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Does anyone have suggestions for how an individual can feel like they’re actually doing something. I already make donations to organizations that advocate for climate activism, vote at local and national level for candidates what support climate action, and in my own live I try to be conscious about the environment impacts or my lifestyle and purchases. Despite all that I still feel like I'm changing nothing. I still feel like there are theses colossal and obvious problems bearing down on our species and all I can do is watch it happen. I hate this feeling of helplessness.

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I work in climate change. I changed my job in order to do so. The pace of change feels glacial (badum-bum). The same can be said of politics, and everything else that involves way too many interests fighting over a very small set of resources. You will never not feel helpless.

Greta Thunberg probably felt helpless. But she turned that feeling into anger, and that anger into action. Henry Rollins said he stays angry, because he doesn't want to accept what's wrong with the world. (I don't think he has as positive an impact as Greta, though)

You, yourself, cannot fix the world's problems. Neither can Greta or Rollins. But if you really feel like you're not doing enough, then hold yourself accountable. List the things you do every day to affect change. Just write down what you're doing. Then when your inner voice says "What the hell are you doing about it?", answer it. If your inner voice says "That's not enough", then do more. Or don't! But be at peace with your decisions.

> Greta Thunberg probably felt helpless. But she turned that feeling into anger, and that anger into action.

Serious question.

What impact has she had? I haven't seen any changes from her actions. People knew about climate change before she came around. What changes did she create?

The biggest impact I've seen is that a lot of people are very angry at her for some reason.

Serious answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg

There isn’t really any actionable changes listed there.

I have read her wikipedia page before:)

What changes has she caused that is listed on her Wikipedia page that are you referring?

It's absurd That any serious climate scientists should take seriously the media pretensions around making an emotionally charged adolescent into a messianic figure, and consider that a useful thing for real climate investigation and some practical policy.

Either many people who work in climate change have some serious critical thinking problems in this field, or the core ideas of good scientific thinking have gone down the toilet for climate change.

The best thing you can do in continue to innovate and build more efficient things. We can use that technology to stop wasting resources, stop pushing negative externalities to the environment, and rapidly bring the entirety of the planet out of abject poverty where they are more concerned about where dinner is coming from than their environment, local or global.

The most important innovation is behavioural: if we collectively stop travelling by ICE to a remote office, we can meaningfully and significantly reduce global emissions.

WFH isn't just a pandemic response measure, it's a climate change measure. We should all fight to WFH, even if we hate it, to reduce carbon emissions.

How does this get shoehorned into every thread?

I hate the way now, we're all making it worse by leaning on"AI".

People can't even write code now without it being a carbon intensive activity, it's pretty insane...we just can't stop.

Quit your job and go to work full time on climate. Start here: https://climatebase.org

This is the only correct answer from all of these. The highly educated are far more likely to make a significant difference especially if they have knowledge that spans multiple fields.

exactly, fly all over the world and tell the dirt poor uneducated masses about the dangers of carbon emissions!

and then realize the dirt poor uneducated masses already have a low carbon footprint because THEY'RE DIRT POOR

What the f are you talking about?

A reliable approximation for your carbon footprint is your total spending, which is closely related to your income.

If your income is very low, you are quite simply not spending much on climate warming activities.

There are some exceptions to the rule, but it is a valid generalisation.

What are you talking about? “Work on climate” means “build the infrastructure to enable the transition away from fossil fuel dependence,” not… whatever imaginary demon you’re fighting with here.

So I looked through Climatebase, and I found it hard to evaluate the companies listed. There's plenty of listings, but no (easy) way to say, "Show me one entry per company, for every company hiring engineering leaders." I either got drowned in "this company has 35 reqs open, so here's 35 entries" or "you've narrowed your filters so much that you only see two companies".

Not quite easy to figure out "Which set of companies are hiring for a role I can fulfill?"

Edit: And within moments, I of course find the URL to do exactly what I want: https://climatebase.org/organizations?l=&q=Engineering%3A+So...

Daydream: Chain all the politicians to rocks within a foot of sea level, so they'll actually care.

More practically, try to downsize your life and carbon footprint. Avoid the performative virtue of buying lots of "green" things. (Many goods like EV's have a huge carbon footprint to manufacture. And eco-tourism via airplane is right out.)

And maybe donate to a non-profit or two that are trying to mitigate the harm that climate change is causing to people much less fortunate than you.

> Chain all the politicians to rocks within a foot of sea level, so they'll actually care.

