What can I do about climate change?

Individuals are in the end the drivers of corporate actions because they are the consumers.

It's not necessarily about buying less stuff but about changing your daily actions and about buying only products you consider environmentally friendly.

Corporations will produce what sells. We decide what sells through our individual choices and actions.

Edit:

We can also make it quite plain to corporations: For example, why not ask coffee shops/takeaways how they plan to pack our order before we actually order then walk away if we don't like the answer? If many people start to do that I'm sure things will change fast.

This is becoming harder and harder with time. Believe me, I would love to buy my kitchen stove, washing machine, refrigerator, aspirator, air conditioner and vacuum cleaner from a local manufacturer. But there are none. How many household brands do really exist and how many are actually known and bought by almost everyone?

Additionally, even if you are an idealist who wants to be the change they want to see, you will still need a bunch of tech gadgets to connect with the world and try to change it -- like a good smartphone and laptop that don't suck. Not every $100 piece of trash will do the job. And the cheaper tech might have actually had much more negative impact on the planet's CO2 footprint.

It's very complex and thus no black-and-white solutions exist.

Some corps like Apple and Samsung seem hellbent on testing the customers' patience with higher prices every year and it will definitely bite them back at one point. That much is true.

> Political action.

Never in my life, not once, have I seen citizens voting actually change anything of significance in a country. Have you? And we're talking less than 10 years here. "These things take time" seems pretty shallow and empty as a justification for things not happening.

An analogue: committing a crime is punishable, inciting it in some cases may be. It is the companies who dig up fossil fuels and use them --- "consumers told me to do it" is not an excuse that absolves from responsibility. Those trading in fossil fuels do what they do on their own accord, for financial gain, and hence carry the responsibility.

I'd like the world to start attacking the source of issues top-to-bottom and not bottom-to-top.

Can the citizens help? Absolutely. Will they amount for much unless corporations start taking action? No.

I've taken to boiling the required amount of water in the kettle when I boil rice or anything similar. It's much faster, too.

It's also a good idea to boil a full kettle once in a while, and pour the remaining boiling water you don't need down the drain. It helps break up fat deposits and kills bacteria that cause bad-smelling drains, and the environmental impact is much less than using drain cleaner. And for the love of your drains, don't pour grease in there!

Which is ridiculuous because every electrician will tell you that your home-grade fuses and the switchboard of your house/block handle such loads quite well without much additional strain on... anything, really.

I quickly wrote her off as a virtue signaller back then.

"i switch off all the bulbs and recycle all my bags. i should be able to buy that nice SUV i want"

Which effect, identifying with environmentalism or i-do-enough-ism, is stronger takes research to find out.

But you have to wonder.

Do you need to use that much soap? Do you need to keep the lights on everywhere? Do you need to use a tumble-dryer or could you let your clothes air dry instead? Do you need that shiny new phone or is your current one good for another couple of years?

Yes, all of these are absolutely small things individually, but put together and done by many people, it does make a difference.

A big thing you can do individually is to Buy Less Stuff. Be happy with the TV you have, don't change your wardrobe just because of fickle changing fashion nonsense, don't replace stuff that works just fine. Break the cycle of consumerism. Don't support the polluting corporations.

The very biggest thing you can do is to be politically active. Vote for pro-environment politicians and parties, be part of political initiatives.

This is critically important, but the mindset of the population need to change for it to be effective. If everyone have the same mindset, things will start to change.

Imagine doing a simple thing like reducing your shower time by 25% or reduce your TV watching time by 25%. With enough people doing it, its impact will be significant.

Are you and they using honey or white sugar from farmed sugarcanes? For the environment sake I wish that vegan diet would include honey as it has a big net-positive effect on the environment compared to farmed sugarcanes by not causing eutrophication or water pollution, and helps with pollination both for wild forests and agriculture.

If that sort of 'stigma' goes away I would imagine a lot more people would be going vegetarian/vegan.

However, I think it's an important side, because it's a side that will increase support for initiatives like the ones you mention.

I think there are other reasons why Democrats don't propose strong climate regulation, such as the large donations they receive from people in fossil fuel.

There is already very strong democratic support for collective actions. Think of all the climate marches, the protests and occupation of DAPL, anti-fracking movements, etc. People who strongly support collective actions way outnumber the people who oppose it. It's just that those who oppose it have all the political and economic power in our society.

The Liberals in power are collaborating with Conservatives and killing collective action solutions by engaging with respectability politics. One is not allowed to protest except for at very specific times and in ways that are chosen by those in power to be acceptable. Any protest that gets too rowdy is decried by both sides. The only other way you are allowed to resist climate change is by buying the expensive stuff in the green packaging rather than the other stuff.

