If you had $5000 that you wanted to use to fight climate change, and you wanted to have it have a bigger multiplying effect than your own personal consumption (install heat pumps, get electric car, etc.), where would you put that, given that most carbon credits seem to be scams?
That is, what's the least-scammy carbon credit, and/or place of concrete change?
Places I donate to, but wonder how much the effect of each is:
* Climate charities focused on legislation (EarthJustice, Clean Air Task Force, EDF, NRDC)
* Direct CO2 removal (Climeworks). Seems like a drop in the bucket, but feel like this tech needs to grow.
* Goldstandard.org Carbon Credits. May be just as scammy, but appears to be direct gifts to green energy projects in developing world. (Of course, maybe they would have gotten the money anyway.)
In the realm of political donations, municipal politics is so often forgotten about, but is in control of some of the lowest hanging fruit for carbon reduction in cities.
Almost the entirety of carbon emissions in cities comes from 1) home heating and 2) transportation, both of which could be significantly impacted by city policy from environmentalist municipal politicians.
For example:
* separated bike lanes (incredibly cheap in the grand scheme of things)
Buy some land in a cheap rural place and fill it with fruit trees and contribute that towards the community each year. That will sequester far more carbon and help the environment more than contributing funds towards these sorts of programmes - and you will likely build up some immovable assets over time.
Or buy some land and leave it alone, let nature do it's thing. Sadly this is not possible as in most places there is legislation in place that prevents you from "mismanaging" land like this.
I'm thinking about doing something like this, but it involves work. I'm going to find native species, maybe focusing on some insect that's in decline, find it's nursery/food plants and fill an area with them, along with any other plants and fungi that have symbiotic relationships with them. Then apply for a grant that specifically targets the threatened species. That way, it's official. It's a ton of work though.
I think it is more fun and fulfilling to attempt to do something with the land - to make it useful towards the local community, than leaving it to nature to just fill the land. For instance, if you make a small pond, you could suddenly have a very interesting ecosystem in this land
I just realized how much I'd like to see a website summarizing legislation for various countries in the world, and venues into purchasing land for the respective locations. I want a hometurf.eco :)
This makes a lot less sense as an impact strategy than buying solar.
I'm not saying solar is optimized, versus say competent lobbying or something smarter, but at least it directly addresses long term climate issues and has a clear causal effect not just on personal consumption but unit price also (and thus others' future energy purchases as consequence).
Donate to aspiring Democrats running for state legislatures in blues states with red State Legislatures or split governments.
> Back in 2019, [David Roberts] wrote for Vox that there is one weird trick states can use to ensure good climate and energy policy. That trick is: giving Democrats full control of the government. It has worked in California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii — the list goes on.
> The 2022 midterm elections brought Democrats full control — with trifectas of both houses of the legislature and the governor's office — in four new M states: Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota.
> Does the one weird trick still work? Well, you’ll never guess what happened in Minnesota last week.
They passed a law that "commits" them to doing something long after the end of the current legislative term, assuming it somehow avoids being amended or repealed until then. Have they made a concrete difference e.g. measurable reductions in emissions, or is this just feel-good party-politics?
I'm sorry, are you actually suggesting that the Democratic Party blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline? Or that they fly on private jets more than Republicans?
At the end of the day, they passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the largest piece of green legislation ever passed in this country. It's not perfect, but it's better than anyone else in this country has ever done. I don't care if you're still annoyed that Al Gore sounded like a scold, that's at least some heading in the right direction, while the current GOP platform is for defunding all green energy and funding more oil.
Start buying reusable and BIFL goods and avoid everything disposable. It's expensive, but worth it for more than the planet. We need to have a lot more focus on the reduce and reuse components of the solution. Most of what we Americans buy is cheap disposable nonsense that shouldn't exist.
You say the disposable nonsense shouldn't exist, so wouldn't a better legal solution be lobbying to better regulate the facilities where these harmful pollutants are originating from?
My cynical outlook is that the organizational behemoths with millions of funds to throw around buying carbon credits do not want to bolster regulatory mechanisms, even in other sectors, for fear of their own sector becoming more regulated. There is a conflict of interest there.
And I don't particularly buy into the 'let's all individually make better choices' solutions either. Has consumer-side activism ever worked? On the other hand, look at the effects of historic crackdowns like the Montreal protocol regulation of chlorofluorocarbons and The Clean Air Act and its ban of leaded gasoline.
I'm all for regulating production of non-reusable nonsense. Coke is not a necessary product, there is no reason to allow them to produce single use aluminum cans. Coke should be a syrup mixed with carbonated water at the site of consumption. This is a real solution I could get behind and take seriously. By contrast I find mainstream environmentalism with the regulating plastic bags and straws and supporting "recycling" a virtue signaling joke and can't stomach supporting it.
Carrying this forward, stop buying shit. Humans today consume an ungodly amount of unnecessary crap. Just in terms of clothing the fast fashion industry has absolutely demolished our sense of longevity and repairability and convinced us we need entire new goddamn wardrobes every other year.
