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City life in 10 years or so will be increasingly more expensive as food becomes increasingly expensive.

There is a triple threat to our way of producing food and the degree we have over extended ourselves:

- We are losing soil at a rate 10-40 times faster than it can be produced: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/3/3/443/htm. This has led the UN FAO to speculate we may only have 60 years of harvests left, likely much less in areas of intensive farming like the UK where soils could be infertile in as little as 40 years: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/24/uk-30-40...

- As much as 50-90% of our calories come from angiosperms which are dependent on insects: https://www.livescience.com/52752-what-if-all-insects-died.h.... Insect biomass as recently reported has plunged globally and they may be largely extinct by 2100: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/why-are-...

- As you noted, climate change will cause areas like the American midwest to experience extreme drought, desertify, and starve the populations that are dependent on it for food.

The problem comes down to people will not give up their lifestyle until they are starving, and by then it will be too late. How do you convince people that the sustainable way to live is to abandon the suburbs, the supermarkets, owning personal vehicles, air conditioning, clothes dryers, air travel, big box stores full of plastic junk - the list of wasteful things we have produced in the last century that needs to go away goes on and on. I'm guilty of partaking in it- I try to live sustainably but here I am making a living flipping 1's and 0's, burning fossil fuels on a machine that caused all sorts of environmental damage to produce. We live in a make-believe world and it's time to wake up.

I have gone through the existential angst that I read in your comment. The ugly depression, the hopelessness. I understand that outcome is a very real possibility. I also believe that humanity will defeat climate change, and before we lose all major megafauna on the planet. I think that this is the most radical position to take: a faith in the ability of humanity, after thousands of years following the path of exploitation, changing to the path of restoration.

Perhaps it's because of the changes that I'm willing to make, and that could be my folly. I see highly compact cities feeding a world of vegans. I see us doing everything in our power to restore the natural world to its splendor. The zeitgeist that we must shift to is alien and extreme to modern cultures, primarily because we have become so accustomed to the exploitation of people and nature that escaping it seems unecessary to many, and therefore impossible.

I have a sense that it will happen. I have a sense that people are tired of this life, and even if they must themselves not live in nature, the act of restoring it will bring meaning to a broken society. For the first time since we left the forests, we will return to the path of peace.

That's a lovely thought, but I don't think it's based in reality. Change, by it's nature, is disruptive, painful, sometimes unbearable. Human nature is to avoid pain. In all of human history, I'm not aware that the human race has ever collectively, proactively changed it's behavour in the way you describe, and I see no evidence that we'll suddenly start now. Ultimately the changes will happen, but they will happen in the same way they have always happened: mother nature will compel us to change by making us suffer.

I agree that we'll have to have an "Oh shit" moment and that moment will have to happen in the United States for things to happen. I don't deny there will be pain. I don't deny that time is short.

I just think that we can move towards being a more perfect species, and that it will soon happen.

I do respect, even admire the optimists view on this. It's not that I don't have faith in humanity, it's that I do have faith in nature, and I have observed how she works.

I absolutely agree with you. My optimism is strained by what has already been lost, and the repercussions will be severe. We will have to start accepting some of the rules of nature, death, and population that the rest of the species of this planet live under, and that is going to be extremely problematic.

There will be death and despair, some of which we are going to have to accept as inevitable. But there is already death and despair. We kill 9 billion animals in the United States for food supply each year. There are more humans slaves now than at any time in human history. We've lost so much wildlife. The massive loss of arthropod life fills me with shock and dismay.

And yet, with suffering beyond suffering, I have a sense. I have no proof, it could all very well be hopeless, but I have a sense that people are ready to stop the exploitation that led us here.

Ask yourself: are you merely hoping that someone else will solve the problem for you so you don't have to make any sacrifices?

I am a vegan. This is the first and most important sacrifice.

I live in WA, eastern side. The fact that I live in a house is problematic, but we are keeping it cold inside. I must wear a jacket inside my house right now to be comfortable. This is almost nothing compared to having been a vegan for the last 15 years.

I drive less than 3k miles a year, work from home, and I'm going to start applying the wealth that I have to sealing up my home insulation-wise (it's old). This is almost literally nothing compared to having been a vegan for the last 15 years.

I have made a vow to never do personal travel by plane again, and will never cross an ocean for the rest of my life. My company has me going across the country twice a year for meetings, but they are about to reduce it to one, I think, and if we improve our train systems, I'm very happy to do a two day train ride to get there, if at all.

My wife and I love animals, and it's the main reason that we have a house. We will not be replacing them as they die. Ultimately my goal is to pay off the current old house that I have, and then either try to fill it with far more people, or have it demolished as I move into an apartment in town, which is a far more efficient way of life.

Almost all of my conversations discuss climate change in some way. In order to get the political pressure that we need to fight this, our culture must change. These comments are part of that key work.

I am not waiting for anyone. I am trying desperately to walk a path without exploitation, and it's incredibly difficult. I cannot expect my family to walk the path to the extent that I desire either, but we are all vegan and don't travel long distance, and these are the most important changes individuals can make.

