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0 pointsmarkvdb7y ago0 comments

It takes a lot of mental bandwidth to think about lowering your own CO² emission. Still useful in terms of awareness though! Less driving and flying, less meat, low cost/high reward home energy efficiency improvements, ... are quite obvious ways.

It's important though not to overlook the effect of investing in other people's carbon efficiency instead. A piece of anecdotal evidence. I willingly spent ~25000€ extra on my Belgium home's energy efficiency. One year later, I end up living in Latvia, where many places don't even have simple radiators valves. When their appartments with city heating get too hot in winter, they just open the window at -30°C! Imagine spending just 5000€ on my home, and the rest offering free radiator valves installations in Latvia -- or other even more efficient schemes of course!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

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belorn7y ago

It is useful to be aware and as such it is good to know the effectiveness of each action.

Going car-less for a year is similar to going vegan for three years or doing 3 crossing of the Atlantic by plane. Switching over to buy exclusively "green energy" is almost twice as effective in reducing CO² emission compared to a vegan diet per year. All those are high impact changes, while home energy efficiency improvements are medium to low impact changes, with wall insulation estimated to be about 50% compared to eating less meat and up to 10th compared to a vegan diet.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541

Gravityloss7y ago

Price signals are one way to do this. This will hit people unequally though, so probably needs some other things at the same time.

Ie if energy price is raised a lot, it will make poor people's lives a lot harder suddenly.

But currently the price of things is very much disconnected from the climate impacts

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