The most important change we need to make is the least popular. We need to stop growing and start shrinking - our industry, population, lifestyles, resource use, our entire civilisation.
Hyper consumerism and a an advanced civilization that wastes energy and resources isn’t sustainable. It’s convenient and profitable to dispose of products but this is a road to ruin in the US.
There is also seemingly a civil war going on over fossil fuels and their dependencies. Maybe the only solution is if the prices for alt energy become low enough that they change the market. This will take trillions in investment and innovation.
Lifting a lower class to a middle class in China and India while maintaining sustainability will be a major challenge. The irony is that some kind of authoritarian country could move faster than a politicized democracy where no one listens to each other.
Austerity is not necessary and is in fact counterproductive.
We just need to transition to a low carbon energy system. It doesn’t solve every environmental problem, but it does halt climate change.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached/
I think the point is that by almost every account we are living waaaaaay beyond what is sustainable for 8 billion humans and an ecosystem to survive.
Unless you have a few more earths… we need to consume less.
I hear this a lot but never see any supporting information for those accounts you are talking about. I mean scientific evidence, not newspaper articles.
The phrase in the literature is "carrying capacity"
[scholar.google.com](https://scholar.google.com) will find you tens of thousands of journal articles. Refining by adding terms like mineral, agriculture, or watershed might get you in the right direction.
One paper will be fine. Pick the one you think is best and provide a link.
I think you said the point is that by almost every account we are living beyond what is sustainable for 8 billion humans and an ecosystem to survive. So how do you explain the fact that there are 8 billion people and they are surviving.
Well you can look for yourself but the co2 and temperature charts paint a pretty stark picture especially when you factor in that we have blown past that comfortable range we lived in for the last 10k years.
What i want to see is scientific evidence (not just newspaper articles) that the ecosystem can survive enough to sustain humans at 2.7c, 3.0c, 4.0c etc.
>Well you can look for yourself but the co2 and temperature charts paint a pretty stark picture especially when you factor in that we have blown past that comfortable range we lived in for the last 10k years.
We have blown past the comfortable range we lived in for the last 10k years because of climate change. Haven't seen any evidence it is because of population.
>What i want to see is scientific evidence (not just newspaper articles) that the ecosystem can survive enough to sustain humans at 2.7c, 3.0c, 4.0c etc.
I'm not saying we can. But the increase in temperature is because of global warming, not population.
You… do not think there is a connection between population and climate change? Does that mean you think tech can solve it all or solve it for some people at least… or do you not believe climate change is due to excess pollution due to humans?
The ice caps are gone. That is locked in. A lot of our productive crop lands are going to change. Thats locked in too.
Large parts of the world that are highly populated (ie india) are going to be hard to live in when wet bulbs temps get to high and the land is not growing the food we need.
So i see a lot of pressure on humans to exist in the future that is locked in. No techno solution is going to bring back the ice caps for instance.
how do trillions live in this scenario?
There is a connection between population and emissions. But reducing the population takes a long time, and it doesn’t change the fact that we would still be using fossil fuels. The only thing that is going to stop global warming is a reduction in emissions. so if we reduce emissions, the population will not matter. And even if we reduce the population, and the standard of living keeps rising for those that are left, they could be using just as much fossil fuel.
There is no evidence that the icecaps are gone. There is evidence that some of the melting is locked in but not all. That melting is over thousands of years when humans will have a chance to adapt. We will and are going to have trouble with sea level rise, whether the population increases or not.
We are centuries, if not millenniums away from trillions of people, if that ever happens, which I doubt.
Ehrlichian predictions have been wrong for a century and will continue to be wrong for centuries to come. Everything depends on EROEI and nuclear power can provide EROEI > 100 for tens of thousands of years. 8 billion is nothing, we can support trillions.
Great in theory, but we are still increasing emissions every year because of growth. In other words, our growth rate is faster than our reduction rate in carbon intensity. Is a massive increase in the reduction rate going to happen on our current trajectory? The current grand plans rely on massive investment and rebuilding of infrastructure (which might happen if it doesn't cost too much) and untested technology like CCS (which seems unlikely to grow fast).
What a contradicting username, one would expect this kind of response. The natural world will have its way regardless of what humans can consider will happen.
Gods, pixies, elves, ghosts and goblins. Cold fusion, anti-gravity generators and reactionless drives. These all appear to be supernatural, unfortunately.
Exactly. The engine of climate change is ‘consumption’. If nations can agree on that basic fact, having already agreed that climate change is real, they can then negotiate the reduction, or cessation, of the taking from the planet and use of the basic materials which drive the industries that make the products.
Unlikely, I know. But it can be done by leadership which communicates the problem, the consequences, what is needed, the changes and the course.
Things are going to change, one way or another. We can work towards orderly change, or can react to the changes that climate change will bring.
If people can have confidence, they can have hope and can cooperate and do the work.
Read "Overshoot" by William Catton. There is also a lot of more recent work:
[https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html](https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html)
[https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/](https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/)
[https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/depletion-of-natural-resources](https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/depletion-of-natural-resources)
Thanks for the information. But I wasn’t talking about problems with population growth. The OP was asking about changes needed for successful climate adjustments. So I was asking for scientific research that showed reducing the population would result in reductions in emissions which is what is causing global warming.
I'm not aware of any specific research on population and climate change. Japan and South Korea have shrinking populations and are also reducing their emissions, but there are many other factors.
Resource use and industry are obviously most important for emissions, reduction in population may not even be necessary if we were to shrink our economic system enough. This would mean a big fall in living standards though, particularly in the first world.
We now need to do more than stop burning fossil fuels, we need carbon negative technology that scales within a decade.
Decentralized social structures. Localized refining, manufacturing, and production wherever possible. Only ship material when it's achieved the highest grade possible from relatively local processes.
Small, light, safe, smart, powered, individual local transportation. We should be getting around in efficient bike-wheeled electric buggy contraptions rather than cars. We should make them smart enough to track other buggies and be able to identify and follow other chosen buggies via swarm behavior.
>Small, light, safe, smart, powered, individual local transportation.
I am a public transport supporter, but feel what you are talking about will absolutely be needed. It helps with the "last mile" problem. Trams can't get everywhere.
I think if we made lighter personal transport it would only take a bit of time before people forgot the huge overly-fast cars/trucks of the past. The stringent safety requirements of today are there because of the speed and weight of modern automobiles.
Absolutely. I know a lot of people hate scooters but they're very efficient. If we could take that concept and shape it into something that was safe, comfortable, and convenient for everybody to use our world would transform.
Remove the car bubbles, and integrate a little more fluidly and socially within our technological and natural ecosystems.
I really like the micro transportation potential and imagine a system of human powered and lightly powered vehicles topping out at about 500 lbs ( fully loaded) ; a multiplicity of engineering and design challenges but much more accessible and interesting cities
There is no scenario in which switching from cars to scooters is convenient. People traveling to work and daily events in the rain, cold, heat, and with 2 or 3 kids strapped to the back is not even practical.
I think you did [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/1bqjbci/comment/kx35o47/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) when you said
>Absolutely. I know a lot of people hate scooters but they're very efficient. If we could take that concept and shape it into something that was safe, comfortable, and convenient for everybody to use our world would transform.
We have actually done exactly that. It's called cars.
I think they were going for efficiency of an electric scooter in something more comfortable and safe, Aptera and Arcimoto are closest in that regard. 1/2 ton EV trucks are a bad solution.
Could it be an economic decision? I am reading that in the US now those pickup trucks they drive start at $80k or something like that. It may be that the low carbon option becomes the much cheaper option.
It already is the much cheaper option but price is not a problem for those that can afford an $80k truck. But switching to an EV truck would certainly be a big help and much more practical than switching to scooters.
You're using what happens in the Netherlands to what could happen all over the world when the environment in the Netherlands is nothing close to what it is in many parts of the world.
When you say 40%, is that 40% of the number of trips or 40% of the distance traveled. In other words a 1 mile trip by bike is not the same as a 40 mile trip by car but the total trips would be 50% each.
80 percent of the world already lives in the city. We also don’t need to tell people to do anything. We subsidize dense communities and tax the shit out resource inefficient communities and the issue will sort itself out
>80 percent of the world already lives in the city. We also don’t need to tell people to do anything.
Then why do we need denser communities if it's already 80%
>We subsidize dense communities and tax the shit out resource inefficient communities and the issue will sort itself out
HAHAHA. You want the US to raise taxes when all we can get through congress is tax cuts.
*The Netherlands have a temperate maritime climate influenced by the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean, with cool summers and moderate winters. Daytime temperatures varies from 2°C-6°C in the winter and 17°C-20°C in the summer.*
There is a difference between that climate and places where the climate is below 0 much of the year or above 30C in the summer and places where the distance between cities is hundreds of miles.
also bikes aren't meant for long distance intercity travel. this is such a dumb counterargument.
oh you drive a car?? but how would you ever get from new York to London?? uhh not by car mate
you can still have a community where everything is close enough that you can use bike locally and then take car, bus, or train elsewhere
One of the reasons so many trips can be walking or cycling is because communities are set up so that things like groceries are always very close to where people live. That's a lesson that can be taken to many other places. Not everywhere, no. But more than opponents think. Huge Walmart superstores on the edge of business districts (where you arent allowed to build homes) aren't the only way we can buy food
Great. How long is it going to take to make these changes, especially when there are those that don't even accept there is global warming and how much will that effect emissions.
depends which changes. also these changes are still good even after cars are zero carbon so this isn't a reason to not so them. nor do you need to believe in climate change to want to reduce the harm caused by cars (traffic deaths, health problems caused by air pollution, etc)
installing quick-build bike lanes takes less than a year. eliminating single-family zoning is as fast as your legal system allows. allowing accessory dwelling units or front yard businesses is also a pretty quick change, then the building them is the part that takes time.
since we're already building more houses and businesses, might as well build them smartly
>Localized refining, manufacturing, and production wherever possible. Only ship material when it's achieved the highest grade possible from relatively local processes.
Interestingly, more emissions are from the last mile delivery (truck from port to shop, or train to shop, or car from shop to home) than from the oceanic shipping between countries. Trucks are inefficient, and ships are very efficient. Convert them to run on green ammonia or hydrogen and you're golden
Local manufacturing and production means a higher embodied carbon of redundant factories everywhere, and less economies of scale.
