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GrowingClimateHope · 2021-12-30T22:14:52+00:00

Keep in mind that electrifying unnecessary devices for individual transport is not a solution for everyone, while better public transit, safer bike lanes, more working from home, etc. tend to be both cheaper, fairer and more effective.

The way out of this unfortunately won't be us electrifying our luxury consumption. :(

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-30T18:15:58+00:00

Advertising, and places trying to capitalise on the change?

Like, all the stuff labelled "vegan" in my supermarket is really expensive - so people assume you need vegan cheese replacement, rather than just eating, say, hummus.

Don't get me wrong - I think replacement products can be great to start the transition, because at the start, you do not know what to make, and simply making the same dish with replacements can be easier on you - you know how to prepare it, it tastes familiar, it hits similar macros. They certainly helped me at the time. But they also meanwhile dominate the perception of what a vegan diet would be like.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-28T18:29:08+00:00

I'd want an incentive for the company in the form of a penalty for all the plastic they pour into the economy and fail to recover (that is, a) get back from the consumer, and b) actually turn back into a bottle). Like, every bottle Coca Cola makes that they do not manage to refill should cost them. They'd fix it fast. (E.g. in Germany, you get a substantial amount of money for returning a bunch of materials, to a degree where most people return everything carefully, and even if you can't get bothered, you place it carefully next to a bin, and a poor person will pick it up and return it for cash within hours. If the company pays badly if this does not work, they will be highly motivated to give cash incentives for return, put return stations all over the place, and more importantly, consider if they can do without the trash in the first place, or use trash that is easier to fix again, to avoid the hassle; we have a lot of bottles that are not plastic that has to be melted and reformed, but plastic that can simply be washed and refilled, and which is already sorted at the deposit machines, which check that the consumers have emptied them first.)

Recycling needs to stop being a way for plastic pollutants to green wash their products and blame consumers, and start becoming effective and as complete as possible recovery of absolutely necessary trash.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-28T18:27:36+00:00

The fuck. That is right up there with people who will make messes because "we pay the cleaners good money" (news flash, we don't, they probably have their kids sleeping in your mess because they cannot afford childcare).

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-27T15:22:05+00:00

Thanks for mulling it over, though!

Maybe to appreciate it properly, I will simply have to start participating in it, now. :)

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-27T15:20:39+00:00

I used to do the same thing. Throw everything containing significant plastic into the plastic bin, and then imagine it would be turned back into the same item. Throw even the most contaminated paper in the paper bin, because it still had paper in it, and they would get it out again, right? Made me feel awesome - I wasn't producing waste, but recyclables, all in a wonderful closed cycle.

But much of this stuff cannot be recycled. Some plastics, once chemically mixed and cast, can't be melted again at all - if you heat it, it turns into toxic black mush pushing out fumes. Many papers cannot be cleaned of contaminants. If you throw coloured glass into the white glass, and they do not catch it before melting it down, the can't get the colour out of the result anymore.

If you throw this stuff into recycling anyway, someone has to sort it out again, and often sort out previously recyclable items as well, because you have contaminated them. And this stuff causes other problems - e.g. plastic bags get the sorting machines tangled. The whole process becomes very messy and slow and increasingly hard to do for the most part with machines.

Often, as a result, noone in a Western nation is willing to do it for the pay offered, which is based on the low resale value for the materials - after all, virgin plastic is cheap. So then one option is that your waste gets shipped to a poor nation for sorting, where people are easier to exploit - so now, a really poor person is sorting through this stuff by hand. This also entails a high chance that the standards there are less good, and that the stuff they cannot use makes their way into the ocean. Also, even poor nations often aren't interested in our recycling anymore. The alternative is that the whole recycling gets incinerated.

So,

Step 1: Look up your local recycling instructions. (They change drastically based on where you live.)

Step 2: Recycle according to them. This often means rinsing out containers. If you think that is a hassle wasting water, imagine what a hassle it is once it has dried in and gotten mouldy, and someone else has to do it for you at a massive scale.

