Climate Change and Committments

The omission of the US (and that other major polluter, China) from the climate COP 28 summit in Dubai because they don’t take climate change seriously might sound sad, and it gives me pause as an American concerned with this catastrophe on an approaching horizon.

I mean, do America’s climate initiatives have to be so vanilla?

I guess it’s a tricky proposition, even in the world of personal finance and for ordinary people, where doing something often means changing career paths or scraping money together for a high-priced electric car. In addition, we pay lip service as a culture to concerns about our footprint, while our culture rarely discusses the root cause of climate change, which is the fact of too many footprints.

Over-Dumping of Carbon

We in the US dumped more Carbon into the earth’s atmosphere than any single country, at about 20 percent of the carbon in the Atmosphere. The US has committed to ambitious emission goals in 2030, 2035, and 2050. But with the assault on the administrative state by conservatives and removing reproductive rights for women (a birth control issue), it’s no wonder the US doesn’t seem serious about fixing climate change.

What to do?

So, what can we do to help ameliorate climate change? Among everything else we could do, is avoiding child-rearing the most profound thing people can do to reduce their footprint? After all, that reduces the number of footprints!

Moreover, The Boomer generation has done a diddly squat about fixing climate change, even though they’ve dumped so much carbon into the atmosphere, crassly leaving it to the kids to fix. So, let’s revisit what we can do:

• Switch to solar power at home.
• Switch to an electric vehicle, an EV.
• Consider converting your gas-powered car to an EV
• Check out engineered foods, food grown in a lab.
• Check out public transit, and if you prefer, use a bicycle for short errands, worker commutes, etc.
• Check out electric bikes and mopeds.
• Reduce the number of non-biodegradable containers, including bags, you use every day.
• Stop waste, especially stop wasting food and water.

In particular, consider engineered foods. We’re already consuming genetically engineered food. Scientists argue that livestock processing produces more greenhouse gases, about 300 times more nitrous oxide. Isn’t it time to at least look at genetically engineered forms of meats as everyday consumption?

On the other hand, did you hear that consumers are converting their current vehicle to an EV?

There are more things you can do than this list offers, but you get the gist. You can do things that make a difference.

The Naysayers

The skeptics of climate change are not so much questioning the science but rather are questioning whether it’s too little too late, it’s not, or questioning whether turning to alternative energy sources is reducing our carbon footprint.

As Lewis Mumford said, our inventions turn around and reinvent us. I would argue that humans invented remedies to climate change, and now those remedies are turning around and reinventing us. All the new technologies, alternative fuels, and energies, and the new sensibility toward waste and pollution are part and parcel of our re-invention, and it takes willing hearts to make the change. After the change, whatever shortcomings can be addressed.

Avoiding Climate Doom

The vast scale of the problem makes getting your head around it difficult, leading scientists to answer most doom-day scenarios, claiming that Climate Change is too complex for the panic-stricken to warn of gloom and doom.

But that doesn’t mean the future is rosy. Or that climate change is something we can ignore.

Many people already see their lifestyles and livelihoods threatened by climate change, which will only worsen. The future promises more droughts, storms, heatwaves, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and warming oceans, and the changes will also grow in intensity.

Rather than put your head in the sand, isn’t it better to combat climate change so that when our livelihoods are threatened, we are already on top of the problem? A human reaction is the only remedy.

What is the Climate Pledge

When then-President Trump backed out of the Parisian Accord on Climate Change, it created a significant reaction in the United States, causing leaders in State offices and corporate offices to create an alternative stand to the Trump Administration’s posture. One of the results was a climate pledge offered to people truly concerned about the future of life on Planet Earth.

Spearheaded by many global companies coming together, the climate pledge is a promise to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2040. How this effort compares to what the government could accomplish with a full-throttled effort to turn the economy green is anybody’s guess, but everybody should consider the effort.

What is the White House Doing?

The Biden Administration rejected the Trump “Climate-Damage” policy in favor of a re-commitment to battling climate change, and they included it in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. If elected in 2025, Conservatives are all but turning their back on the problem, along with other initiatives to remove the US from any participation in the global economy.

Biden established the Climate Policy Office early in 2021 to meet the looming climate disaster and assume leadership in tackling climate problems with a robust response.

By not giving the president the Congress he needs to accomplish significant climate change policy, Americans have signaled to the world that they’re not serious about climate change.

What is the United Nations Response?

The United Nations responded to climate change with the UN Environment Program. They encourage the world to adopt low to zero carbon emissions in critical sectors, such as energy, agriculture, buildings, forestry, industry, and transport.

They’re committed to restoring and protecting natural ecosystems, building reliable ecological foundations, and using a government/business partnership to increase air quality.

Climate Change Policy List

Britannia compiled a list of climate change policies in an article:

• Forming an Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change: Assessing and reporting climate change data.
• The UN Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol
• The Paris Agreement and future climate-change policy

Britannia says local policies monitor the progress toward zero emissions on the one hand and check the preparations of communities for change on the other.

Climate Change and Personal Finance

The savings you’ll experience are nuanced but significant. Whenever you make lifestyle changes, it upends your routine, and that can mean a reorganization of your spending habits. Deciding to use your shopping bag while going for groceries will save you money in communities where local government mandated a plastic bag charge.

What’s that? A nickel’s savings?

Here’s a list of initiatives that could benefit your bottom line:

• New Opportunities created by the Inflation Reduction Act aimed at climate change.
• Working at home saves you money on commuting, reducing how much carbon we put in the atmosphere.
• New careers can be found in forestry, industry, renewable energies, energy bartering, green construction, and green engineering.
• jobs in pollution reduction
• jobs in recycling,
• wind turbine servicing jobs
• Transportation jobs

For all the negativity pointed toward the Green Economy, it’s our future, and it might be helpful to be proactive about it.

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