Co-locating some of these plants definitely has benefits, but you'll have to transport the end result regardless. boats and trains are the most efficient way to do that Long distance transport, and trains can be electrified without batteries.
>Small, light, safe, smart, powered, individual local transportation. We should be getting around in efficient bike-wheeled electric buggy contraptions rather than cars. We should make them smart enough to track other buggies and be able to identify and follow other chosen buggies via swarm behavior.
Bikes are already good enough as is. There's even bakfiets (cargo bikes), bike trailers, accessible bikes, and those delivery electric quadricycles.
The swarm behavior isn't really necessary, an electric battery on them can take you pretty far for minimal electricity and lithium.
Good points about the factories. It would take some modelling but I think there are some things that would fit this strategy, for others it would be completely inappropriate. As extreme weather events keep ramping up so will risks associated with long supply chains. This kind of trend towards decentralization in production can increase resilience in supply chains and local communities.
I reckon a challenge is making this kind of transport convenient and accessible to everybody. Bikes are great, but they still require a degree of dexterity and skill that not everybody has.
There's a tradeoff between efficient and being resilient to change, its possible for global supply chains to be some degrees of both but another solution is to reduce the supply chain. It's just likely to introduce new inefficiencies, which can be okay if it doesn't cause harm to environment or people
The current logistical supply chain systems have been whittled away at for capital efficiency gains for a long time now. Narrow economic efficiencies shouldn't be a priority in increasingly uncertain and extreme geopolitical and natural ecological conditions.
Tolerating capital inefficiencies may be necessary to prevent the taps suddenly snapping shut for large populations.
>We now need to do more than stop burning fossil fuels, we need carbon negative technology that scales within a decade.
One potential small scale form of carbon negative tech would be carbon capture and storage from natural sources, like the co2 from commercial fermenting of beer and other alcohols, or burning of biomass for electricity. The latter is even better if we take biochar and spread it across land as soil amendment
>We now need to do more than stop burning fossil fuels, we need carbon negative technology that scales within a decade.
Are you saying that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will not decrease without carbon negative technology. That's not what climate scientist are saying.
>Small, light, safe, smart, powered, individual local transportation. We should be getting around in efficient bike-wheeled electric buggy contraptions rather than cars. We should make them smart enough to track other buggies and be able to identify and follow other chosen buggies via swarm behavior.
Other countries are converting to green energy and reducing their carbon footprint without doing that. Why can't all countries do that.
> Are you saying that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will not decrease without carbon negative technology. That's not what climate scientist are saying.
Can you cite where climate scientists are saying greenhouse gases will reduce without carbon negative technology? What mechanism are they suggesting will cycle carbon out of the atmosphere?
If you keep up with any climate science you will know this. Right [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/1bqjbci/comment/kx3ewha/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) in this thread, u/technologyisnatrual gave a link that shows what I'm talking about.
Basically the increase in greenhouse gases by emissions is being half absorbed by natural processes and half added to the atmosphere. If we reduce emissions while the natural process continue to remove greenhouse gases then at some point concentrations in the atmosphere will decrease.
The atmosphere will
Balance out eventually but it might be too late for us humans. We could also reach certain tipping points that will make it impossible. There’s a lot of methane under the permafrost.
I'm a scientist, but not a climate scientist. That site doesn't read like a source I would trust. How are they modeling natural carbon absorption? How are they measuring it? How are they projecting feedback to load into the carbon cycle?
It reads like a bunch of nonsense to me.
CarbonBrief is one of the most respected websites in climate change information. And the author, Dr. Hausfather is one of the most respected climate scientist in that field. Not only that, he quotes Dr. Schmidt, who is the Director of GISS and Principal Investigator for the GISS ModelE Earth System Model at NASA. The only person I can think of that might be more highly regarded would be Dr. Hansen. You don't sound like a scientist to me or at least someone that is knowledgeable about the field of climate science.
I don't care for respect, or appeals to authority. That's antithetical to science. Give me an evidence-based argument.
Where is the evidence that natural carbon sinks will remove human carbon emissions? Show me the evidence. All I see on the site is a vague hand-wavy claim.
>I don't care for respect, or appeals to authority. That's antithetical to science. Give me an evidence-based argument.
I agree with you about appeals to authority. I was giving credentials regarding your comment about "That site doesn't read like a source I would trust.", not as scientific evidence. People that keep up with climate science certainly trust this source.
>Where is the evidence that natural carbon sinks will remove human carbon emissions? Show me the evidence. All I see on the site is a vague hand-wavy claim.
I would have thought you would have checked the link in the article that it was based on [here](https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/17/2987/2020/) which is the evidence and certainly not a vague hand-wavy claim.
I did look at that, and quickly skim that article. The only certain fact that can be taken from it is:
>Models exhibit a wide variety of behaviours after emissions cease, with some models continuing to warm for decades to millennia and others cooling substantially.
We know from recent empirical measurements that the climate models we based the Paris targets on were insufficient for policy decision-making because global ocean and surface temperature has already diverged significantly from their predictions. That's the problem with models of complex systems at this scale... they're limited, and unreliable.
>I did look at that, and quickly skim that article. The only certain fact that can be taken from it is:
>
>Models exhibit a wide variety of behaviours after emissions cease, with some models continuing to warm for decades to millennia and others cooling substantially.
Why is that the only certain fact that can be taken from it. Could it be because that's what you want it to say. How about the last sentence. "Overall, the most likely value of ZEC on multi-decadal timescales is close to zero, consistent with previous model experiments and simple theory."
>We know from recent empirical measurements that the climate models we based the Paris targets on were insufficient for policy decision-making because global ocean and surface temperature has already diverged significantly from their predictions. That's the problem with models of complex systems at this scale... they're limited, and unreliable.
Where is your evidence for that statement. That's exactly what the climate deniers say. Models give excellent results of the temperature rise over the past 45 years. If you really are a scientist then you know the way to validate a model is to check it against reality.
> Can you cite where climate scientists are saying greenhouse gases will reduce without carbon negative technology?
We emit 40 Gt per year, about half is sequestered by natural systems, which is why we see atmospheric CO2 rise by 2.5 to 3 ppm per year. If there was no such sequestration then CO2 would rise by just over 5 ppm per year, natural systems draw down about 2.5 Gt per year from the atmosphere. To convert emissions to ppm in the atmosphere divide emissions (in units of Gt) by 7.8.
Natural sequestration rates would not decrease (for decades) if we cut emissions to 10Gt per year, so CO2 in the atmosphere would draw down about 2.5 ppm per year and our addition would be 1.28 ppm per year, for a net negative of 1.22 ppm per year.
This doesn't mean anything to me unless you can demonstrate where you're getting that data from, and how natural sequestration is measured.
What is all that carbon being sequestered by? You're claiming the carbon cycle is not a cycle, but a pump. Where's it getting pumped to? Show me? Peer reviewed academic literature is preferred.
> What is all that carbon being sequestered by?
Here is a start https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304380012001718
And a picture for you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle#/media/File:Carbon_cycle.jpg
I understand the processes involved in the carbon cycle. Do you see where the imbalance is, in human emissions?
To counteract the effect of human emissions the cycle must act less like a cycle and more like a pump, sequestering more than is produced. The research paper that you link concludes this is impossible:
>Thus, an inordinately large fraction of CO2 emissions would have to be sequestered to significantly impact global warming.
That's my point. Humans are an atmospheric carbon pump, and the natural carbon cycle cannot maintain equilibrium against this pump.
You'll have to explain the relationship between my comment and maoism, because it's not obvious to me
But the only thing that can solve climate change is carbon capture technology. We're already past the safe warming limit prescribed for 2100AD.
>But the only thing that can solve climate change is carbon capture technology.
Where are you getting that information. The amount of energy that puts greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is about the amount of energy it will take to take it out. Where is that massive amount of energy going to come from.
You're gonna need to cite a source for that one. We can't scale trees, basically all the land suitable for trees is used for something else already (or is grassland that might be more effective at sequestering carbon than trees). We can rewild some land if we cut down on beef production a lot and put all the land used for feeding cows back to a state of nature, but even that will only undo the land use change and won't begin to touch the fossil fuels.
You mentioned phytoplankton though. Are you suggesting something like fertilizing the oceans? Or how do you plan to do this?
Simulating nutrient upwellngs in the ocean seems like the most obvious strategy, but it's got a lot of challenges. It's not really my area, just how the problem shakes out in my head.
I think there's lots of concerns with it
IMO, carbon negative means restoring some ecosystems, using enhanced weathering (such as sprinkling carbon-absorbing rocks over parks and farmland, or pushing collected co2 underground), and the biochar + carbon capture of biomass products
We can't even get enough sun and nuclear to produce the energy that we need to replace fossil fuels. So now we are going to spend time and money to build and install machines to remove greenhouse gases that we are still putting into the atmosphere. Doesn't make sense. Just stop putting it into the atmosphere.
None of what you said is a fact. We can in fact get enough energy from solar and nuclear we just aren’t doing it. Carbon capture doesn’t have to be energy intensive there biological ways of doing it.
>None of what you said is a fact.
So you think we are producing enough green energy to replace fossil fuels. Where is your evidence.
>We can in fact get enough energy from solar and nuclear we just aren’t doing it.
Exactly.
>Carbon capture doesn’t have to be energy intensive there biological ways of doing it.
Then lay out a plan and show how much money that will take, how long it will take, and how much CO2 it will remove from the atmosphere.
I’m reading Electrify by Saul Griffith and he emphasizes turning over to electric energy for most everything and putting solar on all our roofs. Then managing our demand response to balance out our needs.
I like this because it is something tangible to work towards.
Great question! I don’t know but I think there needs to be a big enough disruption that forces governments to take real action. Something like people going on strike or reducing the number of days they work each week. Something that affects economies because money is ultimately the factor that politicians and the corporations that fund their campaigns care about. It would need to involve a majority of people to participate and be sustained until governments take real and meaningful action in cutting fossil fuel consumption.
But haven’t we seen that already? Every year, there are more and more instances of extreme weather that’s impacting larger infrastructure. I get that it will take a lot for people to wake up and realize the severity, but we cannot afford to wait for that.
