Lead by example. Everyone reading this can go full wind and solar. Can stop driving or drastically cut it down (move closer, use public transport, work remote, etc). We can all grow food in our backyards, or living room, we can all participate in local garden coops etc. We can all refuse to take part in wars, buying new cell phones every year, wearing synthetic fibers that lead to microplastics, etc.
If we, the ones who know and care dont take action today, by example, who will?
Que excuses in 1, 2, 3...
Telling people to change their lifestyle to fight climate change is the environmental equivalent of telling people to diet and exercise to lose weight. On one hand, it's obviously true, but on the other hand we have decades and decades of proof that requiring individual willpower to make societal-wide change is a failed proposition.
Large scale change is only possible with government and technological advancement, e.g. electric vehicle adoption is in some ways accelerating faster than expected, because as battery prices have come down, people have realized that electric vehicles are better in nearly every way. Better storage technologies are also making large-scale renewable energy sources more feasible.
So yes, it's a good idea to drive less and put solar panels on your roof, but let's not pretend that the requisite number of people will "follow your example" if it's too onerous for them to do so.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food#whe...
The point is, we can probably have best of both worlds if we accept lifestyle change (IMO simple life close to nature is an improvement, not degradation) where we enjoy the benefits of technology, but not being dependent on it.
Think living in a village, spending very little, eating non processed, locally grown food, working remotely, driving a car maybe a couple of times per month to visit friends and do some shopping and that’s it.
I’d like to do that not because I feel responsible for climate change, inequality or whatever, but for personal security, longevity, and quality of life reasons.
Edit: side effects of this lifestyle are less co2, less pollution, resilient local economy and much more.
Yes, the individual is not separate from society.
You cannot separate climate change from your "personal security, longevity, and quality of life". They all depend on the climate not changing.
And yes, you are in a trap. You are unable to escape your conditioning. You could live the way you want right now. It will be hard, but you can do it. Lead by example and all that....
Trank you
> be domesticated
Fuck that. That's possibly the most condescending and demeaning way you could have phrased it. But I'm assuming you knew that and did it intentionally.
Standards of living are always increasing because of people's incorrect belief that everyone must live like a king.
Quality of living or life as it were, is more about making sure that whatever standard you live at is providing the best quality it can offer for that life.
You are seeking a higher 'quality' of life, through increasing your standard of living. This WILL result in a higher quality of life, provided you have all the necessary funds to support it. Absolutely. BUT, it comes at costs that you and others will not always see or understand immediately or even as fast as might be preferred on even slower scales.
Meanwhile, if you instead just sought a higher quality of life only, you would be likely be fine with some things being at a slightly lower standard. Such as using transit more often, instead of driving everywhere. You don't have to not own a vehicle; you just have to not drive it needlessly. Make sense?
Yes, I realize that reduces the convenience factor of the vehicle, and yes I realize that transit is often terrible... but the latter is often because it has to compete with the former. Not just in regards to road space, but also personal space. So I admit that there are things that need to be fixed on that side as well. Separate cabins within transit train systems would be a good start I think.
Either or, the fact remains that many of us are able to find ways to get around in society and do things that you do as well. We just don't pollute as much. We live just as well in some ways, maybe not as well in others. But overall we have a roof over our heads, food in our bellies, and half decent clothes at best covering us up. (Disregarding the homeless problem of course... 1 problem at a time...)
So anyways, the main point remains. Quality of life is more important than whatever standard of living you think you prefer to live at; because ultimately if your standard of living isn't giving you the quality you seek, then it's not worth it.
A massive "downgrade" in living is coming regardless of the money you hoard. Maybe not for your kids, but most probably for your grandkids. Even in the short term, looks like a recession is coming based on mortgage rates hitting 5%.
I appreciate the concern and care you have for your children, but setting them up with such a high standard of living will only lead to them suffering.
And you might call my lifestyle a downgrade. That is what everyone keeps telling me.
Yes. Can you tell me more about your set up and what you do to minimize your foot print and consumption?
I live in a minivan on $2600 per month and still manage to save money. But I still. feel like I am not doing enough. I would like to get rid of my van altogether one day and just have all my belongings in a modified push cart. Kinda of like this guy but without the goats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U54HRmglYEA
EDIT: I see that people might be thinking that I said this all sarcastically because of the down votes. But what I said is all true. That is how I live right now. And yes, I feel like I am not doing enough because I appreciate the calamity that our actions are causing.
FWIW, we can build lifestyles that are ecologically harmonious and still have a high standard of living. One example (from the 1970's) is Village Homes in Davis CA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes It's nicer than most suburbs, and it grows food, collects rainwater, etc.
Here's a group that have a tried-and-true system for ecologically harmonious farming: http://growbiointensive.org/grow_main.html Their system uses about 5000 square feet per person, provides a nutritionally complete diet, and increases topsoil volume and fertility over time.