> Direct CO2 removal (Climeworks). Seems like a drop in the bucket, but feel like this tech needs to grow.
I kindly disagree, and I think it is extremely important to understand that. This tech is fundamentally flawed and completely misses the point: climate change (hence CO2) is only a symptom of our biggest problem.
Our biggest problem is abundant energy:
1. Because we have access to a lot of energy, we transform the world in a way that is killing biodiversity: we are currently living a mass extinction (that's not a prediction, that's a fact, it's happening, we can measure it right now). We should do less with less, and preserve habitat for biodiversity. There is no high-tech solution to that, we should preserve life on Earth.
2. Because that abundant energy is mostly fossil based, it emits a ton of CO2. That creates climate change which threatens our very survival (now in the short term). Climate change will create global instability, mass immigration, wars, famines, etc. We don't want that, so we need to emit much, much less CO2. So much less, in fact, that the only viable solution is to do less with less. One could argue that we should "just" replace fossil fuels with better energies (good luck with that, we are not even remotely on that path), but that would not remove point 1 above.
3. Fossil fuels are not unlimited. The peak of conventional oil production was in 2008. The global peak for oil is around now, for gas it is soon. From the peak on, energy will become harder and harder to get (which will induce price instability). Whether we care about climate change and biodiversity or not, fossil energy is going down soon. We don't have viable replacements, so we will have to do less with less. Without abundant energy, we have the same kind of consequences as climate change: global instability, famines, etc. We need to prepare our society to live with less energy. Would you rather go to space on holiday, or eat?
Finally, CO2 removal requires a ton of energy. The only way it can ever possibly be useful is if we suddenly find a way to completely replace fossil energy with renewables (say with nuclear fusion). But it's really not clear at all if we will find such an energy now (nope, wind and solar are not viable replacements for all fossil fuels). Even if we did suddenly get fusion to work, it's already too late: it would take a lot of time to build enough plants everywhere and then rebuild the whole infrastructure to remove fossil fuel.
We need to act now, for our survival. It's high time we accepted that we failed to replace fossil fuels entirely, and even if we did we would still be in a mass extinction. We need to do less with less. Remove what's unnecessary, keep the essential.
It does not mean going back to how people lived in the Middle Age. We need a lot of clever technology if we want to do less with less. That's actually more challenging than what we are doing now, so we need clever people to rethink society and do less with less.
>It does not mean going back to how people lived in the Middle Age.
It basically does though. The clever technology that allows you to have a smaller carbon energy footprint usually just outsources the cost to somewhere else.
There's just no way I can see how people would have anywhere near today's quality of life without the corresponding energy consumption. Number one reason would straight up be political. You're going to have to curb a lot of freedoms from people to do it and they will have a reduction in quality of life since you will never be able to understand what's important to them.
First, it is important to realize that it's not a choice, really. Fossil energy is not unlimited. Either we start preparing for that, or it will happen and we will be unprepared (which will be worse).
> There's just no way I can see how people would have anywhere near today's quality of life without the corresponding energy consumption.
I think that there is a lot we can do without changing the quality of life.
First, we don't need to take the plane for a weekend trip, and for professional reasons many times it can be solved with a video call. My grand parents and even my parents did not fly nearly as much as I did, and I wouldn't say they were living in the Middle Age.
Then we don't need to eat meat. Not so long ago, again, people were not used to cheap meat like today in many places in the world. And pretty clearly, meat is less efficient to grow than plants.
I grew up in a world without smartphones, and I don't feel like I live much better today. Do we really need to swipe TikTok over 5G whenever we have a few minutes (or much more) to lose? Do we really need to have 50 machines running a 1h build on the Cloud for every single commit we push? Do we really need generative AI? I literally lived without it my whole life.
I grew up in the 90s/2000s, I wouldn't call that Middle Age. Many things today are more efficient than they used to be, the problem is the rebound effects. I would argue that we could do a lot already without altering our quality of life in any meaningful way (we would just need to change some habits, like losing 3h on social network everyday).
Of course that's not enough, we need to do a lot more, and that will be more painful. But if we don't manage to start with the part that is not painful, how will we ever get to the next part?
I understand where you are coming from, but this will never happen in the US. This is tantamount to political suicide here. We will all sooner die, or there will be war and revolution before the US gives up its individualism.
That's what I think as well. No way countries like the US (and others, obviously) can make that kind of changes. Unfortunately we're all on the same boat, we will all sink together.
That is, what's the least-scammy carbon credit, and/or place of concrete change?
Places I donate to, but wonder how much the effect of each is:
* Climate charities focused on legislation (EarthJustice, Clean Air Task Force, EDF, NRDC)
* Direct CO2 removal (Climeworks). Seems like a drop in the bucket, but feel like this tech needs to grow.
* Goldstandard.org Carbon Credits. May be just as scammy, but appears to be direct gifts to green energy projects in developing world. (Of course, maybe they would have gotten the money anyway.)
What are other people's thoughts?