It will require a massive change of mindset. The hard question is how to achieve it in a fair way. There has always been a tension between the freedom of the individual and what's best for society and more broadly all humankind. I don't think people have to give everything up, but there will probably come a time when priorities will have to be re-evaluated and many people will have to live with less in the way of disposable gadgets, mindless entertainment, inefficient transport, over-sized houses etc.. Maybe education is the key, more mindful entertainment, less mindless...

Sadly I think the only solution to global warming is something like a nuclear holocaust that kills the majority of the planet's inhabitants, and sends the remainder back to the stone ages, walking around rather than flying and driving in fossil fuel vehicles.

Other than that... Things are bad, getting worse, yet there are plenty of deniers, and it doesn't appear we're going to stop screwing up any time soon. We're too stupid and greedy as a species to avoid catastrophe I fear.

No need for a nuclear holocaust, the increasing ineffectiveness of antibiotics will do the job eventually. Nature has a way of getting even.

What's wrong with mindless entertainment, as opposed to mindful entertainment, from an environmental point of view?

it dumbs you down into non-caring whateva state. there is place for both, after very hard brain-day at work for example, but many folks only have the mindless ones.

> It will require a massive change of mindset.

...or a dictator?

Kill 90% of humans and our CO2 emissions won't be a concern anymore.

You could do with much less than 90% by targeting the worst offenders.

Or: we move all our shit-producing industries to Moon and Mars, places where there is no ecology to fuck up. Expensive but could be done, especially if we find out that those places have good minerals we can mine and work on right there.

I'm trying to imagine the pollution controls that would make that economical. And the space network that would enable it. I think that even with astronomical fines for pollution on Earth, it would be a difficult value proposition. Consider a planet made of solid gold, and then consider how far away it would need to be to make it uneconomical to retrieve. Moon rocks have been valued at $50,800 per gram based on the cost to retrieve them, which should probably be taken as an upper bound rather than a typical figure, but the current spot price for gold looks like it's around $37 per gram. So if the Moon were made of gold, we would need to reduce our retrieval costs by three orders of magnitude to make it worthwhile. I don't have a remotely rigorous way to estimate from that where our current breakeven point might be, but I think it would be pretty close in.

Your idea is pretty crazy, but not completely crazy. There aren't any other particularly good ideas for making space travel profitable. On the other hand, it's difficult to imagine the advances in technology and the environmental concerns that would make it possible. Barring some absolute prohibition, it seems unlikely that spending millions or billions of dollars to manufacture things on Mars would be easier than improving manufacturing processes here on Earth.

It's not hard to change. If everyone changed what they do day to day (stop flying, stop eating beef, stop driving everywhere), we would not be talking about the future in such a bleak way. But everyone thinks they are the exception, it's OK if they do it. That's why governments introduce taxes to discourage bad behaviour, because people are ultimately stupid.

It's hard to change unilaterally. For instance, it's easy to say "stop driving everywhere", but the majority of locales do not cater well to non-drivers. It's easy to say "stop flying", but in practice that's almost equivalent to "don't travel any significant distance from home, ever".

People aren't stupid just because they don't drop everything and make one specific goal their highest priority above all else. Many people haven't even thought about that goal, and even for those who have, it may not even objectively be the highest priority goal.

People could for example elect governments that want to build transit or dis-incentivize carbon heavy activities and incentivize their replacements, but they don't.

We're actually quite lucky to have a decent Green Party and a proportional government system here (NZ), where the Green Party can get up to ~15% of the vote. I wish it was more though.

In a world where no party is proposing reforms that will actually do enough, I feel like I basically have a responsibility to vote for the most environmentally conscious not-totally-insane option.

Indeeed. In the UK, no party has an environmental platform worth mentioning. There isn't even an environment position in the cabinet any more - just industry.

Conservatives promise to dig up the country.

Lib dead promise to dig up the country, slowly.

Labour promise to dig up the country, for the people.

And the greens promise not to dig up the country, but will make us all live in grass huts.

>>That's why governments introduce taxes to discourage bad behaviour, because people are ultimately stupid.

They aren't stupid, they are selfish. At the end of the day it comes down to what's called Tragedy of the Commons: individuals keep doing things they know are bad for the environment because our economic system prioritizes the exploitation of natural resources (which is a zero-sum game by definition) and if they don't exploit it, someone else will. Therefore, everyone continues to do it. That is why we need top-down (read: government) regulation.

Oh stop. I haven't driven to work more than a handful of times in my entire life. I've recycled my recyclables my whole life. I only fly once or twice a year, and I can even cut that out if necessary. I eat meat once a day or less by now (red meat is only a part of that), and not in very large quantities or expensive cuts either. I walk or bike everywhere and take public transit when I can't.

I'm happy to pay higher prices for meat, higher prices for airline flights. I'm happy in general to ration out personal luxuries more thinly than I already do. I really do want to avoid the end of the world.

But at the same time, I want some damned personal security in exchange, and right now I'm not getting any of it. We don't have much personal security if something bad happens in life, and the world is ending anyway.

Carbon tax or bust.

> If everyone changed what they do day to day (stop flying, stop eating beef, stop driving everywhere), we would not be talking about the future in such a bleak way.

And what would replace these things? Would they not create another catastrophic problem in another area?

What is the magic bullet that fixes all the world's problems??

Transit that uses renewable energy, or zero fossil fuels. Such as walking & cycling. Obviously one can cut beef out of their diet, or go full vegetarian. Stop flying is a bit trickier for people who need to travel around, but high speed trains that run on electricity are a good consideration.

And a lot of travelling can be replaced with video meetings. (Seriously, what is a good term? I was about to write Skype-meetings, but want a general term (in particularly since Skype predictably sucks more and more since MS bought them).)