The policies which are currently in place are not there because of the desires of some handful of politicians but because of the desires of the masses. If you'd banish all the current politicians, their replacements still wouldn't be able to enact policies of rapid decarbonization, degrowth and an actually enforced major reduction in consumption of energy, goods and transportation, because their constituents wouldn't accept that.

Keep in mind that personal carbon footprint is an invention of fossil marketers, and a lot of that is intentionally ineffective distraction.

You can't build long-distance UHVDC power lines yourself. Really big changes can only be done at the state level. If you need a new car, an EV is still better than a new gas car, but having public transport and rail network is even more efficient. But you can't create a properly functioning well-funded transport system yourself.

As an individual the best you can do is insulate your house, and if you need heating, get a heat pump. Domestic heating/cooling energy use is significant, and needs to be electrified before it can be decarbonized.

Some things like rooftop solar panels + batteries do work, but that is offloading switching costs to individuals, while the fossil industry is still getting subsidies. Grid-scale solar farms and storage are more cost effective. Wind farms are even better, but you can't build ones tall enough in your backyard.

Turn off the feeds; don't listen to the talking heads. I'm not saying to be ill informed or under informed, but curate your information feeds such that they're challenging you to do due diligence; read journal articles that cite sources and avoid anything that has an advertisement like the bubonic plague.

Distend social media and focus on high-quality, low-throughput content. Rationality is not based in the vox of the masses.

I bought some forest land, and I'm restoring it to riparian habitat. It's not world changing, but if a few hundred acres can be returned to a natural state and grow large, carbon sucking trees, I feel like I'll have done a net good over my life.

This required giving up on some other goals though. I don't know that there's a lot you can do that is sacrifice free.

I've also gone to a mostly vegetarian diet -- preferring to source meat only from local farmers I've met in person. If I haven't met the farmer, I won't eat the meat. This reduces the amount of meat I eat, but still lets me seek it out. Maybe this helps, maybe it doesn't, but it's a pretty easy rule to follow that doesn't require me to be a strict vegetarian. I can have my beef stew as a treat, but also know that I'm not contributing to a massive industry of wasteful excess with every meal.

Climate change is genuinely one of the few things where grassroots movements (pun not intended) can have an outsized impact. Kill your lawn, replace it with native plants, and you can create an absolute oasis for animals that are losing more of their habitats year after year.

This can be a refuge for thousands of animals, give you tons of cool stuff to watch go on in your back yard, and it'll almost certainly save you money as the plants won't struggle to grow and thrive in your area.

> how an individual can feel like they’re actually doing something

That's going to depend on the individual. Some people feel just fine driving a hybrid automobile every day as their big contribution. Some people quit eating meat, quit flying, quit driving altogether, and some even protest. Of course there are many options and many different levels of guilt and helplessness that individuals deal with.

But perhaps you could address your need to feel like you're doing something. You don't have to do anything. You can give yourself some slack. This isn't a problem that you caused, and it's not a problem you're going to solve.

What do you do when a loved one is in the later stages of terminal cancer? Do you fret and feel like you need to do something? Do you yell at the doctors to try one last thing? Do you cry over loss? Maybe but eventually in a healthy person that will all end. Once someone is in hospice, it's time to work toward acceptance and appreciation and to try to enjoy the last bit of time left as much as one can. We're in a sort of planetary hospice situation right now.

Don't have kids.

You feel like you're changing nothing because you are. It's logically impossible to have an impact as one person of billions.

Made this account just to say: with regards to climate change, it's tough because your impact is largely limited to voting + "negative actions" such as flying or driving less, eating less meat, etc. Voting obviously doesn't happen often, and attempting to reduce your carbon footprint is awesome but imo not exactly morale-boosting.

That said, there are other related causes you can give time and effort to that have a direct positive impact, such as volunteering in ecological restoration in your free time. Protecting native biodiversity and restoring ecosystems— which are becoming every-more-threatened due to climate change, habitat fragmentation, and invasive species— is very rewarding work, and more accessible than most people realize. No prior experience or tools needed, just time and energy. You can search for "environmental volunteering" or "ecological volunteering" for wherever you live, and decent odds there are options for you to choose from.

Leading by example is a great place to start.

Otherwise you have to make green choices a win/win or change people’s minds.

EVs are a good example of a win/win. Most people weren’t willing to sacrifice range or power in their vehicles. But now that the range and power is there and electricity is cheaper than gas it’s more of a win/win.

