Encourage decentralisation and self-sufficiency. Produce and consume more locally. I think residential solar is a good start, as it may lead to reduction in overseas shipping for LNG, oil and coal. Small farms and workshops for daily necessities or repairs will further reduce need for commercial transportation. Work from home or encouraging local offices instead of corporate campuses will spread the population, make local businesses more viable, and reduce personal transportation.

All these encouragements should be done via tax credits or subsidies, so vote for parties who’d deliver those.

This response is focused on the US since that’s the place I already have a very good idea of the current laws and challenges affecting climate action. I’d start by passing the following legislation immediately:

• Mandate remote work options for all positions that can be performed remotely. We saw during the pandemic how much commuting to the office negatively impacts the environment as well as people’s lives.
• Carbon tax with a gradual but short (say 4 year) implementation period where it rachets up to the full tax value for carbon emissions directly created by the industry. The carbon tax is intended to make polluting and wasteful choices far more expensive than cleaner alternatives as well as raise tax dollars for significant infrastructure redevelopment
• Create new taxes and tax breaks plus subsidies for rental properties with poor insulation to encourage updating all rental properties to have modern insulation (and similar tax breaks and subsidies for homeowners to upgrade their insulation)
• Federally allow the construction of ADUs in all residential zone types (likely also creating a more relaxed permitting process and building code for ADUs to reduce cost and encourage their construction)
• Federally allow 2 family housing in all single family zoning (meaning a single family zoned lot can now have the main dwelling converted into a duplex plus an ADU constructed, tripling the permitted density)
• Federal tax break and subsidy for the purchase, maintenance and use of bicycles including ebikes and bike trailers (many places are bikable but people just don’t choose to bike. For example, every small town is mostly bikable within town save for any highways that cut through them, and residential streets are very safe places to bike even if they don’t contain dedicated bike infrastructure)
• Gradually but significantly increase annual vehicle registration fees, racheting them from the current ~$120 per year to ultimately cost several thousand dollars per year, with some discounts available to those who do not live in an incorporated community, NEVs and classic cars, thereby greatly discouraging vehicle ownership and car commuting. Also instituting significantly higher registration fees for heavier vehicles

In the longer term I’d also take the following steps:

• Use carbon taxes to fund a massive transit shift away from private cars to build more railroads and better bike infrastructure
• Nationalize the north American freight rail network and turn all railroads into rail operators, and either an existing federal agency or a new agency takes over maintainance, dispatching and expansion of the rail network, significantly lowering the bar for new railroad services and companies to be created
• Massively expand Amtrak services with many new routes and expanded service on existing routes

And for an even longer term cultural shift to encourage slower growth I’d pass the following legislation:

• Impliment UBI as an eventual replacement for all social safetynet programs. Probably a value of around $1k/month per adult and $3k/month per retiree/disabled adult would make it enough that creative individuals could live entirely off of the UBI but low enough to still encourage working. Most importantly this UBI would be decoupled from the stock market so stock market crashes would not affect people’s ability to retire. This fits into climate legislation as it removes one of the primary incentives for infinite economic growth (saving for retirement)
• Strong right to repair legislation combined with minimum warranty terms of 5-10 years (plus minimum expectations for warranties such as limiting how long a repair/replacement may take to receive) for products to ensure higher quality construction
• Greatly expand the EPA’s powers so that a nimble agency can forcibly stop companies from finding new ways to legally pollute our world, as well as providing a second mandate to the EPA to help consumers live more sustainably (this could come in the form of EPA-funded repair workshops and tool libraries for example, probably also EPA-funded vehicle rentals including ebike and ebike trailer rentals so that people can more easily go car-free)

And that’s what I have off the top of my head. Start with the changes that will make a big impact without requiring individual lifestyle change, and in the longer term financially encourage a more sustainable lifestyle. Removing the financial forces that encourage wasteful resource consumption can be all of the incentive needed for people to live much more sustainably and can be enough to put the world’s climate goals within reach

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarco_pod

Make it socially unacceptable to adopt and maintain some behaviours.

It will take generations, but it’s the only way to have the political support to reject certain things.

Vote.

Edit: to be clear, vote in every election you have access to. Local voting and primaries are just important. Voting even if you don’t like any of the options is still important.

If you don’t vote then you’re part of the problem.

Ban planned obsolescence and make a rigorous standard that any new device is designed repairable, reliable and long lasting enough to last at least 10 years if treated right, 20+ years for vehicles and machinery…

This whole ‘you gotta get a new thing every year’ era causes sooo much unnecessary waste and pollution ☹️

Do it like China, handle it, the hard but effective way.

attack the capitalist system.

Starting about 2 years ago, we in the US had a plan and investments. Building out renewables and grid storage like gangbusters. Incentives to weatherize and update hvac. EV incentives and a program to build out charging infrastructure. Finally some investment in intercity rail. No new ice cars after 2035, and a mandate for EV trucks. Huge promises of EV delivery trucks from usps, ups, amazon. It was a good start.

So much for that idea

• heavily tariff companies that attempt to move their companies or operations overseas
• nationalize the biggest environmental offenders
• any company that resists is investigated and charged with crimes against humanity and their company is nationalized
• once tried, executives are imprisoned or executed to set an example
• tax the wealthy with an 80% flat tax, use the income to subsidize impacted industry/workers while also investing in green or net-zero environmental companies

edit: just to add, this would be the less aggressive solution I would want to see. the more aggressive solution would have blood running in the streets of every executive of a fortune 500 company that has negligently damaged the environment and harmed workers rights/safety.

the economic turmoil would be harsh and would take decades to crawl out of, but we could do it. nobody crawls when we’re dead on a dying planet.

