Id like lemmings take on how they would actually reduce emissions on a level that actually makes a difference (assuming we can still stop it, which is likely false by now, but let’s ignore that)
I dont think its as simple as “tax billionaires out of existence and ban jets, airplanes, and cars” because thats not realistic.
Bonus points if you can think of any solutions that dont disrupt the 99%'s way of life.
I know yall will have fun with this!
But it’s time to disrupt 99% of life.
Survey humanity, produce an agreed on level of technology and lifestyle.
We probably need to limit ourselves to housing, food, internet, and safety/defense for everyone and not much else - then slow all industries based on HOW people want to live.
So getting rid of things like, plastic toys, gizmos, extravagances. Phones wouldn’t be updated as often. People would only be able to update their tech if they could meaningfully show it was necessary.
Lots of technology companies would be folded. Lots of industries would be nationalised and folded. International tourism would be greatly restricted. All the stuff we don’t need basically.
People would be mostly employed in the basics: Housing, food, internet. Too far beyond that and you’d have to rely on local people/groups/makers/repair companies.
So massive degrowth, nationalization, and restrictions/regulations to the market.
Most of all, corporations would no longer count as people. In fact society should have to rely on person to person contracting. I don’t really think corporations should exist becuase they become Zombies/Golems that do a lot of destructive things.
Basically degrowth, and restructuring society around degrowth.
Yeah, but that’s a fantasy, people will not do that. OP is specifically asking for something more realistic.
This is the one post I’ve seen here that actually tackles the main problems. Climate change can’t be stopped without degrowth, which means putting a stop to capitalism.
I’d like to add: while there would be a lot we’d have to give up, life under a degrowth economy would be good. Way better than what we have now. We’d all have more leisure time to focus on stuff that matters. Sure, we’d have fewer gadgets and toys, but we’d be able to spend more time with loved ones and engaging in creative and fulfilling hobbies.
Security would go a long way. Not national security but life security. For example I own a bunch of tools and I sorta wish I did not. If I was guaranteed access to something like a tool library that had everything I might need to buy from home depot of such I would not carry any. Heck it could be home depot where when you buy the paint you get the rollers and brushes and equipment to clean it up with your purchase and you return it when your done. Heck could return the leftover paint. Also internet replaces a lot of things. My wife and I are committed to not buying physical things so we using streaming services and buy digital copies of stuff. We get books in pdf now and use games and such to get away from toys and such.
I agree but you should emphasize the positives of degrowth otherwise everyone either gets scared or dismisses it as a non-serious solution politically. The main one being more leisure and less work.
All other “solutions” in this thread are so funny to me. People thinking more efficient/more sustainable stuff will change anything. Solar panels and whatever still need to be produced, causing emissions. If you continue growing infinitely, you’re going to cause infinite emissions with that.
Other than inventing time travel, I don’t think there’s a realistic method at this point. (and then I’m not so sure that time travel is that realistic either)
The idea of personal action vs. corporate/government action is a false choice. The government can force the corpos to stop burning the planet, but that will mean significant lifestyle changes for everybody.
It also means getting our shit together about immigration/ migration/ refugees. And not just in the US, but globally. A humanitarian catastrophe is assured otherwise.
I’m not optimistic.
Not possible. In order to be effective we need a global generational commitment that is beyond our current capacity for cooperation.
China, US, India, Russia. 1, 2, 3, 4. Guess who is least likely to take part in a global agreement?
Russia and China signed on to the Paris agreement, but largely ignore it. Trump famously pulled the US out of the agreement. Twice.
India has been making the right noises about hitting goals by 2030, but I’m not sure how they’re actually progressing, not that it means much without Russia, China and the US.
We need an agreement that commits our people not just now, but for multiple generations into the future without regard to who the individual rulers of the countries are. Won’t happen.
