US rivers drying up, massive heat waves, devastating cold snaps

[Bofferbrauer2]

snyps said:

There is a serious challenge for people to see through in this. The challenge being “What will stop carbon emissions and deforestation?”

Is it increased taxes?
- Nice to believe since it’s the easy thing. Consider, the wealthy will not stop carbon emissions, but will gain monopoly status through being the only ones who can afford this “pollution privilege”.

Is it criminalizing excessive pollution?
- Can you through a CEO in jail for pollution… I don’t know. Would it be a deterrent or is it even possible (considering lobbyists).

Must we all stop long daily commutes?
- Obviously we all have to earn a living to survive as we inherited a huge beholding into society. We don’t cultivate our own food on our own land as nature intended.

Will anything stop deforestation?
- With the shade and oxygen of trees being rapidly replaced with tar and concrete, what can honestly be done.. it like taxes, is the price we pay for living in society.

1. Is it increased taxes?

It's a start. As far as I am aware, there are no (or very very low) taxes on fuel in the US. As a result, a gallon of gas is cheaper in the US than a liter of gas in some countries/regions in Europe. Consequently, the US are driving big trucks which naturally consume more than smaller cars. This alone could cut emissions and petrol consumption of traffic as a whole by up to 20%

2. Is it criminalizing excessive pollution?

That's already done to some degree, like banning CFCs and HCFC, or on the other end of the scale simply by punishing littering. Expanding this could certainly help, how much depends on how big the fines or jailtime would be. 

3. Must we all stop long daily commutes?

Many countries are already working hard to solve this problem. My country of Luxembourg made big waves in spring last year for making all the public transportation within the country totally free to push people to make the switch from their cars to the public transportation. Due to covid coming right afterwards, it wasn't immediately clear how big the impact would be, except for the drivers (not needing to sell tickets meant they could simply open the backdoors and thus avoid direct contact with potentially sick passengers), and traffic has eased up a bit since then, but there's still a lot of work to do.

Another way the country promotes away from the daily usage of personal cars is to extend bike lanes and rental bike stations throughout the city of Luxembourg and also throughout the entire country, and the possibility to bring your bike into the bus or train free of charge. Extending the pedestrian zones is yet another way to push the people to switch away from the car to other means of transportation.

4. Will anything stop deforestation?

Few things will, at least in tropical zones where they are getting used afterwards for farming/plantations and not only for the wood they can provide. In other regions however, deforestation has mostly stopped, and woods are sometimes ever regrowing a bit. But that's not nearly enough to counter the losses of the forests across the equator. There need to be very big reforestations to counter the wood loss alone, not even thinking about absorbing the CO2 we're blasting into the atmosphere right now (I once calculated it, that would need the planting of several billions of trees. Per. Year. Good luck fining enough good space for that!).

Best we can do right now is to ensure our local forests are in good shape and try to push the big corps to move their sourcing out of those forests, both being much easier said than done.