On a macro scale all you can really do is vote for national level candidates that care about these issues. Luckily it’s not hard to see which ones do and which ones don’t.
I even roll my eyes at my city council spending even one second on climate change policy (and they have spent whole meetings on it). Our city of 80,000 people could disappear from the face of the planet and it would not make a bit of difference.
Better to volunteer for a swing district. You can write letters or fundraise from home, anywhere in the country.
You should also volunteer for a swing district though! Very good idea.
It would be hard for me to vote against indoor plumbing if that was needed to save the planet
I would vote against "Same Day Delivery" in a heartbeat though, if it helped
This type of cynicism is both unwarranted and unhelpful.
Just say what you're trying to say. I don't know what "green parties" refers to across the entire globe of climate efforts, but quite obviously yes, most of the positive climate policies have been pushed by people who care about the climate.
Just as obvious, most of those policies were not successfully enacted by the fringiest and most extreme versions of pro-climate people.
Happy to sacrifice some of your CnC to ease obligations on those you give no assurances to.
Unfortunately there's no way the rich would ever let this go through.
That may be true but there aren't enough wealthy people to just attack their consumption. In aggregate, regular people use a lot more energy. There's no way out of this that is going to be popular.
Not sure I understand, the goal isn't to attack anyone's consumption? The whole idea is to stop costs from being externalized. The concept doesn't require wealthy people to make sense, but existing wealth disparity makes it even more attractive for regular people.
> In aggregate, regular people use a lot more energy.
Why would the aggregate matter? Individually, regular people use waaaay less energy than the upper class. That means these regular people would, on average, come out slightly positive. And the "cleaner" someone's lifestyle is, the better this scheme would leave them (which poor people necessarily tend towards, since they cannot afford spending much on consumption).
Trump is paying people to burn more coal, blocking solar, canceling wind.
Could the dems have done more, sure. Are those programs perfect, absolutely not. But one party is moving in the right direction and the other is actively trying to accelerate climate change. Gtfo with that both sides crap.
The both sides bit is jaw droppingly ignorant if you pay attention to regional and national politics.
https://www.wcmu.org/local-regional-news/2025-01-16/michigan...
Well, this is what she said after the race was over:
Harris labels Biden Gaza response ‘inadequate’: ‘I … pleaded with Joe’ https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5517261-kamala-h...
You have to make them want your vote.
that's the difference between you and the public servants that you roll your eyes at.
Working on your own carbon footprint is a $100M marketing trick played on you by oil companies like BP.
Leah Stokes' new book offers instead a "carbon wave" -- how to evaluate and maximize your impact at a local, state, national, and global level. Here's a LinkedIn post. She's got a new book coming out about this: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7496265286...
Every meeting minute spent on discussing climate change is another minute not spent on authorizing things like Flock or permitting data centers. That's nothing to roll your eyes about
Now he's more worried about which toilets people use.
My manager (who is on an H1B in America) asked if I wanted to move there too. Lol :') No way. I'm not even visiting for a meeting anymore.
For me to ever consider travelling there at least 2 things must be fixed: No Trump and no mandatory social media collection and device seizures at the border. Not that I have something to hide but I just don't want to and won't cooperate.
I don't think this will actually happen though (the latter parts, of course Trump won't stay forever). Because the privacy invasion is a bipartisan thing.
People rarely 'go bad' like that. You just learn more about who they really are over time.
I think that, if people who believe in climate change want to be convincing, it would be more effective to avoid blaming specific instances of weather on climate change without strong justification. Especially when the weather isn’t even abnormal.
Los Angeles, especially inland and in the valley, is hot in the summer. It was hot in the summer 30 years ago and it’s still hot in the summer. It’s the typical hot season right now, and the valley appears to be only slightly above season average temperatures today, and coastal LA seeks be slightly cooler than average. Apparently it will be unseasonably cool in a couple days.
More tropical storms are approaching LA and that’s increasing humidity is why it’s sweltering.
"Forecasters attributed the punishing humidity to the remnants of Tropical Storm Iselle moving over the state, as well as unusually warm ocean temperatures due to a combination of a months-long marine heat wave, a powerful El Niño and climate change.
"Dew points in the Los Angeles Basin have been “really high,” hovering around 70 degrees in many places, with a few coastal areas like Redondo Beach and Torrance reaching a dew point of 73 to 75 on Friday, said Ryan Kittell, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. The metric measures the moisture content in the air."
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-08-28/forget-f...
When nuclear power became a thing in the seventies, there was massive planning around a presumed nuclear-powered future. The largest energy storage facilities in the US were all built around that time. This turned out to be a mirage as the cost of nuclear went up with the safety expectations of the electorate, while petrochemical prices dropped. But this time it's not prices we're predicting, it's temperature, which is much more reliable.
We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems. That way we roll from one crisis into the next. There's so many issues we're causing, like entire ecosystems going extinct. Sooner or later that will lead to crises too. We have to stop externalising.
And yes the electorate wants to be safe and for good reason. Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.
Those materials are mined also. At least forethought is given to handling/disposal for nuclear since it’s a known issue.
See how the soviets destroyed half the Czech countryside looking for Uranium for their bombs and power plants: https://www.rferl.org/a/soviet-uranium-mines-explored-abando...
Uranium mining is a dirty business and if we're going to be needing a lot more of it due to expansion of nuclear and leaving the mining to the lowest bidder it will be very polluting.
And if we’re just being offhanded then apparently thorium is a replacement for uranium, or there’s the ability to reprocess used fuel again for nuclear power.
> We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems.
Huh? Local pollution with solid waste vs dispersing that waste into the global atmosphere is the same to you?
> Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.
