Personal Solutions to the Environmental Crisis

[Ego]

What are you doing to avoid contributing to the climate change problem?
What more could you do to improve and why are you not doing it now?
Which personal changes have the most impact?

[DSKla]

-nearly 100% reliant on industrial ag, manufacturing, and supply chains
+could buy more local stuff, buy less in general, and if I lived elsewhere, potentially produce a decent amount of my own food. Being dependent on food supply chain is a huge personal fragility for me.

-drive, usually locally, 3-4 times per month. Fly ~3 times per year.
+mostly bus, and have taken train for longer trips. Just got a bike, too. Eliminating the few car trips I have left would be tough, but I could limit my flights to the two trips I use per year for family. Not yet willing to avoid seeing them.

-use of lights, electronics
+could be stingier on this

+"upgraded" from iphone to simple flip phone that only needs to charge once every 12 days or so wit consistent use, and has 30+ day standby time, and is useless for frivolous data browsing, meaning i only text or call. No emails, even. Hugely positive personal impact in that I am not staring at a screen as much (I am right now though!).
+bike will cut local errands out of already limited driving time.
+except fridge, and occasional coffee grinder, do not any powered appliances in my home. (Laundry room is communal)
+recycle and compost
+when i need to buy something, have been very good at just paying more for a BIFL or nearly BIFL item instead of Chinese junk.
+voted successfully to ban single use plastic bags, and have made a habit of bringing my own cloth bag.

In summary, the lowest hanging fruit for me is to avoid buying things I can live without, and buying the necessities from as nearby as possible. Followed by air travel, which would mean not visiting family.

[Sclass]

I try not to buy too much stuff.

I'm in a state of shock looking at all the online news reports telling people how to get the most stuff for their dollar this Xmas at the department stores. Black Friday cyber Monday Green Friday etc.

Make it stop, please.

There doesn't seem to be a limit to this kind of activity, except well, credit limits. Idiot people buying junk they don't need that they'll barely use that drives them into debt.

What more could I do? Given that I don't buy many things that collect sales tax, I can stand in my shopping cart at Costco with a bull horn yelling "WTF are you people doing?!? Stop Stop Stop plants and animals are being displaced to make room for your fat ass!"

[vexed87]

Mostly my low hanging fruit has been picked by now due to ERE budget enforcing a stoic like lifestyle. Also, most of my hobbies are no longer tied to the grid/tech which helps!

I could improve from 90% of all journeys by bike to close to 99% once my new bike with panniers is complete. Very little of my travel is by car, but I still do one or two trips a month in DWs car for produce shopping.

My biggest impact would be to ramp up my veg plot efforts in the spring. Similarly this is my biggest resilience concern and causes me most anxiety. I abandoned my plot after the fuss of getting married late this summer. I need to grow more potatoes and root veg for calories. Most of my calories are from the industrial agriculture system, however I do buy most veg from my local market.

Otherwise, short of living electric/natgas free life there's not a great deal I can think of doing, with the exception of cutting out all discretionary spending in 2017. I already turn the thermostat way down until DW is complaining about the cold! I bought her a wool jumper and wool socks for Christmas... Hehe

I could go 100% meat and diary free, but I'd say those only account for 3-5% of calories at this point. So, not a huge amount of carbon to be saved there either.

[James_0011]

I don't drive a car at all, and don't really buy anything besides food. Can't really think of anything else I could do. I would love to live in a van with solar panels on the roof, but I suppose the emissions from the van wouldn't be the best thing. Maybe covert it to run on vegetable oil somehow?

I have also thought about long term camping, but it would have to be in a warm climate with lots of natural light. Most likely I would have to be retired too.

[halfmoon]

...I can stand in my shopping cart at Costco with a bull horn yelling "WTF are you people doing?!? Stop Stop Stop plants and animals are being displaced to make room for your fat ass!"

WOW! 'Plants and animals are dying to make room for your fat ass' is DH's favorite-ever bumper sticker that he saw on a VW van years ago and kept trying to persuade me to put on our car (note that the gentler "being displaced" is replaced with "dying"). I deemed it too potentially offensive to my clients, much to his disgust. Such is the price of commerce.

