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Comment by misterzip | Hacker News Reader

Not sure I have too much to add to the discussion but I do have a question – what do the people who know the most about climate change think we (consumers) should do? There seem to be few coherent lobbying efforts; the people best known for accurate science (IPCC) have no information that I can find about what an average human should be doing to help fight the good fight; it all just feels so impossible.

Does anyone here have any links or suggestions? I've done a small amount of work on "raising awareness" (https://twitter.com/ipccbot) but it seems like everyone either knows and cares or knows and doesn't care. A lot of the climate news feels like climate news porn – so the earthworms are freaking scientists out, what does that mean for me? Can I help the scientists? Are there places I can donate? Or specific calls to action I can follow to help advocate for saner climate policy? What is that policy?

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Climate scientist here.

I really resonate with the "climate change porn" bullshit. Drives me crazy, and just makes people numb to it.

The best thing you can do is the thing you're best at doing, and that you're motivated to do. You'll do it well, and others will follow.

If that's too vague, here are some objective suggestions. Might get in trouble for this, but individual action isn't going to fix this problem. I don't really care if you are a vegetarian or a vegan, or whether you buy carbon credits or offset your airplane tickets or whatever other bullshit Wall Street is pushing to get around this problem.

What you should be doing is encouraging systems-level thinking. Get people to understand how top-level governmental decisions (or lack thereof) can lead to a system where carbon is entirely written off as irrelevant in our current economic and political system. Encourage people to think of ways in which, to the best of our ability, lifestyles for all people can be maintained or improved while severely regulating the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Love that idea, but again it's this abstract "change how people think" – who is organizing this collective action? How can I join their existing efforts? My comparative advantage is not public relations / marketing / persuasion, and while I'm going to of course keep trying to make sure the people around me understand the seriousness of the issue, I'm at a loss for how to have a larger impact.

1000% agreed that individual action is not enough, and that we need to get the corporations and governments of the world to make serious changes. But I have no idea what those changes are, or like you say, how we can make them while maintaining or improving lifestyles for all people.

Also, thank you for answering kindly and collaboratively. For some reason I'm just feeling really fed up with climate news porn today and these are all the frustrations and questions I've always wanted to ask.

Your quest for a large impact is noble, but I encourage you to think more locally. Consider your community first, because it's where you have the most direct levers for change. Hell, you could have a book club. You could write up an e-mail to your friends with the climate policies of relevant political candidates, "just FYI!".

There's a middle ground between "I'm buying local produce for myself" and "I'm quitting my job and chaining myself to an oil tanker."

I agree with you, but talking to my local community doesn't feel like it has an impact – everyone I know already agrees with me. All the candidates in our local elections claim to be "green"-focused. I'm wondering, where is the guidance for this? All successful social movements have been guided by leaders with clear expectations and guidelines and suggestions for people at every level of the movement to contribute. Seems like incredibly low hanging fruit to set up a "are you doing the right thing for climate change? do these things for these impacts" checklist, but I don't have the expertise to create that myself. Without it, any time anyone asks me how do I know what I'm doing/recommending will have an impact, I'm reduced to saying "someone on the internet who says they're a climate scientist told me so in a comment."

Sure, I get that. Metrics for impact here, as in many social/philanthropic endeavors, are hard to come by.

You're right about the leadership issue, it's one that has plagued the climate conversation ever since Al Gore fell off. Yale Climate has a somewhat old article on this [0], where you may find guidance.

Bottom line is you don't have to believe me. If you're looking for a modern scientist-leader, listen to Dr. Katharine Hayhoe's TED talk ("The most important thing you can do to fight climate change: talk about it" [1]).

[0]: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2012/03/whose-is-the-... [1]: https://youtu.be/-BvcToPZCLI

First thing is to bother your politician. I wrote a rather disturbing email to my MP, for which I got an acknowledgement that she would go and look at the IPCC reports. A few relevant facts like >100 million barrels of oil consumed daily, human emission of CO2 in gigatons, and the possibility that we're already past tipping point. It was polite but really not a nice thing to read.

I do phone up product suppliers and ask them why they've overdone the packaging but if it's only me they will ignore me. I've bothered BP over their environmental damage in Africa, and much more. I'll continue to do more but in the end I despair because 90% of people don't care.

Were it not for health problems I'd be out in central london getting arrested with the other 1,000 or so arrests in the past few weeks.

So there's answers. But I've been talking about this, and doing stuff about it, for ~20 years and no-one gave a shit. Now it may be too late. So do as you please.

Individual action will not in and of itself solve the climate crisis, but I believe it could be a powerful lever to build the critical mass needed to put global warming at the top of our politicians' agendas. We need to convince our families, friends and neighbors that the climate crisis is a big deal. Words are cheap. But if people see us actully making substantive personal sacrifices in our own lives, sacrifices that cannot be merely written off as performative signaling, but that can only be explained by a strongly held belief that climate change is a BIG DEAL, our exhortations will be far more persuasive.

