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1. Process your emotions and thoughts. Do you care enough to do anything? 2. Assuming you answered yes above, take small steps... eat less meat, drink less mi

1. Process your emotions and thoughts. Do you care enough to do anything? 2. Assuming you answered yes above, take small steps... eat less meat, drink less milk. Vote for politicians who care about the environment. Push for changes locally - bike lanes, mass transit, less car-based society. None of these take massive amounts of effort. Yes, none have a dramatic or immediate impact. But, you have to eat the elephant one bite at a time.

Robotbeat 5y ago
And electrify what cars we have.
- meristohm 5y ago
  And reduce our use of multi-ton vehicles, because electric or not, the conversion cost of that energy is not cheap. Cars are tools first, far before toys, and they tend to need long, flat surfaces to roll on, which disrupt animal movement and harbor plants that sometimes take over. Driving slower, less often, and on dirt roads seems better for some concerns. Depends on what you care about.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Driving on dirt roads? That is not better for the environment! Requires bigger vehicles, potentially bad for drainage, dirty and dangerous.
    - meristohm 5y ago
      You might be right. What are the costs of bitumen/asphalt and oil on the ground over so much area?
- barbs 5y ago
  Are you suggesting we somehow make our existing gasoline-powered cars electric? I'm not very up-to-date so I didn't think that was possible. Unless you just mean replacing them with electric ones?
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    It is possible to convert them, but that’s not what I meant. Refuse to buy any new fossil fuel vehicle. I personally think it’d be fairly easy to just require all new vehicles to have plugs. Already, EPA fuel consumption rules have helped cause over 70% of GM’s vehicles to be “micro hybrid” (integrated start/stop). Requiring all new vehicles to be plug in hybrid within, say, 5 years or so is well within the realm of possibility and would have little pushback since plug in hybrids work for literally everyone’s situation (if you can’t plug in, just don’t). And besides the near term benefits, that sets the stage for eliminating gasoline or at least making it very expensive, which today is political suicide. Everyone will desire access to charging, whether just ability to use a 120V outlet, or use destination chargers. Electricity is effectively as cheap as $1/gallon gasoline right now in my area, which means consumers (who might drive across town for a 10 cent per gallon gas price difference) will happily try to plug in whenever they can, making charging no longer a niche thing for 1% of drivers but something everyone wants and therefore easy to standardize for apartments, on-street parking, etc. 5-10 years after that, we can either start mandating new vehicles be completely emissionsfree.
p_j_w 5y ago
Unpopular truth time: don't have kids. That's any given individual's biggest impact to the environment... creating more mouths to feed. If you insist that you need to raise a family, there are plenty of kids out there that need adopting.
- silon42 5y ago
  have 1 kid (maybe 2nd one later -- developed countries are already doing this pretty much)... also stop immigration (especially from countries having > 1 kid)
  - Vivtek 5y ago
    Stop immigration? How do people moving around on the planet make a difference? Especially since immigration moves people from more impoverished places, where they are more likely to have more kids, to less impoverished places, where they are less likely?
    - bookofsand 5y ago
      To a first, second and third approximation: poor = small energy footprint rich = large energy footprint Assuming the problem is that the global energy consumption is too large, the last thing we want is to increase the energy footprint of the people we already have. Moving people from poor countries to rich countries means greatly increasing those people energy footprint. It is in direct contradiction to the stated goal of reducing the energy footprint of humanity, and serves as a strongly visible signal that the ruling class is not serious about reducing global emissions.
      - api 5y ago
        If the solution to climate change must involve keeping large numbers of people poor or making existing people poorer, it will fail due to populist backlash and nothing will be done. There is only one possible solution: replace CO2-intensive power sources like fossil fuels with low or zero CO2 power sources like nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and solar energy. If that can't be done fast enough, well enough, or affordably, then we should plan and prepare for climate change as a certainty. We have the technology (solar, wind, nuclear, grid scale batteries, HVDC long range transmission lines, EVs), but do not have the political will. This is largely because the fossil fuel industry is powerful enough to block serious efforts, and because national economic and military competition incentivizes nations to defect from any CO2-reducing strategy and exploit cheap fossil fuels to get ahead quickly.

