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There were a study done in Sweden a few years ago that looked at the question about an individuals actions and the corresponding CO2 production. No car > skipp

• npteljes 5y ago
  How could you leave out the one with the biggest impact, which is basically "less humans"?
  • cranekam 5y ago
    *fewer
    • ajryan 5y ago
      I wonder how much energy we waste on pedantry.
      • TeMPOraL 5y ago
        Probably not as much as we waste on resolving confusion caused by playing fast and loose with shared rules/understanding of things.
      • npteljes 5y ago
        Sometimes it has its place. Can you imagine a public speaker making errors like this? I think it detracts from the message. Public, and especially popularly read stuff should be as correct as humanely possible. Good grammar is a habit, improved by repeat exposure.
    • npteljes 5y ago
      I appreciate this, I want my snappy sentences to be grammatically correct.
  • AstralStorm 5y ago
    No, even not having children has lower impact than not doing these things. Especially that environmental costs of them ramp up slowly. Humans tend to be on their own barring social pressures carbon neutral. The biggest expenses being food and water, if these aforementioned practices are applied. It gets even better if these young can work to reduce the impact of the warming. We'll need a lot of manpower to pull off the necessary changes. Just due to the scale of it. Well educated people too. We're on at least one to two generations of lag in education related to physics, chemistry, agriculture, material science, civil engineering, process engineering, general ecology, social engineering... And the old will start to wear down and think in old patterns. Additionally further down the list is "live together in higher density" and "buy locally made things" bits.
    • cool_dude85 5y ago
      I have a hard time believing that "humans tend to be on their own barring social pressures carbon neutral." Can you find some of these carbon neutral humans in first-world countries to show me, as an example? Or when you say "barring social pressures", do you just mean "if you don't count this whole society thing"?
  • philipov 5y ago
    That's not actionable advice on a timescale that will affect co2 emissions any time soon. Are you suggesting we kill people to reduce the population?
    • bsenftner 5y ago
      Just like the idiots vote in a moron, and they kill themselves.
    • wombatmobile 5y ago
      > That's not actionable advice on a timescale that will affect co2 emissions any time soon. Are you suggesting we kill people to reduce the population? Your second sentence is an overreach. The natural death rate in the United States is about 0.9% of the population. [1] [1]. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/death-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat...
      • philipov 5y ago
        Okay, so how many years would it take to halve the world population through natural death rate, and how do you stop all people on earth from having children without a world war?
        • wombatmobile 5y ago
          > Okay, so how many years would it take to halve the world population through natural death rate If the natural death rate is 0.9%, the population would decline by about 9% each decade. The drop doesn’t have to go to 50% - just down to whatever the sustainable limit is. > how do you stop all people on earth from having children without a world war? I’m not sure that even a world war would achieve that. And again, it’s not necessary or desirable to go to that extreme. If the goal is sustainability, we just need to rightsize the population for sustainability. The actual population depends on the prevailing per capita emissions from whatever energy technologies we are using at any given time. The more carbon neutral the technology, the higher the population can be sustained, at least with respect to greenhouse gases. To reduce the birth rate, rather than force everyone to stop, we could just reward those who are willing with tax breaks. X% tax break for zero children. Y% tax break for 1 child. 0% tax break for 2 children. And extra taxes for >2 children.
  • jelger 5y ago
    pretty hard to influence for individuals
  • bluedevil2k 5y ago
    And what’s your solution to this? And has any study said explicitly the number of humans is the main problem? Or their actions and consumption that’s the problem?
  • ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    Some would disagree with this on the moral point that its basically a call for genocide, whether that is intentional or not is hard to tell. I'd disagree on the facts though. There's already such a wild difference in carbon intensity between two humans, that it would be ridiculous to suggest that the first step would be to remove humans rather than the activities that make that difference (and are sometimes wasteful, inefficient or counterproductive)
  • odiroot 5y ago
    Because most of the developed world (if not whole) is already there. How do you plan to implement it in less-develop states?
• AstralStorm 5y ago
  That one for Sweden. In countries that neglected it in building codes, before buying green energy there's an "greenify your home" bit. Mostly heat insulation and removal of fossil fueled heating.
• api 5y ago
  How does this differ if the majority of your electricity is zero carbon? Coal electricity is 60% of emissions. Aviation is less than 5%. How is skipping a flight that highly ranked of you are burning a ton of carbon just being at home (if you have coal fired power). Actual rankings have to be energy mix dependent.
  • mononcqc 5y ago
    Because that 60% from coal is more or less shared across everyone, but flights are, on the global scale, a luxury item. In many cases, taking a transatlantic flight emits more CO2 equivalent than your average person commuting for a year. So even though aviation is a small part of it all, it is one of the individual actions able to have outsized impact, usually for leisure or at least often for non-essential reasons.
