Climate change: has anyone actually said what life would have to look like to prevent catastrophic warming?

[workwoes123]

I’ve been reading articles about the very gloomy, completely ignored, most recent IPCCC report.

What I can’t find is anything saying what daily life would look like if we adopted the measures that are necessary to prevent catastrophic warming? Like, in the UK, if we were to do what’s necessary:

how would we Heat our homes?
What kinds of homes could we build?
How would we travel / what transport could we have?
What would we eat?
What industries would still operate?

The reports all talk about the need to move away from fossil fuel use. What I can’t find is anything telling me what my life will look like if / when we do this?

I know people make what they think are big changes (eating veggie, holidays in the U.K., bamboo toothbrushes etc) but I suspect all these personal lifestyle changes add up to bugger all on a global scale and that the actual impacts on our lifestyles - however modest we think our lifestyles currently are - would be massive and negative (and that’s why no-one’s talking about this aspect of it). Am I right?

Yes it has been laid out and it's not all gloomy at all

I can't recall all the details

Lots of green electric and more energy storage , so home heating and transport electric

Meat once or twice a month

Flights once every couple of years

Forced obselecence illegal - you phone and washing machine should last decades not years leading to less stuff being regularly bought

Even more vibrant second hand markets for things we like to change often like clothes

@Daisydoesnt

And how do we pay for the changes? Especially at the moment

I agree, but we either pay a lot now - or we collectively pay a much, much higher price (I mean that financially as well as in other ways) in the near future. Politicians are too scared to tell us because they are by their very nature focused on the very short term - mainly being voted in at the next election. They are too cowardly to give us the bald facts.

Standard of living is going to go down, even more than it has started to. Fuel poverty. The era of travel abroad for all will come to an end. I think car ownership/ usage will fundamentally change. Taxes are going to up, up, up.

This is the important point. The cost of doing nothing is way higher. It was true decades ago and it’s more true now. Floods, storms, droughts and wildfires are expensive and the irreversible cost of deaths and extinctions is beyond economics.

@SushiGo interesting article. The west tend to have the problem of ageing populations, tbh the lack of planning around that concerns me more than climate change as I'm getting hit by the tax hikes now.

I'm a climate anxious techno-solutionist so thinking about this is sort of my hobby!

• heat pumps instead of gas boilers (have one in my ordinary 1930s house, it's fine)
• everything insulated as a matter of course
• electric cars
• fewer cars, more shared cars in car clubs or hire cars that can self-driving to you (for you to drive)
• electric motorway lanes for lorries with overhead electricity lines with you have for trains
• more electric bikes and cargo bikes for short journeys around cities with infrastructure for parking and riding about
• our electricity being generated by renewables with nuclear as a baseline (at the minute I'm writing it's at 28% wind and 16.8% nuclear - you can see it varying on carbonintensity.org.uk)
• induction hobs instead of gas
• significantly less meat, fish and dairy consumption. But people would still eat these things - it'd be more of an occasional treat and the focus would be on very high quality and high welfare, e.g. veggie most of the time with a fantastic Sunday roast once a week
• lots of hydrogen generation from renewables that would then be used to fuel industrial processes, e.g. steel production
• hydrogen fuelling heavy machinery like cranes
• carbon capture as a matter of course, so if you fly then your carbon capture costs would be included in the ticket
• returning more land to nature (big reason why cutting down on meat is a good thing), so we'll have more wild and nature filled places to visit
• expectation of circular economy - if you can reuse something we already have, or make something with materials that already exist you should do that before extracting new materials.
• regenerative farming practices - keeping soil cover and avoiding ploughing

It doesn't sound so bad right?

“How do we pay for it” endlessly.

How about we seize billionaires mega-yacht money? They can go down in history as the people who saved the world, surely that’s more important than buying private islands, and they’re more responsible for the damage than the average person. Money is nothing compared to the future of the world.

Well strictly speaking green electricity is cheaper than fossil for the last few years

We have the choice of invest now for cheaper long terms solutions

Or not bother abs then pay more for adapting to climate change. Regime everyone in York and the seven valley would be quite expensive for a start

I think a low carbon life sounds much nicer than a climate emergency life

@workwoes123 ok I wrote a long deeply pessimistic post in reply but watch this instead. Ten minutes of your time, same bloke - David Wallace-Wells. Some 'solutions' at the end. It has to be so much more radical than tinkering with individual behaviour and lifestyle.

www.bing.com/videos/search?q=david+wallace-wells+youtube&view=detail&mid=8FFE7EBA54ACFC726C468FFE7EBA54ACFC726C46&FORM=VIRE

I wonder how we will pass the time.

