I really resonate with the "climate change porn" bullshit. Drives me crazy, and just makes people numb to it.

The best thing you can do is the thing you're best at doing, and that you're motivated to do. You'll do it well, and others will follow.

If that's too vague, here are some objective suggestions. Might get in trouble for this, but individual action isn't going to fix this problem. I don't really care if you are a vegetarian or a vegan, or whether you buy carbon credits or offset your airplane tickets or whatever other bullshit Wall Street is pushing to get around this problem.

What you should be doing is encouraging systems-level thinking. Get people to understand how top-level governmental decisions (or lack thereof) can lead to a system where carbon is entirely written off as irrelevant in our current economic and political system. Encourage people to think of ways in which, to the best of our ability, lifestyles for all people can be maintained or improved while severely regulating the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

1000% agreed that individual action is not enough, and that we need to get the corporations and governments of the world to make serious changes. But I have no idea what those changes are, or like you say, how we can make them while maintaining or improving lifestyles for all people.

Also, thank you for answering kindly and collaboratively. For some reason I'm just feeling really fed up with climate news porn today and these are all the frustrations and questions I've always wanted to ask.

There's a middle ground between "I'm buying local produce for myself" and "I'm quitting my job and chaining myself to an oil tanker."

You're right about the leadership issue, it's one that has plagued the climate conversation ever since Al Gore fell off. Yale Climate has a somewhat old article on this [0], where you may find guidance.

Bottom line is you don't have to believe me. If you're looking for a modern scientist-leader, listen to Dr. Katharine Hayhoe's TED talk ("The most important thing you can do to fight climate change: talk about it" [1]).

[0]: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2012/03/whose-is-the-... [1]: https://youtu.be/-BvcToPZCLI

I do phone up product suppliers and ask them why they've overdone the packaging but if it's only me they will ignore me. I've bothered BP over their environmental damage in Africa, and much more. I'll continue to do more but in the end I despair because 90% of people don't care.

Were it not for health problems I'd be out in central london getting arrested with the other 1,000 or so arrests in the past few weeks.

So there's answers. But I've been talking about this, and doing stuff about it, for ~20 years and no-one gave a shit. Now it may be too late. So do as you please.

We won't see everyone tooling around in their autonomous electric cars. the rich will have Tesla's, and everyone else will probably split the massive cost of an ICE car four ways instead of owning one, or walk everywhere.That's assuming we didn't kill half the jobs off in the USA because now a Burger King Value Meal costs $20, due to cigarette-style sin taxes.

You can systems level think all you like, the problem is when it gets expressed into concrete things. I think people would have to admit that it would be a pretty big qol step down for people...it's just that their solutions dovetail neatly with the way they live their lives already.

This is precisely the kind of Carbon-Rules-All thinking that got us here. There is an implicit assumption that the only way we could have ever gotten to the "place we are today," however you choose to define that, is as a result of the burning fossil fuels.

I implore you to sit with some beer/wine/LSD and contemplate an alternative history in which we never drilled a single oil well but had the same desires for successful civilization. See where you get.

The "system level thinking" I'm talking about is the kind that works to explicitly maintain QOL while strongly curtailing emissions. It's possible, and is actually the only way.

- Only take a plane when absolutely necessary.

- Live in a city, sell your car and take public transport

- Reduce meat consumption (at least beef and lamb which are a lot worse than the others). You don't need to eat meat every single day. Also try tofu, tempeh and seitan; you may find you like them.

- Vote with this topic in mind, even if it might hurt you financially.

How about instead, both.

  - Beef 
  - Pork
  - Seafood
  - Chicken
  - Non-meat diet

The information is widely available. I don't think needing more summaries of it is the problem. The problem is people don't care enough to change their behavior. And food is really tied up with identity, while people covet bad identities.

For example, assuming you live in Germany (for the sake of concreteness) and you want to move down the chain from pork to seafood.

1. Are you aware of fish rated as green, yellow or red?

2. Are you aware of other consideration, such as logistics and methods (e.g.: aquaculture vs. wild)?

3. Do you have access to local and sustainable pork (but perhaps not seafood)?

Annoyingly, most of it goes directly against arguments I have seen [1] about how best to reduce animal suffering in the human food chain without everyone going full vegetarian, since one suffering cow can replace an awful lot of suffering chickens even if you percieve individual chickens as "less conscious".

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/23/vegetarianism-for-meat...

Humans aren't immune to mass dieoffs. We're animals too.

They're pushing a carbon tax policy in the house right now https://citizensclimatelobby.org/energy-innovation-and-carbo.... It's a little silly since it seems like there's little appetite for a bill like this with conservatives. I still think it's important to try.

I'd say there's a lot of opportunity to do things on a state or local level. Reducing your state's carbon emissions has a real impact. Push for renewable energy sources. Fight to make the process of rezoning for higher density housing easier in your community and improve public transit.