Meanwhile, we haven't really tried an effective government policy. One that would replace other forms of taxation with a carbon tax.
We've only tried individual solutions, dabbling around the edges, carbon offsets, cap and trade. Manifestly they haven't reduced emissions.
People may indeed view individual action as a substitute for collective action. But we wouldn't ask people to increase government revenue by making donations.
You would have to combine the tax with more serious measures like duties based on either estimated or actual emissions level. Or outright bans.
Additionally mandating certain important practices like garbage disposal, reduction and methane capture.
High tariffs on countries not following suit will take care of that. Try the carrot first but if they don't want to contribute then use the stick.
For example, when every home has roof-top solar, everyone is riding bikes or scooters, growing food locally, not flying, etc. It's harder for politicians to create new subsidies for coal mining, or tax concessions for airlines. Instead they will be more likely to pass carbon fee and dividend schemes or similar.
On the other hand, while everyone continues to drive around in SUVs, buy cheap goods from China, long haul flights all the time, and food from the other side of the world, it's easy for politicians to maintain the status quo.
Individual action can't solve climate change by itself. But it is still meaningful and necessary. Our actions influence the actions of others around us, and we can redefine "normal" for our society. Studies have shown that somewhere between 10 and 20% of a population acting in a new way are enough to shift the opinions of the remaining majority.
Even if you went completely off the grid to live in the woods outside of the industrial civilization eating plants etc this wouldn't fix anything.
Yes, you would certainly reduce your emissions but this is not nearly enough.
Even if a miracle happened and we reached global zero emissions today there are already 415ppm in the atmosphere which will remain there for thousands of years.
Because of climate lag we are now only seeing the effects from the emissions from the 70s and early 80s. Even in 30-40 years when we can see the effects from our current emissions it will not stop there. There are many self sustaining climatic systems that will have been triggered and will continue to change the climate.
Humanity needs to invest all possible resources into clean energy and carbon sequestration. If we don't go all in during the next decade we are done.
Cite please?
> The lifetime in the air of CO2, the most significant man-made greenhouse gas, is probably the most difficult to determine, because there are several processes that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Between 65% and 80% of CO2 released into the air dissolves into the ocean over a period of 20–200 years. The rest is removed by slower processes that take up to several hundreds of thousands of years, including chemical weathering and rock formation. This means that once in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide can continue to affect climate for thousands of years.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhou...
> There is sufficient uptake capacity in the ocean to incorporate 70 to 80% of foreseeable anthropogenic CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, this process takes centuries due to the rate of ocean mixing. As a result, even several centuries after emissions occurred, about a quarter of the increase in concentration caused by these emissions is still present in the atmosphere.
Apparently I'm a hateful person for noticing this discrepancy.
Probably because imposing natality rates would be quite unpopular. Humans tend to think having kids is an inalienable right.
China got away with it because China, but this would not work in other countries.
Imagine that all the people who believed in climate change - globally - committed suicide in some appropriately low-carbon manner. Everyone remaining does not believe in climate change. How long does it take the population to bounce back, and what sort of global warming mitigation do you think happens? Does the world in this thought experiment end up emitting less carbon?
Individual actions might have next to no effect, but institutional actions will. Giving up your opportunity to influence those institutional actions (whether through your own efforts or those of your children) is not beneficial to the environment. Of course, this calculus is different for the average person. But if you're the sort of person who's contemplating suicide to help the environment, you're exactly the sort of person that the world needs to not commit suicide.
Conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, called the most docile claims about global warming/climate change as radical, lies, socialism, communism, anti-business, pro-big government, and so on. The more aggressive claims were impugned as forms of eco-terrorism. It's the same today. The climate change deniers go so far as to insist that all of this is just delusional panic over nothing.
Michael Crichton, science fiction author, was a notable climate change denier who pushed exactly that: this climate change business is nonsense and people who claim otherwise are crazy. He wrote a book on the subject "State of Fear" about how global warming was a fraud, perpetrated by a few to exploit others.
A still sitting U.S. senator, James Inhofe from Oklahoma, says global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. And he cited "Dr. Crichton" and his book as the kind of real facts we need to pay attention to, and invited him to testify before Congress as a climate expert and scientist.
It's like humans are designed to make everything a dispute.
If we're aiming for more reasoned debate I'm not sure the throwing around of the 'denier' label really gets us much further forward.
Don't worry, there are people saying this all over every climate discussion on HN. And then a huge distracting discussion about whether that's a good idea or not.
I might be being disingenuous but I see it so often it makes me curious. I don't know.
People generally want to do the right thing and they want to matter whereas in my experience the average person is not a great systems thinker. So people are very receptive to calls to "be better" because it let's them fight for what they believe set in a framework where their actions matter at least to some degree.
The problem is, these are problems of scale and systems, and once people think they are fulfilling some responsibility they aren't going to pursue other solutions, at least as aggressively.
If we straight up told people: you are going to experience extreme pain within your life time due to climate change, and the only single thing you can do that matters is to put pressure on your government to attack these problems systematically, I think we'd get much better results.