This list is only “epically-bad” if you have a political objection to giving up epically-bad (in a literal way, not a figurative and masturbatory way) Republican-adjacent politics.
I’m not going to speculate on the author’s motives, and 5-12 and 14-16 are useful in a generic “How to Be an Activist” sort of way. But yeah… there is nothing individuals can realistically do that will make much difference, unless we can convince or compel just about everyone else to go along with it, that it will be good for them and their descendents too. (That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do the obvious things, though- use the most efficient transportation that meets hour needs, stay fit, put solar panels on your roof especially if you live in a region with no-money-down solar leasing companies, take advantage of subsidies to improve home efficiency, don’t buy junk you don’t want or need, sign up for your utility’s green power options if you can afford them, etc.). Which it will (benefit them), of course, assuming they prefer that their descendants exist, rather than not, and have a somewhat decent standard of living, rather than not. But most people have trouble seeing that, feeling it on a gut level. Existential risks to the species or to civilization that manifest over the course of decades are just not something our brains evolved to be able to feel, not really, and most (well, all, myself included) of us trust our hearts and intuitions too much and use our heads too little.
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Unfortunately i fear that any truly effective list would have to look something like this…
- Eliminate 3/4 of the human population
- Goto step #1
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I can’t do much as a simple private citizen of a third world country. The best I can do is to use social media and the internet to voice my opinon and to counteract pseudoscience with science. Anthropogenic climate change is real and renewables + nuclear power is probably the best solution as of now
Sheesh, as a programmer I look at that list in horror. When the last person remaining is being cut into 3/4 of a person, and then 9/16ths of a person, and so on… I think maybe we should have built-in a stopping condition.
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I think the red puree at the end counts as one.
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Nuclear power? Uh oh. Judged according to the philosophy behind the site this list is on, you’re part of the problem then.
An explanation: the site’s tied into Naomi Klein’s latest book, and let’s just say that she doesn’t think nuclear power is the way forward. Which is really where her energy policies – admittedly a bit of a mishmash – completely falls apart. She supports wind, solar, and other non-destructive1/non-resource-extractive energies, but doesn’t really address how you maintain a consistent energy balance given the severe troughs that do occur with those sources.
(If you look at reasonable plans for moving to fully-renewable energy sources, you’ll see that there’s always a backup energy generation option located somewhere in the grid for those periods when the solar and wind options are producing less than required. Generally either biofuels, which are only marginally better than the coal plants they replace, or hydroelectric dams. Needless to say, she thinks very little of either of these—the first for good reason, the second for reasons I understand less other than it changes the natural landscape.)
1. “Non-destructive” is, of course, relative here, as there are arguments that the large scale deployment of solar and wind farms are having unforeseen consequences on the wildlife in the areas where they are deployed. (Yes, I could just use renewable, but that would include hydroelectric and biofuels.)
In questions of science, dedicated researchers will spend lifetimes and vast sums of money to arrive at hard data from which to draw conclusions.
The thing about tinkering with the atmosphere, is there’s no way to re-do the experiment later if we decide we don’t like the results. Hard data in this case, is extremely expensive, and if it turns out we weren’t pessimistic enough, then there’s nothing to be done with all this evidence.
You’re going to scoff at all the people spending lifetimes and fortunes to avoid finding out just how bad this could get.
And while he’s carefully conducting these delicate negotiations with policymakers, Big Oil is simply dumping huge amounts of money onto the table to fund their reelection campaigns.
Who do you think they’ll listen to, the people who hired them, or the people who pay them?
As a fellow programer I’m glad you can appreciate that.
goto isn’t considered harmful for nothing! 
Relax! Take a drive to the mall in an SUV, maybe go off-roading for a while. Fishing with dynamite often helps me deal with climate related anxiety…
The article looks silly to you, because unlike most such postings, it’s not making any effort at all to convince anyone that global warming is a problem that needs attention. That opening premise is assumed. If you reject that premise, (and there are many perfectly reasonable, perfectly understandable reasons you might reject that premise) then everything that follows really is going to look like nonsense.
Your alternative is so much simpler! All we need to do is work within the existing system… in which carbon dumpers can outspend mere citizens by several orders of magnitude. And it’s all been made legal by the powers that be, and they must know what they’re doing, right?
If you’re going to limit your attention to working with legislaters, be prepared to take a good hard look at campaign finance reform, the rootstriker movement… and preference voting, for that matter. The whole thing stops looking so simple when you notice how routinely politicians are able to break campaign promises, yet still get re-elected.
There is a great column online by James Lileks where he contrasts two extremes in reducing GHG emissions:
someone who wants everyone pedaling to work like it’s Amsterdam, and wants endless rows of whooshing bird-mincing wind turbines arrayed along the land pumping a trickle of electricity to small houses with
solar-panel roofs and twelve-square-foot backyards, half of which is a compost pit of slimy carrot peelings.
someone who wants to build a half-dozen nuclear power plants? Some can-do futurist with a cheerful faith in technology, smiling at America’s knack for know-how? Radioactive waste? Aw, relax, Poindexter.
We can store it in a mountain until we develop a big enough rail gun to shoot it into the sun. Let’s start crackin’ atoms!
Count me in the second camp. please.
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Except, as I’ve already said, the atmosphere appears to be the means, not the end, to the writer of this article. If he thought we could Finally Get Socialism To Work This Time by replacing every bicycle and Segway with a coal-burning moto-trike, I think he’d do it in a heartbeat.
Radioactive waste? It’s mostly a neutron-poisoned fuel, with only fraction of the energy burnt. Reprocess-reuse, store only for a while to get it less hot so robots can handle it. The reprocessing/fission product removal can even be integrated to the reactor itself, if it is a molten-salt reactor with liquid fuel that doubles as a heat transfer medium. As a bonus, the fission product inventory in the fuel/circulation loop would be kept low, with corresponding decrease of self-heating in case of circulation failure or leak, and decrease of volatiles leaked in case of loop breach.
The two most major problems here are the molten-salt corrosion of construction materials of the loop, and meanies greenies with their antinuke fetish, mostly due to whom we still have around the nuclear Ford Pintos around (hi, Fuckupshima). (And money, which depend on politics, which gets influenced by the screaming greenies.)
I used to know a Conservative leaning person who ran a wild animal rescue centre close to a lot of wind turbines in the UK. He hadn’t heard of any cases of birds being minced by them.
I can live with nuclear power stations though, as long as they are not run like Sellafield.
I’d go further and state that there are two opening premises here:
- Climate change is occurring.
- Climate change is a development that is uniquely inherent to capitalism.1, 2
If you reject either of them – and I get the impression that a number of people here accept the first, but feel that the problem is not something that is necessarily unique to modern capitalism – then the article looks stupid.
1. Which, to cut off that objection from other posters before it re-appears, most likely includes what modern anti-capitalist activists sometimes describe as “state capitalism” given the preference for local ownership of production, local decision making, and local activism instead of central planning.
2. Either that or it’s an attempt to use a large-scale crisis to push through ideologically-motivated economic changes that would otherwise be viewed as difficult or impossible to implement given opposition from governments and the populace. Someone should write a book about that.
I expected a Mark Thomas link there…
Like this?
Or this?
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