Major corporations caused this, only major corporations can solve it. Laws would have to be passed requiring them to offset the damage from everything they do. Coops would need to be set up wherever possible for one industry to reuse waste from another. Subsidies would need to be ethically set up to encourage industry involved with cleaning the environment. Cooperation between nations to combat global issues would be needed. Actual consequences for industries it nations that violate. Education!! And most importantly convince half the world’s population to give a shit or even believe the problem exists. I’ve probably missed some.

The alternative would be magic.

Yeah, between the two, I think magic is probably more realistic. Let’s go with that.

Call a halt to this AI bullshit for a start. I’ve just received a (UK) government questionnaire about my personal energy usage and how I might reduce it. Meanwhile, I learn said government has mooted giving everyone in the country ChatGPT Plus for free!

There are innumerable ways businesses and governments can reduce their energy footprint etc and make a difference.

You are asking two how to questions “combat climate change” and “reduce emissions”

To realistically combat climate change:

• Admit that we need to try geoengineering (we are already doing this with all the CO₂ and CH₄ going into the atmosphere)
• Weather it is SO₂ injection or cloud seeding to artificially increase the albido; we need to reduce incident solar radiation to give us a few more decades to actually reduce emissions

To reduce emissions:

• Tackle the biggest emissions first.
• Electrification of the passenger fleet; that means batteries. Keep fuel cells for heavy transport (maybe)
• Encourage electric biking. And other micro-mobility. Along with better public transport.
• Normalise a historical style diet, meat is a treat only once or twice a week.
• Reduce concrete construction; keep it for the important things like the foundations.
• Reduce the practice of packaging everything in plastic; again keep it for the important things only like electrical insulation.
• Massive ramp up of solar and wind around the world.
• Where we use fossil fuels, ask is this important enough to use FF here?

Carbon taxes:

• Tax CO₂e (carbon dioxide equivalent) at a reasonable rate to encourage all of the reduction measures.
• At less than $65NZD/T the cost is too low to encourage significant movement on the issues.
• Have a ratcheting scheme in the CO₂ market, i.e. add $5-8/yr/T for CO₂e; in 10 years the price will be between $110-140/T. At the 10yr mark, make the ratchet $10-15/yr/T.
• Add a carbon tariff; basically make it more expensive to buy from countries that are not pulling their weight.
• Be careful not to double tax, this is important for buy in from the public. i.e. the carbon tax on fuel should be exempt from sales tax, taxing a tax is a great way to alienate people.

Make it socially unacceptable to adopt and maintain some behaviours.

It will take generations, but it’s the only way to have the political support to reject certain things.

Buy less crap. That’s it. It sounds like a sacrifice, but stuff doesn’t make you happy (provided your basic needs are met). If you are working longer hours to pay for your cars and tvs and fast fashion, your life might improve.

Playing with a cellphone is kinda fun. Know what’s really fun? Friends.

If you’re under 60, buying less crap is going to disrupt your life less than climate change will, so i think i am entitled to the aforementioned bonus points.

Physically destroy oil and gas production and storage facilities. Seems like the most straightforward method. If Ukraine can reduce Russian oil production 20% in a matter of months then people who care about the planet should be easily capable of doing the same… I have been looking into producing a google maps style overlay of global infrastructure that anyone who wants to contribute could use as a target list… but there might be others out there more au fait with mapping technology who could do it better. I’ve been inspired by the book How to Blow up an oil pipeline by Andreas Malm.

My proposal… this is a “long con”, so this seem more like a political proposal rather than something that can quickly fix up our society to be less polluting:

1. Start/contribute to a political party that is catered towards young voters, with somewhere between center-left to full left-wing orientation. Note that sadly this party cannot be “far-left” so no eating billionaires or drastic corporate taxes… yet. Climate change will be a core part of the agenda, but at this point the party has to only focus on low-hanging fruit options (improve recycling & waste management, fines on recycling, taxes on cars, company cars, and high-consumption households, etc). Very important that intermediate steps such as nuclear is accepted (in contrast to some Green Parties), we can’t afford to ruin the economy at this point
2. Try to pre-emptively rule out serious cases of corruption and/or nepotism, and try to base party focuses and decisions on politically unbiased scientific outputs; might need to hire a good scientific panel
3. Use whatever means possible to try and gain popularity without changing the party’s principles. Ads… yes. Social media… yes. Paid influencers… have to swallow a hard pill here but also yes
4. Try to win enough seats to form a majority coalition government with left-leaning and/or green parties. This is where point 1’s not being far-left yet comes into place as the party will need to be at least somewhat popular with most voters and most other politicians
5. Work with the coalition to reduce tax loopholes, try to classify more forms of rich-people “income” into regular taxable income, and shift the main beneficiaries of party politics to focus on the working class. So no more tax loopholes for the rich as much as we can try… and the “no corruption” part from point 2 becomes very important here as otherwise the plan can go to waste
6. The government should have a healthy tax base at this point. Now start giving tax incentives to perform more serious individualistic environmentally-friendly options (for example, subsidized high-speed rail instead of plane, install solar panels, biking instead of driving), and heavily tax or penalize situations that are polluting with no particular upsides (one-time use plastic, private jets, ,)
7. Now THINK BIGGER. Invest tax money to public transit and green energy infrastructure; the population might be accepting of more radical interventions such as banning private jets or prison time for some execs now so we can start doing that

… Frankly, if anyone actually carries out this plan until like step 5 or 6, I think the exact details regarding combat climate change would be trivial, since the government would have very sufficient resources/good will/power to do so at that point

Other than inventing time travel, I don’t think there’s a realistic method at this point. (and then I’m not so sure that time travel is that realistic either)

We need a binding international treaty implementing carbon taxes.

They’re unpopular so we need to take this decision out of the hands of politicians who might be tempted to defect the next time they’re up for reelection, they should only be responsible for the implementation of the policy that was already agreed to and can’t easily be wriggled out of.

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Redistribute all excess wealth perpetually.

Seize control of the corporations that control most of the polution due to global shipping, shut all non-essential services down until our fleet of vehicles are upgraded to carbon neutral.

Reroute military funding to public infrastructure, take away everyone’s gas cars and drivers licenses and force the public to use public transport.

Force the meat industry to cull 99%of cows on earth

Reinvest into the satellite tracking for carbon emissions and stamp out the random offenders.

Guns, we fly a space ship to Mercury make a landing party and start shooting everything we have at the Sun. Tell it to cut the crap or we’ll tarrif all of its light.

• heavily tariff companies that attempt to move their companies or operations overseas
• nationalize the biggest environmental offenders
• any company that resists is investigated and charged with crimes against humanity and their company is nationalized
• once tried, executives are imprisoned or executed to set an example
• tax the wealthy with an 80% flat tax, use the income to subsidize impacted industry/workers while also investing in green or net-zero environmental companies

edit: just to add, this would be the less aggressive solution I would want to see. the more aggressive solution would have blood running in the streets of every executive of a fortune 500 company that has negligently damaged the environment and harmed workers rights/safety.

the economic turmoil would be harsh and would take decades to crawl out of, but we could do it. nobody crawls when we’re dead on a dying planet.

Stop burning fossil fuels. There is no way that doesn’t include that.

Vote.

Edit: to be clear, vote in every election you have access to. Local voting and primaries are just important. Voting even if you don’t like any of the options is still important.

If you don’t vote then you’re part of the problem.