Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

[andrewstuart]

It seems to me that governments can be counted out of taking the leadership needed to solve this within 12 years. If anything they seem to want to act against solving this issue in some cases.

So what can we do so our children don't live in some ghastly hothouse world?

The scientists have told us its our final chance.... not to start within 12 years, but solve it within 12 years.

I feel like the young people need to take charge of the world because the older generations have had their chance and not fixed it.

Maybe corporations are the ones who can be pressured to take the lead.

[tobr]

Fundamentally it is a political problem, not a technological problem. We need high carbon taxes, we need to end fossil fuel subsidies, and we probably need to change our economic system to something that addresses the tragedy of the commons.

But we’ve seen in recent years how technology can influence politics. I’d quote a tweet from Tristan Harris from the other day [1]:

> In an hypothetical world, if Facebook were re-designed entirely into a global coordination tool for billions of people to take the most meaningful and significant steps to fight climate change -- what would it look like?

1: https://twitter.com/tristanharris/status/1049177712227573760

[pauldjohnston]

Well, having done some research into this recently, the tech world has something it can do right now. Switch to sustainably powered Cloud and move to renewably powered/offset Data Centres.

e.g. Google (100% carbon neutral), Azure (100% offset), AWS (Oregon, Montreal, Ireland, Frankfurt regions are 100% carbon neutral)

Cloud/Data Centres emit around 2% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (bet you didn't know that).

There is also research showing that we're going to increase our Data Centre usage by 5x in the next 7 years.

So change that 2% to something much much higher... because that much compute requires that much more energy and we don't have the worldwide renewables infrastructure at scale to cope with the extra capacity.

https://bit.ly/2024wp

https://www.change.org/p/sustainable-servers-by-2024

* Sign the pledge please * (if you agree with it of course)

It's almost the simplest thing we can easily do, and it should put pressure on tech companies to switch to renewables.

If we believe the tech industry is an innovator and a force for good, why not start with the means of production - the energy industry?

Sign up... switch... go!

PS I wrote the whitepaper with Anne Currie - we have not been paid for the work and was entirely voluntary. I used to work for AWS up until June this year.

[aecurrie]

Agreed, this is one for commercial votes ($). We're a rich industry that uses loads of electricity, most of which is fossil-fueled. We need to choose to run our servers 100% carbon neutral and that would make way more difference than individual action. That will get more spending on renewable generation. Our industry has the money and we can personally just choose to host somewhere carbon neutral (as mentioned, Google, Azure or the 4 sustainable AWS regions: Oregon, Montreal, Ireland, Frankfurt right now)

[antoineMoPa]

I wonder what percentage of CO2 comes from programmers commuting to work.

[decasteve]

A couple of others:

Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/umweltschutz/?country=en

OVH also has an energy efficient data centre in Quebec powered by a hydroelectric dam.

[aoner]

Thanks! Just read the white paper. Super interesting. Just signed the petition

[ed_balls]

> Cloud/Data Centres emit around 2% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Is it just from electricity or the total operation? What about manufacturing and hardware replacements/maintenance? Is significant?

[cletus]

So I'm honestly not as concerned about this as I once was.

Don't get me wrong: the climate is going to change, arguably we're in a mass extinction event already and people aren't going to suddenly start acting in the collective long term welfare of humanity.

One of the things I like about futurism is the levelheaded optimism and pragmatism you tend to get. And I'll call out Isaac Arthur as a well-known example of this.

Think there's too many people? You can easily show that the world could easily produce enough to feed a population 10 times what we have now in the very near future, thanks largely to automation.

Think we're dumping too much CO2 into the atmosphere? We no doubt are but that problem basically goes away immediately if we ever get economic fusion power. Even if we don't, the plummetting cost of wind and solar may solve that anyway (by "solve" I mean that as soon as non-fossil fuel power production is cheaper than fossil fuels it becomes economic to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and turn into hydrocarbons).

Too expensive to get to space? Eventually the cost of this will go down to dollars per kilogram.

