Wiki List of Every Action we as a Collective/Individual Can Take Against Climate Change
Wiki List of Every Action we as a Collective/Individual Can Take Against Climate Change
Collective:
-Regulate Polluting Industries
-Improve insulation in older buildings
-Build more apartments
-Put carbon labels on products
-Mandate higher build quality of manufactured goods
-Require that water pipes have pressure management and active leak detection
-Prioritize public transit over electric cars
-Halt all new road developments and just maintain them until public transit is good enough
-Subsidize Electric cars (second to public transit in funding)
-Establish support networks for people who are using older gadgets/cars/clothing to encourage solutions to make goods last longer
-Build more green spaces
-Create a program to recycle old clothing
-More widespread use of contactless payments
-Ban all fossil fuel ads
-Ban oversized vehicles
-Encourage the use of hatchbacks and sedans
-Towns sign plant based treaty
-Convert animal agriculture land to wild lands
-Ban private jets/yachts
-Design cities as more walkable
-Switch to renewable and nuclear technologies
-Support repairability
-Shut down all oil operations
-Mandate microfibre filters for washing machines
-Force companies to mine minerals from e-waste instead
-Give up half of the planet to nature
-Do everything to prevent and end wars
-Tax the rich and use the money for climate initiatives
-Switch to bidets to save trees
-Switch to super slippery toilets to save water
-Mandate all stoves to be electric
-Reduce concrete in constructions projects and opt for bamboo/wood construction
-Require all office work to be done from home for as much as possible
-Ban discrimination and promote affirmative action so that there isn't lost potential or innovation from disadvantaged groups
-Increase grid interconnections
-Implement waste-to-energy conversions for waste management systems (stopgap solution)
-Build robust high sped rail network and ban flights under 4 hours.
-Require much longer warranties on consumer goods
-Require all software to become open source after the company stops developing the code
-Patents expire after 4 years
-Ban cryptominning
-Increase energy efficient standards with new houses with solar panels mandatory
-Support political parties with green policies
-Boycott fossil fuel banks and switch to green credit unions
Individual:
-Switch to E-sim
-Switch to green burials
-Buy used
-Install geothermal heat pump systems
-Install smart thermostats
-Use shampoo/conditioner bars
-Shop at refillable container stores
-Buy stuff at the local store
-Eat plant based
-Switch to Ecosia
-Recycle
-Give homemade gifts
-Compost
-Be organized
-Avoid synthetic cloths
-Buy reputable carbon credits
-Install Linux on new/old computers
-Pickup litter
-Ride your bicycle instead of the car
-Adopt kids and companions instead
-Start your own garden
-Use older cars for more than 12 years
-Keep phone for longer than 5.5 years (easy to do with fairphone,iphone, pixel, samsung or android phone with unlockable bootloader)
-Buy Fairphones as they're the most repairable and have to 8-10 years of software support
-Buy Framework laptops as they're user repairable upgrade-able
-Use reusable diapers for your infant/toddler
-Buy goods within your continent to avoid cargo ship bunker fuel
-Use refillable water bottles for everywhere you go
-Demand that your investment/retirement program switches to green projects
-Switch to e-documents
-Track your government's climate policy by visiting https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/
I will add more to list as more ideas are thought of.
In this entire discussion PUBLIC TRANSPORT has to be the number one measure. It has to be the first thing you see on your home page. Abolish cars, inside cities at least
- Shut down all but the most necessary of production
- Abolish all but the most necessary of work
- Stop all war, yes, all of it. Put on your diplomacy hats and figure it the fuck out
- Transition away from the petrodollar completely as quick as possible
- Abolish white supremacy (Really)
- Yeet the rich, as they are excessive polluters
- Abolish the entire meat industry
and of course, most importantly
- Feel really bad about your personal carbon footprint.
may I sugest instead of just yeeting the rich, where they will decompose and release methane, and that is just wasteful, we use them to feed the hungry?
Finally some good suggestions!
The channel I linked in the previous comment is a great resource for climate-related education. Very entertaining content and they don't pull any punches when it comes to saying it how it is.
-These 4 are basicly Greenwashing:
- -Switch to Esim
- -Put carbon labels on products
- -Switch to Ecosia
- -Buy reputable carbon credits
-Recycle
- -It's not "Recycle", it's "Reduce Reuse Recycle" in order of importance, also anything other then metal recycling is effectively useless.
