no point having a stable environment if you die from a treatable disease because there are no doctors available.
Whenever there's a problem or a risk, and you're deciding what to do about it, one option is always "do nothing". We don't _have_ to stop climate change. If stopping it causes more harm that letting it continue, then we would be wrong to stop it.
So what's the expected cost of climate change?
Windmills and panels everywhere.
There's room for improvement still.
Not until it exists.
Cooooooooooool. Thanks!
China's efforts on the Loess Plateau has been held up as a success in reforestation which has also benefited the local agricultural economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK8JNXHcBMA
"The area of restoration on the Loess Plateau in China is the size of Belgium and thousands of years of subsistence farming had made it barren and infertile. In 1995 the Chinese Government, with support from The World Bank, took drastic action to rehabilitate the plateau, and local people -- seen as both perpetuators and victims of the devastation -- became part of the solution. They completely transformed 8.6 million acres of wasteland into hyper-productive land. This caused a 300% increase in agricultural income and enabled millions of local family farmers to break free from entrenched poverty."
I also agree with the farmer who said "what about our children, they can't eat trees!!". There's an opportunity for climate change solutions need to be communicated at human timescales (days, months, years). Decades are too hard to imagine.
Thanks for the video!
Glad you found it interesting. In the text accompanying the video they link to more videos in the series from Ethiopia and Rwanda, with similar projects to rehabilitate the land.
(ps I just put this great book up on github. The author passed away, would love ideas to re-release the CC content.
Specifically, merging the short Food chapter into a nicely formatted single medium-type article would be a good step for readability: https://github.com/titojankowski/sustainable_energy_without_...)
http://titojankowski.com/sustainable-energy-without-hot-air-...
Thoughts?
One challenge with plant-based sequestration is that the carbon is released when the tree dies/decomposes. I wonder how planting more trees will balance out at the decade-century scale.
A lot more passive solar architecture and pedestrian-friendly spaces.
Sometimes in nature, things happen quickly. Look up glacial surge, for example. Just because a river dried up basically overnight because it got beheaded, it doesn't mean there's some global catastrophe playing out. It just means the glacier receded to a point where the terrain favored the other branch.