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(WEEKLY) Climate Change (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This weekly thread will focus on Climate Change. We're not going to discuss if it exists (it very obviously does), but what we can do. I've seen a lot of blame thrown around, but not much on what can actually be done so I'd like to get some ideas on that front.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

Should the focus be on individual actions or holding corporations accountable for their environmental impact?
Should governments prioritize investment in renewable energy over fossil fuels, even if it means higher short-term costs?
Is it more effective to implement strict climate change laws or to rely on voluntary measures and market-driven solutions?
Should countries be obligated to accept climate refugees displaced by environmental changes?
Is geoengineering a viable solution to combat climate change, or does it pose too many risks?
Should climate change education be mandatory in schools worldwide?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'll bite. I think geoengineering is the only way we solve this without going to global governance (which wouldn't happen on time without major wars).

I'd argue that we can put solar sails/shades in the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point and reduce incoming sunlight be up to ~0.5%. And that it wouldn't be that risky at all. It'd just be another mega construction project, and not a particularly nasty one even.

But I haven't done the engineering on it. I only speak as someone who did Planetary Science in grad school, and knows a bit about orbital mechanics. I once gave a grad school level presentation on solar sails while wearing a colander on my head, so that's exactly how hard I've thought about it.

If I had Elon's money and needed a redemption arc...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think we have to focus on individual action AND hold corporations accountable. The thing I see over and over is people blaming one or the other, but many corporations only pollute as much as they do BECAUSE of individuals using their products or services (see the plastics industry for one example). I do believe that corporations should be financially liable for helping cleanup of any waste they create.

Oh, and outlaw private fucking jets.

Geoengineering can work on a limited scale (cloud seeding, blasting ocean water into the air, etc.), but especially in smaller countries, would require buy-in from neighbour countries to avoid conflict. Some of the solutions I've seen presented are pretty massive in scale and would need nearly the whole world involved to accomplish.

As someone who had forestry and ecology in high school, I think environmental impact education would be valuable in a class focusing on life education (in Canada, we called it Career And Life Management or CALM for short at the time). Of course, some thing has to be given up to do that, and I would suggest rolling back a lot of the mathematics requirements and placing them in college courses where they used to be. As an anecdote, my grandfather worked with the Canadian Space Agency and was stumped by my grade 10 math homework 25 years ago. He said a lot of what I was learning in Math 10 was stuff that was in advanced courses in college when he was younger. One of these skillsets is far more useful broadly in education and life...