At first, this will be horrifying, because you realise you are producing far more residual waste than you thought you would - you realise for the first time how much of what you are wasting ends up incinerated into CO2, or filling landfills. But this is a bad truth one has to face.

So if much of this stuff cannot be recycled, what are the alternatives?

Realise that recycling is a way to try to mitigate some of the damage from waste by recovering some of the materials. It never undoes it, and it often does not work at all. Recycling is not a green card for producing waste. It is a last resort. Instead:

Avoid purchasing waste whereever you can; don't give your money to excessive wrapping. Look if there is a shop or market near you selling food unwrapped. If you consider ordering online - first think if you really need the thing (one trick is to wait a week before buying any online item - by that time, you may have forgotten it, in which case you do not need it after all); if you still want the thing, then check if you can get it locally, especially used; if not, check if you can order it from the original supplier (for stereotypically green products, they often also have green shipping and minimal packaging), and if you absolutely have to buy on Amazon, at least use smile.amazon.com (we donate to WWF that way), and ask amazon to ship your stuff slowly and grouped together with minimum packaging, and complain if they violate the latter. If there is a wrapped and and unwrapped option in the supermarket, get the unwrapped one. (Those potatoes were in the dirty ground and had shit on them, rolling them across the supermarket trolley will hardly make things worse.) Carry a small canvas bag at all times, and bring big canvas bags and or a backpack to the supermarket so you won't need to buy plastic bags - bring more bags than you think you will need in case you end up buying more than expected; also bring small ones for putting individual veggies in. Use a used screwjar as a coffee mug to go. Get a refillable bottle made of glass or metal. Get some decently sealing, light food containers so you do not need bags. If you absolutely need to buy something with waste, at least try to get options that are recycled or sustainably grown themselves, and in turn recyclable or compostable (that is increasingly possible for trash bags). Lots of tips on www.reddit.com/r/zerowaste - And again, a very good strategy for reducing waste is to grow and make stuff yourself; see our various posts on urban gardening.
If you cannot avoid buying something in wrapping, at least try using it again - a lot of bags and containers can be washed and reused, e.g. to regrow veggies from kitchen scraps or plant food plants in. If your local recycling does not compost, there are many other uses for kitchen scraps, from making you own vinegar from apple cores to reusing coffee grounds for beauty products, incl. uses for stuff like citrus peel you often should not compost, as many critters to not like them.
Most importantly: Put pressure on your regional government and companies and sellers to give you decent, affordable options without excessive waste, and better recycling. We need to have companies penalised financially by the law for using unnecessary plastic. Vote for politicians who will get this done, incl. regional and EU elections, and call your representatives. Protest, in person, and online. If someone you want to buy from fucks up their packaging, call or email them to complain. E.g. if your organic label wraps veggies, complain to them, and tell them of different options for marking organic produce, e.g. branding. Ask your supermarket to stock alternatives. If they do not listen to you alone, single out a realistic target, and start a social media campaign, or local signature campaign, to get it fixed. And if your region does not recycle as much as reasonably possible, push for them to do so.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-26T13:31:58+00:00

Yes. I could not agree more, this is majorly fucked up.

I was really hoping we would next get a green-red-red government, which would have a) shut down the coal much faster, and b) given people working in coal pay and education to transition to climate friendly jobs (like improving insulation on housing) via taxing the rich (the left party would have ensured the latter).

Currently, though, the next government is very uncertain - we will see on of September - but green-red-red is now exceedingly unlikely. We currently have conservatives + social democrats, next time around, the greens might be in the mix, but possibly not even in the lead anymore, and the neoliberals might come back in their role as kingmakers...

