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Almost everything you describe is a product of bad urban/house planning.

House planning could require far less electricity, but it's not required by building codes, and the market doesn't acknowledge its value.

Urban planning puts workplaces far away from residential areas because they used to be heavy polluters, but never stopped doing it when workplaces improved.

My workplace office is 1km away from my residence. Someone had the smarts to put a small amount of office buildings in an otherwise residential neighborhood (as well as a few shops). I moved here for the job - it was the obvious choice.

Mixed use zoning has made it so I don't just not need a car, I don't even use public transit often.

I think "The only way out is through" meaning, we will not solve the problem by consuming less or becoming primitive. We will solve the problem by developing through the environmental constraints and replacing our harmful behaviors with better ones. For example, solar, wind, nuclear, and one day fusion providing power instead of coal, oil, and natural gas. Electric cars instead of internal combustion and so on.

People just are not going to use less stuff. In fact, they're going to use more. There are billions of people in the developing world who use a lot less energy and stuff than people in the developed world - but they are developing and will come to use and consume more and more. We won't impoverish ourselves, we can't ask the developing world to stay poor, and the population is growing all the time.

Plans or hopes that involve consuming less are unrealistic. The only way to save the environment is better technology and geo-engineering.

'consuming less' does not mean 'becoming primitive'.

ever-growing consumption on a finite planet is unrealistic.

The comment I'm replying to is discussing things like not flying or not using electricity. I'd describe forgoing modern comforts as primitive.

While infinite growth is obviously not possible I think we are a long way from the population that we could reasonably support on a still healthy planet if we had the technology to do so. I also think that in a hundred years or maybe a little less we'll start to get big opportunities for growth in space, both in the form of doing manufacturing off world and creating new population centers.

yes the best argument of those telling us not to worry for this planet lies in their plan to leave it.

Agreed on needing better tech and the futility of trying to forcefully lower living standard.

However I feel there are also choices that align with all the goals. Such as spending less on cheap disposable shit (which is so hard to do in our current environmenr) and using the materials in higher quality durable things that also offer a better experience. Not to mention shifting some consumption to services like amazing food and culture.

I think it's going to need both. We are in a phase where we can basically do the low hanging fruits. I assume we'll be able to save a lot of CO2 that way. But the goal is ZERO. I just can't imagine a world with net zero CO2 and everybody is driving a Tesla. The mining, fabrication, transport, materials is all very resource hungry. I think current studies suggest an electric car uses about half as much CO2 in it's lifetime. I'm sure it can be improved.. but ZERO ?

Cap and trade, and then gradually lower the cap (driving the price of emitting carbon up). When a lot of money is on the line people tend to get creative.

There’s no physical law that says we must put CO2 in the air to unlock these resources. With the right incentives people will figure it out.

>I can't do without a car

Never buy another car. Fix what you have when you need to.

Eat less meat. Live principled- not that you don't but doing these things is almost contagious. I notice friends and family following my lead. Consuming less, buying less.

> Fix what you have when you need to.

Not possible to do myself, and it's not feasible to pay someone to do it. I don't have the tools, the electronics, nor the replacement parts (not to mention knowledge or time) to keep a modern car going for the remaining 30-50 years of my lifetime. Attempting to fix it at the point where everything is falling apart becomes impractical (as I keep trying to tell my dad when he's spending even more money to make a '79 truck run).

Not to mention that getting those parts custom made or shipped to you from across the country incurs its own environmental penalty.

> Eat less meat.

I've found that, to keep a balanced diet without meat, it's quite a bit more expensive, and exceptionally more time consuming. Then there's the health issues (like those outlined in the scar study featured on HN a week or so ago).

I absolutely could compromise my health and lifespan for the sake of the world, but I'm not going to.

> Consuming less, buying less.

There's a lower limit to how much less you can do and still remain as a healthy, productive adult, but I agree that it's a good thing to do for many reasons; it's something I try and do.

Even if I took every step outlined, it would have, effectively, no impact on the environment.

Didn't say to not eat meat- but most people eat more than necessary.

I was a little facetious when suggesting to keep your car forever. Just don't ditch it merely for being "old". That really goes for anything.

You can also accept the fact that you are but one human among billions. Tend your garden.

Frankly all of this advice sounds a lot like “don’t water your lawn in a drought” while the almond farmers down the road continue to guzzle it up. One tends to throw their arms up in exasperation and drown their lawn in water out of sheer hopelessness.

Forget all the pessimism and misanthropy. It's never going to solve our problems. Instead, focus on making things that make people more efficient. We won't ever be able to guilt-trip and shame our way out of climate change, but we just might be able to engineer our way out instead.

