1,2,3 have huge potential for climate and economic value. 4 is a straw man that obviously does nothing. But what do you propose exactly?
Yes, 1 and 3 would be fantastic – although switching to electric without at the same time reducing SOVs is IMO very inadequate if you take int account all of the planetary boundaries, not just climate change. 2 is a policy that might stem from the system change, not the actual change. 4 is not based on facts: there are billions of people in the world who are living within planetary boundaries. Can't stress this enough: it's not "humans" that are the problem but the wealthy people that are taking more from nature than nature can regenerate.
A meaningful system change to me is where there is a deliberate and continued reduction in material flows and energy use in the rich countries until they are below planetary boundaries. That can be done if they deliberately start reducing overproduction. That in turn would happen if governments would abandon the goal of aggregate economic growth across all sectors, but instead increase the parts of the economy that produce well-being and scale down the parts that don't. Another system change would be if the rich countries would pay for the catastrophic damage they have inflicted on the countries worst affected by climate change, and then stop taking advantage of poor countries by ending unequal exchange.
Those would be system changes.
I'm not saying nothing except politics is needed – everything would be doubly hard if e.g. solar wouldn't have become so cheap.
But given what is easy in the current world (producing and selling stuff) and what is hard (creating political change), I wish that the most capable and smartest people in the world would work mostly on the hard parts.
You've obviously thought about this topic quite deeply - have you heard any realistic proposals on how to achieven this? I have yet to hear any, and until I do I'll be devoting my energy to changes that have at least some chance of being enacted, like a carbon tax.
What I'm talking about is what the academic degrowth research has been working on for the past 20 years. (What's under the degrowth umbrella is the current wave of discussions started by the 50 year old "The Limits to Growth" report.) Doughnut economics is also intimately related.
If you want to learn more, as it happens, there is a brand new book "Degrowth & Strategy" with a free PDF here:
http://mayflybooks.org/degrowth-strategy
Note: I haven't yet read it, but it has got a lot of endorsements and great reviews from the top researches on the field, so it should be good.
Let alone that historically non-capitalist countries had terrible ecological track record. For example here in ex-USSR. In USSR era ecological situation was pure catastrophe. But we're making massive improvements for the last few decades. And capitalist market economy works damn great to support ecological efforts.
> Another system change would be if the rich countries would pay for the catastrophic damage they have inflicted on the countries worst affected by climate change, and then stop taking advantage of poor countries by ending unequal exchange.
So, let already rich elite in poor country syphon even more money off rich countries? While making rich countries poor, so there's a big chance for elite in rich countries become even more detached, similar to poor countries. Global elite unite & fuck over the rest...
Also, „reducing overproduction“ will fuck over poor countries much more. Make stuff expensive to produce and suddenly bringing back manufacturing is much more viable.
Indeed, and the best way to avoid that is to ignore the people using pushing their polarising simplistic us-vs-them rhetoric into the discussion.
For example, there is a lake in my hometown. Next to it, there was a carpets factory. Do you know how you could know what color they'd use that day? Just go swim in the lake in the evening :) The factory didn't care. Upper tier of the party doesn't care if some workers' town lake is messed up. There's neither resources nor incentive to take care of it.
If you'd go to local party office or KGB, they'd laugh you off and go party with the factory management :) Oh, and you probably work in the same factory. Or local school/shop/water, which is run by the same single party as the factory.
As a citizen, do you want to vote with your wallet and not buy carpet made in such way? Tough luck, that's the only carpet factory you get it from :)
State farm in the outskirts of town was run in same way. Just drop fertilizer in a water ditch and call it a day. Who cares how much you produce and that local ecological system is messed up? Meanwhile tractor driver can steal diesel planned for fertilising the fields and sell it in black market :)
It's not a random town with tough luck. This was modus operandi throughout USSR. If you want bigger scale stories, look up lake Karachay and Majak nuclear accident(s) :) Same line if thinking, just worse consequences.
https://www.epa.gov/nutrientpollution/sources-and-solutions-...
The EPA itself was started by a right-wing president because rivers were catching fire due to pollutants.
In China, a nominally communist party is working to shift from coal because air pollution was a threat to their continued rule.
