I'm sitting in my air conditioned room, in the USA. Doing computer stuff, naturally.
I look at what I can do about this. I can turn up the temp in my room, and the house. Meager difference. I can use less water - I already am, with getting showers every other day on average. I can eat less meat - which I do with purchase of the beef CSA. I'm big into the repair movement, and repair household equipment and electronics with my knowledge of circuitry and 3d printing. I recycle, but that's if its not repairable or reusable/repurposable.
I look at what I'm actually doing, and I'm at my limit. There isn't anything else I can add on to reduce footprint. And in reality, the same goes for many people.
These global climate change issues are the sum of all the work in this world, but the bulk of it is emitted by companies who do the cheapest thing. And if dumping gigatons of CO2 or methane in the air makes more sense, that's done. I can petition my congresscritters, but it's well known they do not listen to the little guy (https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-... ). Your party is irrelevant here.
So what do I do? know what we're doing is what we can and hope some rich people pull up the cause, and not try to escape the atmosphere in a penis-shaped rocket.
Apparently, a reasonably sustainable level of CO2 production is about 3T per person per year. The average in the US is about 17.5T pp/yr.
But ... 5.3T pp/yr of that amount is caused by the existing coal fired power plants in the USA.
So one thing you could do is to write to your elected representatives to specifically petition for the abandonment of this form of power generation and its replacement with renewable systems.
Guaranteed to work? Nope. But if we do get rid of those plants, it will make a HUGE difference at the national and international scale.
[ EDIT: missed the 1 in front of the 7 for the average US CO2 output ... 17 not 7 ]
Nuclear could have already replaced coal by now. Renewables need a lot of battery storage and transmission to scale up to not relying on coal any longer, since a majority of it is relying on the sun and wind.
Nuclear is such a horrible replacement. Let's let future generations deal with the waste from the power that sustained our lifestyle. I hate it. I'd rather live with less.
You would, but realistically, a majority of people are not willing to live with significantly less (which would entail a contraction in the economy and loss of jobs). And that includes all the people in countries still catching up. Nuclear was the alternative decades ago, and we could have witched to it until renewable tech was up to scale.
So we decided a significantly warmer climate was better than dealing with radioactive waste. Now it looks like we made the wrong risk assessment.
Realistically, which is all that matters for this issue, you're not going to change how everyone values their work and things. Maybe it changes once we get to 2.5-3 degrees warming.
All that really needs to happen is for enough people to value other kinds of work to make a market. Once that happens, it will compete with existing ones and that is just fine.
Could happen via government action, literally start paying for work and pay at a rate that seeds a market.
Could happen with individuals too. Think gig work without a company making billions at the top. While that is super attractive for some, it is entirely unnecessary, and in my view, a leaner overall model paying more to labor will prove a worthy device to move these sorts of ideas along. A variation on all this could be collectives. Companies owned by everyone in them, lean at the top, robust otherwise.
As for things, maybe we see a return to longevity in service life being more highly valued. I harbor this value now. Absolutely hate things that I know I cannot use for a decade or more. We can do so much better than the current churn of devices and software. A bit different priority and we could see more things as robust as say, Google maps still able to operate with devices made a long time ago.
Oddly, it seems that finding that deep shaft that is known to be geologically stable for at least a couple of half lives is fairly difficult, to say nothing of the issue of transporting the material from the reactor to said shaft.
Every time I mention this here on HN I am down-voted. But I really think that in a next few decades sending (dangerous) cargo to (deep) space will become cheap and reliable. Space tourism just started this month and that will fund thousands of engineers working on that goal.
Nah, we can do pretty well with just wind and solar.
The practical difficulty with using renewables effectively is that you need to be able to either store large amounts of energy for later use, or trade power across long distances. We (by which I mean "in the U.S." but for other developed countries it's pretty much the same) could buy solar power from Kenya, Australia, Algeria, or similar places to get us through the night if we had high-capacity transcontinental HVDC lines running to those places. That's a major infrastructure project that would cost a lot of money, but I expect it's probably worth it.
