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?

@ImplementingTheDennisSystem plastic bottles are very easily recycled. Various depolymerization technologies are becoming increasingly deployed such as plasticenergy.com/

No, it's vague enough that they can use it to extract taxes for the rest of our lives with no clear goal.

If we have only 12 years to prevent climate catastrophe, how feasible is it that we can even prevent it? And surely while huge power plants and factories are running any efforts of the likes of us is futile?

Why do the people in power act like there's no impending climate catastrophe?

[quote BuanoKubiamVej]@user1471447924 Completely agree with this. Being child free is the best thing people can do for the environment anyway!

If all the intelligent and climate-aware people don't have children then the next generation will be dominated by the children of stupid people who don't care about the planet and cling to unsustainable lifestyles.

Far better to have one child and teach them to live sustainably, if environmental concerns are your only motivation. Of course choosing to be child free for entirely other reasons than environmental concerns is totally valid, it's just not very rational to claim that environmental concerns are the reason.[/quote]
100% this

@Justanotherobserver yes offshore wind turbines, onshore solar, a bit of tide and wave, and a whole load of efficiency improvements.

Current plans (as in approved and funded) are for a 500% increase in installed capacity of offshore wind within ten years.

We won't do any of this stuff. It would make bugger all difference anyway. We will do nothing and parts of the world will become uninhabitable for humans over time. Poor people from those parts will stop thriving, children will not be born or will not make it to adulthood. Local wars will break out over resources. More people will die. Rich people if any will buy their way out. Other places won't want to let them in. The population of the world will decline until the problem of climate change naturally rights itself. Most of us in rich countries will be insulated from this. Some coastal erosion, some wind farms, a bit of a fuss about some animal extinction but basically we won't be that bothered. We will be okay. The population of the world does need to drastically reduce though.

[quote Daftasabroom]@Justanotherobserver yes offshore wind turbines, onshore solar, a bit of tide and wave, and a whole load of efficiency improvements.

Current plans (as in approved and funded) are for a 500% increase in installed capacity of offshore wind within ten years.[/quote]
Those turbines are going to use up a heck of a lot of concrete, plastic and steel.

If all the intelligent and climate-aware people don't have children then the next generation will be dominated by the children of stupid people who don't care about the planet and cling to unsustainable lifestyles.
It won't be children in the UK that fail to be born. We already know where climate change will hit hardest and it's not here. We will get richer 'they' will get poorer. But the world won't end, though there will be a lot fewer of us in it.

@Justanotherobserver all of which can be recycled.

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

Mudgetastic I get you don’t like rich people but isn’t ‘culling’ them a bit extreme?
What method would you use? Firing squad? lethal injection? Gallows?

[quote Daftasabroom]@Justanotherobserver all of which can be recycled.[/quote]
Not for ever.

And yet @bebanjo most of those older people in their 80s receiving the care visits that you want to kill off have grown up in an era of rationing and make do and mend - and the ones I know have carried that mentality throughout their lives - I imagine their carbon footprint is lower in 80 years than other people's in 40 years . Rather than killing them off it might be a good idea to take advice from the way many of these elderly people have lived their lives.

@Justanotherobserver offshore wind turbines predominantly utilise steel pilings and very little if any concrete, steel is 100% recyclable. The technologies to recover the polymers used in the GFRP blades is maturing all the time. The fibres are 100% recyclable.

We would need to live more like people in Uganda or China.

As parts of the world become unliveable we would need to work out how to accommodate 100s of millions of climate refugees.

www.bigissue.com/news/environment/what-will-the-world-look-like-in-2050/?fbclid=IwAR19a0gNtV1fV6qKmEiDPgkPLmsDxcmeBsxXF9GgXZu3GfMIWIK0OhBm9bI

☝️ that article is one of the clearest ones I've found.

The list by @BocolateChiscuits is good. Green lifestyles can be comfortable and nice. As an early adopter. my home is lovely and warm at very little cost because it’s well insulated, I put in an air source heat pump and the solar panels on the roof reduce the cost of the electricity. If David Cameron’s Tory government had not cut subsidies to green tech for homes, many more would be like me instead of panicking about the fuel cost hikes. Politicians can be very short sighted.

@DesidaCrick

So what happens if:

I rent
My insulation depends on what my landlord will provide
I live in an appartement
I can’t afford a heat pump
I don’t own a roof to put solar panels on

@iCouldSleepForAYear

That article is written from the POV of
a single person living in shared housing. It would be useful to see what envisaged For a family with kids?

The vision clearly emphasises urban living. That makes sense to me: économies of scale etc.

