[smartmic]

It is important to keep reminding ourselves that climate change is a real problem for humanity and that each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions. It is a problem that requires solutions, but implementing these solutions involves so much inertia that it can sometimes be painful.

And let's contrast that with the AI hype. It's more the opposite, a kind of solution to problems we didn't really have, but are now being persuaded we do. It would be sensible to invest an equal share of the resources currently being pumped into AI with uncertain outcomes into the complex issue of climate change. And, no, AI won't solve it; unfortunately, it only makes it worse.

[mullingitover]

> each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.

I have to disagree here.

This idea of a consumer-level personal responsibility for the fossil energy industry's externalized costs is a lot like the plastic producers shifting blame for waste by saying that it's the consumers' fault for not recycling. It's transparent blame-shifting.

The fossil energy industry pulls the carbon out of the ground and distributes it globally. Then it buys and sells politicians and, through mass media, votes, to ensure they maintain the industry's hegemony.

You only have to look at the full-blown slide of the US into a despotic petrostate to understand the causes of the climate crisis.

[vaylian]

Hank Green did a good short video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvAznN_MPWQ

TL;DW: It is important that individuals show that there is a real problem and that they perform actions that address the problem. This demonstrative behaviour leads to social dynamics where more people feel encouraged to perform actions and to drive larger change.

You need to start somewhere.

[Mordisquitos]

I agree with you that consumer-level personal responsibility is absolutely not the way to go. To a certain extent I try to non-dogmatically "do the right thing", but I know it's simply a cute hobby.

The only solution is systemic. The incentives need to be in order for businesses and consumers to do the right thing not because it is the right thing, but because it's cheaper or more convenient. That can only be implemented via legislation and investment of public resources, hence from the political level.

And what determines whether the politicians in charge are ones who will implement the changes needed to mitigate the problem, rather than ones who will keep alive the system which is intensifying it? Well, we're back to square one: each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.

[rtpg]

While arguments can be made at the futility of individual action against a system action, it’s not like companies are making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash. There are consumers of what is being produced!

Society’s choices and lifestyles are the cause of fossil fuel consumption, at a very high level. The plastic bag exists because it has users.

There are quantitative arguments against many silly consumer-focused initiatives. In aggregate tho companies aren’t burning fossil fuels for fun. Burning fossil fuels costs money, and a lot of people would rather not spend that money!!

[throw310822]

I never understood this. The companies sold you fossil fuel, you burnt it and got benefits out of it: transportation, energy, heating, constructions, fertilizers and food, etc. You want them to pay for the negative consequences of your fossil fuel consumption while you keep all the generated benefits?

[SJC_Hacker]

Its a case of prisoner's dilemma. Individuals making the proposed lifestyle changes in order to make a genuine dent in AGW amount to jumping on the tracks in order to stop a freight train.

This is the one issue where I feel some sympathy with the right. I hate "Virtue signaling" about as much as they do. I'm sorry, but if you are going to snap at people over eating beef, while you fly/drive all over the country/world unnecessarily, you are absolute full of shyte.

[leptons]

I gave up driving in the 1990s because I knew back then the situation was untenable for the climate. I chose to try to live a life that contributes less to the destruction of life as we know it. Life without a car has brought sacrifice, but I'm glad I did it. No, my single sacrifice won't save the planet, because far too many people are addicted to cheap energy, and free movement. Blaming the oil industry is like blaming the cows because you ate too much cheese. Now there are electric cars, but unless you are charging it up every day from solar/battery (along with your house), then you're still only helping a little.

Suppose the fossil fuel lobby disappeared tomorrow, along with government subsidies and any hegemony you think exists - people are still going to be addicted to cheap energy. Only when the forms of energy they currently rely on really starts costing what it would cost to save the planet from climate change will you and others realize that every decision has a consequence. You want to drive 2+ hours in traffic every day? That has a real cost for the environment to do it with fossil fuel.