Video calls, remote meetings, typically how we call it at work. Use it with clients even in the city

Stop pumping carbon into the sky?

Have you seen a volcano erupt in real-time via satellite? I have and I've tracked the plume for days and sometimes weeks. Sometimes, there are 5 or 6 of these events a day. A very rare day to not have at least one of earth's visible volcanoes erupt.

Now lets talk about all the volcanoes that are underwater... then we can talk about solar weather and more...

Nobody is impressed by your stupid stories of having been a weatherman in the air-army. Annual average volcano emissions are three orders of magnitude smaller (that's 1/1000, for the innumerate in the audience) than human CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion. And you can't fucking _see_ CO2 anyway. It's fucking invisible. Whatever you saw from that volcano was water or dust or ash or whatever, the things that volcanoes spew into the upper atmosphere that counteract the warming effect of their CO2 emissions.

Your tone greatly diminishes the value of your arguments (on which I agree, by the way). Could yo try being less personally aggressive, next time?

No. This is the tone I intend to take with all dimwitted or disingenuous climate change deniers on this site.

Even cutting down on beef while still eating other meat would be a significant help, I believe. That's achievable though I imagine the beef industry would lobby against any push.

I used to think this way. Then I realized how many truly greedy and completely selfish people are living among us, and it's more than half. At that point, I gave up and joined the masses. The only way to fix it is to incentivize technology improvements and create government policy structure to assault climate change from the top down. And that won't get major until the problems become so evident that almost nobody can deny it. The future is bleak and it's hard to see where the good real estate of the future will be.

I was thinking about more extreme change than that to be honest, a really noticeable change in quality of life. I already try not to fly or drive too much.

But even with what you list, external factors based on other people still happen, like your work wants you to fly somewhere, or public transport sucks because everyone else is still driving.

I disagree that we feel like the exception when we're acting like everyone else. We feel like the exception when we're trying to be better and others aren't.

> And it's very hard to change without everyone else changing as well.

Sometimes I wonder if it's just a matter of "if you build it, they will come". As in, if there was a public works style initiative to build green cities from the ground up out in the middle of nowhere, and would enough people reconsider their current situation and trade it for a lifestyle and an environment that is less dependent on energy and other resources?

I've been trying to grasp the basics of 3D modeling and Blender lately, because I have an idea in my head of what sort of 'green city' I'd like to live in. Before I say any more, I should clarify that I understand almost none of the intricacies of city planning, material science, architecture, etc. and I don't want to come off as someone who thinks that learning all that is trivial -- I'm looking at it more as art, I just want to create a pretty model of a city that I can zoom around in from different perspectives.

What I'm envisioning is an dense network of open-air structures separated by wide passageways for walking and biking. The buildings themselves would all be the same height (5 stories maybe?) and the tops of all buildings would be reclaimed as community gardens and interconnected by skyway-like walking bridges. Living units would be minimal and adjustable in size by taking a modular approach [0], with not-so-strict zoning laws that would allow for makeshift small businesses and markets to open up amongst the community. Roads proper might exist once every 10 blocks or so. I'd imagine a city like this would be much cheaper to live in, so that too might be attractive for potential residents.

A lot of what I'm talking about is influenced by living in an extremely population dense area in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I have about 5000 neighbors living in a 100m radius (seriously) and we all get along quite well. Here's a photo from the balcony of my first apartment here looking down our alley:

https://66.media.tumblr.com/23e3cc103960ec568bdc1a0086e71901....

It's amazing to live with everything you need just a few blocks away, but it would be even nicer if we could integrate greenery and vegetation into stairwells, and reclaim the tops of these buildings as open space for the community. This style of living has allowed me to get by comfortably without a car or moto for four years now, so I suppose that's at least a little bit green!

I hope this doesn't sound like the idle ramblings of a crazy person, but maybe if by some stroke of luck I become very rich, then after 10 years of learning I'll at least be capable of enlisting smart people to help me build a city like this. Or maybe Paul Graham wants to give me a billion dollars? That would be nice :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_building

Unfortunately the end of your URL got cut off. :(

Look up Le Corbusier’s Radiant City for something from way back in the early 20th century that sounds a little bit like your idea.

Also don't give up on Blender, it took me a while too but now I wouldn't use anything else. It's all about learning the main keyboard shortcuts really - which is a big barrier to newbies but a bit speed boost once you get used to it.

Oops, I was having trouble editing my post and so I had to delete it and repost it. It got cut off in the process of copy-pasting.

Here's the URL again:

https://66.media.tumblr.com/23e3cc103960ec568bdc1a0086e71901...

The images I'm seeing of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City are so beautiful. I would love to have the ability to create a Blender model of something like that.

This short documentary on architect Vo Trong Nghia also made a large impact on me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgQoVbEX8-A

What kind of green city has gardens on the roofs instead of solar panels? I guess one that is actually green.

: P

Throw in some solar panels too! I have no idea what the balance is, or which route is actually 'greener' in an environmentally-friendly sense, but definitely part of the experience of a green city for me would be to actually have it green-colored and covered in plants. But if you can grow a lot of your food right on top of the building, then at least that cuts down on the need to expend energy transporting it in. And between having lush greenery overhead and building open-air structures with natural ventilation, hopefully it would be cool enough to reduce the need for air conditioning. The building I live in has good natural ventilation and so I actually haven't had AC these four years and I've survived in the blazing Cambodia heat :)

If you look at the graphs that have greater time lines than 100k years, you will see this is a pattern.

No doubt we as humans are speeding up the process and making it worse, but it seems likely that its going to happen regardless of what we do.

For this reason, I'd suggest we are 'gonna change' when the time comes.