If you are concerned about climate change, stop eating animals. Governments are slow to act, but switching to a plant based diet is something you can do right now.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...
From the article:
>At a global scale, the FAO has recently estimated that livestock (including poultry) accounts for about 14.5 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions estimated as 100-year CO2 equivalents.
>A PNAS model showed that even if animals were completely removed from US agriculture and diets, US GHG emissions would be decreased by 2.6%(or 28% of agricultural GHG emissions). This is because of the need to replace animal manures by fertilizers and to replace also other animal coproducts, and because livestock now use human-inedible food and fiber processing byproducts.
So if you live in the US, decreasing meat consumption will help significantly, but people in the US use a heck of a lot of GHG producing energy in other forms:
* https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
A lot of prisons in the world are already smoke free, I see no reason why the privilege of eating meat shouldn't be withheld from them as well. Want to eat meat? Then don't break the law.
If we keep thinking that individual actions is the best thing to do because governments are slow to act, then, government will certainly be slow to act. That's a pretty sad self-fulfilling prophecy.
I've stopped using fossil fuel transportation (living in a big, European city I can rely on my feet, my bike and the pretty good subway systems + and trains and EV when traveling). I'm going vegan and get most of my food from community-supported, organic agriculture. My electricity is 100% from renewable (solar, wind and hydro). I don't buy shit anymore and I'm doing my best to reach zero waste (not easy). I'm trying to be positive and inspire people around me (no more criticizing, just showing that many of those small actions are not that hard to do).
Yet, things deteriorate pretty fast. We lost 30% of the birds in just a few decades in my country, and worst, 80% of insects. CO2 emissions are rising fast (3+% this year, while the government promised to reduce them). I can think I'm doing my part, and go on with my life. But I can't sleep. The average citizen just don't have the time, peace of mind, or resources, or the required information to act.
Telling others to change their habits won't do much. We've got to organize and make big decisions. The small steps won't be enough, that's for sure (cf. https://www.france24.com/en/20180828-france-nicolas-hulot-re...)
exactly what things are #1 - 5 for you will vary by country and lifestyle, but assuming a coastal-american/northwestern-european "tech worker" bias, its: #1 children, #2 cars, #3 heating, #4 electric, #5 flying, #6 red meat.
The first reason is baby/bathwater: The reason we care about climate change is for the sake of children; simply denying them existence isn't much of a solution. E.g. You could equally solve homelessness by (humanely and painlessly) killing all the homeless people in their sleep.
But more importantly:
If the present is any indication, in the future, children of "coastal-American/Northwestern-European tech workers" are going to be the only people with the motivation and ability to address climate change.
Subtract them from the equation and think about who is left: Religious nativists (Muslim, Christian, and otherwise), supremacist ideologues and ethnonationalists, and a great mass of impoverished third-worlders too disconnected and ignorant to even use birth control correctly. There is no chance a climate change solution gets sustained without the high-IQ pro-globalist Western elite.
Basically if you're reading this you should have as many kids as possible to benefit the planet in the future.
a) Religious nativists,
b) Supremacist ideolouges,
c) Ethnonationalists, or
d)"a great mass of impoverished third-worlders too [...] ignorant to even use birth control correctly"
...is simultaneously pretty offensive, and bafflingly hyperbolic. Alternatively, given that I live in Texas, and am therefore neither a coastal-American nor NW-European tech worker, would you mind telling me which of those four alternative categories I'm in?
It's essentially the Idiocracy plot, with climate change twist.
> Given the timespan involved, everyone who can intellectually contribute to fixing the problem in the article must already have been born.
E.g I obviously don't mean that literally no person who doesn't live in the coastal USA can help. I'm indicating an archetype of a person.
Is it? And if so, whose? If we should plan for disaster by 2040, I'm going to see it. I stand a good chance of living 30-40 years past it (unless modern medicine collapses, which isn't unlikely).
Given the timespan involved, everyone who can intellectually contribute to fixing the problem in the article must already have been born. Voluntarily going childless absolutely deserves to be on that list. The children I choose to benefit may not be my own, and that's fine. I'd hope that the false equivalence with killing homeless people would be obvious, but just in case: there is a real difference between stopping a life that is already in progress, and deciding not to start one in the first place.
> If the present is any indication
That's a hell of an assumption. The safer stance is to assume that the West will shrink in significance, and for Asia and Africa to grow.
Your comment about the "great mass of impoverished third-worlders" is not consistent with reality: the number of people in this state is less than a billion; you're leaving out the vast numbers of educated and capable folk in China, India, and Africa, who not only outnumber Western tech folk, but also many of whom have a far higher incentive to solve the problem because they directly risk their home locations becoming uninhabitable.
This is a ridiculous analogy. Hypothetical children who don't exist have no rights (because, again, they don't exist) -- homeless people do have human rights.
The rest of your post is just eugenics.
I agree with number 2 and number 3 though, using bikes as daily transportation and fixing your home's heat-leeching-off issues (for example, windows drafts in old homes) makes really big difference!
its always fascinating to me when people read the most extreme possible interpretation into a single word like that.
did you interpret that list to mean you can't use electricity or heat your home anymore either?
it also absolutely cannot be fixed without mass waves of individuals acting.
its an AND not an OR
In addition: if you have ever tried the veggie burger, it’s surprisingly good (the beef is a bit tasteless anyways) and I bet most people wouldn’t notice the difference, especially if McDonald’s pimp their veggie patty a bit more.
Also, you don't have to go all-in at once. Introduce a special veggie burger, maybe even in a few stores or selected countries only. Gradually, switch more and more burgers to the veggie version.
Defaults matter, as they say.
It's actually quite popular, even amongst the non-veg population.
Personally, I've always liked vegetarian burgers better than meat burgers anyway. There's so much variation and flavour in vegetarian patties, whereas meat patties tend to just be a lump of meat, sometimes with some interesting seasoning.
I'm thinking of the Beyond and Impossible burger brands especially.
Soy is a big reason the loss of biodiversity in my country. People are cutting down trees left and right because soy grows everywhere and pays well.
"That's easy", I could say, "just stop planting a single thing". But this doesn't make sense for the farmers, who are asked to give away money to allow (from their POV) rich people to ride more Hummers.
So we come with a better answer, "enact and enforce laws protecting native forests", and now we are back where we started, because a problem that we wanted to solve with individual action suddenly requires government intervention.
I believe in individual action, as I said in another comment. But I don't think it's an "either/or": we created governments specifically to solve problems like this.
In Cowboy Bebop, the Japanese animated show, there is a scene with two characters smoking outside. It is clear during the show that they are morally grey at best, and yet they both have a cup with them to catch their cigarette's ashes, even though they are outside on top of an old boat (a sci-fi one). Such a detail is meaningless in the overall scheme of things, but the mentality is what matters: by living in a society where every individual does their best, no matter how meaningless, is how you end up with streets as clean as those of Japan, where everyone carries their garbage with them.
Individual action is important to create a societal mindset - if you inspire two people to change their behavior, it scales up.
Now there's a motto to live by. Isn't that all we have? Individuals acting?