Maybe try changing your life so that you don't spend 2+ hours every day driving around in traffic. That's what I did, I got a job locally, got rid of my car, and started riding my bike everywhere. If it was far, I planned ahead take the bus/train. I do this in Los Angeles, since the 1990s - not exactly a bike-centric place to live, but it is entirely possible to do. Of course it's more difficult to do this in rural areas, but maybe that should be the exception.

[beloch]

Corporations do whatever is in their financial interest, provided it is legal. They're neither good or evil. (If they were DnD characters their alignment would be "lawful greedy".) What is legal is determined by governments, who are elected by individuals like you.

This is why people need to be reminded of the impact and causes of climate change. You can't just say, "Oil corporations are evil" and absolve yourself of responsibility. That's how nothing gets done. Corporations are not going to stop being "evil" of their own accord. They're going to obey the laws and regulations set forth by the governments they operate under.

Americans elected a president who openly campaigned on bringing back coal and said, "Drill baby drill!". Oil executives made campaign donations but, ultimately, this is the fault of Americans. They're not educated enough and they tolerate too much money in their politics. Scapegoating oil companies does nothing to solve these problems.

[tech_ken]

I hear what you're saying but also have lately felt a lot of frustration with this framing. I definitely agree that large corporations share an outsized portion of the blame; they have misled and misdirected us past the brink of crisis in pursuit of profit. And as you point out, one of the special cruelties of their system is that it prearranges individual consumer options so that we have the illusion of choice, but ultimately wind up complicit no matter what we choose. Thus its incumbent on us (collectively) to make a decision that's not on the menu we've been handed. But (critically) its still going to be individuals making that choice. It's not enough to merely topple Big Oil at a social scale, we will also have to give up our F-450s and sprawling SFH tracts with four car garages. It's not necessarily fair, and it's not necessarily our fault, but it's still our responsibility (because it's ultimately our future that's at risk).

[rapnie]

It is still everyone's responsibility, just not to equal extent. That petrolstate also rose to power through democratic elections.

[marginalia_nu]

Problem is that we if we all stand in a circle and point fingers at the next guy who is to blame, that doesn't really move us toward any sort of solutions.

In fact the reason it's so easy to find others to blame is that the responsibility is a shared one. Holding consumers responsible doesn't absolve producers, or governments for their participation. All have to be held responsible for their actions. That's the only way forward.

[cassepipe]

Most people would agree that drug dealers hold more moral responsibility for delivering a product that they know is highly addictive but on the other hand no one would absolve an addict of any responsibility. Even you think addiction is a illness, we still expect people to help themselves by deciding to get help/seek treatment to fight the addiction.

[conductr]

It’s government’s fault for not regulating it properly. You can’t give individuals choice and then blame them. Just like you can’t give industry the ability to mass produce these things that are so inherently bad for current but especially future humans. Only governments are responsible for playing that kind of long game.

[EGreg]

It’s actually a lot more systematic than you think: https://magarshak.com/blog/government-and-industry-distract-...

[j2kun]

> consumer-level personal responsibility

Indeed, the biggest personal responsibility is to make this a top political priority when deciding who to elect. Nothing will change until we consistenly fire leaders who refuse to act decisively on this.

[Gud]

There is nothing g to “disagree” about. Of course systemic changes are required. But if the individual improve their actions it will have a meaningful impact too

[Synaesthesia]

Americans use a lot of power. Buying big houses means they have higher heating and cooling costs. All this makes a big difference.

[quantified]

If you drive a fossil fuel vehicle, you have chosen to buy into this. If you drive it 3 blocks when you could walk, you've chosen to go the way the fuel company wants you to. That's you.

Plastic is a bit different, you didn't choose the packaging. And you probably don't have the option to recycle anyway. Putting in a special bin doesn't change the fact that it's probably going to a landfill anyway.

Some of it's consumer level. Do what you can. Don't whatabout it.

[myrmidon]

Every industry ever is going to externalize all the costs you allow it to externalize.

The individual responsibility is to vote for representatives that prevent such externalization through regulation, and to stand behind such regulation even if it is slightly inconvenient (plastic drinking straws) or somewhat costly (gas, flights).

