Ask Lemmy

solutions that dont disrupt the 99%'s way of life

This is not possible. Barring some miracle technologies being developed, we would have to radically change our standards of living and give up our modern convenient lives to make meaningful changes.

Stop burning fossil fuels. There is no way that doesn't include that.

attack the capitalist system.

Vote.

Edit: to be clear, vote in every election you have access to. Local voting and primaries are just important. Voting even if you don’t like any of the options is still important.

If you don’t vote then you’re part of the problem.

But it's time to disrupt 99% of life.

Survey humanity, produce an agreed on level of technology and lifestyle.

We probably need to limit ourselves to housing, food, internet, and safety/defense for everyone and not much else - then slow all industries based on HOW people want to live.

So getting rid of things like, plastic toys, gizmos, extravagances. Phones wouldn't be updated as often. People would only be able to update their tech if they could meaningfully show it was necessary.

Lots of technology companies would be folded. Lots of industries would be nationalised and folded. International tourism would be greatly restricted. All the stuff we don't need basically.

People would be mostly employed in the basics: Housing, food, internet. Too far beyond that and you'd have to rely on local people/groups/makers/repair companies.

So massive degrowth, nationalization, and restrictions/regulations to the market.

Most of all, corporations would no longer count as people. In fact society should have to rely on person to person contracting. I don't really think corporations should exist becuase they become Zombies/Golems that do a lot of destructive things.

Basically degrowth, and restructuring society around degrowth.

Ban planned obsolescence and make a rigorous standard that any new device is designed repairable, reliable and long lasting enough to last at least 10 years if treated right, 20+ years for vehicles and machinery..

This whole 'you gotta get a new thing every year' era causes sooo much unnecessary waste and pollution ☹️

The idea of personal action vs. corporate/government action is a false choice. The government can force the corpos to stop burning the planet, but that will mean significant lifestyle changes for everybody.

It also means getting our shit together about immigration/ migration/ refugees. And not just in the US, but globally. A humanitarian catastrophe is assured otherwise.

I'm not optimistic.

Genuinely there needs to be a fee that companies must pay for the pollution they create, with it written into law that they can't palm the cost off on their customers.

We need to move shipping away from the 'barely more refined than crude oil' fuels they use

We need to ensure protection of the oceans by making it so that outflowing waste from industry never reaches the watercourse in the first place.

Single use plastics need to be removed from the supply chain (alternatively changed at the production level so they're made from plant cellulose or a material that doesn't break down into PFOAS or microplastics)

We also need to block petrochemical companies from lobbying or interfering with politics, and prevent them from funding smear campaigns against renewable energy sources

dont disrupt the 99%'s way of life.

This is ridiculous, because the problem inherently requires cooperative change, and as we've seen people will throw shitfits over things as small as plastic straws.

A big thing would be to start switching from ever expanding auto infrastructure to public transit systems where possible.

1. Fewer vehicles that transport more people
2. Can use the space that is currently occupied for parking cars better

Another big thing requires changing our diets. Some types of food are more resource intensive than others, but also we ship food all over the planet and the resources for transport also contributes. Eating food that is in season on your continent would make a big difference.

The last thing is maybe the least obvious to regular people, but maybe we don't need to build that data center yet if we can't power it without fossil fuel. We need to entirely stop expanding energy usage until we've switched over entirely to sustainables.

In summary, basically everything that needs to happen is going to affect regular people, and they're going to have to get over it, or we're going to make the planet completely unlivable.

Aren’t we at the point of no return?

Engineer a virus to send back in time to slow down CO2 emissions

wait a minute...

Tax billionaires out of existence, ban fossil fuels, invest in carbon capture, ban corporate greed, switch all solutions to the slightly more expensive, green alternative

Eat the rich. I remember when the Twitter account that posted where Musk's private jet is all the time and holy shit, he travelled a lot.

Like, multiple times a week where this machine that fucks up the environment is used to transport a single person.

Or the disgusting mega yacht that Zuckerberg uses.

During my whole life I'm not gonna destroy the environment like every single one of leeches on society does in a month.

It's not everything obviously, but mandate that all people who can do their job from home must do their job from home. This will take a bite out of cars and improve general human morale.

Eliminate carbon trading programs and just set hard limits. Went over your allocation of carbon? Guess you're done for the quarter.

Eliminate LLCs. Bring on the accountability.

Proviso of this is that, globally, politicians grow a spine, along with a sense of morality, and long term planning. It would also require them to deal with the money hoarding issues with the hyper rich.