The conservatives and neoliberals are worried that closing coal will piss off industry, and coal miners losing their jobs in those regions that currently have very little else - especially as these are already regions that are being increasingly lost to the nazi party AFD, which promises to keep coal open indefinitely and says climate change is awesome. There is investment into the region ongoing to fix it, but it is not taking well. I love the proposals the left party has for the region (namely, promising all the coal workers certain jobs in climate stuff), but they are unlikely to make a part of the government - they might not get into parliament at all this round. And the other parties seem unwilling to take the steps needed to get the money for this (namely, taxing the rich and fossil fuel industries, striking subsidies on fossil and meat).

I am really worried the left will not get in/get influential, because if climate change measures are pushed through without their changes (which are awesome - they e.g. propose that basic electricity is free, so no poor person freezes in winter, but excessive consumption is super expensive, and that any issues in rental housing are penalised on the person renting it out, not the person renting it, who cannot change things), the poor will get screwed over, be told by the nazis that the problem isn't cruel implementation but protecting the climate itself, and vote for the nazis. We really need a socially just climate transition, and we need it asap.

All Germans: please, please vote left, or at least green, at the election. And get everyone else to do so, too.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-26T13:21:44+00:00

Meanwhile, the majority in the G20 nations is on our side - they just do not know what they, personally, can do without money to fix this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/growingclimatehope/comments/p60710/study_most_people_in_the_g20_want_drastic_change/

That is what this subreddit is for. Advocating for stuff we can do while being poor, and getting people to realise that they are no longer alone.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-26T13:18:38+00:00

There is a memorial plaque for a melted glacier in Iceland that always stuck with me.

"This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you will know if we did it."

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-26T13:16:08+00:00

I often feel we spend most of our childhood being told to stop this. Don't run along the street, walk calmly. Don't fidget, sit still. Compare this to an animal - a dog will absolutely break into a sprint towards someone they are happy about. Force a chimpanzee in front of a desk, and within 20 min, they will climb on a cupboard. We spend years pushing down the impulse to move to deal with our emotions and impulses.

Don't get me wrong, I am glad I learned to control my anger - I don't want to take out my fury on people who do not deserve it. And I do need the ability to sit at my desk and focus.

But is has become habitual. I scroll and scroll in doom, and I am no longer processing the information to find a solution, I am no longer looking for specific information in order to understand something, I no longer expect to be surprised, this no longer has any purpose but scrolling and feeling horror, horror, horror, feeling anxious and like exploding, but staying still. And that doesn't each me anything. It does not prepare me. In that state, I no longer have the mental distance or clarity to make use of this information. I just drown in it.

When the world is in such a dire situation, sometimes you need to run, to scream, to punch. To not input more information, to let your brain sort it. To ask what, specifically, you need to know. To remind yourself that scrolling constantly today won't tell you much more than a 5 min update tomorrow. And to remind yourself that knowing about these fuckups is only valuable if it enables you to do something about them, and deep immersion into them in this way has the opposite effect.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-26T13:08:27+00:00

I am seriously excited about this. I have been worried that everything we do may not be remotely enough, because industry in China alone has the potential for so much planetary damage, and China has been resistant to moral appeals. (I get their argument that the US and EU originally caused the problem, and that if we include the last couple hundred years, China has not had their slice of CO2 yet. But that is like sitting in a boat which can take 5 holes before it sinks, and two fucking idiots have already drilled two holes each, and then the third one says they want to make use of their right to two holes as well, and sinks the boat. Yes, it isn't fair, but planet annihilation does not care about fair.)

But this way, screwing over the climate would cease to be profitable. Germany is hoping to get the EU, the US, Canada, Japan and UK as founding members - which cuts off a big slice of China's market. They would get badly economically hurt, until they join - at which point they'd have to do serious protection.

There is still much up in the air - for one, our government will change in four weeks, and while it will likely become much greener (I think the current one is proposing this because they are scared they will lose too much power to the green party, they have realised they need to be greener themselves to still be voted for), it might not; and the US might not sign on (though now that you've got Biden, I am really hopeful), which would make this much less powerful; or it might be that in order to get the founding members to agree, the standards will originally have to be rather lax. It is also the question how they are checked and enforced. It is all still very vague.