Here's a fellow with a complete manual for small-scale alcohol fuel production integrated into (Permaculture) organic farms. http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/node/277 You can grow your own carbon-neutral fuel, convert ICE cars and other engines to run on it, and stop using fossil fuel, w/o expensive and hard-to-dispose of batteries. Alcohol exhaust is non-toxic. You can make it out of almost anything with starch or sugar in it. (Old donut dough, bakery scraps, food waste, etc.) The atoms in the fuel come from air and water, so you are basically exporting stored sunlight from your farm and keeping all the nutrients and minerals and such. The leftovers from making alcohol can be fed to livestock (yeast, eh? It's protein. The leftovers are a better feed than the initial, uh, stuff!)
Like this in regards to solar that just popped up on my radar today?
https://www.wral.com/rooftop-solar-rate-changes-could-cast-l...
" NC Capitol NC Capitol Rooftop solar rate changes could cast long shadow over industry, climate change Tags: solar, NC Utilities Commission, utility bills, NCCapitol, Duke Energy, house & home Posted March 25, 2022 6:22 p.m. EDT Updated March 26, 2022 8:41 a.m. EDT
By Laura Leslie, WRAL Capitol Bureau Chief
Raleigh homeowners Gary and Jane Smith are very concerned about climate change. They added a solar array in 2019 to help reduce their carbon footprint.
"There was a tax credit and a rebate from Duke, and it began to make financial sense to put the solar panels on," Gary Smith said.
The panels frequently make more energy than the Smiths need. Duke buys it back at full retail price. It’s called net metering.
But state law says that has to change by 2027.
"The worst case scenario that we could potentially walk into is a complete erosion of this concept called net metering," said Matt Abele with the NC Sustainable Energy Association (NCSEA). "Obviously, we would love to continue down the path of net metering as it currently exists here in North Carolina. But unfortunately, that's just not the reality of how it's playing out."
NCSEA is one of the groups that negotiated the deal with Duke Energy late last year. It will reduce what the utility pays for rooftop solar power during most daylight hours. And it will add a minimum bill for homeowners with solar panels."
So while we try to change individually, the corporations will see a chance to profit. Duke Energy had a 12% net profit margin with a gross profit of $4.4 Billion in December 2021.
I would say voicing your opinion that these utility companies should publicly owned would be a good start.
Your power bill is more than just generation costs. It's also distribution AND providing power 24/7, which household solar (without storage) does NOT do.
Suppose that your power company charges $0.50/KwH at peak time. They pay less than $0.50/KwH to other power generators, so why should they pay that to someone with rooftop solar?
Note that solar actually doesn't line up with demand all that well. (Most panels are oriented for maximum power production, which peaks too early in the day.)
https://twitter.com/StefLhermitte/status/1507397236849876992
These companies are concerned about losing profit, because shareholders. And they actively fight against solar whenever they can because one solar uses is a loss to them. And they use the propaganda you reiterate to believe their sad story.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/13/solar-power-...
https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2021/12/20/fl...
Why should they pay to time-shift your energy production?
Having previously invested in Duke Energy (but not currently directly invested in them), that gross profit figure seemed dramatically wrong. Because it is.
For the quarter ending (not the month of) Dec 2021, Duke Energy had a gross revenue of $6.2B, with a cost of revenue of $3.6B, for a gross profit (for the quarter) of $2.7B (figures are correct but seem incorrect due to rounding).
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DUK/duke-energy/gr...
Duke Energy annual gross profit for 2021 was $18.137B, a 4.49% increase from 2020.
https://wraltechwire.com/2022/02/10/duke-energy-ceo-q4-cappe...
"For the year, the company reported profit of $3.91 billion, or $4.94 per share. Revenue was reported as $25.1 billion."
Profit, that is money left over. Can you explain how stating a companies profit is cherry picking?
That’s not at all what gross profit is, nor is their GP for 2021 that high.
In rough terms: Gross profit is revenue minus cost of revenue. Operating income is gross profit minus operating expenses. Pretax profit is OI minus financing and other costs and is much closer to “after all expenses (except taxes)”.
Further, their financial statements show their gross profit for 2021 to be $12.1B with a taxable income of $3.8B. (Both the yahoo link above and WSJ agree: https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/DUK/financials/annual... (For WSJ, take gross revenue and subtract COGS ex-D&A to get to GP))
In other states (look up what happened in Nevada), rules have been changed that massively rebalance the economy in favor of not getting rooftop solar.
I agree with some of the other comments here about renewables sometimes causing harm through their production / lifecycle. Our best bet is the first “R”: Reduce.
Let's be realistic. Only 100 companies responsible for 71% global emissions.