• The first step is a massive push for renewables. They should be representing 200-500% of grid demand regularly. If nuclear can get up to speed and be part of this, great, but we can't wait on it.

• That excess power should be soaked up by large scale, portable, energy storage. Green hydrogen is the current best option, but synthetic fossil fuels could also take up the slack. Depending on the area, desalination could also be combined into this.

• We seriously decarbonise the transport networks. For vans and smaller, electric vehicles win. BYD have demonstrated that low cost electric cars are viable. For larger vehicles, where electric becomes inefficient, hydrogen is viable. This is where a lot of the excess hydrogen will be going.

• Carbon credits with teeth. Rather than relying on a planned economy mindset, we can make capitalism work for us. We need a global fixed carbon emission limit. This limit should trend towards net zero on a preset timetable. Credits are bid on, akin to stock market trades. Companies must have credits by the end of the year/period. The fine for not having credits should be a multiple of the closing credits price (10x?). The fine for falsification should be multiples of that, erring towards corporate execution levels.

This will force easy savings out of the market quickly. It will then force compulsory emitters to factor in Carbon costs.

• Combined with the carbon credits will be negative credits. If a group takes a ton of CO² out of the air, long term, they gain a new credit. They can sell this to emitters. This will provide the CO² emissions industry requires, while meeting net zero.

An example of this might be large scale bio capture on the open ocean. Grow seaweed etc on pontoons, and turn it into a solid. This can then be locked up (old coal mines?) taking carbon out permanently.

• Geo engineering. There are multiple methods of reducing incident sunlight on the earth. Everything from powders in the upper atmosphere, to mylar solar shades at the Lagrange point. They will be short term fixes, but will buy us time.

None of these require massive reductions in quality of life. They do require changes in how we do things. It's also worth noting that I've not covered the numerous problems to be solved e.g. power grid upgrades to account for renewables. None of these should be insurmountable however, just engineering, or political/policing challenges.

An no, I've no fucking idea how to get politicians to grow a spine and do what's required for our long term comfort/survival. Fixing the planet? That's just a (really big) engineering problem. Fixing human nature? ...Fuck knows.

In my opinion it is not possible to fight climate change while maintaining the same standards of life that we have now. Even if we are going to try, this will probably not be followed by many states with big population, so probably its not gonna work. From what I see, everyone is fighting climate change today by posting stuff on their social medias but when it comes to change habits, its another story.

Anyway, my idea is that we don't have to ban things like cars and airplanes but we can use them more efficiently. We can repair more and buy less. Do we really need to change a car after 100.000 km? In my country, If you live in a big city you can use public transport most of the time, so why we don't start to connect well also the small places?

Do we really need to buy fruits and vegetables that comes from other continents and needs to be chemically treated, transported, stocked and consequently generates pollution?

In the consumer technology Sector people usually changes their computers and phones every 3-5 years even if the hardware is still working well. The software is usually becoming more heavier over the years without adding real features (See Meta's apps). We must accept that this is not compatible with fighting climate change because we are producing too much waste that is avoidable together with massive exploitation of resources. The majority of users are not educated to understand how our technology works at its most basic level, I think that we may start from here.

Maybe we cannot erase billionaires but we can stop adulating or hating them and giving them unnecessary notoriety.

Major corporations caused this, only major corporations can solve it. Laws would have to be passed requiring them to offset the damage from everything they do. Coops would need to be set up wherever possible for one industry to reuse waste from another. Subsidies would need to be ethically set up to encourage industry involved with cleaning the environment. Cooperation between nations to combat global issues would be needed. Actual consequences for industries it nations that violate. Education!! And most importantly convince half the world's population to give a shit or even believe the problem exists. I've probably missed some.

The alternative would be magic.

Yeah, between the two, I think magic is probably more realistic. Let's go with that.

Adopt. Don't make new people. Take in people who have been abandoned. My father had the same idea in the 1970s — I suppose I should be fortunate my mother overruled him on that one. But he had the idea almost 50 years ago, for similar reasons.

And apply a similar philosophy to the rest of your life. We all know the word recycle. And I have been a proponent of recycling for over 30 years. I've heard it doesn't help. I've heard some municipalities take it all to the same place. I don't care. I still do it. But I also remember when there were three words. The original slogan went "Reduce. Reuse. Recycle." Many people forgot the first two. You can reuse and repurpose a lot of things. But you should also reduce consumption as well. Eat less processed food. Stick to protein — plant and animal (unless you're a vegetarian/vegan obviously). Stick to the outside of the grocery store (produce, dairy, deli, meat). Bakery is nice for an occasional treat, but find out what they make in-house and not ship in frozen.