And, if you have ample means, have as many kids as you can support in your chosen lifestyle, so they will grow up to invent more and better policies and technologies to make the future a place we actually want to live in again.

> have as many kids as you can support

How ironic considering that the very source of earths problems are because of humans. Somehow, the solution is more. Never a better response from, a human.

Yeah, that struck me as odd too. The biggest thing anyone can do to reduce their future carbon footprint is usually to have fewer or no children.

That's a pretty big thing to ask, though, as children are pretty central to most people's lives.

It's an interesting point, though: is it better long term for environmentally-conscious people to have fewer or more children? If they have fewer, then most of the children born will be to parents who are not environmentally-conscious, and will likely grow up without an ethos of reducing their consumption, which will negatively affect public policy. But if environmentally-conscious people have more children, they will add to the drain on the planet, but raise kids who hopefully will grow up to influence public policy in the direction of less consumption. Not sure which choice will be a net benefit, but I suspect the kind of person who would make their child-bearing choices primarily on the basis of environmental impact is uncommon enough that it wouldn't make much of a difference either way.

>It's an interesting point, though: is it better long term for environmentally-conscious people to have fewer or more children?

Earth has produced a grand total of one species that even has the potential to be effective stewards. That's us. Earth is already on the far backside of how much longer it will be habitable due to the Sun. And I see no reason to think that any other intelligence that did evolve here wouldn't be beset by the same problems we have now.

So (IMO) intelligent, conscientious people having fewer children helps nothing. We (humans) are the best thing our biosphere has got, by a long shot, in terms of long-term preservation of life, which is something that I personally think is of great importance.

If you and your children have a negative carbon footprint, then having more kids is actually optimal.

When things go extinct without human presence, it’s a morally neutral event. It’s just something that happens. No one cries for the trilobites.

When you say the source of earth’s problems are because of humans, I believe you’re right but not for the reason you think. Earth doesn’t have problems. Earth simply abides. Humans on earth, they have belief systems that consider certain changes to the planet problems. In that sense humans are the cause of the problems. Without humans to care about it, it’s just a change, not a problem.

This misanthropy is self-defeating and accomplishes nothing besides making the holder feel smug and superior.

Be honest: the entire species isn’t going to be persuaded to stop reproducing to save kelp forests. You know this is true as well as I do. Nor is everyone going to get rid of all their possessions and return to preindustrial life. Only a few people want to do this, and since it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t work.

Fifty years of this moral pleading to reduce consumption and reproduction has done jack shit to help the environment. Eight billion people want a developed-world affluent lifestyle and each and every one of them will personally guillotine you if you try to deny it to them. Preventing this desire is a lost cause.

Given that humanity stubbornly will not listen to you, and given that your odds of establishing a totalitarian state to force them to do so are long, it is time to look for other solutions. If humans are going to be here and are going to demand affluence, we desperately need to find ways to deliver that without destroying the biosphere. And having fewer kids will not help with that—in fact it’ll hurt. The more minds we can focus on the problem, the better.

It will not be easy and there is no promise of success, but it is better than a cause that is already lost.

But is it? I thought it was because of peoples and more to the point corporations and government "excessive" consumption of resources....? I'd argue kids actually (can) diminish use of resources by combining 2 (a couple) individuals in a smaller (spatial)unit sharing meals, going out/traveling less, ... also the happiness, anger,sadness and whole other spectrum of emotions one is directly confronted with when having kids helps with entertaining empathy...

We already have a surplus of people in developed nations. Having more people doesn't change anything.

I used to be strongly opposed to this mindset, but living next door to neighbours with land rovers, a mountain of turf cut from a "protected" bog for heating (hey, it's free, and you get to destroy wetland habitate _and_ emit more than coal!), and _SEVENTEEN KIDS_ (because God made them or something). I really am doubting if the few people who actually give a shit having _fewer_ kids is the answer. We need to outcompete people like quiverfull.

>I've found that, to keep a balanced diet without meat, it's quite a bit more expensive, and exceptionally more time consuming.

I’d be interested in what you consider “balanced”. I’ve found that when my diet is almost exclusively plants my grocery bill was nearly halved. I’ve even found it’s cheaper to by from higher end organic grocery stores than Walmart supercenters when I exclude meat. The scales tip the other way when I buy processed or boxed vegetarian/vegan food.

Community sourced agriculture boxes are often quite economical as well.

The GP stated that they live in "the North". Depending on which country that is, that may very well indicate that quite a few foodstuffs are more expensive (and environmentally damaging) due to transport from areas where it can grow, or it may simply not be available.