Worried about how we'll produce all that power? When getting stuff into orbit is sufficiently cheap it'll become economic to put solar collectors in orbit and beam energy back to Earth.

And all you need for this kind of optimism is the kind of technology we're widely expected to have this century.

So it's kind of sad that a lot of the larger fauna is doomed but you're not going to change people's appetites for rhino horns, fish bladders, tiger oil or pangolin dishes. Then again, maybe future genetics can restore some or all of those species.

The Earth has also been a lot warmer than it is now so I have trouble believing the doomsday scenarios of runaway climate change that'll turn the Earth into Venus just because the Earth has been here for 4-5 billion years, has been hotter than now and hasn't become Venus yet. We also seem to have a pretty poor history of predictions when it comes to climate change too.

Fundamentally this also seems like a "betting with the Mayans" type scenario too. Either the doomsayers are right and we're screwed. If so, you'll be right but who cares? We're still screwed. You're probably better off just hoping things will work out because, honestly, I think there's a pretty decent chance they will.

[lozenge]

Ah, techno utopianism. It ignores reality in many ways, here are two.

First, if we have clean energy, are we going to shut down fossil fuel plants that have already been built? If not, then fossil fuel will just become cheaper as demand drops, making burning fossil fuels attractive again. Countries currently plan to reduce their emissions, but none are planning to reduce their fossil fuel exports. They just hope it will show up on another country's emissions balance sheet.

Even if we did develop super cheap clean energy, that would only reduce emissions in the future. Past emissions hang around for centuries and contribute to warm the planet (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhou...). We would need to pay huge amounts to sequester that CO2 and I don't see anybody volunteering to foot that bill.

This paper summarises both issues well: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Both are just aspects of the fundamental issue - although technological solutions perhaps could be developed, there is no political or economic will to do so, and no indication that will change.

[netjiro]

> The Earth has also been a lot warmer than it is now

Key here is rate of change, and what humans can survive. We are changing the climate many many times faster than ever before. Nature does not have the time to adapt. And the wars, famines and mass displacements coming from ecosystem collapse is like nothing we've seen in human history. Think we have a problem with a few million migrants? Try a billion or two!

P-T Extinction event "The Great Dying" took on the order of 100 000 years to elevate CO2 and still killed off 96% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrates. The largest mass extinction ever(?) We're going strong in that direction over a few hundred years.

And a very hot earth will have large areas that are not survivable by humans, by traditional crops and food animals, and so on. Storms and floods massively more powerful than we see today.

Frankly, how can you not be afraid of that future? It's very likely your descendants won't survive it.

[boomlinde]

> Fundamentally this also seems like a "betting with the Mayans" type scenario too. Either the doomsayers are right and we're screwed. If so, you'll be right but who cares? We're still screwed. You're probably better off just hoping things will work out because, honestly, I think there's a pretty decent chance they will.

I think you are fundamentally missing the point of the question. The question is what we can do to prevent climate change, not how we should align our beliefs not to worry about it.

> So it's kind of sad that a lot of the larger fauna is doomed but you're not going to change people's appetites for rhino horns, fish bladders, tiger oil or pangolin dishes. Then again, maybe future genetics can restore some or all of those species.

This perfectly exemplifies my problem with this attitude.

You call this "levelheaded optimism", but you're basically throwing your hands up hoping for someone to apply some sort of sci-fi solution to the problem at some point in the future. Calling for Jurassic Park to restore extinct species is the opposite of levelheaded. To say that there's nothing we can do about it now is really just thinly veiled defeatism and not at all optimistic.

Meanwhile, for example, the demand and supply of rhino horns is decreasing overall, not because people are content with speculating about how someone else in a future generation will solve the problem, but because deliberate action is being taken to change the attitudes towards rhino horns, campaigning to educate people about the medicinal myths surrounding them, to destroy smuggled horns and to protect the animals from poachers.

If the people engaging in these actions had just laid back, convinced that someone will be able to beam rhinos from a parallel universe by 2100AD anyway, they'd probably have been extinct by now.

