- I try to avoid buying new things for as long as possible. When I can, I repair what I own or buy used. Living in a small apartment provides some natural incentives to avoid buying too much stuff.
- I avoid eating meat, and when I do, try to eat Chicken or fish.
- I try to take short showers and don't flush the toilet if I only urinate (it took my wife a while to get used to this, but she came around after a bit).
- I avoid using paper towels and reuse aluminum foil and bags as often as possible (often, you can wipe off the aluminum foil and use it a second or third time).
Some of these may not make much of a difference.
I have not spent too much time thinking about this, so my reasoning may be faulty, but I will share it anyway:
I am more worried about deforestation and the rainforests and poaching than climate change.
I want to keep a healthy planet so that conscious beings, and especially humans, can continue enjoying it. Thus, there is a balance between enjoying life (e.g., traveling) and reducing emissions. It seems, as is often the case with difficult ethical questions, that finding balance is key.
I think this is the key point that needs to get marketed. The 'save the planet' works well for people with holistic view of things but we need to get the other 50% (or whatever as I made that ratio up) on board. And I think pushing a message like 'dont let polluters ruin your lifestyle' message would be more effective for the unconvinced portion of the world. Turn the message back to something personal and micro rather than 'the planet is doomed' type messaging.
Small difference is better than nothing, but the inconvenience to eco friendliness ration seems very bad with this one
What is inconvenient about not flushing the toilet if you only urinate? I may have a weak nose, but I have never smelled anything. If you are skeptical that this is the case, I would try for a couple days and see what you think.
I think the amount of water saved is higher than you expect. I work from home and drink a lot of coffee, so maybe my usage is higher than yours.
According to https://www.home-water-works.org/indoor-use/toilets:
> Toilet flushing is the single highest use of water in the average home, so it also presents a prime opportunity for water conservation. With the average person flushing five times a day, toilets make up about 31% of overall household water consumption.
2019 was a great year for limiting my spent resources:
- I went fully plant-based in January, quit meat, eggs, dairy etc
- I joined a local gym that I can ride my bicycle to (or run in the warmer weather)
- I started working from home 4/5 days of the week
- I walk up the block and take a bus to work on that extra day
I also turn off my heat during the day when I'm home, and use a little space heater rather than burn natural gas keeping the whole house warm, since I'm in my office 99% of the time anyway.
Things I'd like to change in 2020 or beyond:
- My "daily driver" is still a large Dodge Ram - though I rarely ever drive it and certainly not daily, but occasionally I need it. It's an '09 so I've had it for quite a while. I want to replace it with something less ridiculous, but our lease on the Honda HRV is up so that'll take priority. Something electric if possible though our house is old and there's nowhere to install a charger.
I've heard that replacing your gas guzzler with an electric car can actually generate more carbon by virtue of the carbon emissions associated with the manufacture of electric vehicles, and consequently you're better off driving your gas guzzler til it dies before going electric. I'd be very curious to hear from people who know more about this. Intuiting about emissions is really hard, unfortunately (which is why I'm curious about carbon offsets as a solution).
According to the video, average electric car is in the green after 4.8 years. If you already own a Prius that could be true, but a Dodge Ram is unlikely.
We've also started bringing more things into our local area, walking more, and using public transit. We've cut our gas usage by 75%, saving roughly $2,500/year.
We consume less, buying secondhand where possible, aiming for quality, or just evaluating whether you really need something.
We're eating less meat and more beans. I was vegan once for a two-year period, I won't go back there - I don't believe a 100% vegan diet is a good idea. However, it is important to reduce meat consumption (majority vegetarian diet is the goal), and we make sure 100% of our meat is purchased from a small local farm using sustainable and humane practices. I'm really interested in entomophagy and will take any chance to eat insects I can find.
I live in Seattle so my electricity is nearly 100% emission free, and I pay for the green option to offset another home's electricity somewhere in Washington.
Lastly, we've stopped flying for vacations. There's plenty to enjoy in the local area.
Things still to be improved: my car, a Jeep Liberty, is an awful gas-guzzler. The next car will be electric (or better yet, no car).
I'm keen to start an urban farm with aquaponics and insect farming.
I will keep advocating for safer streets so that it's a viable option for more people to move around cities without a car.
I'm saving money to buy some degraded agricultural land someday and restore it.