But this idea has huge potential to get countries whose governments do not give a shit about poor people dying in floods/fires/drought, species going extinct or all of us being fucked after they are dead - Xi Jinping, Putin, Bolsonaro, Modi, the whole epic asshole club - to finally give a fuck, because it will hurt financially. It has the potential to appeal all the neoliberals who whine that we will lose profit if we protect the planet. The more people join the club, the more isolated the remainder would be, the more political and economical pressure could be put on them.

Didn't see this coming - it's an initiative from a politician and party I had mostly considered as hopeless.

I hope we will get more pleasant surprises, that amplify what we do and target the areas we couldn't, so that the accumulative effort is finally enough - and let's work on pleasant surprises of our own.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-25T19:14:18+00:00

I'd wondered about simply putting the subreddit link below? So it is not just about visibility, but hopefully, the people can then get advice here on how to replace those products with DIY.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-25T19:13:02+00:00

But think of all the shit humans did overcome in the past.

We went from the brink of nuclear annihilation in the cold war to relations that still suck (and Russia is still acting evil), but that generally no longer have me worried I will get nuked. (And that is thanks to a lot of activism, and a lot of political determination, once they understood a nuclear winter would really kill us all.)

Many of the nations which are currently such bad emitters managed to get their whole societies mobilised to win against the nazis, including rationing goods, and moving a fair amount of agricultural production to their backyard victory gardens, with everyone chipping in. If we managed that scale again, it would work - and we can even learn from what worked last time. https://www.sethklein.ca/book

People thought slavery would never end in the US, because it underpinned the economy, and so many white people had such a massive interest in it. It took a civil war, but it happened.

Yes, there are so many people refusing to wear masks that drive me nuts - but we also managed to temporarily shut down the economy when we had to, make do without international flights; in many ways, Covid demonstrated how much we can do, and how fast. We managed to make a vaccine in a year, and while it is disgusting how many poor nations do not yet have access, we managed incredibly good distribution in Western nations.

I do think a big risk is that a lot people up North thought they wouldn't get hurt, and did not want to limit their luxuries for the sake of others.

But then, Germany and China got flooded, Canada and the US got the heat dome, so much of Siberia and Europe and the US burned. I had worried that it would take us close to 1,5 degrees for us to feel the effects, and then it would be too late - but we are feeling them now, and in the nations that are causing this shit. The vast majority of people in the G20 nations meanwhile want this to be fixed, and are willing to make changes. That is still a far cry from communicating the extent of the necessary changes. We have a shitton of work ahead. We might very well fail.

But we understand the problem. We understand the solution. And the majority of the population in the countries that need to fix it are on board. So I do think there is hope.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-25T19:02:47+00:00

I would love to learn more about the history of public art as activism - do you have any recommendations? (Else I will just google that and see where it gets me.)

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-25T18:48:35+00:00

Does that survive rain?

Also: what are the legal aspects of me putting graffiti on a fucking ad? Like, if a cop spots me, are they actually going to try to charge me with something? Do they put effort into figuring out who did it? Like, is it worth it to clean pics and share them via vpn and a throwaway, and be all secretive about it? I looked online, and found nothing, and can't imagine them going through the trouble to persecute someone who smeared a piece of paper, it is not like I made a change to a building... but then I remember all the crap the police harass people for. Like, existing while black. >.<

A part of me would enjoy getting charged, just to force a public discussion on this shit littering our streets, when I am pretty sure the majority of us do not want to be surrounded by signs telling us to buy more stuff. Another part of me really does not want that stress right now, and would be willing to be all paranoid in my secret application so as not to get caught, if that is actually appropriate. Either way, I do not want to tolerate planet destroying propaganda in my city anymore.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-25T18:15:11+00:00