So much entertainment is about 'stuff' - all the home decor programmes/websites/magazines. The fashion magazines. The holiday programmes. All the ingredients for the many cookery progs. Gardening advice is a lot about buying that new plant or plants for a great display - ignoring the mound of plastic pots and empty compost bags that that results in.

We could write books, read books, go online and read stuff.
Go walking, cycling.
In the past there was more work involved in running the home and garden which took up time.

@heldinadream

Ouf - so “relatively liveable” is that best we can hope for? Even if we do manage to overcome all the political / human / other obstacles to address climate change. That’s not going to win many elections.

[quote workwoes123]@heldinadream

Ouf - so “relatively liveable” is that best we can hope for? Even if we do manage to overcome all the political / human / other obstacles to address climate change. That’s not going to win many elections.[/quote]
I'm sorry. My best hope now is that the war with Putin will take him out swiftly and that that will unite much of the 'democratic' world and bring about some kind of consensus that we cooperate or die.

That will mean bringing in universal laws that will completely change life as we know it.
Nothing else is long-term tenable. That's why we can't get people to properly talk about it. But personally I'm fed up with trying to tread an optimistic line to keep on board people who can't face how bad it is. It's just a shame that's most of humanity.
I need to probably bow out now as I know no-one wants to hear this.
Thank you so much for raising the questions. I wish you well. The book is worth reading and difficult to stomach but has been around a few years and is well known.

No one wants to change. Just read the threads about the rise in gas price’s, to even suggest that we all were jumpers and use hot water bottles brings outrage, ‘ it’s like going back in time, we should all feel warm in our own homes’ are some of the things said.
No one wants to join the dots.
We have a population problem course the old are ‘living’ longer.
Can’t talk about assisted suicide, need to get cars off the road, but some of these people need 6 visits a day. That’s 6 car journeys a day. Cut down on plastic, each visit needs the use of sometimes 4 pairs of disposable gloves, maybe 3 disposable aprons, masks, incontinence pads, which have to be put in a plastic bag, up to 1/2 a packet of wet wipes. That’s all 6 times a day.
Let’s have electric cars, where do you plug them in when you live in a terraced house?
Schools teaching kids about the environment, yet produce more wast paper than in the history of schools.
Then there’s food, everything has to be in plastic, everything has to be thrown away the day it says on the packet.
I’m sure there’s more.
The point is it’s no good just saying we need to change this and that. We need to change everything, starting with the way we think .

I've been thinking more, and as an individual without lots of spare funds, its tough. We have a gas boiler which realistically should last another 10 years, I would like to replace with electric, but can't justify the cost of replacing a fully functioning boiler. Solar panels for my house would cost between £5-10k, I dont have that even if we could get planning.

Theres a great opportunity right now with high gas and electricity prices to heavily subsidise solar panels so the production of the majority of electricity for many homes and businesses is no longer a problem the government has to solve, but of course they won't grab it. They could start with every state funded school, hospital and council building being offered panels.

The lockdown did show a lot of people working from home was possible, even if only 2 / 3 days a week. That has made a massive difference.

Yes people are afraid of change and so are quite prepared to kill off older other people it seems

Not a nice look I think

Culling the eldest 40% would not be as effective as culling the richest 10% in society

We can still use plastic, just for essential purposes
We can get the necessary infrastructure for electric cars
We never had petrol stations or motorways 100 years ago ( or so)

@bebanjo - about a year ago, I read a thread talking about the environmental impact of living longer. I quipped perhaps we should have not locked down and let covid rip through the older generation, but many others seemed to think that actually yes, perhaps we should have done.

Kind of goes back to Dominic Cummings' white board photo of the COBRA meeting when they had a section labeled "who dont we save?"

Have a look at the Zero Carbon Britain reports from the Centre for Alternative Technology.

There's also George Monbiot's Heat, although parts of that might be a bit out of date now.

I get the rage at people on here talking on threads about how they couldn’t possibly give up meat/dairy. But that’s one of the things that we can personally do to have a big impact.

@workwoes123
how would we Heat our homes?
Most of us will heat our homes with heat pumps running off renewable electricity.

"What kinds of homes could we build?*
Homes that we should have been building for the last 25 years. Homes which are highly insulated so require very little heating or cooling, homes that are healthy due to mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. The places we live will be healthier and more pleasant with less pollution and more green space.

How would we travel / what transport could we have?
Urban air mobility will revolutionise inter city and short hop travel and run off either renewable electricity or green hydrogen. Trans continental travel will be by electric train or hydrogen fuelled aircraft. Inter continental travel will be by wind assisted shipping or bio fuelled aircraft.

What would we eat?
Much the same as we eat now but reduced meat and dairy; pizzas, pasta, fab veggie curries with lots of Dahl and bhaji, mushroom dishes etc etc.

