Sir David Attenborough: Climate change 'our greatest threat'
bbc.com
bbc.com
They are, however, a portion that is very convenient to shed crocodile tears over. Nobody notices when your employer's profit per employee increased by $5,000 year-over-year, without any increase in your take-home, or blames the government when their landlord raised rent again, but increase the cost of gas by 10 cents/litre, and everyone loses their minds.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/03/are-the-french...
Then the solution is a Private sector one - for this high net worth eighth of the population to invest the vast majority of their savings portfolio into green energy sector. But this would be even more effective if we made investments outflows less possible, so we should create a hedge fund that would require around one decade of a commitment period. This will supercharge R&D into this sector leading to better solutions, maybe one a political majority will support.
It does seem risky to tie your personal finances to the progress of green energy, but since the climate threat is already the greatest risk of all, it seems a worthy swap. And since it seems like green energy is a "no-brainer" / inevitability, then the investment is almost a sure thing to pay off in the long run. So in the end you'll not only help the planet but help yourself.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080324173612.h...
It seems like we're on track for a huge crisis, but as group we're slow to react.
The closest we have come to such a feat would be outlawing of some ozone depleting chemicals 2 decades ago. It's highly unlikely we will be able to accomplish this. Any sustained international response will undoubtedly be reactionary instead of proactive.
If people could help engineer cheaper clean energy or more efficient air conditioning, that would help.
https://www-m.cnn.com/2018/11/28/world/air-conditioning-clim...
While it may be very true that any one individual may create more positive impact by putting focus on something else, individual consumption is a part of the problem.
Go after your own low hanging fruit. But don't let it distract you if you think you can make a greater impact somehow.
We really need to make some rather large changes. India, China, and emerging markets need a lot of clean, affordable, clean energy, for example.
What? I'm not saying that at all...
Ironically, one of the things I uncovered in the process of raising my pitchfork and planning a protest against my local utility was the best evidence I've found of just how much of an impact individual actions can have collectively: power consumption in the US has completely flatlined since 2007, so much so that My Local Utility's 20 year plan put out in 2015 was made completely irrelevant in only 3 years. Why? Turns out it's just a little bit more efficient appliances and then a hell of a lot more efficient lightbulbs. Dead serious, that's all it took to stunt the growth of our national power consumption, even accounting for things like manufacturing moving overseas. And the only reason the appliances haven't made as big an impact as the lightbulbs is their longer replacement cycles delay their impact.
Stuff that small and simple absolutely, 100% makes a difference. Those are the quickest, easiest changes we can make because they are the changes within our power, and to act like people can't focus on both at the same time is absurd and imo completely irresponsible. Yes, raise our pitchforks, but always keep in mind that we're the market and our wallets have the power to fuck their shit up. After reading that 10% of total global power consumption is literally just heating and cooling, I'm dropping $80 on a programmable thermostat because that's an easy, effective thing I can do between now and my protest at the end of the month. (Oh ho, stickin it to ya twice, TVA! ;] )
What we really need is investment into clean energy solutions. Investment is not going to come by robbing a percentage of GDP as a "carbon tax."
Making it bloody expensive to produce ghgs seems like a pretty excellent way to spur investment to me.
In fact, it creates the perverse incentive that the legislature are generating so much income from carbon taxes that they will not want it to stop. Imagine that they're taking 2% of GDP and someone comes along and promises low-carbon energy solutions. The government is then going to lose 2% of their budget. They won't want that.
When the costs are passed on to the consumer, I can discriminate between GHG-intensive products, and non-polluting products, by price.
And they have the unfortunate outcome that they outsource the work to private entities which don't have to behave like regular companies (ie, compete in a free market).
Governments waste money. If left to the free market, costs would be reduced because those who can't compete on costs would find themselves out of work.
In the USA: https://www.sunrisemovement.org/
In the UK: https://rebellion.earth/
Others?
For example, if your diet is largely vegetarian but includes some low-order animal protein sources like sardines it's insignificantly worse for the environment than if you were vegan.
