How would You or I do that?
Consider changing your career path to work on climate issues.
Invest in moonshot ideas like sustainable fuel, small-scale nuclear, fusion, etc.
Get involved locally. Set a good example, and help others follow your lead.
Call your senators.
Before you do that, check where and how your power is generated. You might never break even (carbon-wise) on your solar roof.
If your energy is already clean, gas heating and electric cars are the way to go. EVs are getting better and better, especially if you have two cars, check if one of them isn't only used to make small sub 100 miles trips.
I'll add, at a personal level:
* promote remote work: commutes are an astounding part of the carbon footprint, and unlike a warm home and diverse food, often not that enjoyable; this is the one where you can influence your colleagues the most: if you are at home, why would _they_ go to the office have a meeting with you?
* set-up a heat pump, preferably a ground-based one, if you have a heating bill; isolate your house better either way, have horizontal shades to block Summer but not Winter sun;
* eating less red meat and dairy — once a week, once a month; I’m no vegan and I’ll gladly share a Porterhouse with you for either of our birthday, but in the Wednesday bolognese, plant-based substitute are fine;
* travel less far, by train if you can.
There’s more you could do, like recycling, but if you check, the impact of those is minor for now or at least, your ability to encourage those as a consumer isn’t great. Running a personalised carbon estimation is a good exercise to see what’s your most impactful effort.
Cut it down to a really good and well produced $steakthing on sundays and skip the crappy everyday burger or switch that to veggieburgers.
Don't have to become vegan. Simply reduce volume.
Harder, we must learn to let go across all sectors of the economy, for all countries, for all society strata.
Action follows desire. As a species, we must shift the conceptualization of the world from globalism to localism. Return to the world view of people living in 1900 or before.
The average individual view of the world must stop 100 miles from the place he/she was born. As a New Yorker, seeing an image filled with beaches and palm trees advertising Cabo vacations should raise the same level of revulsion as an image filled with vast open spaces and wild horses advertising for Marlboro cigarettes.
https://calculator.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx?tab=3
Ouch. Lots of one way tickets for anyone who isn't white in Europe or America.
Aviation contributes a relatively small amount of emissions in the transportation sector, which in turn also contributes about 1/4. So why does it have to go? Why not attack the actual big problems first? That would be passenger vehicles and medium/large trucks. I am pretty encouraged by where the industry is going so far, even if the trucking sector is not as far ahead as the passenger cars seem to be.
It doesn't.
> even if the trucking sector is not as far ahead as the passenger cars seem to be.
Trucking fuel emits carbon, so getting an EV already reduces that footprint. Buying more durable goods also reduces shipping volume.
I fully appreciate your frustration. I have a similar reaction when I hear cycling being proposed as a solution, with one difference: flying is largely an optional luxury, driving to work is not.
As an individual, flying roundtrip once from LA to NY, is sufficient to eat up about half the CO2 budget for the year. That is too much in itself. It does not mean that there mustn't be deep cuts everywhere else too. Americans, and especially well off Americans like the ones I expect populate HN, fly around without even thinking of the costs.
Therein lies the immensity of the task ahead: nobody is willing to give up their creature comforts. Not even relative luxuries like the vacation in Cabo. No, we rationalize our inaction by pretending the problem will solve by itself, via some futuristic tehno wand: carbon capture, fusion, solar power, anything but downsizing our expectations and desires.
Beyond the personal, on the broader political scale, I also don't know that targeting any particular thing makes sense. All emissions, from all contributors, need to fall. Something like a carbon tax would cleanly attack the least efficient carbon emitters first.
There might be some targets that contribute more than their fair share: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/five-percent-power...
It's like optimizing code. You don't go optimizing everything willy-nilly, you profile first, and attack the most egregious hotspots.
Aviation is also a sector where emissions are pretty much unavoidable (long distance electric flight is untenable), and offsetting emissions is the only path forward. Drawing a line and restricting aviation can't work: think of all the important connections, collaborations, business deals, etc that require aviation. One might argue they aren't needed, but such restrictions will reduce the rate of progress/innovation, which is a necessary prerequisite for climate change action. A new solar cell (for example) will not be developed in isolation.
The fact that governments don't mandate carbon offsets for aviation at this stage is appalling though. Trivial to do relative to the impact and doesn't really raise ticket prices a whole lot.
Assuming we want to preserve some semblance of social order, the task ahead is to downsize our intimate desires and expectations of the world.
As long as a tax or a compensation program is announced in time, fair, uniform, rational and effective, they won’t have the political power to oppose it. You can encourage research and development of electric planes: it’s unclear if it will make sense for larger, or longer distance, but politically, encouraging a shift in technology is a better message than banning, or discouraging flying altogether.
If you demand it now, after 18 months of near bankruptcy, many companies will go down (which could be the goal, but I’m not sure that’s the easy way to put it) but if you make the impact on ticket prices progressive in time and clear, I’m not seeing anyone in the street — other than pilots and attendants, and they’ll find a new job.
'what can I do'?
The easy answer is to point to some of the myriad things one can do. Aviation has perhaps the biggest bang for the buck, easy to unilaterally give up and with quantifiable significant impacts. And yet, utterly insufficient by itself.
The hard answer is that we need to downsize our expectations by an order of magnitude.
I don’t know how many people you or everyone expect will die from global warming, but I believe that the number is some orders of magnitude around millions; I also believe that the estimated impact in people’s mind will consistently go up, and that more people will opt to make remote family function more common — of use trains, electric cars and boats to travel.
I anyone had told me, two years ago, that my elderly and technophobe mother would have an informed discussion about which VC technology to use for us to attend my brother’s wedding, I’d be dismissive (maybe not insulting) too: she barely understood that FaceTime and Facebook are not the same thing. But after her mother’s funeral on Zoom, and her nephew’s wedding on Hopin and her being asked to help film christening because she became her parish tech expert… Things have changed.