My proposal… this is a “long con”, so this seem more like a political proposal rather than something that can quickly fix up our society to be less polluting:
- Start/contribute to a political party that is catered towards young voters, with somewhere between center-left to full left-wing orientation. Note that sadly this party cannot be “far-left” so no eating billionaires or drastic corporate taxes… yet. Climate change will be a core part of the agenda, but at this point the party has to only focus on low-hanging fruit options (improve recycling & waste management, fines on recycling, taxes on cars, company cars, and high-consumption households, etc). Very important that intermediate steps such as nuclear is accepted (in contrast to some Green Parties), we can’t afford to ruin the economy at this point
- Try to pre-emptively rule out serious cases of corruption and/or nepotism, and try to base party focuses and decisions on politically unbiased scientific outputs; might need to hire a good scientific panel
- Use whatever means possible to try and gain popularity without changing the party’s principles. Ads… yes. Social media… yes. Paid influencers… have to swallow a hard pill here but also yes
- Try to win enough seats to form a majority coalition government with left-leaning and/or green parties. This is where point 1’s not being far-left yet comes into place as the party will need to be at least somewhat popular with most voters and most other politicians
- Work with the coalition to reduce tax loopholes, try to classify more forms of rich-people “income” into regular taxable income, and shift the main beneficiaries of party politics to focus on the working class. So no more tax loopholes for the rich as much as we can try… and the “no corruption” part from point 2 becomes very important here as otherwise the plan can go to waste
- The government should have a healthy tax base at this point. Now start giving tax incentives to perform more serious individualistic environmentally-friendly options (for example, subsidized high-speed rail instead of plane, install solar panels, biking instead of driving), and heavily tax or penalize situations that are polluting with no particular upsides (one-time use plastic, private jets, ,)
- Now THINK BIGGER. Invest tax money to public transit and green energy infrastructure; the population might be accepting of more radical interventions such as banning private jets or prison time for some execs now so we can start doing that
… Frankly, if anyone actually carries out this plan until like step 5 or 6, I think the exact details regarding combat climate change would be trivial, since the government would have very sufficient resources/good will/power to do so at that point
Die off.
Major corporations caused this, only major corporations can solve it. Laws would have to be passed requiring them to offset the damage from everything they do. Coops would need to be set up wherever possible for one industry to reuse waste from another. Subsidies would need to be ethically set up to encourage industry involved with cleaning the environment. Cooperation between nations to combat global issues would be needed. Actual consequences for industries it nations that violate. Education!! And most importantly convince half the world’s population to give a shit or even believe the problem exists. I’ve probably missed some.
The alternative would be magic.
Yeah, between the two, I think magic is probably more realistic. Let’s go with that.
Buy less crap. That’s it. It sounds like a sacrifice, but stuff doesn’t make you happy (provided your basic needs are met). If you are working longer hours to pay for your cars and tvs and fast fashion, your life might improve.
Playing with a cellphone is kinda fun. Know what’s really fun? Friends.
If you’re under 60, buying less crap is going to disrupt your life less than climate change will, so i think i am entitled to the aforementioned bonus points.
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There’s always damage control that can be done
This is extremely important: we are not at the point of no return.
Climate change can be stopped, even now. It will take lots of work, but it’s possible.
ClimateAdam, who has a PhD in climate science from Oxford, made a video about this. It’s 5 years old, but he’s still making videos with similar points today. It’s my understanding this is still the predominant view amongst climate scientists. The main reason I think this is that there aren’t many calling for geoengineering, which if we were at the point of no return would be something we’d have to explore.
The reason this is so important is because as climate change denial becomes more and more infeasible, it will get replaced primarily with climate change defeatism. The sooner we start pushing back on this, the better.
“Point of no return” is a simplistic concept. It depends on the your threshold for how bad it gets. Most climate scientists would agree that we’re just at or about to pass the 1.5°C target. But they would also agree that ever extra fraction of a degree matters. It’s not a question of “when are we fucked?” Its a question of “how quickly can we act to minimise severity of change?”
Source: am climate scientist, have been to a major climate conference in the last few months, and talk to other climate scientists regularly.
I am not a climate scientist and have not been to conferences but im a reasonably intelligent human who has five decades of experience on this planet and I can see we are already fucked in that things have changed in how the planet works. I see the storms (not just the news making ones but how unoften light rain has become around me and how often general storms have become), I see the flooding, I see the change in the seasons, etc. To me its now when are we fucked because again we already see that we are. To me its how roughly we want the fucking to be ultimately and can we bring it back down to a more tender and loving level.
