What kind of drastic change should one take? Not having kids, OK, drastic but doable. Cutting out meat, driving less, etc, OK.
But what about the rest of the production chain that assumes you're the same as everyone else (whom continues to use and depend on that production chain), which is an ocean of waste compared to what any single person can do? We can individually push the needle very slightly, but it does nothing to push the needle on our behalf within the bigger economic machine. All those wasteful international processes are pushing forward faster than ever. It's like we're bleeding out and you just recommended dabbing the wound with a string of thread.
What are some realistic things that an individual or group of individuals can do to prepare?
The energy consumption (and therefore carbon emissions) per capita in the west/US comes almost entirely from the feedback loop between single-family-detached housing and the car-or-two it takes to live in that kind of sprawled out lifestyle. Put another way, Transportation and Housing (heating & cooling) are the #1 and #2 sources of carbon emissions for suburban, exurban and rural dwellers.
If you live in a 5+ unit building, do not own a car, rarely fly, sign up for your utilities low-carbon supply option, and cut out red meat, its possible to be a full order of magnitude below the american average.
http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Am...
So the #1 thing an American can do to fight climate change is be "pro-city". Move there. Encourage building/density there. Help fix the schools. Use, vote for, and demand more and better public transit.
People who insist on having a yard and several feet of air-gap between them and their neighbors are the real climate change deniers.
> So the #1 thing an American can do to fight climate change is be "pro-city". Move there. Encourage building/density there. Help fix the schools. Use, vote for, and demand more and better public transit.
This seems nearly as impossible as direct political action against climate change. Effectively, none of the current residents of cities want anyone else to move there, let alone allow more development, especially of greater density. Cities themselves seem to be pretty uniformly terrible at scaling-up to support larger populations. NYC's subways seem pretty close to crippling failure as-is.
I don't prefer revolution, but some kind of significant 'shake-up' seems pretty inevitable given the ossification of all of the relevant 'systems'.
This is another area where technology is hugely beneficial. Not everyone can move to a city, but people who drive to work could work remotely one day a week. Hell, let's make it Friday, who wouldn't like that? There are few office-type jobs that one just CAN'T do remotely at least one day a week, so you've cut a significant part of the emissions of a significant part of the American population.
And this can be instituted as an economic incentive; employers could get a tax credit or something in exchange for the proportion of work they allow employees to do remotely.
Are American cities ready to build enough housing and infrastructure to handle a collective influx of over 120,000,000 Americans currently living in suburbs and rural areas? HA! I wouldn't and actually couldn't (financially) move to a major city as it stands barring a pretty sumptuous raise or downsizing from my 2 BR apartment to a studio. Rents are ridiculous, taxes are higher, air is much more polluted, traffic is horrible, public transit is hit or miss and often unreliable. If all of that improved I might reconsider, and I'll land my flying pig on my urban apartment balcony when that happens. For all the mayors' talk about meeting the Paris accords, or as "enlightened" as many cities think they are (looking at you SanFran), many of those cities will need their own bastille day where the city zoning laws are literally torn up burned in the streets before being "pro-city" is even reasonable for anyone lower than upper-middle-class.
Complete revolution would be ideal for meaningful change but is highly unlikely. As it stands we have to adapt existing systems to be clean, or at least cleaner. That means LED light bulbs, more solar (rooftop or grid) and wind/hydro/geothermal where possible, and electric vehicles. Which is where we're heading right now. Given the current rate of expansion, I imagine suburban emissions from housing/transportation will drop drastically over the next 50 years. Meanwhile those yards are carbon sinks.
The problem with American cities is NIMBYism: existing property owners are the ones with control of the zoning and the approval for new construction. So SanFran can't replace its too-small housing with lots of high-density high-rises because the people who own the other land there don't want it.
The fix for this is to move control of zoning and construction permits to the state level.
Sadly, being "pro-city" is extremely political. Even if we could set aside people's personal preferences, I'm not sure how we start to overcome the ideological gap between urban and rural residents...
>"People who insist on having a yard and several feet of air-gap between them and their neighbors are the real climate change deniers."
Why are we the climate change deniers? What about those of us with yards that are completely edible and green and don't require our food to be hauled in from across the country? I don't think the issue is as cut-and-dry as you make it sound. I'd also recommend you look into the agricultural and food supply chain for these large dense cities.
>So the #1 thing an American can do to fight climate change is be "pro-city". Move there.