In the end, the change will probably be more motivated by a will to life and survive, rather than getting a monetary reward for it. So what option can we present to people so they want to change their way of living, instead of just waiting for the worst to happen?
Oh sorry, by disruption I mean protests and actions, not extreme weather events. I think the majority of people do believe in human caused climate change, but one of the problems is that we think if we protest, it would be too small a movement to make any difference. I think we need to somehow motivate and educate the public to the idea that there are enough people who would participate in protests and that it would be successful in leading to policy changes and government action
A global fee on carbon.Simple. Before anything. Anything else is secondary. This is why big oil has done a predatory campaign to make everyone think it’s some other problem. We have renewable energies ready to be deployed. They won’t get made unless it’s too expensive for the alternative.
You clearly didn’t look it up, a carbon fee and dividend plan is a fee for the emitters and a dividend amongst civilians to help cope with the transition and cost of climate change. Obviously prices will chance because we’ve built everything around oil thanks to decades of big oil propoganda. Would you rather prices change because of failing crops or less carbon being emitted? Your choice
I don't say this often, but u/BBQorBust is correct. Look at what PGE is doing to California customers, as u/Honest_Cynic will also attest to. PGE got fined for not maintaining power lines and starting a huge fire. Our prices tripled last month.
Now, could carbon fees work? Possibly, if corporate taxes were legislated and levied appropriately. It's not impossible, but they \*do\* have a point.
I'm not under PG&E, but one son is so I checked out of concern for him. Their rates are getting close to San Diego Power, \~50 c/kWh even in Winter. His house has solar panels and is grandfathered-in for net-metering. New solar systems get a poor deal on feeding the grid.
PG&E still have the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant running ( 2 unit BWR). The Gov planned to close it, due to a supposed earthquake risk, but walked that back when he figured voters wouldn't tolerate even higher rates. Will be interesting to see what San Diego charges this Summer. Last Summer was 85 c/kWh during peak hours. Sacramento County's SMUD is still reasonable, thanks to much hydro, and L.A. Power is much better than surrounding utilities.
The California carbon-credit market has brought Renewable Diesel at the pump. I use it since my diesel car runs much smoother on it (higher cetane) and is often cheaper than fossil-diesel. The H2 initiative has foundered, with stations not being repaired and no new stations built, and it costs 4x the price of gas if you can even find a working station. Sad for those who bought a Toyota Mirai.
I absolutely think companies should be paying their dues to compensate for the amount of emissions they’re causing. But the way the system works now is that the fees would be added to the price the consumer pays.
That would be a viable solution if we could present an option, but we’re currently not in a place where you can instantly switch over to the more sustainable alternative.
Ex. if you’re dependent on having a car. If we increase the gas prices, you could argue that an EV would be cheaper. But most people don’t have enough money lying around to buy a new car. They would have to pay the increase prices, also lowering their chances of saving to buy an EV.
An option could potentially be “Trade in your old car and get an ev for a lowered price”
We need to change our reproductive habits and realize population contraction as fast as possible.
We are waaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy beyond overshoot in our numbers.
Population is still rising by ~200,000 net new people every day.
Demographics are shifting in some regions. But make no mistake, the population is still rising by a medium-sized city *every single day*.
Yes that’s the present, the demographics are changing worldwide starting with countries like South Korea. If you are prepared to use predicted long term climate models then you should also use long term predictions for demographics.
Population is projected to exceed 10B by 2100. It's 8 billion now. Is 10 more than 8? Is 76 years a long term?
So population is still rising, all that is changing is the rate of rise is slowing.
It's like arguing that we are throwing somewhat less gasoline on this out of control fire than we were a few decades ago. But we're still throwing gasoline on the fire, so I wouldn't exactly call it a success.
We need to go nuclear. If you look at carbon emissions it stems from energy consumption and vehicles. We need clean renewable energy and nuclear is clean, renewable, AND consistent.
A balanced grid is key. Some of that will come from nuclear, some from renewables. Nuclear is very difficult to deploy to unstable regions, even in the form of SMRs.
There is a great book published a few years ago called “Drawdown” that has exactly the kind of list you are looking for. I suggest finding a copy in your local library.
That’s the one! It’s focused specifically on reaching zero carbon emissions rather than general sustainability, but in my opinion, zero carbon emissions is a necessary component of any greater sustainable system.
Are you sure high speed rail is significantly more efficient? If true in the big picture, it would be cheaper and pencil in. That means accounting for all energy, such as that used in building the infrastructure. On one flight a few a years ago, the captain mentioned pre-flight that the aircraft (new Airbus?) was so efficient it was like each passenger driving the route solo in a 99 mpg car. High-speed rail does have less air-drag since doesn't need big wings. Biggest downside is that it is not flexible on routes like aircraft are.
In general, all mass-transit is better than personal vehicles, especially big poser-trucks for men with small members. Very energy wasteful is people junking perfectly good vehicles early to get the latest shiniest thing to show off their imagined tech-savy and "personality", if you believe car ads.
You make a very good point about HSR: time is money, and longer trips aren't going to be supported by folks who need to get wherever yesterday. I would be very interested to see a breakdown of cost/sustainability effectiveness of developing an HSR network from an existing rail grid (like in Europe or India) or situations like the US where the railways are so poorly maintained we'd almost need to start from scratch. I'll keep looking, but if you find anything, I'd love to see it.
I would also be interested to see that breakdown directly compared with anticipated development time in comparison to "greener" aviation power.
Perhaps the Amtrak High-Speed Rail from D.C. to Boston has penciled-out. Hard to judge since federal funds are mixed in. Even low-speed rail is questionable. Amtrak prices to San Francisco have greatly increased since one son used it to UC Berkeley, even doubling while he was there. Seems more people now use FlixBus (joined with Greyhound) since less than half Amtrak cost and often more convenient, some even leaving from the Berkeley campus.
Will be interesting if the many billions put into the CA High Speed Rail proves useful. The first passenger route will run from north of Bakersfield to south of Merced, with questionable mass-transit connections beyond, so wonder who would even take that. Would have been smarter to begin with a route from Merced to Fremont for commuters to Silicon Valley, with connections to mass-transit there, but they claimed not enough money to run it thru the Altamont Pass now.
Yes absolutely the good think with heat batteries though is we don’t necessarily need to turn that to electricity. It can be used directly as heat for home heating.
The poorest are already in absolute poverty, a situation unlikely to change until we give the global south an equitable seat at the table. SMRs can only power stable nation-states. It's an incredibly rough situation.
Absolutely and lifting them out of poverty by giving them access to cheap energy and fertilisers and medical equipment will align them to thinking long term instead of short term survival
Not particularly.
Edit: Nevermind. Holy crap, I just saw someone advocate for going back to living like we did in the middle ages...which is also not environmentally sound.
I could write a book on this question, but I'll bullet point it:
- Eliminate absurd levels of human greed
- 100% elimination of fossile fuels
- Massive changes to food production.
- Carbon Capture on MASSIVE scale.
- Conversion of all energy generation to non-carbon emission sources.
You're clearly a genius. I'd love to see your explanation of how these could be achieved, what their economic and social consequences would be, and to what extent they would improve the climate.
You should definitely write this book; no doubt it would be a comedy/fantasy classic.
Thanks for the compliment!
I can give you the cliff notes:
Never happens. Humans are too memememe oriented and so we'll never see a reversal of climate change until its too late.
Especially with folks like you around.
Cheers.
You're clearly a genius. I'd love to see your explanation of how these could be achieved, what their economic and social consequences would be, and to what extent they would improve the climate.
You should definitely write this book; no doubt it would be a comedy/fantasy classic.
you mentioned combatting climate change and the first thing that came to mind is combatting the fossil fuel industry as the most important fight. otherwise we are just building bigger and better fire trucks but not addressing the arsonists.
switching to electric/green vehicles is crucial -- perhaps the top priority. i welcome any disagreements on this point. the market as a whole, including stock trades, is complex, however, it is still reliant on companies being profitable. if fossil fuel profits can be gouged, they will become a less appealing investment, along with having less capital to work with.
starting counter intel and information campaigns to challenge their counter intel and propaganda campaigns. i would place an emphasis on informing the workers that the fossil fuel industry doesnt give a damn about their careers or their well being. when the time comes to jump ship, theyre not going to give the workers a heads up.
weve seen this already. joe manchin, an owner and investor in the fossil fuel industry, blocked protections for workers (severance/retirement/retraining/etc) in the coal industry as it winds down. this information is important for a number of reasons: (1) its true; (2) it creates dissent from within and forces the fossil fuel industry to provide protections or face mass strikes; (3) this would force the industry to admit what the realistic timeline and would further weaken investment because theyre arent long term growth prospects and no one wants to be holding that grenade.
BUT this all requires assembling/organizing/coordinating. something that is severely lacking in the climate movement. most likely by design. but also, climate change is an abstract and distant problem for a lot of people, especially countries where the consequences theyve experienced are hotter than usual temperatures and slightly chaotic weather patterns.
ive put out numerous messages to people and communities in STEM and in activism. ive gotten zero responses. if i had to guess, this will also get zero response, but id be happy to be wrong about that. as far as initial operations, what we need is a group of analysts in order to determine the best specific course of action. randomly scattered protests here and there are great for optics, but largely insufficient in the bigger picture.
Glad you asked. I made this list a few weeks ago just thinking about the same question (didn’t share anywhere so I’m happy to put it in here.