Right, 20_000 deaths from the tsunami is no big deal, the pollution is!
Since you're ignoring any and all statistics wholesale, I hope you never fly — 9/11 was terrible after all, so aviation is clearly unsafe.
To put it plainly, everyone wants the problem to go away without having to change anything about their lifestyle.
If you insist on finding a way to criticize leftists on the climate file, a much better tack would be pointing out how some environmentalists have opposed nuclear power or densification.
At some point we finally will need to admit that they were not fools for saying that.
Fresh water is vanishing. Nuclear plants need water (and absence of arsonists) to not go out of control. They will need ten years (or most) to be built. At this point the place may be in the way to be flooded by the sea, or in the way to became a desert. Can a new nuclear plant return their investment if they will be operative only for ten years more before to turn into a rusty reef?. Probably not.
Had we spent this pile of money into renewables, we would be in a much better position.
Maybe 10ish years ago the left was all on board with individual action, but now it has heavily shifted to "I can drive my SUV because it's on Big Oil to fix the climate"
The way individuals can meaningfully contribute is by supporting politicians that will make policies and rules and regulations the meaningfully encourage that collective action, and when they have a choice between more than one corporation for some product or service that are not too different as far as impact on the lifestyle goes choosing the one that is better from a climate change point of view.
The politicians and the corporations (encouraged by incentives and regulations by the politicians) can then bring about changes that will make it so the lifestyle changes for individuals that help with climate change also improve the individual's situations so people voluntarily make them in large numbers.
For example there are a lot of people in the US who would be better off if their next car was an EV except the public charging infrastructure isn't good enough for their needs. Build a lot more public chargers that support 800V cars and many of these people will pick an EV. This is something government can bring about.
For an average individual it is perfectly fine, to use a sports analogy, to play the game as it is now while supporting league wide changes to the rules to make it a better game in the future.
Sorry but this is absolute nonsense.
What we eat matters. A huge amount of what people eat is unnecessarily excessive in terms of resources required to create it. Beef and dairy, most meat, are good examples of this.
An individual can reduce their contribution to climate change by up to 30% by simply forgoing meat and dairy. That percentage obviously varies quite a lot, but it can be huge.
Add in that food waste is a huge problem and this makes more sense.
So they go from their contribution to climate change being completely insignificant to it being 70% of completely insignificant.
If I dropped all meat and dairy it would reduce the world's annual emissions by 0.0000000026% (if we are optimists [1]).
This level of reduction only matters is a very large number of other people do it too, and getting that to happen requires a lot of top down effort.
[1] Realistically cows are produced in integer amounts. My foregoing burgers and steaks would not reduce the number of cows. At most have a minuscule affect on prices too low to be detected. Same for other meats and dairy.
Of course... Every year where the consequences weren't in sight, saying we should consume less, buy less, eat less meat, I have been called 'degrowther' and it has been explained to me that I would increase human suffering because it would reduce the economy size. Ok, fair, I just wanted to help future human, but if you don't plan to have any, you do you.
Now I'm told I think it's corporations that should fix it. Of course.
By the way, I still think it's consumerism (and consumption capitalism) the reason we can't deal with the issue. That corporations are the biggest voice that push for this system is incidental, but yes, breaking big corps in smaller entities would probably help solve the problem. A bit too late now, but better than never.
Also, who on the left think that corpos will do anything to help humanity? Really? I think at most, some thinks it's the government to do everything but corpo? Really? Your friends on the left seems to me very, very much in the center, center right to be exact.
And we do feel hopeless and helpless. And the only thing we can do is to promote and advocate for science. It was a scientist who made us stop adding lead to gasoline. It was because of scientists we were able to stop ozone layer destruction. It was a scientist who invented the catalytic converter. It was a scientist who broke the asbestos industry's decades of denial and a scientist who broke big tobacco.
We didn't have to "change our lifestyle" - scientists proved bad things happening and politicians listened. The current imbalance in the political system is that the right simply just wants to ignore the science. And even half the country shitting their souls out in explosive diarrhea won't change it. Therefore the right have no right to representation, because the survival of our species is at stake. We need to vote them out.
The big problem is this is all driven by consumption and it’s hard for people to cut back on consumption. I don’t know how to explain to people how a simple life is much easier than the complicated life of the rich and famous they see every day on the Internet.
I don’t think there is an answer for this, I think there’s way too much propaganda on the other side of the equation. My only hope from this El Niño is that it creates such damage and disaster that it starts waking people up. I think if it affects the ranchers and farmers that will be a big plus because they are usually on the side of not believing in climate change.
What I do right now is just keep talking to people and preparing, but I’m lucky since I live in a minivan full-time. I mean, I can drive anywhere. The weather suits me.
Tell us more
We'll talk climate science, impacts, and what we can do to avert the worst impacts of the worst El Niño in human history.
The numbers are daunting and the returns are scant, but the effort is one that should be made.
The upside is I saw little sign of Gorgan LNG style Carbon Capture; where a massive source of CO2 greenwashes releasing 100 units of CO2 by stuffing 1 unit back in the hole it came from.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/24/shell-ccs-facility-in-canada...
Dubious accounting trick at best .. not even working as it was sold on the box in practice.
Atmospheric CO2 already floating about appears to be what the air-mining crowd are targeting (albeit small scale so far).
Also: you can justify just about anything by inspiring panic. I'm not buying it.
An economy that seizes climate solutions can zoom ahead in terms of innovation, manufacturing, and enforcement. The changing climate is one of the biggest economic opportunities we've ever seen in human history, but somehow we've convinced ourselves that it's not only the worst non-opportunity ever but somehow would break capitalism. The richest man on the planet makes electric cars.
How many children do you have?