(We can even mitigate the risk of the power lines being temporarily disabled by keeping the fossil fuel plants on standby and just not using them except as an emergency backup.)
Another option is to just build batteries on an unheard-of scale. Lithium iron phosphate cells might do the job -- being free of cobalt an nickel, the only other major bottleneck resource would be lithium. I'm not sure how practical it is to build the kinds of gigantic battery packs that would be needed to provide, say, an 18-hour backup power supply for the entire U.S., but it's probably less cells in total than we'd need to electrify our current fleet of gas-powered cars.
edit: to clarify, I'm not particularly opposed to nuclear. I just don't think it's the only option at this point.
I don't think those figures are right - 5.3T/7.5T would mean 70% of CO2 in the US is caused by coal-fired power plants. According to the EPA data for 2019 [1], power generation accounted for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions, and 62% of that was fossil fuels ("mostly coal and natural gas") - so that means fossil fuels for electricity accounted for 16% of the greenhouse gas emissions. The EPA report shows transportation as the largest source, at 29%
Their figures also suggest CO2 emissions were 20T pp in the US in 2019! (6558MT of CO2, 328.2M population)
> The EPA report shows transportation as the largest source, at 29%
The reason I'm so struck by the coal-fired electricity production numbers are that this seems VASTLY easier to fix than the transportation numbers. Even if the latter would have more impact, I think we're still a long way from being able to dramatically affect that, whereas ramping up renewable electricity generation and ramping down fossil fuels seems like a (relatively) simple challenge.
Yeah, add it to the long list of things we're just not doing :-( nuclear could have made a significant dent in CO2 from base load generation, but we didn't fund work into safer nuclear generation so we're stuck with fairly limited options for base load now
Even replacing coal with natural gas generation would eliminate about 2.5T PP/yr. Obviously we can do better than that, but it probably makes sense to some extent as an interim measure. What I mean is some highly beneficial changes don’t even need to be particularly drastic or costly.
The buried lede is that, if the prophets of climate doom are correct, you need to substantially reduce your standard of living. And all those third-worlders that are trying to improve their standard of living? They need to stop doing so, yesterday, and learn to accept their impoverished standard of living. But do it cleaner!
But they won't want to do that, predictably. And to get them to do so will require enforcement. And enforcement will require coercive power - so violence. And that will result in war that has the potential to be more destructive than the doom being predicted.
If the problem is as significant as alarmists predict, the only palatable solution is technological. So if you feel so motivated, concentrate your effort there. Because the data says everything else you can do is inconsequential and is mostly virtue signaling.
I'm not making any claim about the legitimacy or seriousness of global climate change. Just pointing out that the medicine we choose can destroy as much or more than the disease.
> you need to substantially reduce your standard of living
California's per capita electricity consumption has stayed flat since 1970. That's in part due to strict energy efficiency standards. By contrast, per capita electricity consumption in the rest of the country has increased 50%, and that's despite California's standards indirectly improving efficiency elsewhere.
Today per capita consumption in California is nearly half that of the rest of the country, but the standard of living (modern conveniences, etc) is hardly less than elsewhere. Note that California's temperate climate does not explain this away. Home heating is still largely fossil fuel based in most of the U.S., including in California. And most of the population growth in California since the 1970s has been in the Central Valley and Southern California, places where air conditioning is as ubiquitous as anywhere else. Shifts in industrial makeup helped some, but the same industrial sectors also became more energy efficient. In general, most of the relative improvements are a product of better energy efficiency. And that was accomplished primarily through non-politicized regulators quietly and steadily mandating marginal efficiency improvements over the decades.