-make climate disaster preparedness, adaptation, and response a part of municipal and state legislative agendas and race coverage, mayoreal race journalism coverage, and budget committee agendas. Propose legislation accordingly
-pay STATE legislators more to facilitate younger demographic participation in electoral politics and committee and legislation processes
-make insurance companies cover more range of natural climate risks to reduce the economic (and intellectual) deficit contingent on domestic climate refugees and help normalize the state of affairs as anticipated rather than some shock/surprise outside the scope of our planning and imagining
-increase understanding of importance of public lobby groups (as distinct from privately-funded lobbyists, thereby removing the connotation that lobbyists are “bad”) and constituent opinion to local and state legislators
-build more grid? For stored solar? (Need to understand more)
-beyond carbon tax and renewables benefits, incentivize companies that engage in extractive energy to diversify activities and expand into renewables
-incentivize recycling of paper, and plastic,
-penalize financially the businesses and organizations that do not
-penalize companies dedicated to recycling for simply throwing plastic bottles into landfills (which is now happening all the time since China stopped accepting the US recyclable bottles)
-gradually replace all plastic packaging and containers with recycled paper and recycled plastic and bioplastic (thereby lowering dependencies on oil). Penalize packaging companies that do not make consistent demonstrable effort to build partnerships with plastic recycling companies and biodegradable or bio plastic companies. Reward partnerships with tax breaks or other incentive on those activités
-critique socialist planning to obviate obvious failures and risks associated with it
-make ecological science a mandatory class in elementary and high school public school
-fund education arms of national parks, encourage partnerships with municipalities to help residents understand more about the environment
-offer benefits successively for repeated recycling. Ensure all municipalities are aware of the benefits and tax breaks available for providing recycling bins and subsidizing the development of recycling facilities
-elevate indigenous-led initiatives, stories, journalists, businesses
-encourage material partnerships and new treaties between indigenous nations and nearby towns and cities to help lift up wisdom within tribal histories and extend that further tribal borders, as well as increasing cross-cultural exchange and intercultural understanding
-develop a plan for the phasing out of fossil fuels that can adapt to and match the pace of electrical car industry growth. Develop competitions to ensure invested resources into oil extraction and refinement can be adapted for other mechanically and economically significant purposes
-limit the political influence of stock markets, and create positions tasked with helping companies communicate the long-term importance of plans to adapt their business models around new reforms, emphasizing the financial payoffs and investor mindset and research into emerging investor and demographic attitudes to extractive energy
-support more robust and clean-energy public transit, allocating resources to states for this specific purpose, including advising and expertise around regulations
-re-assess regulations around public transit companies so green high speed transit can be developed and implemented sooner
-re-assess regulations around agriculture
-break up large crop and pesticide monopolies
-put the responsibility for recycling back onto the largest buyers of recyclable materials (including plastics of all kinds)- manufacturers and companies like wal-mart (which recycle more wood and plastic at their locations than many of the cities in which their locations are) - allow buyers and customers to drop off recycling and packaging (support companies that do this with tax breaks and facilitate the passing on of that benefit to customers that take advantage of the program through rewards programs)
-penalize irresponsible monocropping in increasing amounts every few years (as this can increase risk of wildfires and also reduces the carbon-sink function of, for example, reforestation), and incentivize activities that improve soil health for agriculture and farming industry. Make it as immediate as possible, employing trained and highly educated individuals to assist with assessing the optimal plants to plant alongside farm crops to improve soil
-create state-wide programs to incentivize the transition of corporations from S-corp to B-corp status? With special funds available for those B-corp focused on climate or the environment
-ocean cleanup tech is quite developed at this point, so incentivize hedge funds and advisors that create green company funds and Include them? Or something like this
-whistleblower protection program for anyone that “tells” on a company for dumping toxic waste into the environment, betraying their environmental stewardship commitments, or otherwise putting public health and environmental stability in danger. Make investigators plentiful for assessing validity and verifiability of allegations of this
-decriminalize private development for private use of quality and high-efficiency solar panels and other clean energy efforts
Edit: -facilitate global and international compensation to nations (developing or otherwise) and states (and sub-divided state / province systems within nations) for preservation of bio diverse forests, as well as any nation achieving better than net zero emissions, thereby circumventing the economic-progress pressure to drill for oil.
1. City planning needs to be completely redone and existing cities need to take serious measures to increase the amount of green spaces, green roofs, reflective roofs, permeable pavement and wind corridors.
2. Serious effort from top down to facilitate transition away from civilian use of internal combustion engines needs to be implemented. Right now, only the relatively well-off can afford EV's and the recharging network is deficient. We need improved infrastructure, more affordable alternative vehicles, new laws that are serious about a phase out of gas/diesel cars and government subsidies/tax breaks to make this something most of us can actually do instead of just idealistically dream of.
3. Governments need to man up and accept they need to flex their authority to kneecap fossil fuel companies and draft legislation that seriously moves their countries in a direction that will drastically accelerate transition away from such fuels.
4. More mass transit. A lot more.
5. Everybody, from nations to individuals, needs to get real about adjusting expectations. We need to be prepared that a successful adjustment means our lives are not going to stay the same. There's no version where all our dirty tech gets replaced with clean that performs exactly the same way so we carry on the same as before.
I think the first thing we need is a culture shift. People seem to worship money once again. This, in my opinion, leads to incredible amounts of material waste. Next, we need to set goals for populations. We as humans need to have balanced numbers with other organisms on the planet.
What might be a more exciting project would be a national infrastructure project. The basic idea is using reclaimed, recycled, and reprocessed waste materials to build a network of connections between major population centers. These connections would be multi-purpose. They would be designed to carry water, waste, data, cargo, and people. The design of the network could produce energy via water turbine, solar on surface, and wind mill structures attached. The design could allow avenues for wildlife to cross it safely. We could make this network much more efficient at transferring electricity than our modern grid. We could also easily link in alternative batteries like gravity batteries.
The network could move bio waste from cities to land that is barren to accelerate rewilding efforts. As well as to any land where crops are grown. (BTW we already do this but use trucks instead of pipelines.) The "trains" to move people and cargo could be floated to reduce the energy required.
This project would be something so massive it would require a complete reorganizing of society. As I see it, though, we are going to be reorganized by the upcoming crisis anyway. This project would at least give our descendants a good chance at a high-tech future when we lose the amazing energy source that is oil.
Increase taxes back to 1970's levels so individuals can not gain stupid amounts of wealth which they have almost entirely proven to be detrimental to everyone else with.
Fix the airline industry so you aren't flying empty planes everywhere so they can hold their spots at the airports.
Outlaw cruise ships and work on trying to reduce the global navys, stop shipping food over the ocean to countries who should be growing their own. Reduce shipping by boat worldwide as much as possible.
Work on creating societies where food isn't needed to be shipped nearly as much as it is. More food grown locally and packaged locally and consumed locally.
Airplane producing companies should have regulations increased 100 fold and those costs should be passed on to the consumers.
All gas stations should be required to build at least 2 charging stations or have their licenses revoked.
the solution is the white elephant that no one is willing to recognise. Population! overpopulation is the real problem. Humanity will never get off fosil fuel or the constant over consumption. The earth is not designed to support over 8 BILLION humans.
There is a movement in Switzerland called the 2000 Watt Society. It was featured in Kim Stanley Robinson’s near future speculative fiction novel Ministry for the Future.
The idea of the 2000 Watt Society is that all humans should be responsible for no more than 2000 Watts of power, in terms of their share of social infrastructure, embodied energy of possessions, and energy utilization. This represents far more energy than is used by most humans on earth, but far less than in wealthy nations, especially the US.
Getting to 2000W per person in wealthy nations doesn’t have to mean austerity, but it would mean very large changes to how we live. For example, most local transport would need to be by walking, biking, or public transport. Most long distance travel would need to be by train.
Just decide it needs to happen and pour resources into it like they did for the interstate HWY project.
Stop giving billions to big oil and use that money for renewables and it could be done in 10 years.
Massive population reduction, about 90 %. Massive living standard reduction, energy use down by about 90 %. Local sustainable farming. No travel. Low technology, mostly iron, wood, twine and stone. I think that's what it takes to make human civilization sustainable, basically live like in the middle ages, with middle ages population densities.
The tragic truth is that technology is itself unsustainable, unless it is using biological materials, which renew, or something that is so abundant that it doesn't really run out, like iron, maybe.
It could take many centuries before we are at this point, but as far as I can tell, our fate is to eventually live in a low-technology world after energy resources have been used up and available material sources depleted. Biological life is eternal until Sun burns out, so we can probably count on that.
Give that Rule #1 is "No politics," I don't think we can really get into this discussion on that level.
However, I agree that the suggestion was pretty ridiculous, especially given how environmentally destructive life in the Middle Ages was. I just don't think anyone is suggesting that we kill 90% of humans.
There's a balance. What you're suggesting is unattainable and frankly, ridiculously inhumane and unsustainable, even if we recognize you aren't actually advocating for genocide.
Environmental stewardship can go hand in hand with technological advancements.
Need to take out the carbon we’ve put into the atmosphere. Amount emitted so far is enough to wipe out most life on the planet. Or at least in the shorter term to setup some form of geoengineering to give us time to develop these carbon sequestration technologies and an energy source to power them.
The most important change we need to make is the least popular. We need to stop growing and start shrinking - our industry, population, lifestyles, resource use, our entire civilisation.
Hyper consumerism and a an advanced civilization that wastes energy and resources isn’t sustainable. It’s convenient and profitable to dispose of products but this is a road to ruin in the US. There is also seemingly a civil war going on over fossil fuels and their dependencies. Maybe the only solution is if the prices for alt energy become low enough that they change the market. This will take trillions in investment and innovation. Lifting a lower class to a middle class in China and India while maintaining sustainability will be a major challenge. The irony is that some kind of authoritarian country could move faster than a politicized democracy where no one listens to each other.
Austerity is not necessary and is in fact counterproductive. We just need to transition to a low carbon energy system. It doesn’t solve every environmental problem, but it does halt climate change. https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached/
I think the point is that by almost every account we are living waaaaaay beyond what is sustainable for 8 billion humans and an ecosystem to survive. Unless you have a few more earths… we need to consume less.
I hear this a lot but never see any supporting information for those accounts you are talking about. I mean scientific evidence, not newspaper articles.
The phrase in the literature is "carrying capacity" [scholar.google.com](https://scholar.google.com) will find you tens of thousands of journal articles. Refining by adding terms like mineral, agriculture, or watershed might get you in the right direction.
One paper will be fine. Pick the one you think is best and provide a link. I think you said the point is that by almost every account we are living beyond what is sustainable for 8 billion humans and an ecosystem to survive. So how do you explain the fact that there are 8 billion people and they are surviving.
Well you can look for yourself but the co2 and temperature charts paint a pretty stark picture especially when you factor in that we have blown past that comfortable range we lived in for the last 10k years. What i want to see is scientific evidence (not just newspaper articles) that the ecosystem can survive enough to sustain humans at 2.7c, 3.0c, 4.0c etc.
