If you ruled the world, what would you implement to help with climate change

[GiraffeInTheCity]

Daydreaming if world domination whilst doing a rain dance...

If you ruled unilaterally, what would you do to make things (anything) more climate friendly? I would

• set net zero targets for much sooner (net zero 2050/2030 feels like ages given the emergency) and would require companies to have solid plans to get there. Probably set it for the next 3 to 5 years. Massive fines if you don't meet targets.

• mandate large scale public transport infrastructure upgrades in big cities where there isn't enough (tax the billionaires to pay for it) and make driving in them difficult (ULEZ, scant parking etc)

• renationalise energy and water, with the view to run it on clean energy and without pumping effluent into the rivers / sea. I imagine there would need to be massive upgrades here too to achieve that. Not renationalising because the private sector is being a bunch of thieves dishonest, But because things need to move quickly now, this is an emergency.

• make eating meat / dairy / fish illegal (I know I'll get flamed for this one...) --

-- What would you do?

Predictions over the past 60 years not occurring yet taxes rising as a result.

I'm not sure where you've been living for the last few years but here on planet Earth the doomsday predictions have been borne out. Could you give me an example of a wrong prediction?

Give me an example of a right prediction.

Reduce the population massively.

The prediction was that global warming will lead to increasing number of, and increasing severity of extreme weather events. Link

@whentheraincame your turn.

Starting with your family presumably?

Is that you Vladimir? How exactly are you proposing to do that?

Population control in the acceptable sense of women having fewer babies is happening already at a very rapid rate, and the richer countries where each baby will be consuming most are changing fastest. But population growth isn't being driven by individual women having too many babies: it's driven by the sheer number of female babies born twenty years ago reaching maturity now. Even if each of them has one baby that can still lead to short term population growth, because there are so many more women in their twenties having babies than there are women in their eighties dying. (Ignoring men here for the sake of the maths).

Educating women, making sure they have full access to contraception and vaccinating and otherwise protecting the babies they do have, are the best ways to bring the population down slowly and sustainably in the long term. Fortunately these are also wonderful things to do in their own right. But they won't save the planet from climate change because the ripples of previous population growth are too strong: only cutting the emissions of the people who exist already will do that.

Educating women

This by the bucket load. Educating women in developing nations increases the age at which they start having children, it reduces the number of children they have and it increases their economic productivity to themselves, their families and their communities.

Suitably vague

So then, we do all the measures they're saying, what impact will that have? How many years will we extend this thing by? The climate changes anyway. If we did every single effort from today - how many years would that halt the process by?

Of course there are loads of things they said would happen that didn't. That's why this article exists to say 'don't worry, it's coming' to ramp up the fear. But what did materialise from all these, were higher taxes on us, the population, with little change from the people in charge.

www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-didnt-first-earth-days-predictions-come-true-its-complicated-180958820/

The sensible thing would be for people to have less children rather than a mass cull.

Well seeing as the title is you ruled the world I'd just ban it. I wouldn't need to bother to persuade people to change.

@whentheraincame the article is written by a journalist, hardly renowned for unbiased reporting. You really don't have any evidence to support your argument do you?

Keep turning your light switches off then. See if it helps.
the irony is I'm probably a thousand times more environmentally friendly and conscientious than you. I just don't do anything on the basis that we can supposedly halt climate change by some unknown quantity in some unknown time period according to some very rich people who own lots of factories and use lots of private planes.

Answer this honestly; why do the people who tell us climate change is so bad keep flying off to holiday and polluting the earth?

Just that one question?

The quantity would be net zero.
The time period is by 2050.
Whataboutism is the weakest of arguments.

What are your household or personal scope 1 emissions?

I agree whentheraincame.

No idea but we don't drive, eat meat, travel by air, and we have one child only

You?
the super rich?

My manifesto...

Annual airmiles allocation to every man, women and child, that can be traded. It would cap ridiculous and unneccesary travel and also redistrubute wealth as the poor could sell their allocations to the highest bidder.

Treat seafood with the same reverence that we treat threatened and endangered land mammals and stop killing them.

Incentivise work from home at a business level in order to reduce carbon emissions and the need for expansion of the road and rail networks.

Ban paving of gardens for driveways (lots of permeable options are available) and put a permitted development limit on the % area of the back garden that can be hard landscaped (including artificial turf).

Legalise euthansia (by consent obviosuly), to reduce the number of high care needs individuals so that we can continue with the birth rate decline without worrying about how we care for the large percentage of the population that is elderly.

Increase education opportunities for girls and young women globally (including higher education) as this is a proven way to reduce birth rates by increasing age at birth of first child and reducing family sizes.

@whentheraincame how can you say you are a thousand times more environmentally friendly when you don't even know your carbon footprint let alone mine.

It's a figure of speech.

How do you measure up to my practical examples?
How do the super rich who tell us there will be climate change doom measure up to my examples?

Omg I'm so glad you lot are NOT in power - your utopia sounds like a communist nightmare of social control.

@whentheraincame no flying, Vegan/Veggie/local/organic household, very limited driving, renovated our house to Passive Haus standards (10% of national average energy consumption).

I couldn't give a monkeys about what the super rich do, fortunately they are an incredibly small % of carbon emissions.

I base ALL my decisions on real world data and science.

It takes too long for the effect of people having less children to filter through

And if those fewer children have high carbon footprints , we would lose

It's number of people* footprint per person that matter

And unfortunately the footprint per person may well go up if the number of children per female goes down

After all, a car journey for a family of 3 isn't less than one for a family of 4. A family of 3 is more likely to afford a carbon expensive lifestyle - eat more meat for example as their income is shared among fewer mouths

It's not about caring what they do, it's about thinking about why if they believe climate change is an emergency they would ever get on a plane again,

The terror we are imbued with from them, they would feel a thousand fold because they have access to all the information.

It doesn't make sense.

Why do you think a person with access to all the information on climate change ever gets on a plane for a holiday? Death wish? What?