-Buy stuff at the local store
- -this only helps if the local store is also buying locally.
-Start your own garden
- -Start your own sustainable garden,
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- -is forward-thinking
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- -values ecosystem support
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- -makes as little negative impact on the earth as possible
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- -works with nature instead of against it
Recycling was also confirmed a few years ago to be a total scam, with almost all of it going straight to the landfill.
Aluminum and Steel, some kinds of batteries and electronics are worth recycling because extracting and refining new supplies of metals from raw ore is an extremely costly and energy intense process. A good rule of thumb is if you can find it on the periodic table it's worth recycling.
How couls any of those be labeled greenwashing if the goal is a complete list of possible actions?
Yeah some dont have a huge impact like esim and ecosia, but theyre the better alternatives to things we use anyway.
Carbon labels would make a huge difference, I dont know what you mean there.
Carbon credits are used for greenwashing, because most are not regulated and monitored strictly enough. That doesnt mean carbon credits in general are greenwashing. Buying reputable ones with actual impact definitely helps.
Its sad that many people are kept from donating by the myth that 'it doesnt help anyway' or 'theyre just gonna keep my money'. Sure if you just donate wherever, chances are your money is not used efficiently, but there are a lot of organizations that are reputable and efficient, you just need to do a little research
Its important not to give things with low impact the same weight as actions that have a big impact. easy low impact fixes give the appearance of helping but only serve to distract form harder actions that need to be taken.
There is no such thing as a reputable carbon credit, for every ton of CO2 you produce you can pay me to Unburn a ton of CO2. It doesn't do anything to reduce the amount of CO2 produced it just makes it harder to audit the CO2 production and helps to hide the extent of the problem.
Carbon credits are bullshit. Like, what are you actually paying for? No one is taking the carbon in the atmosphere and stuffing it into little jars.
If it’s a tree planting initiative, that’s a great idea, but a lengthy process, and the moment that tree gets cut down to make room for something else, or if there’s a forest fire, the effort is undone.
Honestly, carbon credits are mostly a feel-good measure to make people feel better about consumption from a particular source. It’s a fantastic way for a company to market themselves as caring for the environment while simultaneously destroying it - companies only care about profit, and will happily burn the planet if it makes them money.
If you truly want to make a difference, consume as little as you can get away with.
Making public transit accessible, reliable, fast, clean, and completely free will encourage people to ditch their cars. I'd like to see privately owned cars completely banned in cities and towns with a population of >1000 people, but that's a step for after setting up public transit services to handle the load.
Build a robust high speed rail network and ban short flights of <4 hours.
Requiring much longer warranties on consumer goods in general, paired with strong right to repair bills.
Requiring all software source code to be released to the public after the company stops maintaining the product will keep an enormous number of devices useful for longer too, and will improve efficiency.
Patents expire after 4 years; if a company came up with a patent that improves efficiency of something, keeping it behind massive fees will limit the adoption and advancement of that technology.
Banning crypto mining.
Reducing concrete in construction projects in favour of mass timber from sustainably sourced forests (the wood building materials are a form of carbon storage), and bamboo construction (even more sustainable than wood, though more difficult to work with?)
Requiring all office work to allow working from home most of the time.
Patents expire after 4 years; if a company came up with a patent that improves efficiency of something, keeping it behind massive fees will limit the adoption and advancement of that technology.
Wow I just ranted about this yesterday! I really hope this idea catches on. We really need to accelerate adoption of improvements.
Patents are a double-edged sword, the initial goal is to encourage R&D investment, but in practice patents are made to create exclusive control over who can use that technology. I think it's okay for patents to exist, but they should expire fast rather than letting the company who owns the patent to rest on their laurels with their monopoly over their invention, this way we can iterate and improve upon it.
Patents taking very long to expire may have made sense back in the day when technology adoption was slower (although I think they were too long for even back then). In the modern era, our tools allows for a much faster time-to-market, so keeping the duration of the parents is even more harmful.
We can see it all the time, and a fun example of it would be Cherry switches; they invented the MX style switch and have done minimal improvements for a long time, and once the patent expired, competitors started selling MX clones (clones were available in china before the patent expired, but there weren't as many as there are now), this meant that Cherry switches were now the inferior in quality to the clones, which is better for the consumer; had the patent expired sooner, both Cherry and competitors would have started the iterative race much earlier.