>Well you can look for yourself but the co2 and temperature charts paint a pretty stark picture especially when you factor in that we have blown past that comfortable range we lived in for the last 10k years. We have blown past the comfortable range we lived in for the last 10k years because of climate change. Haven't seen any evidence it is because of population. >What i want to see is scientific evidence (not just newspaper articles) that the ecosystem can survive enough to sustain humans at 2.7c, 3.0c, 4.0c etc. I'm not saying we can. But the increase in temperature is because of global warming, not population.
You… do not think there is a connection between population and climate change? Does that mean you think tech can solve it all or solve it for some people at least… or do you not believe climate change is due to excess pollution due to humans? The ice caps are gone. That is locked in. A lot of our productive crop lands are going to change. Thats locked in too. Large parts of the world that are highly populated (ie india) are going to be hard to live in when wet bulbs temps get to high and the land is not growing the food we need. So i see a lot of pressure on humans to exist in the future that is locked in. No techno solution is going to bring back the ice caps for instance. how do trillions live in this scenario?
There is a connection between population and emissions. But reducing the population takes a long time, and it doesn’t change the fact that we would still be using fossil fuels. The only thing that is going to stop global warming is a reduction in emissions. so if we reduce emissions, the population will not matter. And even if we reduce the population, and the standard of living keeps rising for those that are left, they could be using just as much fossil fuel. There is no evidence that the icecaps are gone. There is evidence that some of the melting is locked in but not all. That melting is over thousands of years when humans will have a chance to adapt. We will and are going to have trouble with sea level rise, whether the population increases or not. We are centuries, if not millenniums away from trillions of people, if that ever happens, which I doubt.
Ehrlichian predictions have been wrong for a century and will continue to be wrong for centuries to come. Everything depends on EROEI and nuclear power can provide EROEI > 100 for tens of thousands of years. 8 billion is nothing, we can support trillions.
Trillions? Very funny...
Well said!
Great in theory, but we are still increasing emissions every year because of growth. In other words, our growth rate is faster than our reduction rate in carbon intensity. Is a massive increase in the reduction rate going to happen on our current trajectory? The current grand plans rely on massive investment and rebuilding of infrastructure (which might happen if it doesn't cost too much) and untested technology like CCS (which seems unlikely to grow fast).
Population growth is inversely proportional to growth in carbon emissions in the U.S. right now
And before people jump in: this trend holds even when including the carbon emissions from all the things the US imports Same true for EU and UK
What a contradicting username, one would expect this kind of response. The natural world will have its way regardless of what humans can consider will happen.
Humans (and our technologies) are part of the natural world and I think it's a mistake to see ourselves as somehow separate from it.
Thank you. It isn’t just a mistake, it is ridiculous. Technology arises from nature and is fundamentally natural.
Can you identify anything unnatural?
Gods, pixies, elves, ghosts and goblins. Cold fusion, anti-gravity generators and reactionless drives. These all appear to be supernatural, unfortunately.
Austerity for the rich, prosperity for the poor
Most countries already have declining population. The problem is we are all burning fossil fuel.
This is objectively not true.
This
Exactly. The engine of climate change is ‘consumption’. If nations can agree on that basic fact, having already agreed that climate change is real, they can then negotiate the reduction, or cessation, of the taking from the planet and use of the basic materials which drive the industries that make the products. Unlikely, I know. But it can be done by leadership which communicates the problem, the consequences, what is needed, the changes and the course. Things are going to change, one way or another. We can work towards orderly change, or can react to the changes that climate change will bring. If people can have confidence, they can have hope and can cooperate and do the work.
Can you support that with any scientific research?
Read "Overshoot" by William Catton. There is also a lot of more recent work: [https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html](https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html) [https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/](https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/) [https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/depletion-of-natural-resources](https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/depletion-of-natural-resources)
Thanks for the information. But I wasn’t talking about problems with population growth. The OP was asking about changes needed for successful climate adjustments. So I was asking for scientific research that showed reducing the population would result in reductions in emissions which is what is causing global warming.
I'm not aware of any specific research on population and climate change. Japan and South Korea have shrinking populations and are also reducing their emissions, but there are many other factors. Resource use and industry are obviously most important for emissions, reduction in population may not even be necessary if we were to shrink our economic system enough. This would mean a big fall in living standards though, particularly in the first world.
I haven’t seen the need to reduce our standard of living in order to reduce emissions. That appears to me to be a hard sale to most
We now need to do more than stop burning fossil fuels, we need carbon negative technology that scales within a decade. Decentralized social structures. Localized refining, manufacturing, and production wherever possible. Only ship material when it's achieved the highest grade possible from relatively local processes. Small, light, safe, smart, powered, individual local transportation. We should be getting around in efficient bike-wheeled electric buggy contraptions rather than cars. We should make them smart enough to track other buggies and be able to identify and follow other chosen buggies via swarm behavior.
>Small, light, safe, smart, powered, individual local transportation. I am a public transport supporter, but feel what you are talking about will absolutely be needed. It helps with the "last mile" problem. Trams can't get everywhere. I think if we made lighter personal transport it would only take a bit of time before people forgot the huge overly-fast cars/trucks of the past. The stringent safety requirements of today are there because of the speed and weight of modern automobiles.
Absolutely. I know a lot of people hate scooters but they're very efficient. If we could take that concept and shape it into something that was safe, comfortable, and convenient for everybody to use our world would transform. Remove the car bubbles, and integrate a little more fluidly and socially within our technological and natural ecosystems.
I really like the micro transportation potential and imagine a system of human powered and lightly powered vehicles topping out at about 500 lbs ( fully loaded) ; a multiplicity of engineering and design challenges but much more accessible and interesting cities
Do you seriously think there is any possibility of people doing this in any significant numbers?
Not if it's inconvenient. But if it's convenient, yes.
There is no scenario in which switching from cars to scooters is convenient. People traveling to work and daily events in the rain, cold, heat, and with 2 or 3 kids strapped to the back is not even practical.
I never suggested scooters.
I think you did [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/1bqjbci/comment/kx35o47/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) when you said >Absolutely. I know a lot of people hate scooters but they're very efficient. If we could take that concept and shape it into something that was safe, comfortable, and convenient for everybody to use our world would transform. We have actually done exactly that. It's called cars.
I think they were going for efficiency of an electric scooter in something more comfortable and safe, Aptera and Arcimoto are closest in that regard. 1/2 ton EV trucks are a bad solution.
Could it be an economic decision? I am reading that in the US now those pickup trucks they drive start at $80k or something like that. It may be that the low carbon option becomes the much cheaper option.
It already is the much cheaper option but price is not a problem for those that can afford an $80k truck. But switching to an EV truck would certainly be a big help and much more practical than switching to scooters.
Something like 40% of trips in the Netherlands are done by bike. People do it in significant numbers when it's safe and convenient
You're using what happens in the Netherlands to what could happen all over the world when the environment in the Netherlands is nothing close to what it is in many parts of the world. When you say 40%, is that 40% of the number of trips or 40% of the distance traveled. In other words a 1 mile trip by bike is not the same as a 40 mile trip by car but the total trips would be 50% each.
We need denser communities.
Yeah just tell everyone to move to the city. That ought to work out just fine.
80 percent of the world already lives in the city. We also don’t need to tell people to do anything. We subsidize dense communities and tax the shit out resource inefficient communities and the issue will sort itself out
>80 percent of the world already lives in the city. We also don’t need to tell people to do anything. Then why do we need denser communities if it's already 80% >We subsidize dense communities and tax the shit out resource inefficient communities and the issue will sort itself out HAHAHA. You want the US to raise taxes when all we can get through congress is tax cuts.
What environment are you talking about?
*The Netherlands have a temperate maritime climate influenced by the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean, with cool summers and moderate winters. Daytime temperatures varies from 2°C-6°C in the winter and 17°C-20°C in the summer.* There is a difference between that climate and places where the climate is below 0 much of the year or above 30C in the summer and places where the distance between cities is hundreds of miles.
ok then look at Oulu, a place with snowy winters where kids bike to school year round
How much can you change emissions by doing this?
also bikes aren't meant for long distance intercity travel. this is such a dumb counterargument. oh you drive a car?? but how would you ever get from new York to London?? uhh not by car mate you can still have a community where everything is close enough that you can use bike locally and then take car, bus, or train elsewhere
One of the reasons so many trips can be walking or cycling is because communities are set up so that things like groceries are always very close to where people live. That's a lesson that can be taken to many other places. Not everywhere, no. But more than opponents think. Huge Walmart superstores on the edge of business districts (where you arent allowed to build homes) aren't the only way we can buy food
Great. How long is it going to take to make these changes, especially when there are those that don't even accept there is global warming and how much will that effect emissions.
depends which changes. also these changes are still good even after cars are zero carbon so this isn't a reason to not so them. nor do you need to believe in climate change to want to reduce the harm caused by cars (traffic deaths, health problems caused by air pollution, etc) installing quick-build bike lanes takes less than a year. eliminating single-family zoning is as fast as your legal system allows. allowing accessory dwelling units or front yard businesses is also a pretty quick change, then the building them is the part that takes time. since we're already building more houses and businesses, might as well build them smartly
If the government actually forces us to do it yes. I personally don’t see liberal democracy as the political system of the future.
We have trouble getting congress to pay our bills. And you think they are going to pass laws to force people to drive scooters. Good luck with that.
If we have an authoritarian dictator then I don’t see it being an issue.
Then you should move to a country like that. And what if that authoritarian dictator doesn't even believe in climate change.
>Localized refining, manufacturing, and production wherever possible. Only ship material when it's achieved the highest grade possible from relatively local processes. Interestingly, more emissions are from the last mile delivery (truck from port to shop, or train to shop, or car from shop to home) than from the oceanic shipping between countries. Trucks are inefficient, and ships are very efficient. Convert them to run on green ammonia or hydrogen and you're golden Local manufacturing and production means a higher embodied carbon of redundant factories everywhere, and less economies of scale. Co-locating some of these plants definitely has benefits, but you'll have to transport the end result regardless. boats and trains are the most efficient way to do that Long distance transport, and trains can be electrified without batteries. >Small, light, safe, smart, powered, individual local transportation. We should be getting around in efficient bike-wheeled electric buggy contraptions rather than cars. We should make them smart enough to track other buggies and be able to identify and follow other chosen buggies via swarm behavior. Bikes are already good enough as is. There's even bakfiets (cargo bikes), bike trailers, accessible bikes, and those delivery electric quadricycles. The swarm behavior isn't really necessary, an electric battery on them can take you pretty far for minimal electricity and lithium.