I love the idea of higher-density living, the problem is that it's simply unaffordable for a large part of the population. They can only afford houses with yards and several feet of air-gap, as you put it. How do you propose to fix this?
For example, look at Japan. In Tokyo, you can rent a small (very small) efficiency apartment for perhaps $500, according to what I hear on YouTube. A larger one big enough for a couple might be $900 or $1000. Such a place will be clean, safe, and just a few minutes' walk from the subway. Now look at NYC: there's no possible way you'll find something to rent at that price in a place that's at all safe. So telling people to "move there" is really rather asinine; are you going to pay me $1500/month so I can afford a livable apartment in Manhattan? (I'll make up the other $1000 on my own, your $1500 is a subsidy)
As long as the property owners in a municipality have all the power over building and density, we're going to have this problem.
Realistically, you should make communities local and more self-sufficient, like they used to be.
This idea that you have to commute 20 miles to work every day, in a personal car, is less than 100 years old. People used to grow up, live, work, and marry and raise families in their villages. Not many would travel all the time. Mozart was probably the most traveled of his time, and he probably didn't go half as many miles as the average worker today.
Make it so people can work from home. Give them an unconditional basic income so they don't have to work.
The problem is capitalism, as much as many people here don't like to hear it. Capitalism is great at what it does -- but it doesn't care about externalities. If a person runs out of food, capitalism doesn't care. If a species goes extinct, the world is turned into farms and monocultures, or the planet is polluted or resources are depleted, capitalism won't care until it's done.
Self-sufficiency is rife with its own inefficiencies.
For example, using Mozarts timeframe and attempting it place it on our current planet leads to a situation where no logical comparison can be made. He is from around 1800, there were around 900 million people at the time. You could grow enough locally to feed the population locally in most places. This is no longer true. Mass transportation of food, water, and resources for survival are currently necessary.
The problem is not capitalism, the problem is people
Pretty much every living creature goes through stages of increased resource availability -> growth -> overshooting population capacity or resource reduction -> population reduction. As we can see, overpopulation of raccoons, antelopes, and alligators isn't caused by capitalism, it is caused by the biological imperative to breed -> consume -> breed -> consume. Furthermore your willingness to blame capitalism blinds you to knowledge and an impartial view of what is occurring. Such as, most first world capitalistic countries are experiencing population stagnation. Japan, US, and western Europe all have decreasing population, until you take immigration into account. Also many non-capitalistic countries have terrible problems with pollution (Russia anyone?), thereby again rendering your premise that capitalism is the problem. Blaming the wrong thing never fixed the problem, whipping boys don't lead to solutions.
One drastic change would be to abandon capitalism and the idea of growth. Instead, we should be focusing on sustainability which is completely at odds with capitalism.
We need to start making products that are designed to last a long time as opposed to them having been built for planned obsolescence. We need to start abandoning throw away things like plastic containers. For example, Coca-Cola produces a staggering 100 billion disposalbe plastic bottles http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/coca-cola-pl... a year. We have to start moving heavy industry off fossils. We have to move away from combustion engines, and need to abandon cars in general.
The reality of the situation is that most contribution to climate change comes from industrial sources and not individuals.
What's going to happen is that majority of humanity will simply die off. If enough humans are left alive to carry on civilization, hopefully they will have learned something from that.
Re kids: I was saying if you have kids, surely that's even more reason to act.
I'm not a survivalist. No idea if you want to prepare? Move north and stock up on guns, ammo, seed, water and soil?
But, I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Well over 50% of Americans and Europeans view climate change as a threat. That's 500 million of the most affluent humans on the planet. The "economic machine", by which I assume you mean $3 bottled water, SUV, McMansions, beef, exists for them; not the other way around.
Although there might be opportunities for beach-front surf shops on tropical Baffin Island, good luck getting customers when the rest of the world has gone to hell.
Customers aren't often a concern for the subsistence farmer, although I suppose you might sell or barter any surplus - though you may be better advised to share it freely and so build goodwill.
But what about the rest of the production chain that assumes you're the same as everyone else (whom continues to use and depend on that production chain), which is an ocean of waste compared to what any single person can do? We can individually push the needle very slightly, but it does nothing to push the needle on our behalf within the bigger economic machine. All those wasteful international processes are pushing forward faster than ever. It's like we're bleeding out and you just recommended dabbing the wound with a string of thread.
What are some realistic things that an individual or group of individuals can do to prepare?