I know I'm going to get downvoted for this, but the answer to your question depends on your analysis of the problem.
If you're an ecomodernist, who believes we can stop and reverse the transgression of planetary boundaries (climate change, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, ocean acidification, etc.) without any meaningful system changes, the sibling comment tips might help.
If you are, like me, unconvinced by the ecomodernist argument – and have a grasp on all of the different ways the environment is being destroyed (not just "climate"), know Jevons paradox and rebound effects, are up to speed with the empirical knowledge of decoupling rates of both energy and material flows compared to "safe" limits – then "working for climate" almost exclusively means working to bring about a big political change.
Unfortunately that limits quite a bit the income potential of the work, but for me that's what "working for climate" means.
Let me know if you want to be put in contact with a partner working at one of the key consultancies advising EU countries' governments (+EU itself and some other countries) to help them evaluate their impact on climate and strategies to reduce them.
> ...working to bring about a big political change
Can we start a quick brainstorming what promising organizations exist that support this goals and in turn joining/supporting them would be a viable option for individuals to have an actual impact towards political change?
I'm a big fan of ClientEarth - they essentially take governments and organisations to court to try to force them to meet local and international environmental laws. It's one thing having the laws in place, but if they aren't enforced they aren't worth anything.
What a horrible landing page mechanism. Just show me the site, not a ten-second splash screen drip-feeding me words just because you think it looks cool.
You can tell they are effective as they get regularly attacked by people here who seem to have a visceral hatred of them and very weird justifications for why (they're under the thrall of the fossil fuel companies apparently)
Anyone that advocates for increasing democracy generally, whether more representational democracy in existing democracies that have broken systens (US or UK) or spreading it further. People generally want action for climate change, the people who don't need to spend a lot of money and tell a lot of lies to hold this back. The more democracy the more they'll need to spend.
HN types might be more attracted to the business or analytical sides though. Carbon Tracker or Bloomberg New Energy Finance which proceed from the premise that climate change is inefficient and there's market based opportunities there to be exploited.
Within big orgs like Google and Microsoft they have similar teams I believe, looking for the cheapest and most synergistic ways for them to save money and help the climate at the same time.
>Anyone that advocates for increasing democracy generally
I find this take fascinating. In my model, increasing democracy correlates negatively with increasing long term planning, which only then wouldn’t be the case if our species was acting as a collective. Aggregating individual interests doesn’t magically lead to collective interests, just to the set of actions that map on individual demand. There are no real majorities in favor of the rather radical changes required to deal with the major problems of our time, the opposite is the case. People are willing to sacrifice the stability of the future in favor of their well being in the current legislative period, especially in countries with demographics skewed towards the elderly.
Democracy is not the solution unless a culture of sanity becomes prevalent, and that’s not on the horizon afaik.
Borrowing from a german idiom, the current model is “Eltern haften für ihre Kinder”, parents are liable for their children. What we need is the cultural change in the opposite direction, that being a heavy awareness of the fact that children are de facto liable for the actions of their parents.
If you look at polling, the people are usually better than the politicians at long term planning.
This seems to be generally true in history too. That's a big reason why propaganda is a thing. Having to convince lots of people to do something not in their interests is hard work.
Democracy is messy, and imperfect but it gets attacked from both sides, the people who think the rich and powerful have too much control of it and the ones that want the rich and powerful to have more control.
It's easy to be cynical but generally every small step towards greater democracy has paid off.
With regards to old people voting, the answer is more young people voting, not taking votes away from older people.
Even many counter-examples you might think of, like early USSR and modern China, were often reactions against even more anti-democratic rule and can be considered steps towards greater democracy.
And this is not a new thing, many of the things we study in classics are the reactions against greater democracy:
> As Robert Dahl writes, "Although the practices of modern democracy bear only a weak resemblance to the political institutions of classical Greece...Greek democratic ideas have been more influential...[and] what we know of their ideas comes less from the writings and speeches of democratic advocates, of which only fragments survive, than from their critics."[9]
> Aristotle was a mild critic "who disliked the power that he thought the expansion of democracy necessarily gave to the poor."[9] Plato was an opponent of democracy who advocated for "government by the best qualified."