Suffice it to say that there's alot of pandering to the environmental lobby among Californian politicians. And lots of tension about the cost and viability of various environmental efforts. But as with politics anywhere, the importance of the objects of these fights is usually blown way out of proportion. The most consequential and productive regulations were quietly working in the background for decades, and didn't come with huge price tags.
The problem would be solved if we had cleaner sources of energy. Get rid of coal and you're most of the way there. None of that requires us to change our way of living, it just makes certain rich people less wealthy.
No scientist is arguing that we need to live in poverty, please keep the straw man arguments out of this.
You do not need to reduce your standard of living, you need to alter your lifestyle to achieve the same standard of living in a more energy-efficient way. Many American cities are set up to encourage car use; we can change that. Many Americans live in detached homes that require more energy to heat or cool; we can change that, and in fact we would likely reduce the need to drive a car everywhere in the process, while also reducing the amount of coal being burned to power all those ACs.
Really though, "alarmists?" You might have been able to accuse scientists of being alarmist 30 years ago, but they predicted increasingly frequent extreme weather events, and for the past decade we have watched the trend do exactly what was predicted. Now instead of talking about how we can avoid this outcome we are sitting here talking about how to not make things worse while we learn to live with floods, hurricanes, heat domes, and polar vortexes.
This has always been nonsense, I’ve seen it get trotted out for 20 years now.
We have technology, we can work on reducing carbon output without sending ourselves back to the Stone Age. We just need the political will to actually drive it.
Fun fact: the US military is the largest polluter in the world and has held the record for decades. 750,000 tons of toxic waste every year in the form of depleted uranium, oil, jet fuels, pesticides, defoliants, lead and other chemicals.
And hey we got the PRC military adding the equivalent of the German Navy, every year, in ships to their roster. No they don't run on solar panels in case you were wondering.
So take your three showers a day. Keep your car idling at stop lights. Burn your garbage. I'm not trolling. Your 'foot print' is a drop in the ocean compared to the real behemoths out there.
And I haven't even started on the companies that PRODUCE equipment for these large forces.
>Fun fact: the US military is the largest polluter in the world and has held the record for decades
Source?
> So take your three showers a day. Keep your car idling at stop lights. Burn your garbage. I'm not trolling. Your 'foot print' is a drop in the ocean compared to the real behemoths out there.
Your footprint is a drop in the ocean because you're one of 8 billion people on earth. Just from that figure alone it's obvious that a you can't do much by regulating your own consumption. However, telling people to do whatever they want and it doesn't matter because they're 1 in 8 billion is the wrong message to send, because if all 8 billion people follow your example that would lead to a massive increase in pollution.
> if all 8 billion people follow your example that would lead to a massive increase in pollution
Most people don't follow GP's example because they can't, not because "they're getting the right message". And you bet that as soon as they can, they will. Why? Because most people don't care about the "message", whatever you believe it is. The ones who actually do something about it are the ones who would regardless of any mass-targeted "message". Going one step further, I'd say that it would be better if everyone realized that they can't do anything on their own because that might actually get people to work together, and that's the very reason why the common message is that "everyone should do their part": because that's how you keep people from working together.
>Going one step further, I'd say that it would be better if everyone realized that they can't do anything on their own because that might actually get people to work together,
Do people actually believe this? ie. "everyone will just buy a tesla on their own, so we don't need government intervention"?
>that's the very reason why the common message is that "everyone should do their part": because that's how you keep people from working together.
That's awfully cynical. During the pandemic there were multiple PSAs telling people to "do their part" by staying home, wearing masks, etc. Was that also some sort of conspiracy to keep people from working together?
The headline does not seem to be supported by the article, which mainly consists of various pollution figures for the US military but lacks comparison to other entities. The closest it gets to that is saying the US military produces "more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined". Overall it makes a convincing case that the US military is a large polluter, but not that it's "World’s Biggest Polluter".
It's a blog for a coop chain. A skim of the article reveals the same problem as the previous: lots of facts and figures about how much the US military pollutes, but not many comparisons required to make the claim that they're the largest.