Our personal contribution (I won't remotely call it solution, because that's a fairy tale) to the environmental crisis is to own acreage in various places and plant thousands of trees. We also nurture wildlife in every way we can, because trying to save the environment solely for human survival would be morally corrupt even if it were possible.

[7Wannabe5]

Well, first, I am going to remind myself that guilt is a terribly inefficient, slogging in boots through molasses swamp, variety of motivator (for me, YMMV.) Then, next, I am going to ask myself how I can have fun and profit due to the reality of such matters as global climate change due to excess human dumping of CO2 and peak extraction of various resources such as petroleum and copper.

Within my current social circle, there is a man who is 76 years old, worth over $50,000,000 and in excellent physical health for his age (runs several miles, does headstands.) I spoke with him about the problem, and his response was "It doesn't matter what we do because China will never comply."

[rfgh]

"It doesn't matter what we do because China will never comply."

In many ways, The USA is worse than China on the environment. And we may get worse with the new Executive administration.

[Tyler9000]

Personally, I'm generally not motivated at all to change my behavior to save the planet. The virtue signalling part of it doesn't interest me and is often a major turnoff. But I do care very much about living more efficiently and producing as little waste as possible because I think it is simply the smart and responsible thing to do. And on top of that, I understand that being less of a consumer saves a ton of money which enables me to live a happy, financially independent life. To the extent that my personal goals overlap those of the larger environmental movement, I'm happy to do my part. And they overlap quite a bit!

From my perspective, I believe that people who truly want to make a difference with the environment would get a lot more traction if they set aside trying to get everyone to do it for the same reason and instead focused on appealing to different motivations towards the same practical goals. For example, I suspect Jacob has likely had a greater impact in advancing positive environmental causes by discussing the individual benefits of ERE than by directly promoting climate science. That doesn't mean I think he should change a thing -- it's merely an observation that he does a good job of reaching different types of people.

[Sclass]

...I can stand in my shopping cart at Costco with a bull horn yelling "WTF are you people doing?!? Stop Stop Stop plants and animals are being displaced to make room for your fat ass!"

WOW! 'Plants and animals are dying to make room for your fat ass' is DH's favorite-.

Yes, I stole this from your post. It was great.

Within my current social circle, there is a man who is 76 years old, worth over $50,000,000 and in excellent physical health for his age (runs several miles, does headstands.) I spoke with him about the problem, and his response was "It doesn't matter what we do because China will never comply."

Right, but the majority of that Chinese pollution is created making things like one time use electronic hatching eggs for American kids, LED fireplaces for American living rooms and Christmas lawn decorations.

[oldbeyond]

Also see viewtopic.php?f=7&t=8389

If you're on here you're likely doing much better than the average, as there's a lot of overlap between conserving energy and money. Striving to improve is commendable, but sooner or later you'll hit diminishing returns. Which lends support to the idea of activism, which opens another can of worms.

I tend to think that doing something for yourself and sharing the process with an interested community can be quite effective. Say, the gardening thread here. Or retrofitting insulation in your house and documenting in on a forum/in a blog. Compiling and disseminating information can also be effective if you target the right demographic.

Of course, making the herd ditch their Christmas lights would make a bigger difference than reducing us ERErs energy consumption by 10%, but my hopes here are tempered. Then again that might say more about my outlook and need for apparent causation(I made X sell his car! vs I was a small part of a big movement that might've decreased junk shopping by 0.3% according to our latest estimates granting X,Y and Z) than about the possibilities for social change.

[Jean]

I get wood and food from dumpsters, I don't own a car.
We installed dumpstered solar panel as energy source for our new house (which was sitting empty awaiting its destruction).
We are very close to a zero impact, but that's only possible because everyone else is wasting so much.
Thriving on what one would like to see disapear is nice for coping with it.

[theanimal]

@Jean- Correct me if I'm wrong, by a dumpstered solar panel, do you mean you retrieved it from a dumpster? Why would someone throw out a functioning solar panel?