They can't be maintained or improved. People will be forced to accept a lower standard of life as they are switched to less environmentally impacting methods, and will be punitively taxed to cover for the things that it's simply impossible to remove.

We won't see everyone tooling around in their autonomous electric cars. the rich will have Tesla's, and everyone else will probably split the massive cost of an ICE car four ways instead of owning one, or walk everywhere.That's assuming we didn't kill half the jobs off in the USA because now a Burger King Value Meal costs $20, due to cigarette-style sin taxes.

You can systems level think all you like, the problem is when it gets expressed into concrete things. I think people would have to admit that it would be a pretty big qol step down for people...it's just that their solutions dovetail neatly with the way they live their lives already.

> People will be forced to accept a lower standard of life as they are switched to less environmentally impacting methods

This is precisely the kind of Carbon-Rules-All thinking that got us here. There is an implicit assumption that the only way we could have ever gotten to the "place we are today," however you choose to define that, is as a result of the burning fossil fuels.

I implore you to sit with some beer/wine/LSD and contemplate an alternative history in which we never drilled a single oil well but had the same desires for successful civilization. See where you get.

The "system level thinking" I'm talking about is the kind that works to explicitly maintain QOL while strongly curtailing emissions. It's possible, and is actually the only way.

Off the top of my head:

- Only take a plane when absolutely necessary.

- Live in a city, sell your car and take public transport

- Reduce meat consumption (at least beef and lamb which are a lot worse than the others). You don't need to eat meat every single day. Also try tofu, tempeh and seitan; you may find you like them.

- Vote with this topic in mind, even if it might hurt you financially.

That last one, x1000

Individual action will barely make a dent, to the point where it’s nearly pointless to bother. We need global collective actions and a worldwide tax on carbon emissions.

There's no need to bother paying women equally for equal work at my employer (pointless to bother), what we need is changed laws to ensure women get fair pay in all cases. See how silly this sounds?

How about instead, both.

The most common refrain I've heard is to reduce meat consumption, and to shift from high-carbon-output meats to lower-output ones. I think the rough order, from highest to lowest, is:

  - Beef 
  - Pork
  - Seafood
  - Chicken
  - Non-meat diet

I'm willing to believe you (and I am already doing this!) but can you show me where any climate scientists advocate for consumers to take this kind of action? And model out how supply of these high-carbon-output food sources will be affected by this depending on how many consumers take action? If you don't have the time or interest that's totally fine, but I'm trying to make the point that it's really confusing for me as a consumer to understand what to do about climate change. I really wish the IPCC or other climate groups would get together with a list of actions for regular people, along with the predicted effects of those actions.

This is not from the IPCC but a multidisciplinary commission that presumably included climate scientists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_diet

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/30/dining/climat...

The information is widely available. I don't think needing more summaries of it is the problem. The problem is people don't care enough to change their behavior. And food is really tied up with identity, while people covet bad identities.

Interesting; I hadn't seen that list before.

Annoyingly, most of it goes directly against arguments I have seen [1] about how best to reduce animal suffering in the human food chain without everyone going full vegetarian, since one suffering cow can replace an awful lot of suffering chickens even if you percieve individual chickens as "less conscious".

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/23/vegetarianism-for-meat...

What happens when you have 15 billion people eating a non-meat diet?

They eat vegetables instead. What are you getting at?

You get a lot of pesticides.

Soon, 7 billion living people.

Humans aren't immune to mass dieoffs. We're animals too.

That's 35 or more years out. First fix the emissions then work on population growth to increase the doubling time. Unless we want to discover the point at which Malthus was right?

Many high-level decisions fail to take into account lower-level intricacies.

For example, assuming you live in Germany (for the sake of concreteness) and you want to move down the chain from pork to seafood.

1. Are you aware of fish rated as green, yellow or red?

2. Are you aware of other consideration, such as logistics and methods (e.g.: aquaculture vs. wild)?

3. Do you have access to local and sustainable pork (but perhaps not seafood)?

And even if you consider this stuff, most people won't; supporting pork is supporting pork, because pork is fungible. Only the simple approach is viable.

The order in that list may depend on how the animal is farmed. For example, in some countries the beef is raised outdoors on grass and the pork is raised indoors.

CCL https://citizensclimatelobby.org/ in the US is working towards something, albeit in a mild and incremental way.

They're pushing a carbon tax policy in the house right now https://citizensclimatelobby.org/energy-innovation-and-carbo.... It's a little silly since it seems like there's little appetite for a bill like this with conservatives. I still think it's important to try.

I'd say there's a lot of opportunity to do things on a state or local level. Reducing your state's carbon emissions has a real impact. Push for renewable energy sources. Fight to make the process of rezoning for higher density housing easier in your community and improve public transit.

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