Climate Action is a form of deliberate existence to address Climate Change.
Before you decide anything, you should collect and organize information that might be helpful for you to make a decision.
Humans often have a big Ego, which is formed by genes and culture. In reality, most of the stuff going on in the world is not about us, still our lives are influenced by it. This means that in order to know whether one can do something useful or not, one has to reach into the “unknown” that goes past direct relevance for your own life in the moment. If you can extend yourself in this way and think about the world this way, then it is possible for you to reason about Climate Action. Otherwise, your best course of action is to rely on the direct advice by climate scientists.
Climate Action is best considered as a kind of outside-the-box way of thinking, because our biases are not usually the best tool to support action.
To reason about Climate Action, one must understand the risks. The risks are bounded by the worst possible thing that can happen.
The worst possible thing that can happen, is the following:
There are many other predictions that might come true, but that is the gist of it. While there are greater systemic risks that is part of foundation of life, these 3 risks are easy to understand, which in turn makes them easy to reason about.
The whales do not care about you dying either.
The point is to try reach beyond your Ego and think about “the worst possible thing that can happen” as an outside-the-box thing, which is not directly relevant for your life. Anything that makes whales die is likely to also influence your own life, but it takes a lot of inference steps to figure out why. Instead of starting with “me” as the single entity of concern, it is better for reasoning about Climate Action to expand the “virtual sensory apperatus” to more entities. These entities are spread around the Earth and in different environments to cover the overall health of ecosystems.
There are no “bad guys”, there are only “bad languages”.
Human brains can reason very abstractly about their environment and societies, which allows us to perform complex tasks. However, the downside of reasoning abstractly is complexity of language, which forces us to take subjective perspectives in order for reasoning to be efficient. Some of these subjective perspectives do not consider the well being of fish, whales, animals and humans.
Thus, it is the mechanism of subjective abstract reasoning that kills life. The power of humans have to perform complex tasks also destroys the environments that support life.
Imagine a hypothetical world where it was not the CO2 levels in the athmosphere that caused fish, whales, animals and humans to die. Yet, in this hypothetical world, something else is causing death.
The CO2 levels is just one measurement out of many. CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas, nor is the greenhouse effect the only destructive consequence of Climate Change.
Climate change deniers talk about Climate Change in a way where error of reasoning happens around causation of concrete measurements, like CO2 levels. In this language, anything is used to justify passivity of Climate Action. The conclusion is the same and predictable, regardless of whether there are other good reasons to commit to policies that aligns with Climate Action.
Climate change deniers have always and will always be wrong about the basic facts of climate science. However, notice that the way they are wrong is because the lack of outside-the-box thinking around Climate Action. The language of climate change denial is destructive, not necessarily because facts are wrong, but because it forces a way of thinking that is “undeliberate”.
The Earth gets destroyed to increase the profit margins about 5-10% in short term, at the cost of 50-100% profit margins in the long term.
With other words, the destruction is not due to rational decision making, but due to greedy bias.
Greedy bias is not an emotion, but a sub-optimal way of solving problems by first taking drastic actions that increases utility in the short term, but needs redoing or undoing in the long term to maximize utility.
In practice, there is no person on Earth that benefits from lack of Climate Action.
When people reason about governments today, they tend to weight official intentionality above internal intentionality. The reality is that the internal intentionality of governments is to continue activities and subsidies that will make the worst possible thing that can happen, becoming a reality.
To become a vegan today, or eating less meat and consuming less diary products, is seemingly drastic lifestyle change for somebody who does not like changes.
Furthermore, if policies were put in place to e.g. forbid over-consumption of meat, then it would provoke emotions of having freedom restricted.
However, changing lifestyle is not the worst possible thing that can happen. In practice these changes are OK.
When your house gets flooded or you lose some in your family from the hundreds of consequences of Climate Change, you will experience a situation that is much more inconvenient than “I feel uncomfortable thinking about it”.
