Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

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The highest impact things an individual can do, roughly in order are: Don't have children. Don't own a car. Don't fly internationally. Don't eat meat. Don't eat dairy. Don't eat imported food.

And you don't need to be a hardline child-free bicycle riding vegan hippy to make a difference.

Reductions in all those things will make a difference. Have fewer children. Choose to own a more efficient car and choose to drive it less. Reduce your long distance and international travel. Eat more plant based food and less meat and dairy. Eat more locally sourced and seasonal food. And there are other lesser impact things too: live in a smaller and better insulated house. Prioritise efficiency higher - choose to buy more efficient appliances. Use low energy lighting. Choose to live near where you work/play/socialise. Choose lower carbon impact hobbies and recreation, perhaps a sailing boat instead of a ski boat? Perhaps athletic sports instead of Nascar?

At a bigger picture level. Vote for the planet, appropriately prioritise climate change policies in your voting choices (and with two party politics, this can be difficult to do, don't vote in a facist just because they're a treehugger, but try to also not vote in your own self-interest if that candidate is deeply in bed with the fossil fuel lobby). Focus your career towards ecologically sound companies/industries where you can - actively seek and choose jobs with climate change in mind, if you have a choice between two roles consider carefully before jumping to the slightly higher paid fossil fuel job. When making or contributing to decisions at work, ensure consideration for climate impact is brought up where appropriate.

And make a noise. Be publicly unsatisfied, even if you have no solutions. Let other people know you care, even if you can't see any real way to make a difference yourself.

Can we stop with the don't have children advice. It's one step away from telling people to go kill themselves. People can choose to have children or not but it is not constructive to tell people to have or not have children. For most of us not having children will render saving the planet (as in making it habitable for humans) a meaningless exercise.

The impact of having a child in the first world is huge. You could live as close to a third world lower middle class lifestyle as possible and have one child.

The impact of immigration is even bigger. All first world nations have declining birth rates now and would reduce their population numbers substantially without immigration. Yet in many countries reach record population numbers on a yearly basis - because millions of immigrants keep pouring in.

I'd rather stop immigration before further driving our birth rates down and leaving world of the future to the low intelligence populations that are currently driving population growth on a global scale. The only ones following this "don't have children because of the climate" advice are those intelligent enough to do so. The whole thing is completely dysgenic in its nature.

I think you word you’re looking for is educated. Small but significant difference.

I do not have any children, by choice - out of selfishness more than environmental concerns if I’m being brutally honest with myself.

But I care deeply about the mess we’re leaving for my nieces and nephew, and for many of my friend’s children.

And, quite frankly, saying “not fucking up a planet is a meaningless exercise” if it doesn’t happen to allow _your_ precious DNA to survive? That’s not the sort of awful person I’d admit to being in public...

That's fine. They who breed will inherit the earth!

It's about having less children, not "not having children".

The world isn't black and white.

Having more children than we need is why we're in this whole mess to begin with. If people stuck to having 2-3 kids instead of 4-5, we'd have a much longer runway to transition to renewables, including building up storage capacity.

Instead, we're scrambling and calling transitioning from coal to natural gas a success, when it's just changing 1 fossil fuel for another, while the world is burning (quite literally, in some parts) around us.

>Reductions in all those things will make a difference.

As choices left to the individual? Not likely. Only systemic/legal changes would have any impact...

And there's zero chance of systemic/legal changes without the voting public making it clear (by their individual actions and choices) that it matters to them.

Sea Shepherd, for example, are crazy far-end-of-the-bell-curve outliers. In my mind they're one of the ecological equivalents of RMS. Actions and choices that go way beyond what most people would consider sensible or necessary, but who're critically important for the movements they represent, because the "other side" has much worse and many more outliers in the "wrong direction". Without the work RMS has done over decades and the example he's set - flawed as he is - we could not have open source in the position it is today.

Sea Shepherd lobbing jars putrecene onto the decks of Japanese whaling "research" ships in the middle of the ocean is insane. But seeing suburban moms wearing Sea Shepherd tshirts in shopping malls and parks and political protests has without doubt made political candidates think differently.

Individual changes aren't enough, but they're necessary. Pushing for systemic change and laws forcing others to change their lives but not wanting to voluntarily make changes in yours just looks like hypocrisy.

Well, until the law changes for everybody, others get a competitive advantage over you by not making those changes.

So it's not hypocrisy, it's basic economics

Very short term, maybe. My personal experience is that reducing our family environmental footprint improved our life and is financially positive.

More biking in the city, health improves, less water/electricity consumption, bills are reduced, less meat, no overweight issues.

You have quite a strong positive coupling/link between paying attention to the nature and yourself.

My basic economics is that my bank account tells me it is good.

These kinds of guidelines for abstinence all add up to an approximation for "don't exist". People persuaded into this lifestyle will have a negligible effect on the climate, because the vast majority of people will keep living their lives in a way that they seek enjoyment and fulfilment, rather than as an exercise in minimising their impact on the climate.

It's okay for the small minority of motivated people to forgo enjoyment in pursuit of this ideal, but just don't be mistaken into believing that it will have a measurable effect.

The only real solution is to make natural human behaviour non-CO2-emitting.

> The highest impact things an individual can do, roughly in order are: Don't have children. Don't own a car. Don't fly internationally. Don't eat meat. Don't eat dairy. Don't eat imported food.

You can have a still vastly bigger effect by affecting the footprint of others.

Re GP context, even with a low income you might get a lot done in activism / community organising, it might also make you feel more fulfilled as you are fighting to save the planet.

> The highest impact things an individual can do, roughly in order are: Don't have children. Don't own a car. Don't fly internationally. Don't eat meat. Don't eat dairy. Don't eat imported food.

Living in a small and well-insulated flat should also make a sizeable impact.

In a way if you don't have children your opinion on climate change doesn't really matter.

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