[baddox]

I think the biggest counter to that optimism is that while those necessary technologies are being developed, civilization will perhaps be going through major disruption that causes lots of suffering and death. Humans will almost certainly not go extinct, and may even get some great technological advancements out of the ordeal, but at the scale of human lives there will be a lot of suffering.

[brylie]

While I appreciate your optimism, it comes at the risk of failing to take personal action. The general sentiment is that people are uninterested in, or incapable of, making meaningful lifestyle changes , and that some future technological developments will transcend the Earth's carrying capacity to sustain us while cleaning up our collective mess. While there may be some shades of truth to that sentiment, it is still within our power and responsibility to live sustainably.

[quickthrower2]

> The Earth has also been a lot warmer than it is now so I have trouble believing the doomsday scenarios of runaway climate change that'll turn the Earth into Venus just because the Earth has been here for 4-5 billion years, has been hotter than now and hasn't become Venus yet. We also seem to have a pretty poor history of predictions when it comes to climate change too.

This is disingenuous because humans have been around say 2M years, and those hot climate years were >5M years ago. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record).

We don't need Earth to have Venus conditions for it to be a big problem for us.

[annadane]

And before someone replies with "How can you possibly say that", you can do both - be optimistic about the future and also change your own personal habits and become educated on the topic in general anyway.

[Carpetsmoker]

Sounds very optimistic, but also depends on a lot of "if"s and "maybe"s. Fact is that while a lot of hard problems do get solved by new innovations, not all of them are, and systems do fail catastrophically sometimes.

Who knows what the future will bring. I have little doubt that the planet and human species will survive in the longer term, but the ecological, human, and economic costs will be huge. It's a stupid gamble: the benefits to ignoring climate change are small, and the dangers are huge.

It bothers me to no end that even in Europe many parties that acknowledge that climate change is real and a serious problem (basically everyone, only the US/GOP is a mainstream source of climate denial) kind of ignore it because "zomg the economy might shrink 0.001% the next quarter". It's spectacularly short-sighted, and it's one of several examples where our democratic system is failing massively in addressing serious problems.

[WhompingWindows]

You don't have to turn the Earth into Venus. You just have to raise the Earth from 283 Kelvin to 285 Kelvin, and you'll get massive flooding and ice melt which technology won't be able to wave away. Look at hurricanes today, they are deadly, where is the tech saving us from them?

[sshine]

> Too expensive to get to space? Eventually the cost of this will go down to dollars per kilogram.

You speak of this as if space migration is going to be scalable.

[drjesusphd]

> Worried about how we'll produce all that power? When getting stuff into orbit is sufficiently cheap it'll become economic to put solar collectors in orbit and beam energy back to Earth.

I used to be a big believer in this. But, from a pure waste heat standpoint, if we ever have to worry about having enough area in Earth's surface for solar panels, we have much bigger problems.

We are nowhere near that point now, but given a small but steady exponential growth in the energy supply, we'll get there in a couple hundred years.

However, space based solar power could help with intermittently of solar/wind if battery tech doesn't outpace enonomic orbital launches.

[vjsc]

In my opinion, the large corporations behind fossil fuels have too much of an economic clout. The governments around the world are dependent on them for a considerable amount of their respective national economy. So yes you are right about government not doing much about this.

Ultimately, unless there is a relatively quick mass extinction event, no government is going to be bothered into action. Climate change and the devastation it's going to cause, is going to play out slowly over the years. The most affected would be the poorest of the world. They are going to die first. The rich will have enough resources to be able to not only survive, but also thrive on these events as new business opportunities are going to be created.

Ultimately, Earth maybe a very different place 100 years from now, but the rich of today are surely going to have their descendants living quite comfortably.

The only thing an individual can do is to strive to get as rich as possible, because that is the only security that's going to save you and your family in the bleak future that lies ahead of us.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Large corporations have too much economic clout because our economic and political thinking is pre-rational and not fit for purpose.