The biggest problem is that a significant part of the global population is not willing to make even the smallest sacrifice in lifestyle towards such a goal (=> this is often difficult to see if you are in a more left/green bubble, but i absolutely true of the average citizen).

We, as voters, have expressed so little care for climate and environment sustainability that politicians don't even bother catering towards that niche any more.

In the US there was an super obvious choice 25 years ago in the US between genuine, ambitious sustainability and some generic politician not even half as competent as his father, and we all saw the outcome; politicians since barely even bother pretending to be concerned about climate sustainability because voters just don't care.

[mmooss]

It's another claim of powerlessness, which is exactly what the 'fossil energy industry' wants people to say - it's demoralizing, paralyzing, and like any disinformation it's a distraction from actually doing something; now we're debating this stuff instead of doing something. So is the victim debate - who is at fault, assessing blame, etc.

Nobody, as a single human being, can accomplish much in any field. Every significant thing humanity does happens in large groups. The good news is, we are hardwired to work in groups - you see it all over, all the time. People naturally organize and work together; think of FOSS projects, for example. And that is what democracy is, and democracy is the most dynamic, effective, changeable method of government in human history.

Let's stop wasting time debating it and get to work. A simple thing to do is to reduce personal climate output. Again, you can't have much effect alone, but humans act together, and we all can do our part. That's why there isn't trash covering the streets - one person can't prevent that, but everyone is putting their garbage in the bin.

I am responsible for the consequences of my actions and words, and for my community - we all are, of course. The victim / blame perspective is the opposite of that - victimhood is a justification / rationalization for a lack of responsibility, for inaction. As anyone with experience of decent management knows, that is the last thing you do. The problem needs to be solved.

[femto]

Andrew Forrest, a well connected billionaire, puts the blame on a group of 1000 "captains of industry".

https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/inside-and...

[xnx]

I have to disagree here.

Companies would stop doing anything in the face of a unified boycott.

We love to blame companies, private equity, capitalism, government, anyone really. It's us. They lie to us because we want to be lied to.

[DonnyV]

The 2 biggest contributors to climate change are ...

- US Military

- Cargo Ships

You fix those 2 things and like 60% of pollution goes away.

[WhompingWindows]

If everyone chose to eat veggie burgers and seitan steaks instead of using beef, the climate's trajectory would immediately improve. For all the responsibility of industry, many individual world citizens could, and many have, changed their lifestyle due to the moral issue of climate-changing emissions.

[ctoth]

The concern about climate is well placed. Ripple et al. lay out a serious case that we may be closer to tipping cascades than models predict, with the Greenland Ice Sheet potentially vulnerable to tipping below 2°C warming, well before 2050.

But "invest an equal share of the resources currently being pumped into AI into climate" misidentifies the bottleneck. Marine cloud brightening could produce meaningful planetary cooling for roughly $5 billion per year at scale (NAS estimate). That's like what? 1% of what was spent on AI infrastructure last year?

The money exists. What doesn't exist is the political coordination to spend it.

The goddamn Alameda city council shut down a University of Washington MCB field test in 2024 because nobody told them it was happening on their property. Go look it up.

This's the actual bottleneck: governance, coordination, and political will, not capital.

When someone says "we should invest resources in X instead of Y," it's worth asking who "we" is and what mechanism they're proposing. AI investment is private capital chasing returns. You can't redirect it to climate by wishing. The implicit model, that Society has a budget and we're choosing wrong, assumes a resource allocation authority that doesn't exist. If you want to argue for creating one, that's a real position, but it should be stated openly rather than hidden inside "it would be sensible."

Also ... "AI won't solve it; it only makes it worse" is doing a ton of work! The energy consumption concern has real merit. But materials science, grid optimization, and climate modeling are direct climate contributions happening now. Google has saved energy in its datacenters ... using AI!

Blanket dismissal of an entire domain of capability isn't seriousness, it's pattern matching. (Ironically, there's a phrase for systems that produce plausible-sounding output by matching patterns without engaging with underlying structure. We're told to be worried about them.)