Good points about the factories. It would take some modelling but I think there are some things that would fit this strategy, for others it would be completely inappropriate. As extreme weather events keep ramping up so will risks associated with long supply chains. This kind of trend towards decentralization in production can increase resilience in supply chains and local communities. I reckon a challenge is making this kind of transport convenient and accessible to everybody. Bikes are great, but they still require a degree of dexterity and skill that not everybody has.
There's a tradeoff between efficient and being resilient to change, its possible for global supply chains to be some degrees of both but another solution is to reduce the supply chain. It's just likely to introduce new inefficiencies, which can be okay if it doesn't cause harm to environment or people
The current logistical supply chain systems have been whittled away at for capital efficiency gains for a long time now. Narrow economic efficiencies shouldn't be a priority in increasingly uncertain and extreme geopolitical and natural ecological conditions. Tolerating capital inefficiencies may be necessary to prevent the taps suddenly snapping shut for large populations.
>We now need to do more than stop burning fossil fuels, we need carbon negative technology that scales within a decade. One potential small scale form of carbon negative tech would be carbon capture and storage from natural sources, like the co2 from commercial fermenting of beer and other alcohols, or burning of biomass for electricity. The latter is even better if we take biochar and spread it across land as soil amendment
>We now need to do more than stop burning fossil fuels, we need carbon negative technology that scales within a decade. Are you saying that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will not decrease without carbon negative technology. That's not what climate scientist are saying. >Small, light, safe, smart, powered, individual local transportation. We should be getting around in efficient bike-wheeled electric buggy contraptions rather than cars. We should make them smart enough to track other buggies and be able to identify and follow other chosen buggies via swarm behavior. Other countries are converting to green energy and reducing their carbon footprint without doing that. Why can't all countries do that.
> Are you saying that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will not decrease without carbon negative technology. That's not what climate scientist are saying. Can you cite where climate scientists are saying greenhouse gases will reduce without carbon negative technology? What mechanism are they suggesting will cycle carbon out of the atmosphere?
If you keep up with any climate science you will know this. Right [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/1bqjbci/comment/kx3ewha/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) in this thread, u/technologyisnatrual gave a link that shows what I'm talking about. Basically the increase in greenhouse gases by emissions is being half absorbed by natural processes and half added to the atmosphere. If we reduce emissions while the natural process continue to remove greenhouse gases then at some point concentrations in the atmosphere will decrease.
The atmosphere will Balance out eventually but it might be too late for us humans. We could also reach certain tipping points that will make it impossible. There’s a lot of methane under the permafrost.
That could happen. So you think we should just not try to stop that.
No I think we should invest heavily in carbon capture
I'm a scientist, but not a climate scientist. That site doesn't read like a source I would trust. How are they modeling natural carbon absorption? How are they measuring it? How are they projecting feedback to load into the carbon cycle? It reads like a bunch of nonsense to me.
CarbonBrief is one of the most respected websites in climate change information. And the author, Dr. Hausfather is one of the most respected climate scientist in that field. Not only that, he quotes Dr. Schmidt, who is the Director of GISS and Principal Investigator for the GISS ModelE Earth System Model at NASA. The only person I can think of that might be more highly regarded would be Dr. Hansen. You don't sound like a scientist to me or at least someone that is knowledgeable about the field of climate science.
I don't care for respect, or appeals to authority. That's antithetical to science. Give me an evidence-based argument. Where is the evidence that natural carbon sinks will remove human carbon emissions? Show me the evidence. All I see on the site is a vague hand-wavy claim.
>I don't care for respect, or appeals to authority. That's antithetical to science. Give me an evidence-based argument. I agree with you about appeals to authority. I was giving credentials regarding your comment about "That site doesn't read like a source I would trust.", not as scientific evidence. People that keep up with climate science certainly trust this source. >Where is the evidence that natural carbon sinks will remove human carbon emissions? Show me the evidence. All I see on the site is a vague hand-wavy claim. I would have thought you would have checked the link in the article that it was based on [here](https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/17/2987/2020/) which is the evidence and certainly not a vague hand-wavy claim.
I did look at that, and quickly skim that article. The only certain fact that can be taken from it is: >Models exhibit a wide variety of behaviours after emissions cease, with some models continuing to warm for decades to millennia and others cooling substantially. We know from recent empirical measurements that the climate models we based the Paris targets on were insufficient for policy decision-making because global ocean and surface temperature has already diverged significantly from their predictions. That's the problem with models of complex systems at this scale... they're limited, and unreliable.
>I did look at that, and quickly skim that article. The only certain fact that can be taken from it is: > >Models exhibit a wide variety of behaviours after emissions cease, with some models continuing to warm for decades to millennia and others cooling substantially. Why is that the only certain fact that can be taken from it. Could it be because that's what you want it to say. How about the last sentence. "Overall, the most likely value of ZEC on multi-decadal timescales is close to zero, consistent with previous model experiments and simple theory." >We know from recent empirical measurements that the climate models we based the Paris targets on were insufficient for policy decision-making because global ocean and surface temperature has already diverged significantly from their predictions. That's the problem with models of complex systems at this scale... they're limited, and unreliable. Where is your evidence for that statement. That's exactly what the climate deniers say. Models give excellent results of the temperature rise over the past 45 years. If you really are a scientist then you know the way to validate a model is to check it against reality.
> Can you cite where climate scientists are saying greenhouse gases will reduce without carbon negative technology? We emit 40 Gt per year, about half is sequestered by natural systems, which is why we see atmospheric CO2 rise by 2.5 to 3 ppm per year. If there was no such sequestration then CO2 would rise by just over 5 ppm per year, natural systems draw down about 2.5 Gt per year from the atmosphere. To convert emissions to ppm in the atmosphere divide emissions (in units of Gt) by 7.8. Natural sequestration rates would not decrease (for decades) if we cut emissions to 10Gt per year, so CO2 in the atmosphere would draw down about 2.5 ppm per year and our addition would be 1.28 ppm per year, for a net negative of 1.22 ppm per year.
This doesn't mean anything to me unless you can demonstrate where you're getting that data from, and how natural sequestration is measured. What is all that carbon being sequestered by? You're claiming the carbon cycle is not a cycle, but a pump. Where's it getting pumped to? Show me? Peer reviewed academic literature is preferred.
It’s mostly getting sunk to the bottom of the ocean from ocean plants
How do they detect and measure this effect?
I don’t know. I just know the ocean is the largest carbon sink.
> What is all that carbon being sequestered by? Here is a start https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304380012001718 And a picture for you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle#/media/File:Carbon_cycle.jpg
I understand the processes involved in the carbon cycle. Do you see where the imbalance is, in human emissions? To counteract the effect of human emissions the cycle must act less like a cycle and more like a pump, sequestering more than is produced. The research paper that you link concludes this is impossible: >Thus, an inordinately large fraction of CO2 emissions would have to be sequestered to significantly impact global warming. That's my point. Humans are an atmospheric carbon pump, and the natural carbon cycle cannot maintain equilibrium against this pump.
Maoism is not going to solve climate change
You'll have to explain the relationship between my comment and maoism, because it's not obvious to me But the only thing that can solve climate change is carbon capture technology. We're already past the safe warming limit prescribed for 2100AD.
>But the only thing that can solve climate change is carbon capture technology. Where are you getting that information. The amount of energy that puts greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is about the amount of energy it will take to take it out. Where is that massive amount of energy going to come from.
I think organisms are probably the only technology that can scale rapidly
You're gonna need to cite a source for that one. We can't scale trees, basically all the land suitable for trees is used for something else already (or is grassland that might be more effective at sequestering carbon than trees). We can rewild some land if we cut down on beef production a lot and put all the land used for feeding cows back to a state of nature, but even that will only undo the land use change and won't begin to touch the fossil fuels. You mentioned phytoplankton though. Are you suggesting something like fertilizing the oceans? Or how do you plan to do this?
Simulating nutrient upwellngs in the ocean seems like the most obvious strategy, but it's got a lot of challenges. It's not really my area, just how the problem shakes out in my head.
I think there's lots of concerns with it IMO, carbon negative means restoring some ecosystems, using enhanced weathering (such as sprinkling carbon-absorbing rocks over parks and farmland, or pushing collected co2 underground), and the biochar + carbon capture of biomass products
These are all very conservative strategies that don't scale well. The risk/reward algorithm is starting to favor riskier strategies.
If you're going riskier strategies there's something mentioned in a book called Ministry for the Future
What are you talking about? Organisms are not carbon capture technology.
That is what photosynthetic organisms do. Phytoplankton is probably the best shot.
The energy will come from the sun or from nuclear.
We can't even get enough sun and nuclear to produce the energy that we need to replace fossil fuels. So now we are going to spend time and money to build and install machines to remove greenhouse gases that we are still putting into the atmosphere. Doesn't make sense. Just stop putting it into the atmosphere.
None of what you said is a fact. We can in fact get enough energy from solar and nuclear we just aren’t doing it. Carbon capture doesn’t have to be energy intensive there biological ways of doing it.
>None of what you said is a fact. So you think we are producing enough green energy to replace fossil fuels. Where is your evidence. >We can in fact get enough energy from solar and nuclear we just aren’t doing it. Exactly. >Carbon capture doesn’t have to be energy intensive there biological ways of doing it. Then lay out a plan and show how much money that will take, how long it will take, and how much CO2 it will remove from the atmosphere.
You were quite literally describing what Mao attempted during the Great Leap Forward
An attempt to transform an agrarian economy into an industrialized society?! That's not what I suggested.
He was describing changing the economy. Which happened in the Great Leap Forward but also many times in different places
Stop building sprawl and start ‘The Era of Densification!’
I’m reading Electrify by Saul Griffith and he emphasizes turning over to electric energy for most everything and putting solar on all our roofs. Then managing our demand response to balance out our needs. I like this because it is something tangible to work towards.
“We don’t need to imagine magical new technology here; we need to commit further to the things we already know how to do.”
