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A short list of things which are fairly easy to do. Don't have children. Switch to a vegetarian or vegan diet. Use public transport or bikes / walking rather th

• gostsamo 6y ago
  If you don't have children, why should you care for the future generations? There could be some abstract argument about the unborn being as human as currently living people, but it cuts both ways.
  • rbg246 6y ago
    Do you mean to say you don't care for any living thing but your family?
    • steerablesafe 6y ago
      People care for their close ones much more than for strangers. It's human nature. It's not binary between caring and not caring.
      • rbg246 6y ago
        I think if you read the parent comment it was a binary question. Not disagreeing with your comment though.
    • gostsamo 6y ago
      I mean that not having children is denying unborn people from the lives that they might have for no better reason that this might be easier for someone else unborn. This line of thinking leads to a suicide as a logical step which is rather bad extreme.
      • fulafel 6y ago
        Saving potential people from being not-born leads to very bad extremes as well (maximizing reproduction). This is not a useful model of thinking.
        • gostsamo 6y ago
          I agree. My point is that having children or not is the wrong argument. Decreasing population growth is much more ethically achievable by decreasing child mortality in developing countries, providing women there with the education to be self-reliant on their own, and providing them with birth control so that they can plan their parenthood.
          • fulafel 6y ago
            Rejecting the issue based on the fact that both logical extremes are failures is case of double headed reductio ad absurdum I think :)
            • gostsamo 6y ago
              The argument itself is reductionist in nature. No man, no problem. I'm not sure if you are arguing because of love for formal proofs or because you want the full treatise why it sucks, but if the latter, just say so.
              • fulafel 6y ago
                I'm not sure what "it" is any more, but I think having modest amount of children is a good idea, and people from rich countries don't get to recuse themselves - we have such big carbon footprints. And appeals on behalf of unborn people sounds suspiciously like some of the dramatic appeals to emotion favoured by christian fundamentalists in the context of birth control.
    • kolinko 6y ago
      The point of fighting climate change is to preserve human life on earth (and in good conditions). If we destroy the environment, nature will survive - some spiecies will die off, but new ones will emerge. Nature was doing very well when co2 was a few times more than today. It’s just humans that were’t there to witness it.
      • rbg246 6y ago
        This is just so human centric surely you can see how caring for all of Earth's biome is important. Personally, I care about Earth's biome in its current state, and do not want to cause unnecessary suffering to animals or plant ecosystems because people trashed the joint especially since we had the ability not to.
        • gostsamo 6y ago
          It is human-centric, yes. However, the argument "don't have children for the only reason that they will trash the planet" is broken in its very core. First, because a person making it will have a difficulty explaining their own existence, and second, because if they don't have children, the chances are that their values will die with them and the Earth shall be inherited by the wasteful.
          • mariusor 6y ago
            > First, because a person making it will have a difficulty explaining their own existence Maybe to you. I derive a great enjoyment from just being alive myself and living my own potential. Considering a life meaningless without procreation is a very unintellectual perspective in my opinion.
            • gostsamo 6y ago
              You miss the part where the very existence of the person brings suffering through the consumption of all kinds of nature destroying goods. Obviously such person values their enjoyment over the suffering of others. This is one of the main issues of utilitarian philosophy where the attempt of applying universal measures of cost-benefit analysis returns unpleasant results.
• alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  Although nice, a single person won’t make a difference. We need to change as a whole of society, and that means legislation. 2020 showed society can shift when faced with dire consequences.
  • rbg246 6y ago
    For your own ethics and morality you should try though.
  • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Society needs pioneers to show that you can reduce your environmental impact whilst still having a good quality of life.
    • FrojoS 6y ago
      A lot of things need critical mass. Being able to fly now and then increases my quality of life. Quitting flying won't lead us into a future of carbon free air travel, but legislation might.
      • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
        Legislation can't really make air travel carbon neutral, there is no technology on the horizon that will allow crossing the Atlantic without emitting a ton of carbon.
        • FrojoS 6y ago
          Synthetic carbon based fuels for instance could be made green house gas neutral. It's just not economical so far.
  • chungus_khan 6y ago
    The idea that individual action even can is so utopian. When I'm emperor there will be no crime because everyone will recognize that crime is bad, even if doing crime benefits them. Individual action isn't bad or anything, but we can't just wish away our problems by saying that everyone will get along.
• rbg246 6y ago
  Great set of actions. Cutting down on flying is another action you can take, I looked up emissions from taking flights and its a significant chunk of annual emissions.
• artonge 6y ago
  I don't know why you are downvoted, those are exactly the main steps to reduce one's emissions. I have heard somewhere that emissions can be divided roughly in 4 categories: - Transport. To reduce this category, you need to travel less and if you need to travel, go by foot, bike or public transports. - Food. To reduce this category you need to reduce you meat consumption, 2 or 3 times a week is enough, buy less transformed goods, ie cook more, and buy local grown food. - Consumption. To reduce this category, follow the 5 R: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle. - Public emissions. This one is tied to all the public services we get. It can only be reduced by reaching agreements as a society. As for the children, obviously if we all stop having children, this is all of no use. In developed countries we already have stabilized our demographic growth, so I don't think there is a need for limiting oneself.
  • devdas 6y ago
    Children in developed countries involve significant changes in lifestyles, adding to the consumption of resources.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • barry-cotter 6y ago
    > I don't know why you are downvoted, those are exactly the main steps to reduce one's emissions. Any ideology that demands you not have children is for those who will leave neither physical progeny nor intellectual ones.
