Ask Lemmy

The idea of personal action vs. corporate/government action is a false choice. The government can force the corpos to stop burning the planet, but that will mean significant lifestyle changes for everybody.

It also means getting our shit together about immigration/ migration/ refugees. And not just in the US, but globally. A humanitarian catastrophe is assured otherwise.

I'm not optimistic.

Engineer a virus to send back in time to slow down CO2 emissions

wait a minute...

But it's time to disrupt 99% of life.

Survey humanity, produce an agreed on level of technology and lifestyle.

We probably need to limit ourselves to housing, food, internet, and safety/defense for everyone and not much else - then slow all industries based on HOW people want to live.

So getting rid of things like, plastic toys, gizmos, extravagances. Phones wouldn't be updated as often. People would only be able to update their tech if they could meaningfully show it was necessary.

Lots of technology companies would be folded. Lots of industries would be nationalised and folded. International tourism would be greatly restricted. All the stuff we don't need basically.

People would be mostly employed in the basics: Housing, food, internet. Too far beyond that and you'd have to rely on local people/groups/makers/repair companies.

So massive degrowth, nationalization, and restrictions/regulations to the market.

Most of all, corporations would no longer count as people. In fact society should have to rely on person to person contracting. I don't really think corporations should exist becuase they become Zombies/Golems that do a lot of destructive things.

Basically degrowth, and restructuring society around degrowth.

companies and countries have largely abandoned it already, the most polluting ones dint do anything to reduce it at all. consumers are the smaller emitters of it.

these companies have actively funded groups to dissuade "carbon usage" so they dont have to reduce thier own emissions.

Ban planned obsolescence and make a rigorous standard that any new device is designed repairable, reliable and long lasting enough to last at least 10 years if treated right, 20+ years for vehicles and machinery..

This whole 'you gotta get a new thing every year' era causes sooo much unnecessary waste and pollution ☹️

I'm vegan, have no intention of ever buying a car and plan on never having children. That's probably as much individual action as anyone can ask for. Anything after that is up to corporations and governments, so we should make sure they are incentivized to do the right thing 👍

Eliminate cattle agriculture. No more growing alfalfa in the desert.

Carbon capture in the form of mass re-forestation.

Zoning out single-family homes.

Increased taxes on rural residents. Decreased taxes in urban areas.

Nurembergesque trials for oil company executives.

Refocusing the Department of Homeland Security on fighting forest fires exclusively. ICE agents will be sent to forest fires all over the globe and tasks with putting them out or die in the attempt.

Every citizen gets 4 flight credits a year. 1 credit needed per flight. These roll over if you don't ude them.

Removal of Trump supporter's reproductive organs for population management

If they won't shut down their CO²-spewing factories and plants, then we will have to.

Eat the rich. I remember when the Twitter account that posted where Musk's private jet is all the time and holy shit, he travelled a lot.

Like, multiple times a week where this machine that fucks up the environment is used to transport a single person.

Or the disgusting mega yacht that Zuckerberg uses.

During my whole life I'm not gonna destroy the environment like every single one of leeches on society does in a month.

Guns, we fly a space ship to Mercury make a landing party and start shooting everything we have at the Sun. Tell it to cut the crap or we'll tarrif all of its light.

dont disrupt the 99%'s way of life.

This is ridiculous, because the problem inherently requires cooperative change, and as we've seen people will throw shitfits over things as small as plastic straws.

A big thing would be to start switching from ever expanding auto infrastructure to public transit systems where possible.

1. Fewer vehicles that transport more people
2. Can use the space that is currently occupied for parking cars better

Another big thing requires changing our diets. Some types of food are more resource intensive than others, but also we ship food all over the planet and the resources for transport also contributes. Eating food that is in season on your continent would make a big difference.

The last thing is maybe the least obvious to regular people, but maybe we don't need to build that data center yet if we can't power it without fossil fuel. We need to entirely stop expanding energy usage until we've switched over entirely to sustainables.

In summary, basically everything that needs to happen is going to affect regular people, and they're going to have to get over it, or we're going to make the planet completely unlivable.

No plastics but natural materials, wood, leather stuff like that Renewable energies, reduce consumption, public transport everywhere instead of cars. Higher density of living together.

PUNISH THE COMPANYS! NO PRIVAT JETS OR IN LAND FLYING!

Go vegan/vegitarian. Not just for the enviorment but personal health! And when meat then not mass produced meat. Butcherm if you cant afford it then maybe dont. Its not neccissary

Starting about 2 years ago, we in the US had a plan and investments. Building out renewables and grid storage like gangbusters. Incentives to weatherize and update hvac. EV incentives and a program to build out charging infrastructure. Finally some investment in intercity rail. No new ice cars after 2035, and a mandate for EV trucks. Huge promises of EV delivery trucks from usps, ups, amazon. It was a good start.

So much for that idea

I'm going off the top of my head here:

Okay so you know the concept of evaporative cooling for the new AI data centres? It's hugely wasteful, and definitely not the only way to accomplish the goal, but it's cheaper. I feel like if we actually figured out all the bullshit of that calibre and just outlawed it, we'd make a significant start towards improvement and only marginally impact the bank statements of a few ultra rich billionaires.