Yes. A lobbyist who wants to avoid new legislation to control climate change, but still claim they care about it.

You might be underestimating how much personal benefit a selfish materialist can wring out of teaching people things.

I, for example, love teaching people basically anything I know. To the point where I'm probably unhelpful. There have been numerous instances where there is a skill gap between me and someone else that I have closed and benefited greatly from closing. Usually this is in academic and workplace settings, but I suspect most parents would also see this dynamic. It also works socially when they return the favour and find some interesting idea for me in return at a later time.

If they don't follow my advice, that is often even better for me in the medium-long term because it suggests my advice is bad and I get an opportunity to correct my mistakes and misconceptions.

One of the most fortunate outcomes of the modern era is the more you want to maximise your own material success, the more advantage you can get from maximising the ability and resources available to those around you. I've been led to believe that a sample of most serious leadership groups will pick up an unusually high concentration of clever sociopaths - I suspect at least some of them will be excellent leaders because they figured this little factoid out.

The scenario is extremely different from someone asking me to give up driving because someone else will hypothetically benefit. As an interesting anecdata, I gave up driving because of economic and safety concerns, which are far more convincing to me personally.

They will be dead anyway in a few years, and their species also in a few MYr. Do you value their continuity more than our own?

Last time I checked, a lot of planets in our galaxy, I doubt squirrels have that much inherent value.

These are basically Malthus talks, with people suggesting to take straws who gets to live and who does not.

Africa is big, so it's a very coarse way of narrowing down a location. Population pressure is a multiplier, so people in poor countries with few cars and a diet that does not depend on cross-country transport of food have a smaller impact on environment than fewer people accustomed to a more expensive life style.

> When there's news that the population of Japan is decreasing people talk about it as if it's a catastrophe.

An aging or decreasing population can be a catastrophe, but not because of environmental effects; the concerns are of a social nature, as a shrinking population usually means a reduction in essential services. The one child policy that was active for years in China has left a characteristic mark on the demographics, leading to a small population of young people supporting a large population of old people.

At least with the Prius-style hybrids, though, regenerative braking isn't the only advantage:

* The engine is an Atkinson cycle, which has better thermal efficiency than a typical Otto cycle engine.

* The electric motor is providing torque off the line, so there is no need for a torque converter (which reduces efficiency).

* The engine can be completely shut off when cruising at low speeds.

* The power split device (PSD) is more reliable than a traditional transmission, reducing maintenance costs over the lifetime of the vehicle. (it is much less labor intensive to replace the battery than to service the transmission)

The advantages add up when driving around town, but at highway speeds, a 3-cylinder or small 4-cylinder non-hybrid will often have better gas mileage.

At least in my plug-in hybrid I get statistics on that. I have driven it 80% on electricity with average fuel consumption of 2.0 l/100km the 16 months I have owned it, that include 2 longer trips of 700km with average fuel consumption of 4.0 l/100km and some charging problems last winter. The car have 200hp, so would have been a lot more if not hybrid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RhtiPefVzM

Further to that, I'm not sure it's a good idea anyway in many cases if you're worried about sustainability of the human race and our current lives - if we all stopped having children, society would pretty much collapse. Who's going to look after us when we're old? Clearly we don't all need to have 12 children, but 0 won't work either.

The goal of combating climate change is to make the planet more liveable. You don't achieve that by not living.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N9nVLXMhPc

Short term: Build MODERN, waste reducing, nuclear (fission) plants. If proliferation is a concern, require the military be hired to protect them and the logs/supervision open to the public with short delay.

Long term: I like the 3001 / Gundam OO / generic scifi solution. Solar collectors. Point lots of solar energy at a focal location and do useful things with it.

I keep seeing this bandied about but it really feels like people pushing their ideology as the answer to whatever question was asked.

I was 'born vegetarian' and I struggled to eat meat. I tried my hardest and genuinely believed that if I did not eat meat like everyone else then I would end up physically weak, without a fully developed brain etc. I endured eating burgers in the belief that they were really good for me.

I never learned to cook the stuff and got over my fears of not eating meat. Laziness really, not wanting to have the hygiene problems of a contaminated kitchen. A few meat food scares (BSE) helped me to take the easy route (for me) of living without eating meat. Haven't died of a lack of B12 yet and I know plants don't have any need for B12 but we do.

Anyway, I have had time since the days of teenage fear to think more positively about what I do and do not eat. There are notable athletes, thinkers and Hollywood stars that are strictly vegetarian. My meat eating friends only seem to know of Hitler as being famous for being vegetarian but I know not everything in this world is black and white, just because Hitler didn't eat burgers doesn't mean that I should.