Changing minds is a lot harder.

What about not having a personal vehicle at all?

How does switching from no car to an EV help climate change ? Manufacturing EVs results in emissions.

I strongly believe engineers will solve this not politicians.

Either that or game over. Totally agree that humans cannot coordinate on this scale.

Well, yeah, there is also the chance that we don't solve it at all. I just don't think you can design a political solution to this. Other than mass killings and I'm not for that at all.

We have to develop technologies that improve our efficiencies and reduce our emissions.

The engineers have alternatives to more than enough cases where greenhouse gasses are produced or released.

The "political" problem is how to solve the economics problem. As long as society "subsidizes" damage to the environment, by not charging the damagers, then damage will continue to be extremely lucrative and near impossible to stop.

But the incentives for Big Energy to resist change are so huge, that I don't see a timely solution without explicitly co-opting them.

I.e. solving their economic problem to solve our environmental problem.

Get every Big Energy CFO into a room and establish what kind of incentives they would need to find hard CO2 drawdown legislation a financially attractive opportunity worth pursuing with greener alternatives en masse.

New massive subsidies for Big Energy would not be a fair use of citizen's taxes. But the alternative of continuing to "subsidize" their destruction of the environment is far more costly.

And the side benefits of greater energy security and independence, international stability, etc., would be worth a great deal too.

Consume less, buy less material stuff, eat less meat/fish, have less than 3 children, set a good example without becoming annoying to family and peers.

Don't over stress it though. You can't change the world but you can set great seeds with examples.

What sacrifices can you do in your own life? That is certainly the easiest and most certain way you can contribute. The impact will be limited no doubt, but the most obvious place to start.

> What sacrifices can you do in your own life? That is certainly the easiest and most certain way you can contribute. The impact will be limited no doubt, but the most obvious place to start.

Respectfully, I think a better plan is to work hard to reach a position of power and/or leadership, and then make changes that affect millions. Minor changes in my household have relatively zero impact in the big picture.

I think you'll find it very difficult to convince people to make a sacrifice that you are not willing to make yourself. Or are you talking about forcing them?

The truth is that whatever you or I do personally has no effect at all globally on this.

That's also true of hundreds of global and international problems.

The best approach is to accept that which you cannot change.

That's really not true, and we have the largest experiment on collective behaviour in history to show this. COVID lockdowns had an _enormous_ impact on carbon emissions.

Everyone should fight to WFH, even if you hate it, because the benefit to reducing carbon emissions is known and significant.

IIRC Covid reduced emissions by about 7%. Then they went back up. That's big... but not as big as the 10% reductions we actually need every year

But COVID lockdowns were not created by me or OP.

How do you suggest that we collectively reproduce the situation from COVID lockdown times ?

I really dislike those arguments. It's like why bother voting, one vote does not change much.

You can be conscious about your consumption and set great examples. Or you can decide you don't care and keep ordering stuff on amazon every day, shove meat and fish everyday in your mouth, change car every few years while flying regularly and pretend is somebody's else problem.

It's a fact, not an argument. Dislike it if you want, it's still true.

And yes, your or my individual vote will never determine an election. I know this and still vote.

Elections that are decided by a single vote are fairly common. If we looked at local elections, we could probably find more than every year. [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_close_election_resul...

Friends of mine work at a company called Satelligence ( https://satelligence.com/ ).

They use satellite data to check that various countries and companies keep their promises. E.g., a country receives money based on the promise that some rain forest is protected, then they are paid to check that no logging takes place there.

That's one of the few use cases for software that I believe can actually help.

Buy a lot of AC machines but make them cool the outside and put the exhaust in your house!

Figure out how to stop China from building a new coal-fired power plant every week.

Emissions per capita in China are not even that high though.

I didn't realize it was a per capita problem. Maybe we can breed our way out of it so the global emissions per capita will be better and the environment will be happy.

Not sure why you are being sarcastic. No one wants to reduce their emissions (maybe a small number do or perhaps only in the abstract. Most like their steak and international travel. I know I do) so how do we make it fair? I cannot see any way that is fair that isn’t based around some per capita distribution. Of course this will be impossible to do exactly, but we should aim for an approximation.

Coal is the dirtiest power source available. Globally, electricity is among the largest source of emissions. China has a strong commitment towards renewables, but for various reasons they also love coal. A brand new power plant is a long term commitment: these things last for decades. Building a new one today means burning through coal for 30+ years.

