6 ms·

If you had $5000 that you wanted to use to fight climate change, and you wanted to have it have a bigger multiplying effect than your own personal consumption (

by SamBam 3y ago

If you had $5000 that you wanted to use to fight climate change, and you wanted to have it have a bigger multiplying effect than your own personal consumption (install heat pumps, get electric car, etc.), where would you put that, given that most carbon credits seem to be scams? That is, what's the least-scammy carbon credit, and/or place of concrete change? Places I donate to, but wonder how much the effect of each is: * Climate charities focused on legislation (EarthJustice, Clean Air Task Force, EDF, NRDC) * Direct CO2 removal (Climeworks). Seems like a drop in the bucket, but feel like this tech needs to grow. * Goldstandard.org Carbon Credits. May be just as scammy, but appears to be direct gifts to green energy projects in developing world. (Of course, maybe they would have gotten the money anyway.) What are other people's thoughts?

VintageCool 3y ago
Donate to aspiring Democrats running for state legislatures in blues states with red State Legislatures or split governments. > Back in 2019, [David Roberts] wrote for Vox that there is one weird trick states can use to ensure good climate and energy policy. That trick is: giving Democrats full control of the government. It has worked in California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii — the list goes on. > The 2022 midterm elections brought Democrats full control — with trifectas of both houses of the legislature and the governor's office — in four new M states: Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota. > Does the one weird trick still work? Well, you’ll never guess what happened in Minnesota last week. https://www.volts.wtf/p/minnesota-sets-out-for-net-zero-emissions#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/minnesota-sets-out-for-net-zero-emis...
- amrocha 3y ago
  Not everyone lives in the US
- lmm 3y ago
  They passed a law that "commits" them to doing something long after the end of the current legislative term, assuming it somehow avoids being amended or repealed until then. Have they made a concrete difference e.g. measurable reductions in emissions, or is this just feel-good party-politics?
  - jplusequalt 3y ago
    It's better than the republican party removing environmental protections during the Trump administration.
- akomtu 3y ago
  This should be added as the 4th option, right after carbon credits.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  > Donate to aspiring Democrats running for state legislatures So they will blow up a natural gas pipeline and cause the largest release of greenhouse gasses in human history? How about so they can fly private and scold poor people for not caring about the environment enough? Would be better off buying the carbon credits.
  - SamBam 3y ago
    I'm sorry, are you actually suggesting that the Democratic Party blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline? Or that they fly on private jets more than Republicans? At the end of the day, they passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the largest piece of green legislation ever passed in this country. It's not perfect, but it's better than anyone else in this country has ever done. I don't care if you're still annoyed that Al Gore sounded like a scold, that's at least some heading in the right direction, while the current GOP platform is for defunding all green energy and funding more oil. The two parties are not the same on this issue.
pkphilip 3y ago
Buy some land in a cheap rural place and fill it with fruit trees and contribute that towards the community each year. That will sequester far more carbon and help the environment more than contributing funds towards these sorts of programmes - and you will likely build up some immovable assets over time.
- dusanh 3y ago
  Or buy some land and leave it alone, let nature do it's thing. Sadly this is not possible as in most places there is legislation in place that prevents you from "mismanaging" land like this.
  - jug 3y ago
    I just realized how much I'd like to see a website summarizing legislation for various countries in the world, and venues into purchasing land for the respective locations. I want a hometurf.eco :)
  - raffraffraff 3y ago
    I'm thinking about doing something like this, but it involves work. I'm going to find native species, maybe focusing on some insect that's in decline, find it's nursery/food plants and fill an area with them, along with any other plants and fungi that have symbiotic relationships with them. Then apply for a grant that specifically targets the threatened species. That way, it's official. It's a ton of work though.
  - pkphilip 3y ago
    I think it is more fun and fulfilling to attempt to do something with the land - to make it useful towards the local community, than leaving it to nature to just fill the land. For instance, if you make a small pond, you could suddenly have a very interesting ecosystem in this land
- Veedrac 3y ago
  This makes a lot less sense as an impact strategy than buying solar. I'm not saying solar is optimized, versus say competent lobbying or something smarter, but at least it directly addresses long term climate issues and has a clear causal effect not just on personal consumption but unit price also (and thus others' future energy purchases as consequence).
palata 3y ago
