[myshpa]

Good points. Minimalists saving the planet should add one more:

10. Eat plants.

Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...

If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free an area as big as Africa for wildlife/reforesting) https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

Eat more plant-based foods https://www.un.org/en/actnow/food

Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/

Global food system emissions could preclude achieving the 1.5° and 2°C climate change targets https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357

Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Livestock and climate change: what if the key actors in climate change are... cows, pigs, and chickens? https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Livestock-and-climate-...

Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm

World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/70/1/8/5610806

[c00lio]

11. No pets.

Your pet is more harmful to the environment than your car.

12. Less or no children.

All of the above, combined.

[damnesian]

>Your pet is more harmful to the environment than your car.

as do their human companions. I mean if you're going to Modest Proposal pets, why stop there?

And here's #13: turn off your phone, your laptop, your desktop computer. Read a book if you want edification. Go talk to someone in person if you want to express your opinion.

[falloutx]

Didn't know I was inadvertently saving the environment. This shouldn't continue. Will buy a pet today while not biking back from work.

[_dain_]

The whole point of saving the environment was to leave a better world for our children and grandchildren. Someone has to show up after us.

[c00lio]

Yes, but for mankind to continue, there has to be less of mankind.

[Capricorn2481]

This is a myth. We are not over overpopulated, the problem is the way we live.

[c00lio]

No. The problem is overall resource consumption. Which is a product: people * consumption/person. Since consumption per person has a lower limit, there has to be an upper limit for the sustainable number of people on the planet. Since standard of living should be at least equal to that of your ancestors, resource consumption per person will also be above the bare necessary minimum. And since the normal mode of population growth is exponential, any change in consumption per person is meaningless anyways, the overall resource consumption would be exponential nonetheless. So yes, we are always on the verge of overpopulation, followed by catastrophic collapse. We only avoided collapse in the past because technology (industrialization, green revolution) enabled exponential growth in resource production. But that might be a one-time thing.

[goodpoint]

Wrong. Pollution per person is extremely unequal across the world. There's a significant fraction of human population living in a completely sustainable manner and another fraction that is destroying life on earth.

Don't try to blame the first group for the sins of the second.

[aziaziazi]

Thanks for the courage to express 12. Absolute anthropocentrism can’t continue indefinitely and we already see boomerang effects.

[myshpa]

The population growth trend is already declining in many (western) countries and is projected to go down in a few decades max everywhere. Best contraceptive is education, prosperity and urbanization.

IMHO the best way to limit our negative impacts is

- stop exploiting other countries (there are almost no poor countries, only overexploited ones)

- urbanization ( https://i.redd.it/fl28yusb1r5b1.jpg )

- abandoning fossil fuels (so far we're not making a dent https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/renewables-growth-di... )

- stopping animal agriculture (destruction of the environment, biodiversity, pollution, overfishing ...)

[cynicalsecurity]

Good luck trying to convince Russia or China to stop exploiting other countries, abandon fossil fuels or stop animal agriculture.

Here is the unsolvable problem of the climate activism. They can't save the climate, but they are capable of destroying their own homeland, playing right into the hands of those authoritarian monsters.

[aziaziazi]

Well then you didn’t understand the point of climate activism. It’s not about “saving the climate” but instead “keeping our home habitability”. You can choose to:

- keep packing more fellow on your homeland, our children with them. Don’t change anything but wish them good luck, the Science and Industry will solve everything as it always did anyway, right ? Guess what, it won’t make the two giants stop being authoritarian.

- not doing (much) more children in your homeland so no descents will suffer from the density. The “authoritarians monsters” will probably profit of that.

Do you really value democracy and freedom (I value it a lot, me too) so much that you continue gambling with descents’s home habitability?

It’s not about giving up but about recognizing that adding more soldiers won’t stop the war.

[cynicalsecurity]

I absolutely agree on trying to become a better person in terms of producing less waste. My point it, little effort won't work. We need radical solutions that could work on the global scale.

I want people to think big. Instead of carrying a water bottle and use paper bags focus on how you can help a whole country like India or China or even a whole continent like Africa.

Set goal of stopping Coca-Cola from dumping their plastic waste in Afrika. This would include much more effort than just carrying a water bottle or sleeping 8h.

[myshpa]

Don't look up!

> Good luck trying to convince Russia or China

Whataboutism. Best way to avoid doing anything.

> the unsolvable problem of the climate activism. They can't save the climate, but they are capable of destroying their own homeland

That's incredibly foolish.

[c00lio]

No. Prisoners' dilemma.

There are two possible answers to climate change: avoidance and preparation. Avoidance means that the world reduces its CO₂-footprint to zero or less to limit global warming or even to revert it. Preparation means that, if global warming cannot be avoided, states prepare for the changes in weather, sea level, agriculture, etc.

Avoidance can only work if all nations worldwide do participate to reduce their CO₂-footprint. If some big nations do nothing, or even worse, if non-consumption of fossil fuels by western nations causes a price drop and a shift of fossil fuel consumption to the rest (instead of an overall reduction), avoidance by the west is pointless and a waste of resources. All the world has to participate for avoidance to be successful.

On the other hand, preparation mostly works on a more local level. Nations with coastlines invest to protect those, nations threatened by water shortages invest in countermeasures such as maybe desalination or storages, etc. Even if the rest of the world doesn't care, preparation will mostly work for the local community.

Both avoidance and preparation need a lot of resources. But allocation to avoidance is only sensible if every nation agrees to it, otherwise those resources are wasted and far better spent on preparation.

[_dain_]

Anti-natalists are the enemy of mankind.

[namaria]

None of the species that have gone extinct (which are over 90% of all species that ever existed) reduced their rates of reproduction voluntarily.

[kelipso]

They'll breed themselves out, so it should work itself out over the long term.

[Fricken]

A half billion years have passed since the invention of sex and they're still showing up. How long term are we talking?

[kelipso]

I'm sure there were anti-natalist groups in the thousands of years of human history but well they weren't so numerous a 100 years ago, and they probably won't be so numerous a couple of hundred years from now either.

[throwaway602088]

…Said the horny rat in an overcrowded cage

…Said the Easter Island native

…Said the XX century boomers

Would you elaborate on your thought? Why questioning the demography is “enemy of mankind”? Is there other subjects/sciences we should avoid completely to be friends with mankind?

[namaria]

When three companies move nearly all the food around the globe, and we throw away between a third and half of our crops in transit, telling me to change the menu to save the planet is a bad joke.