zerakith

Just a note on the climate science that might help here. We aren't facing a binary outcome. Our actions now, even small ones, have tangible effects on the outcomes we face in a highly non-linear way.

The FF (and meat) industry absolutely want you to feel that you have no agency and no amount of change will not make a difference so may as well give them your last lot of money as you settle for a worse (if any) future. Its absolutely not inevitable, other futures are possible. Avoiding the very worst is the difference between all out collapse of human and earth systems and a situation where things gets dicey for a while but one we can recover from. I know it can feel bleak and trigger the reaction you are talking about but the best solution to that is to pick up a shovel and start helping. There's so many ways to do that doing small but easy changes to your personal consumption is a good start. The best are those you do collectively with others as it multiplies your impact and gives you tangible resiliance networks for the changes that are coming.

Different actions aren't separable in that way. Adopting one "green" behaviour will shift peoples attitudes to others and make wide top-level change easier to implement. "What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming" has a good discussion of this and there may be some more recent resources. This is especially true when both (all) changes are necessary. I can't easily stop private jets but I can quite easily not choose the worst option for my diet (and also other things like avoiding discretionary flights). Seems really clear cut to me that we should be doing the bare minimum in our personal lives whilst we organise to make the worst offenders accountable.

I agree with you that regulation (of meat production) is vital to all this as well but that will mean costs going up which needs to have enough people on board and aware of the harms to facilitate. We need enough change in attitudes to facilitate the necessary changes in regulation and law (whilst also tackling the inequality, the powerful and structural economic system that promotes harmful behaviours for their benefit). .

Both are the problem. An activity that is less harmful but more people do can add up to more than a more harmful activity that very few people do.

No pathway where we avoid the worst of what's coming doesn't involve this sort of change for most people.

Who knew recommending Distros could be so controversial 😛?

Seriously though I think this is a great flowchart and you took on board the more reasonable suggestions from the intial post. This flowchart now quickly eliminates some of the distro choice anxiety. Worst case a newbie might end up on a distro like mint and then end up migrating to a different one.

One comment I had is that I actually didn't know what opinionated DE meant without googling despite being a long time Linux user (maybe thats just my ignorance) and I wonder if a newbie might be confused maybe there's another way of saying it (flexible versus simple?).

Anyway, I really think early me would have appreciated this when I first started even if that would been ultimately "use Ubuntu" back then.

Net zero isn't really well defined or meaningful at any level below the entire globe.

I agree and we can't stall because of uncertainty we have to move forward on the basis of the best knowns now.

What I would say though we do have a lot of the analytic and scientific tools in place to assess these kinds of impacts and sadly we are quite far away from t being applied consistently. Even adaptation gets barely any funding and political focus and it gets less and less as you move to other related issues like biodiversity loss or the other planetary boundaries we are crossing. Part of the reason for that is that Climate Change is still being largely treated as a technical/technological challenge (switch this technology and the problem goes away) rather than the challenge to the whole economic and culture systems of the world that it is.

Need a systems view to be embedded or we run the real risk of pushing the problems around rather than solving.

Only that they (and a few of the big demand industries like car manufacturers) have captured a number of the political and economic engines of society in order to promote FF usage and ensure that it continues. That includes some really dirty tactics.

Given the unequal nature of global decisional making means (in my view) only a broad large sizable majority (or maybe a large enough minority) of ordinary people being mobilised across different sectors, countries and strategies can really take on that level of entrenched power.

One of the reasons it is so important to get on top of cultural, behavioural and lifestyle change is that the FF companies are so good at marketing and manfuacting demand for the product. Avoid FF use in Electricity or in one country they'll move to a different use case or different market. The only way to tackle that in my view is relentless focus on supply as well as alternatives (I.e. you had yo start turning the taps off whilst turning on green supply) as well as working on a wholesale shift in the mindset of human culture away from extractive colonial one to someting more contemplative about our role within earth's systems. So the average person (and organsiation) will need to, on some level , consider the impacts of thoer actions far beyond the first order impacts.

Rest in Power Natenom

How do you use KDEConnect for productivity? I am currently planning a move to KDE Plasma from Gnome (when 6 comes out).

Not suggesting we go against renewables at all and don't think anyone on here would be. We do need to be able to have the conversation about the negative externalities of them though so we can attempt to mitigate the effects and operationally decide on the details (how, where etc).

On lifestyles: there's huge variation in what people consider an improved lifestyle (espcially internationally). The implications for energy and emissions of those differences are also huge. There are certainly behaviours that we almost certainly can't sustain (never mind flying cars any level of flying where the majority of people fly like the top 10%).

There are inevitably and unfortunately going to be trade offs and we need to be open and honest about that if we are to get people on board. And because of the power base of the FF industry we will need sizable minorities of majorities of activite support for the transition from across all society.

I absolutely understand the frustration as we look and feel the impacts of the the failures of historic climate change policy but we still have to get it right.

Yeah I was thinking hypothetically of just the steam bit independent of the mechanism to heat the water.

I remember someone arguing that the future was nuclear powered steam engines to me once...

Just worth saying that the tone is uncessarily. We rely directly and indirect on ecosystems (even ones far away from where we live) and we must get on top of our impact on them to survive.

We aren't in a position globally of just killing a few snakes but out threatening the viability of the whole web of life and risking ecosystem collapse certain areas.

We absolutely have to be questioning which projects help alleviate those issues as a whole as they are interlinked!

Also I think its worth challenging your strawman of go back to live in a tent. It is based on a misunderstanding of human prehistory and its relationship to the environment. Additionally, there is a huge spectrum in energy demands for different technologies and lifestyles and how much we can sustain is a key question for environmentalism.