Amazing, really. You are facing a massive - nearly unpredictable problem - changing the climate. Faced with a problem of such magnitude, you decide the best solution is... A second, massive and even more unpredictable problem. Achieving widespread, totalizing political and economic change that not only has to succeed, has to be better than the system we have now also has to solve the first problem.
To say this is difficult is an understatement. I'd argue it's also impossible and the result would be widespread suffering and a failure to solve climate change due to the distraction. Luckily you're not going to succeed, because like I said, it's really difficult.
I'm familiar with the line of reasoning. It's common among particularly left wing people and comes directly from their thinkers and philosophers. I think it was Gramsci who first said that the 'good' society 'cannot even be imagined' under the current system. This is a cop out for all those who believe they could make the utopia, they don't know how but they're sure the first step is total political change, and step 2 will make itself known then. It shouldn't have to be explained why this is a stupid idea, and how dangerous and harmful it would be.
This response is more insulting than it needs to be. There's nothing amazing about thinking that in order to solve a hard problem, you need to do a hard thing. Whether or not implementing political change is a necessary first step to solving climate change has nothing to do with whether implementing political change is hard or even impossible. It's absolutely plausible that there's no way to solve climate change without systemic change. It's also plausible that we can't solve climate change without systemic change AND that systemic change is very hard or even impossible. These statements aren't contradictory. In addition, tying the suggestion to a political party and then calling it stupid is not a constructive form of discourse.
> they don't know how but they're sure the first step is total political change, and step 2 will make itself known then.
This is entirely the issue with green types, (myself being married to one, and leaning green-er myself)
The "ecomoderates" are actually the ones pushing for sensible change. We can not cause a giant upheaval of society and then figure out what works (unless you think other humans are the problem and should be eradicated - inwhich societal disruption is one stone for two birds). Figure it out now.
Part of figuring it out is actually figuring out what is to be solved. Sri Lanka thinks that it was to do with fertilizer, and caused a catastrophe for themselves.
Plastic waste pollution/landfill is often something that is said needs to be solved, - A few months ago scientists found/grew an algae that eats plastic. I was thinking that it's amazing because that can really help clean up the place and deal with landfill. The overwhelming response was "No we can't have that, that's carbon released in the air from bug farts, it's best to leave the plastic in the ground".
The only way forward is progressively and piecemeal until viable solutions are found. If you want faster actions, then contribute more viable solutions that don't involve killing your neighbour. The fact is that things are getting better, and they are continuing to get better. You need to be patient in figuring out your ideas.
I'm currently building a house or of hemp-crete which will absorb carbon out of the atmosphere as it dries, and I'm figuring out the problems with it (mainly labour intensive, a mushier organic concrete) and so trying to find solutions to make it more widely used.
What does meaningful system change mean to you?
1. Trillions of dollars of investment in the transition to solar?
2. Carbon tax (and other taxes on externalities?)
3. Abandoning combustion engines and switching to electric?
4. Moral persuasion to convince people to that humans are a cancer upon the earth?
1,2,3 have huge potential for climate and economic value. 4 is a straw man that obviously does nothing. But what do you propose exactly?
Yes, 1 and 3 would be fantastic – although switching to electric without at the same time reducing SOVs is IMO very inadequate if you take int account all of the planetary boundaries, not just climate change. 2 is a policy that might stem from the system change, not the actual change. 4 is not based on facts: there are billions of people in the world who are living within planetary boundaries. Can't stress this enough: it's not "humans" that are the problem but the wealthy people that are taking more from nature than nature can regenerate.
A meaningful system change to me is where there is a deliberate and continued reduction in material flows and energy use in the rich countries until they are below planetary boundaries. That can be done if they deliberately start reducing overproduction. That in turn would happen if governments would abandon the goal of aggregate economic growth across all sectors, but instead increase the parts of the economy that produce well-being and scale down the parts that don't. Another system change would be if the rich countries would pay for the catastrophic damage they have inflicted on the countries worst affected by climate change, and then stop taking advantage of poor countries by ending unequal exchange.
