Transportation pales in comparison to heating and cooling homes and businesses. The single greatest thing we can do to reduce climate change from a policy standpoint involves reducing that. From work at home, to multi family zoning, to converting business skyscrapers into living space, to increasing efficiency and fossil fuels from energy production. And all that does a lot to improve transportation environmental costs as well.
this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
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The best thing you can do to help the climate? Kill a billionaire.
Best legal thing? Idk... Vote I guess?
We need to go back to a 90% or higher tax rate on income over some threshold, and fix the loopholes that let wealthy people have income that doesn't count as income. Especially the "take a loan and pay that back and all the activity there doesn't count as income for tax purposes" bullshit.
And tax corporate profits more, and make a corporate tax system that rewards real R&D (while auditing to prevent fake tax shelter R&D), rewards higher employee salaries and better benefits (instead of taxing those), and rewards infrastructure investments like new factories but also investments in efficiency, water use reduction, etc.
The most powerful action? Make our politicians start investing heavily in bicycle infrastructure and public transportation infrastructure.
This car culture is insane
Voting is great, but lobbying, gerrymandering and PACs can subvert the democratic process. Historically, this is where protests have shown to be helpful.
First thing to come to mind is: Voting. Wherever you are.
EDIT: Wow, guess i am not alone with that,
@[email protected] @[email protected]
Voting is a witchcraft mind-spell ritual in which the victim thinks his wish gives him power.
Sabotage oil and gas infrastructure?
Have to be careful on this one as you don't want to cause more harm than good. Make sure it's all focused on disabling pumps and valves while not increasing the likelihood of releases.
Some idiots would go around blowing things up causing massive environmental damage when what we really want to do is just leave the stuff in the tanks it's already in, or in the ground it's already in.
And animal agriculture
This one is probably bad but I actually really like it.
I’m really into the book “Ministry of the Future”. It has a lot of shit like that in it.
I read that last year, actually. Potential spoilers:
Just difference of opinion but I wasn't a fan. I obviously think the subject matter is interesting and I liked the sociopolitical basis of the story. But I felt it was bogged way down by an author who was trying to make several parts into some weirdly verbose report to give it a sense of realism (I seem to recall an entire chapter being a written-out list of fictional committee names that were being created to fight climate change). At the same time, when he was writing about the terrorist attacks like swarms of drones attacking infrastructure, it felt really vague and Hollywood, dare I say, even boomer-esque. Just a bit lofty for the sake of action.
You're in good company though, I remember reddit fuckin loved that book so it's probably just not for me. I'm also sensitive to hype and it didn't live up to it.
Yeah, not every book is for everyone. Doesn’t really change whether or not I liked the book.
The book has flaws for sure, but it seemed like it was almost as alarmist as it should be. It seemed utopian to me in the end. He completely missed out on how fascists are going to react to all this for instance.
Yeah, I agree. We need more books like it these days...
Personal vehicles are the largest single source of emissions in the US.
If only denser housing structures and public transportation and work from home didn't all keep getting voted down and shouted down by NIMBYs so we had a better way. I get out and vote and write letters to elected officials. Not much more many of us can do.
Huh so you’re telling me most people want nothing to do with living in crammed apartment buildings?
Wow shocked pikachu face.
It's possible to build nice apartments that have a good amount of space to live in. But that's not as profitable per sq ft for the property management companies that have been buying up all the land.
There's also some minor regulatory reforms that are probably needed to allow a little more flexibility in building design, specifically around the required number/type/location of stairwells. But we have to be careful about that one because we don't want to make death traps.
... you realize the US has a huge housing problem where thousands of people are literally without a home? I bet a lot of people would choose to live in a "crammed" apartment building than be homeless. Right now, NIMBYs don't even want the free market to dictate whether dense housing should be created. There's zoning restrictions which don't allow the option for the creation of denser housing. What's happening now is home owners in those areas want to continue to disallow other people to build denser housing. Not even talking about 20 floor building, but sometimes even 2 story apartments or a location where more than 1 family can legally live. Its extremely regressive and helps their home prices increase, while making it harder for non home owners to gain a home.
Wow. Way to show you have no understanding of neither the proposed solutions nor NIMBYs. The idiots voting them down don't care about what is actually being proposed, they care exclusively that it will lower housing costs. If there's enough housing for everyone their house suddenly isn't as precious a commodity and their retirement plan just withered away.
There's plenty of people who would happily move into new apartments.
Cool story bro. Have fun living in a crammed apartment building. Be sure to comment about how awesome it is and how everyone should do it.
wow, didn't think that was the case, but based on 2021's numbers, its true. Transportation from vehicles, including personal vehicles, accounts for 29% of emissions. This is the largest source, right above electricity generation (25%). Thought transportation would be top 3 but that something else would overtake it. source
Exclusively working from home since 2018 so I cut out 10 un-necessary driving trips a week. x2 since my wife is WFH now too.
Installed solar panels to run the house during the day, so our working hours are fully solar powered.
I guess that's all we can do for now.
If you do have to go out, use a bicycle instead of a car.
Not a good option for hauling groceries in the rain. But I get where you're coming from.
Been doing that all my life. For that you have water tight bags on your bike.
Also, you'll have much more smaller supermarkets dotted all over the place, instead of one Walmart for an entire city. You just go and quickly buy the stuff you will use that day.
It really isn't an issue
If you're looking for other things to do:
- vote to address climate change (some people can only really vote to reduce the damage done slightly)
- Reduce meat consumption (doesn't even have to be zero meat)
- Reduce flying Regardless, thanks for driving less, and helping the cause!
Vote
Fucking vote.
Reminder that Trump repealed 112 environmental regulations in one term. Over a decade of legislation lost, that will take over a decade to reenact.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks-list.html