Climate change will bring increased intensity to weather events going forward (hurricanes, fires). It's too late to avoid some of that (e.g. Australia). I think our globalized society is actually very fragile and susceptible to disruption, so focusing on local resiliency will matter more into the future. I'll be looking at food security, water storage for extended droughts, and building in resistance to weather events like high winds and fires.
Nowadays everyone pretends to be green or to be saving the planet by buying a Tesla or taking shorter showers. Here is the thing though, those things statistically don't matter. They are a good way for most people to signal that they are doing something while not really doing anything.
The things that matter the most are [0]: Having less kids, not OWNING a car (owning an EV doesn't really count), not taking flights. Almost nobody does that though because those changes are really difficult
I believe that we should stop making people believe that they save the world by buying a Tesla and push it a bit more as a real environmental crisis.
[0]: https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/07/12/how-to-reduce-y...
And what's the point, where do you draw the line? If we have to reduce our standard of living, we've failed to come up with smart solutions. If I take your line of thought further, we'd better stop fighting famine and developing vaccination.
With your own solar (I don't have yet), the idea is that you can transition more of your usage to electric (say change water heater from gas to electric) without paying a cut to someone else.
Voting for candidates with a good environmental record, because that's really the only way to solve the problem.
Beyond that, I'm also considering buying solar power.
I don't commute to work. I use carsharing if I have to use a car (every month or 2).
I spend 8h a day working for my current client, whose success directly lowers CO2 emissions.
I am slowly optimizing my buying habits for groceries etc., one item at a time to reduce waste. I try to buy the most expensive, high-quality stuff (for everything) and stick to it as long as I possibly can.
I don't know how I could improve my lifestyle further, without totally boycotting modern society. Maybe I am missing something, but I think from my position you can only marginally improve. From here on it's on politicians.
I don't think I am very far along. If you have a lifestyle like I do, you get most of the benefits almost for free. Improving upon that is very hard.
On the other hand, I think someone living in a (first world) village, could be way more conscious about these things than I am and would still have a hard time to come close, just because he or she is sharing his house/car/roads/infrastructure with less people.
Currently putting together a doc to later publish on what we should all be doing on this front: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-67lMjm7C1b9PpbKfFn39ucI...
As a result, I'm building my own plane to run 91 octane E10 from the corner pump. With redundant electronic ignition and fuel injection I'm expecting in excess of 30mpg equivalent at around 150mph, about two to three times the efficiency of your average Cessna. Being under an experimental type certificate, conversion to electric once battery density is reasonable should be feasible.
replaced a minivan with a leaf: https://twitter.com/ecoffey/status/1036815557008318465
I bike to work: https://twitter.com/ecoffey/status/1208223257695940611
We've been talking about converting a chunk of lawn into a bigger garden as well.
I had solar panels for five years; we're generating ~90% of our electricity. Planning to buy a used Nissan Leaf (maybe later this year) to replace one of our vehicles.
On the CO2 sequestration front, I've been offsetting 10x my family's generated CO2 for the last ~5 years. More here: https://automicrofarm.com/blog/2019/03/solving-climate-chang...
It seems like a “debt” you take on. Today I will produce N carbon and plant enough trees to consume N carbon over 10 years. However, you aren’t actually watching the carbon repayment over 10 years. You’re trusting someone to do it for you. It seems like an easy swindle with how little regulations there are in this space.
It would be cool if there were an organization (non- or for-profit) that would get you annual (or quarterly) reports on how their carbon capture is going. Perhaps through drone fly-overs, with software to capture the 3D image changes and then calculate/estimate the carbon mass storage increase/decrease.
I recently donated to TeamTrees. I'm looking for other places to donate that will have significant impact. This is a guess, but I think that charities are likely able to make a bigger impact per-dollar than I can by trying to decarbonize my own lifestyle. I found this[0] Vox article recently and the first two organizations look compelling. I need to do more research, but I'm hoping that they're making significant differences and that I can help just by donating regularly.
That said, I'm still considering buying an electric car this year. I at least want to contribute to having fewer ICE cars on the road. I know there's a difference of opinion on whether buying a new EV actually helps...short-term, it may not, but if nothing else I'm supporting the industry's growth, and long-term hopefully it does reduce my own personal emissions. And, locally, I'm just tired of inhaling exhaust...
[0] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/12/2/20976180/climat...
(BTW: Not sure if you did the numbers, but with my solar system, electricity is so darn cheap that running a heat pump (air) is cheaper than running a natural gas furnace. If my house was smaller.)