I don't think I'm doing enough on my own. I also don't have illusions I'll convince many others. I'm not really trying to. I'm not trying to save the world, just survive it.

You are asking two how to questions "combat climate change" and "reduce emissions"

To realistically combat climate change:

• Admit that we need to try geoengineering (we are already doing this with all the CO~2~ and CH~4~ going into the atmosphere)
• Weather it is SO~2~ injection or cloud seeding to artificially increase the albido; we need to reduce incident solar radiation to give us a few more decades to actually reduce emissions

To reduce emissions:

• Tackle the biggest emissions first.
• Electrification of the passenger fleet; that means batteries. Keep fuel cells for heavy transport (maybe)
• Encourage electric biking. And other micro-mobility. Along with better public transport.
• Normalise a historical style diet, meat is a treat only once or twice a week.
• Reduce concrete construction; keep it for the important things like the foundations.
• Reduce the practice of packaging everything in plastic; again keep it for the important things only like electrical insulation.
• Massive ramp up of solar and wind around the world.
• Where we use fossil fuels, ask is this important enough to use FF here?

Carbon taxes:

• Tax CO~2~e (carbon dioxide equivalent) at a reasonable rate to encourage all of the reduction measures.
• At less than $65NZD/T the cost is too low to encourage significant movement on the issues.
• Have a ratcheting scheme in the CO~2~ market, i.e. add $5-8/yr/T for CO~2~e; in 10 years the price will be between $110-140/T. At the 10yr mark, make the ratchet $10-15/yr/T.
• Add a carbon tariff; basically make it more expensive to buy from countries that are not pulling their weight.
• Be careful not to double tax, this is important for buy in from the public. i.e. the carbon tax on fuel should be exempt from sales tax, taxing a tax is a great way to alienate people.

Biggest problem is that only about 20% of the population of our planet is trying to make a difference and the rest are too poor to care and the 1% are busy building bunkers with the money they stole from the once middle class that are now too poor to do anything.

My answer isn't to tax the rich, it's to get rid of them and invest all that money into green tech, funding reforestation, improving EVs, that's just of the top of my head.

Geoengineering: Whether through launching solar shades into space to block sunlight and cool the planet down, pump aerosols into the atmosphere, cloud seeding, or anything else. I think this is where our research should be going. I think it's too late to avoid the worst-case-scenarios of climate change from merely cutting emissions, so more drastic measures to alleviate or even reverse the effects may be necessary. Plus it'll help us with any future colonizing and terraforming of worlds outside of Earth.

Public transport infrastructure to reduce our reliance on cars & planes: While I don't think hyperloops or a transatlantic tunnel are feasible, building tens of thousands of kilometres worth of overground and underground railway routes to interconnect towns and cities with high speed maglev trains is. China have the right idea.

Right to work from home: Remote working reduces our dependency on cars and frees up real estate to address the various housing crises we have.

Right to repair and outlawing planned obsolescence: Should we have to buy a new smartphone every 3 or so years because Apple or Samsung want to maximize profits? Do we care at all about the amount of electronic waste we're producing?

Accelerate our efforts to reverse desertification and plant trillions more trees: If we can turn parts of the Sahel, Gobi Desert and the Australian outback green, that could have a very beneficial effect on the environment.

I'm not a doomer, in large part because I think that economic forces will reduce greenhouse emissions significantly on their own, and despite hitting recent setbacks in policymaking that would push those reductions to happen more more quickly or with deeper cuts, that decarbonization back down to 1990 levels is still going to happen in our lifetimes.

Here's how I think we'll get there:

• Phasing out fossil fuel electricity generation. Solar power is just ridiculously cheap compared to any other method of generation. As we deploy grid scale storage, demand-shifting technology and pricing structures, develop redundancy with wind and advanced geothermal (and possibly fusion in the coming decades), we're going to make fossil fuel electricity generation uncompetitive on price. Maybe ratepayers and governments don't want to subsidize carbon-free energy, but why would they want to subsidize carbon emitting energy when those are no longer competitive?
• Electrification of transportation (electric vehicles, including big stuff like trains and buses and small stuff like bikes and scooters).
• Electrification of heat, both for indoor climate control and furnaces/boilers for water and industrial applications. Heat pumps are already cost effective for new construction in most climates, and even retrofits are approaching cost competitiveness with fossil fuel powered heaters.
• Carbon capture as a feedstock into chemical production, including alternative fuels like sustainable aviation fuel. Once electricity is cheap enough, even only at certain times of day, energy-intensive chemical production can hit flexible output targets to absorb surplus energy supply from overproduction of solar, to store that energy for later or otherwise remove carbon from the atmosphere.