Both seem to focus on the US military producing more co2 than many countries. I'm not sure how this is supposed to support the claim that they're the biggest polluter. The bay area probably produces more co2 than "many countries" (eg. Liechtenstein and Tonga), but that doesn't mean they're the biggest polluter in the world.
"...the DOD is the world’s largest institutional user of
petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse
gases (GHG) in the world. From FY1975 to FY2018, total DOD greenhouse gas emissions were more than 3,685 Million Metric Tons of CO2 equivalent."
"World's largest institutional user of petroleum" is both more precise and pretty damning.
it is far too late for individual action. it is major manufacturers and producers that need to act, because there are only tens of thousands of them (which can be regulated, with enough will) and not billions of individuals, who cannot.
holding individuals accountable for ignored environmental externaities of producers is a dead end. people will buy/consume the cheapest thing made available to them.
> I look at what I can do about this. I can turn up the temp in my room, and the house.
> So what do I do? know what we're doing is what we can
Everything you do is inconsequential in the face of living in a detached single family home on a quarter acre lot.
That very simple fact has exponential knock on effects requiring so much more mass to move so much further and hence consuming so much more energy, that everything else you do is meaningless.
The only solution was reducing total consumption, either per capita or capitas itself, but the former is not going to happen if people live in insufficiently dense manners that preclude public transport or walking and bicycling, and necessitate large roads, parking lots, and personal vehicles.
And of course, once you own or benefit from detached single family house lifestyles, you are not going to vote for anything that inconveniences you or causes you to reduce consumption, such as increased taxes on fossil fuels.
If we could wave a magic wand & cut global energy consumption in half via more public transit & denser living, but still burning fossil fuels... we would have the exact same crisis, perhaps delayed a few years.
I'm naturally inclined towards austerity, but this problem cannot be fixed with cutbacks & efficiency alone.
Not at all, reducing global energy consumption by half would massively reduce, as well as delay the total long term impact. It’s true a lot of impact is baked in due to past emissions, but that’s no reason for complacency or fatalism. There still a lot we can do to reduce total impact and mitigate the impact we will suffer.
I don't advocate complacency or fatalism, instead I've come to hold the opinion that rapidly shifting to low/zero carbon technology is our best shot. Just look at how quickly natural gas felled king coal - a matter of years - once it became significantly cheaper. (We can't stop at natural gas, but it does produce half the CO2 as coal)
A key part of this viewpoint is that strong demand in the market can actually be an accelerator.
Turning back to austerity - even if a 50% drop in demand could save us, it's just never going to happen. Even the global COVID lockdowns made less than a 10% cut in energy consumption. You'd be stunningly successful if you cut even 1% through austerity campaign.
Dense living is associated with poorer mental health and a variety of diseases, and that not taking into account people with autism, introversion etc, some of whom find urban density neurologically intolerable.
The American development pattern is the problem that we can actually solve. If you genuinely care, and this isn't pandering, read the book Strong Towns. Our cities are designed as inefficiently as possible, on purpose, and things like zoning and automobile infrastructure literally ban climate conscious living spaces.
We should also at least have a carbon tax for things like normalizing beef as an alternative rather than a primary food source.
Other than world war, what mechanisms do you propose to get China, India, and the entire 3rd world on to an effective carbon tax plan?
I mean, if the answer is world war, I’ll at least give you credit for an honest answer. I just rarely see that come up. The truth is yes we can and should do better, but also realize that other nations will take any advantage they can, including ignoring climate concerns.
So if it’s a global problem, it needs a global solution, so what is that mechanism to apply one?
You impose tariffs on their exported goods to compensate for their failure to impose carbon taxes, and maybe even impose an export tax on goods shipped to them. China needs trade with other countries and will get on board with a carbon tax if enough of the world is on board with such a plan, no war needed.
