[scotty79]

Not sure if you want to go where honest approach to this takes you.

To make as little impact as possible you should use as little resources as possible, so you should always choose cheapest, most artificial, mass produced versions of everything, including food, never travel, work as little as possible and only remotely. Basically be poor or at least act poor in every aspect of your life. Wear cheapest clothes and don't buy a new pair until they literally fall apart to the point that parts of you are sticking out that are illegal to stick out.

You might say that it's not a healthy way to live. That's even better, the sooner you die, the less resources you'll use. Don't breed of course.

If you are afraid you might have trouble sticking to your resolutions, then donate all of your wealth to something environmental and just move out of US into some poor country. It will do the bulk of your impact saving for you.

[drusenko]

This might be accurate today, but it ignores our ability to make technological progress to make our current activities low or no impact.

Further, this line of thinking - that you need to sacrifice your lifestyle in order to save the planet - is IMO one of if not the major reason we haven’t made progress on addressing climate change to date. Plainly put, people tend to be short term selfish, even often at the expense of their own long term interests, and they tend to not want to change their behavior / habits.

We should instead focus on the technological progress that we need to make in order to be able to not only maintain our current lifestyles but possibly have them be better (eg a Tesla is a better car, a heat pump is more comfortable than a furnace, an induction stove boils water faster and has more precise control, etc). To be clear, most of this isn’t technological invention it’s implementation - a lot and a lot of implementation.

[scotty79]

I don't think we can wait on technological magic bullet to deus ex machina save us from disaster.

Economy got us into this mess. Economy needs to get us out.

Climate change would be already solved if somebody figured out how the richest could earn more money when the energy is more expensive rather than when it is cheaper.

Billionaires would singlehandedly legislate all the necessary laws that would make energy as expensive as it really is to our planet. An our livestyles would change against our selfish preference. You wouldn't fly abroad for vacation if it costed more than your annual salary.

People in the developed world would need to be much poorer in relative terms to save the planet from global warming.

Tradeable right for emitting CO2 are great mechanism, because they let rich get richer by driving up the price of CO2 and the high price changes behaviors of energy consumers, producers and whole economy.

[drusenko]

Agreed that we can’t wait. The large majority of the technology we need already exists, we just need to accelerate the adoption that would happen naturally.

A focus on this “punitive” side of things - that we need to pay for our transgressions through a dramatically reduced lifestyle - is just going to ensure that we drive straight off the cliff.

And yes, the economy is going to need to get us out of this. We need to make sure that the incentives are properly structured for the majority of the transformation to happen via the distributed market mechanisms vs being centrally planned.

[svnt]

Your classism is a big part of the problem.

What you describe is called asceticism, it has a long and storied history with significant contributions to the long-term cultural stability of humankind, and American culture basically just hasn’t been around long enough to develop it yet.

[scotty79]

> ... with significant contributions to the long-term cultural stability of humankind

I don't think that's true. Leitmotif of history of humankind is the exploitation of available resources to the boundaries of reason and beyond.