Politics is definately important to climate change, but not the team sports level politics that many indulge in.
China is turning away from coal mostly because they don't want to be dependent on Australia and other sources of coal.
Farmers in market economies literally do this, when the costs are externalities to them, it's the same thing being done for the same reason.
With the right incentives, they'll do something else.
I think the only thing that can save us short-term is technology. Inventing and implementing new gizmos is something we're actually good at. Long-term we're probably screwed anyway, because we'll eventually disturb the biological systems on the Earth too much (either via pollution, ocean acidification, killing biodiversity, soil depletion etc.), and they're way too immense and complex for us to fix. People forget that we're part of Earth's ecosystem, but if we disturb it too much we'll be reminded of it either via plagues (we got a taste of it already) and/or famines.
The only thing is whether any of it will be in a somewhat controlled, damage limiting fashion, or will it be just one stupid catastrophe after another.
I feel new gizmos are generally just more fuel onto the fire of consumerism, and will just speed up the process, not slow it.
The USA wastes a lot more resources to achieve similar standard of living to Europe. And even Europe is putting a lot of effort into policies that simultaneously improve their standard of living and reduce waste or pollution.
Saying that "standard of living" is synonymous with "amount of fossil fuels you burn" is standard climate change denier rhetoric.
People with efficient cars and well insulated homes have higher standards of living than those who don't.
It's not similar though. Americans live in way bigger homes and on way bigger plots of land. Streets are wider. Everything is less cramped in general. Also, US has possibly the best health care quality (note I'm not discussing health care _insurance_) in the world. They can also afford more consumer niceties (iPhones, nice cars, foreign vacations etc.). All that extra stuff and quality requires extra fossil fuels and minerals.
Water, Uranium, Gold, Copper, Sand?
Whatever it is, there's almost a certainly a way to use it more efficiently and therefore improve standards of living in Europe, and the rest of the world, at the same time.
And things that are mined in general (like metals). They won't run out but as we mine the easy deposits first, the amount of energy it costs to mine a given amount will be forever increasing. E.g., eventually it will cost more energy to mine the materials for a wind mill than the electricity it will generate in its lifetime.
The only pipe dream is to continue breaching the planet boundaries.
But severe limitations were imposed during wars on the population by the state, so they are in the realm of possibility (once we acknowledge the severity of the problem, which we are not doing, because of many reasons).
We should also add that the expansion of renewables energy create more jobs than the fossil fuel sector, therefore there is at least some hope of this limitations being not as severe as w think. It was calculated that, to be sustainable, the lifestyle should go back to the sixties, during which we lived fairly well but without a savage overconsumption as now.
No. The earth doesn’t need saving. The diversity of life needs saving. Planetary boundaries is the wrong goal.
I would also like to have something more concrete here, but I think the GP hinted at why there is no single elevator pitch-like answer to real-world problems like climate change:
>> [...] have a grasp on all of the different ways the environment is being destroyed (not just "climate")
So electric vehicles reduces the energy required.
Longer term: Gasoline cars are not viable at all; electric cars are viable to the extent one can secure the energy for them. It is a way of getting any road transportation done in the future AT ALL; that is surely not a con?
I hope noone is arguing that moving to electric cars by itself is sufficient to stop climate change. That would be a con but also seems like a strawman.
The goal should be net zero, and electric cars are needed to have road transportation at all.
The mythical climate change boogeyman, that's hasn't melted all the glaciers or put Manhattan underwater like we were warned of 30 years ago.The fearmongering is all based on models- and covid demonstrated how useless those are with complex systems.
What's the solid evidence any of it will happen? The IPCC model is an average of other models, it has no validity by itself (just reject the carp models until it's past performance looks good). What models have had an accurate forecast and for how long?
https://nypost.com/2020/01/10/the-telling-tale-of-glacier-na...
What kinds of solid evidence will you accept? Should we wait until all corals have bleached and withered away? Should we wait until all of Greenland is arable? How many years of drought should California endure until you might start accepting that maybe something has been changing for the worse?
Or should we rather ignore you and focus instead on things we can change?
1. the climate has always changed. 2. the rate of change depends on a lot things, among them how much green house gases exist in the atmosphere.
You have to have a pretty poor understanding of science to deny either one.