Actions rooted in open source culture can make a big impact
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The real "solution" will come from increasing sales tax to 25% like Sweden, increasing gasoline tax to $5 per gallon like the UK, energy tax, carbon emissions tax, fuel duty, etc. - people can't consume when they can't afford it. And necessity is the mother of all inventions afterall.
And then we can all struggle in poverty with high taxes and interest rates, whilst a few rich Americans live in luxury with their private jets and multiple SUVs, etc.
Then use that tax money to clean up the pollution.
Side effects: people will invent cheaper ways to clean up pollution
It's shocking how environmental impact and taxation are completely disconnected at the moment.
- producing concrete, steel, (including mining) etc is no more polluting in other countries - producing vegetables, bananas and other stuff is interesting because you want to have them in countries that don't have them => eat local stuff - water is the same in every country - clothes are not less difficult to produce efficiently etc.
so yes, we could stop importing and building stuff right here.
Now this would have two very educational effects: - mining stuff makes your nice countryside, well, not nice. Lesson learned: yeah, you do have some footprint and you must accept it. - building stuff paying workers at your country's rate may make things more expensive to you. Lesson learned: you must value work.
We're talking about future generations here. If it means changing our core values, then, we'll have to change them.
I also wouldn't call the shredding and landfilling of consumer goods efficient and those practices seem to have largely arisen from the ability to mass produce goods cheaply making discounting them further less profitable than simply destroying them.
This also ignores the inefficiencies promoted by global manufacturing that involves shipping half-finished products around the world many times over because shipping is effectively free compared to paying for all the manufacturing to happen in one place (and handling the finishing touches domestically allows marketing the product as domestically made).
There doesn't seem to be a one-to-one correlation between efficiency (which literally just measures cost reduction, as externalities don't factor into it unless they have a price tag) and less pollution (unless you handwave carbon capture and offsetting as magic and ignore the real world effects to only focus on numbers on paper).
Child labor in arsenic mines (to use a graphic but not entirely hyperbolic example) may be contributing to GDP but that doesn't mean it's desirable or that the countries doing it are better off than they would be if it weren't.
I'd bet it would increase inequality as well, given that people with low incomes proportionally pay more taxes on bought goods and services than people with higher incomes (I'm quite certain that's the case but economics really isn't my strong suit).
That means you suggest to push more and more people to poverty, generating unrest, repressions, dictatorships "to keep the society up", witch end up like in the first part of the '900 in nazi-fascist regimes the same polluter and criminals against humanity who fund them in the past fund the same move now.
A very simple example: WFH means I can work on a desktop. A desktop means a computer that can last 10+ years in relative comfort for 99% of jobs and be destined to such jobs when not enough anymore for more demanding activities like a new desktop for a child out of the parent now-dismissed "workstation-desktop". If I have a less wealthy life probably I can't use a desktop, I might get just a craptop able to last two years maximum from some company. An EV for me might be nice: not using it every days I can mostly recharge from solar so it might be cheap enough and protect against fuel shortage around my homes if/when they'll happen. Someone who use a car daily because he/she need can't. Those who cook with gas mostly do that because that's are the tools they have and can't afford buying new ones.
FLOSS is a must not for the Earth but for us humans, to preserve Democracy, to avoid a day being locked out of our home, having lost our third-private-party provided IDs, locked out from our car etc. FLOSS principles of development, witch means public research and public money, public code, are a must to evolve in a socially sustainable manner instead of funding very few humans interests against all others BUT no, increasing prices of polluting things people's depend on is NOT at ALL a solution, it's just a way to lend in a dictatorship with a polite justification.
If we want made a genocide of so many people to save the human species we need to be loud and clear, because we need to preserve "background noise" that made natural selection and evolution possible. The idea of classical eugenics is not less harmful nor a-scientific than the classic cross marriages between nobles not only for short-term political reasons but also to preserve the lineage "purity". We can't substitute nature effectively so we need to preserve diversity and natural selection, trying to generate and artificial one with various basis is a recipe to end up in a disaster large enough to have enough potential to crash our spaces.
About taxes no, Sweden have high taxes and a deep social fracture with very relevant unrest, with crimes, bombs and shooting on the streets not much differently than certain parts of the USA or Sri Lanka these days. Swiss or France or Russia (the state, not the federation) so far have far less deep fracture while have less fiscal pressure. The issue with taxes is in their meaning.
If it increases too much that could happen, but there is nothing that says taxes have to be increased too much.
> About taxes no, Sweden have high taxes and a deep social fracture with very relevant unrest, with crimes, bombs and shooting on the streets not much differently than certain parts of the USA or Sri Lanka these days. Swiss or France or Russia (the state, not the federation) so far have far less deep fracture while have less fiscal pressure. The issue with taxes is in their meaning.
You don't seriously think Sweden has a similar crime rate with bombs and shootings as certain parts of the US... You're watching too much propaganda if you believe that.
Let me correcting you: it's happening NOW, almost all other the world. We have already violent unrest in poorest countries and we start to have mass protests in less poor but still with not much developed social systems countries. And not due to tax increases but to mere price increase MOSTLY artificial using covid and Ukraine as excuses but partially NOT artificial due to real shortage and supply chains issues...
> You don't seriously think Sweden has a similar crime rate with bombs and shootings as certain parts of the US...
I do not think, I know, having lived in Sweden with some friends still there and having some friends in USA, surely I'm not in both places right now (I'm in France) BUT hearing their stories that's essentially the same, only handled in different ways and advertised in different ways.
> You're watching too much propaganda if you believe that.
We all do, I try my best to collect feeds for generic news to have different propaganda's to be compared and hear people from different places in general but that's is...
