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What You Can Do About Climate Change

nytimes.com

61–70 of 119 posts

Re: What You Can Do About Climate Change

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, I have a lime tree and fig tree in my apartment, along with some other plants. Even if not driving is not an option, there's always carpooling which should approximately halve the impact of driving alone. We can either wait for climate change to disrupt our lives, or we can disrupt climate change.

what about just preparing for the consequences of climate change.

We could practice by colonizing Venus.

Re: What You Can Do About Climate Change

#62
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats ok i can take it but what you dont seem to get is that we are humans not systems and thus wont be making the changes any other way than through technology. you are basically asking humans not to be human which i believe is a common engineering blind spot :) dont hate the players hate the game.

Maybe you're underestimating how human culture can change in few years, specially when you consider the rising economical impact of climate change...

i dont think i am. humans have mostly changed because technology allowed them to. its those large progresses which gave us new opportunities to change.

Edit: why the down vote? care to qualify rather than going trough all my comments you dont like and downvote them whoever you are?

Re: What You Can Do About Climate Change

#63
post #46
post #19

1) If you have to buy an electric vehicle. 2) Go vegetarian. (Avoid beef if you can't and eat meat less). 3) Stop buying stuff. 4) Repair not replace. 5) Move to an urban environment. 6) Consider going car free. (Walk, Bike, Public Transport, Car clubs). 7) Stop flying. 8) Avoid plastic packaging, or at least any product in packaging that cannot be locally recycled. (Here in the UK I have no idea why we allow food to…

Regarding 9), if you're reading this you should have as many children as possible. Your high-IQ genes will be passed on to them; only the intelligent of the next generation will have the foresight and technical ability to develop real (technological) solutions to environmental problems. It's pretty well-demonstrated that the moralistic approach to climate change, where you harangue people into recycling or biking or…

[deleted]

Re: What You Can Do About Climate Change

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5) Move to an urban environment Are you serious? If I go and buy an acre of land (or many acres, more likely) and grow my own food, keep a few animals, and trade with my neighbours, how the hell does "move to an urban environment" make me suddenly more efficient? So I can rely on the supply chain to get all the goods that I could get by walking down the street to another farm?

Why is this being downvoted?

Because there's not 7.5 billion acres of arable land that's also got good, stable water access.

Also, because someone living in a major city produces dramatically less carbon due to economies of scale, and your idea would result in an incredibly low density, offsetting any gains to food shipping cost.

Re: What You Can Do About Climate Change

#65
post #46
post #19

1) If you have to buy an electric vehicle. 2) Go vegetarian. (Avoid beef if you can't and eat meat less). 3) Stop buying stuff. 4) Repair not replace. 5) Move to an urban environment. 6) Consider going car free. (Walk, Bike, Public Transport, Car clubs). 7) Stop flying. 8) Avoid plastic packaging, or at least any product in packaging that cannot be locally recycled. (Here in the UK I have no idea why we allow food to…

Regarding 9), if you're reading this you should have as many children as possible. Your high-IQ genes will be passed on to them; only the intelligent of the next generation will have the foresight and technical ability to develop real (technological) solutions to environmental problems. It's pretty well-demonstrated that the moralistic approach to climate change, where you harangue people into recycling or biking or…

It's troubling that you believe your genetics are responsible for economic success and education.

Re: What You Can Do About Climate Change

#66
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats ok i can take it but what you dont seem to get is that we are humans not systems and thus wont be making the changes any other way than through technology. you are basically asking humans not to be human which i believe is a common engineering blind spot :) dont hate the players hate the game.

Then we will sooner or later loose. It is true that this time we might avoid disaster (it will be very rough whatever we do from now on) with the help of technology. But that is just luck that there is a technology available to help us. In a slightly different world, solar would never be cheap enough or good enough to provide energy in a sustainable way. And this is true for many other aspects, tragedy of the commons…

i am unconvinced regulation will help. i still find it quite telling that the biggest drop in US co2 emission was because of fracking not anything the otherwise very progressive obama adminstartion.

just becuase its luck and we dont lime that doesn't mean regulation will work, thats simply the wrong way to think about this.