> Direct CO2 removal (Climeworks). Seems like a drop in the bucket, but feel like this tech needs to grow. I kindly disagree, and I think it is extremely important to understand that. This tech is fundamentally flawed and completely misses the point: climate change (hence CO2) is only a symptom of our biggest problem. Our biggest problem is abundant energy: 1. Because we have access to a lot of energy, we transform the world in a way that is killing biodiversity: we are currently living a mass extinction (that's not a prediction, that's a fact, it's happening, we can measure it right now). We should do less with less, and preserve habitat for biodiversity. There is no high-tech solution to that, we should preserve life on Earth. 2. Because that abundant energy is mostly fossil based, it emits a ton of CO2. That creates climate change which threatens our very survival (now in the short term). Climate change will create global instability, mass immigration, wars, famines, etc. We don't want that, so we need to emit much, much less CO2. So much less, in fact, that the only viable solution is to do less with less. One could argue that we should "just" replace fossil fuels with better energies (good luck with that, we are not even remotely on that path), but that would not remove point 1 above. 3. Fossil fuels are not unlimited. The peak of conventional oil production was in 2008. The global peak for oil is around now, for gas it is soon. From the peak on, energy will become harder and harder to get (which will induce price instability). Whether we care about climate change and biodiversity or not, fossil energy is going down soon. We don't have viable replacements, so we will have to do less with less. Without abundant energy, we have the same kind of consequences as climate change: global instability, famines, etc. We need to prepare our society to live with less energy. Would you rather go to space on holiday, or eat? Finally, CO2 removal requires a ton of energy. The only way it can ever possibly be useful is if we suddenly find a way to completely replace fossil energy with renewables (say with nuclear fusion). But it's really not clear at all if we will find such an energy now (nope, wind and solar are not viable replacements for all fossil fuels). Even if we did suddenly get fusion to work, it's already too late: it would take a lot of time to build enough plants everywhere and then rebuild the whole infrastructure to remove fossil fuel. We need to act now, for our survival. It's high time we accepted that we failed to replace fossil fuels entirely, and even if we did we would still be in a mass extinction. We need to do less with less. Remove what's unnecessary, keep the essential. It does not mean going back to how people lived in the Middle Age. We need a lot of clever technology if we want to do less with less. That's actually more challenging than what we are doing now, so we need clever people to rethink society and do less with less.
TexanFeller 3y ago
Start buying reusable and BIFL goods and avoid everything disposable. It's expensive, but worth it for more than the planet. We need to have a lot more focus on the reduce and reuse components of the solution. Most of what we Americans buy is cheap disposable nonsense that shouldn't exist.
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  You say the disposable nonsense shouldn't exist, so wouldn't a better legal solution be lobbying to better regulate the facilities where these harmful pollutants are originating from? My cynical outlook is that the organizational behemoths with millions of funds to throw around buying carbon credits do not want to bolster regulatory mechanisms, even in other sectors, for fear of their own sector becoming more regulated. There is a conflict of interest there. And I don't particularly buy into the 'let's all individually make better choices' solutions either. Has consumer-side activism ever worked? On the other hand, look at the effects of historic crackdowns like the Montreal protocol regulation of chlorofluorocarbons and The Clean Air Act and its ban of leaded gasoline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol#Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol#Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_(United_States)#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_(United_States)#...
  - TexanFeller 3y ago
    I'm all for regulating production of non-reusable nonsense. Coke is not a necessary product, there is no reason to allow them to produce single use aluminum cans. Coke should be a syrup mixed with carbonated water at the site of consumption. This is a real solution I could get behind and take seriously. By contrast I find mainstream environmentalism with the regulating plastic bags and straws and supporting "recycling" a virtue signaling joke and can't stomach supporting it.
- neuronerdgirl 3y ago
  Carrying this forward, stop buying shit. Humans today consume an ungodly amount of unnecessary crap. Just in terms of clothing the fast fashion industry has absolutely demolished our sense of longevity and repairability and convinced us we need entire new goddamn wardrobes every other year.
IMTDb 3y ago
Any charity/program designed to slow down population growth.
FreshStart 3y ago
How about we pay crypto bounties on attacks on carbon infrastructure when the price gets to low?
Tiktaalik 3y ago
In the realm of political donations, municipal politics is so often forgotten about, but is in control of some of the lowest hanging fruit for carbon reduction in cities. Almost the entirety of carbon emissions in cities comes from 1) home heating and 2) transportation, both of which could be significantly impacted by city policy from environmentalist municipal politicians. For example: * separated bike lanes (incredibly cheap in the grand scheme of things) * pedestrianization of public spaces * legalizing relatively denser apartment buildings everywhere. * public transit improvements All work to take CO2 emitting cars off the road Political movement toward bans on gas for home heating (already occurring in many places) a further way to reduce CO2 emissions.