[MSFT_Edging]

> not capital

Capital, and by relation the system that centers the idea of Capital as a method for moving around resources is at the very center of this.

Since Capital follows near-term incentive, if the "pollute the world" path has a greater near-term incentive, that's where the market will follow. If a single member of the system goes for long-term incentive(not cooking the earth), other near-term incentive chasers will eat their lunch and remove a player.

The system itself is a tight feedback loop searching for local maxima, and the local max is often the most destructive. With chasing the local maxima, also comes profit and capital that influence the political system.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Marine cloud brightening could produce meaningful planetary cooling for roughly $5 billion per year at scale (NAS estimate).

Eh. Cloud brightening is a temporary hack, stops working as soon as you stop actively doing it, and isn't an alternative to switching away from fossil fuels. It's probably worth doing to push back the "ice melts and releases more carbon" thing but let's not confuse it with the extent of what needs to be done. You can't actually solve the problem for $5B/year.

> AI investment is private capital chasing returns.

Getting private capital to work for you is a good way to solve the problem. The real problem is politics.

The EV tax credits and the subsidies oil companies get were costing about the same amount of money, but we only got rid of one of them. Nuclear should cost less than fossil fuels, but we're told that fission is scary and Deepwater Horizon is nothing but spilled milk so the one with the much better environmental record has to be asymmetrically regulated into uncompetitiveness.

If we actually wanted to solve it we'd do the "carbon tax but 100% of the money gets sent back to the people as checks" thing, since then you're not screwing everyone because on average the check and the tax cancel out and corporations pay the tax too but only people get the check. Then everyone, but especially the heaviest users, would have the incentive to switch to alternative energy and more efficient vehicles etc., because everybody gets the same check but the people putting thousands of miles on non-hybrid panzers pay more in tax.

The "problem" is that it would actually work, which is highly objectionable to the oil industry and countries like Russia since it would cause their income to go away, hence politics.

[pendenthistory]

Cooling the planet is neither a technical nor financial problem. The problem is that environmentalists want this to be a moral issue. They already decided on the solution. If the solution is not environmental communism with them in power, they will not have it.

[yoyohello13]

Unfortunately, more people seems to care about getting AI to play SimCity than the environment.

Renewable energy technology is ready, right now today, to replace fossil fuels. All we have to do is start doing it, but the Oil lobby is just too strong apparently. There is no political will. I wish I was wrong, but I just don't see humanity pulling together to solve this one.

[SJC_Hacker]

> Renewable energy technology is ready, right now today, to replace fossil fuels. All we have to do is start doing it, but the Oil lobby is just too strong apparently. There is no political will. I wish I was wrong, but I just don't see humanity pulling together to solve this one.

Sorry, but its really not. Perhaps in some sectors such as ground transportation, but definitely not in air and sea transport and fertilizer production, and many industrial processes. At least not at scale, where would have to make massive lifestyle sacrifices which are not politically acceptable outside of extreme authoritarian states who have no reason to do this anyway.

[mym1990]

We are a planet of 8 billion people, interest will vary widely. Expecting everyone to swarm on the same issue at the same time is simply not how humanity has worked in the past. Innovation often happens because many people go different directions, testing what works and what doesn't. Getting AI to play SimCity may be a stepping stone to real life urban planning, or it may be nothing, who knows?

[candiddevmike]

If you're looking to experience a "climate change" simulator, kind of, the game Oxygen Not Included is an interesting chemistry sandbox where you need to balance things like O2, heat, food, etc in a "terrarium" of sorts. The parallels to climate change are similar to real life--most of the game ending problems you encounter are from short sighted thinking earlier on/kicking the can down the road.

[filoeleven]

If you're near Lake Powell, you could also visit it right now and compare it to what you remember. Not a simulator, just a pretty scary real thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCEJDU9_p4Q

[estimator7292]

Gotta love the cycle 200 heat death

[kelseyfrog]

I found Half-Earth Socialism: The Game[1] to be fun for quite a few playthroughs.