In order to avoid the worst possible thing to happen, there are at least two things that are required:
These two processes both need to happen in parallel.
It is not sufficient to decrease emissions drastically. It is also not sufficient to grow carbon capture exponentially.
The number of inference steps requires to make these two processes happen, is large, so it is a non-trivial task just to reason properly.
Surviving doomsday-scenarios is a common theme for Hollywood movies, but is not a good strategy in reality. The modern lifestyle of humans is so complex that it requires task specialization and vast logistics to work. In practice, a such lifestyle can not be maintained indefinitely in any doomsday bunker.
The problem is not about survival in the short term. The problem is how to make humanity successfully reproduce.
Without successful reproduction, humanity will die out. Whether you can survive e.g. 20 years in a doomsday bunker is of little relevance, except as a way to explore your Ego and testing out a Hollywood narrative in your life.
Through most of humanity’s existence, we lived as nomads. Nomads move from place to place to sustain their communities due to changing seasons and accessbility to food. All the things that a nomad owned, had to be moved using scarce energy. As a result, nomads only kept a few things which they valued highly.
In the modern lifestyle of humans, we settle down in a single place and bring the resources for survival there. This requires huge amounts of energy and is often vasteful.
Nomadic lifestyle is useful to learn and reason about because it provides a perspective that is outside-the-box thinking, which is necessary to reason properly about Climate Action.
The reason exponential growth in carbon capture is necessary for system change, is due to the overshoot of human activity and consumption. This means, if most humans died in 20-30 years and we lost the capability to grow carbon capture, then the climate would continue warming for thousand years from existing emissions.
It means, if you were able to survive 20 years in a doomsday bunker and then left it, you would face the same transition necessary into a nomadic lifestyle to support human reproduction. Therefore, an early transition into nomadic lifestyle will more likely increase the probability of avoiding the worst possible thing from happening.
Civilization is a fragile thing, which has been developed and collapsed multiple times in history. When civilization collapses, people are forced to gang up in order to be safer of violence and to access resources.
A single person with resources can not protect them against a violent tribe. This is why violent tribes develop under collapse: The motivation of accessing resources and distribute them internally.
Over time, larger tribes attack smaller tribes when resources become scarcer. As the smaller tribes get eliminated or they join up in larger tribes, in the end there is often only a single tribe within a large area. This single tribe is what becomes the seed for a new civilization.
Civilizations increases in complexity until its power to influence the environment leads to its own destruction. More often than not, this is the typical development.
What is different about Climate Change is that there is a global tribe which causes total destruction of Earth. After the collapse of this global tribe, there might be no way for civilizations to reoccur, and humans die out. However, the game equilibrium of violent tribes is still in place, at least temporarily, regardless of the conditions for civilization.
Your prospects for a lifestyle, in the absence of Climate Action, is limited to the nomadic choice belonging to a violent tribe. This means, owning very few things, going vegan (as meat will be difficult to access) and experiencing a lot of unpleasant things that you would otherwise like to avoid. In that lifestyle, you will probably die from a preventable or curable desease today, with an average lifetime expectancy around 40 years.
With other words, your lifestyle will be significantly worse and more drastically changed, than if you support Climate Action. Staying in a bunker will not work in the long run.
This is one of the best case scenarios compared to the worst possible scenario, which is simply that everybody dies. I would be very concerned, if I were you.
First, we have to stop doing stuff that kills us. This means, investing in automated theorem proving and rational decision making as basis for policies.
With other words, all decisions concerning civilization must be kind of like an open source project, where people can learn and iterate in collaboration. The power to change laws should not be put on single institutions like a supreme court, because a small group of people making decisions is not guarantee of safety or distribution of resources.
Second, we have to use Gini solvers to automate economic distribution. The way the economy functions today, is to gather wealth to a few lucky individuals while freezing out the majority from the economy. This way is sub-optimal, which can be fixed (and this is attempted manually today) by lowering the Gini coefficient. The Gini solver works like a stable gradient that optimises distributed rational decision making.