nah it's natural
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Honestly, the majority of what you listed isn't going to make any difference in the slightest even if literally everyone did it tomorrow.
Here's a completely random non-comprehensive list of stuff that would actually be pretty impactful though.
Upgrade your dryer to a heat pump dryer , they use 1/4 the amount of electricity to do the same job if literally everyone traded their electric dryer for the heat pump dryer it would dramatically reduce energy usage and thus also result in a dramatic drop in CO2 generation from various energy generation sources. You don't have to worry about your old dryer it is made of 90% material that actually gets recycled for real just drop it off at a scrap yard.
Use your compost bin actually start separating stuff for it properly . Most people don't make use of it, if you are particular waste Company does not offer composting then simply make a compost box somewhere on your property if you can and start composting there's a lot of things that just end up in the trash that could be compostable which would be better for it the environment and reduce the burden on the waste system.
Curb the demand for forever chemicals. Replace everything in your kitchen with stainless steel or wood or glass. No plastic or Teflon just learn to preheat your pans properly and use a little bit of oil the sticking of your eggs is nothing more than a skill issue I use stainless steel and I can make fried eggs that slide around like they're on ice. And not just the pots and pans replace all of your utensils plates bowls. It creates a small surge in waste initially as you get rid of the old stuff but as long as it's going forward you never purchase the plastics again it means demand will go down.
Those are just a couple completely random things that would be fairly simple and easy to do that would actually make a pretty drastic difference if even just 40% of the population would follow through but I speak from experience when I say if you attempt to get people on board with any of these they just can't be bothered because it's a slight minor inconvenience compared to what they already do
Upgrade your dryer to a heat pump dryer , they use 1/4 the amount of electricity to do the same job if literally everyone traded their electric dryer for the heat pump dryer it would dramatically reduce energy usage and thus also result in a dramatic drop in CO2 generation from various energy generation sources.
Dryers are such an American thing. Heat pump dryer sounds extra expensive. My European ass just hangs clothes to dry. Guess what, they're dry by the next day. I compensate by having multiple days worth of clothes. Heat pump dryers are like 700 EUR, a good quality clothes rack is 15 EUR.
Use your compost bin actually start separating stuff for it properly . Most people don’t make use of it, if you are particular waste Company does not offer composting then simply make a compost box somewhere on your property if you can and start composting there’s a lot of things that just end up in the trash that could be compostable which would be better for it the environment and reduce the burden on the waste system.
So as of 2024, in my country, it's actually mandatory to either have a compost bin, or alternatively a compost enclosure in your garden if you have a garden. You get fined if you have neither (so apartments will always have the bin). Reason was, a lot of people threw meats and stuff in their compost piles and that attracted animals. So now it has to be enclosed to keep them away.
But does composting actually affect that much, as far as CO2 is concerned? I just do it because compost is great for fertilizing crops and soil deteriorates if you keep growing mostly the same shit every damn year (even when rotating where exactly which thing is). The soil apocalypse is another one we're going to have to face soon.
Curb the demand for forever chemicals. Replace everything in your kitchen with stainless steel or wood or glass. No plastic or Teflon
IKEA over here gives a 15 year warranty for certain models of their stainless steel pots and pans, but not the ones that have teflon coating. Get yourself a 2.8 liter pot with a 15 year warranty for 5 fucking euros (discount price not regular I think). Lid included in the price. 15 EUR 28 CM stainless steel pan, 15 year warranty. Carbon steel pan of same size, 30 EUR. Also 15 year warranty. I already bought one pot and one stainless pan. No idea if I'll ever need a warranty on these goods (except maybe the pot for the plastic handles if they get loose and can't be tightened anymore), but the prices themselves are already better than teflon shit in a regular grocery store and those often don't last too long. Next up I'm buying a carbon steel pan so I can compare that to the stainless steel one. Previously all I've owned has all been teflon or ceramic. I've personally contributed to the teflon industry by about 3 pans over 10 years.
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Economists are orgasming so fucking hard at this you wouldn't beliee
Some economist did his calculations and came to the conclusion that climate change up to 4°C would only cost 0.1% GDP (or something else ridiculously small). Somebody else remarked that his calculations showed the same 0.1% at -4°C. There was a a kilometer of ice on the spot he was now sitting when it was last -4°C, and you'd think the influence on the economy of that would be a bit more than 0.1%.
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Edit: see reply. With correct numbers now I'm mad too.
By your own numbers that’s a tiny fraction of the world’s energy use. It seems strange to put such a disproportionate focus on such a small fraction. Where is this rage for the transportation sector?Transportation is moving in the right direction atm, even if it is slow. AI is going the wrong direction.