1. https://play.half.earth/

[beanshadow]

> And, no, AI won't solve it; unfortunately, it only makes it worse.

A conclusive argument for this still seems out of reach. AI does solve some problems, and it's not exactly clear which problems AI "only makes worse". It's not clear how much energy all of our AI systems will use, and while it's tempting to outright believe they'll simply use more and more, even that's not yet clear based on arguments presented.

[bayindirh]

> It's not clear how much energy all of our AI systems will use, and while it's tempting to outright believe they'll simply use more and more, even that's not yet clear based on arguments presented.

For the last 20 years, power consumption of HPC is increased per cubic inch as systems are miniaturized and density increased. The computing capacity increased more than the power use, but this doesn't mean we didn't invent more inefficient ways to undo significant part of that improvement.

It's same for AI. Cards like Groq and inference oriented hardware doesn't consume as power as training oriented cards, but this doesn't mean total power use will reduce. On the contrary. It'll increase exponentially. Considering AI companies doesn't care about efficiency yet means we're wasting tons of energy, too.

I'll not enter into the water consumption debacle, because open-loop systems waste enormous amounts of water.

All in all, we're wasting a lot of water and energy which would sustain large cities and large number of people.

with regards from your friendly HPC admin.

[bcrosby95]

Outside AI independently uncovering some energy breakthrough there is nothing it can do to help, only hurt. We already have a source of clean, cheap, unlimited energy, we aren't rolling it out the way we could and should because some rich people would rather have us on a subscription plan where we literally light our source of energy on fire so we have to keep coming back for more.

[pyrale]

> It's not clear how much energy all of our AI systems will use

Is it superior to zero?

Does AI replace existing, more costly energy use patterns to the extent that its own energy use is offset?

[thinkingtoilet]

Perhaps someday. For now, it amount of energy used to produce and run these models is astronomical. It may be the case AI is a net positive for the environment at some point, but as it stands that is nothing but speculation. The reality is it is making the situation worse.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

It's important to remember that in REALISTIC worse case emissions projections, by 2050 - we will have CO2 higher than levels seen in the last 10 million years - but there was a 500 million year period where CO2 levels were an order of magnitude higher than that - and there's NO WAY we're getting there without destroying civilization first, so there's no chance on current trajectories that we turn the planet into Venus.

The super danger zone is ~1000 PPM CO2 - where ocean chemistry changes. In worst case scenarios in 50-60 years, we could get there - but there's a lot of reason to believe we won't, and we DEFINITELY aren't getting there by 2050.

The graph the main source shows is cherry-picked. Look at this: https://co2coalition.org/facts/for-most-of-earths-history-it...

Saying we're on a "hothouse" trajectory plays into the Apocalypse / Earth Becomes Venus trope, which is so ridiculous for our lifetime even under the absolute worst case realistic scenarios.

[Lerc]

I agree to an extent that each of us contributes in a manner, but the manner that we contribute is not certain. A person who puts more effort into reducing their own personal climate impact could be doing worse than using the same effort to enact systemic change. It could be bailing water on a sinking ship instead of fixing the leak. The problem is you might not appear to be doing anything in isolation. Just spending that extra effort at work and sending the money earned to the ship patching people so they can get what they need would fix the problem better. If you choose bailing are you not just choosing something visible but ineffective over achieving the desired outcome but just being a boring taxpayer.

As for AI, to characterise it as a "solution to problems we didn't really have" is placing your opinion over others. They may be right or wrong about it but many AI proponents firmly believe that AI can provide solutions to real world problems that we definitely have. You may disagree about their potential effectiveness, and that's ok, but at least tolerate that people might have different ideas about how to make the world better.

[nostrademons]

The difference is emblematic of the difficulty in getting attention for climate mitigation. AI succeeds because you can sell a service to an individual human which will give them advantages over other humans. Climate change mitigation fails because you are trying to sell a service to humanity which will result in a better end state over some other hypothetical imagined future. Humans make decisions, not humanity, and many of them are pretty bad with both hypotheticals and imagination. It's no wonder that a product designed to make them do better at what they do, right now is more successful than one designed to make everybody do better than what would otherwise have resulted, 50-100 years in the future when they'll likely be dead.

