Every country has its climate change activists, some of them militant like the extinction rebellion in the UK or the greennewdealers in the US
What exactly do they want us to do?
Live life like in the pre industrial revolution times. Everything is so interconnected in our lives, so how exactly are we expected to untangle our modern lives from everything around us that pollutes?
Simple examples please that will actually make a difference.
Simple examples? Phase in a tax on oil products (of the order of several hundred percent) so that the price to the consumer reflects the true cost, including environmental impact. Then the market will have the appropriate economic incentives to develop clean energy technology. A similar phased-in tax for animal food products, cattle produce a vast amount of methane.
Militant?
Well, the first thing one can do is not to deny that it’s happening. Second, this Wikipedia article mentions specific things one can do at an individual level to mitigate climate change. Obviously, though, what’s more important is what is done at a national or global level.
As in any kind of political movement, climate change has its extremist activists, and in my view, they do the world no favors by associating solid science with their extremist lunacy. It’s exactly that kind of extremism that allows climate change deniers to claim that the “real intent” is to create wealth transfer to poorer nations, or that the proposed solutions would return us all to a pre-industrial stone age.
What should we do that makes a difference? Basically, be aware that climate change is already having huge effects on the planet (the current heat waves in Europe and many parts of North America, stronger storms, more extreme droughts in some areas and more extreme rains and flooding in others) that are only going to get worse, and act accordingly. “Act accordingly” means more things than I could possibly list, but includes supporting and funding clean energy initiatives like wind, solar, and nuclear electric power, driving efficient cars (not necessarily electric or even hybrid, but does everyone with a gigantic Ford F-150 actually need one?), and just generally being conscious of one’s carbon footprint.
I, for one, as an example, live a perfectly comfortable lifestyle while having a carbon footprint that I’m sure is far lower than that of most Americans. The reasons: popular support for nuclear power, which provides more than half of all power in this province, much of the rest being hydroelectric; driving a fuel-efficient car; running an efficient air conditioner; doing a minimum of traveling either in terms of driving or flying; greatly reducing my consumption of meat products like red meat that have direct and indirect environmental impacts and aren’t healthy anyway; supporting programs to educate the public about climate change, and so on. A huge difference can be made if people just understood the nature of the problem and some simple things they could do to reduce their carbon emissions.
The UK recently went two weeks without any of its coal plants on the national grid. It was all renewable energy sources. Um, er, well not quite.
Okay, anyway, their grid capacity in general is now half renewables. With that percentage to increase greatly.
And the UK is sort of behind the times in Europe. Germany, Spain, etc. are doing better.
And none of these countries are heading into a new stone age. Quite the contrary. They are becoming more efficient and more reliant on domestic sources which will help their economy in the long run.
The technology is rapidly advancing. This idea of going back to the stone age is absurd. I cannot comprehend why someone would think that.
Well, pretty much everything the US is doing right now? Do something else. There are thousands of different things that could mitigate climate change that have zero to do with “go back to preindustrial times”; virtually none of them is being advanced in the US, particularly by the current federal government.
This really doesn’t belong in General Questions, maybe IMHO or Great Debates.
Control. It is all about control. Controlling your behavior to fit their world view of what you should be doing. And that will always be a moving target. The expectations will change and never be enough. Climate change activists want to be like a world wide Home Owners Association. Managing your behavior. A little change will never be enough.
The important issues, like all the ocean going ships belching out tons of low quality fuel, because they can’t be regulated, are ignored. If everyone in the world had an electric car it would not make a dent in the carbon contribution of these ships. So we ship the raw materials half way around the world, have poor people turn them into shoes, and then ship them back. And no one is concerned about this.
We must look the other way and regulate your behavior. Because you are the one killing the planet. Don’t you feel bad?
Who is this nefarious “they”? The Illuminati? The Freemasons? Some other secret society, the ones that faked the moon landing? :rolleyes:
Wait, what? The problem is all about unregulated shipping? And no one cares?
How about some facts? The biggest global source of emissions at 25% is electricity and heat production, and the worst offenders are coal-fired power plants. The transportation sector contributes 14%, most of it gasoline and diesel. Shipping contributes between 2.2 to 2.5% of the global total, so it’s not insignificant, but far from the biggest factor. Whereas cars and truck emissions worldwide actually produce the biggest net impacts on climate when accounted for in terms of both CO2 emissions and absence of compensating aeorosols. Shipping emissions in that same graph are almost negligible.
Also, shipping emissions, which you claim can’t be regulated, are in fact being addressed by the UN’s International Maritime Organization.
How about first acknowledging that there is no one magic-bullet solution that will fix everything. Secondarily to that, also acknowledge that just because something isn’t a magic-bullet solution, it doesn’t mean it isn’t a valuable tool for addressing the problem. Failure to realize these things is why activists on both sides of the fence go completely bonkers.
It has to be mentioned, after many past discussions the thing one should be aware is that a lot of the arguments like this one are coming from misunderstandings and omissions from very unsavory information sources. In fact the talk about allowing some increase in temperature to no more than higher than 2 degrees Celsius from the start of the industrial revolution is precisely because we could not go cold turkey from using fossil fuels.
