How do we actually get out of this climate disaster?
It’s April and I am sweating like crazy, it fucking sucks, but it also got me wondering what can I do? There is so much conflicting advice out there, even if I tell others about this, when they ask for a solution what do I tell?
If you’re a world leader fishing for ideas then you could try using regulatory bodies, alternatives incentives, and monetary policies to do the following: disincentivising plastic import/manufacturing, disincentivising meat consumption, disincentivising car ownership/road-expansion, disincentivising pets, disincentivising power consumption and fossil fuels, and finally funding education and promoting smaller families with less children (these last two things are intrinsically linked). You also have to come to an agreement to do all of these things alongside other nations, because if your nation stops producing as many cows and pigs then some impoverished nation will just crank up their own production to fill the market gap.
Basically, we would only use a third as much agricultural land to live on if we didn’t eat meat. With less people that would use even less land with an added bonus of lower emissions by a massive amount per person in developed nation because of lower fuel cost and power consumption. You can lower emissions even more by investing heavily into more efficient modes of transport like railways and buses, in many cases making towns and cities as well as large distance travel doable on foot without a car. We know that educated people, particularly women, lead to lower population growth: which is a good thing, because less emissions and more efficiency. Basically two techniques are being deployed in this example: lower emissions per person and lower number of persons.
Will this fix the damage we’ve done to the atmosphere and the planet? No, more complex solutions would need to be employed for individual problems like atmospheric methane to ensure our planet continues to be livable for the next century, but we know for a fact that even slightly lowered human activity has a huge beneficial impact because we saw those beneficial effects firsthand during the pandemic.
But wtf do I know, I’m a banjo. You’re a world leader. Visit some Universities, talk to experts on panels, and figure it out.
My husband once said “we’re not killing the planet, we’re just rearranging it in a way that is not conducive to human life”. I think about that when I feel hopeless, we’re just a blip on a bigger radar, and we need to drop the main character syndrome that the world dies when we do.
Destroy the supply chain. It’s surprisingly fragile, and if it fell over it might even be impossible to rebuild. For instance, energy production has a whole bunch of dependencies on mining, which requires large amounts of energy - and all the infrastructure requires constant maintenance, which requires all the infrastructure.
One swift kick in the nadgers and the whole system goes down in a tangled heap, with all your tools at the bottom.
Large-scale industry would be crippled out of existence for a very long time, possibly forever - and maybe the oceans wouldn’t end up boiling.
There are plenty of chokepoints in the system, where a small disruption could have disastrous effects. Just look what one ship screwed up by getting temporarily stuck in a canal for a couple of weeks. If a nation or two set their mind to it, they could throw a spanner or three in the works that would rip the whole engine apart.
The human cost would be utterly devastating, of course. Billions would die, and the knock-on effects would just accelerate the decline.
But the way things are going, they’re all going to die anyway, and take the rest of the planet down with them. This way seems less-worse, and we get to play The Last Of Us irl.
Adapt to it as best we can. Minimize your use of fossil fuels, particularly Natural Gas(Methane). Get some books on farming to understand a worst case need to live off grid.
We're past the point that we can go back. The glaciers on Antarctica and Greenland are in a self-sustaning melt cycle at this point.
Natural gas ads are popping up again, pretending to be the “clean” fossil fuel. It doesn’t surprise me that they try this shit, but it does infuriate me.
Very pessimistic view here. I believe we have already passed the point of no return with human emissions. The worst of climate change will now happen faster and sooner than it naturally would. It’s just a matter of mitigating the disaster imo.
That is reality, it doesn’t matter if the entire world turn off fossil fuel usage permanently this instant, there is allready far too much greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere to reverse course, we might get to delay the inevitable a decade or so, but shit is comming.
It’s weird how ‘not giving up’ got us penicillin and earthquake warnings, so I’d hope we do a little more than “we won’t. Oh well.”
We are making progress down paths that could shorten the correction after all the CO² and methane is removed from the atmosphere, and it seems important to explore the potential – as many as we can, actually, as science often fails.
comming
I may need a translation. Related to comms, like in communications?
Companies can make money off penicillin. Governments can readily allocate funds to visible, common disasters.
Disasters that have been a century in the making and require whole nations to change the way they do things for an observable result decades down the line is almost impossible to get money for. Our shortsightedness is our downfall
Can we have a quick collapse? If the world is going to catch on fire there’s a few people I want to be sure are still alive when the consequences of their actions happen.
Some seem to be concerned enough by it that they might threaten secession (forming new nations that will do something about it) if their nation won’t do anything. And nations tend to hate secession.
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