You can't do rational planning on a planetary scale when your political frameworks are explicitly tailored to maximise short-term resource accumulation without limit for a micro-minority.

We're not going to win this one without a revolution - not just the usual violent class swap that lops off one aristocracy to make room for another, but a moral and cultural revolution in how we plan for the future as a species.

I'm not optimistic, because IMO it's too big a challenge, and we literally don't have the brains or the culture for it.

But I'm open to being surprised.

[simonh]

In democracies we can't all just throw up our hands and blame it on the political class and big business. If the ordinary people of the developed world really wanted something done about it, as a higher priority than anything else, there is no gun held to their heads preventing them from voting for that. We are all benefiting hugely from the cheap energy reaped from fossil fuels, whether we like it or not, and in the main the fact is we like it.

Imagining that 'large corporations' are reaping all the benefits and could bear all the cost of weaning the global economy off fossil fuels is jaw droppingly naive. The massive costs of weaning ourselves off fossil fuels would bear down heavily on all of us, and especially the poor and the third world. Can we imagine China elevating hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the last 30 years without fossil fuels?

I'm no climate change denier, far from it. You're quite right that the costs will be severe, even catastrophic, but there is no easy answer to this.

[jsingleton]

Depressingly pragmatic. While building resilience is certainly worthwhile, we can still fix this and should try.

I think individual actions can add up, particularly when we use the magnifying power of tech. I wrote a lot on this recently and I can't fit it all in a comment so I'll just link to it.

https://unop.uk/how-to-help-with-a-big-global-problem-as-a-t...

It boils down to a three step process:

- Understand

- Organise

- Amplify

There's a post for each and more to come.

[raquo]

Well, as comfortable as you will be able get with global wars, refugees, food shortages, etc. going on.

Governments and countries are not very stable under these conditions. Probably shouldn't expect your wealth to crisis proof your life in this scenario. Won't hurt but we'll all be much better off organizing to avoid this future.

[growlist]

Or migrate northwards, or upwards in elevation (latter might not work as well due to decreased precipitation). UK's latitude and natural moat are looking like pretty useful attributes, at the expense of losing considerable amounts of low lying coastline.

[daralthus]

Sorry for painting a negative picture, but when poor countries are destabilised they create conflict for otherwise stable western countries too. Simply because it creates an opportunity for bad actors to gain strategic power.

For example, without becoming too political, it seems a plausible strategy for Russia to try and control migration from the east to gain influence over the EU.

Depending on the hyperbole, similar conflicts could become war scenarios where your wealth would not be enough to protect you.

Considering this, getting rich is certainly a good advice, but might not be enough. We need to work on de escalating the situation even without any altruistic reasons, if you want to maximise your personal survival chances.

[blablabla123]

> In my opinion, the large corporations behind fossil fuels have too much of an economic clout.

It's easy to blame the big corporations. It's also about the governments facilitating alternatives and about eventually, literally every person buying into that.

[wtmt]

Don't wait for others to do things or take decisions. That's going to be an uphill battle if you really want changes quicker. Start with yourself, and then push others (including friends, family, colleagues, corporations, politicians, etc.). A lot can be done if people take up changes on their own instead of waiting for politicians or corporations or "those other polluting countries" to "just do something" about it.

Here are a few things you can do yourself and encourage those you know personally to follow:

1. Eliminate/reduce throwing or wasting food. Don't buy anything you wouldn't finish eating.

2. Eat only plants, or make plants the largest part of your meals while eliminating or reducing the consumption of animal products. Make sure you read up on nutrition and/or join some support groups.

3. Walk as much as possible and avoid fossil fuel based transport for yourself. Or try cycling. If necessary, take public transport.

4. Promote and use renewable sources of energy, like solar and/or wind, wherever possible.

5. Have fewer children or delay have children a little bit. This may have some other side effects depending on where you live and how the population demographic looks like.