1: http://time.com/4266874/vegetarian-diet-climate-change/ 2: https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/weatherize/insulation/add...
I really, really hope synthetic meat explodes in popularity because I've tried being vegetarian and I'd really rather not.
In addition to sustainably raised/organically farmed/etc, local sourcing can matter for carbon footprint (what you save in the carbon output of the farm itself you gain again in cross-country shipping carbon).
FYI, the recent UN report says that global net CO2 emissions has to fall by 50% by 2030 (11 years from now) and reach zero by 2050 for us to have a chance of averting the worst of the disaster.
As of right now, global CO2 emissions are still increasing: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-co2-emissions-se...
All that does is leave you less well off, meaning you have less to invest in real solutions.
Carbon taxes are a power grab by globalists and have no impact on solving the problems they claim to be taking the money for.
I see you whining a lot in this thread about how "globalists" (whoever those are) don't have a good plan. What's your plan? And remember, "do nothing" is not a viable plan because then the fish and crops die.
This is drastic, but there's a few obvious situations in which you don't want to find yourself. You don't want to be a farmer in a high-population subtropical country. You don't want to be a military-age person in a country that's already concerned with food and water security, let alone general resource scarcity. But you also don't want to be a homeowner in a flood-prone location where in a few decades your insurance will price you out, nor would you want to operate a farm, even in a high-income country, in a place where you're already struggling with increasingly severe droughts. Above all else, you don't want to find yourself in a situation where you're ill-equipped to handle crises in the global or local markets as pressures build on struggling populations.
The irony is that the strategy to insulate yourself from the worst of climate change is very similar to the strategy to insulating yourself from every other social and economic ill: be wealthy, mobile if needed, and for your extended community to be self-sufficient if required.
Write to your representatives to support this bill, or a similar one if not in the USA: https://medium.com/basic-income/this-idea-can-literally-chan...
Carbon tax the fossil fuel industry to make them switch to green energy faster (they are already investing in this). Distribute the proceeds as UBI to sell t to the public - Alaska’s Permanent Fund already has done this by “nationalizing” their own oil reserves for decades AND they have the lowest inequality of all US states. Win win!
Form a political party in your country to focus on the most pressing issues (and avoid getting mirrd in eg gender bathrooms) and an app to unite everyone (I am doing this with rational.app and rational.party)
REFORESTATION. CARBON SEQUESTRATION. There has been something in the human psyche that associates deforestation with progress. Well, it no longer is (we are bumping up against other limits).
Support efforts like Nori and IBM’s carbon credits blockchain. But on a country level, it would be amazing if they set up a fund to reward countries for trees and carbon sequestration. Have actual incentives to grow it instead of laws punishing deforestation only. Bolsonaro would have something more cashflow positive from the rainforest in his mind finally. We have to PAY FOR WHAT WE WANT, WITH TAXES.
Raise awareness, eg with scandalous art pieces that have a license to pollute with black smoke in a city, and attract people to websites that show accurate models of what’s happening NOW, not just projections. Like parts per million of CO2 and methane, acidification of oceans etc.
The rainforest produces 20% of the world’s oxygen and Bolsonaro wants to cut it down. we need more PRESENT DAY STATS repeated enough time by enough people.
Want to know more? Contact greg at the domain qbix.com with HN CO2 in the subject line
Keep doing those things. Even if you aren't singlehandedly solving the crisis, you are at least setting an example for others to follow, which is what matters. When people see others caring, they begin to question their own level of caring. If everyone wrote off small changes as "What's the point?", then that attitude feeds into the habits of others too.
> but I'm interested in slightly longer term projects (say the next 10 years).
I don't have a perfect answer for you, however, incorporating this into a career or public works effort would be something. R&D and implementation is still worth something. Even if it's not crazy lucrative or game-changing immediately, proper change takes time and has to be started somewhere. Think of all the R&D efforts from the past that contributed to massive changes in the present. Someone had to think, work, and tinker on projects to come up with adaptable outcomes. The work of one still has the potential to impact many.