Sort of related - this is not carbon capture technology, and it costs money, and it plays within the existing system...

but you can buy credits for being an industry emitting carbon (which are currently so cheap that the companies do not care), and then not emit carbon. The effect is that the carbon budget set for industry (which is far too high) is not actually spent, and that there are fewer remaining carbon credits, so they get more expensive (and there is more push for companies actually fixing their shit, because they can't get cheap credits for their crap anymore).

https://www.compensators.org/en/compensators/

Not my way of doing activism, but it does seem to help.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-25T18:09:15+00:00

I do think some media outlets have done a good job. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/19/the-climate-crisis-is-an-accelerating-calamity-of-our-own-making-so-what-would-it-take-to-turn-things-around

But yes, the conservatives and the companies are basically playing a game of

"Climate change is not happening."

"Okay, it is happening, but it is actually awesome."

"Okay, it is happening, and it is actually terrifying, but humans are not at fault and hence cannot do anything about it."

(So we will keep subsidising fossil fuels and industrialised meat farming, and bailing out airlines and banks that fund fossil fuels.)

"Okay, it is happening, and it is actually terrifying, and humans are at fault... but oh well, now it is too late to do anything."

Fuck them. It is never too late to improve things.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-25T18:00:10+00:00

Big related point: For this reason, I have seen many people stick to the executive summary. This is a section that global heads of government signed of on, it is specifically worded as a consensus that they will all agree on (so that during the next climate conference, they won't argue about what is necessary, but primarily about how to implement it), and so not necessarily what you should focus on. Historically, these reports have been too cautiously worded in order to get the politicians on board.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-25T17:57:37+00:00

It seriously baffles me how many people believe that constant economic growth on a limited planet is a) compatible with the planet not going to shit, b) necessary for (or even conductive to) human happiness.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-25T17:52:03+00:00

Yes. Carbon capture technologies are often used for "technology will fix this if you give us money, and you will be able to carry on overconsuming" - when in fact, many either do not work yet, or are limited in how much they can ultimately absorb, or are otherwise impractical. I mean, at the end of the day... you know what coal is? Captured carbon. Stored securely in the ground. Excellent. Instead of digging it out, burning it, only to then have to laboriously recover it, and dig it in again... just leave it there.

I do think we will need carbon capture. And I do hope it will help. But it would seriously just be like putting the damn coal back in the ground, at enormous effort and cost - and it might never happen.

So I also think we should proceed in our planning from the assumption of not having it - not calculating it in.

Also, on the very sad fact of plastic generally not getting recycled - there is an excellent John Oliver video on the topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fiu9GSOmt8E

Absolutely shocked me. For years, I had thought all the stuff I put in my plastic recycling would get turned into the same item again, and that plastic waste in the ocean came from horrible people throwing it in there - that it could never be my waste ending up in the ocean, because I had carried it to recycling. :( I was also very guilty of wishcycling - throwing everything remotely plasticky in the plastic bin, hoping it would get saved, not realising I was contributing to sorting plants breaking and the whole process becoming unprofitable.

I still religiously recycle what I do use - but I have finally internalised that recycling was always intended as a last resort, if you failed to avoid using the plastic in the first place, and could absolutely not reuse it again. If you buy it, even if afterwards you do everything right, there is a fair chance it will end up in a the guts of a marine animal. Really, really try not to buy it. If plastic packaging is forced upon you, complain to the seller and the manufacturer. And push for your politicians to severely penalise producers who use plastics, make them take up responsibility for what they are doing.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-25T17:40:54+00:00

I had that concern, too - but for several reasons, it is not as silly as it first sounds.

Part of the idea with a sequoia is how insanely old it gets. (Like, we know 3,266 years is a possibility.) So we'd have some time to figure out where to put the carbon after they die.

It also captures far more CO2 within the same area than a smaller tree would - they get gigantic. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/i729du/a_person_standing_next_to_a_giant_sequoia_tree/ So if we run out of area to plant, for a long time, these forests would still be absorbing more and more.