I couldn't have a balanced and nutritionally complete diet without mean, if I stuck to what I can obtain from local sources or what's available at the same or lower price than meat. Also, most of the stuff that is available seems to be based on Soy produced abroad, and then shipped here.

With that taken into account, I'll stick to having some meat in my diet and keeping both costs and the CO2 footprint down. After all, simply reducing the meat consumption would probably have a large effect on it's own.

>most of the stuff that is available seems to be based on Soy produced abroad

This makes me think you may have been falling into the mindset that you either need to eat equivalent protein as a meat diet or were biasing towards processed foods which tend to rely heavily on soy. Personally, I don’t like the taste of those and I found they tend to be more expensive. Trying to make a facsimile of one diet with another is difficult.

I can’t speak more to the OPs geography without specifics but for the vast amount of the “north” in the US, it’s not much of a problem. Of course, it’s all relative to personal goals.

Regardless, I think you’re right in just reducing meat consumption is a more pragmatic approach for most. I think both issues speak to the need to adjust what the “norm” is, both for health and environmental reasons.

Do what you want others to do as well. Yes you can't change everything yourself, but as a community you can. This is a problem of individualism. You can't fix that with more individualism.

> I've found that, to keep a balanced diet without meat, it's quite a bit more expensive, and exceptionally more time consuming.

Mass produced meat is cheap because you don't pay it in $ but in pollution and animal suffering.

I was a "ah whatever they're just animals" guy for a long time, but once you do your research it's basically impossible to eat cheap meat again. It's jot even a question of polluting less, it repulses me now

Nsfl, this is a video from one of the supposedly "best" slaughterhouse in France: https://youtu.be/KWbgZQxd6J4

> I've found that, to keep a balanced diet without meat, it's quite a bit more expensive, and exceptionally more time consuming.

Do you just gnaw on raw steak from the dumpster? I have been a vegetarian since 2009 mostly because it is so quick and convenient. Other than fruit and shelled nuts, I cannot think of anything faster and simpler than opening a can of beans. Frozen vegetables come pre-chopped, you just put them in a frying pan. If you are concerned about your health and lifespan, you should become vegan, like I did in 2017. It is the fastest, easiest way to lower your cholesterol and improve your cardiovascular function. I did not expect my exercise performance or subjective feeling to improve as much as it did. Anyway, here is a good source for ideas: https://nutritionfacts.org/

> Never buy another car. Fix what you have when you need to.

In my country most cars are bought used, imported from another country (usually Germany, sometimes the US) after they've deemed them not worth fixing (i.e. salvage). Whatever is broken is fixed up, tested for safety and emissions (we are an EU country), and sold to someone here. Labour costs are quite low (compared to Western EU & US), there's a great availability and parts, and people are quite skilled here, so pretty much anything can be done.

It used to be common to import cars from the UK (for some reason, much cheaper 2nd hand than the rest of Europe), and convert them from right to left hand drive - but a few years ago the government said they wouldn't allow those cars to be re-registered, which put an end to that.

Recently a friend had to fix the Webasto unit (diesel pre-heater) on his car and found someone who admitted his 'hobby' was fixing them. €100 later and what he thought he needed to replace was as good as new.

When the cars come here they often already have multiple hundreds of thousands of kilometers on the clock, but they are usually 'fixed' so who knows how much they've really done. Said friend's odometer says it has done 350k, but we assume it's closer to 500k.

Once cars are deemed salvage here (usually at the point where the floor is rusting out, or the frame has been damaged in an accident), parts are stripped and resold on the 2nd+ hand market, or the cars are shipped to Central Asian countries where the same all happens again.

Anyway, I'm not really sure what my point is, but it seems relevant to this. If you really want to you can keep an old car running, whether it's economical is a different story (I imagine in the US with higher labour costs and lower availability of spare parts, maybe not). But you also need to consider how things are used after your life, cars for sure do not just get melted down when you declare them worthless (one man's trash, is another man's treasure definitely applies here). I'd imagine consumer electronics and appliances are much worse for the environment in this regard than cars.

Or just get an electric car (plug-in hybrid if you're worried). It's already less than half the emissions of a conventional new car. And if you keep the car for a significant length of time, you'll have beat the emissions of even just keeping your existing crappy used conventional car.

> what can an individual actually do about it?

Get politically engaged with organisations that are demanding systemic change

EDIT: I don't see what is negative or controversial about this suggestion. The commenter says they cannot do the right thing because of how the system works and what options it makes available to them and at what price. So in that case we must all do work to change the system. The market is currently dictated by many different policies and legislation, causing most things you buy to be artificially cheap or expensive in one way or another. We can change this through policy or other means to make carbon products more expensive -- driving more expensive while clean transit is cheap, inner city housing cheaper than suburban sprawl, etc.