You can rail upon my imagined hypocrisies if you desire. You can also join me if you wish.

I didn't mean to imply you were definitely a hypocrite, I merely meant to point out that all the wishing and desiring for a better world is meaningless if you are not willing to take action toward creating it yourself.

As is often the case with forum posts, it was meant just as much, if not more, for the general audience as it was for you in particular.

I thank you for the opportunity to describe the changes necessary. People will test my statements: is it really that important to be vegan? How much does my travel impact climate change?

With even a small amount of research, people will discover the importance of these changes and might join me. Compared to optimism and platitudes, my comment describing what I'm doing could be the most important one I write today.

Thomas had an important role.

> Small things are already happening, like school kids striking, people doing civil disobedience etc, people reducing or not eating meat, trying to avoid buying too many plastic products, using public transport etc, but I'm thinking is this enough?

It's not even close to enough. Things are not changing in any significant way. Then you have places like China, India, Brazil which are rising from poverty and into somewhat Western standards. If anything, pollution overall will probably get worse. We have already lost.

It's going to be tough, not technically but politically. We're not doomed just yet but serious action is required right now. Something on the scale of Facebook and Google getting behind it and using their reach to motivate people.

I do think individual actions can add up, particularly when we use the magnifying power of tech. I wrote a lot on this recently and I can't fit it all in a comment so I'll just link to them at the end.

I'd strongly encourage anyone in tech who cares about this to get involved in https://climateaction.tech/ where there are some very active slack channels. Lots of knowledgeable people on there and some of us old cleanweb peeps too.

It boils down to a three step process:

- Understand

- Organise

- Amplify

There's a long post for each on my blog and a bonus one.

https://unop.uk/how-to-help-with-a-big-global-problem-as-a-t...

I built www.writegreen.org in 2011, specifically to channel my own energy and angst around this topic to drive policy change (don't change your lightbulbs, change your laws). Unfortunately, the realities of having a family to feed kept me from fully promoting and developing it. Would be great to get feedback and partner with others looking to make a dent on this problem.

Thanks for this. Will check this out. I'm always looking for 'world positive' projects.

Food security issues will appear more and more, but they won't appear to be climate issues, they'll appear to be money or politics issues.

The huge rise in referrals to foodbanks in the UK: is this a food security issue or a poverty issue? Either way there are people struggling to get food.

It's a Tory party issue. Their Universal Credit system is designed to restrict people's welfare payments, and if possible eject them from the system by hook or by crook. I'm not playing politics here - all the metrics show large jumps in 2014, when the system was introduced (replacing the older benefits). Rough sleeping spiked. Unemployment (as measured by people on benefits) plummeted.

The UK is plenty rich enough to feed all its citizens. It just chooses not to.

They chose to design in a five week wait for first payment for the poorest and least able to cope. Then sanction people at every possible turn and have a refusal and appeal apparently as a standard part of claiming sickness benefits[1]. How could food bank use not grow? Even Rudd recently admitted UC caused the rise of food banks.

It's an appalling, vindictive, punitive system that's been designed to be exactly that.

[1] The rate of successful sickness appeals reached 60% in 2015, not sure of figures since: https://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/news/3481-dwp-recruits-180...

Amber Rudd even admits that rising food bank use has been caused by Universal Credit:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/feb/11/universal-cr...

I don't know whether this is admirable honesty or complete cynicism.

I am in my 30s. I think people around my age will be able to live out most of our lives in relative normalcy. I think children born today will inherit a world that's even more cruel, brutal, and difficult to survive in. The rich will wall themselves off in heavily guarded citadels while climate disasters and the resulting refugee crises tear the rest of the world apart.

I am in my fifties. I have seen a dramatic enough change in my lifetime (lack of proper winters any more, massive loss of insects and wildlife, loss of diversity in the countryside and a terrifying[1] growth of consumerism and plastics) to think you will probably significantly reassess that relative normalcy. Or you might be lucky to live somewhere that will isolate you from most of it.

My kids, of course, grew up with all those huge losses and changes being their baseline normal on which all expectations are set. They think fields without diversity or wildlife and everything in plastic packaging is normal, unless they see some archive footage or history of primitive pre-internet times. They've barely seen snow, so don't expect to, etc.

[1] I grew up with slow consumerism 1.0 in the 70s. My parents generation mainly replaced their car, TV, appliance or even kitchen only when it broke or wore out. Not that much went in the bin, now the wheelie bin is filled with unavoidable packaging. We are apparently supposed to replace everything when the ads say there's a new colour, or the spec got bumped 2%, long before it becomes unusable or worn. Can't help but feel we're going backwards at a rate of knots.

No, I don't think we can collective choose to be better. We need a bacteria or disease to wipe out half the population (Thanos style) in order to give us a chance. I don't think even controlling birth rate right now will be enough. We are causing a multiplier by living lives that are 2x as destructive as 20 years ago at the same time we are doubling population. We've always been a greedy species but before the last 200 years it was out of our grasp. It no longer is and we keep stoking the furnace higher.