I also put in a wood stove and light the fire when it's extremely cold and I'm home for awhile. Wood is carbon neutral. (The carbon released is carbon that the tree captured while it was alive.) (Although some people like to point out that burning wood releases particulates and other nasty pollutants.)
It's just the basic carbon cycle: plants remove carbon from the air as they grow, and return it as they decay, (or burn in a natural fire.)
I'm thinking about a community run portal to try and match person to the correct advice. E.g. someone with investments should find advice about how to invest to help. People interested in acting locally should find environmental groups to join. Activist people .
Google is fine if you know what you are looking for, but I have come across a few different times where I didn't know the correct terminology. E.g. I wanted to find something like a community energy group in my local area, but I didn't know what it was called.
I'm not currently sure how to do this. Some form of search engine where people put in information about themselves is a possibility. Or an advanced directory.
Nothing. There's no action I can take on an individual scale that matters one whit. The best I could hope for would be to gain some mythical moral high ground for lecturing others on their consumption.
If I had to guess, it would be voting for Sanders in the primary, whenever that comes around to my state. Even then, I'm not hopeful it will meaningfully change the politics in the United States. The structure of the senate, electoral college, and judiciary enshrined in the constitution, combined with the almost unimaginable difficulty of amending that system, and the prevalent first-past-the-post voting system means my country will remain at the mercy of the coal-burning red-meat eating minority currently in charge.
I went through data recently that convinced me that US Citizens should plant 20 trees a year (or pay a service). I'm hunting for a good service that does that, that isn't just planting trees that would already be planted anyway.
The "historical primary energy consumption from 1950 through 2018" chart shows you how the US energy sources has grown over the years.
#2 - I don't drink milk.
#3 - I don't drink alcohol.
#4 - I bike to work.
via negativa!
Energy producers (e.g. a wind farm, or a huge converted coal power station which burns "waste" forests) get credits for producing renewable energy which they can sell. A company like bulb buys those credits, and so long as they buy credits which add up to the amount of power their residential customers use they can say they're 100% green.
If most UK residential customers used a green provider there wouldn't be enough credits and that could in theory drive change but in practice most UK residential customers pay their "incumbent" even though that's usually the most expensive and has no benefit whatsoever.
The actual supply of electricity to homes is by a boring but necessary natural monopoly supply company. They're the people who come out if a storm smashes the power lines.
They'd better be operational soon, because their production and delivery generated a bunch of emissions upfront - in China, presumably - that'll take years to compensate.
It's something to consider anyway.
I also think it can only be done through an international planned economy, seeing as capitalist nation states keep going to war against each other and prioritize short term gains in their competition with one another.
People in this thread want to feel like they save the world by buying an EV but that change is statistically insignificant (even if everyone on the planet bought an EV).
I fully agree with you that real change is going beyond our actual economy. The "micro-step" changes that we are taking right now with solar and EVs are almost useless.
Even worse, as you say it creates two class of people based on money: The ones that can afford the green-washed toys and the ones that cannot and are now blamed for "polluting".
Real change is going beyond single occupancy car for example, or reducing over population on the planet. But those are mainly economical changes that nobody wants to conveniently talk about because those are actually hard. Buying solar panels, walking to work or taking shorter showers are conveniently nitpicked easy metrics for feel-good effect.
I already linked this somewhere else but the only thing that makes me feel sane about the environment is socialist organizing. we have some people in the bay area, check it out: https://www.socialistalternative.org/2019/08/08/climate-cata...
I moved out of the State of California to a jurisdiction without insane environmental laws, and now pay 0.08c/kwh, which more or less makes solar irrelevant. I bought a really nice, big house that was extremely affordable and enjoy a great quality of life. I use the extra money I make that isn't spent on electric bills and taxes to enrich the local economy, which helps lift people out of poverty and promotes innovation.
I'm installing air filters to remove the smoke particles from the fires and I'm building a hydrogen cooled suit for 50+ degree days, once I have the prototype working I can completely isolate myself from the environment to the point I could take a stroll in the middle of a forest fire.
At this point it's being comfortable for the next 50 years until industrial society collapses.
> This was due to a decrease in coal plants
> Further, renewables were up 6% in 2019
> Emissions rose from buildings [2.2%], industry [0.6%], and other parts of the economy
I'm supposed to take delivery of solar panels at my house today. It shouldn't be long before they're operational. I'm so excited!
To people in general, what improvements are you making (not your country, but you personally)? Not something you've always done - what's your latest new eco-project, big or small?