this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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It’s April and I am sweating like crazy, it fucking sucks, but it also got me wondering what can I do? There is so much conflicting advice out there, even if I tell others about this, when they ask for a solution what do I tell?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

If you're a world leader fishing for ideas then you could try using regulatory bodies, alternatives incentives, and monetary policies to do the following: disincentivising plastic import/manufacturing, disincentivising meat consumption, disincentivising car ownership/road-expansion, disincentivising pets, disincentivising power consumption and fossil fuels, and finally funding education and promoting smaller families with less children (these last two things are intrinsically linked). You also have to come to an agreement to do all of these things alongside other nations, because if your nation stops producing as many cows and pigs then some impoverished nation will just crank up their own production to fill the market gap.

Basically, we would only use a third as much agricultural land to live on if we didn't eat meat. With less people that would use even less land with an added bonus of lower emissions by a massive amount per person in developed nation because of lower fuel cost and power consumption. You can lower emissions even more by investing heavily into more efficient modes of transport like railways and buses, in many cases making towns and cities as well as large distance travel doable on foot without a car. We know that educated people, particularly women, lead to lower population growth: which is a good thing, because less emissions and more efficiency. Basically two techniques are being deployed in this example: lower emissions per person and lower number of persons.

Will this fix the damage we've done to the atmosphere and the planet? No, more complex solutions would need to be employed for individual problems like atmospheric methane to ensure our planet continues to be livable for the next century, but we know for a fact that even slightly lowered human activity has a huge beneficial impact because we saw those beneficial effects firsthand during the pandemic.

But wtf do I know, I'm a banjo. You're a world leader. Visit some Universities, talk to experts on panels, and figure it out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I die, and for the first time, know true peace.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

It has taken about 100 years to create this problem.

We can start to solve it, maybe today, or maybe tomorrow, but it won't go away within a single election period...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

My husband once said "we're not killing the planet, we're just rearranging it in a way that is not conducive to human life". I think about that when I feel hopeless, we're just a blip on a bigger radar, and we need to drop the main character syndrome that the world dies when we do.

Also though, scalp the 1%.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's as easy as stop reproducing.

So, ummm... Welp.

Damn.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Or reproduce more, but be selective such that our descendents are adapted to the new conditions.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

Destroy the supply chain. It's surprisingly fragile, and if it fell over it might even be impossible to rebuild. For instance, energy production has a whole bunch of dependencies on mining, which requires large amounts of energy - and all the infrastructure requires constant maintenance, which requires all the infrastructure.

One swift kick in the nadgers and the whole system goes down in a tangled heap, with all your tools at the bottom.

Large-scale industry would be crippled out of existence for a very long time, possibly forever - and maybe the oceans wouldn't end up boiling.

There are plenty of chokepoints in the system, where a small disruption could have disastrous effects. Just look what one ship screwed up by getting temporarily stuck in a canal for a couple of weeks. If a nation or two set their mind to it, they could throw a spanner or three in the works that would rip the whole engine apart.

The human cost would be utterly devastating, of course. Billions would die, and the knock-on effects would just accelerate the decline.

But the way things are going, they're all going to die anyway, and take the rest of the planet down with them. This way seems less-worse, and we get to play The Last Of Us irl.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Get rid of capitalism. Which, we won't.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago

assassinate the top 1%.

If each of us able bodied where to go and collect scalps of the top 1% we'd have a fighting chance.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Adapt to it as best we can. Minimize your use of fossil fuels, particularly Natural Gas(Methane). Get some books on farming to understand a worst case need to live off grid.

We're past the point that we can go back. The glaciers on Antarctica and Greenland are in a self-sustaning melt cycle at this point.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Natural gas ads are popping up again, pretending to be the "clean" fossil fuel. It doesn't surprise me that they try this shit, but it does infuriate me.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

Very pessimistic view here. I believe we have already passed the point of no return with human emissions. The worst of climate change will now happen faster and sooner than it naturally would. It's just a matter of mitigating the disaster imo.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (1 children)

We wont.

That is reality, it doesn't matter if the entire world turn off fossil fuel usage permanently this instant, there is allready far too much greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere to reverse course, we might get to delay the inevitable a decade or so, but shit is comming.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (4 children)

It's weird how 'not giving up' got us penicillin and earthquake warnings, so I'd hope we do a little more than "we won't. Oh well."

We are making progress down paths that could shorten the correction after all the CO² and methane is removed from the atmosphere, and it seems important to explore the potential -- as many as we can, actually, as science often fails.

comming

I may need a translation. Related to comms, like in communications?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

CO²

I may need a translation. CO² like in E = mc²? What is the square of oxygen?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

It boils down to cash.

Companies can make money off penicillin. Governments can readily allocate funds to visible, common disasters.

Disasters that have been a century in the making and require whole nations to change the way they do things for an observable result decades down the line is almost impossible to get money for. Our shortsightedness is our downfall

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I guess we could build a gigantic airconditioner and solve the problem that way....

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

comming

It's a typo of coming. As in the word "come" or "to arrive".

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

A long and rough collapse, followed by a slow rebuilding of a much smaller but much more unified global society.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Can we have a quick collapse? If the world is going to catch on fire there's a few people I want to be sure are still alive when the consequences of their actions happen.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Some seem to be concerned enough by it that they might threaten secession (forming new nations that will do something about it) if their nation won't do anything. And nations tend to hate secession.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I know people here shit on individual action, but avoiding beef and driving are the two big ones

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

I shit in a bucket and recycle it into my own food, does that count as making a difference?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Not having kids is also huge

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

This is the biggest reduction to your possible carbon footprint. I'm glad I have been successful with this step.

And, please, raise a kid or three to pass that along. Just don't produce them.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Societal collapse.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Degrowth until we live within planetary bounds accomplished with cultural evolution and ending capitalism is the only thing that could actually work.

All other proposed solutions fail to address the fundamental unsustainability of our way of life and could only hope to slightly slow our demise.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

At this point? Nuclear war.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

As individuals, nothing. And if you do whilst countries like China, the US and Russia continue to pollute on a massive scale, you're being taken for a fool.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Are you the head of a major international corporation? If not, there's nothing meaningful you can do.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

You can hope that billions of people choose to act against their own self-interest in a way that has never happened before or you can move somewhere with a cooler climate.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Focus on income inequality and the rest will also get addressed. Cutting out meat is good, but that doesn't matter when Elon musk decides to jet from SFO to San Jose because he doesn't like traffic.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

He should have his own car on the CalTrain. Would be much cooler and less polluting.

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