Now role models are all well and good, however, the history of food is far more fascinating and I really like understanding how we got here.

The Chicken Tax is what got me to do my own thinking on the history of food. My grandmother was the last generation to remember when chickens were not what you ate every day. There was a time - not so long ago - when people saved up to eat a chicken based meal, this would be Christmas or a birthday, as a treat. Chicken is now wolfed down as part of a sandwich, sat at the desk, not savoured or enjoyed in some special ritual as per seventy years ago. The farmers in the USA changed the game to the intensive farming we have for chickens, the Chicken Tax that petrol heads know of was the gateway for me to learn that story.

Eggs were not a year round product, there was Easter and maybe a 'second brood' later in the year. So even eggs - a substitute for meat - are not actually what we think they are, we have forgotten the seasonal aspect.

Then there is the the cow. For most of mankind's history with the cow the cow was a beast of burden with added milk. You didn't eat your cows in times gone past when a cow was more like a domestic appliance, for pulling the plough. Only if there was plague and famine would you want to eat the cow. Doing so meant harsh times.

The Dutch invented a new harness for the horse in the 17th century that enabled horses to pull the plough. This put the cow out of work so there was a change on the farm. At around the same time the guy that inspired Darwin and did all the selective breeding made cows into the beef product every burger scoffer so enjoys. The cows that pulled the plough were nearer goat sized, albeit podgy goat sized, hey were not these giant things we have today, stuffed with corn and killed before the diseases from their corn fed diet kill them.

Then there are the sheep. I grew up in an area where wool was what mattered. I have studied the local history and absent from it is any mention of eating lamb or mutton. The products that were shipped out of the area were wool, more wool and more wool. The world was getting clothed not fed.

Clearly our ancestors had many uses for the animals they lived with and every scrap went to 'good' use. Unless you were lord of the manor then game was off the table too. People were not at all well nourished with the chemicals we sprinkle on the land today - doors in old houses are only 5 foot 6 inches tall, they didn't need them to cater for 6' tall people.

I think it is really important to understand a little bit about how we got here and why it is that we think we need beef. The ethics of the slaughterhouse is divisive, an in-depth appreciation of history is not. Really we have been conned into believing so much of the modern life, tricked into believing we need things that we do not.

A fully loaded 747 gets about 100 miles per gallon per passanger and takes a more direct route.

If you had a fuel inefficient van and four people for the same trip you’d like burn more fuel.

> The world can respond in three ways to signals that resource use and pollution emissions have gone beyond their sustainable limits. One way is to disguise, deny, or confuse the signals. Generally this takes the form of efforts to shift costs to those who are far away in space and time.

> A second way is to alleviate the pressures from limits by employ- ing technical or economic fixes. [...] These approaches, however, will not eliminate the causes of these pressures.

> The third way is to work on the underlying causes, to recognize that the socioeconomic system has overshot its limits, is headed toward collapse, and therefore seek to change the structure of the system.

Leaving the hard decisions to "future problem solvers" is exactly response #1, "shift costs to those who are far away in space and time", i.e. future generations.

http://donellameadows.org/archives/a-synopsis-limits-to-grow...

If they don't like it, they could try to move to a city and swap their high transportation cost for higher rent.

Not necessarily and that's certainly not settled. Kuhns paradigms is another way to think about it than Poppers idea of building knowledge as bricks that create a house. I am not convinced knowledge works the way we normally think about it.

Furthermore "climate science" is not actually following the scientific principles as it's not falsifiable for obvious reasons.

"Climate science" is metascience in the sense that it builds on and interprets data which has its own set of issues besides the issues with data modeling.

There are plenty of examples of mistakes, false predictions, cheating with the data etc. that anyone who wants to have an opinion on this should be really really really careful how much we actually can demonstrate vs. how much is speculated. Just taking it on faith that the scientific community is in agreement about a lot of the details is simply misguided.

There are plenty of theories around natural fluctuations even big ones like this (and bigger) so the trick IMO is not discussion whether humans are affecting it as we can't change that and will not change that, in fact, if we did it probably would lead to more death than the consequences of flooding and it certainly will lead to more poor people without any means to deal with the ever-changing climate.

You and others seem to be of the impression that nature is fundamentally friendly and safe towards us and we are destroying it, my position is that nature is fundamentally hostile and dangerous and that we are using technology to be safer from it. Yes, that has consequences but I take those any day compared to becoming paralyzed by trying to solve a problem that is many times more complex than any other things we have ever solved before. CopX is a great example of just how little our global initiatives help.

Flying less, eating less meat isn't the solution to the problem, more actual science, engineering and entrepreneurship and making people richer so they start caring about their close environment is.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Climate_Alliance