Having fewer kids, having housemates, eating less food, buying fewer things, not driving a car, not inducing demand for services that require cars, etc
Find more about this under the term "Climate Shadow": https://www.mic.com/impact/forget-your-carbon-footprint-lets....
use less energy, period. ideally yes, the energy should be renewable and not cause harm to the environment as well.
> It's also more ethical solution than forcing people to live in tiny apartments and preventing them from traveling.
What does this have to do with ethics? Is "more ethical" when you bother people less?
You can't significantly reduce food intake, but switching to a plant-based diet is more beneficial than many other changes.
Switching to a plant based diet is almost equivalent to eating half as much of an omnivorous diet : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-06466-8
However, dividing omnivorous food intake by two would probably not be possible in the long term, unless your diet is way oversized.
And it's easier to switch to a plant based diet than to be constantly hungry.
Reducing environmental impact is a marathon, not a sprint : it s much better to take actions that can be sustained in the long term than very impressive actions that are marginally more effective, but abandoned after 2 month
The improvement is way bigger than that for most meat-intensive (e.g. American) diets.
See https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
There's only so much that a person can do to reduce emissions. And this is the big lie that big corps PR sold you: that you as individual is main person responsible.
According to this article from The Guardian, 100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
Literally nothing you or I can do in our entire lifetime will have as big an impact as fixing just one of those companies.
I don't see it. Saying "consume less/differently" is not the same as saying "be poor".
> There's only so much that a person can do to reduce emissions. And this is the big lie that big corps PR sold you: that you as individual is main person responsible.
> According to this article from The Guardian, 100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
> Literally nothing you or I can do in our entire lifetime will have as big an impact as fixing just one of those companies.
It seem that you read nothing past the title of that article. Those are fossil fuel companies. The study contains data on GHGs that come from direct operational emissions and emissions from the use of sold products. That means that if you use a car the emissions that are produced by that usage are counted towards the emissions of one of those companies that extracted/refined your fuel.
To have significant impact all these "eat less, have fewer kids, don't use services that demand the use of cars" is more or less "be poor".
> It seem that you read nothing past the title of that article. Those are fossil fuel companies.
Does it matter? The number matters. 100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions.
Literally nothing you or I can do in our entire lifetime will have any significant impact compared to this 100 hundred. And we haven't talked about the long tail of companies.
Individuals have been sold a lie that only they are responsible for fighting the climate change.
Eat less, today with obesity epidemic showing no signs of stopping, doesn't have to mean being poor but can mean to be healthy. Having kids is expensive, saying that having less kids makes your poorer is divorced from logic. I can see how saying don't use services that demand the use of car can seem to be advocating for being poorer but it doesn't necessarily follow.
> Does it matter? The number matters. 100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions.
It seems that not only did you not read the article that you linked but you did not read my previous post to the end. As I've explained In my previous post that those 100 companies do not produce 71% of emissions. What they do produce is fossil fuel that, when burned, produces those 71% of emissions.
> Literally nothing you or I can do in our entire lifetime will have any significant impact compared to this 100 hundred. And we haven't talked about the long tail of companies.
So what you are saying is is that if all of the people of earth stopped using fossil fuels today those 100 companies would still be producing and burning(they'd have to since nobody else would be doing it) enough fossil fuels to produce those 71% of emissions? Why would they do that?
> Individuals have been sold a lie that only they are responsible for fighting the climate change.
I agree that the responsibility doesn't solely lie on an individual. I disagree that an individual has no responsibility. The rest of what you wrote is idiocy that, without you understanding it, advocates for being poor.
If we get enough renewable power, electric cars and start building houses from wood (excellent way of storing carbon), then there's no fundamental reason why people couldn't still drive cars, live in fairly large apartments and so on. Reasonable amount of consumption wouldn't be a problem in such world.
It's not even means-tested so they're literally taxing struggling workers to pay rich parents just for knocking out more babies.
I'm glad to inform you that besides struggling (child-free) workers there are also rich (child-free) workers. I'm sorry to inform you that besides rich parents there are also struggling parents.
You certainly save a great deal of energy in the short term for both you and the state. Long term this is extremely destructive. If you want to see how it ends look at former/current communist countries like Russia and China.
Find more about this under the term "Climate Shadow": https://www.mic.com/impact/forget-your-carbon-footprint-lets....
But then again, if you really want to do something about at your own level, just travel less (be it for work or leisure), watch less netflix and don't upgrade your machines, just replace them when they don't work anymore. That'd be start.
I hate to say it 'cos I hate those punchlines, but this time, "less is more" :-)
When you just make a blanket statement that everything is "symbolic nonsense" it's easy to assume that you're not interested in helping, but just one of the many people who has pivoted directly from "climate change isn't real so we should ignore it" to "climate change is inevitable and so we should ignore it".
I see that people like the articles author do feel bad about it, and do some metrics like that to feel less bad about it. None of the things the author did does reduce emissions. If i wanted to reduce emissions, i'd probably not even have the tech to show me the emissions charts.
I think this is come kind of coping mechanism. Okay if you need it, but i won't pretend its more than that.
Sounds like "symbolic nonsense to feel better about yourself". By reducing your personal carbon emissions a North American can probably go from 22 tonnes of C02e/year to maybe 5 tonnes CO2e/year. Maybe a little less if you really try. So you can cut maybe 17 tonnes / year * 80 years = 1360 tonnes over a lifetime. That's about the CO2 emissions of a plane doing 2 return trips across the Atlantic. If you're from Europe your baseline emissions are probably lower (by almost a factor of 2 between the USA and Western Europe) and therefore so are the potential savings.
Although cutting one's personal carbon footprint is a good first step, individual lifestyle changes aren't enough to make a difference. They're OK, but not more than that. Technical, cultural and political solutions are all required, and although there might be parts of the original article that are misguided at least it's trying to engage with the problem at more than an individual level.