> It seems like we're on track for a huge crisis, but as group we're slow to react.
My theory is that we are essentially up against a "nonphysical" entity (it's silly but South Park captured this with the use of 'ManBearPig'), so people don't treat it the same as an "us vs. them" dilemma. It's really an "us vs. us". It's hard to react to something that's not right in front of our faces. There's always the ability to count on tomorrow until the day arrives that there won't be any more tomorrows to count on. At which point, people usually look around for solutions. There's a group that will outwards and a group that will look inwards. There's an endless amount of excuses and distractions to fall back to, but at the end of the day doing something is better than doing nothing.
Edit: looks like we've had to give you a bunch of warnings already. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart, we'd really appreciate it.
That said I will happily review the rules page again, I didn't intentionally violate it.
You can have a much bigger effect by getting rid of OTHER people.
Limiting your own consumption is completely counter-productive, as it leaves the resources to be consumed by those who do not share the same worries. They will simply have more resource available to increase their number and influence. (It's similar to those worrying about overpopulation and deciding to not having children : it's simply making sure the genes of those worrying won't make it to the next generation.)
In a non-policed commons situation, the only time it makes sense to try to shame people into consuming less is if they are your competition and you want to get rid of them.
The future belongs to whoever shows up for it. Here are the current likely winners: https://population.un.org/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2012_HIG...
If you are convinced a crisis is coming and want to make a significant contribution, try to develop a workable policy proposal and a convincing case of why it would be a good idea. I have invested a few weeks researching this topic and found nothing I would feel comfortable sharing with skeptics and saying, "here's a good case that a CO2 tax would be beneficial" (or something similar).
An example of an unconvincing case is the recent report from the US government; they claimed GDP will be 10% lower in 2100 if we don't make drastic cuts to CO2. The issues with it are (1) Our GDP in 2100 will be 10X what it is now, so 10% is irrelevant. (2) The cost to cutting CO2 drastically will reduce GDP even more. (3) The report assumed worse than the worst case scenario from the IPCC, i.e. it's very unlikely.
Humanity & most people are notoriously bad at making long term predictions.
It is estimated that there is, on average, a ten year lag between the time CO2 is emitted and the time its maximum effect is felt in the climate. Some estimate the lag can be even longer. So we haven't yet seen the worst of the ~36GtCO2/yr we've been releasing into the air for the last ten years or so.(1)
Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.(2) And it is at the heart of one of the positive feedback loops we have started by warming the earth. The arctic permafrost contains a difficult to estimate but staggeringly large amount (in the Gigatons) of methane, both in the form of methane hydrates (frozen methane) and stored carboniferous materials which, when no longer frozen, are quickly turned into methane by bacteria.(3) At this point existing warming of the planet has progressed to the point that there is no way to stop a massive arctic methane release.(4) And, in fact, if you look at the recent satellite data(5) you will see that the methane levels at most layers of the atmosphere are higher than the satellite instruments are capable of measuring.
And reducing our emissions may make things worse. The Aerosol Masking Effect (aka global dimming) is what scientists are calling the fact that sulfur and other pollutants in the air can reflect sunlight away from the earth and cool the planet.(6) If we stopped all CO2 emissions today the global temperature would rapidly rise as the aerosols fell from the atmosphere.
There's a lot more, but I'm feeling too much anxiety about this to go on.
1. http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/031...
2. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-gree...
3. https://envisionation.co.uk/index.php/nick-breeze/203-subsea...
4. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2785/unexpected-future-boost-o...
5. https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Products/atmosphere/soundings/iasi...
6. https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/our-aerosol-emission...
But, I guess you can ignore all that. The scientists are just trying to scare you so they can get a few extra thousand in funding. That's the real problem here.
Climate change is going to be a net negative for almost all humankind and life on the planet, even for those places where you think on the surface it might have a positive effect.