There’s now no way to stop or reverse the inevitable collapse of the comfortable way of life we have right now. This isn’t a fight for survival or for the planet, it’s to perpetuate the system we enjoy at the moment.

The only way remaining to minimise the damage to our way of life is with some huge geo-engineering projects. Like scattering reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect some sunlight away or releasing some novel chemical into the oceans to fix carbon dioxide and lock it away.

The risks of experimenting like this has always outweighed the benefits (like the guys who thought they could kill a hurricane and instead magnified it and sent it back inland resulting in the deaths of multiple people). But now it’s too late to worry about things like that because the inevitable impacts of climate change including wild fires, habitat destruction, biodiversity collapse, extreme weather events are all here now while most of the world is still arguing about whether it even exists or not.

Move to renewable energy. We have the necessary capacity, just keep installing renewable sources and phasing out the rest. Keep nuclear plants operational as long as they’re safe, too, but don’t waste too much resources building new ones.

Keep on moving electric storage from lithium ion to pumped hydro/sodium ion/other technologies depending on scale. Leave lithium ion for portable electronics and specialized cases only.

Develop better public transit networks, ideally make it free like in some cities. Also, make bicycle lanes mandatory for new neighborhoods, and convert old roads to have bicycle lanes whenever possible. With that, you won’t need to ban cars as they’ll grow less relevant (although you can increase tax on car sales to raise money and further disincentivise car ownership).

Also, develop high-speed rail whenever it makes sense, as an organic and much more ecological replacement for planes. Make sure they are modular enough to scale for demand, to avoid dragging extra.

Plant more trees and algae to help scrub the extra CO2. Intensify marine plastic collection efforts to assist the natural growth of marine ecosystems.

Ban petroleum-based plastics whenever possible. For most applications, there are more friendly biologically produced options; they are fairly cheap, too, it’s just that regular plastic is even cheaper.

Extend reduce-reuse-recycle. Make more places serve into your own tare, make use (on a personal level) of what you normally throw away, and for what you do throw away, make sure it gets into recycling. Get creative! For example, did you know some used plastic bottles can be turned into a 3D printer filament? You can go wherever from there!

Reduce beef production/import and consumption. For what you do consume, make sure it comes from milk breeds, because otherwise you don’t share the ecological footprint with the dairy, which skyrockets the footprint of a steak. In any case, beef is the single most terrible food source in terms of ecological footprint, being several times worse than pork, poultry and dozens to hundreds times worse than plant foods.

Oh, and the AI centers currently in construction by tech giants are becoming one extra major point of concern. We should review which of these are actually necessary, because this thing doesn’t seem to stop scaling up, with some planned centers consuming as much energy as a major city.

I think it’s too late. But theoretically speaking, it would require totalitarian measures because people will not willingly choose degrowth and a significant decrease to their standard of living. People will not choose “less.”

You would also have to get all nations across the globe to magically work together. The reason is that those who limit themselves based on sustainability will be outcompeted by those who don’t impose such limitations. To use an example that is relevant to the present: as much hand-wringing as there is about AI and its various hazards (environmental and otherwise), simply “not doing” AI isn’t really an option so long as other parts of the world are going for it. Opting out of an arms race can put you at a severe disadvantage.

Human nature is really working against us.

You are asking two how to questions “combat climate change” and “reduce emissions”

To realistically combat climate change:

• Admit that we need to try geoengineering (we are already doing this with all the CO₂ and CH₄ going into the atmosphere)
• Weather it is SO₂ injection or cloud seeding to artificially increase the albido; we need to reduce incident solar radiation to give us a few more decades to actually reduce emissions

To reduce emissions:

• Tackle the biggest emissions first.
• Electrification of the passenger fleet; that means batteries. Keep fuel cells for heavy transport (maybe)
• Encourage electric biking. And other micro-mobility. Along with better public transport.
• Normalise a historical style diet, meat is a treat only once or twice a week.
• Reduce concrete construction; keep it for the important things like the foundations.
• Reduce the practice of packaging everything in plastic; again keep it for the important things only like electrical insulation.
• Massive ramp up of solar and wind around the world.
• Where we use fossil fuels, ask is this important enough to use FF here?

Carbon taxes:

• Tax CO₂e (carbon dioxide equivalent) at a reasonable rate to encourage all of the reduction measures.
• At less than $65NZD/T the cost is too low to encourage significant movement on the issues.
• Have a ratcheting scheme in the CO₂ market, i.e. add $5-8/yr/T for CO₂e; in 10 years the price will be between $110-140/T. At the 10yr mark, make the ratchet $10-15/yr/T.
• Add a carbon tariff; basically make it more expensive to buy from countries that are not pulling their weight.
• Be careful not to double tax, this is important for buy in from the public. i.e. the carbon tax on fuel should be exempt from sales tax, taxing a tax is a great way to alienate people.

I’m vegan, have no intention of ever buying a car and plan on never having children. That’s probably as much individual action as anyone can ask for. Anything after that is up to corporations and governments, so we should make sure they are incentivized to do the right thing 👍