Robotbeat 5y ago

And electrify what cars we have.

meristohm 5y ago
And reduce our use of multi-ton vehicles, because electric or not, the conversion cost of that energy is not cheap. Cars are tools first, far before toys, and they tend to need long, flat surfaces to roll on, which disrupt animal movement and harbor plants that sometimes take over. Driving slower, less often, and on dirt roads seems better for some concerns. Depends on what you care about.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Driving on dirt roads? That is not better for the environment! Requires bigger vehicles, potentially bad for drainage, dirty and dangerous.
  - meristohm 5y ago
    You might be right. What are the costs of bitumen/asphalt and oil on the ground over so much area?
barbs 5y ago
Are you suggesting we somehow make our existing gasoline-powered cars electric? I'm not very up-to-date so I didn't think that was possible. Unless you just mean replacing them with electric ones?
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  It is possible to convert them, but that’s not what I meant. Refuse to buy any new fossil fuel vehicle. I personally think it’d be fairly easy to just require all new vehicles to have plugs. Already, EPA fuel consumption rules have helped cause over 70% of GM’s vehicles to be “micro hybrid” (integrated start/stop). Requiring all new vehicles to be plug in hybrid within, say, 5 years or so is well within the realm of possibility and would have little pushback since plug in hybrids work for literally everyone’s situation (if you can’t plug in, just don’t). And besides the near term benefits, that sets the stage for eliminating gasoline or at least making it very expensive, which today is political suicide. Everyone will desire access to charging, whether just ability to use a 120V outlet, or use destination chargers. Electricity is effectively as cheap as $1/gallon gasoline right now in my area, which means consumers (who might drive across town for a 10 cent per gallon gas price difference) will happily try to plug in whenever they can, making charging no longer a niche thing for 1% of drivers but something everyone wants and therefore easy to standardize for apartments, on-street parking, etc. 5-10 years after that, we can either start mandating new vehicles be completely emissionsfree.

p_j_w 5y ago

Unpopular truth time: don't have kids. That's any given individual's biggest impact to the environment... creating more mouths to feed. If you insist that you need to raise a family, there are plenty of kids out there that need adopting.

silon42 5y ago
have 1 kid (maybe 2nd one later -- developed countries are already doing this pretty much)... also stop immigration (especially from countries having > 1 kid)
- Vivtek 5y ago
  Stop immigration? How do people moving around on the planet make a difference? Especially since immigration moves people from more impoverished places, where they are more likely to have more kids, to less impoverished places, where they are less likely?
  - bookofsand 5y ago
    To a first, second and third approximation: poor = small energy footprint rich = large energy footprint Assuming the problem is that the global energy consumption is too large, the last thing we want is to increase the energy footprint of the people we already have. Moving people from poor countries to rich countries means greatly increasing those people energy footprint. It is in direct contradiction to the stated goal of reducing the energy footprint of humanity, and serves as a strongly visible signal that the ruling class is not serious about reducing global emissions.
    - api 5y ago
      If the solution to climate change must involve keeping large numbers of people poor or making existing people poorer, it will fail due to populist backlash and nothing will be done. There is only one possible solution: replace CO2-intensive power sources like fossil fuels with low or zero CO2 power sources like nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and solar energy. If that can't be done fast enough, well enough, or affordably, then we should plan and prepare for climate change as a certainty. We have the technology (solar, wind, nuclear, grid scale batteries, HVDC long range transmission lines, EVs), but do not have the political will. This is largely because the fossil fuel industry is powerful enough to block serious efforts, and because national economic and military competition incentivizes nations to defect from any CO2-reducing strategy and exploit cheap fossil fuels to get ahead quickly.