In this entire discussion PUBLIC TRANSPORT has to be the number one measure. It has to be the first thing you see on your home page. Abolish cars, inside cities at least
How couls any of those be labeled greenwashing if the goal is a complete list of possible actions?
Yeah some dont have a huge impact like esim and ecosia, but theyre the better alternatives to things we use anyway.
Carbon labels would make a huge difference, I dont know what you mean there.
Carbon credits are used for greenwashing, because most are not regulated and monitored strictly enough. That doesnt mean carbon credits in general are greenwashing. Buying reputable ones with actual impact definitely helps.
Its sad that many people are kept from donating by the myth that 'it doesnt help anyway' or 'theyre just gonna keep my money'.
Sure if you just donate wherever, chances are your money is not used efficiently, but there are a lot of organizations that are reputable and efficient, you just need to do a little research
Its important not to give things with low impact the same weight as actions that have a big impact. easy low impact fixes give the appearance of helping but only serve to distract form harder actions that need to be taken.
There is no such thing as a reputable carbon credit, for every ton of CO2 you produce you can pay me to Unburn a ton of CO2. It doesn't do anything to reduce the amount of CO2 produced it just makes it harder to audit the CO2 production and helps to hide the extent of the problem.
Carbon credits are bullshit. Like, what are you actually paying for? No one is taking the carbon in the atmosphere and stuffing it into little jars.
If it’s a tree planting initiative, that’s a great idea, but a lengthy process, and the moment that tree gets cut down to make room for something else, or if there’s a forest fire, the effort is undone.
Honestly, carbon credits are mostly a feel-good measure to make people feel better about consumption from a particular source. It’s a fantastic way for a company to market themselves as caring for the environment while simultaneously destroying it - companies only care about profit, and will happily burn the planet if it makes them money.
If you truly want to make a difference, consume as little as you can get away with.
Making public transit accessible, reliable, fast, clean, and completely free will encourage people to ditch their cars. I'd like to see privately owned cars completely banned in cities and towns with a population of >1000 people, but that's a step for after setting up public transit services to handle the load.
Build a robust high speed rail network and ban short flights of <4 hours.
Requiring much longer warranties on consumer goods in general, paired with strong right to repair bills.
Requiring all software source code to be released to the public after the company stops maintaining the product will keep an enormous number of devices useful for longer too, and will improve efficiency.
Patents expire after 4 years; if a company came up with a patent that improves efficiency of something, keeping it behind massive fees will limit the adoption and advancement of that technology.
Banning crypto mining.
Reducing concrete in construction projects in favour of mass timber from sustainably sourced forests (the wood building materials are a form of carbon storage), and bamboo construction (even more sustainable than wood, though more difficult to work with?)
Requiring all office work to allow working from home most of the time.
Patents expire after 4 years; if a company came up with a patent that improves efficiency of something, keeping it behind massive fees will limit the adoption and advancement of that technology.
Wow I just ranted about this yesterday! I really hope this idea catches on. We really need to accelerate adoption of improvements.
Patents are a double-edged sword, the initial goal is to encourage R&D investment, but in practice patents are made to create exclusive control over who can use that technology. I think it's okay for patents to exist, but they should expire fast rather than letting the company who owns the patent to rest on their laurels with their monopoly over their invention, this way we can iterate and improve upon it.
Patents taking very long to expire may have made sense back in the day when technology adoption was slower (although I think they were too long for even back then). In the modern era, our tools allows for a much faster time-to-market, so keeping the duration of the parents is even more harmful.
We can see it all the time, and a fun example of it would be Cherry switches; they invented the MX style switch and have done minimal improvements for a long time, and once the patent expired, competitors started selling MX clones (clones were available in china before the patent expired, but there weren't as many as there are now), this meant that Cherry switches were now the inferior in quality to the clones, which is better for the consumer; had the patent expired sooner, both Cherry and competitors would have started the iterative race much earlier.
Another example is the pacojet; a commercial instant ice cream maker which costs $6000 and had no competition, so no reason for the company to improve it. After the patent expire Ninja made a $300 home version of this which is in some aspects superior to the original.
This is why I proposed, instead of completely abolishing all patents, to shorten the lifespan of the patent. Some inventions shouldn't be patentable, like pharmaceuticals; because even for a short time, gatekeeping a lifesaving product behind a massive paywall is insane.
I think there should be some kind of legal/constitutional mechanism that gives the state power to declare a certain invention as "significant for the public's well being" and expunge the patent, paying a reasonable compensation fee to the patent holder.
Great idea, jotted down a list of things I've found to be impactful over the past year, some of them overlap with what's already been posted.
Installed solar panels (according to my app, last year they produced enough MWh to equal 8.5 tons of CO2)
Trade in our ICE car for an EV (in a year has avoided 5.5 tons of CO2)
Insulated our house (attic and walls) coupled with double-pane windows. Cuts down on AC and furnace usage immensely and makes the house much more pleasant overall
Not sure what you are suggesting the better alternative would be? Scrap it? Whoever purchased the used vehicle could have bought a new car instead (which would have required more raw materials for processing).
One common issue I noticed among environmentalists is they argue with each other about what the perfect solution should be instead of just starting somewhere. Any progress is better than nothing at the rate the climate is changing and such progress tends to compound over time.
Require every company submit a yearly energy reduction plan. Not only is it good for the environment, it's good for the bottom line on day one and allows for additional site expansion by increasing the currently available energy budget without having to upgrade infrastructure.
It looked different from the formatting I did on my notes.
eSIM reduces plastic and shipping use.
Using older computers has to be weighed against the newly developed efficiencies in the latest cpus/gpus. Windows 11 is dropping computers that are like 4 years old. That is way too soon for perfectly good computers.
Synthetic cloths are used a lot currently so using microfibre filters is a stop gap measure until we have biodegradable cloths.
Using windows is also massively wasteful, it spends probably more than half of the processor usage on analytics and tracking stuff. Linux or other free kernels are much better in terms of power usage, on old and new hardware
A very limited list of countries in the world have good enough infra for electric cars. The same about plant based: in developing countries finding a good plant based food, like meat replacement or vegan milk, is a challenge.