Those would be system changes.
I'm not saying nothing except politics is needed – everything would be doubly hard if e.g. solar wouldn't have become so cheap.
But given what is easy in the current world (producing and selling stuff) and what is hard (creating political change), I wish that the most capable and smartest people in the world would work mostly on the hard parts.
"...if governments would abandon the goal of aggregate economic growth across all sectors..."
You've obviously thought about this topic quite deeply - have you heard any realistic proposals on how to achieven this? I have yet to hear any, and until I do I'll be devoting my energy to changes that have at least some chance of being enacted, like a carbon tax.
There is no easy answer, and making a change this big is a monumental task. Personally I've still come to think that just because making this change is very hard, that's not an excuse for me to not try, because the alternative is so much worse.
What I'm talking about is what the academic degrowth research has been working on for the past 20 years. (What's under the degrowth umbrella is the current wave of discussions started by the 50 year old "The Limits to Growth" report.) Doughnut economics is also intimately related.
If you want to learn more, as it happens, there is a brand new book "Degrowth & Strategy" with a free PDF here:
Andrew Yang's proposal in the last Democratinc party primary of replacing GDP with a 'national report card' seems like a realistic-enough approach. In fact, I'd say if one views Andrew Yang's platform as a whole (particularly the heavy value-added tax) through an environmental perspective, I'd say he had the best environmental proposals I've seen for any politician in my lifetime.
The problem with political change is that then it becomes highly polarised political topic. With some people pushing rebranded communist ideas. Then suddenly it becomes political spectrum issue and not climate issue.
Let alone that historically non-capitalist countries had terrible ecological track record. For example here in ex-USSR. In USSR era ecological situation was pure catastrophe. But we're making massive improvements for the last few decades. And capitalist market economy works damn great to support ecological efforts.
> Another system change would be if the rich countries would pay for the catastrophic damage they have inflicted on the countries worst affected by climate change, and then stop taking advantage of poor countries by ending unequal exchange.
So, let already rich elite in poor country syphon even more money off rich countries? While making rich countries poor, so there's a big chance for elite in rich countries become even more detached, similar to poor countries. Global elite unite & fuck over the rest...
Also, „reducing overproduction“ will fuck over poor countries much more. Make stuff expensive to produce and suddenly bringing back manufacturing is much more viable.
ahm, so, how exactly was ex-USSR ecologically worse than western countries, that were already producing en masse all sorts of single time use plastic unnecessary products, solely for the purpose of economic growth? Single time coca-cola bottles, plastic wrapping etc were not found in USSR. Yes, certain energy sectors were inefficient, and burning a lot of energy in vain, but still it seems to me that it was way less environmentally impactful than consumer society in the west. But that's just my personal armature opinion.
It was not „inefficiency“. It was environmental disasters left & right without nobody responsible. Single-use plastics is peanuts compared to just dumping chemicals and bio waste left and right.
For example, there is a lake in my hometown. Next to it, there was a carpets factory. Do you know how you could know what color they'd use that day? Just go swim in the lake in the evening :) The factory didn't care. Upper tier of the party doesn't care if some workers' town lake is messed up. There's neither resources nor incentive to take care of it.
If you'd go to local party office or KGB, they'd laugh you off and go party with the factory management :) Oh, and you probably work in the same factory. Or local school/shop/water, which is run by the same single party as the factory.
As a citizen, do you want to vote with your wallet and not buy carpet made in such way? Tough luck, that's the only carpet factory you get it from :)
State farm in the outskirts of town was run in same way. Just drop fertilizer in a water ditch and call it a day. Who cares how much you produce and that local ecological system is messed up? Meanwhile tractor driver can steal diesel planned for fertilising the fields and sell it in black market :)
It's not a random town with tough luck. This was modus operandi throughout USSR. If you want bigger scale stories, look up lake Karachay and Majak nuclear accident(s) :) Same line if thinking, just worse consequences.