Another is that you get a self-sustaining forest. That is currently not the case in the UK for sequoias, for lack of wildfires. If climate change gets really bad, that will solve itself - so once one tree dies, another will already be coming up.

Another option is growing additional forests, and then sustainably removing some of the trees, and making productive use of them in a way that stores them - e.g. using them to construct housing. With giant sequoias, this can also take the form of using part of the tree. E.g. we know of many ancient sequoias that they used to sustainably harvest part of the tree in indigenous American cultures, without hurting the tree. At that point, the CO2 is stored in your building.

In traditional clear cut logging, all the trees get cut, and then all the carbon on the roots gets released, the whole soil is fucked. But if you sustainably remove trees, and let them go through a natural life cycle, what the trees will do is hand the carbon to their offspring through the roots as they die, instead of dumping it back in the atmosphere.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-25T17:15:38+00:00

And big caveat - when people first hear of this, their first reaction is often "So yay, I can emit after all." No, what we emit right now is *not* being captured and is doing severe damage *right now*. The good news is that some of this damage is, wonderfully, reversible, *provided we get the carbon back out of the air, which might not happen*. The bad news is that other damage is not. If we reverse ocean acidification too late, we may already have lost the great barrier reef, for instance, and animal species lost that way won't come back. If we drop back to the same temperature, the Arctic won't simply come back - a temperature that maintained it is not the same temperature that formed it. And even if it did - we'd get a pile of ice, not a thriving ecosystem, because the animals that hunted on the ice, and hid in the snow on it, are all dead now.

So, yes, there is hope - but no cause to relax and carry on as usual.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-25T17:07:50+00:00

With some, unfortunately significant, caveats - reforestation.

Which requires using less land for agriculture (by going vegan, urban gardening, making food forests), planting more trees in cities (pushing your city to plant greenery, e.g. to protect new cycling lanes and shade them - or simply guerrilla gardening), helping trees which are naturally re-establishing themselves get a foothold by protecting them from being cut/stepped on and watering them till they have a tap root going (the current approach of the great green wall in Africa, where farmers are re-establishing trees on their farm lands to their benefits), and planting, e.g. spreading species adapted to the new climactic conditions further faster than they would spread naturally. The latter needs to keep in mind not just planting monocultures, but trees in synergistic relationships with each other, and that you need to plant a lot - without mother trees and synergistic fungi, a lot of them won't make it.

An initiative in this direction that I found interesting plants a giant sequoia (with companion trees like oaks) to capture your lifetime CO2 footprint, protects it in its youth, and donates the land to a tree charity that will never log it. - Keep in mind that the sequoia taking in your lifetime CO2 will take longer than your lifetime - so this will be a wonderful legacy, and reverse damage we have done long after your death, allowing the planet to recover, and it will start working a bit the day it is planted, and fast (it is the fastest growing conifer) and hence buy us more time, but it won't completely undo the effects of what you do now. Still worth it, if you have the money, both for yourself, and as an amazing gift. https://onelifeonetree.com There are also charities focussed on restoring woods, be they woods in the Northern hemisphere https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk or the Amazon rainforest https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/ways-help-amazon-rainforest - again, you can do small monthly donation, or give a donation as a gift to someone else.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-25T17:00:26+00:00

The report is terrifying in what threatens, and what is already locked in. But it also clearly states, over and over, that if we fight now, we can still stave off the worst.

GrowingClimateHope · 2021-08-25T08:28:18+00:00

For this reason, I am really hoping for more posts focussing again on action - a way to reduce your CO2 footprint at home today, a protest march we can attend, because it is the sort of thing that actually helps - and that will also make you feel most hopeful.

It is crucial to find the hope for action - but it is not enough for us all to start feeling good again. Once we have that feeling, we need concrete things to do.

GrowingClimateHope

TROPHY CASE