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I look at this graf, and I really feel like, it's so sudden that you can't really stop this at a human level. Human are curious adventurous and like confort and enjoy surviving. As soon as we started using coal and gaz,it was too late. We would probsbly need to renounce everything to have a slightly better outcome. So clearly, people don't give a shit anyway.
wrote last edited by [email protected]When covid stopped everything the noise in the oceans and cities decreased so much the animals started singing again. Dolphins returned to Venice, whales to New England harbors, the environmental impact of those years was significant. We are capable of adapting quickly and making huge impact, covid showed us that's it's just an unwillingness on the part of the ruling class. It can be done, we're just told "small, incremental change is best" (neo-lib bs enshrining short-term profits). Kill the industries, pay the people via social safety nets, federal jobs program to build better stuff, public projects, public ownership. Public money made most things but the people in power transferred all that tech and IP into private hands.
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Edit: see reply. With correct numbers now I'm mad too.
By your own numbers that’s a tiny fraction of the world’s energy use. It seems strange to put such a disproportionate focus on such a small fraction. Where is this rage for the transportation sector?My numbers were mixed in the previous post; I was mixing total global and total annual use. I'm sorry about that; the numbers looked off but I didn't catch the time scale difference.
AI companies are projected to use 1kTWh in 2025. Transportation is projected to use 1.2TWh, industry, 1.1TWh. Bitcoin, everyone's favorite whipping-boy, is estimated to use only 173TWh globally, a mere 17% of AI. Residential is only 800TWh, 4.5x Bitcoin, but 80% of AI. Commercial is less, at 600TWh.
These all come from different sources: homeinst.org and Deloitte are the main ones, but the Bitcoin stat comes from Cambridge and the EIA (eia.gov), and the AI industry number comes from an MIT and backed by a different Deloitte report.
The industrial sector is the largest energy user, but AI is a close third just below transportation.
I was surprised that cryptocurrency energy use was so relatively small, given the hysteria. Bitcoin alone is 173TWh, far smaller than all of the sectors, and a fraction of AI; but even adding all of the other cryptocurrencies, the estimated consumption rises only to 215TWh. That pushes it past the smallest user, the agriculture sector sitting at 200TWh, but still well below everything else.
AI is the third largest energy consumer, annually, globally.
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Upgrade your dryer to a heat pump dryer , they use 1/4 the amount of electricity to do the same job if literally everyone traded their electric dryer for the heat pump dryer it would dramatically reduce energy usage and thus also result in a dramatic drop in CO2 generation from various energy generation sources.
Dryers are such an American thing. Heat pump dryer sounds extra expensive. My European ass just hangs clothes to dry. Guess what, they're dry by the next day. I compensate by having multiple days worth of clothes. Heat pump dryers are like 700 EUR, a good quality clothes rack is 15 EUR.
Use your compost bin actually start separating stuff for it properly . Most people don’t make use of it, if you are particular waste Company does not offer composting then simply make a compost box somewhere on your property if you can and start composting there’s a lot of things that just end up in the trash that could be compostable which would be better for it the environment and reduce the burden on the waste system.
So as of 2024, in my country, it's actually mandatory to either have a compost bin, or alternatively a compost enclosure in your garden if you have a garden. You get fined if you have neither (so apartments will always have the bin). Reason was, a lot of people threw meats and stuff in their compost piles and that attracted animals. So now it has to be enclosed to keep them away.
But does composting actually affect that much, as far as CO2 is concerned? I just do it because compost is great for fertilizing crops and soil deteriorates if you keep growing mostly the same shit every damn year (even when rotating where exactly which thing is). The soil apocalypse is another one we're going to have to face soon.
Curb the demand for forever chemicals. Replace everything in your kitchen with stainless steel or wood or glass. No plastic or Teflon
IKEA over here gives a 15 year warranty for certain models of their stainless steel pots and pans, but not the ones that have teflon coating. Get yourself a 2.8 liter pot with a 15 year warranty for 5 fucking euros (discount price not regular I think). Lid included in the price. 15 EUR 28 CM stainless steel pan, 15 year warranty. Carbon steel pan of same size, 30 EUR. Also 15 year warranty. I already bought one pot and one stainless pan. No idea if I'll ever need a warranty on these goods (except maybe the pot for the plastic handles if they get loose and can't be tightened anymore), but the prices themselves are already better than teflon shit in a regular grocery store and those often don't last too long. Next up I'm buying a carbon steel pan so I can compare that to the stainless steel one. Previously all I've owned has all been teflon or ceramic. I've personally contributed to the teflon industry by about 3 pans over 10 years.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I live in an area where it is raining more often than not so unfortunately clothes lines are not really an option for me, though i compensated by going entirely off grid. I have enough solar and battery storage that I am completely self-sufficient. I have a heat pump dryer, heat pump hot water heater, and I still use things like a dishwasher as they do use dramatically less water than doing it by hand
I guess that's one I also forgot to put on the list heat pump hot water heater yes they are more expensive than the standard electric but they will pay for themselves pretty quickly unless you just almost never use hot water. Same for the dryer, it is indeed more expensive than a standard electric one but it will pay for itself pretty quickly with the 1/4th power used
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Hell yeah, bring back pangea. I want dragonflies the size of baseball bats.
