Voluntarily. Mostly.
By people doing what we’ve done:
- Replaced old attic insulation with R-60 (higher than that actually)
- Upgrading old homes (before we bought our 50-year-old house, a prior owner updated the windows to triple paned)
- We installed a solar PV system that not only powers our home but contributes 1.5 MWH to the local utility grid each year. Two years later, our neighbor has done the same with an even larger solar PV array.
- We heat our home using locally sourced wood (made from wood waste products). The UN rates wood heat as climate neutral.
- We’ve installed two 220v 14-50 outlets – one outside and one in the garage, for future EV charging. If we were to get an EV, our current excess solar output would be more than enough for our local driving.
- We live in a small town so miles driven is not much. Everything is pretty close.
- Our home/life carbon output is currently 1/4th that of an average American home. If we had an EV, that would drop to about 1/8th. After that, there is not much we can do. We can’t exert much control over the products or services we use – it takes energy to produce and distribute food, for example. The “backend” of the products and services that make our lives possible is not something we control.
- Note – I no longer ride a bike. I spent my early work years commuting by bicycle. However, having had six traumatic brain injuries – three of them in bicycle incidents, including a skull fracture – two doctors have recommended I no longer ride a bike due to the cumulative effect of brain injuries. Riding a bike is considered an elevated risk for me.
I strongly suspect that most “forced” climate initiatives will accomplished next to nothing and will be as effective as public health was in controlling a highly contagious respiratory virus. Which is to say, completely ineffective. In fact, government mandates, like public health, will likely cause numerous harms – without yielding benefits.
Instead, many people will gradually migrate towards more efficient use of energy. Running out and buying a new EV doesn’t deliver many benefits: at 200,000 miles of driving, the total life cycle carbon output of an EV is an estimated -28% less than that of a similar sized ICE vehicle. In fact, the EV will initially result in more carbon emissions due to energy used during its manufacture.
Change will occur because of voluntary activities not mandates. But mandates will likely lead to harms, and be corrupted by those who seek to profit or gain power from the mandates. The elite will continue to do whatever they want, of course, thumbing their nose at us.
Finally, this all assumes that (1) climate is controlled by human-induced activities, and (2) that our changes will then result in changing the climate. At this point, much of this remains based on “models” – and we saw during the last 2 1/2 years that disease models were useless garbage. Not a good endorsement of modeling chaotic systems and based major decisions on their output.