[Gilberto de Piento]

I get wood and food from dumpsters, I don't own a car.
We installed dumpstered solar panel as energy source for our new house (which was sitting empty awaiting its destruction).
We are very close to a zero impact, but that's only possible because everyone else is wasting so much.
Thriving on what one would like to see disapear is nice for coping with it.

Wow, that's impressive and I'm sure a lot of work.

[EdithKeeler]

Well, I live in a much smaller house than most people. Of course, I live here by myself, so....

I have a lot of pets, but I spay and neuter them. (Pets are hard on the environment from a waste standpoint, not to mention other things. I don't think we should give up pets, but we should be responsible about them).

I am much more judicious about what I buy these days.

I am eating more vegetarian meals/less meat meals.

in the negative/stuff I need to work on column:

I need to be better about little things like bringing my shopping bags from home. I always forget them.

While I buy less stuff, what I do buy often comes from Amazon. I feel really bad about the packaging (I do recycle), and also feel bad that I'm probably running someone out of business. But it's so convenient!!

[Jean]

@theanimal
Yes they were in a dumpster on a demolition work site.
Probably because it was cheaper to dump them, than trying to sell them.

@Gilberto
getting food from dumpster is less effort than going to the supermarket. You don't have to think about what to buy, and everything is in the same place, instead of spread all around a supermarket.
Installing the solar pannels was done in a few hours by a flatmate.

[vexed87]

@edithkeeler, have you looked into composting animal waste? I do it, it's straight forward. Make sure it's well broken down before use to avoid the gross factor. Not for use on human produce plants though, fertilising fruit trees and pollinator attracting flowers is perfectly safe.

[7Wannabe5]

I wrote:
Within my current social circle, there is a man who is 76 years old, worth over $50,000,000 and in excellent physical health for his age (runs several miles, does headstands.) I spoke with him about the problem, and his response was "It doesn't matter what we do because China will never comply."

Sclass replied: Right, but the majority of that Chinese pollution is created making things like one time use electronic hatching eggs for American kids, LED fireplaces for American living rooms and Christmas lawn decorations.

Yeah, my own response was something like "Well, we could stop buying toaster ovens from them." Then he went to Costco and bought me some flannel pajamas with monkeys on them. My life has become so weird lately.

I don't mean to sound like such a negator. Things I do:

1) Resell stuff other people are dumping. Preserve books on the topic of lost arts and crafts.
2) Live in neighborhood full of refugees and teach their children.
3) Plant trees. Bury huge piles of wood. Grow food.
4) Take online courses and read on topics of ecology, soil science, climate change etc.

Barring specific local not-yet-predictable emergent negative event, I don't really see my lifestyle changing all that much in the resource strapped future. Typical moment in my current daily routine might be trying to calm down an autistic child recently immigrated from Yemen who is screaming because he only has one mitten and it is extremely cold outside.

[borisborisboris]

I don't think it's been mentioned yet and I get that it's kind of controversial (as seen in other threads) but for the sake of completeness: don't reproduce.

[Sclass]

Yeah, my own response was something like "Well, we could stop buying toaster ovens from them." Then he went to Costco and bought me some flannel pajamas with monkeys on them. My life has become so weird lately.
.

Toaster ovens and warm pajamas are useful stuff. I bake cakes in my toaster oven to save me from using my giant electric oven to bake a tiny cake. Pajamas save on energy bills.

I was talking about the total schlock I'm seeing out there like these Hatchimal eggs that are the rage this Christmas. A little animatronic chicken pecks its way out of a plastic egg for the one time glee of a kid. Ridiculous. There should be an ewaste surcharge on this trash. Or the fake LED fireplaces you lean up against the wall and plug in. Or the ten foot tall illuminated inflatable bear on my neighbor's lawn with a blower I hear howling all night. I wonder what the poor Chinese factory workers are thinking when they make these gimmicks for our markets. "Boy if I work hard maybe I can have a Hatchimal for my kid...but first we have to eat."