Id like lemmings take on how they would actually reduce emissions on a level that actually makes a difference (assuming we can still stop it, which is likely false by now, but let’s ignore that)
I dont think its as simple as “tax billionaires out of existence and ban jets, airplanes, and cars” because thats not realistic.
Bonus points if you can think of any solutions that dont disrupt the 99%'s way of life.
I know yall will have fun with this!
Major corporations caused this, only major corporations can solve it. Laws would have to be passed requiring them to offset the damage from everything they do. Coops would need to be set up wherever possible for one industry to reuse waste from another. Subsidies would need to be ethically set up to encourage industry involved with cleaning the environment. Cooperation between nations to combat global issues would be needed. Actual consequences for industries it nations that violate. Education!! And most importantly convince half the world’s population to give a shit or even believe the problem exists. I’ve probably missed some.
The alternative would be magic.
Yeah, between the two, I think magic is probably more realistic. Let’s go with that.
I see an opportunity with rising electricity costs due to AI infrastructure building. People are getting angry about their high bills. If enough out solar panels on their houses and install batteries, we’ll be off the grid in short order.
solutions that dont disrupt the 99%'s way of life
This is not possible. Barring some miracle technologies being developed, we would have to radically change our standards of living and give up our modern convenient lives to make meaningful changes.
Our standards of living should not include planned obsolescence where you gotta buy or exchange a new phone every year, stuff should be designed to last at least 10 years, if not longer…
Renewable electricity seems like it gets us most of the way there.
The remaining problems I can think of are concrete and fuel for air travel. We could probably go without concrete, although it would suck, and otherwise we just have to recapture the CO2 from the atmosphere. Direct capture and storage has proven trucky because the kilns are large, hot, and rotating, making them difficult to seal E-fuel or biofuel would have to be the solution for air travel. Maybe airships are close enough to qualify as non-disruptive, I guess.
You are asking two how to questions “combat climate change” and “reduce emissions”
To realistically combat climate change:
- Admit that we need to try geoengineering (we are already doing this with all the CO2 and CH4 going into the atmosphere)
- Weather it is SO2 injection or cloud seeding to artificially increase the albido; we need to reduce incident solar radiation to give us a few more decades to actually reduce emissions
To reduce emissions:
- Tackle the biggest emissions first.
- Electrification of the passenger fleet; that means batteries. Keep fuel cells for heavy transport (maybe)
- Encourage electric biking. And other micro-mobility. Along with better public transport.
- Normalise a historical style diet, meat is a treat only once or twice a week.
- Reduce concrete construction; keep it for the important things like the foundations.
- Reduce the practice of packaging everything in plastic; again keep it for the important things only like electrical insulation.
- Massive ramp up of solar and wind around the world.
- Where we use fossil fuels, ask is this important enough to use FF here?
Carbon taxes:
- Tax CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) at a reasonable rate to encourage all of the reduction measures.
- At less than $65NZD/T the cost is too low to encourage significant movement on the issues.
- Have a ratcheting scheme in the CO2 market, i.e. add $5-8/yr/T for CO2e; in 10 years the price will be between $110-140/T. At the 10yr mark, make the ratchet $10-15/yr/T.
- Add a carbon tariff; basically make it more expensive to buy from countries that are not pulling their weight.
- Be careful not to double tax, this is important for buy in from the public. i.e. the carbon tax on fuel should be exempt from sales tax, taxing a tax is a great way to alienate people.
increase the albido
My brain saw this as ‘libido’ for a second. I was like, you want us to fuck our way to carbon neutrality?
I was about to suggest cross-posting to imgur when I realized I merely misread the word :\
Well it is a hypothesis that needs testing…
Quagmire, is that you?
In your defense, it’s actually spelled “albedo”.
Exactly, I think that’s a lot of what threw me.
Call a halt to this AI bullshit for a start. I’ve just received a (UK) government questionnaire about my personal energy usage and how I might reduce it. Meanwhile, I learn said government has mooted giving everyone in the country ChatGPT Plus for free!
There are innumerable ways businesses and governments can reduce their energy footprint etc and make a difference.
With all the world (at least western nations) drifting backwards at least into nationalism (some countries even at full throttle into fascism), this could be used as an advantage: Why not shifting the narrative into the direction, that a stable, clean and healthy enviroment is pinnacle of patriotism (like the narrative of a healthy body was used in national-socialist propaganda 90 years ago in Germany), along with renewable energy that makes each nation independent from others. Wind turbines and solar power for freedom, so to say. Things like coal rolling or similar acts like wasting resources will be deemed as un-patriotic then.
