Quote:
Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction
I think the biggest problem when it comes to reducing per capita carbon footprints is that trying to manage it at an international or national level doesn't work. It puts pressure on industry, which just passes the cost on to the consumers. It's not really fair to make consumers pay more, who are already paying out the nose, so that the billionaires on top can keep raking in the profits.
For it to work, it has to be a collaborated effort at the community level. Instead of trying to force people into reducing their carbon output by making it economically unviable, they need to be persuasive by making cities more logistical to reduce the need for energy. Promote producing and buying local products, better city planning, better public transport, that sort of thing.
It will require a complete cultural shift to change "car culture" in North America, to convince people that they don't need avocados from Mexico or a TV in every room of the house. That's the tricky part.
|
If you want to change the culture around owning a car, there needs to be ways for people to to move from point A to point B easier than jumping in their car to do so.
Are we doing enough with inner city transit? Outer city transit? Transit within higher population areas? Seems to me that there is always bickering going on when it comes to that.
It just annoys me that people like to bicker about over consumption, when a single family, or thousands of single families can't really make much of a difference even if they make the supposed changes that we think are needed.
I love to bang on the construction material drum, because concrete contributes up to 8% of yearly worldwide C02 emissions. For the most part it gets ignored because it isn't a 'sexy' problem to solve.
The other thing is removal of C02 from the atmosphere through proper forest management, water management and simply planting more trees. We all know that all those things are not looked after properly either, and again, these are not issues a single family, person or even thousands of individual families can change. It needs to be done on a big scale.
Quote:
As trees grow, they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving global heating. New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions from human activities that remain in the atmosphere today, a figure the scientists describe as “mind-blowing”.
The analysis found there are 1.7bn hectares of treeless land on which 1.2tn native tree saplings would naturally grow. That area is about 11% of all land and equivalent to the size of the US and China combined. Tropical areas could have 100% tree cover, while others would be more sparsely covered, meaning that on average about half the area would be under tree canopy.
The scientists specifically excluded all fields used to grow crops and urban areas from their analysis. But they did include grazing land, on which the researchers say a few trees can also benefit sheep and cattle.
“This new quantitative evaluation shows [forest] restoration isn’t just one of our climate change solutions, it is overwhelmingly the top one,” said Prof Tom Crowther at the Swiss university ETH Zürich, who led the research. “What blows my mind is the scale. I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.”
|
https://www.theguardian.com/environm...nopy-emissions
And yet everytime the 'plant more trees' or 'better forest management' subject comes up, it gets dismissed.
I don't get it.
Also, this is something that could be funded to help people on an individual scale. One does not need to believe in 'climate change' in order to plant trees. Funding everything from individual backyard trees, shelter belts to full reforestation efforts could make a big difference. Right now if I want to plant some Manitoba Maple, I need to pay for them. Fine, but we won't get very far by requiring everyone to 'pay' for planting trees.