If you think of yourself as committed to this cause and yet you see issues or barriers with the above, that's only a sign of how these things seem impossible to others who don't care enough. Work with (and on) yourself first.

Don't be shocked or surprised: you will see a whole lot of apathy all around you. People will even try to discourage you from doing anything and try to convince you that whatever you do just doesn't matter. Stop looking at them or listening to them.

[patagonia]

I used to bike everywhere. It cost me personally. I showed up late sometimes. Wet. Disheveled. Sometimes didn’t go because the distance or weather.

While I’m all behind the “be the change you want to see” method, I sincerely believe that it can actually take you out of the fight.

While I’m bicycling on the way to a meeting someone is there a few mins early / or gets two meeting in, and they are able to lobby more. Or do more. And have more of an impact.

Or said allegorically, we need more sheep in wolve’s clothing to take on the wolves in sheep’s clothing.

[unit91]

> Have fewer children...think of yourself as committed to this cause...People will even try to discourage you...Stop looking at them or listening to them.

This sounds a lot like a cult religion to me.

[Waterluvian]

I like polar bears so it's sad to see those go. It will be disturbing to see coastal cities founded next to sunken cities. Storms are fun but only when they're occasional. I already miss the insects.

We worry about losing languages, cultures, artwork to the unyielding entropic horror named time. Not because we have a pragmatic need for them. But the future is scary when you can't bring the past with you. My culture is my security blanket.

Maybe my kids are going to grow up in a world not defined by technology but by the change in daily regimen of existence. Humans adapt really well to just about anything, so I bet my kids will feel right at home. They'll roll their eyes on cue when I insist that the future wasn't supposed to be like this.

I've always kind of wondered how someone as liberal as me can possibly turn into an old curmudgeon. Maybe this is how. Maybe I'll be disquieted not by being overrun by the creep of new gadgets, but by looking around and seeing a completely foreign anthroposphere.

[CalRobert]

Well, we _could_ build a world where the majority of people:

* Live in a very well insulated flat in the city that isn't made of concrete

* Have meat and dairy only as a luxury item

* Use solar and wind power for your heat pump and AC

* Ride a bike or walk to work, or take electrically-powered public transport

* Use non-luxurious sea transport to go on foreign holidays

we'd be about there. But boiling today's young people for the sake of cheap gas has proven more politically feasible.

[JBReefer]

People on HN seem to believe the default state of humanity is driving everywhere and living in the suburbs, when that's only true in particular parts of the US for the last 80 years or so. A frequent question I see about not owning a car is "well how could I possibly get groceries otherwise??" The only way we can address our individual footprint and our isolation crisis is to build real towns and cities again, but I'm doubtful.

Don't have a lot of hope for this one, people are willing to tell others to change their patterns but will rarely change their own. That way, you get woke points but don't have to do anything. Plus that Tesla looks GREAT in the driveway, especially when you consider that climate change is all everyone else's fault.

[josho]

> Maybe corporations are the ones who can be pressured to take the lead.

Yes. They absolutely will. But only after they have the right incentives. Those incentives can be created over night by having governments put in place a carbon tax.

It gets even worse. If a large group of people reduced their energy consumption to help climate change it has the consequence of reducing demand and therefore energy costs will come down. That will make green energy cost uncompetitive and slow down the transition to green fuels.

This change really does need to come from government. So get politically involved.

[DyslexicAtheist]

We are past the point where we we can fix this with discussions & civil discourse. Not to say that we shouldn't try. But a leaflet campaigns and discussions aren't going to reduce emissions. The best solution would be not to have kids (too late for me) and adopt instead if you must, not to own a car, try to own as little as you can (it will make you happier too). Plant stuff, pick up gardening, go offline and go outside to reconnect with where you come from. Anything that contains batteries is probably toxic. Most shit we don't need we just are brainwashed into thinking we do.

An interesting read is Technological Slavery The Collected Writings Of Theodore J. Kaczynski, A.k.a. ' The Unabomber' which has been mentioned in Bill Joy's famous post "Why the Future doesn't Need Us" and my guess is that despite his infamy he might be heralded as some kind of "hero" in 50-100 years time.