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
To make as little impact as possible you should use as little resources as possible, so you should always choose cheapest, most artificial, mass produced versions of everything, including food, never travel, work as little as possible and only remotely. Basically be poor or at least act poor in every aspect of your life. Wear cheapest clothes and don't buy a new pair until they literally fall apart to the point that parts of you are sticking out that are illegal to stick out.
You might say that it's not a healthy way to live. That's even better, the sooner you die, the less resources you'll use. Don't breed of course.
If you are afraid you might have trouble sticking to your resolutions, then donate all of your wealth to something environmental and just move out of US into some poor country. It will do the bulk of your impact saving for you.
Further, this line of thinking - that you need to sacrifice your lifestyle in order to save the planet - is IMO one of if not the major reason we haven’t made progress on addressing climate change to date. Plainly put, people tend to be short term selfish, even often at the expense of their own long term interests, and they tend to not want to change their behavior / habits.
We should instead focus on the technological progress that we need to make in order to be able to not only maintain our current lifestyles but possibly have them be better (eg a Tesla is a better car, a heat pump is more comfortable than a furnace, an induction stove boils water faster and has more precise control, etc). To be clear, most of this isn’t technological invention it’s implementation - a lot and a lot of implementation.
Economy got us into this mess. Economy needs to get us out.
Climate change would be already solved if somebody figured out how the richest could earn more money when the energy is more expensive rather than when it is cheaper.
Billionaires would singlehandedly legislate all the necessary laws that would make energy as expensive as it really is to our planet. An our livestyles would change against our selfish preference. You wouldn't fly abroad for vacation if it costed more than your annual salary.
People in the developed world would need to be much poorer in relative terms to save the planet from global warming.
Tradeable right for emitting CO2 are great mechanism, because they let rich get richer by driving up the price of CO2 and the high price changes behaviors of energy consumers, producers and whole economy.
A focus on this “punitive” side of things - that we need to pay for our transgressions through a dramatically reduced lifestyle - is just going to ensure that we drive straight off the cliff.
And yes, the economy is going to need to get us out of this. We need to make sure that the incentives are properly structured for the majority of the transformation to happen via the distributed market mechanisms vs being centrally planned.
What you describe is called asceticism, it has a long and storied history with significant contributions to the long-term cultural stability of humankind, and American culture basically just hasn’t been around long enough to develop it yet.
I don't think that's true. Leitmotif of history of humankind is the exploitation of available resources to the boundaries of reason and beyond.
Please research solar and wind before switching, though. Until we have solved the problem of energy storage, in many cases, solar and wind actually tend to increase pollution, because they both rely upon polluting raw materials for both themselves and their batteries and need backup power, which to this day means gas.
That is unless you find yourself with a good problem set in which e.g. you only need energy while the sun is out (AC in the summer, maybe, or perhaps warming up water for your early evening shower?) or while there is wind (no example from the top of my head, but I'm sure there are good ones).
I think the two of you are talking past each other.
I do generally agree with you on your second point that it might not be the most productive action to take - for the time being it would probably be better for most people to focus on electrifying their homes paired with switching over to 100% clean energy (many utilities allow you to choose this option).
We have. Pumped hydro and batteries (iron flow is successfully being deployed commercially, but also lithium ion; Li-Ion prices continue to drop 6-12% per year.)
> because they both rely upon polluting raw materials for both themselves and their batteries and need backup power, which to this day means gas.
No.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-e...
> To pick a much tougher case, the “dark doldrums” of European winters are often claimed to need many months of battery storage for an all-renewable electrical grid. Yet top German and Belgian grid operators find Europe would need only one to two weeks of renewably derived backup fuel, providing just 6 percent of winter output — not a huge challenge.
> The bottom line is simple. Electrical grids can deal with much larger fractions of renewable energy at zero or modest cost, and this has been known for quite a while. Some European countries with little or no hydropower already get about half to three-fourths of their electricity from renewables with grid reliability better than in the U.S. It is time to get past the myths.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2012/sep/26/myt...
> The essence of the wind sceptics' case is that a scaling up in wind power will have to be "backed up" by massive investment in gas-fired open cycle turbine (OCGT) plants, which are cheap to build but considerably less efficient than the combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plants which deliver the vast majority of the UK's gas-fired electricity supply.
> Their arguments are not borne out by current statistics, however. If the sceptics were right, the recent windy conditions would have seen considerable use of less-efficient OCGT as wind input to the grid ramped up and down. In actual fact, during the entire June-September period, OCGTs and equally dirty oil-fired stations produced less than one hundredth of one percent of all UK electricity. In total they operated for a grand total of just nine half hour periods in the first 19 days of the month – and these periods had nothing to do with changing windspeeds.
Further references:
https://usa.oceana.org/renewable-energy-myth-vs-fact/
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy05osti/37657.pdf
Stick to writing web browsers.