Stop allowing people to dump exhaust and waste untreated into the air and otherwise in the environment, full stop. Full illegal, if you violate it the entire company is dissolved. That'll suck for shipping, manufacturing, fuck it. We need to actually stop this to achieve some kind of meaningful change. Go back to sails and windmills if we need to, we achieved global industry and shipping before the internal combustion engine existed, we can do it again.

Phase out fossil fuels. It'll suck a bit, fuck it. Increase reliance on public transport and population density. Make it so you don't need individual transport to accomplish basic necessities for the vast majority of people.

Ramp up public collaborative research into batteries, power storage, carbon capture, climate science. At this point we're playing catch up, we need everything we can to try to rectify this shit storm like yesterday.

I think the first step is to get a good spotter and then exhale on the pull.

Tax billionaires out of existence, ban fossil fuels, invest in carbon capture, ban corporate greed, switch all solutions to the slightly more expensive, green alternative

Aren’t we at the point of no return?

It's not everything obviously, but mandate that all people who can do their job from home must do their job from home. This will take a bite out of cars and improve general human morale.

Eliminate carbon trading programs and just set hard limits. Went over your allocation of carbon? Guess you're done for the quarter.

Eliminate LLCs. Bring on the accountability.

Geoengineering: Whether through launching solar shades into space to block sunlight and cool the planet down, pump aerosols into the atmosphere, cloud seeding, or anything else. I think this is where our research should be going. I think it's too late to avoid the worst-case-scenarios of climate change from merely cutting emissions, so more drastic measures to alleviate or even reverse the effects may be necessary. Plus it'll help us with any future colonizing and terraforming of worlds outside of Earth.

Public transport infrastructure to reduce our reliance on cars & planes: While I don't think hyperloops or a transatlantic tunnel are feasible, building tens of thousands of kilometres worth of overground and underground railway routes to interconnect towns and cities with high speed maglev trains is. China have the right idea.

Right to work from home: Remote working reduces our dependency on cars and frees up real estate to address the various housing crises we have.

Right to repair and outlawing planned obsolescence: Should we have to buy a new smartphone every 3 or so years because Apple or Samsung want to maximize profits? Do we care at all about the amount of electronic waste we're producing?

Accelerate our efforts to reverse desertification and plant trillions more trees: If we can turn parts of the Sahel, Gobi Desert and the Australian outback green, that could have a very beneficial effect on the environment.

There's now no way to stop or reverse the inevitable collapse of the comfortable way of life we have right now. This isn't a fight for survival or for the planet, it's to perpetuate the system we enjoy at the moment.

The only way remaining to minimise the damage to our way of life is with some huge geo-engineering projects. Like scattering reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect some sunlight away or releasing some novel chemical into the oceans to fix carbon dioxide and lock it away.

The risks of experimenting like this has always outweighed the benefits (like the guys who thought they could kill a hurricane and instead magnified it and sent it back inland resulting in the deaths of multiple people). But now it's too late to worry about things like that because the inevitable impacts of climate change including wild fires, habitat destruction, biodiversity collapse, extreme weather events are all here now while most of the world is still arguing about whether it even exists or not.

CO2 seems to be the main problem, so why don't we just burn it. Powerstations powered by burning CO2 would be good for the atmosphere while providing heat and power for communities. And CO2 is abundant so it should be cheap, too!

In my opinion it is not possible to fight climate change while maintaining the same standards of life that we have now. Even if we are going to try, this will probably not be followed by many states with big population, so probably its not gonna work. From what I see, everyone is fighting climate change today by posting stuff on their social medias but when it comes to change habits, its another story.

Anyway, my idea is that we don't have to ban things like cars and airplanes but we can use them more efficiently. We can repair more and buy less. Do we really need to change a car after 100.000 km? In my country, If you live in a big city you can use public transport most of the time, so why we don't start to connect well also the small places?

Do we really need to buy fruits and vegetables that comes from other continents and needs to be chemically treated, transported, stocked and consequently generates pollution?

In the consumer technology Sector people usually changes their computers and phones every 3-5 years even if the hardware is still working well. The software is usually becoming more heavier over the years without adding real features (See Meta's apps). We must accept that this is not compatible with fighting climate change because we are producing too much waste that is avoidable together with massive exploitation of resources. The majority of users are not educated to understand how our technology works at its most basic level, I think that we may start from here.

Maybe we cannot erase billionaires but we can stop adulating or hating them and giving them unnecessary notoriety.

I think it's too late. But theoretically speaking, it would require totalitarian measures because people will not willingly choose degrowth and a significant decrease to their standard of living. People will not choose "less."

You would also have to get all nations across the globe to magically work together. The reason is that those who limit themselves based on sustainability will be outcompeted by those who don't impose such limitations. To use an example that is relevant to the present: as much hand-wringing as there is about AI and its various hazards (environmental and otherwise), simply "not doing" AI isn't really an option so long as other parts of the world are going for it. Opting out of an arms race can put you at a severe disadvantage.

Human nature is really working against us.