Humans and society is in deeper in trouble than we think and stand "no chance of being saved". If you are of sound mental state, I suggest Thomas Ligotti's "The Conspiracy against the Human Race"

https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/

https://archive.org/details/TechnologicalSlaveryTheCollected...

https://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-against-Human-Race-Contriv...

[wrinkl3]

Personally, I don't feel like me rescinding my earthly possessions and refusing to procreate will do anything to help anyone, other than maybe quench my own conscience.

That whole approach is referred to as hair-shirt environmentalism, I believe. Bruce Sterling once observed that if you're trying to combat Climate Change solely by minimizing your individual impact, the logical conclusion would be to stop living altogether.

[marmaduke]

from the Joy article,

> Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control.

doesn't that describe our financial markets already?

[haihaibye]

>> The best solution would be not to have kids

Many countries use immigration to stop population falling. The increased co2 from 1 person moving from a developing -> developed country would pretty much cancel this out.

[revel]

Practically speaking, the single biggest area of low hanging fruit is clean shipping. Right now the largest 15 cargo ships emit more greenhouse gasses than all the cars on the road combined. The US could take the lead on this issue by modifying the Jones Act, a peculiar piece of legislation that forces maritime commerce between US territories to use US ships with an American crew. If the Jones Act were modified to include incentives for zero emission ships it would heavily incentive investment in this critical area. This single change in legislation would reduce the cost of goods and services in Hawaii and Puerto Rico, increase trade, and provide a powerful economic carrot to reduce carbon emissions.

[jonstewart]

Give money to Democratic candidates challenging Republican incumbents, right now.

If we believe in evidence-based science, then all evidence points to Republicans being anti-science. You don't have to be a committed lifelong Democrat to see that the current Republican party is fighting climate change efforts at every turn and needs to be displaced in order for political progress on the issue to happen.

[seymour333]

What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe? Start an economical catastrophe.

We need to immediately, and meaningfully, move away from oil, gas, and other carbon heavy industries in any way that we presently have the means to do so.

If everyone who is presently in the market for a new vehicle could afford to buy an electric one, we'd probably be in better shape. If every household could put solar panels and take a load off of the grid, we would be moving in the right direction.

The problem is these technologies are new, and expensive, and they can't be effective at solving the problem they set out to solve without mass adoption.

Mass adoption won't even _begin_ to happen until the average person can pick up a used Model 3 for around $10k. Where populations heavily use mopeds and motorcycles we need a flood of affordable electric alternatives. Both of those scenarios are at least a decade out.

If we need to solve this in 12 years we're screwed. Best bet is to move somewhere cold and inland. Then at least you can be somewhat comfortable while the whole thing goes down. Although the process of moving the world's economy away from oil (to whatever extent that can be achieved while still producing plastics etc.) is going to make life miserable no matter where you are.

[jsingleton]

I wrote a trilogy of long posts on this topic very recently so I'll just link to that.

https://unop.uk/how-to-help-with-a-big-global-problem-as-a-t...

In summary, it's not somebody else's problem. It's our problem and we need to take responsibility and fix it. We already have all the core technology required to solve this and we just need to make it happen. Everyone can help, particularly the talented crowd on here.

[super-serial]

I've mentioned it here before, but my favorite is crushing and spreading olivine rocks: http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli...

It's a natural process and we just have to mine as many rocks as we dig up oil. We just need to catch up for the last few hundred years where we only dug up oil and no rocks. Just US $200 billion per year to offset all of humanity's carbon emissions. If I was a billionaire I'd already have started developing robots to mine and grind up rocks for accelerated weathering.

[codingdave]

Don't forget that the small things add up -- small things on their own won't change the world, but they change the lifestyle of one family at a time, and it helps both a little in the short run, and more as children raised in climate-aware homes grow up. If everyone starts making small changes, it will change demand, which changes markets, which changes politics.