To borrow from a Taoist concept, we shouldn't expend effort fighting the current of a river when the current itself can be utilized to accomplish our goals. In this case, the capitalist incentive structure of wanting to do stuff that makes money is now being turned towards decarbonization for cost savings or outright profit.

Yeet billionaires into space is a decent start.

Compost the rich

Soo by realistic do you mean something you and me could actually do? Then almost nothing. It will stop when it stops, because the other 8 billion people have a say. I do political activism on the off chance it will indirectly affect something somehow, but I don't think it has, to date.

If you just mean non-disruptive per the 99% comment, a carbon tax is often thought to be the way to go. It makes greener things cheaper and so more favoured by buyers in a really balanced, fair way.

We had a small one in Canada, and a massive political movement for cheap gas started and crushed it. :(

Starting about 2 years ago, we in the US had a plan and investments. Building out renewables and grid storage like gangbusters. Incentives to weatherize and update hvac. EV incentives and a program to build out charging infrastructure. Finally some investment in intercity rail. No new ice cars after 2035, and a mandate for EV trucks. Huge promises of EV delivery trucks from usps, ups, amazon. It was a good start.

So much for that idea

I'm vegan, have no intention of ever buying a car and plan on never having children. That's probably as much individual action as anyone can ask for. Anything after that is up to corporations and governments, so we should make sure they are incentivized to do the right thing 👍

I think the first step is to get a good spotter and then exhale on the pull.

I'm going off the top of my head here:

Okay so you know the concept of evaporative cooling for the new AI data centres? It's hugely wasteful, and definitely not the only way to accomplish the goal, but it's cheaper. I feel like if we actually figured out all the bullshit of that calibre and just outlawed it, we'd make a significant start towards improvement and only marginally impact the bank statements of a few ultra rich billionaires.

Stop allowing people to dump exhaust and waste untreated into the air and otherwise in the environment, full stop. Full illegal, if you violate it the entire company is dissolved. That'll suck for shipping, manufacturing, fuck it. We need to actually stop this to achieve some kind of meaningful change. Go back to sails and windmills if we need to, we achieved global industry and shipping before the internal combustion engine existed, we can do it again.

Phase out fossil fuels. It'll suck a bit, fuck it. Increase reliance on public transport and population density. Make it so you don't need individual transport to accomplish basic necessities for the vast majority of people.

Ramp up public collaborative research into batteries, power storage, carbon capture, climate science. At this point we're playing catch up, we need everything we can to try to rectify this shit storm like yesterday.

Buy less crap. That’s it. It sounds like a sacrifice, but stuff doesn’t make you happy (provided your basic needs are met). If you are working longer hours to pay for your cars and tvs and fast fashion, your life might improve.

Playing with a cellphone is kinda fun. Know what’s really fun? Friends.

If you’re under 60, buying less crap is going to disrupt your life less than climate change will, so i think i am entitled to the aforementioned bonus points.

companies and countries have largely abandoned it already, the most polluting ones dint do anything to reduce it at all. consumers are the smaller emitters of it.

these companies have actively funded groups to dissuade "carbon usage" so they dont have to reduce thier own emissions.

I don't think there's any hope of addressing climate change as long as Europe and the USA adhere to a capitalist economic system.

There's now no way to stop or reverse the inevitable collapse of the comfortable way of life we have right now. This isn't a fight for survival or for the planet, it's to perpetuate the system we enjoy at the moment.

The only way remaining to minimise the damage to our way of life is with some huge geo-engineering projects. Like scattering reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect some sunlight away or releasing some novel chemical into the oceans to fix carbon dioxide and lock it away.

The risks of experimenting like this has always outweighed the benefits (like the guys who thought they could kill a hurricane and instead magnified it and sent it back inland resulting in the deaths of multiple people). But now it's too late to worry about things like that because the inevitable impacts of climate change including wild fires, habitat destruction, biodiversity collapse, extreme weather events are all here now while most of the world is still arguing about whether it even exists or not.

Encourage decentralisation and self-sufficiency. Produce and consume more locally. I think residential solar is a good start, as it may lead to reduction in overseas shipping for LNG, oil and coal. Small farms and workshops for daily necessities or repairs will further reduce need for commercial transportation. Work from home or encouraging local offices instead of corporate campuses will spread the population, make local businesses more viable, and reduce personal transportation.

