Today the Supreme Court essentially said the EPA couldn't regulate power plants, thereby gutting a significant enforcement mechanism and tool in the toolbox. Joe Mancion thwarted Biden's ambitious climate agenda. The problem is getting worse, not better. Time is running out. This planet's physically dying. One wants to help, but not using plastic straws sure ain't the answer. What to do??
Population control happens naturally with good social policies. The US already has a below replacement birth rate. As does nearly any other country with a high standard of living.
Nice pablum but not true. Maybe that makes you feel better? Coral reefs are dead. Fish infested with micro plastics . Polar ice caps melting. 6th great extinction. Forests aflame the planet over. Yet humans continue to proliferate. We’re not doing the dying, we’re doing the murdering.
Really hard as an individual. As you said, just using reusables is pretty small. I would say find an organization devoted to climate justice and volunteer. Demand your elected tepresentatives act.
None of those things mean the planet is dying. Earth will continue to exist no matter how bad we fuck it up.
Sure, earth will exist. Mass extinctions, mass famine, huge areas uninhabitable. But planet itself still here. Great future. Seemingly unrelated but not, promote education for girls. In every culture, every religion, when women are educated they have fewer children. Unchecked population growth is a major driver of climate change.
Start in your own backyard, ie start local. It’s the only way things get done. Throwing money to the top to federal bureaucrats just doesn’t work, period. Many of these climate agenda groups are funded by big oil partnerships which is a huge red flag for me. I just don’t buy the line that they simply feel bad about pollution and suddenly want to help. They are more interested in tax cuts and creating false scarcity.
I, for one, am looking forward to a dense venus like atmosphere with temperatures akin to that of an oven...
Nothing local can help soon enough. That's a fools errand. This needs to be tackled on the national level (actually, a world level, but the US has had the power to influence change at the world level for the last 75 years).
I agree this needs to be addressed on the global level, but I'm not sure how much influence the US has. Especially when considering China pollutes almost twice as much as the US (at least in CO2 emissions anyway.). China, with more than 10,065 million tons of CO2 released. United States, with 5,416 million tons of CO2 India, with 2,654 million tons of CO2 Russia, with 1,711 million tons of CO2 Japan, 1,162 million tons of CO2 Germany, 759 million tons of CO2 Iran, 720 million tons of CO2 South Korea, 659 million tons of CO2 Saudi Arabia, 621 million tons of CO2 Indonesia, 615 million tons of CO2
Yeah, it's not a local or individual issue by any means. And it was a great trick the corporations pulled to push recycling and make it look like it was an individual problem. Recycle the harmful plastics that we pump out. If not, we're all screwed. Stop pumping out the plastics, fucker! But they won't. They just shift the blame to consumers.
My preference would be to institute a carbon tax (or pollution tax, really) and dividend. We have a board who audits manufacturing all over the world and institutes a tax on items which are not manufactured responsibly. For other countries this would probably be on a country wide level rather than at the item level. So items from China would get a 10% additional tax, for example. Or maybe 40%. Whatever it works out to. The tax is then handed out to the people of the country the item is manufactured in via a progressive dividend. The environmental board can handle audits and distributing of the funds. Raise the tax until it's no longer cost effective to manufacture those items irresponsibility. The dividend would be progressive in nature, so anybody making under $250k would make more money on the dividend than the additional tax would cost them. It would then be more profitable for manufacturers to make products in a sustainable way. I would agree with you that we may not have the influence to pull this off for long. Our politics over the last 30 years or so have been so isolationist that we may be losing the leverage to pull this off if we don't get shit in order soon.
Major Breakthrough Puts Dream of Unlimited, Clean Nuclear Fusion Energy Within Reach This is what I'm hoping can give us a big boost in tackling climate change.
The only and best answer I see is some sort of carbon capture technology that becomes affordable and works.
If we all just went cold turkey on carbon fuels, the earth would bounce back and find equilibrium. We will never be able to go back to the way it was before industrialization though. Edit: That's just my non-scientific opinion and why I think fusion is our best bet. Not that it could ever happen.