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but these changes are small in the whole of it. we live a fossil fuel reliant lifestyle. what would you be willing to give up? cars as a whole? electronics as a whole? indoor climate control? constant hot water? heavy meat consumption? global travel? people care, but the human demand for all of these is heavy and hard to shake. sooner or later they may not be an option anymore
For my part, I live in a rural area and raise my own chickens for meat and eggs. I buy fresh meat and veggies from local farmers. My whole household works from home which helps reduce my car footprint but I still drive a gas vehicle once or twice a week because we don’t have mass transit and biking is unsafe due to lack of infrastructure and big US trucks. There are a good 4 months a year that I don’t use AC or heat in my house and just open the windows. I don’t leave things on when I’m not using them. For work I use a raspberry pi and/or a tablet instead of a monster gaming pc.
I’m not going to feel guilty for my lifestyle, I do a lot more to reduce my impact than the average person.
Ideally we would all live in tiny, energy efficient capsules and work within a mile of our residence while consuming responsibly farmed foods. That way the entire population can suffer in order to offset the pollution caused by unregulated industry.
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We can stop at a human level if we decapitate the rich and powerful.
It's a lot harder because humanity got so used to the comfort of burning fuel for power
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Who do you suggest we vote for in order to adequately address this problem? Like fascism, I don’t see a way to vote ourselves out of this predicament.
We’ll have to remove power from capital owners (like Zuck and Altman) directly, in order to save ourselves.
I agree! I don't think we can vote out way out, not in one fell swoop.
We need to vote locally, and support voting reform efforts. If we can normalize IRV at the local level, so that people lose their fear of the unknown, we have a chance to get it into congressional elections, and that's where real change will happen. Eventually, ideally, we get rid of the electoral college and use IRV in presidential elections, and then we might see a surprise third party win. We can do most of this without constitutional changes.
But, can we survive as a country long enough to get there? It's a long road, and I don't know.
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Add computers to your list! Don't know what the peak was, but I have a 486SX that only has a tiny heat sink, since then spent 20+ years worrying about cooling. Now I'm typing this on an Intel NUC that's back to a passive heat sink.
Yeah, my daily driver for work is a raspberry pi. I still use active cooling though.
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Eh things will get more dire but doubt it's happening anywhere fast enough for that
It’s already having nasty effects already? Storms are worse and more intense, more flooding that kills people… how many people have to die before you say “that was quicker than I expected”?
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Honestly, I hate to jump on the antinatalism bandwagon but having a child now would almost certainly condemn them to an existence of scarcity and pain.
What makes this doubly difficult is that if we had acted at the first sign of trouble, we almost certainly could have lived comfortable lives with minimal sacrifices and every year we put it off the sacrifices we would have to make in order to maintain our climate get more severe.
We aren't putting it off. Already many countries are deploying renewable energy like it's going out of fashion, and have been for years. China, France, the UK, Spain, and India all have significant parts of their energy coming from renewables and nuclear, or are building more as we speak. Here in England our largest source of power is wind. People are already doing stuff about it, just not fast enough or universally enough. Technology for renewables and energy saving has gotten progressively better over the past several decades. Even fossil fuel technologies like cars and natural gas plants have gotten markedly more efficient meaning they produce less CO2 than they did previously, while also emitting lower levels of other pollutants too. It's even possible now to power planes with biofuels.
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Imagine finding that people your own age ignored it too, like they're doing right now.
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We aren't putting it off. Already many countries are deploying renewable energy like it's going out of fashion, and have been for years. China, France, the UK, Spain, and India all have significant parts of their energy coming from renewables and nuclear, or are building more as we speak. Here in England our largest source of power is wind. People are already doing stuff about it, just not fast enough or universally enough. Technology for renewables and energy saving has gotten progressively better over the past several decades. Even fossil fuel technologies like cars and natural gas plants have gotten markedly more efficient meaning they produce less CO2 than they did previously, while also emitting lower levels of other pollutants too. It's even possible now to power planes with biofuels.
wrote last edited by [email protected]power generation has come a long way but specially in the North America the story isn't as good, while we've made progress the amount of methane produced by our natural gas wells is not only frightening but difficult to track due to lack of accountability.
it's my opinion if we want the sort of radical greenhouse gas reduction required to stave off the worst of climate change then we need three things:
- an aggressive plan to phase out coal and natural gas
- embrace public transportation and bikes
- drastically reduce the amount of red meat we eat
I do believe it's possible I'm just also think it's really difficult to get political will for those sort of things.