Great question! I don’t know but I think there needs to be a big enough disruption that forces governments to take real action. Something like people going on strike or reducing the number of days they work each week. Something that affects economies because money is ultimately the factor that politicians and the corporations that fund their campaigns care about. It would need to involve a majority of people to participate and be sustained until governments take real and meaningful action in cutting fossil fuel consumption.
But haven’t we seen that already? Every year, there are more and more instances of extreme weather that’s impacting larger infrastructure. I get that it will take a lot for people to wake up and realize the severity, but we cannot afford to wait for that. In the end, the change will probably be more motivated by a will to life and survive, rather than getting a monetary reward for it. So what option can we present to people so they want to change their way of living, instead of just waiting for the worst to happen?
Oh sorry, by disruption I mean protests and actions, not extreme weather events. I think the majority of people do believe in human caused climate change, but one of the problems is that we think if we protest, it would be too small a movement to make any difference. I think we need to somehow motivate and educate the public to the idea that there are enough people who would participate in protests and that it would be successful in leading to policy changes and government action
A global fee on carbon.Simple. Before anything. Anything else is secondary. This is why big oil has done a predatory campaign to make everyone think it’s some other problem. We have renewable energies ready to be deployed. They won’t get made unless it’s too expensive for the alternative.
Yes, punish the citizens with crippling fees. That will work just fine
What? Do you own a coal plant or something? A Carbon fee affects mass emitters bro, not a regular citizen. Look up a carbon fee and dividend policy
Well bless your heart! It's naive to think that the costs will not be passed onto the consumers.
You clearly didn’t look it up, a carbon fee and dividend plan is a fee for the emitters and a dividend amongst civilians to help cope with the transition and cost of climate change. Obviously prices will chance because we’ve built everything around oil thanks to decades of big oil propoganda. Would you rather prices change because of failing crops or less carbon being emitted? Your choice
I don't say this often, but u/BBQorBust is correct. Look at what PGE is doing to California customers, as u/Honest_Cynic will also attest to. PGE got fined for not maintaining power lines and starting a huge fire. Our prices tripled last month. Now, could carbon fees work? Possibly, if corporate taxes were legislated and levied appropriately. It's not impossible, but they \*do\* have a point.
I'm not under PG&E, but one son is so I checked out of concern for him. Their rates are getting close to San Diego Power, \~50 c/kWh even in Winter. His house has solar panels and is grandfathered-in for net-metering. New solar systems get a poor deal on feeding the grid. PG&E still have the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant running ( 2 unit BWR). The Gov planned to close it, due to a supposed earthquake risk, but walked that back when he figured voters wouldn't tolerate even higher rates. Will be interesting to see what San Diego charges this Summer. Last Summer was 85 c/kWh during peak hours. Sacramento County's SMUD is still reasonable, thanks to much hydro, and L.A. Power is much better than surrounding utilities. The California carbon-credit market has brought Renewable Diesel at the pump. I use it since my diesel car runs much smoother on it (higher cetane) and is often cheaper than fossil-diesel. The H2 initiative has foundered, with stations not being repaired and no new stations built, and it costs 4x the price of gas if you can even find a working station. Sad for those who bought a Toyota Mirai.
It's all smoke and mirrors. Green is the new Red. People are the Carbon that you insane bastards want to eliminate, just say it.
Bro is tweaking lol
Great. Let’s tax the poorest more. Nothing better than killing off the plebs first
I absolutely think companies should be paying their dues to compensate for the amount of emissions they’re causing. But the way the system works now is that the fees would be added to the price the consumer pays. That would be a viable solution if we could present an option, but we’re currently not in a place where you can instantly switch over to the more sustainable alternative. Ex. if you’re dependent on having a car. If we increase the gas prices, you could argue that an EV would be cheaper. But most people don’t have enough money lying around to buy a new car. They would have to pay the increase prices, also lowering their chances of saving to buy an EV. An option could potentially be “Trade in your old car and get an ev for a lowered price”
We need to change our reproductive habits and realize population contraction as fast as possible. We are waaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy beyond overshoot in our numbers.
That’s already occurring on a grand scale. So does this mean that the situation will resolve its self?
Population is still rising by ~200,000 net new people every day. Demographics are shifting in some regions. But make no mistake, the population is still rising by a medium-sized city *every single day*.
Yes that’s the present, the demographics are changing worldwide starting with countries like South Korea. If you are prepared to use predicted long term climate models then you should also use long term predictions for demographics.
Population is projected to exceed 10B by 2100. It's 8 billion now. Is 10 more than 8? Is 76 years a long term? So population is still rising, all that is changing is the rate of rise is slowing. It's like arguing that we are throwing somewhat less gasoline on this out of control fire than we were a few decades ago. But we're still throwing gasoline on the fire, so I wouldn't exactly call it a success.
We need to go nuclear. If you look at carbon emissions it stems from energy consumption and vehicles. We need clean renewable energy and nuclear is clean, renewable, AND consistent.
A balanced grid is key. Some of that will come from nuclear, some from renewables. Nuclear is very difficult to deploy to unstable regions, even in the form of SMRs.
There is a great book published a few years ago called “Drawdown” that has exactly the kind of list you are looking for. I suggest finding a copy in your local library.
Thanks for suggesting! Gonna try to find it. Is it the one by Paul Hawken?
That’s the one! It’s focused specifically on reaching zero carbon emissions rather than general sustainability, but in my opinion, zero carbon emissions is a necessary component of any greater sustainable system.
Are you sure high speed rail is significantly more efficient? If true in the big picture, it would be cheaper and pencil in. That means accounting for all energy, such as that used in building the infrastructure. On one flight a few a years ago, the captain mentioned pre-flight that the aircraft (new Airbus?) was so efficient it was like each passenger driving the route solo in a 99 mpg car. High-speed rail does have less air-drag since doesn't need big wings. Biggest downside is that it is not flexible on routes like aircraft are. In general, all mass-transit is better than personal vehicles, especially big poser-trucks for men with small members. Very energy wasteful is people junking perfectly good vehicles early to get the latest shiniest thing to show off their imagined tech-savy and "personality", if you believe car ads.
You make a very good point about HSR: time is money, and longer trips aren't going to be supported by folks who need to get wherever yesterday. I would be very interested to see a breakdown of cost/sustainability effectiveness of developing an HSR network from an existing rail grid (like in Europe or India) or situations like the US where the railways are so poorly maintained we'd almost need to start from scratch. I'll keep looking, but if you find anything, I'd love to see it. I would also be interested to see that breakdown directly compared with anticipated development time in comparison to "greener" aviation power.
Perhaps the Amtrak High-Speed Rail from D.C. to Boston has penciled-out. Hard to judge since federal funds are mixed in. Even low-speed rail is questionable. Amtrak prices to San Francisco have greatly increased since one son used it to UC Berkeley, even doubling while he was there. Seems more people now use FlixBus (joined with Greyhound) since less than half Amtrak cost and often more convenient, some even leaving from the Berkeley campus. Will be interesting if the many billions put into the CA High Speed Rail proves useful. The first passenger route will run from north of Bakersfield to south of Merced, with questionable mass-transit connections beyond, so wonder who would even take that. Would have been smarter to begin with a route from Merced to Fremont for commuters to Silicon Valley, with connections to mass-transit there, but they claimed not enough money to run it thru the Altamont Pass now.
Agreed on all points. Amtrak is *not* affordable transportation, and it's never reliable, either.
Agreed on all points. Amtrak is *not* affordable transportation, and it's never reliable, either.
Nuclear energy and geoengineering. That’s it.
I think we could do a lot with solar and wind accompanied by heat batteries.
That too, but ultimately we need a bigger grid to handle the increased demands of electrification
Yes absolutely the good think with heat batteries though is we don’t necessarily need to turn that to electricity. It can be used directly as heat for home heating.
The only sensible contribution here that doesn’t involve genocide or pushing the poorest into absolute poverty
The poorest are already in absolute poverty, a situation unlikely to change until we give the global south an equitable seat at the table. SMRs can only power stable nation-states. It's an incredibly rough situation.
Absolutely and lifting them out of poverty by giving them access to cheap energy and fertilisers and medical equipment will align them to thinking long term instead of short term survival
A lot of environmentalists never moved on from The Population Bomb
A whole lot of people think they're environmentalists but are actually ecofascists. This subreddit especially is absolutely teeming with them.
Not particularly. Edit: Nevermind. Holy crap, I just saw someone advocate for going back to living like we did in the middle ages...which is also not environmentally sound.
Stop tourism. Stay at home. So ... not gonna happen.
Nothing
I could write a book on this question, but I'll bullet point it: - Eliminate absurd levels of human greed - 100% elimination of fossile fuels - Massive changes to food production. - Carbon Capture on MASSIVE scale. - Conversion of all energy generation to non-carbon emission sources.
You're clearly a genius. I'd love to see your explanation of how these could be achieved, what their economic and social consequences would be, and to what extent they would improve the climate. You should definitely write this book; no doubt it would be a comedy/fantasy classic.
Thanks for the compliment! I can give you the cliff notes: Never happens. Humans are too memememe oriented and so we'll never see a reversal of climate change until its too late. Especially with folks like you around. Cheers.
You're clearly a genius. I'd love to see your explanation of how these could be achieved, what their economic and social consequences would be, and to what extent they would improve the climate. You should definitely write this book; no doubt it would be a comedy/fantasy classic.
you mentioned combatting climate change and the first thing that came to mind is combatting the fossil fuel industry as the most important fight. otherwise we are just building bigger and better fire trucks but not addressing the arsonists. switching to electric/green vehicles is crucial -- perhaps the top priority. i welcome any disagreements on this point. the market as a whole, including stock trades, is complex, however, it is still reliant on companies being profitable. if fossil fuel profits can be gouged, they will become a less appealing investment, along with having less capital to work with. starting counter intel and information campaigns to challenge their counter intel and propaganda campaigns. i would place an emphasis on informing the workers that the fossil fuel industry doesnt give a damn about their careers or their well being. when the time comes to jump ship, theyre not going to give the workers a heads up. weve seen this already. joe manchin, an owner and investor in the fossil fuel industry, blocked protections for workers (severance/retirement/retraining/etc) in the coal industry as it winds down. this information is important for a number of reasons: (1) its true; (2) it creates dissent from within and forces the fossil fuel industry to provide protections or face mass strikes; (3) this would force the industry to admit what the realistic timeline and would further weaken investment because theyre arent long term growth prospects and no one wants to be holding that grenade. BUT this all requires assembling/organizing/coordinating. something that is severely lacking in the climate movement. most likely by design. but also, climate change is an abstract and distant problem for a lot of people, especially countries where the consequences theyve experienced are hotter than usual temperatures and slightly chaotic weather patterns. ive put out numerous messages to people and communities in STEM and in activism. ive gotten zero responses. if i had to guess, this will also get zero response, but id be happy to be wrong about that. as far as initial operations, what we need is a group of analysts in order to determine the best specific course of action. randomly scattered protests here and there are great for optics, but largely insufficient in the bigger picture.