Of course if things are truly implemented fairly, the US will also likely be subject to such taxes due to our own apparent inability to reduce our per capita carbon emissions...
Yes. Taxing our way to a better climate is one consideration.
But what happens when you need something more than they need to sell it? As in the case of China… steel, aluminum, titanium, food, machinery, computers, plastics, vehicles, or clothing… you know… those “couple of things” that we have collectively allowed China to make for us while pretending we’re all so green and the slave labor isn’t a problem.
India, maybe you can tax into compliance. Third world, maybe, but someone will scream it isn’t “fair”. But China? I’m skeptical we tax ourselves greatly and them effectively without them becoming the number one superpower and then doing as they please anyhow.
>But what happens when you need something more than they need to sell it?
The CCP's entire domestic legitimacy comes from the economic growth that has come about since Deng took over. They need to keep the wheels spinning as much as the West does.
Civil disobedience? But even then it’s crazy that people have to glue themselves to objects in the middle of highways to be heard and even then nothing really changes.
We had the technology to solve these problems years ago. This isn’t a technological problem, this is a problem about values. Do we value money or our environment more?
The climate catastrophe unfolding will be the biggest wake up humanity has ever had. That is the only silver lining to this existential predicament
> I look at what I'm actually doing, and I'm at my limit.
Smaller house, solar panels, don't drive, don't eat meat, and don't have kids. And don't vote for politicians who are busy spreading nonsense.
> I've given up hope that this will be solved.
Oh, me too. Now it is about managing your personal guilt, which you realize at some level, judging from your comments. For me, I am likely past my lifetime CO2 budget, due to just 5 years of transatlantic flights for work (plus 15 years of driving in the US). I can't undo the damage that I have done, and now I have both eyes open staring into the abyss.
I guess you gotta find low-impact ways of enjoying life. I can recommend slacklining.
> Smaller house, solar panels, don't drive, don't eat meat, and don't have kids. And don't vote for politicians who are busy spreading nonsense.
I already live in a trailer. Solar wouldn't make sense since we have 2 big trees over our trailer providing us shade. Cuts down on AC in the hotter months (now veering on March).
Not driving has been easy with WfH since last early March. I'm happy with that. I don't like driving anyways.
My SO and I are a DINK - double income no kids. This is one of the largest climate change decisions that can be made at a human level.
> And don't vote for politicians who are busy spreading nonsense.
Oh, I don't. Nor do I have any preconceived notions that my opinion does matter either. I'll do my civic part, and vote when its due, do jury duty, etc. But my opinions do not matter at any scale other than household.
I guess for me, it's not as much guilt, but foreboding. I know what the science says, and it'll be worse than what they say. I know I've done my share of pollution of many sorts, simply by using a vehicle, or flying.
But this problem isn't solvable by me. Or my politicians.. Or even by the USA. This needs a worldwide drastic response at every level. And do I see that happening? Not in a hundred years - until it's catastrophically too late.
The kids thing is curious. Maybe I'm just selfish, but I have no kids and my thinking is, well, I'm not that worried about how the earth will be after I die. Meanwhile the folks with kids are the ones who produced giant resource consumers and ironically -- because they want to ensure their kids' wellbeing -- are the ones most worried about the planet's survival.
Obviously the answer is for me to care about society (on a global level), but it's hard to do so without skin in the game. And considering it feels like others don't care or are still very wasteful... why should I be pious?
I find the whole "don't have kids" thing sad and short-sighted. Having kids was the single greatest thing that's ever happened to me, and yes there's a CO2 footprint as a result but ultimately humans need kids to have a future. Please have children, and teach them the importance of the planet.
It's something I keep quiet about in day-to-day life since it seems to invite reprisal, but if we're soul-searching for what we as individuals can do, I beg you to try eating no meat at all. There seems to be an increasing awareness that animal farming as currently practised is an environmental catastrophe on many levels, including emissions[1]—I dimly recall the IPCC report being quite clear that it's incompatible with a world that isn't ever-worsening, and suspect the obvious conclusion of "stop entirely" has been watered down to "try to eat less" because they fear people will just assume the former is too onerous and not bother.
