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There are many things that can be done, unfortunately for anything truly effective to be done we need: 1. Lower the quality of living for a huge amount of hu

There are many things that can be done, unfortunately for anything truly effective to be done we need: 1. Lower the quality of living for a huge amount of humanity 2. Have massive technological breakthroughs 3. Embark on large scale geo-engineering 2 & 3 are the only moral choices - condemning the world to live in poverty isn't ok. Europe and the US are only ~25% of all emissions and the rest of the world is increasing at a staggering rate.

pier25 7y ago
4. lower the human population Not having kids is probably the biggest contribution one can do for the environment, specially on countries with very high emissions per capita such as the US.
- TehCorwiz 7y ago
  So you want to self-select for people who don’t care about the environment?
  - pier25 7y ago
    So you are implying that caring about the environment is a matter of natural selection and genetics?
    - dantheman 7y ago
      I'd say that culture, like religion, is passed down by the parents. There are a lot of calls and attitudes that are passed down.
- petre 7y ago
  No worries, it's self regulating. No need to not have kids. I have a shimp colony in an aquarium. It only grows as much as the food source allows it to. It would probably get crowded and quite hot in the future, but we'll manage without eugenics and not having kids, or having just one kid, which was tried before in China and was a failure.
  - UnFleshedOne 7y ago
    Try feeding your shrimp with algae wafers, get them to reproduce a lot, then stop feeding them. Sure, population will downregulate to sustainable levels again, but individual shrimp will wiggle some choice words at you with their whiskers, while they are starving to death and are being consumed by their friends and family.
imtringued 7y ago
One thing I always wonder about is that people claim that solving climate change requires us to go back to the middle ages. This isn't correct at all. Electric cars exist. Cheap renewables exist. As we invest more into reducing CO2 emissions we gain more headroom for further inventions that make us independent from fossil fuels. The problem is that we don't make enough of these investments. Trump decided to support coal instead and Germany slowed down it's expansion of renewables.
arbitrary_name 7y ago
1. is not poverty though, and it is a moral decision if we chose collectively. Remember, billionaires are on average not happier than your average citizen. The people of many African countries are no less happy in aggregate than your average american. So why would lowering our collective level of consumption be immoral, if it did not lower our level of happiness? We need to stop assuming that our current level of wealth is somehow the apex of progress: it categorically is not
CalRobert 7y ago
Be a vegetarian, ride your bike or walk to work, and live in a high-efficiency apartment in the city using solar and wind-generated electricity. Have 2 or fewer kids. Take holidays via train. Buy less single use crap. Bonus! Give everyone 6 months holiday a year because humanity has more crap than it's ever needed but not enough time. I mean, how much lower is that? I wouldn't mind it.

pier25 7y ago

4. lower the human population Not having kids is probably the biggest contribution one can do for the environment, specially on countries with very high emissions per capita such as the US.

TehCorwiz 7y ago
So you want to self-select for people who don’t care about the environment?
- pier25 7y ago
  So you are implying that caring about the environment is a matter of natural selection and genetics?
  - dantheman 7y ago
    I'd say that culture, like religion, is passed down by the parents. There are a lot of calls and attitudes that are passed down.
petre 7y ago
No worries, it's self regulating. No need to not have kids. I have a shimp colony in an aquarium. It only grows as much as the food source allows it to. It would probably get crowded and quite hot in the future, but we'll manage without eugenics and not having kids, or having just one kid, which was tried before in China and was a failure.
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  Try feeding your shrimp with algae wafers, get them to reproduce a lot, then stop feeding them. Sure, population will downregulate to sustainable levels again, but individual shrimp will wiggle some choice words at you with their whiskers, while they are starving to death and are being consumed by their friends and family.

imtringued 7y ago

One thing I always wonder about is that people claim that solving climate change requires us to go back to the middle ages. This isn't correct at all. Electric cars exist. Cheap renewables exist. As we invest more into reducing CO2 emissions we gain more headroom for further inventions that make us independent from fossil fuels. The problem is that we don't make enough of these investments. Trump decided to support coal instead and Germany slowed down it's expansion of renewables.

arbitrary_name 7y ago

1. is not poverty though, and it is a moral decision if we chose collectively. Remember, billionaires are on average not happier than your average citizen. The people of many African countries are no less happy in aggregate than your average american. So why would lowering our collective level of consumption be immoral, if it did not lower our level of happiness? We need to stop assuming that our current level of wealth is somehow the apex of progress: it categorically is not

CalRobert 7y ago

Be a vegetarian, ride your bike or walk to work, and live in a high-efficiency apartment in the city using solar and wind-generated electricity. Have 2 or fewer kids. Take holidays via train. Buy less single use crap. Bonus! Give everyone 6 months holiday a year because humanity has more crap than it's ever needed but not enough time. I mean, how much lower is that? I wouldn't mind it.