Another example is the pacojet; a commercial instant ice cream maker which costs $6000 and had no competition, so no reason for the company to improve it. After the patent expire Ninja made a $300 home version of this which is in some aspects superior to the original.
This is why I proposed, instead of completely abolishing all patents, to shorten the lifespan of the patent. Some inventions shouldn't be patentable, like pharmaceuticals; because even for a short time, gatekeeping a lifesaving product behind a massive paywall is insane.
I think there should be some kind of legal/constitutional mechanism that gives the state power to declare a certain invention as "significant for the public's well being" and expunge the patent, paying a reasonable compensation fee to the patent holder.
We have a community for this topic over at !climate_action_individual@slrpnk.net
I'm sure they would love this if you cross posted ^^
I have done that! I would love more ideas to be put forward!
Improve the insulation in your home (loft, cavity wall etc etc)
Require new homes to be built with higher standards of insulation and heat pumps for heating.
Require new homes to be built with solar panels.
Divest any investments (pensions, savings etc) away from funds that contain oil and other polluting companies.
Great idea, jotted down a list of things I've found to be impactful over the past year, some of them overlap with what's already been posted.
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Installed solar panels (according to my app, last year they produced enough MWh to equal 8.5 tons of CO2)
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Trade in our ICE car for an EV (in a year has avoided 5.5 tons of CO2)
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Insulated our house (attic and walls) coupled with double-pane windows. Cuts down on AC and furnace usage immensely and makes the house much more pleasant overall
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Prefer 100% cotton clothing/avoid synthetic materials
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Installed a Lint-Luv-R microplastic filter on our washing machine
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Shop at refillable container store and avoid single-use plastic where possible
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Eat more plant-based food, e.g. oat milk, rice, tofu, beans, noodles, etc.
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Install a rain diverter in our downspouts to collect rain water
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Reusable diapers if you have an infant/toddler. Diaper waste piles up fast
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Run/walk to the gym and grocery store
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Prefer items made in North America versus overseas (cargo ships burn bunker fuel )
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For coffee, I bring a travel cup and ask if they can fill that instead of a plastic cup (iced) or cup with a plastic lid (hot)
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Donate to reputable environmental organizations
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Replace landscaping with native plants, allow pollinators to do their thing
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Vote for the world you want to live in and pass on: with your time, dollar, and ballot
Trading your ICE car for an EV? So somebody else now drives your old car? Doesn't save any CO2.
Not sure what you are suggesting the better alternative would be? Scrap it? Whoever purchased the used vehicle could have bought a new car instead (which would have required more raw materials for processing).
One common issue I noticed among environmentalists is they argue with each other about what the perfect solution should be instead of just starting somewhere. Any progress is better than nothing at the rate the climate is changing and such progress tends to compound over time.
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Has someone listed EAT THE RICH, I think it is the most enviromentaly concious thing we can do
Second is Communism
3rd ... Make sure that you compost the rich that you could not eat
Require every company submit a yearly energy reduction plan. Not only is it good for the environment, it's good for the bottom line on day one and allows for additional site expansion by increasing the currently available energy budget without having to upgrade infrastructure.
A very limited list of countries in the world have good enough infra for electric cars. The same about plant based: in developing countries finding a good plant based food, like meat replacement or vegan milk, is a challenge.
Greater investor into electric car infrastructure should come second to public transit.
Plant based doesnt need to be mock meats. People can have lentils or beans for their protein substitute.
Plant based milk would thrive on the global market as most people are actually lactose intolerant.
Formatting is broken.
How is eSIM green?
Using old computers can be a pro or a con, depending on its efficiency and your electricity source.
Avoid synthetic cloths and microfibre filters seems at odds.
It looked different from the formatting I did on my notes.
eSIM reduces plastic and shipping use.
Using older computers has to be weighed against the newly developed efficiencies in the latest cpus/gpus. Windows 11 is dropping computers that are like 4 years old. That is way too soon for perfectly good computers.
Synthetic cloths are used a lot currently so using microfibre filters is a stop gap measure until we have biodegradable cloths.
Individual Action on climate change is more or less useless,,, we should look at systemic issues and fixes
I just got a 11 year old thinkpad and installed linux mint on there. Now I can use linux anytime I want :)