by SamBam 3y ago

VintageCool 3y ago

Donate to aspiring Democrats running for state legislatures in blues states with red State Legislatures or split governments. > Back in 2019, [David Roberts] wrote for Vox that there is one weird trick states can use to ensure good climate and energy policy. That trick is: giving Democrats full control of the government. It has worked in California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii — the list goes on. > The 2022 midterm elections brought Democrats full control — with trifectas of both houses of the legislature and the governor's office — in four new M states: Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota. > Does the one weird trick still work? Well, you’ll never guess what happened in Minnesota last week. https://www.volts.wtf/p/minnesota-sets-out-for-net-zero-emissions#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/minnesota-sets-out-for-net-zero-emis...

amrocha 3y ago
Not everyone lives in the US
lmm 3y ago
They passed a law that "commits" them to doing something long after the end of the current legislative term, assuming it somehow avoids being amended or repealed until then. Have they made a concrete difference e.g. measurable reductions in emissions, or is this just feel-good party-politics?
- jplusequalt 3y ago
  It's better than the republican party removing environmental protections during the Trump administration.
akomtu 3y ago
This should be added as the 4th option, right after carbon credits.
willcipriano 3y ago
> Donate to aspiring Democrats running for state legislatures So they will blow up a natural gas pipeline and cause the largest release of greenhouse gasses in human history? How about so they can fly private and scold poor people for not caring about the environment enough? Would be better off buying the carbon credits.
- SamBam 3y ago
  I'm sorry, are you actually suggesting that the Democratic Party blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline? Or that they fly on private jets more than Republicans? At the end of the day, they passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the largest piece of green legislation ever passed in this country. It's not perfect, but it's better than anyone else in this country has ever done. I don't care if you're still annoyed that Al Gore sounded like a scold, that's at least some heading in the right direction, while the current GOP platform is for defunding all green energy and funding more oil. The two parties are not the same on this issue.

pkphilip 3y ago

Buy some land in a cheap rural place and fill it with fruit trees and contribute that towards the community each year. That will sequester far more carbon and help the environment more than contributing funds towards these sorts of programmes - and you will likely build up some immovable assets over time.

dusanh 3y ago
Or buy some land and leave it alone, let nature do it's thing. Sadly this is not possible as in most places there is legislation in place that prevents you from "mismanaging" land like this.
- jug 3y ago
  I just realized how much I'd like to see a website summarizing legislation for various countries in the world, and venues into purchasing land for the respective locations. I want a hometurf.eco :)
- raffraffraff 3y ago
  I'm thinking about doing something like this, but it involves work. I'm going to find native species, maybe focusing on some insect that's in decline, find it's nursery/food plants and fill an area with them, along with any other plants and fungi that have symbiotic relationships with them. Then apply for a grant that specifically targets the threatened species. That way, it's official. It's a ton of work though.
- pkphilip 3y ago
  I think it is more fun and fulfilling to attempt to do something with the land - to make it useful towards the local community, than leaving it to nature to just fill the land. For instance, if you make a small pond, you could suddenly have a very interesting ecosystem in this land
Veedrac 3y ago
This makes a lot less sense as an impact strategy than buying solar. I'm not saying solar is optimized, versus say competent lobbying or something smarter, but at least it directly addresses long term climate issues and has a clear causal effect not just on personal consumption but unit price also (and thus others' future energy purchases as consequence).