Any kind of workable solution to large, societal-level problems needs to deal with the principal agent issue. Society doesn't actually exist; humanity doesn't actually exist. These are abstractions we use to label the behavior of individual people. You need to operate on the level of individual people to get any sort of outcome.

(FWIW, this is a major reason why concepts like markets, capitalism, democracy, rule of law, and federalism have been successful. They work by aligning incentives so that when one person takes an action that is good for themselves, they more-or-less end up benefitting the people around them too.)

[matthewdgreen]

We contribute to it 1% by the actions we take as individuals, and 99% by the leaders we select.

[belorn]

The major road blocks for solutions has been unchanged for the last decades. The same strategy talked about at the beginning of the 21st century still has the same problems, and while more people are aware of climate change, we are only further away from creating and implementing solutions.

Taking Europe as an example, the main strategy is still to use the combination of natural gas, biofuels created from farming corn, and renewables to enable electrification. This strategy lacks both scientific and political consensus among the people who believe in climate change. The result is that as strong one side of the same movement are pushing for it, the other side is also pushing against it. We see the exact same thing with the other major strategies involving tree planting and changes to the culture (diet).

[sho_hn]

Maybe we could ask AI!

https://chatgpt.com/share/698ce97b-4d54-8000-aecb-542ceecb00...

[Lerc]

But https://chatgpt.com/share/698cee2c-b8c4-800f-b3cb-fa8869f874...

[M95D]

> [...] every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.

I would like to note that the decisions we make at our jobs have the most impact.

[pjmlp]

Unfortunately it won't happen, as humanity rather nuke ourselves generating memes, while driving beverage from paper straws.

[j-krieger]

> that each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions

I‘ve travelled quite a bit and I find it hard to convince myself that I as a city dweller contribute any meaningful amount to pollution or waste. I‘ve seen rivers of trash flow directly into the ocean. The rich and wealthy pollute disproportionally in such a way that I don‘t think offloading the responsibility to the general public is fair.

[jacquesm]

The simple counterargument is that there many more of us than there are of them, so even if on an individual level we have less effect collectively we have much more.

[getnormality]

> It is important to keep reminding ourselves that climate change is a real problem for humanity and that each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.

Which decisions though? The decisions to hold back nuclear, NIMBY solar, or keep cheap Chinese EVs out of the hands of consumers have a much bigger impact than whether you leave the lights on. Freezing in place with our existing fossil fuel system and fearfully minimizing our consumption will at best only slightly slow our decline.

IMHO, we must rise above fearful, superstitious individual moralism and boldly apply ambitious zero carbon energy science, engineering and policy, including fission (to keep things going in dark winters) and possibly even geoengineering (pending extensive research and small-scale pilots).

We cannot afford continued reflexive, neurotic rejection of any deviation from the status quo as we approach these tipping points. Continuing exactly as we are is not safe, nor can we return to preindustrial society. We need to build zero carbon supply for the needs of civilization. Including the stuff that people are uncomfortable with out of ignorance.

We need a plan. Neurotic criticism of every realistic plan is not a plan.

We cannot afford a continued overhang of 1970s Boomer environmentalist sentimentalism. Scientific engineering of the future is needed, not ideological nostalgia for an idyllic past we can no longer return to.

AI may not do much good directly, but it has the salutary effect of making rich tech companies care about electrical supply and distribution, accelerating the learning curve towards cheap supply.

[razster]

As a human living on this planet, with roughly another 50 years left, I say we allow our actions to continue. We are unable to stop those in power and with high influence from doing anything; we deserve what is coming. Earth will be fine without us. Good luck everyone!

[Mentlo]

Until the problem is politically recognised by the masses with adequate concern there will be no change. Climate collapse is not a problem for the capital and the elites it’s only a problem for the masses, but getting the masses to understand that requires higher levels of complex system understanding and third and fourth order effects - something which is not a majority trait.