    • api 5y ago
      That's quite false. I live in Southwestern Ohio and get probably 75% of my power from coal. My pot of coffee emits far more CO2 than someone in Portland, who gets 0% from coal and most of their power from hydro. It's the same pot of coffee. Our cost of energy is similar and our standard of living is similar. Where you get your power greatly affects how much CO2 you emit doing the exact same things. All energy is not created equal. There are two huge barriers to doing anything about this problem. The first is denialists and those with vested interests in fossil fuels promoting denialism. The second is well-intentioned people who understand that there is a problem over-complicating the issue, promoting misunderstandings, or promoting the idea that this can't be solved without massive decreases in standard of living. The latter, which I term "abstinence based environmentalism" by analogy with abstinence-based sex ed, will work about as well as politely telling teenagers not to have sex. If you tell people they need to become poorer to save the planet, they'll ignore you... especially if they are already poorer than you in which case you look like a hypocrite. This problem is actually pretty simple. The following steps won't solve it 100% but they'll go pretty far. (1) Phase out coal for electricity generation in favor of... almost anything else except maybe oil shale. (2) Push electric vehicles, not because all EVs categorically emit less carbon than gasoline cars but because it's a hell of a lot easier to replace a few point source power plants than it is to replace a vast fleet of millions of internal combustion engines. (That and your typical EV is indeed better... even if your electricity is 100% coal an EV is generally no worse than an ICE car due to the superior efficiency of large power plants and the high embodied energy of gasoline.) (3) Continue to subsidize renewable energy and grid-scale storage. (4) At least stop shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants before renewables are in place to replace them, and at best put some serious funding behind next-generation nuclear efforts. Fusion is also grossly under-funded. Ignore the "it'll always be N years away" idiots. There has been substantial progress even with very limited funding available. There is no point in quibbling about small contributors like aviation (<5%) while we are still burning shitloads of coal and coal is far easier to replace than jet fuel. You don't solve a problem like this by making the solution maximally inconvenient.
• aivisol 5y ago
  The highest bar in the chart says "have one fewer child". It actually exceeds any others by extremely large margin [0]. How is that even considered as the option? One child less means halving population after every generation. Eliminate the population and problem solved? [0] https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/drimage/1120/630/4832/fourchoices_1.jpg https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/drimage/1120/630/4832/fourc...
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    You can't fault the logic, fewer people means less demand for the things that create the carbon emissions in the first place.
  • ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    They appear to be suggesting exactly that, if you read the asterisk: "Cumulative emissions from descendants, decreases substantially if national emissions decrease." So doing all the other ones actually lowers that one. And even then it only makes sense if no-one else has more kids to compensate, so it's a personal action that will cut your personal carbon, but like most things in this area not something that works unless we all do it (globally)
  • wizardofdos 5y ago
    It's true tho. On a world with limited resources and limits to the amount of pollution our planet can deal with, less people means a longer runway.
  • tirpen 5y ago
    > One child less means halving population after every generation I really don't see the problem here? It's not like having a large population is in itself a noble goal that makes life better for people.
    • rich_sasha 5y ago
      All of our economics relies on having new people. Pensioners, ie people who cannot produce anymore, are effectively upkept by the younger generations, in exchange for their savings. We don’t know how to run economies without young people. Look at the demographic issues in Japan, and lesser extent now in China.
• Mikeb85 5y ago
  Of course the biggest emitters are industrial. Anything we attribute to individuals pales in comparison to the transport industry, production of goods like steel and concrete, resource extraction, power generation and production of consumer goods. Telling consumers to cut back on X is essentially passing the back and making consumers feel bad without actually addressing the bulk of emissions.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Yes, but those things do not exist in a vacuum, they are produced based on demand. If we care so much about our own convenience that we are unwilling to change the things we can on an individual level, how will we ever be willing to sacrifice things as a society? Are you going to give up your 2-day prime delivery because we no longer ship things by truck? Or a wide variety of items at your grocery because we stop gathering food from the four corners of the earth?
    • TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Come on, it's not that GP, or me, or you willed 2-day prime delivery into existence. It's something Amazon, and other companies, offer. It can be "given up" by everyone, without any objection, by said companies deciding not to offer it anymore. People will grumble and adapt, because they can't really do much about it. The leverage over this, and all other conveniences, rests squarely with the companies offering them. People choose out of what's available on the market, not from the space of possible offerings.
      • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        And Amazon will stop offering it if people stop using it. It seems to me that people are using this argument to put all the blame on corporations and big industry while ignoring that their own actions are the reason such entities exist in the first place.
        • pnt12 5y ago
• lucb1e 5y ago
  Also note that some of them are easy and you can simply do them today. Buying green energy might not be as good as ditching your car altogether, but it's a lot easier so you might as well start with the quick wins. And the category of buying shiny new stuff is missing. It's a big part of consumer-influencable emissions, though it's admittedly even harder to make a significant impact on than ditching cars after you bought your essentials second-hand (where possible/reasonable of course). Pushing for products to be produced in a climate-neutral fashion (voting with your wallet) would definitely be something though. Edit: wait, Sweden. How is space heating not on that list? Surely where the majority of the Swedes live is not too cold for heat pumps with perhaps a bit of aid from pure electrical heat creation for a few days per year, is it?
• justnotworthit 5y ago
  > Get a electric car Chart says "Switch eletric car to car free". Text says car free is 2.4 tonnes a year, diet 0.8 a year.