Stop burning fossil fuels. There is no way that doesn’t include that.
How we gonna melt steel, copper, titanium, tungsten, etc?
Sadly, fossil fuels aren’t going away anytime soon. ☹️
There are ways to melt those without burning fossil fuels. Whether the alternatives are easy, affordable, or can run at a useful rate is debatable
Arc furnaces are standard already.
The thing you really need a reducing agent for is smelting, and for that hydrogen is already used at smaller scales.
Iceland refines a lot of metal and I think they’re close, or at, 100% renewable.
Yup, Iceland has such cheap geothermal and hydro energy that they just use electric furnaces to smelt aluminum.
attack the capitalist system.
Wow thanks for this insightful answer
With combat.
And the free market value system, because it doesn’t value externalities.
I’m not a doomer, in large part because I think that economic forces will reduce greenhouse emissions significantly on their own, and despite hitting recent setbacks in policymaking that would push those reductions to happen more more quickly or with deeper cuts, that decarbonization back down to 1990 levels is still going to happen in our lifetimes.
Here’s how I think we’ll get there:
- Phasing out fossil fuel electricity generation. Solar power is just ridiculously cheap compared to any other method of generation. As we deploy grid scale storage, demand-shifting technology and pricing structures, develop redundancy with wind and advanced geothermal (and possibly fusion in the coming decades), we’re going to make fossil fuel electricity generation uncompetitive on price. Maybe ratepayers and governments don’t want to subsidize carbon-free energy, but why would they want to subsidize carbon emitting energy when those are no longer competitive?
- Electrification of transportation (electric vehicles, including big stuff like trains and buses and small stuff like bikes and scooters).
- Electrification of heat, both for indoor climate control and furnaces/boilers for water and industrial applications. Heat pumps are already cost effective for new construction in most climates, and even retrofits are approaching cost competitiveness with fossil fuel powered heaters.
- Carbon capture as a feedstock into chemical production, including alternative fuels like sustainable aviation fuel. Once electricity is cheap enough, even only at certain times of day, energy-intensive chemical production can hit flexible output targets to absorb surplus energy supply from overproduction of solar, to store that energy for later or otherwise remove carbon from the atmosphere.
To borrow from a Taoist concept, we shouldn’t expend effort fighting the current of a river when the current itself can be utilized to accomplish our goals. In this case, the capitalist incentive structure of wanting to do stuff that makes money is now being turned towards decarbonization for cost savings or outright profit.
I miss being this optimistic. No hate, I just don’t have that hope in me.
US carbon emissions peaked in 2007 and have been coming down since. US capita carbon emissions peaked in the 1970s and have been coming down since.
The concern has always been with the much, much larger developing world, if they would one day become rich enough to emit carbon like North America. And as it turns out, China’s push for low cost solar and low cost EVs have revolutionized the energy world for development economics. Now if you’re a poor agrarian country looking to industrialize, the cheapest energy available just happens to be clean.
It’s like how the developing world mostly skipped landline infrastructure in the 2000’s because cell phones became easier and cheaper to build. We’re seeing the same thing play out with fossil fuel electricity generation, where most new capacity coming online, even in the third world, is solar.
Yes. OP can’t solve it. Lemmy can’t solve it. But even not solving it will be okay unless you’re a coral reef, because we got lucky and technology is bailing out our asses. The few token political initiatives will help a bit.
If we end ourselves it will be in a different way.
Oh no, we will die because of ecological collapse caused by climate change. So it just depends on how many steps you count as being involved, but we will die, ultimately because of anthropogenic climate change.
We grow ~all our own food, and pollinate with our own bees and artificial methods. Somewhere will stay suitable for that even if we’re going all the way back to the dinosaur times hothouse Earth. That right there is enough for mere survival and basic industry.
Maybe it could feed into the reasons for a nuclear war, or something, ooor maybe it’s bound to happen without. Or maybe humanity will go on indefinitely.
Make it socially unacceptable to adopt and maintain some behaviours.
It will take generations, but it’s the only way to have the political support to reject certain things.
Genuinely there needs to be a fee that companies must pay for the pollution they create, with it written into law that they can’t palm the cost off on their customers.