palata 3y ago

> Direct CO2 removal (Climeworks). Seems like a drop in the bucket, but feel like this tech needs to grow. I kindly disagree, and I think it is extremely important to understand that. This tech is fundamentally flawed and completely misses the point: climate change (hence CO2) is only a symptom of our biggest problem. Our biggest problem is abundant energy: 1. Because we have access to a lot of energy, we transform the world in a way that is killing biodiversity: we are currently living a mass extinction (that's not a prediction, that's a fact, it's happening, we can measure it right now). We should do less with less, and preserve habitat for biodiversity. There is no high-tech solution to that, we should preserve life on Earth. 2. Because that abundant energy is mostly fossil based, it emits a ton of CO2. That creates climate change which threatens our very survival (now in the short term). Climate change will create global instability, mass immigration, wars, famines, etc. We don't want that, so we need to emit much, much less CO2. So much less, in fact, that the only viable solution is to do less with less. One could argue that we should "just" replace fossil fuels with better energies (good luck with that, we are not even remotely on that path), but that would not remove point 1 above. 3. Fossil fuels are not unlimited. The peak of conventional oil production was in 2008. The global peak for oil is around now, for gas it is soon. From the peak on, energy will become harder and harder to get (which will induce price instability). Whether we care about climate change and biodiversity or not, fossil energy is going down soon. We don't have viable replacements, so we will have to do less with less. Without abundant energy, we have the same kind of consequences as climate change: global instability, famines, etc. We need to prepare our society to live with less energy. Would you rather go to space on holiday, or eat? Finally, CO2 removal requires a ton of energy. The only way it can ever possibly be useful is if we suddenly find a way to completely replace fossil energy with renewables (say with nuclear fusion). But it's really not clear at all if we will find such an energy now (nope, wind and solar are not viable replacements for all fossil fuels). Even if we did suddenly get fusion to work, it's already too late: it would take a lot of time to build enough plants everywhere and then rebuild the whole infrastructure to remove fossil fuel. We need to act now, for our survival. It's high time we accepted that we failed to replace fossil fuels entirely, and even if we did we would still be in a mass extinction. We need to do less with less. Remove what's unnecessary, keep the essential. It does not mean going back to how people lived in the Middle Age. We need a lot of clever technology if we want to do less with less. That's actually more challenging than what we are doing now, so we need clever people to rethink society and do less with less.

TexanFeller 3y ago

Start buying reusable and BIFL goods and avoid everything disposable. It's expensive, but worth it for more than the planet. We need to have a lot more focus on the reduce and reuse components of the solution. Most of what we Americans buy is cheap disposable nonsense that shouldn't exist.

wildrhythms 3y ago
You say the disposable nonsense shouldn't exist, so wouldn't a better legal solution be lobbying to better regulate the facilities where these harmful pollutants are originating from? My cynical outlook is that the organizational behemoths with millions of funds to throw around buying carbon credits do not want to bolster regulatory mechanisms, even in other sectors, for fear of their own sector becoming more regulated. There is a conflict of interest there. And I don't particularly buy into the 'let's all individually make better choices' solutions either. Has consumer-side activism ever worked? On the other hand, look at the effects of historic crackdowns like the Montreal protocol regulation of chlorofluorocarbons and The Clean Air Act and its ban of leaded gasoline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol#Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol#Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_(United_States)#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_(United_States)#...
- TexanFeller 3y ago
  I'm all for regulating production of non-reusable nonsense. Coke is not a necessary product, there is no reason to allow them to produce single use aluminum cans. Coke should be a syrup mixed with carbonated water at the site of consumption. This is a real solution I could get behind and take seriously. By contrast I find mainstream environmentalism with the regulating plastic bags and straws and supporting "recycling" a virtue signaling joke and can't stomach supporting it.
neuronerdgirl 3y ago
Carrying this forward, stop buying shit. Humans today consume an ungodly amount of unnecessary crap. Just in terms of clothing the fast fashion industry has absolutely demolished our sense of longevity and repairability and convinced us we need entire new goddamn wardrobes every other year.

IMTDb 3y ago

Any charity/program designed to slow down population growth.

FreshStart 3y ago

How about we pay crypto bounties on attacks on carbon infrastructure when the price gets to low?

Tiktaalik 3y ago

In the realm of political donations, municipal politics is so often forgotten about, but is in control of some of the lowest hanging fruit for carbon reduction in cities. Almost the entirety of carbon emissions in cities comes from 1) home heating and 2) transportation, both of which could be significantly impacted by city policy from environmentalist municipal politicians. For example: * separated bike lanes (incredibly cheap in the grand scheme of things) * pedestrianization of public spaces * legalizing relatively denser apartment buildings everywhere. * public transit improvements All work to take CO2 emitting cars off the road Political movement toward bans on gas for home heating (already occurring in many places) a further way to reduce CO2 emissions.