* Multifamily housing is much more energy efficient. Is it legal to build throughout your city, or does zoning prevent it?
* Is there good bicycle infrastructure so people don't have to drive for everything?
* Does your city still have expensive parking mandates that lock in car dependency? Get rid of those. They also get in the way of places becoming more walkable.
* This one hurts, but: eat less beef.
* Advocate for good transit as another way for people to get around without driving a personal vehicle.
* What can be done in your city/region to electrify heating for homes and businesses?
* What can your region do to build more renewable energy capacity?
Those are all things where even a few voices can sometimes make a difference.
If you want to see real progress on the climate, a few thousand people changing their daily habits is not enough. Governments need to take action and hold industry to account. That looks to be an increasingly unlikely event, but that doesn't justify taking ineffective action instead as a placebo.
It reminds me of the '90s when we are all told that recycling was necessary for saving the environment. Decades later, we'll still spending time sorting our garbage, despite evidence that no one wants recyclable waste, it still ends up dumped somewhere, and it costs more money to handle. [1]
These are things that ordinary people without a lot of money or power can work on today in a country like, say, the US, where the federal government is in the hands of evil people and is not going to be doing much in terms of climate change in the near future.
The federal government may be a lost cause for the moment, but your city or state might provide an avenue to get some things done. Those things won't fix the whole problem, but they're still progress, and the connections you make while doing those things will be useful in future, bigger fights.
I agree: people can work on this individually. And it won't make a lick of difference.
How many items on this list require government action? How many require corporations' cooperation. What am I going to do, build the bike lanes myself as a hobby?
Exactly. That's why it's ineffective to evangelize this as individual effort. If you want to live in a multifamily home, they have to be zoned, funded, and built. That requires lobbying the government, moral rectitude.
Multifamily housing is generally cheaper in high land cost areas. It helps solve the housing shortage.
More bikes and transit and fewer cars means cleaner air and fewer traffic deaths.
Less fossil fuel usage in general means less pollution.
Cities that use land more efficiently tend to be more walkable, pleasant, and don't gobble up things like farmland or forests outside the city.
Come to think of it, less beef is probably better for your health, too.
Won't matter when it's 120 degrees F every day.
This can't be said enough. It simply cannot be said enough. It cuts right to the heart of how we view the world in the west: as autonomous, separate individuals, with no communal counterweight and certainly no model of power (some entities in the world have vastly more power than others) We assume that because our constitutions grant us equal rights or whatever, we all have equal responsibility and equal power.
But polluters, the biggest sources of emissions, have way more power and way, way less responsibility. And yet we continue to tell ourselves to focus on our own individual behaviors to combat global heating. The effects are real, but tiny, and our elites continue getting away with our annihilation.
For those in the US, I'd add lobbying your congresspeople to support the revival of the Energy Permitting Reform Act. It's something that didn't make it across the line before the end of the last congress, but basically, making it easier to bring new generation capacity on the electrical grid disproportionately benefits renewables, because they make up the vast majority of wattage waiting in the queue. As we've seen by the explosion of deployment in less regulated grids (Texas, and most of the world), the economics now favor solar+storage and wind, we just have to let people build as much of it as they want to.
* Plant more trees
Is it the "far right"? Or is it that technology and fertility have actually lowered the risks substantially?
Solar plus batteries, right now, seems to be the cheapest form of new energy. Given that, you would expect most of new energy to be "green". (And if you look at the stats, that seems to be coming true.)
Electrification of transportation is happening quickly. China is cranking out cheap electric cars that are generally better than ICE cars of yesterday. And the world seems to be transitioning.
And fertility rates are dropping everywhere. So the amount of people we will need to support in the future continues to decline.
I've mostly stopped worrying about climate change. Not because I don't think it is real. But because I think we are clearly on the path to mitigating the worse scenarios.
Yes, it is. They're committed to "Every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out". [0]. They keep saying this to us, and we don't seem to believe them. I like your optimism, and I'm not denying a lot of what you're saying -- renewables fast becoming the cheapest energy. But that's not deterring people: the far right here in the US are about to dismantle the government's legal rationale for regulating emissions. They're laughing at us right now, doing victory laps. They're telling polluters to take the gloves off.
These people are terrorists, extremists, and they're in charge of the world's single most powerful economy and military. They're obsessed with domination, with doing violence to the weak and the poor and to nature. It's pure Freudian thanatos.
It's just hard to take your position.
[0] https://theecologist.org/2023/dec/05/every-molecule-hydrocar...
It's thus, yes, the correct impression for readers.
The Heritage Foundation (Project 2025, far-right, anti-climate) is working with the Heartland Institute (spreading climate science denial across UK / EU)
They do not like EU rules that hold US firms accountable to climate laws.
https://www.desmog.com/2026/02/10/donald-trump-uk-eu-maga-sl...
I just meant that I don't think the lack of concern is necessarily due to them. I think it may have more to do with the reality that we are already on a good path.
Bill Gates famously wrote a "note" about it last year: https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/accelerate-energy-innovation...
This evidence based article published in one of the worlds top scientific journals comes to the opposite conclusion.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/china https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi... https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
It's true that the West did peak in 2007 (as did South America, India, and Africa), but Asia's emissions are so massive that they more than make up for all of the reductions of the rest of the world. That last link I posted makes clear how big the problem with China is.
As a 52 year old who never believed we would take climate change seriously (and who is more convinced than ever I was correct as society actually regresses on this issue) I did what I had to do -- I purposefully didn't have children.
Good luck to those of you who did.
This ain't my problem. I'll be dead (or close enough) when the shit fully hits the fan and won't have doomed any offspring to the upcoming migration/resources wars
But never the zillionaires, they've worked haaaard and deserve everything!
In one aspect, the autocratic rule of Xi Jinping has a positive: "We're going to cover the whole mountain with solar panels, and force electrification of cars." and there's no busybodies protesting and threatening to vote his party out of office.
Not because the alternative is so great, but because Trump is so horrible that it's not even a question. We really don't need someone who doesn't even acknowledge climate change in charge of the world's biggest economy.
As for what "we" collectively can do... let's assume you are speaking of areas of research. We may need to focus on researching adaptation techniques for the areas that are going to be the hardest hit, or that have the fewest resources to cope. It's a sad topic but it may be needed. Assume the worst, hope for the best, and plan for what you can.
So still some hope I think! And it’s possible the populist “dumb dumb bricks” crew will decline in popularity when the inevitable lack of tangible improvements continues. Though since we are dealing with dumb dumb it may take a while
The idea that this current apocalyptic prediction is expected to be better than reality is... not comforting.
I don't know what to do.