What industries would still operate?
All of them, just more efficiently and without damaging the environment or our children's futures.

@Kfjsjdbd

I get the rage at people on here talking on threads about how they couldn’t possibly give up meat/dairy. But that’s one of the things that we can personally do to have a big impact.

I don't eat red meat. You can get the rage at me not giving up dairy. BUT I only have one child. I don't have a dog (or any other pets). I drive a hybrid car. I often use the train instead of the car when it's feasible. I don't drive a SUV. I don't leave my car idling when I stop somewhere. I don't do ski-ing or cruises and have had one long haul holiday in my 50 years on this planet. I don't buy plastic tat (although I do have ready meals from time to time, so yes I get unnecessary plastic trays). And my electricity tariff is 100% renewable (and yes, I know the actual electricity I use isn't 100% renewable, but what replaces it, is).

So I'll enjoy my cheese.

Anyway there's not much point any of us doing anything when a megalomaniac is quite happy to order the complete destruction of a country, or part of it. Aside from the obvious human cost of the war in Ukraine, what is the environmental cost of it?

@yellowsuninthesky there's a thing in the study of sustainability called "discourses of delay", one of which is "there's nothing we can do as individuals" or whataboutism. We live in a consumer society, your attitude is damaging your children's futures.

@BocolateChiscuits thanks for your list, that's interesting.
What do you think can be done about the massive volume of plastic 'tat' that so much of the world's economy is built on? I'm thinking massive shipping containers bringing millions of items a week from China, which are then sold in The Range, B&M etc etc? Will that gap ever be filled by something better do you think?

@Kfjsjdbd giving up meat and dairy is really not as big a deal as reducing and making informed choices. The biggest deal is we need to stop burning fossil fuels - it's 20x bigger than the beef and dairy industry.

@BocolateChiscuits has pretty much nailed it.

Worldwide we need to push harder on female education and empowerment, reduction in infant mortality and availability of contraception, which will reduce the global population, but the sheer maths of the situation with growing numbers of girls reaching their twenties over the next decade means that that's not going to make any difference in the time we need it to.

From a local POV what it looks like is:
Much less meat and dairy consumption.
Virtually no use of fossil fuels without carbon capture at source, so no ICE transport, no domestic gas boilers or jobs, and no fossil fuel powered flights.

Hence:
Much less flying
Houses which are electrically or possibly hydrogen heated and either better insulated or colder.
All electricity generation to be either nuclear, renewable or possibly fossil fuel with effective CCS.
No ICE cars

@BocolateChiscuits

I'm a climate anxious techno-solutionist so thinking about this is sort of my hobby!

• heat pumps instead of gas boilers (have one in my ordinary 1930s house, it's fine)
• everything insulated as a matter of course
• electric cars
• fewer cars, more shared cars in car clubs or hire cars that can self-driving to you (for you to drive)
• electric motorway lanes for lorries with overhead electricity lines with you have for trains
• more electric bikes and cargo bikes for short journeys around cities with infrastructure for parking and riding about
• our electricity being generated by renewables with nuclear as a baseline (at the minute I'm writing it's at 28% wind and 16.8% nuclear - you can see it varying on carbonintensity.org.uk)
• induction hobs instead of gas
• significantly less meat, fish and dairy consumption. But people would still eat these things - it'd be more of an occasional treat and the focus would be on very high quality and high welfare, e.g. veggie most of the time with a fantastic Sunday roast once a week
• lots of hydrogen generation from renewables that would then be used to fuel industrial processes, e.g. steel production
• hydrogen fuelling heavy machinery like cranes
• carbon capture as a matter of course, so if you fly then your carbon capture costs would be included in the ticket
• returning more land to nature (big reason why cutting down on meat is a good thing), so we'll have more wild and nature filled places to visit
• expectation of circular economy - if you can reuse something we already have, or make something with materials that already exist you should do that before extracting new materials.
• regenerative farming practices - keeping soil cover and avoiding ploughing

It doesn't sound so bad right?

This list is nice but doesn't take into account the externalities of things like electric cars. The mining for minerals that strips environments and the vast new factories, for example. And where is all the electricity coming from? Wind turbines?

Do you know the weight of materials that go into each one? "Building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of plastic."
peckford42.wordpress.com/2019/08/09/one-wind-turbine-takes-900-tons-of-steel-2500-tons-of-concrete-45-tons-of-plastic/

Do we really want other people's environments to look like the pictures on this page just so we can drive electric cars and bikes?
meta.eeb.org/2020/09/10/europes-raw-materials-ambitions-and-the-right-to-say-no/

I have no answers but believe we'll find out soon enough that we'll end up where we're currently heading and it won't be pretty.