Not fertilizer in water. But literalyl piles of fertilizer in water ditches. No farmer in market economy would do that, because fertilizer is damn expensive.
China is turning away from coal mostly because they don't want to be dependent on Australia and other sources of coal.
How would you structure incentives in market economy to incentivise discarding fertiliser in ditches? In worst case, you'd be better off selling it in black market.
Probably heavy taxation of consumption and lowering the average standard of living across the globe. Too bad it's a pipe dream, people will never vote for it and an dictator that tries to impose it will be overthrown.
It's not the "standard of living" that is unsustainable.
The USA wastes a lot more resources to achieve similar standard of living to Europe. And even Europe is putting a lot of effort into policies that simultaneously improve their standard of living and reduce waste or pollution.
Saying that "standard of living" is synonymous with "amount of fossil fuels you burn" is standard climate change denier rhetoric.
People with efficient cars and well insulated homes have higher standards of living than those who don't.
> The USA wastes a lot more resources to achieve similar standard of living to Europe.
It's not similar though. Americans live in way bigger homes and on way bigger plots of land. Streets are wider. Everything is less cramped in general. Also, US has possibly the best health care quality (note I'm not discussing health care _insurance_) in the world. They can also afford more consumer niceties (iPhones, nice cars, foreign vacations etc.). All that extra stuff and quality requires extra fossil fuels and minerals.
How comes that you have the "best health care quality" but all the indicators of health care quality like life expectancy is among the worse in the Western world?
It's not only about fossil fuels. It's about all the resources that we use more of than is regenerated each year. I think both the US and Europe use too much.
Can you be more specific? What are they using too much of?
Water, Uranium, Gold, Copper, Sand?
Whatever it is, there's almost a certainly a way to use it more efficiently and therefore improve standards of living in Europe, and the rest of the world, at the same time.
Fossil fuels, fresh water, CO2 budget to limit warming, fertile soil, artificial fertilizer.
And things that are mined in general (like metals). They won't run out but as we mine the easy deposits first, the amount of energy it costs to mine a given amount will be forever increasing. E.g., eventually it will cost more energy to mine the materials for a wind mill than the electricity it will generate in its lifetime.
I'd be shocked if even one country does it in a meaningful way. It's just so contrary to human nature.
I think the only thing that can save us short-term is technology. Inventing and implementing new gizmos is something we're actually good at. Long-term we're probably screwed anyway, because we'll eventually disturb the biological systems on the Earth too much (either via pollution, ocean acidification, killing biodiversity, soil depletion etc.), and they're way too immense and complex for us to fix. People forget that we're part of Earth's ecosystem, but if we disturb it too much we'll be reminded of it either via plagues (we got a taste of it already) and/or famines.
Well, it will happen, because the current standard is unsustainable, and that's the definition of the word.
The only thing is whether any of it will be in a somewhat controlled, damage limiting fashion, or will it be just one stupid catastrophe after another.
I feel new gizmos are generally just more fuel onto the fire of consumerism, and will just speed up the process, not slow it.
"Environmental problems have contributed to numerous collapses of civilizations in the past. Now, for the first time, a global collapse appears likely. Overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich and poor choices of technologies are major drivers; dramatic cultural change provides the main hope of averting calamity."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3574335/
The only pipe dream is to continue breaching the planet boundaries.
But severe limitations were imposed during wars on the population by the state, so they are in the realm of possibility (once we acknowledge the severity of the problem, which we are not doing, because of many reasons).
We should also add that the expansion of renewables energy create more jobs than the fossil fuel sector, therefore there is at least some hope of this limitations being not as severe as w think. It was calculated that, to be sustainable, the lifestyle should go back to the sixties, during which we lived fairly well but without a savage overconsumption as now.
The idea of planetary boundaries is ridiculous. Are you talking about the collapse of an ecosystem? Multiple ecosystems? That’s still defined. But planetary boundaries is another word for “saving the earth.”