That is itself the catastrophe.
The enlightenment was supposed to chase away the shadows. But as the radius of the light of science and technology expands so does the circumference of the darkness beyond.
We know more than ever how vulnerable we are. We know of many more horrible ways to die. We see ever more beautiful possible futures that may never be reached. It is the age old cost of knowledge since Eden. [1]
But take hope, the alternative is ignorance and total darkness. And there are worse things than monsters in the shadows. A greater concern is our own death-drive toward Thanatos - in that we _know_ what we are doing, throw caution to the wind, mock as naysayers and Cassandras anyone who points out the obvious trajectories into tragedy and blindly try to "push through" as if technology were a separate force in itself, rather than an extension of our being.
Humane technology (technological humanism) is the only antidote, but that requires putting people before profit, and saying that comes at a cost here. [2]
[1] I'm just channeling Mumford here
Let me add, that to embrace the darkness, instead of pushing it away, is where we will find answers. I wish more people could see how frenetic knowledge makes them. I found forgetting helps me the most.
And I agree with your [2].
Sorry I needed to re-read the post to think about your points.
There are alternatives but almost all are unpleasant. There is the "pharmaceutical society" of Huxley. Possibly humans can be molded into something resembling worker ants who will accept any degree of technological dominance and dependency without complaint if mentally modified. In some parts of the world where 1 in 3 people take a prescriptions such as Prozac we are probably some of the way there.
There is "ambient domination" of the kind of P.K Dick (Ubik), D. Potter's Cold Lazarus, or A. Niccol's GATTACA, where technological dominance has effectively disappeared, leaving a superficially pleasant and peaceful world, but its effects are soaked into a defeated "last man" culture of "post-humans".
Or there's endless Soviet style struggle, permanent technological war against invisible or virtual outside enemies, as in G. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four. N. Klein's idea of "crisis capitalism" outlines one form of the general case - and if you allow the conspiracy theorists their way "plandemics" (yes they say that), and even climate change are a vehicles for such eternal paternalism.
Those are just three off the top of my head. I'm not a sci-fi writer or "futurologist" (shudder), but I'm sure there's a dozen models for dystopias in which digital technology plays a major part, drugging, monitoring and propagandising humankind at behest of the few.
> It sounds like you consider the anxiety of the age a/the major problem (I agree)
Not so much, I think every age has had its deep anxieties, I grew up in the cold-war fever of the 80s when we did nuke drills at school and hid in the basement.
What is uniquely worrying about now is the wilful ignorance and acceptance. Anxiety is a symptom. What distinguishes anxiety from fear is that fear is about something, whereas anxiety is diffuse. People are choosing not to know about their world (retreat into amusement, comforting fake news etc), and celebrating their ignorance of technology as a form of magic. Despite doing that we still suffer the crippling effects of anomie, alienation, disconnection, and so on, but no longer have somethiing concrete to point to as the source. Under Marxism it was the Bourgeoisie, but today's "One Percet" don't cut it, being almost accidental villains/co-victims of invisible cybernetic currents.
> But is there really only one solution?
No certainly not. But I am foremost a scientist, and came late in life to social philosophy and psychology, so I favour answers that rely on human rationality and organisation (I realise that on HN there is huge cynicism toward that and lots of talk about how "dumb people are" and "what they really want is", and talk of "sheep following network effects". I think that kinda goes with an immature (pre-2013) entrepreneurial mindset.
Given an absence of hope for beneficent corporations or governments for me the only hope is a future in which people retake technology in some way. But exactly what that means is still something I am working out. Whoever solves that will not just improve the world, but get rich too. So far Gates. Zuckerberg et al have failed, because "scale" is something they put before purpose.
> there are other possibilities worth discussion.
Please check out digital vegan and humane technology as I'd love to talk about those other possibilities.
Yeah tech/money interests are part of it. I think the bigger part is lifestyle change. Most of the things that we would need to change have no better alternatives that can also support the current lifestyle. People are resistant to changing their personal actions.
Some of it is entirely unknown too. We can't switch to electric vehicles overnight, and EVs have environmental costs too. How do we solve that? And what does a world without plastics look like?
We incrementally get better at it. For one thing, it should be possible to power any mining, manufacturing or recycling process with electricity.
I haven't heard that. Do you have a link?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/02/republica...
No amount of changing my lifestyle stops overfishing, pipeline leaks, or factory emissions.
My second biggest concern is the rapid loss of natural habitats and the concomitant loss of biodiversity.
Look at the convulsions we need to go through to address climate change politically, and realize that it is only one of maybe a thousand potential grave threats, each of which pits collective well-being against technological/monetary interests. Some may even struggle to be recognized as a threat (antibiotic overuse, microplastics).
It's a good time to be doomer.
[0] https://sacawa.net/documents/test.pdf