We need to move shipping away from the ‘barely more refined than crude oil’ fuels they use
We need to ensure protection of the oceans by making it so that outflowing waste from industry never reaches the watercourse in the first place.
Single use plastics need to be removed from the supply chain (alternatively changed at the production level so they’re made from plant cellulose or a material that doesn’t break down into PFOAS or microplastics)
We also need to block petrochemical companies from lobbying or interfering with politics, and prevent them from funding smear campaigns against renewable energy sources
Vote.
Edit: to be clear, vote in every election you have access to. Local voting and primaries are just important. Voting even if you don’t like any of the options is still important.
If you don’t vote then you’re part of the problem.
Depends on where you live.
In some places, voting is extremely important and can affect things majorly.
In some places, voting is completely useless because the voter has legitimately no power in a rigged system.
If a rigged vote gets 100 votes to person A and 0 votes for person B then you will think person B’s ideas aren’t valid.
If a rigged vote gets 100 for person A and 35 for person B, well person B’s ideas shouldn’t be ignored. It also shows the 90 people that didn’t vote that maybe they should vote next time.
In a rigged election, you’re not going to be delivered legitimate vote totals.
But it’s time to disrupt 99% of life.
Survey humanity, produce an agreed on level of technology and lifestyle.
We probably need to limit ourselves to housing, food, internet, and safety/defense for everyone and not much else - then slow all industries based on HOW people want to live.
So getting rid of things like, plastic toys, gizmos, extravagances. Phones wouldn’t be updated as often. People would only be able to update their tech if they could meaningfully show it was necessary.
Lots of technology companies would be folded. Lots of industries would be nationalised and folded. International tourism would be greatly restricted. All the stuff we don’t need basically.
People would be mostly employed in the basics: Housing, food, internet. Too far beyond that and you’d have to rely on local people/groups/makers/repair companies.
So massive degrowth, nationalization, and restrictions/regulations to the market.
Most of all, corporations would no longer count as people. In fact society should have to rely on person to person contracting. I don’t really think corporations should exist becuase they become Zombies/Golems that do a lot of destructive things.
Basically degrowth, and restructuring society around degrowth.
This is the one post I’ve seen here that actually tackles the main problems. Climate change can’t be stopped without degrowth, which means putting a stop to capitalism.
I’d like to add: while there would be a lot we’d have to give up, life under a degrowth economy would be good. Way better than what we have now. We’d all have more leisure time to focus on stuff that matters. Sure, we’d have fewer gadgets and toys, but we’d be able to spend more time with loved ones and engaging in creative and fulfilling hobbies.
I agree but you should emphasize the positives of degrowth otherwise everyone either gets scared or dismisses it as a non-serious solution politically. The main one being more leisure and less work.
Yeah, but that’s a fantasy, people will not do that. OP is specifically asking for something more realistic.
Security would go a long way. Not national security but life security. For example I own a bunch of tools and I sorta wish I did not. If I was guaranteed access to something like a tool library that had everything I might need to buy from home depot of such I would not carry any. Heck it could be home depot where when you buy the paint you get the rollers and brushes and equipment to clean it up with your purchase and you return it when your done. Heck could return the leftover paint. Also internet replaces a lot of things. My wife and I are committed to not buying physical things so we using streaming services and buy digital copies of stuff. We get books in pdf now and use games and such to get away from toys and such.
All other “solutions” in this thread are so funny to me. People thinking more efficient/more sustainable stuff will change anything. Solar panels and whatever still need to be produced, causing emissions. If you continue growing infinitely, you’re going to cause infinite emissions with that.
Buy less crap. That’s it. It sounds like a sacrifice, but stuff doesn’t make you happy (provided your basic needs are met). If you are working longer hours to pay for your cars and tvs and fast fashion, your life might improve.
Playing with a cellphone is kinda fun. Know what’s really fun? Friends.
If you’re under 60, buying less crap is going to disrupt your life less than climate change will, so i think i am entitled to the aforementioned bonus points.
The idea of personal action vs. corporate/government action is a false choice. The government can force the corpos to stop burning the planet, but that will mean significant lifestyle changes for everybody.
It also means getting our shit together about immigration/ migration/ refugees. And not just in the US, but globally. A humanitarian catastrophe is assured otherwise.
I’m not optimistic.
