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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Work on local things to make your own city better. Plenty of stuff that's not too difficult, even if it won't fix everything:

* Multifamily housing is much more energy efficient. Is it legal to build throughout your city, or does zoning prevent it?

* Is there good bicycle infrastructure so people don't have to drive for everything?

* Does your city still have expensive parking mandates that lock in car dependency? Get rid of those. They also get in the way of places becoming more walkable.

* This one hurts, but: eat less beef.

* Advocate for good transit as another way for people to get around without driving a personal vehicle.

* What can be done in your city/region to electrify heating for homes and businesses?

* What can your region do to build more renewable energy capacity?

Those are all things where even a few voices can sometimes make a difference.

View on HN

Individual habits will not be decisive in fighting climate change. Telling people to follow this advice will (a) inconvenience them in the short term (b) lull them to a false sense of security that they are fighting climate change (c) set them up for disappointment when climate change happens anyway, and (d) worst of all, these suggestions let the real perpetrators off the hook.

If you want to see real progress on the climate, a few thousand people changing their daily habits is not enough. Governments need to take action and hold industry to account. That looks to be an increasingly unlikely event, but that doesn't justify taking ineffective action instead as a placebo.

It reminds me of the '90s when we are all told that recycling was necessary for saving the environment. Decades later, we'll still spending time sorting our garbage, despite evidence that no one wants recyclable waste, it still ends up dumped somewhere, and it costs more money to handle. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyMs2xox_hE

> these suggestions let the real perpetrators off the hook.

This can't be said enough. It simply cannot be said enough. It cuts right to the heart of how we view the world in the west: as autonomous, separate individuals, with no communal counterweight and certainly no model of power (some entities in the world have vastly more power than others) We assume that because our constitutions grant us equal rights or whatever, we all have equal responsibility and equal power.

But polluters, the biggest sources of emissions, have way more power and way, way less responsibility. And yet we continue to tell ourselves to focus on our own individual behaviors to combat global heating. The effects are real, but tiny, and our elites continue getting away with our annihilation.

But individual behavior is not about preventing climate change, it’s about doing what’s right. It’s wrong to pollute the environment, one way or another. A single person not stealing won’t reduce the crime rate in a country yet it is the right thing to do.

That's not a fair comparison. Everything we do affects the environment. The goal is to limit that effect where it matters. It's not ethical, it's practical.

Apart from eating less beef, every single suggestion in the post your are responding to is about infrastructure and advocacy, not individual habits.

And almost all of them have plenty of other benefits too:

Multifamily housing is generally cheaper in high land cost areas. It helps solve the housing shortage.

More bikes and transit and fewer cars means cleaner air and fewer traffic deaths.

Less fossil fuel usage in general means less pollution.

Cities that use land more efficiently tend to be more walkable, pleasant, and don't gobble up things like farmland or forests outside the city.

Come to think of it, less beef is probably better for your health, too.

> less beef is probably better for your health, too.

Won't matter when it's 120 degrees F every day.

My advice is to install air conditioning, and choose a place to live that will be affected as little as possible. Avoid the Maldives or New Orleans, perhaps choose somewhere a little hilly and cool with good connectivity.

Great suggestions. I will pass your advice on to literally all of humanity.

That's what will happen, you might as well get ahead of the rush.

> Apart from eating less beef, every single suggestion in the post your are responding to is about infrastructure and advocacy, not individual habits.

Exactly. That's why it's ineffective to evangelize this as individual effort. If you want to live in a multifamily home, they have to be zoned, funded, and built. That requires lobbying the government, moral rectitude.

I did not write 'individual habits' - you did. Things like zoning are not individual choices at all. But they are something that you and a few friends might be able to influence at city hall.

None of this "lulls" involved people, nor lets anyone off the hook.

These are things that ordinary people without a lot of money or power can work on today in a country like, say, the US, where the federal government is in the hands of evil people and is not going to be doing much in terms of climate change in the near future.

The federal government may be a lost cause for the moment, but your city or state might provide an avenue to get some things done. Those things won't fix the whole problem, but they're still progress, and the connections you make while doing those things will be useful in future, bigger fights.

> These are things that ordinary people without a lot of money or power can work on toda

I agree: people can work on this individually. And it won't make a lick of difference.

How many items on this list require government action? How many require corporations' cooperation. What am I going to do, build the bike lanes myself as a hobby?

The work is getting your local or state government to do the things. I thought that was quite obvious.

Great list!

For those in the US, I'd add lobbying your congresspeople to support the revival of the Energy Permitting Reform Act. It's something that didn't make it across the line before the end of the last congress, but basically, making it easier to bring new generation capacity on the electrical grid disproportionately benefits renewables, because they make up the vast majority of wattage waiting in the queue. As we've seen by the explosion of deployment in less regulated grids (Texas, and most of the world), the economics now favor solar+storage and wind, we just have to let people build as much of it as they want to.

I would add:

* Plant more trees

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