No. The earth doesn’t need saving. The diversity of life needs saving. Planetary boundaries is the wrong goal.
It’s not in the paper, actually (searched for “bound”). Reading the Wikipedia makes me feel like it is bad science, tbh. Meaning, too popular to critique adequately. But it makes no sense. Biodiversity isn’t a boundary it is a goal.
I would also like to have something more concrete here, but I think the GP hinted at why there is no single elevator pitch-like answer to real-world problems like climate change:
>> [...] have a grasp on all of the different ways the environment is being destroyed (not just "climate")
Where is the electricity coming from to charge your electric vehicles? Electric vehicles have a lot of potential to reduce pollution and noise in cities, but as a solution to "fixing" inevitable climate they are a con.
Electric vehicles use a lot less energy in total in the supply chain than gasoline cars (extracting and refining and transporting oil uses a lot of energy too, some of it electricity).
So electric vehicles reduces the energy required.
Longer term: Gasoline cars are not viable at all; electric cars are viable to the extent one can secure the energy for them. It is a way of getting any road transportation done in the future AT ALL; that is surely not a con?
I hope noone is arguing that moving to electric cars by itself is sufficient to stop climate change. That would be a con but also seems like a strawman.
The goal should be net zero, and electric cars are needed to have road transportation at all.
Absolutely agreed, except for one part: I don't think net zero will be enough. It might have been enough if we were at net zero thirty years ago. But now, in addition to net zero (which would be an impressive feat to achieve, society-wide), we need to work on absorbing carbon from the atmosphere, before the ocean does it for us.
The mythical climate change boogeyman, that's hasn't melted all the glaciers or put Manhattan underwater like we were warned of 30 years ago.The fearmongering is all based on models- and covid demonstrated how useless those are with complex systems.
What's the solid evidence any of it will happen? The IPCC model is an average of other models, it has no validity by itself (just reject the carp models until it's past performance looks good). What models have had an accurate forecast and for how long?
What kinds of solid evidence will you accept? Should we wait until all corals have bleached and withered away? Should we wait until all of Greenland is arable? How many years of drought should California endure until you might start accepting that maybe something has been changing for the worse?
Or should we rather ignore you and focus instead on things we can change?
I'm trying to make it easier to find homes where you can walk, bike, and take public transport to your daily needs (and have great broadband so you can work from home where taht suits).
No, changing zoning laws so that cities are built in a way that makes this possible for a bigger portion of the population would count as system change.
Correct. It is due to the politics and incessant greed of human nature that our ecological problems are difficult to reverse.
From the politics POV, they must impose a limit on how much factories should produce, because ultimately the climate problem has been caused due to our exploitation of resources and their eventual disposal as waste.
Less production = less waste = better ecology
But if you remember what happened with the toilet papers during covid, I don't have to remind you what's going to happen when production of most goods is unanimously reduced.
There will be those who panic buy, and those who intentionally hoard, and a basic shortage of everything which I'm sure humanity in general is not willing to cope with for the sake of our environment. Hence, reversing the damage cannot be possible.
However, those who want to try, I wish you all the best in your endeavours.
What is your opinion on the current post-truth politics backed by ubiquitous social media?
I am at a loss when figuring out how to even work towards meaningful change in an environment where that messages are viewed / liked / shared is the only important thing, and the relation of that message to physical reality is completely irrelevant.
And I have the feeling that in general, software is part of the problem, not the solution :-(
While I agree that political change is necessary for a host of reasons, and that the current global system (more specifically the late-stage-capitalist US-hegemony financial world order with almost no democratic controls left) is pretty ill-suited to the task of fixing climate change... I think it's probably all we've got for this one in the timespan necessary.
Either the pain will reach deep enough into the system to affect the pride of the few remaining people who still have levers of control which can amount to more than "money go up", or the very mechanisms of capital will be affected "money not going up anymore. guess we gotta fix the planet", or it will all fail spectacularly and those in power will use the new climate conditions as a perpetual planned obsolescence to profit off increased costs of living worldwide for however long that lasts before a war breaks out and ends it all.