All these encouragements should be done via tax credits or subsidies, so vote for parties who'd deliver those.

Sorry, not sorry, but the

I dont think its as simple as "tax billionaires out of existence and ban jets, airplanes, and cars" because thats not realistic.

is not something we can skip as ducking billionaires and private jers are a large part of the reason we're here in the first place.

Ban private jets, all of them. Maybe exceptions for medical flights only. There is no reason for their existence, there is no human right that says "well humans must be able to own their own airplane!"

Ban super yachts, there is no reason why they should exist beyond showing off what an abusive hoarding asshole the owner is.

Make cities for humans, not for cars. That doesn't mean ban cars outright but do make cities like in the Netherlands and more. Cars should be kept out of cities asuch as possible. Pedestrians and bicycles first (and in many places, only) and replace the vast majority of cars with electrified public transport. Make neighborhoods mixed buildings with homes, stores and bars and restaurants. All industrial stuff in industrial parks.

This will change the urban design of cities. You'll get many more smaller stores all around, people don't need a car to go yo Walmart, they walk to their neighborhood store. This will make all countries as nice as "oh my god the Netherlands is so nice, it's so nice with the small streets and the bicycle allowing you to go everywhere". It'll also lower CO2 by a shit load. In the Netherlands, a huge amount of the population doesn't have a car because they don't want a car. It's expensive and they no longer actually NEED one. Cars that are left should all be electrified.

Tax the rich, and not just a little bit. The 1% and 0.1% are extreme polluters and take and waste beyond anything that can be construed as normal. There is no inherent human right to be a billionaire. Tax the rich and prohibit anyone from having a networth over 10 million dollars (example figure, but something around that) by taxation. Any income after you reach that is 100 % taxed. Of course there will be tax brackets, starting at zero for the poorest, going up and up to that 100%.

Limit company sizes to 1 billion dollars networth and or 1000 employees. After that billion, revenue taxes go to 100% equally. No company should be too big. If the company is worth that, btw, you'd need loads of shareholders as each individual can only have a networth of 10 million, remember?

Teach our children that being super rich is something shameful. You've been abusive, you've been hoarding, it's abusive and you should be ashamed, and (as said above) prohibited

Require all product producers that all their products are recyclable, repairable, built with sustainable materials from sustainable sources. If it's not sustainable, don't sell it.

Same for packaging, bit also require all packaging to have only one packaging, not twenty, and all packaging material must be paper

Require stores to also sell used versions of their products. This requires that they also buy used products from their customers. This of course doesnt apply to food and such :)

Prohibit stores from dumping unsold items. If something doesn't sell, they can give it to the government for distribution

Ban plastics where possible. No plastic in packaging, for example. No plastic bottles, go back to glass. Standardize certain bottle sizes and colors for easier reuse.

Teach kids hat he basics of Capitalism is okay, but that it can become an evil beast if not controlled well. Consumerism is not okay, you don't need half the crap people have in their homes these days

With that said, prohibited ALL advertising. If I'd have to see another single lie from a company about how their product really is the best, it'd be too much

Stop inheritance. You should be able to inherit some memorabilia from your loved ones, not that castle they owned

Make all enormous homes with 50 rooms into nice spa hotels. Nobody has the right to have a home that is crazily oversized.

Tax meat heavily. It's still okay (for now) as it's such a staple of everyone's diets, but seriously, you don't need a two pound steak. Limit the amount of meat allowed in single servings. Push for laboratory meat.

Require farms to have all livestock to be able to roam free, have good food, etc.

Those are a few rules to staet with a generally healthier and better world for everyone. I'm sure some rules are incomplete, need more detail, need exceptions or slight modifications, but the basics are there.

Nothing not what we have today HAS to be the way it is, it is the way it is because we all allow it. Changing economic systems is usually disastrous, so let's keep capitalism, it's the best system to make capital. But with these basic limits, nobody gets too rich. The government gets loads of money that it can use for social systems like free healthcare, free education, free food and housing, universal basic income, etc.

Sounds pretty neat in my head, I'll start refining and adding to this list.

If they won't shut down their CO²-spewing factories and plants, then we will have to.

First, people need to accept that we exist within a culture of overconsumption that directly contributes to climate change. Sacrifices to common conveniences will need to be made before we can make any meaningful change.

I'm not saying this is all on the individual. Corporations contribute tremendous waste. But they do so in service to society's demand for convenience and instant gratification. We all need to learn to live with less.

Die off.