Here is the hard truth, We are a fossil fuel civilization. The problems are complex, we can green wash and eat some organic pop corn, but that does not help.
edit: there are some serious people trying to bring real solutions, I find Vaclav Smil, taking it to the next level of thinking instead of the constant greenwashing marketing campaigns.
I buy nearly all my food from the local market most of which comes from farms within a hundred miles, I minimise energy consumption, most of the furniture I buy is good second hand stuff, I rarely buy clothes and everything I do own would fit on a single 3ft rack in a closet (and does).
I recycle as much waste as I can, I don't have a garden so that restricts some options in terms of growing food/composting.
I take showers not baths.
My desktop is 5 years old with upgrades, my laptop is 3 years old, I've no current plans to replace either.
I don't do any of this for purely ecological reasons (though that's a nice benefit) but because I have everything I need to live comfortably and I don't put much premium on expensive possessions, I want to own stuff not be owned by stuff.
Not really sure how much more I can do given that I rent so major energy upgrades aren't really a possibility.
But the stuff was put there on purpose and it mostly... sits there. As designed.
What about water bottles? Many of those are made of plastic from oil. Not all are recycled. Or most things made of plastic for that matter.
What about fertilizer? We are using dead dinosaurs to fertilize our crops.
The list goes on.
I'll say this, though: should we reduce our dependence on oil as fuel, we will buy ourselves a lot of time to fix the other issues.
You have a powerful, organized group that have worked to obstruct discussion on the crucial topic of how to solve this problem for a while. Punishing them harshly would serve the important purpose of preventing their obstruction.
Figuring out how to deal with the climate change problem would be hard if everyone was negotiating in good faith. If we can exclude those who have polluted discussion entirely, so much the better.
And of course the power of individual choice to solve is minimal, rhetoric like "you can do something to stop global warming" is exactly ridiculous greenwashing. Broad state policy is needed. And said policy has to be formulated from enlightened self-interest - sure the solar industry is as self-serving as the oil industry but if we can use their self-interest, so much the better.
Edit: Suppose you had a company with ten divisions. The head of one division pursued a project that made the company a bunch of money but which that head knew would result in the company ultimately loosing even more. When that came to light, would not the sensible thing be to demote the head down to dog catcher and consult with everyone else how to change course? Does this kind of reasoning require that the other divisions head be saints or something? No.
I rememebr the 1980s clearly, and how incensed people were then. I also rememebr that environmental damage was covered up, and that industry was suppressing or spreading FUD against science.
In the time since, it hasn't improved - and Kyoto, a band-aid over a gangrenous wound, has failed instead of getting stronger.
Studying human nature and working in larger more coordinated goods is pretty much the last Hail Mary option. Enlightened self interest is very clear - "let's see who survives till the end. I'm going to be its me."
The issues are pretty vast, and short of someone convincing the first world to give up fossil fuels, while simultaneously convincing the third world to give up their ambitions, - enlightened self interest only leads to more fuel being burned.
I bet that we will be resorting to terraforming before we tell people that they can't live a first world standard of living.
BTW, Asphalt is 99% recycled (yes, even the binder). http://www.asphaltpavement.org/index.php?option=com_content&...
edit: its more about pervasiveness of petro-chemicals we hardly acknowledge, all the while still building cities and subsections for Cars instead of humans.
We need electric cars and grid level storage to be able to fully replace fossil fuels. To even get there we have to be realistic about energy needs. I don't like fracking but I accept it as a lesser evil to King coal. I wouldn't want to live next to a nuclear plant but I understand how impossible it will be to continue energy consumption growth - renewables aside - without significant investment in nuclear energy or a staggering growth in fossil fuel use. We cannot pretend that in one or even two generations we will be magically powered by the sun and the wind any more than we can make believe that the world has unlimited fossil fuel resources and that we can burn them without consequence for ever and ever.
Climate change and sustainability is the rare beast that can only be felled by a death of a thousand cuts.
This enables us to test a second prediction made by the report: the temperature increase caused by C02 level rise. The report gives a very wide range for this: 1.1 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the humidity change. The usual baseline assumption about humidity is that relative humidity will remain constant, and the report notes that that assumption leads to the larger prediction--7 degrees F--for temperature rise by the year 2000. That is about 4 degrees Celsius.
Even if we correct for the actual CO2 level rise vs. predicted--about a 20% increase vs. 25% predicted--that still gives about a 3 degree Celsius predicted temperature rise by the year 2000, as compared to 1968. The actual rise was about 0.5 degrees Celsius.
The report does say that the estimating method it uses likely overestimates temperature rise; but it does not, as far as I can see, consider the possibility that it might overestimate temperature rise by so much. So as far as I can see, the oil industry's decision to treat this information as much more uncertain than its authors claimed was reasonable.