I have found it to be the opposite—simple steps, fun, healthy—and sort of want to launch into a full tale, but it has been a long week and I was just heading to bed. Still, I'm more than happy later to suggest recommendations and recipes and/or generally chat if you (or anyone) would like.
Absolutism ("eat no meat") really does turn people off (because they can't envision a lifestyle without meat). I have cut down my meat intake by about 90% and it's great. I still eat a burger every quarter or so.
Transportation and energy production make up a majority of CO2 emissions in the U.S. and probably most industrialized countries. As an individual person, you can get rid of gas-burning cars (perhaps replace with an EV if you need a car) and put solar panels on your roof if that's an option.
At the state and national level, though, a lot more could be done. Ground transportation could be fully electrified. (I think the quickest way to get there is not to wait for battery technology to get better but rather just electrify the major freeways so that cars and trucks can charge while they're moving, and people won't need huge, heavy, expensive batteries to get anywhere.)
We could also expand solar and wind investments. To even out power production and consumption, we could finance the construction of intercontinental high-voltage DC lines, so we can buy solar power from the Sahara in the middle of the night and sell to Europe or wherever in the daytime.
We could invest in battery manufacturing. Most U.S. made electric vehicles are basically luxury supercars that use expensive batteries that require large amounts of nickel and cobalt. What we need to get away from burning gas is mass-production of lithium iron phosphate cells (or whatever technology that replaces it) which have somewhat lower energy density but use cheaper, more readily available raw materials and are much safer and much more durable. This is the kind of technology we need to make cheap cars for ordinary middle-class people with low environmental footprint.
For that matter, it would be great if EV tax credits applied to conversions as well as new vehicles. Hardly anyone converts vehicles now because it's expensive and high-effort, but if there was a simple kit to convert, say, a semi-recent Honda Civic to electric that can be installed easily by a mechanic and doesn't require any custom fabrication, maybe we'd have a lot more people going that route. Especially if it was subsidized to the point where the out-of-pocket expense is low.
More nuclear plants might be a good thing too, but it's not absolutely essential.
> I look at what I can do about this. I can turn up the temp in my room, and the house. Meager difference. I can use less water - I already am, with getting showers every other day on average.
Depending where you live, it might not even make a difference.
I'd say the biggest contribution one can make is to aggressively vote for parties that support green power generation. Project like these [0] are stalled by lobbyist but offer a real chance to curb emissions.
Up until now, I think it's been too hard to direct your money away from the companies emitting loads of carbon. But I wonder, now that Europe is talking about a border tax for imported carbon, and the US has introduced legislation for a border tax, could that change, even before other places institute the same? To be eligible for import to Europe, would producers elsewhere need to tally and report the carbon associated with goods, such that non-European consumers could also finally have the information to choose lower-emission options?
Most of the companies on the various “top polluters” lists are energy companies. We can direct our money away from them by walking, biking, transiting or buying an EV.
... but also shipping goods, right? The 3000 mile caesar salad, spread-out global supply chains, etc?
Yes, green transportation (or just less) is good. But if I sit at home and order goods to be delivered to me, it's actually quite difficult to pick which have the smallest footprints.
A lot of energy goes into manufacturing products such as steel, plastic, aluminum, servers etc.
The energy sources for these items are at the discretion of the large buyers. A steel plant can absolutely make the switch from coal to solar/wind at its own discretion.
> So what do I do? know what we're doing is what we can and hope some rich people pull up the cause
What we do is unionize, and in a way where we can then withdraw our industrial contributions to climate change.
> I look at what I'm actually doing, and I'm at my limit.
I am willing to bet you've not yet tried to "manage up."
