No point in reading any of this because there’s literally nothing you can do about it.
Governments taking further action will further mitigate the problem and might save places like Miami. That's the opportunity here that humanity isn't really taking advantage of.
I've read plenty of papers on this but the ability to track "imported CO2" is fairly limited.
The most obvious place that's usually missing in capital gained from foreign investments. If, in a hypothetical example, an investment firm make a billion dollars running a foreign oil company, then put that money into a US startup, this wouldn't count as "imported emissions", but clearly if you worked at that startup your job and all the money you spend would have come from exported emissions.
The second place these studies tend to fail is how long of a trail of CO2 they follow. If one of the reasons it's cheaper to build a product in China is because the factory is closer to a carbon intensive raw material producer this not counted. If the energy to keep your low cost workers is cheaper and that's part of why they are low cost, that's not counted.
It's not the fault of these reports that they can't track all of this, but it's not a great argument for green technology reducing emissions.
If also doesn't matter if the US and EU reduce emissions, it matters if we do globaly. I can also promise you that if we forced China to reduce emissions we should feel that impact pretty dramatically in the west Economically. The best proxy globally to economic development is energy production, we live in a global economy, we all share that energy.
But after that, an EV, solar panels and heat pump heating are 3 steps that will eliminate hundreds of tons of CO2 vs alternatives, and will increase your standard of living since they're cheaper over the long term.
Going vegetarian and eliminating flying also would have a big impact, but that involves real sacrifice, unlike the above options.
In the US, where in most places the general election is preceded by a "primary" election for the parties to select candidates for the general election and in which you can only vote for candidates from your party, I'd suggest one other thing when it comes to voting.
If you live in an area where one party pretty much always wins in the general election, register for that party so that you can vote in their primary. That way your vote does actually have some influence on the outcome.
It won't change which party wins the general election, but it can help move the winning party toward the center. Primaries are usually lower turnout than the general election, which can make it easier for an extremist candidate to win them because the people who vote for the extremists tend to be more enthusiastic and thus more likely to actually vote in the primary.
If you are in an area where both parties have a good chance of winning the general election, but one party seems more susceptible to extreme candidates winning their primary, consider registering for that party to try to move them more toward the center. It means giving up influencing the other party, but if that party usually picks OK candidates your vote is probably better used trying to help get rid of extremists.
So no the idea of a primary challenge is a lost cause and the younger generation internalized it this past election.
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10464793/Tot...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/01/Global-land-use-g...
An entire party is basically accelerationist, and the other one largely just waffles about.
The problem isn't that they choose to waffle, but that their power is on a knife edge when they have any power at all and they disagree about what to do.
That said, human ingenuity and economic forces are starting to stem the global warming tide, despite what governments are doing.
Look at the current political situation in the US, it's dominated by the cost of gas and groceries. Nothing else really matters.
The leaders should speak truth and act in the common interest. The voters should love the truth rather than lies, and should be mature enough to own their mistake rather than seek fairy tales in which their selfishness is good, even heroic.
Also, the voters in the US aren't uniquely bad. It's just that there's a deep cultural fissure in the US which is ripe for exploitation. It's easy to make the voters prefer punishing their neighbors over any other goal.
Human CO2 emissions are so far off the scale of anything that has ever happened naturally that nature as she evolved on Earth has no way coping.
Regardless, this is only one of potentially thousands of ways we can make an impact. We won't solve the problem without cooperation, but we also don't even have to cooperate at all to start. All of us can start right now and the combined effort will lead to results.
Disclaimer up front: I live as if human caused climate change is real, haven't traveled by plane for years, went on holiday abroad three times since I'm old enough to remember - and this includes honeymoon, I buy used, repair etc etc.
So please read me out instead of shouting "JAQ" at me.
This cannot be true, can it?
I have a simple thought experiment here:
Take a globe. Or imagine one.
Look at the areas where the oil fields are. It should be small areas outside the Norwegian coast. Small areas in the middle east. Small areas in Ukraine and Russia. Small areas in US, in the Mexican Gulf, outside Brazil etc.
Then compare with a single continent.
Feel free to reason about it and tell me why I am wrong.
Because I am actually interested in the answer, because I live like it matters and it would be great not to have to convince myself to care.
And, if your calculations change, feel free to stop demotivating people from trying to help.
PS: If you take this as a defense for senseless consumption you are misreading. For those who have given up already I give you another reason: Very often the things I do makes very good sense economically too. I think I have a better, more enjoyable life because I don't waste my money on buying new crap all the time and instead prioritize long lasting goods and experiences and prioritize maintaining what I already got.
If you are confused about why you'd need to plant a whole continent of trees to offset our CO2 emissions, rememeber(or discover for the first time) that your average oil field(or coal mine for that matter) is a product of literally millions of years worth of carbon deposits - that's why oil is so incredibly energy dense.
According to some quick googling one tree absorbs about 25kg worth of CO2 per year. My car emits that much by just driving ~100 miles (using about 10L of petrol in the process). If I do 10k miles per year, that is a lot of trees just to offset emissions of a single vehicle, and there are millions of personal cars out there - and they aren't even the largest source of emissions.
As expected I got a couple of downvotes, but it is worth it for answers like this.
Edit:
That is 100 trees for each car, isn't it? But the same 100 trees would do the job for the same car next year?
Edit 2:
Assuming steady state.
It’s going to take everyone actively blocking the activities causing this problem.