To me its how roughly we want the fucking to be ultimately and can we bring it back down to a more tender and loving level.
More or less, yeah
No reasonable scientist is going to call for geoengineering unless they could be sure they are not making it worse. We are certainly in a point of no return in that we will not get back to 0 but until we are actually falling apart we won’t know for sure if we can’t survive at +3 or +5.
Passed it a while ago. That doesn’t mean we can’t slow down.
Humanity will evolve to deal with the changes, maybe. Maybe not.
Honestly, if capitalism stopped tomorrow, and we all did community planting. Were restricted on car usage, and did carbon capture techniques that were proven to work… All en mass, globally, I suspect we could change things.
The problem is Capitalism and freemarket “progress”. The endless carbon fuelled march to no where (in the name of money). A lot could be done without that humming away like nothing is wrong, but politicians want to protect Free Market Capitalism and aren’t laying down reasonable restrictions.
There are no carbon capture and storage technologies proven to work at a meaningful scale.
Geoengineering is probably the only way to counteract things now.
But that involves fucking around with the bottom of our food chain in the oceans so there’s obviously a good deal of reluctance to start down that path.
It’s not an on/off switch. Everything we can do will lessen the impact even if it can’t be stopped.
But as others mention, real impact comes from governments and international cooperation, not individual actions. Hence why voting is so important.
Encourage decentralisation and self-sufficiency. Produce and consume more locally. I think residential solar is a good start, as it may lead to reduction in overseas shipping for LNG, oil and coal. Small farms and workshops for daily necessities or repairs will further reduce need for commercial transportation. Work from home or encouraging local offices instead of corporate campuses will spread the population, make local businesses more viable, and reduce personal transportation.
All these encouragements should be done via tax credits or subsidies, so vote for parties who’d deliver those.
Decentralization in general is less efficient and therefore requires more resources. For example small scale farming has less yield per acre compared to large scale farming, thus you have to use more acres to produce the same yield leading to more environmental destruction. Or with the small local workshops, each of those workshops will require a vast array of machines and tools to handle every situation, some that may be rarely used if at all, so you need to produce thousands of copies of these tools for every shop that may not be used, using more resources, as opposed to having to only create one copy for a central repair facility.
The cost, including the environmental cost, of transport rarely exceeds the gains in efficiency from centralization. Working at an office for a computer job is the exception as theres very little gain. But working from home in a job where you cant send your work over a wire to the next worker would obviously lose a lot of efficiency from work from home.
We don’t want to spread people out, the more spread out they are the longer it will take to get places and the more likely they will use a car. We need people in dense centralized places because that’s where we get these efficiencies of scale. Public transportation becomes better with density, distribution of goods becomes easier, heating and cooling large complexes is more efficient than individual homes.
If they won’t shut down their CO²-spewing factories and plants, then we will have to.
I’m vegan, have no intention of ever buying a car and plan on never having children. That’s probably as much individual action as anyone can ask for. Anything after that is up to corporations and governments, so we should make sure they are incentivized to do the right thing 👍
Throw in no plane travel also
Shift away from consumerism and go back to a more local economy. Yes, that’s going to be very bad for the western world’s way of life. I forfeit my extra points because there’s no way to change without some disruption.
I’m a gardener, and focus first and foremost on building soil, through composting and using aerated compost teas. I plant and maintain areas that are supportive of wild pollinators. I ride my bike or walk to most places I need to go. And I drive an EV, which is mostly powered from the solar panels on my roof. Yes, this was a significant expense to do so. I eat a diet that is primarily vegetarian. I’ve been doing all of these things and more for most of my life.
It’s not everything obviously, but mandate that all people who can do their job from home must do their job from home. This will take a bite out of cars and improve general human morale.
Eliminate carbon trading programs and just set hard limits. Went over your allocation of carbon? Guess you’re done for the quarter.
Eliminate LLCs. Bring on the accountability.