So, there is already an acknowledgement by most serious activists that while the change should take place, it can be incremental. And untangling our lives from pollution is not an impossible thing, as it was shown in the past when dealing with phosphates in rivers and lakes, controlling acid rain and removing ozone layer depletion gases. (It has to be noticed also that a lot of contrarian media declared in the past that economical ruin could follow if we took care of our pollution)
One bit that shows how a lot is missed specially by the contrarian media:
(How much solar would it take to power the US.)
Now, for sure only one source like solar will not do the whole job, but once we do realize that then we will add wind power, geothermic and even nuclear power to that mix then one can be cautiously optimistic.
Changing our habits will take a long long time. In any case taxing our use of fossil fuels now, in the hope that it will generate industry interest in other sustainable fuels will result in increased use of fossil fuels in order to generate the large scale technology for bon fossil fuels ie increase our carbon emissions short term. For eg the factories required to build solar panels will be running off the coal powered grids for a long time.
Why dont we stop unnecessary activities that use a lot of fuel and resources. Here is a list
Olympics
Wimbledon
Ryders cup
World cup sports
Super bowl
Glastonbury and other musical festivals
Fireworks on new years eve
Formula one racing
I doubt that even the most hardened of climate change activist will support this.
My emphasis - what’s so resource-intensive about fireworks?
But yeah, end all of those, I’ll happily support that.
I am a climate change activist (though not militant) and what I want:
I finally stopped using oil myself in 2007 or 2014 depending on how you count. I live today in a large luxurious house (solar panels, heat pumps, the works) but my carbon and emission footprint is a small fraction of what it was back when I lived in a small apartment. (I ride the diesel bus, and I buy food packaged in oil based plastic, etc.etc. all that would not be the case if I had a say in that.)
I very much don’t believe we should go back to the stone age or live in caves or stop “unnecessary activities”. The exact opposite in fact. We live in the stone age today. Better technology will fix emissions, raise living standards and make us all happy. I want people to want better tech, then to make better tech and then to switch to using better tech.
Regression to pre-industrial or prehistoric technology levels is a strawman argument by those who don’t want to change anything. No rational[sup]1[/sup] climate change activist advocates those ideas.
There are three things that, if we do them, will reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses enough to forestall drastic changes in the Earth’s climate. They’re all big changes and will not be easy to do. But only one of them will actually make a big difference in how you live from day to day.
None of those requires we stop having large events like the Olympics. Or to regress to pre-industrial tech. The main obstacle to making these changes is that too many people have an economic stake in not doing them.
[sup]1[/sup] This is not to say there aren’t irrational climate change activists who may have some ideas along these lines.
If you ignore the whole “flying/shipping thousands of tons worth of shit around the world for entertainment” thing, formula 1 power units are the most efficient in the world. Greater than 50%. Even better than big powerplants.
Moved to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Not anywhere near to a complete list of “unnecessary activities that use a lot of fuel and resources.” It mostly seems to include entertainment types that you, personally, are not interested in. You might also include, say, movies and TV shows, going out for restaurant meals or even fast food, vacation travel, and lots of other stuff.
Some would support almost anything, but I doubt that even if you eliminated all the activities you mention it would be more than a blip in energy savings vs. autos, planes, air conditioning, heating, lighting, and all the other things that contribute to increasing carbon dioxide.
I suspect that pre-industrial tech, if engaged in by our current population levels, might make matters worse, not better. Imagine all humans currently living on the planet keeping themselves warm and cooking with wood and peat fires. Wood and renewable peat have their place, and careful use of them can be part of the long term solution – but having everyone abruptly switch to this would cause the forests to disappear in no time, and choke everyone anywhere near the cities on the particulates while at it. And as dtilque says this is not what anyone serious is recommending.
We need to go on in order to get out of this mess that we’re in, not back. In some ways and some areas the results of going on may look like the results of going back – setting things up so that more people can get to work and stores by walking, for instance. In other ways and other areas they may wind up looking like nothing we’ve ever seen before – really good rooftop solar combined with really good and compact batteries, for instance; the tech is heading that way though it’s not there yet.
And as jjakucyk said we’re not going to solve this with One Perfect Button, Push This And Everything’ll Be Fine. We need a whole lot of multiple different solutions, sized and adapted to different locations, different needs, different availability of sun, wind, water, geothermal, etc.
What can you do now? Cut down on your individual excess use some, yes. No one bit will solve the problem, or even help significantly; but adding up billions of individual bits can make a very large difference. (What specifically you can cut down on without messing yourself up I’d have to know a lot more about you to have any idea about. Most of us can do, and/or are already doing, some things. And it isn’t only a matter of doing without – often it’s a matter of doing differently.) And vote. Vote for people who admit there’s a problem. Vote for people who make decisions based on available science, and who support funding and improving the science instead of choking it. Vote locally for individual projects that fit the specific location, and against ones that look likely to do further damage.
Transporting the racecars and other equipment is only half the carbon problem. All the spectators and the catering to them contribute the other half. Probably more than half.