Re: What You Can Do About Climate Change

#67
Since ships are much bigger polluters than cars, a better thing to do would be to buy local exclusively. Governments could impose huge tariffs on imported goods (something Trump would certainly not mind). While we're at it we should probably ban mass production, too, tear down our cities and replace them with farming communes wherein everything people consume or use is produced sustainably from the local environment.

We're past the point where we can fool ourselves that virtue signalling will make a difference. If you want to make an impact on the climate, Western society has to fundamentally change into something quite different. It's a political problem with necessarily political solutions.

Re: What You Can Do About Climate Change

#68
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats ok i can take it but what you dont seem to get is that we are humans not systems and thus wont be making the changes any other way than through technology. you are basically asking humans not to be human which i believe is a common engineering blind spot :) dont hate the players hate the game.

Yeah, you're right of course. Any solution requiring humans to change at large scales through raw appeals to emotion is itself Dead on Arrival. This is where I'm really happy that the cult of mustachianism[1] is spreading as virally as it is. More people than anyone could ever have imagined, up and down the economic spectrum and up and down the Cost Of Living spectrum, are banding together to save money, and by exten…

i think you are a victim of a little wishful thinking here. with around a billion people getting into the middle class you are going to see one thing only and that is an increase in resource usage. the normal populations usage is not the problem but the industry that support their consumption.

you arent seeing humans change, you are seeing technology allowing for other types of living but any actual effect on climate they wont have.

Re: What You Can Do About Climate Change

#69
post #59
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me for the forthcoming rant, this is not a slight at you, but I really dislike the kind of attitude that you are projecting here. Al Gore famously said in his documentary that a lot of people go from Denial to Despair without pausing at the middle step of Doing Something about it. Biking definitely can solve climate change. Seems to me that people simply do not get it through their heads that climate change s…

I don't know anyone that wants to live 25 miles from work. But almost everyone I know cannot afford to live closer and wants to. I'd love to live in the city. Too bad it's completely unaffordable, even at 3x the median income. This particular solution you have provided is also a solution only the upper class can employ, just like the one in the article. Wind turbines and nuclear reactors: now we're finally getting so…

I disagree that this is an avenue open only to the upper class [1]. Not everyone can do everything, sure (if you're working two jobs, for example, the climate can rightly go fuck itself) but a lot of people can do a lot more.

I also disagree that they are insignificant drops in the bucket. The point I'm trying to make is that "culture" is infuriatingly hand-wavy and difficult to quantify, but it matters. As an example, I live in Geneva. Here, all shops close at 7 PM. This means that there less commercial activity past those hours, fewer people mindlessly roaming around in malls etc. Now, surely there are regulations guiding this too, but any government official wanting to undo this because "muh freedom", will be laughed out of the room because there is a culture here that treats this as deeply important.

[1]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/04/06/frugal_living_in_m...

Re: What You Can Do About Climate Change

#70
post #69
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anyone that wants to live 25 miles from work. But almost everyone I know cannot afford to live closer and wants to. I'd love to live in the city. Too bad it's completely unaffordable, even at 3x the median income. This particular solution you have provided is also a solution only the upper class can employ, just like the one in the article. Wind turbines and nuclear reactors: now we're finally getting so…

I disagree that this is an avenue open only to the upper class [1]. Not everyone can do everything, sure (if you're working two jobs, for example, the climate can rightly go fuck itself) but a lot of people can do a lot more. I also disagree that they are insignificant drops in the bucket. The point I'm trying to make is that "culture" is infuriatingly hand-wavy and difficult to quantify, but it matters. As an exampl…

none of that have any effect on climate change what so ever. you need to effect the industry to have any impact and thats not going to happen enough to have any effect.
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