The CO2 level rise clearly must have been an estimate based on, "If we project current usage trends forward, here is how much fossil fuel gets burned. Here is what that does to CO2." That usage model would have been thrown off by the first OPEC price shock of the 1970s, which induced a lot of conservation efforts and resulted in significantly less emissions.
I'd be shocked if they had the basic "fossil fuel to CO2" relationship wrong. There is no way that they could have predicted the economic shocks that slowed consumption.
Now let's talk about their environmental model. They gave a range from about 1 F to 7 F. The actual rise is about 1 F. I'd call that a success! (And why did you switch between F and C? Was it just to make the actual rise seem smaller.)
Moving on, you argue for which model should apply, then argue that they got it wrong. Your behavior already doesn't make me trust you, but let's assume you are right. What mistake likely explains it?
My best guess is that they simply did a long-term steady state model for what temperature things would stabilize at. That is a relatively simple calculation, and would have been fairly accurate if the atmosphere were mostly separate from the ocean. However we've learned since that heat exchanges with the oceans are much larger than we knew. (I remember circa 1990 learning in fluid mechanics that there was a big question THEN about how much global warming would slow down.) So the long-term temperature picture in the model is relatively accurate, but we get there more slowly than predicted.
This is the kind of detail of our system that we COULD NOT have predicted with 1960s science. They knew that they were overestimated and knew that they would be right in the end, but had no way to know how long it would take to get there.
For example, the switch from F to C is because the underlying paper is written using F, as that was the style of the time; but the GP presented in C as that is the current preferred unit.
Robinson admits that the model is crude, as he was using an older model of Moller (from 1964), and that he expected that more sophisticated models would improve forecast accuracy. Nonetheless, the numbers presented in the paper are reflected accurately in the GP's post, including uncertainty ranges, and the comparisons seen valid at a glance.
In this case, the GP is not cherry-picking, at least not in the usual sense, as they are using the "cherry-picked" portions of the paper to produce verifiable predictions.
Admitting that early models of climate change make some inaccurate predictions does not necessarily undermine the correctness of the directionality, especially as newer research has come to light, but it does present a less sinister explanation as to why the results were not taken as seriously modern observers feel they should have been.
We all burned oil in our cars. We didn't make an effort to carpool because it wasn't convenient. Skipped days riding our bike to work because it's too cold, etc.
To me holding the blame entirely on the oil industry is akin to persecuting prostitutes for sex crime.
The oil industry has a lot of power. They even have their own party in american politics, the GOP or Grand Oil Party.
This is a collective action problem; if we don't collectively limit or penalize the emissions, we're just leaving grass on the commons for someone else to graze.
With that said, cutting back can prepare you for the time when collective limits or taxes are in place. It can also signal your own belief in the seriousness of the problem. But individually refusing to overgraze the commons cannot be blamed for commons going barren; the refusal to implement real limits, however, can.
And no, subsidies for more efficient grazing aren't "limits"; they make it worse.
"We didn't make an effort to carpool because it wasn't convenient."
if the oil companies had not done this:
"deliberately obfuscate, falsify documents, spend millions on misleading advertising, attempt to buy off critics or fund massive lobbying of law makers"
If you think the answer is obviously yes, then also please think about the dramatic turn in smoking statistics since it was revealed that the cigarette companies were acting in the same manner.
I know, naive and with many holes, but imagine it for a moment...
Some will look worried, chat on forums about these stuff but continue to do nothing because "there is nothing we can do".
[0] - http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2016/01/usa-suv-crossover-marke... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock's_Long_Shadow
Who is going to be so brave to tell poor third world countries they cannot have nice things? We do all the time, by complicity in geopolitics which consist in things such as propping up dictators elsewhere so "our" corporations can get bigger slices of pies and resources rather than the local population. Not to mention war. So who is going to tell the actual centers of power that this can not be tolerated any longer? That is the real question IMO.
The problem is taking out resources and exploiting people at a level that cannot be sustained; not that others want to do it too, but that anyone does.
I mean, what is "a Western lifestyle"? For me it's stuff like basic sanitation, freedom of speech, high literacy rates, having medicine and clothes and shelter. Living and letting live, and last but not least work, preferably meaningful. Yes, some prosperity is a requirement to even have the possibility of those things. But buying new things all the time, ordering screws individually at Amazon, and throwing away a lot of plastic, those things and others seem not strictly needed to me.
We need the scientific method, human rights and rule of law, not so much a constant stream of trinkets. People should be free to strive for trinkets, sure, but without too much pollution (which is essentially a way of restricting the freedom of others; indirectly, but very powerfully). As many things in life, it's not really a complex issue, it's not wanting to step on the toes of powerful people or peers that makes it complicated and contorted I think.
