I am a climate realist. It has become apparent to me that the worst will be inevitable in the coming years and that climate change will take decades to reverse so my take is that climate policy should also prioritize adapting to this phenomenon while we still can.
We can look at hot dry regions in the past in order to learn how to deal with the heat while still conserving energy.
I think the best way to deal with this would be to replant more trees to help the environment regulate itself, but in the current Anthropocene era all solutions provided are just green capitalism which is unlikely to ever put a dent into the problem and the bourgeoisie will not give up land to become forested areas. It would be possible to move the current population into larger denser cities to always keep more land available for wooded areas (And this would probably increase the standards of living since rural areas are so neglected) but this is even more radical than just planting more trees at the expense of land that some millionaire could use to build another Wal-Mart or crappy Amazon warehouse.
We need a bit more uh… Oomph than that. I say make building absorb less heat in the hot days while keep us warm in the colder ones will still conserving energy.
There is tons more we could do besides reforesting actually. If we stop using plastics, use more renewable forms of storage, increase access to plumbing so water in cans is not so much of a necessity, it would greatly help the pollution we get. Obviously fossil fuels and car usage is huge, but if we put all the population in cities the issue of cars would have to work itself out and we would probably end up with walkable megacities, with cars reserved for rural people who actually need to travel like that.
stop using plastic
As in for disposable ones?
Yeah, but even the non-disposable ones don’t always seem ideal to be honest. Plastic in clothes makes an issue when it ends up being burned in landfills in Africa.
Yeah. Maybe plastic should be reserved for shit like phones. I miss this that’s made with long lasting materials like wood.
Small thing YOU can do:
Research native plants and flowers to your area. Buy seeds from said plants if you can find them. Spread them in the wild around you. I must have planted hundreds of native flowers around here by now. No idea of they have all grown, probably not, but at least some of them did. They attracted pollinators who spread other plants, etc. Like, a bag of native steeds costs me 1 or 2 euro and it is good for hundreds of flowers.
Organize in local climate action groups.
If you have a garden, rewild it. Let native species take over, remove concrete and tiles and such, make your garden a Wildlife Sanctuary.
Stop eating meat and other animal products.
Start buying second hand clothes.
I know we all like to go: no individual action will cause systematic change. But I like that at least I can do something.
I am also talking abt a societal level as in what other ways can society adapt to climate change? My take is architecture and clothing
this is actually a very good read on the subject https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/
pretty bleak but good. I’m still not convinced a midcentury collapse is inevitable though.
The problem is that it’s difficult to say at the moment, but the mere fact that it’s a real possibility is rather concerning all of itself. The bad news is that all the climate change trends have been happening at a much faster rate than was expected. We may also hit tipping points like methane release from the permafrost that could have profound effects completely out of our control.
Rewilding and remediating nature, defaulting veganism, using architecture transit and so on to reduce the contradiction between town and country, heavy input into disaster assistance and prevention programs (it’s entirely possible to prevent wildfires and reduce hurricane damage), lots of lower tech/consumption solutions, and hemp and solar, etc. For most of this we need socialism. I recommend reading Half Earth Socialism (and the cosmonaut critique), and Socialism or Extinction, but those are far from all encompassing and there are other resources out there.
I’m silly, two books I own, A People’s Green New Deal and How to Blow Up a Pipeline are probably good.
There will definitely be a need to have significant amounts of resource (food and other agricultural products) stock piling as the climate becomes more unpredictable and variable. Otherwise famines will be far more common.
Ultimately it’ll mean analyzing the conditions as they currently exist and will exist in the coming decades and having realistic plans based on local and global conditions.
Citys, regions, countries, will need to look at what is currently lacking in their response and put in the resources to address the deficiencies. This could include things like cold/hot shelters, flood mitigation infrastructure, massive food storage infrastructure, backup sources for water and energy supply.
For a resource perspective, we would need improvement to efficiency (including removal of capitalist incentives for making products that are not needed and over marketing them for the sake of profit, obviously), and retrofitting cities for lower overall energy and resource use. Having the ability to run a city on less means the storage and buffers needed in the event of an emergency are much smaller.
Lots and lots of energy consumption and massive infrastructure projects, and for those who can’t: migrations.