Either way, these decisions are probably out of the hands of the vast majority of people, ourselves included (unless you have a staggeringly rich uncle).
The mechanisms I see we have available, in this obscure niche forum for engineers, are to reduce the pricetag of climate action to levels where it makes capital sense. At $100/ton it's a ceiling of $3 Trillion to suck up 100% of the world's CO2 each year. Adjust to more reasonable targets as needed. Now... comparing that to bailouts of the past and considering we can likely get that pricepoint much lower at scale (or even profitable, with e.g. a self-perpetuating kelp farm harvested for fuel/plastic) that really doesn't seem like that much. The mass manufacturing and/or geoengineering to actually implement such projects seems daunting and risky in new ways, but the financials aren't all that bad. Someone just has to pony up. And imo the current situation is simply a political/financial game of hot potato where every faction wants to push the problem down the line for someone else to handle until the absolute last minute - even as solar and tech improvements are making potential solutions that much more achievable (which again motivates the delays).
Even now, with just current solar panel technology, the sheer investment value in just buying some panels and having them pay for themselves in a couple years is going to motivate most of the change needed. Obviously there are still a lot of industries that cant use that immediately, and a lot who are motivated to protect their sunk cost investments (anyone with an oil portfolio - aka most of the decision makers) - but still, capital is gonna react to this all. Just likely too slowly...
The most likely scenario I see where climate change gets solved by the current system (of the shrinking set of scenarios where it's solved at all) is where governments (and their financial backers) consort to fund some mega projects for mass CO2 drawdown. This results in a lot of money somehow flowing to oil and gas people (buyouts to pay them not to interfere), and increased power concentration in the US hegemonic global state - though possibly with a new negotiated balance between its participants. They implement these projects using some wartime-style measures of mass manufacturing and pseudo-command-economies to start up the project (WWII production would be easily capable of this - govs can do quite a lot when they actually try, and print debt/money to fund it). Once it's mostly built and derisked, sucking down CO2 successfully, the project will probably be privatized to some megacorp which charges a perpetual fee to taxpayers and is owned by the backroom financiers/political authors of this project. It will become a hated entity in the future like Nestle or Facebook, but it will also at least mostly mitigate extreme climate problems - probably artificially keeping things at a soft boil perpetually to ensure it gets paid. The profits of such a corp will not flow to the people whatsoever though, naturally. It will cause new "unforseen" environmental and social problems probably, but these will be debated ad-nauseum on talk shows whether they're worse than climate change. The project's true cost and effectiveness will be heavily distorted by the sheer amount of greased hands in its overall construction and operation. Though its creators will at least have had the prescience to make sure it sucks down enough carbon to reduce global measurements by a reasonable amount each year - or they'll monopolize the measuring agencies.
I don't understand like half of these words. Ecomodernist I new to me, decoupling rates, some paradox, rebound effect... is this a riddle? What here needed prefixing with an anti-downvote spell, the claim that we need systematic change to fix systematic problems?
I wrote this very quickly as just one comment among dozens of very different comments, so I really didn't expect to get the attention. It's much harder to write with plain words about these topics, so that's the reason for all the jargon.
As for the anti-downvote spell, I knew from previous experience that I get downvotes every time I question the importance of technology. And I did notice many downvotes this time too (from karma fluctuations), but just got a lot more upvotes.
If you're an ecomodernist, who believes we can stop and reverse the transgression of planetary boundaries (climate change, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, ocean acidification, etc.) without any meaningful system changes, the sibling comment tips might help.
If you are, like me, unconvinced by the ecomodernist argument – and have a grasp on all of the different ways the environment is being destroyed (not just "climate"), know Jevons paradox and rebound effects, are up to speed with the empirical knowledge of decoupling rates of both energy and material flows compared to "safe" limits – then "working for climate" almost exclusively means working to bring about a big political change.
Unfortunately that limits quite a bit the income potential of the work, but for me that's what "working for climate" means.