That is a very common screed that probably feels good but has no tangible effect.
Can you be more specific? Which lifestyles need to be reduced? What specific action are you demanding specific individuals take?
Can you be more specific? Which lifestyles need to be reduced? What specific action are you demanding specific individuals take?
Some dietitians also claim the seasonality of edible plants helps our gut biome (but I can't find that source again)
Also, local-in-season is, IME, lower cost.
One small, kinda easy, step
What you as an individual can actually do is contact your delegates, your ministers, your officials, your industry partners, whoever you have access to, and tell them exactly why it's their problem to solve. You not buying bananas is a good gesture, but a carbon tax that makes out of season bananas unprofitable is where we need to implement the change.
One way to think about it which might be helpful is to triage your targets: have a short-term goal which you could do today with no real barriers (e.g. pick a protein other than beef), a mid-term goal which you can do on your own but might take some planning (bike / transit to work or shop, use a clothesline instead of a drier, replace old non-electric appliances in your house with electric ones, buy your electricity from a renewables supplier, etc.), and a long-term goal with more dependencies which you can't do quickly or on your own (get involved in local politics to reduce car usage, hound your elected representatives, etc.).
As well, while you and I are doing the right thing, it's likely we are the minority, and for many it's just due to the economics of their situation. We have built a societal appratus that pollutes, it's not fair to put the onus of change on the individuals when they have the least agency of all. Although of course we can do our various parts to help.
My cynacism is probably better seen as exasperation, because it is absolutely mind boggling that we are at the point we are yet the only levers we have are to eat less fruit, or take a bus. Why isn't one of our levers "ban fossil fuel entirely in industries where there are alternatives"? Why is it up to us to correct for profit chasing industrial practices?
I have a functional can opener in my kitchen which I crank by hand. The suggestion to replace it with an electric version is stupid virtue signalling.
My toilet runs on water pressure, gravity, and me pressing the lever. Should I get a model with wifi actuated electric flush handle?
I have not had a TV in a couple decades. What TV with wifi and always-on do you recommend to virtue signal?
My car has a cassette tape deck. Should I replace the car for a new model with a built-in 20" dashboard TV to signal that I save the planet?
Ah, “virtue signaling”, ever the reliable indicator that someone is attempting to converse in good faith.
Take this as an opportunity to learn what a major appliance is and that some of them burn natural gas or use electricity very inefficiently:
I'm keeping my hand-crank can opener. No need to take this opportunity to research electric can opener appliance energy usage.
not to replace passive ones
Those things are still worth doing because en masse it has an effect, and if the single cargo ship is idling in the dock, then that doubles the negative effect, so offsetting counts for... something, at least.
We are decades beyond the pail at this point is why. There is of course reason to change your own behavior, but we need rock solid actionables from industry to change emissions at the scale we need.
If I've learned one thing from plugging holes in my insulation, is that leaks are cumulative. A crack here, a hole there, a bad seal there, a gap in the insulation there; it all adds up. CO2 emissions, the primary driver of climate change, is a "leaky" situation. We've got a huge distributed system here. We need to plug holes at every level. We're not one CPU or one core. We can do multiple things at once. If anything, people doing local things are viral, cathartic, and set the tone for change.
Despite my doomerish top comment (I still think we are screwed), but I compost, I recycle, I reduce waste as much as possible, and these effects "won't help". Whatever.
We can't even get one of the wealthiest nations in the world, Australia, to stop digging up coal in 2022, when it's citizens are busy installing enough solar to power whole cities. We the people need to wield our power to get the people up top to do the right thing, else it's for nothing.
Nope, its just piggy-backing on existing trade routes. Wont change anything.
Evaluate diet containing all micro and macronutrients with absolute minimum carbonfootprint and ban everything else. Enforce these bans harshly.
I lived in SE Asia for the first 30 years of my life, then moved to the US. There are so many things that Americans and first world people take for granted what would be considered luxury in the other side of the world- and you have to live through that experience to come to that realization.
A bowling alley where you walk or bike might not be too bad. I don't think they have very massive carbon footprint. On other hand car trips to skiing, or nature should be right out. And tourism in general outside immediate local vicinity.
And then in general consume less, like electronics. Do we really need to replace them every other year or should once in five to ten be enough? And what do we serve with them? Could we start spending more effort to optimize energy consumption and transfer of data?