    • rayiner 6y ago
      Thank God for that.
    • artonge 6y ago
      Fair point.
    • archarios 6y ago
• tsimionescu 6y ago
  Reducing personal emissions is a red herring. The vast majority of emissions are not coming from individuals, but from industry. And contrary to popular beliefs, there is no way to dismantle an industry by changing your personal behavior - we need massive political and economic overhauls to have any measurable impact. And telling people that a sustainable world requires them to be vegetarian or vegan is wrong and counter-productive. We do need to significantly reduce consumption of animal products, but there is no need to eliminate them from our diets completely.
  • jusssi 6y ago
    I live in a small country (~5.5M people) that is near the top of the list for CO2 emissions per capita. The usual argument around here for not spending any effort in reducing CO2 emissions is that it won't matter: as a nation, we're so small compared to China and the US that we'll make no difference. Therefore, we should sit on our hands and tell the rest of the world to fix the situation while we watch. By your logic (edit: unnecessarily harsh. "by the logic you present here"), everyone else but the absolute largest single CO2 emitting entity shouldn't do anything (because there's someone who's even worse), and that largest one can point back to the others blaming them for not doing anything either.
    • musingsole 6y ago
      Isn't it an optimization problem though? Focusing on anything but your bottleneck (or largest carbon producer) has minuscule effects. If the largest carbon producer did do enough work to become tied with the 2nd largest producer, there's now an argument for why the 2 largest must do something while the rest watch. Granted, yeah, it'd be better for everyone to do what they can and let's all kumbaya, but it doesn't look like the incentives will ever line up for that.
      • Qwertious 6y ago
        Optimization isn't about focusing on the largest resource consumer, but on the most reducible. (Note that this makes your statement basically tautological) And given that China's main problem is its population (which is basically impossible to reduce much more right now and they're still dealing with negative side-effects from their effective but not-very-nice One Child policy), not it's emissions per person, China doesn't have as much to reduce. Whereas if the US lived at China's level of emissions per capita, then the world's total greenhouse emissions would drop by over 10%.
• AlgorithmicTime 6y ago
  Imagine all the people conscientious about climate change choose not to have children in order to minimize their environmental impact. Does that seem like a strategy sustainable over a few generations?
• Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  > Don't have children. I think you are being too conservative here. Just kill yourself, thus sparing the rest of humanity from the CO2 you will inevitably produce over the course of your life. You can also sell your organs and donate revenue and your whole estate to some reputable organization that fights with global warming.
  • jusssi 6y ago
    If you go down that road, it'll be much more impactful if they stick around and start killing others, instead. Just saying.
• epistasis 6y ago
  The first few are little better than buying carbon offsets, IMHO. > don't have children This still leaves the rest of humanity! We need to change the system so that human existence is more sustainable. While having fewer humans on earth might seem to make the challenge slightly smaller, if we have a huge generation of people in retirement and a tiny fraction of working age folks who are both supporting the older generation and rebuilding all our industry, that actually makes the problem harder! > vegetarian diet Looking at the bigger picture, if you discard of your vegetarian foods scraps in the trash, they get converted to methane, having emissions on the same order of magnitude as cattle emissions. And we need ruminants to provide the fertilizer to soil to make it into a positive carbon sink. We must instead look at soil, and using soil as a carbon sink. Modern industrial farming causes huge amounts of carbon release from soil, and that includes organic farming on the industrial scale, like what one could buy in Whole Foods. We instead need to shift agriculture to modes (e.g. no-till) that regenerate soil rather than depleting it. And that will include some animals. Preventing a burn of a gallon of gas has clear and definable implications, and if we stopped all gas burning tomorrow, that would be fantastic. However cutting out all beef tomorrow would leave us in a tough spot for our food system, everything is far far more complex when it comes to out agricultural web. We must come up with a food system that is carbon neutral, and preferably carbon negative. That means composting, no landfills, and some degree of animals. Fixing the food system requires systems change, just like fixing industrial processes does, and personal action can not cross that gap. As far as personal things one can do, I would add a few more: 1. Replace natural gas furnaces and water heaters with heat pumps. These are a carbon win even if tour grid is burning a lot of natural gas, because heat pumps move 3+ units of heat doe every unit of energy consumed. If you can't do that now insulate the hell out of your home (a good idea anyway) 2. Get involved in local politics, to force local policies to encourage systemic change. A local government with a policy of only financing construction with carbon-neutral steel and cement has a chance of forcing market change, where personal action has no chance. I do a lot of your list, because I want to do something, but I think we need to realize that it's not really close to enough. We need to change all of society, and personal responsibility will not get us there.
  • the_gastropod 6y ago
    > Looking at the bigger picture, if you discard of your vegetarian foods scraps in the trash, they get converted to methane, having emissions on the same order of magnitude as cattle emissions Oh, c'mon. 1. No they don't. 2. Cows' methaney burps aren't the only greenhouse gas issue w/ animal agriculture. Those animals definitionally eat more food than they produce (in in the case of cows, it's by a large factor). Meat is inherently an inefficient form of food. 3. Don't throw your food scraps in the trash—it's easy to compost. > need ruminants to provide the fertilizer to soil to make it into a positive carbon sink No. No you don't. Composting works just fine. But furthermore, the number of cattle we have today is laughably excessive for talking about fertilizer production. It's not even worth mentioning at this point in time.