Some small examples:

Walk to the grocery store every other day instead of driving once a week.

Use mass transit. Recycle. Use products made from renewable, recyclable materials.

Go ahead and put up a solar electric system, even if the costs aren't perfect, nor is the tech, or even always the carbon offset.... but it moves demand in the right direction and sends a message.

Turn down your heat in the winter, and your AC in the summer. Turn lights off when you leave a room. Be aware of your energy burn. As another commenter said, don't write or use cryptocurrency.

Produce and buy local goods.

And for cryin' out loud -- VOTE, for people who will be on the right side of this issue.

[crispinb]

The collapse of the dynamically stable climate on which agricultural civilisation is founded is vanishingly unlikely to be prevented at this stage - no-one has ever even outlined, let alone detailed, even one remotely plausible political route from business-as-usual to where we need to be. As others here note, it's fundamentally a problem of world politics, howevermuch a proportion of HN readership may wish to suck at the corner of their technological comfort blanket. As we have no meaningful world polity, it's unsolvable. Our civilisation will almost certainly descend into chaos & war as the early effects of climate collapse roll in this century. Look at the convulsions flowing from a tiny trickle of refugees into Europe in 2015-16. That was barely a taste of what's to come.

It's hardly surprising - nothing in H. Sapiens' constellation of seemingly unique traits (cognitive flexibility, sociality, cultural transmission through language etc) equips it to make collective decisions on a global scale. It's kind of telling that just as it's becoming most blindingly obvious that all our major challenges are planetary, there is a general retreat from commitment to global decision-making. We're not adequate to to the task. This isn't anyone's fault - it's just biology.

[fallingfrog]

To solve this crisis in 12 years would require overthrowing the government of every country with an industrial base and replacing them with much more progressive people. You can try if you want but I don't see it happening. As far as actually convincing people of global warming, the older generation will absolutely never believe it no matter how much evidence you present. They are truly lost. Change will only be possible after they have died. This is going to be a sad, tragic period in human history, and nobody in the future is going to understand why we made such self destructive decisions. It will pass though. Hundreds of years from now the climate will slowly begin to return to normal. Despite the fact that the fight is hopeless, though, I'll continue to try.

[DanielBMarkham]

The definition of terms becomes critical here. "Catastrophe" is an alarming word. If 25% of the human population died, it would certainly be a catastrophe. But the planet would still be around. Humans would still be around. A thousand years from now, it might be remembered as "that really bad time"

Planet-scale change is truly Brobdingnagian. Anything in your life is insignificant compared to that. You have to frame this discussion before you even begin. Are you talking about stuff you can do that you can see the result of? Or are you talking about stuff you can do that will make things look different a thousand years from now? The first one is doable. The second one? We've had tens of billions of people live on this planet. I don't know of any that managed that. Maybe a dozen or so?

If I wanted to enact change, I would create acceptance criteria before I started. Am I in this to feel good? To change my local government to do X? And so forth. If your goal is something like "I want the world to be a better place!" then that's a great goal, but it's a feeling, not a goal. Goals you can measure. Goals have numbers and measurement criteria.

If you just want to be upset and vent, fine. That's a perfectly fine thing to do. After all, things suck. A lot of things suck. It's actually a more honest and healthy goal than any of the others I've discussed. We are a social species. We adapt through conversation and persuasion.

[Tempest1981]

We should focus our efforts where there is the most bang per buck:

- Cleaner energy for developing countries, esp. China and India. Pay for their solar panels, to prevent new coal plants.

- Research clean energy technology — solar, wind, hydroelectric. Drive maximum efficiency, and minimum cost.

- Raise awareness worldwide. Keep talking.

This documentary was informative: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/an_inconvenient_sequel_trut... (2017, 10 years after the original)

2018: https://www.eco-business.com/news/coal-is-in-decline-globall...

[marmaduke]

Related question: where could one find jobs related to climate change efforts? beyond walking, eating less meat, etc I might want to put my working hours in as well, but no idea who/what to look for.