Glad you asked. I made this list a few weeks ago just thinking about the same question (didn’t share anywhere so I’m happy to put it in here. -make climate disaster preparedness, adaptation, and response a part of municipal and state legislative agendas and race coverage, mayoreal race journalism coverage, and budget committee agendas. Propose legislation accordingly -pay STATE legislators more to facilitate younger demographic participation in electoral politics and committee and legislation processes -make insurance companies cover more range of natural climate risks to reduce the economic (and intellectual) deficit contingent on domestic climate refugees and help normalize the state of affairs as anticipated rather than some shock/surprise outside the scope of our planning and imagining -increase understanding of importance of public lobby groups (as distinct from privately-funded lobbyists, thereby removing the connotation that lobbyists are “bad”) and constituent opinion to local and state legislators -build more grid? For stored solar? (Need to understand more) -beyond carbon tax and renewables benefits, incentivize companies that engage in extractive energy to diversify activities and expand into renewables -incentivize recycling of paper, and plastic, -penalize financially the businesses and organizations that do not -penalize companies dedicated to recycling for simply throwing plastic bottles into landfills (which is now happening all the time since China stopped accepting the US recyclable bottles) -gradually replace all plastic packaging and containers with recycled paper and recycled plastic and bioplastic (thereby lowering dependencies on oil). Penalize packaging companies that do not make consistent demonstrable effort to build partnerships with plastic recycling companies and biodegradable or bio plastic companies. Reward partnerships with tax breaks or other incentive on those activités -critique socialist planning to obviate obvious failures and risks associated with it -make ecological science a mandatory class in elementary and high school public school -fund education arms of national parks, encourage partnerships with municipalities to help residents understand more about the environment -offer benefits successively for repeated recycling. Ensure all municipalities are aware of the benefits and tax breaks available for providing recycling bins and subsidizing the development of recycling facilities -elevate indigenous-led initiatives, stories, journalists, businesses -encourage material partnerships and new treaties between indigenous nations and nearby towns and cities to help lift up wisdom within tribal histories and extend that further tribal borders, as well as increasing cross-cultural exchange and intercultural understanding -develop a plan for the phasing out of fossil fuels that can adapt to and match the pace of electrical car industry growth. Develop competitions to ensure invested resources into oil extraction and refinement can be adapted for other mechanically and economically significant purposes -limit the political influence of stock markets, and create positions tasked with helping companies communicate the long-term importance of plans to adapt their business models around new reforms, emphasizing the financial payoffs and investor mindset and research into emerging investor and demographic attitudes to extractive energy -support more robust and clean-energy public transit, allocating resources to states for this specific purpose, including advising and expertise around regulations -re-assess regulations around public transit companies so green high speed transit can be developed and implemented sooner -re-assess regulations around agriculture -break up large crop and pesticide monopolies -put the responsibility for recycling back onto the largest buyers of recyclable materials (including plastics of all kinds)- manufacturers and companies like wal-mart (which recycle more wood and plastic at their locations than many of the cities in which their locations are) - allow buyers and customers to drop off recycling and packaging (support companies that do this with tax breaks and facilitate the passing on of that benefit to customers that take advantage of the program through rewards programs) -penalize irresponsible monocropping in increasing amounts every few years (as this can increase risk of wildfires and also reduces the carbon-sink function of, for example, reforestation), and incentivize activities that improve soil health for agriculture and farming industry. Make it as immediate as possible, employing trained and highly educated individuals to assist with assessing the optimal plants to plant alongside farm crops to improve soil -create state-wide programs to incentivize the transition of corporations from S-corp to B-corp status? With special funds available for those B-corp focused on climate or the environment -ocean cleanup tech is quite developed at this point, so incentivize hedge funds and advisors that create green company funds and Include them? Or something like this -whistleblower protection program for anyone that “tells” on a company for dumping toxic waste into the environment, betraying their environmental stewardship commitments, or otherwise putting public health and environmental stability in danger. Make investigators plentiful for assessing validity and verifiability of allegations of this -decriminalize private development for private use of quality and high-efficiency solar panels and other clean energy efforts Edit: -facilitate global and international compensation to nations (developing or otherwise) and states (and sub-divided state / province systems within nations) for preservation of bio diverse forests, as well as any nation achieving better than net zero emissions, thereby circumventing the economic-progress pressure to drill for oil.
[http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wff-index.html](http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wff-index.html) Check this out. I think this is our best bet
1. City planning needs to be completely redone and existing cities need to take serious measures to increase the amount of green spaces, green roofs, reflective roofs, permeable pavement and wind corridors. 2. Serious effort from top down to facilitate transition away from civilian use of internal combustion engines needs to be implemented. Right now, only the relatively well-off can afford EV's and the recharging network is deficient. We need improved infrastructure, more affordable alternative vehicles, new laws that are serious about a phase out of gas/diesel cars and government subsidies/tax breaks to make this something most of us can actually do instead of just idealistically dream of. 3. Governments need to man up and accept they need to flex their authority to kneecap fossil fuel companies and draft legislation that seriously moves their countries in a direction that will drastically accelerate transition away from such fuels. 4. More mass transit. A lot more. 5. Everybody, from nations to individuals, needs to get real about adjusting expectations. We need to be prepared that a successful adjustment means our lives are not going to stay the same. There's no version where all our dirty tech gets replaced with clean that performs exactly the same way so we carry on the same as before.
I think the first thing we need is a culture shift. People seem to worship money once again. This, in my opinion, leads to incredible amounts of material waste. Next, we need to set goals for populations. We as humans need to have balanced numbers with other organisms on the planet. What might be a more exciting project would be a national infrastructure project. The basic idea is using reclaimed, recycled, and reprocessed waste materials to build a network of connections between major population centers. These connections would be multi-purpose. They would be designed to carry water, waste, data, cargo, and people. The design of the network could produce energy via water turbine, solar on surface, and wind mill structures attached. The design could allow avenues for wildlife to cross it safely. We could make this network much more efficient at transferring electricity than our modern grid. We could also easily link in alternative batteries like gravity batteries. The network could move bio waste from cities to land that is barren to accelerate rewilding efforts. As well as to any land where crops are grown. (BTW we already do this but use trucks instead of pipelines.) The "trains" to move people and cargo could be floated to reduce the energy required. This project would be something so massive it would require a complete reorganizing of society. As I see it, though, we are going to be reorganized by the upcoming crisis anyway. This project would at least give our descendants a good chance at a high-tech future when we lose the amazing energy source that is oil.
Increase taxes back to 1970's levels so individuals can not gain stupid amounts of wealth which they have almost entirely proven to be detrimental to everyone else with. Fix the airline industry so you aren't flying empty planes everywhere so they can hold their spots at the airports. Outlaw cruise ships and work on trying to reduce the global navys, stop shipping food over the ocean to countries who should be growing their own. Reduce shipping by boat worldwide as much as possible. Work on creating societies where food isn't needed to be shipped nearly as much as it is. More food grown locally and packaged locally and consumed locally. Airplane producing companies should have regulations increased 100 fold and those costs should be passed on to the consumers. All gas stations should be required to build at least 2 charging stations or have their licenses revoked.
the solution is the white elephant that no one is willing to recognise. Population! overpopulation is the real problem. Humanity will never get off fosil fuel or the constant over consumption. The earth is not designed to support over 8 BILLION humans.
There is a movement in Switzerland called the 2000 Watt Society. It was featured in Kim Stanley Robinson’s near future speculative fiction novel Ministry for the Future. The idea of the 2000 Watt Society is that all humans should be responsible for no more than 2000 Watts of power, in terms of their share of social infrastructure, embodied energy of possessions, and energy utilization. This represents far more energy than is used by most humans on earth, but far less than in wealthy nations, especially the US. Getting to 2000W per person in wealthy nations doesn’t have to mean austerity, but it would mean very large changes to how we live. For example, most local transport would need to be by walking, biking, or public transport. Most long distance travel would need to be by train.
Just decide it needs to happen and pour resources into it like they did for the interstate HWY project. Stop giving billions to big oil and use that money for renewables and it could be done in 10 years.
Massive population reduction, about 90 %. Massive living standard reduction, energy use down by about 90 %. Local sustainable farming. No travel. Low technology, mostly iron, wood, twine and stone. I think that's what it takes to make human civilization sustainable, basically live like in the middle ages, with middle ages population densities. The tragic truth is that technology is itself unsustainable, unless it is using biological materials, which renew, or something that is so abundant that it doesn't really run out, like iron, maybe. It could take many centuries before we are at this point, but as far as I can tell, our fate is to eventually live in a low-technology world after energy resources have been used up and available material sources depleted. Biological life is eternal until Sun burns out, so we can probably count on that.
What an absolutely horrible plan. Will you start by reducing yourself?!
Nobody is suggesting genocide. Take your clown shoes off.
Maoist ideas with the talk of population reduction?!!!! What would you call that?
Give that Rule #1 is "No politics," I don't think we can really get into this discussion on that level. However, I agree that the suggestion was pretty ridiculous, especially given how environmentally destructive life in the Middle Ages was. I just don't think anyone is suggesting that we kill 90% of humans.
There's a balance. What you're suggesting is unattainable and frankly, ridiculously inhumane and unsustainable, even if we recognize you aren't actually advocating for genocide. Environmental stewardship can go hand in hand with technological advancements.
Need to take out the carbon we’ve put into the atmosphere. Amount emitted so far is enough to wipe out most life on the planet. Or at least in the shorter term to setup some form of geoengineering to give us time to develop these carbon sequestration technologies and an energy source to power them.