We need carbon sequestration, maybe.
PS: will the sun entering a cooling period have any serious effect at all on Earth?
Working from home obviously helps, but transportation is almost inconsequential. I think it is responsible for around 15% of emissions and that includes every form of logistic emitter. Individual traffic doesn't help but wouldn't necessarily be an issue and people are dependent on it outside of the largest cities.
Agriculture on the other hand is one of the largest factors next to power generation.
If every developing country reaches the industrial stage, we will surely fail hard. So technological transfer to developing countries is a necessity, so they can skip this development state for greener alternatives. That is an obligation developed countries need to acknowledge.
Technological progress can help too, but I don't think it is a good idea to depend on it alone.
Or perhaps California emits few CO2 so that is has become a larger factor percentage wise?
https://ww3.arb.ca.gov/cc/inventory/pubs/reports/2000_2017/g...
Neither of these things are guaranteed to continue after COVID passes. More Westerners going vegan doesn’t automatically lower emissions if people in developing countries continue to grow their meat intake.
On the flip side, if people move out of urban cores and increase online shopping, those might have a negative impact on emissions.
Edit: Seems like people are misinterpreting the "negative impact on emissions". By that phrase, I meant that more personalized delivery and suburban living may very well lead to an increase in emissions. Apologies for the confusion.
Delivery services driving items around, with laws even mandating full money-back without questions asked in eg Germany (inviting people to order clothes in a couple of candidate sizes and lots of retoure) are heavy on emissions as well.
But it's surely an improvement over Westerners not going vegan, and people in developing countries continuing to grow their meat intake.
This particular report is easily found at the CARB website as scoping_plan_2017.pdf
Plant-based diet.
Treat others kindly.
Luckily, it's becoming increasingly clear that that part will sort itself out without any kind of draconian China-style laws to forcibly limit family sizes: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30677-2
That the population is developing in manageable ways in most of the world is one of the good news that will really help us on our way. The recipe is well-known by now: give women control over their own bodies and their own lives, and provide a social safety net that at a minimum is strong enough that having a large amount of children as an insurance stops making sense. IT WORKS :-)
At that rate it will be centuries before the world starts running out of people - plenty of time to anticipate and start planning more kids again.
In a growth-growth-growth economy, you miss out on a bunch of consumption by having kids young. So people wait, travel the world, eat at fancy restaurants, climb the ladder, and then have one or two right at 30 so that they can get back to climbing the ladder ASAP, afford their nice house, etc.
What happens when the economy isn't growing, you're in the same job for 40 years, air travel is prohibitively expensive, big houses with yards are illegal, etc
And for the last part, big houses have been inaccessible to most urbanites for a while now. Yet urbanites have fewer children later in life than people in rural areas where land is cheap.
> Yet urbanites have fewer children later in life than people in rural areas where land is cheap.
People move to cities (in part) to pursue career or social advancement, for which education (often through the mid-twenties) is often a prerequisite. If you want kids more than you want to make partner at a law firm ... you don't move to the city.
Sure. Perhaps not international travel, but let's say we agree for the sake of further discussion.
> It also involves a lot less economic growth.
Perhaps.
> And without growth, you can't have a default assumption of a leadership role with sufficient experience.
I can't speak for everyone, but neither I nor most of my peers find a "leadership role" desireable at all. This idea that one must "rise through the ranks" to be "successful" seems like a sad americanism to me.
> chances are you aren't managing a team, because junior employees won't outnumber senior employees.
So what? I'm struggling to see the relation to what you were saying before about "staying in the same job for 40 years".
> People move to cities (in part) to pursue career or social advancement, for which education (often through the mid-twenties) is often a prerequisite. If you want kids more than you want to make partner at a law firm ... you don't move to the city.
Fair enough. I still don't understand your argument one bit.
In an austere, sustainable lifestyle, there are fewer things to do instead of have kids. The current economy both applies lots of pressure to delay kids and provides lots of alternatives to people on the fence about them.
In an entirely re-imagined, sustainable, economy, will the invisible hand keep family sizes down the same way it does in developed nations today? I'm not sure.
We need to rethink our cities, mobility, and transportation in general to truly make a difference.
Just don't listen to them? This isn't rocket surgery. Once you realise something is propaganda and false narratives, it becomes easy to avoid it or point out to others who might be more susceptible.
How do we demonize greed / powerlust, and make cooperative goals more attractive?