I fear the only solution to this is that a climate correcting perverse incentive materialises, such as fusion at scale being more profitable than fossil fuels, but without mass-panic induced traits such that fission has.

[mym1990]

I think if the hope is that the whole world comes together to reduce emissions to a meaningful level, there is little to no chance of that. Even in the face of clear evidence, many leaders either do not believe it or do not think it will affect them in their lifetime. Capitalism and globalization march to a different drum.

The hope becomes that we can innovate our way out of the problem with technology, that is the race to the finish. AI will likely help us get there faster, but 2nd place will not be an option.

You could say industrialization was a solution to a problem we didn't have...but efficiency and profit is always the pursuit of business, and unfortunately that is a lot of the world we live in.

And I say this as someone who loves the idea of energy that doesn't come from burning things.

[tasuki]

> each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.

How on earth would anyone contribute to its mitigation? Of course everyone, everyone, contributes to its intensification, no matter how "green" they are. Yes of course, people contribute to the intensification in wildly different degrees.

[cons0le]

Imagine if we had laws that required all LLM compute to come from solar, or other sustainable power sources. We could have used the market's thirst for AI as a backchannel way to force creation of new sustainable energy.

In contrast to Elon/XAI's illegal methane fuled datacenter in memphis

[2III7]

Imagine if we had people that actually listened to scientists, reduced their carbon footprint and changed their habits.

[htx80nerd]

every year (month?) that passes people are saying the end of the world is right around the corner due to climate change. then 10 yrs passes, nothing happens, and they keep saying the same stuff.

the system warning you the world is in big trouble dont remind you 'their side' has been saying the sky is falling for ~40+ yrs.

[Carrok]

I've started composting. I'm sure that'll outweigh the average Vegas visitor's emissions. /s

I'm being a bit facetious obviously, but it does feel a bit like tilting against windmills. We need policy and systemic changes, if we're relying on individuals to all collectively start doing the "right thing", we're sunk.

[smartmic]

I agree. But at least in a democratic system, the "each and everyone of us" are politicians that each and everyone elects. So it starts from the basis, IMHO.

[reactordev]

You laugh but if everyone changed just some of their behavior, we would be in a much better place.

We used to reuse glass jars, now it’s plastic. We used to can goods, now it’s plastic. We used to use refillable bottles, now it’s plastic. We used to have car doors that went “thunk” when you slammed them shut, now it’s plastic.

If we each are mindful of the amount of trash/litter/waste we produce and take an active step towards minimizing it, we would all be in a better place.

[adolph]

Sorry to be a debbie-downer but

the composting process is also a source of greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9933540/

[tastyfreeze]

I make lots of compost for my own use. Composting is at best delaying carbon release. As soon as you stop recycling materials the carbon will be released to the atmosphere. In permaculture circles the goal is to close open loops of waste/resources. If you want to permanently lock carbon in your soil, and improve fertility, make biochar. Throwing charcoal in your compost is the easiest way to make it into biochar. It really works and is a permanent amendment.

If you wanted you could even weigh the raw charcoal to quantify the carbon you have sequestered.

[Voultapher]

Framing man made climate change - aka the 6th mass extinction event - as a problem in search of a solution is by itself the very reason we won't "solve" it.

Trying to solve climate change in anything but a very narrow sense is like trying to perform humane torturing. One can either treat others humanely _or_ torture them. The two at the same time is impossible. The majority of conversations around climate change focus on doing the same things - modernity - but without the negative effects. Chasing a way to humanely torture children will not in fact stop the torturing of children. The goal is wrong! No amount of "solutions" will help you if they all aim to achieve the goal that itself is the root cause of the issues.

[frogperson]

There simply is no solution to this problem. We would all need to stop driving, flying, and eating meat. Most families (in the US, anyway) would suffer unemployment and starvation if they couldnt drive to work.

Humans will continue to do whatever is needed to survive,, and that currently involves driving, flying, and eating meat. They will only stop when those behaviours are either not possible, or hinder survival.