I got involved in climate advocacy in 2021. Since then I’ve successfully lobbied my local government to start an energy resources study, which will look at ways for my community to quickly transition to renewables. A small thing. But if we all do small things, it will add up!
Still though. My state, Arizona has really terrible people writing awful laws. This legislative session they’re proposing a 12.5% tax on purchasing solar if you’re not a utility, and a bunch of other regressive, anti-free market, pro-fossil fuel legislation [1]. We’re going to vote these people out of office this November and remove barriers to using our states abundant solar resources.
And since HN is a startup and technology forum, we need cheap utility scale energy storage as soon as we can get it. It exists, but solar+storage is just a bit too expensive for most regions of the country. If it does become cheaper than methane, that makes the move away from fossil fuels much easier. If you want to work on this, do it.
But also, citizens engagement is crucial. If you live in a regressive state like mine. It’s super important to get involved. If you live in a place that is going in the right direction, engage on the implementation details, there are so many ways good climate policy can get derailed in bureaucracies. There are a ton of groups that you can work with on this [2] [3] [4].
[1] https://legiscan.com/AZ/bill/HB2281/2024
[2] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/
I think the next phase will be people like me, not climate change deniers but climate change doomers.
The US could go carbon neutral tomorrow and it wouldnt make a dent because of China, India and Russia. 3 Billion people pumping pollution into the the air like their is no tomorrow vs. a couple hundred million reducing their footprint isn't going to make a lick of difference. I think people have always had a hard time understanding things at scale, especially a global scale.
The ONLY answer, live your life like there's no tomorrow because chances are is there isn't going to be.
The problem with this attitude is that it prevents you from solving problems that might actually affect the odds of humans making it to tomorrow or any other near-term date. Right now it looks as if we're in the run-up to World War III. [0] Perhaps we should spend a little energy preventing that. Or perhaps aquifer exhaustion, a long-standing issue exacerbated by climate change. [1] Or solving the political polarization that prevents us from addressing other problems. [2] Humans have faced all of these problems in the past and generally solved them.
Climate change is obviously a serious and challenging problem. But it seems doubtful civilization will be directly overturned any time soon by climate change alone. Europeans and others made it through crises like the Black Plague, which killed a third or more of the population without extinguishing the arc of civilization. [3] It's the knock-on effects we need to worry about, as well as the things that prevent us from fixing them.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/opinion/china-taiwan-war....
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/climate/global-groundwate...
[2] https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politi...