[quote workwoes123]@DesidaCrick

So what happens if:

I rent
My insulation depends on what my landlord will provide
I live in an appartement
I can’t afford a heat pump
I don’t own a roof to put solar panels on[/quote]
Assuming we get our act together the answer is that the landlord can't rent out a house with substandard insulation (the minimum rating is planned to increase from E to C I 2025) and the answer to heating urban apartments where heat pumps aren't an option is local neighbourhood heat/CHP schemes.

Yes. A decent government will ensure that the landlord is legally obliged to upgrade the property.

The apartment block would have solar panels on. Might not be enough to power all flats in the building (although discovered recently they can be put on the side of buildings as well as the top, this could have been factored into all new block building for the last 10 years. It could be factored in to all new block building from now onwards as a condition of planning permission).

As I understand it, most homes have the potential to produced over half the electricity they need from solar panels, some more than they need that can be sold back into the grid. If we moved to a position where most electricity use in domestic and small businesses was no longer produced by power stations, wouldn't that vastly reduce the UK consumption of fossil fuels without lowering quality of life?

Big businesses create most of the climate problems. We though, can turn off heat when not necessary. (I don't mean getting hypothermia in January). Plastics, they've been found in people's lungs. Micro-plastics, that is. Plastic food packaging could be banned, France is doing a trial. People in suburbia driving large jeeps is ridiculous! They were originally designed as off-road, military vehicles. So, much more, very good quality, electric buses and trams, with trained staff, to make sure antisocial behaviour goes from public transport. Or cycle.

Why do the people in power act like there's no impending climate catastrophe?

Presumably, because they like the idea of staying in power! I think I remember Michael Mann (The new Climate War author) saying that most politicians already know what needs to be done: they just don’t know how to get re-elected after doing it.

@ImplementingTheDennisSystem for tackling the plastic tat, I really hope that the sharing and circular economy takes off. There's some small indications it might, e.g. the popularity of Vinted, baby stuff/clothes rental services, Library of Things, the Right to Repair movement, and toy subscription services. Manufacturing would shift to making fewer, higher quality items, that are designed to last, with an inbuilt plan for what to do at their end-of-life. Hopefully people would shift from being so obsessed with owning things (and feel a bit happier for it too!).

But it'd be a slow thing to change. Luckily, solely thinking in terms of climate change manufacturing and transporting cheap plastic tat isn't a top cause of greenhouse gas emissions - plastic is cheap, partly because it doesn't cost a lot of energy to produce. Decarbonising steel manufacturing for instance, has far more scope to reduce emissions, without needing broad societal change at an individual level.

@Justanotherobserver so what's your plan then?

Wind turbines need steel and concrete, so we're going to give up on them, and instead drill and pipe gas from the North Sea/Norway to generate electricity, and live with the ensuing climate change caused by emissions?

Electric car batteries need mines, so we're not going to switch to them, and continue with our petrol cars, and mine billions of tonnes of petrol every year to fuel them, and live with the (surprisingly regular) oil spills, and with the ensuing climate change caused by emissions?

The techs aren't perfect, but given the timescales we've got to tackle climate change, we can't sit around twiddling our thumbs, burning fossil fuels by default, and waiting for "perfect" to rock up. Actually, one day "perfect" might turn up - nuclear fusion looks a good candidate (not like the nuclear fission that we have at the moment, way better) - but it won't be until after 2050.

You're right to pile the pressure on though. It's helping to drive these techs to improve. Plus there's massive economic advantages to addressing these problems - things like lithium and cobalt are very expensive. People are trying to figure out things like sodium-ion batteries, Lithium mining in abandoned tin miles in Cornwall, floating wind turbines, ways to reduce lithium and cobalt in batteries like using silicon instead of carbon in them, and fair-trade, and regulated mining. I think mining should've been talked about at COP.

So my point of view is that you've made good points, that need to be addressed and are being addressed, but that given the timescales we've got to tackle climate change, they shouldn't stop us embracing new technologies.

@workwoes123 @BocolateChiscuits males some really good points, the future isn't going to be some grim dystopian place unless we let it happen. Technologies don't just appear as if by magic, they need investment and really deep skills pool. But technology won't just work on its own, it needs behavioural change by consumers, it is us as consumers that drive the priorities of big business.

On which note, big business is making huge strides, Tata Steel publish EPDs for every single one of their UK products, the cement industry has a specific GHG Protocol, there is now also one agriculture.

I'm pretty positive that the UK and EU are leading the charge on this. I'm no fan of Boris generally but he's doing okay on climate change.