I will never have enough money in my entire lifetime to out-politic Google for one year, let alone the oil industry for the remainder of my life.

  Rise like Lions after slumber
  In unvanquishable number--
  Shake your chains to earth like dew
  Which in sleep had fallen on you--
  Ye are many -- they are few.

There are ways to demand systemic change outside of the lobbying umbrella.

Getting involved can take other forms than just giving money. And even whatever little money you can give, if multiplied by others who care, can help.

Luckily you shouldn't need to do those things all by yourself.

People lived in the north prior to the invention of electricity, so it's possible. Maybe more difficult now due to the quantity of firewood that would be needed with a larger population? Architecture (and dense urban development) plays an important role in electricity-free livability across various climate conditions. Some buildings work well in the cold, some work well in the heat. That's not to say you as an individual can address these problems, but society as a whole can design urban systems which support low-energy living in even difficult conditions.

> but society as a whole can design urban systems which support low-energy living in even difficult conditions.

What's the forcing function? It's already been proven that a global climate crisis is not enough to move society. It's not profitable enough to convince corporations to do it. The 0.1% have no cause to do it; even the humanitarians among that group have much better investments they can make.

EDIT: Also, in the past, living in the north without electricity was managed by burning wood and coal. Given the significant increase in population the impact to the environment of burning all that would be irrecoverable on its own.

>It's not profitable enough to convince corporations to do it.

Can policy not make it profitable? It seems like regulation can be a means of creating market incentives. It worked well for leaded gas, I tend to think a carbon tax/market may work

At best, like leaded gas, it will take about 30 years, which in this case is far, FAR too late.

At worst, there is no way that anything approaching that sort of regulation will ever fly in today's political system. Period.

Seems to be working quite well in Europe [0]. There are reasons to be optimistic.

[0] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/02/24/p...

Sure northerners can hunt whales and burn the blubber to stay warm just like the indigenous people used to do.

People lived in the north without electricity but they've NEVER lived in the north without fire. And there aren't enough trees in the north. Iceland (for instance) cut all of theirs down for heating and other uses. Similar to the British Isles. They turned to burning peat and coal to stay warm (etc). Others have mentioned whale blubber.

Unless you live near a hot springs, electricity is actually the best we've got for staying warm in the north with the least carbon emissions. Nuclear, wind, hydro, or geothermal are all valid options for producing this electricity in the North. Probably in combination and probably with some storage (batteries plus occasional hydrogen?) and heatpumps to increase the efficiency. So in fact, USE electricity.

In the Global South, solar reigns supreme as far as the least expensive energy source.

Get an electric car. Even a plug-in hybrid is good enough to cover your commute. There are a bunch of used Volts and Bolts out there that are quite affordable, and even entry-level new Teslas are no more expensive than the average new vehicle.

I sympathize with you because the environmentally minded are telling you to do the impossible and claiming that electric cars are a cop out or whatever. They aren't. It's actually easy.

your situation is pretty common. it has a small effect, but vote for candidates who will reduce car dependency and support public transport measures. the developed world got this right in the early 20th century, we can do it again.

The best solution, AFAICS, is to push for space exploration. In the meantime, if you're single, you could try to live in a more dense downtown location where living car-free is practical. I'm not sure that would be a good idea if you had kids though.

Or get an electric car. Even with embodied emissions, it's half (or less) of the emissions of a conventional car. And improving over time. (In the US, emissions per kWh of electricity have dropped about 30% over the last 10 years alone.)

Living in a dense neighbourhood where you don't need to commute by car is more efficient still. But yes, if that isn't an option, an electric car, preferrably a Tesla so you can indirectly support Musk's space exploration goals, seems like the next best option.

20 miles is doable with an eBike or speed pedelec. Probably not as environment-friendly as a normal bike, but probably beats a car. And it’s healthier.

The only thing that can be done is have fewer children. Everything else is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The good news is that this is already happening in most places. The bad news is that population growth is still out of control in Africa and parts of Asia, and may lead to a environmental crisis before population growth gets under control.

Done. I have no children, nor plans for children. Sadly, a childhood friend of mine has made up for myself and my partner 5 times over.

And as it turns out, it's your childhood friend that get to raise those children and not you, so if you wanted to help posterity then we'll have to hope your friend isn't a climate change denier or something.

Have children. Not too many. Raise them well.

How do you know that this was in response to you? Isn't it more likely that it was in response to another person?

And yet, those places in Asia and Africa are much less of a problem for the environment than we are in Europe and the USA.

Raw population numbers are not the biggest concern. Consumption and excessive luxury, wasteful production practices and burying all of these under the rug are the root of all these problems