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When covid stopped everything the noise in the oceans and cities decreased so much the animals started singing again. Dolphins returned to Venice, whales to New England harbors, the environmental impact of those years was significant. We are capable of adapting quickly and making huge impact, covid showed us that's it's just an unwillingness on the part of the ruling class. It can be done, we're just told "small, incremental change is best" (neo-lib bs enshrining short-term profits). Kill the industries, pay the people via social safety nets, federal jobs program to build better stuff, public projects, public ownership. Public money made most things but the people in power transferred all that tech and IP into private hands.
I think that's what pushed me into absolute nihilistic depression. We CAN do something and we can do it right now, but we're choosing not to.
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No, I won't give them the out. This isn't them simply being outgunned on messaging or outmaneuvered by corporate interests.
Theirs is a story of objective dereliction of duty.
Previous generations leveraged the future of their descendants to improve their wealth and economic growth. Those same generations and wealthy twats are now vying for global control as right-wing governments take power.
Yeah, there was corporate propaganda at play. That does not negate the duty of the electorate to stay informed. They could have looked into it, but they didn't because it was an inconvenient truth.
We've had strong indication that CO2 was going to fuck us since 1896 from research by Svante Arrhenius. And if you want to go waaaaayyy back, the idea that a small percentage of atmospheric gases could absorb infrared radiation was 1859 by John Tyndall. Oh, or maybe we can start the clock at 1824 when Joseph Fourier (yes that Fourier) first proposed the idea of greenhouse gases.
So after 200 fucking years of knowing about this, we've still done fuck all.
So yes. Many of our parents were willfully ignorant and didn't prioritize this issue because ... The Mexicans are coming across the border and we can't have that even if we'd really like to kick off a green energy revolution. AREGGHHHH! IF ONLY IT WEREN'T FOR THOSE DAMN ILLEGALS THEY WOULD'VE SOLVED THIS!
Previous generations leveraged the future of their descendants to improve their wealth and economic growth
Previous generations developed the industrial infrastructure that granted historic consumer surpluses (and waste), but vanishingly few of them reaped the full benefits.
This isn't a problem of generation, its a problem of economic planning (or lack there of). The post-WW2 dedication to a fossil fuel economy was a military decision more than a civilian one. Capturing and holding large sources of fossil fuel made up the bedrock of the Cold War.
Blaming this decision on Meema and Pepe is ahistorical.
We’ve had strong indication that CO2 was going to fuck us since 1896 from research by Svante Arrhenius.
We've had evidence of anthropogenic climate change, but also ample evidence of sizeable economic benefit to petroleum products - plastics and fertilizers not being the least of it.
We had the opportunity to engage in long term moderate and sustainable use, but squandered it in the name of short term consumer-driven profits.
But, again, this wasn't a decision made by a mass of proles, democratically. It was dictated from corporate boards and corrupt Congressional legislatures and Pentagon war rooms.
The knowing didn't matter, because the public was never given a real choice.
Many of our parents were willfully ignorant and didn’t prioritize this issue
Efforts to prioritize the issue was repeatedly thwarted through elaborate and labor intensive lobbying campaigns, gerrymanders, bribes, blackmail, and direct physical violence.
FFS, you had the national guard deployed to brutalize pipeline protesters just a few years ago. And that's a drop in the bucket besides the sacks and pillaging of native reservations, the toppling of foreign governments, and the endless FUD broadcast globally to defame ecologists and activists.
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I may be nitpicking here but I think people are misinterpreting the caption.
They aren't directly saying, "your parents ignored this and now we're fucked"
It's saying, "IF your parents ignored this and you found out, you'd be mad"
Implying that, "YOU should not ignore this, because what will YOUR children think of YOU?"
A lot of people are focusing on saying "uh well my parents aren't to blame" or "they wouldn't understand" but that's not the point of the message.
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Hell yeah, bring back pangea. I want dragonflies the size of baseball bats.
Not sure, but I think that wasn't because of higher temperatures but higher levels of oxygen in the atmosphere.
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our handsome investors had a free market solution but then the government said no
Some libertarian
I think in the long term there could be a libertarian solution - the Coase Theorem says that externalities can be resolved with very low transaction costs (that don't currently exist).
But that's something libertarians should've pitched 40 years ago. Now the only solution we know will help are time-tested Pigouvian taxes.