It's not our fellow consumers who are causing climate change, it is supply-side; it is management. Only industrial and trade unions have the leverage "stop the line," and demand a less-profitable, albeit life-saving economy.
Bezos and his phallic rocket is just a distraction: considering how much money he can burn, it's to him what a trip to Maui is to plebs like me. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter.
I think we just have to keep pushing the society (and each other) in the right direction. Hang on, I believe it will eventually get better, though it will get a lot worse before it starts to get better.
You could live in 200 square feet. You could bathe with one bucket of room temperature water. You could use no air conditioning whatsoever. You could eat only vegetarian food. Etc etc.
You won’t, (and I won’t either) but if it comes down to human survival, forces will find a way to make you do it.
This comment has gone grey but I think it is an important point. Our basic expectancies for what makes a comfortable life are higher than ever. Is that an ethical problem or just a result of more/better technology? I'm not really sure.
I would argue we have the technology to sustainably live as we do, for the most part. What we don't have is the manpower and resources to go through and replace all the old tech with the new tech that would allow us to mostly maintain our standard of living.
Not sure why you're being down voted-- This is the right answer. I see people getting mad at suppliers but they have yet to realize they would still please like their consumption supplied...
Like most problems in the world today, your money can do more good that your individual actions.
The Effective Altruism movement has found some charities that either have proven advocacy records or offer legitimate carbon offsets, and which have a need for more funding.
The Clean Air Task Force seems widely approved of by a variety of EA researcher organizations, with one estimating that they prevent a ton of emissions for less than a dollar.
The offset programs are probably less effective in EV, but more certain. $10 per ton, I believe? Still highly affordable.
* Switch to using 100% renewable energy from your electric company.
* Live in an apartment where shared walls, floors and ceilings means lower energy usage
* Move to a city where you can walk, bicycle or transit (or at least have a short drive to most things).
But the most important is to become involved in climate politics, especially state and local politics. Even in California (the largest state in the union) all you need is a dozen or so people to get a meeting with a state representative.
You can try to come up with or attempt to improve an existing technical solution - whether it be a green alternative to reduce emissions or carbon capture/terraforming. If you want a place to start, alternative power sources for freighters would have a huge impact.
IMO individual action is nearly worthless beyond making you feel better. I did all the right things for decades and someone else just consumed the resources I saved by building golf courses and taking international vacations.
The world needs more Elon Musk types to think big and bring a lower carbon footprint to modern living. Thinking people will voluntarily put themselves at a disadvantage for the greater good goes against much of what we know of human nature.
Its like a little kid making a mess of his room. He or she will never prevent the mess. But the mess will always be fixed. I have good faith that the human species will fix it. One day the entire biosphere will be controlled.
I think this is overly optimistic. While I think I agree, you make it sound like there will be no consequences. I think things will get much worse before the human race decides to do something about it.
The mess will not "always be fixed," because we have no parents in this analogy. We are the leaders in this world. You are simply taking on the role of an adolescent shirking responsibility.
I look at what I can do about this. I can turn up the temp in my room, and the house. Meager difference. I can use less water - I already am, with getting showers every other day on average. I can eat less meat - which I do with purchase of the beef CSA. I'm big into the repair movement, and repair household equipment and electronics with my knowledge of circuitry and 3d printing. I recycle, but that's if its not repairable or reusable/repurposable.
I look at what I'm actually doing, and I'm at my limit. There isn't anything else I can add on to reduce footprint. And in reality, the same goes for many people.
These global climate change issues are the sum of all the work in this world, but the bulk of it is emitted by companies who do the cheapest thing. And if dumping gigatons of CO2 or methane in the air makes more sense, that's done. I can petition my congresscritters, but it's well known they do not listen to the little guy (https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-... ). Your party is irrelevant here.
So what do I do? know what we're doing is what we can and hope some rich people pull up the cause, and not try to escape the atmosphere in a penis-shaped rocket.
I've given up hope that this will be solved.