The best use of the world's resources would be to ensure no new coal plants are built, regardless of each individual country's emissions problems.

Furthermore, China is ahead of most countries in Europe on a per capita basis. Making excuses for them just because they aren't at the top on this metric is kinda bullshit.

The feeling of helplessness you’re describing has been intentionally taught to you. It’s what keeps the religion going. “If only I could do MORE…”

All I can think of is to build many nuclear power plant in a remote place, and use the energy to do carbon capture, somehow.

That's based on the assumption that the CO₂ removed from the atmosphere is worse that the produced nuclear waste.

Degrowth. There is no way to square this circle. Sorry.

“Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”

Had to look that up, a quote from the now-destroyed Georgia Guidestones, apparently. Hard to tell what your message is when there's literally nothing but the quote to give you context.

live like its 1880

buy stuff as if the garbage man does not exist...in 1880 they didn't have trash removal

buy one set of clothes you wear pretty much every day until they fall off of you

buy a few tools that will last you forever

no more disposable anything, remember the trash man doesn't exist

wash clothes by hand

cook everything yourself, even better grow your own food

sorry no biking, rubber is an industrial process...you walk everywhere just like great grampa did

no need to worry about fossil fuels...you won't be using them in any capacity other than maybe a nice fire in the winter in your wood burning stove which will be the only "appliance" you own (good news - they last forever!)

etc etc

this is probably what sustainable living looks like until we get star trek matter synthesizers

you'll never get a date living like this but you'll also never again worry about 98% of the crap of modern life

>live like its 1880

>sorry no biking, rubber is an industrial process

Bicycles had rubber tires as early as 1870 and before that, rubber was widely available in the 18th Century.

If you're going to snark, at least snark correctly.

You're guttaing his percha, but apparently he's rubber and you're glue.

sorry no biking, rubber is an industrial process...you walk everywhere just like great grampa did

This is ridiculous. If petroleum were used solely to produce bicycle tires and things like seals for appliances, the world would be unimaginably 'greener'.

That entire list is just disingenuous, defeatist nonsense.

Nope.

Get the best minds in the world together and ask for an action plan for salvaging climate within two generations...100% chance it will be some variation of "live like its 1880"

Get the best minds in the world together and ask them and they'll say you're talking out your ass.

See how useless that argument is?

Biking is demonstrably more efficient than walking. And electric bikes are even more energy efficient than biking.

Sure, manufacturing a bike takes some energy, but there's huge value in people using e-bikes to get everywhere.

Walking = 0 emissions; Biking = emissions spent on manufacturing the bike and transporting it to you + trash from all the packaging it comes in.

Walking is more sustainable.

It takes ~50 kcals to walk 1 kilometer, and approximately 25 kcals to bike 1 kilometer, and approximately 10 kcals (electric + human) to use an electric bike to move 1 kilometer.

I put ~1,000 kilometers on my electric bike last year, which is a net savings of ~40,000 kcals. That's not an insignificant amount of energy saved per year. And many of those trips I had a passenger, a load of cargo (like plants from the nursery, soil, clothing, groceries, etc.) that was too large for me to carry.

So, while an infrequently used bike is probably a loss, sustainability-wise, there must exist a break even point. 40,000 kcals is not nothing. It's not huge, but it's not nothing.

And compared to owning a car? A car might be 500-1000 kcals/kilometer or more. Doing the same math with a car (1,000kms) is like, 500,000-1,000,000 kcals for a small car , 50,000 for walking, and 10,000 for electric biking. No matter what, the savings of walking or biking are monumental compared to a car.

And if we really, really had to we could find ways to dramatically reduce manufacturing, transport, and packaging costs for electric bikes.

> you'll never get a date living like this

There are plenty of people around the world that live like this and want to raise their family this way.

And lots of intentional living communities.

But location is everything.

This would mean massive deforestation to heat and build with wood. That means much more carbon than most people currently produce with less land taking it in. Burning wood ain’t the answer. Also, 1800s was the era where coal became available for businesses and the wealthy, and that’s also a bad idea. To suggest no major energy source would likewise be bad as billions would die.

Okay 1680

Not having children is the best thing you can do.

> Despite all that I still feel like I'm changing nothing.

You're doing the right thing. Saving the planet isn't sexy. It's getting a few more years out of your old car instead of buying another. It's skipping a few generations of iPhone and making your current device last longer. It's skipping that vacation to Aruba this year. It's researching dozens of brands at your supermarket and being a patron of those with better practices, rather than those you prefer.

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