Pay to have someone shoot EM.
I doubt that kill is that cheap…
Well, a certain cadre of income is responsible for the lion’s share of western emissions. Maybe you could use that money to “influence” them.
While this isn’t a suggestion, just want to say don’t let other people saying one person doesn’t make a difference discourage you from doing what you can anyway.
“What is any ocean but a multitude of drops”? If a million people each don’t bother because they alone don’t make a difference?
Similar to the Starfish Story.
Actual suggestions:
- Aid education. Lots of illiterate youth is going to be a problem when they can’t even read to research on their own.
- Encourage increasing plant-based agriculture and the reduction of animal agriculture. Animal agriculture is terrible for the environment, and ironically the “green” version of it is even worse for the environment than factory farming if it were done to scale with the same product output. (Hunting is also not good to promote as an alternative, because if we hunted as much as we eat we would absolutely cause mass extinction very fast.)
Put that money in stocks or ETFs that align with your climate goals. You don’t even have to dig too deep to find ones that meet your needs. Much digital ink has been spilled on the topic. Just find one or two you like and go for it.
In a general sense, put the money where you want change to happen in this version of reality.
Give it to a group like Just Stop Oil or other direct action / sabotage focused climate activism group - they’re perpetually broke and could do a lot of good with that money.
If you have any natural gas appliances in your home (like water heater, dryer, stove, oven, HVAC), transition to an electric version. Cancel your gas service.
Also, improve insulation and other items to reduce you heat/cooling loss.
Yeah that should offset the massive pollution from global industry right? I feel that the shift of responsibility to the individual is a distraction.
These are ways to immediately reduce your carbon footprint with $10,000, which is what OP asked for. There is absolutely no “shift of responsibility” involved in deciding to stop giving natural gas manufacturers and distributors your money.
Please show me where OP asked for ways to “immediately reduce their carbon footprint.”
That is not what was requested in the post title. “Carbon Footprint” is a piece of propaganda perpetuated by the biggest industry offenders to shift blame to the individual and distract from their own massively disproportionate contribution to climate change.
That totally ignores the demand side of the equation. If people didn’t want to buy X believe me, they wouldn’t sell X. I’m pretty sure the horse and buggy industry and cathode ray tube tv industries would’ve loved to have kept selling their products.
I can’t help but notice you’ve contributed nothing productive to this conversation
So you’re gonna skip over the part where I was right and you were plainly wrong?
If I were to suggest an actually productive solution with a $10k budget, my comment would be removed and I’d be on a list. We both know what that means.
It means 1) you lack the imagination to describe your ideas with any nuance and 2) you’re the kind of guy who tells other people to put themselves in danger while sitting behind your keyboard doing nothing
You have a very interesting way of ascribing motive here. You say I lack imagination, I say you have an excess of imagination.
Probably planting trees as effectively it’s free to scatter seeds you find.
As a few people have said, buying something like solar panels, or the deposit on an electric car would probably be the best - reducing your impact is probably the most you can do.
The other option could be green investment… They do exist, ignore ‘transitional energy’ funds (90% oil majors), look at the individual shares that any fund that looks interesting. I have some money in EdenTree funds. That way your money is hopefully helping do good, while (hopefully) growing so you can do something that will have a bigger personal effect.
Why is this so low in the comment section
Delay, deny, defend.
You could get a decent boomstick for 10k
Your time and energy is far more valuable than your money.
I would recommend using that money as an emergency fund, and getting involved with an activist organization working to stop climate change. There are a wide range of them, with tactics ranging from legislative pressure to property destruction and civil disobedience. Believe it or not, there are lots of small local problems that a small group can meaningfully impact, and will add up.
While there are systemic problems that cannot be solved by an individual, they can be solved by collective organization. You have to be part of that collective if you want to stop climate change.
Send it to me, I’ll grow some trees and hemp and shit.
10k will not do much good on the grand scale of things. Once you start involving other people directly, the costs start skyrocketing. Be it if you want to bribe politicians, fund a revolution, invest into sustainable tech or just creating a bottle cap recycling programme, 10k just isnt gonna get you far enough. So focus on your own climate impact. I think the absolute best you could do for the most positive net good is to take inventory of your own carbon emissions and replace or upgrade whatever you need to lower them. Lower your heating usage by getting a heat pump instead of burning coal for example. This will depend on how low your carbon output currently is though.
Buy the cheapest viable land you can and build an Earthship home out of tires, cans, bottles, and compressed Earth. Take yourself off the grid as much as possible.
So buy land, dump trash on it. Got it.
*Repurpose trash…
No. Build an Earthship home by using inexpensive, rejected materials that don’t break down easily to make an off-grid structure that will gather and generate electricity, water, and food for potentially centuries.
Also Earthship.com
How long would it take for the environmental cost (including CO2 emissions, and the inefficient use of resources associated with trying to live away from others) of the new building to be overcome by the savings in energy (and thus CO2 and associated environmental degradation involved in gathering those resources) when compared to just living in an already built house?
I’d wager that just maintaining an old house is better. Of course if you ignore everything else other than energy use and diverting something from a landfill, earth ships are very cool. Maybe not $10,000 either.
Its unclear whether one person building an earth ship instead of buying and maintaining an older house would make any positive environmental change.
Instead, if you took your $10,000 and partnered with others who have similar investments, you could build a small mixed use building which includes a couple shops on the ground floor, and dwellings on the next few floors (likely you would have enough combined to get a mortgage/loan to build). Why? Living in an apartment style building is going to be more efficient than any kind of single person dwelling (and you could use some of the earth ship ideas as well), having shops near homes would also help eliminate occasional car trips by having amenities right where you live. As a bonus, if this building was built for the investors to live in, you all now have equity and relatively low cost housing that is much easier to sell than an Earth ship in the middle of nowhere, should you ever need to move.
Start a fund raiser, do advertisement, (make some donations your self so that it does not look dead) - ones you get a lot of money (lets say you have doubled) - start again and repeat until you double - within 10 cycles of doublings, you reach 10 million, and keep doing until you get rich enough (lets say 10 more cycles to reach 10B) then you have 2 paths to choose - either be a hero and actual invest in research and actively reversing shit done, maybe helping displaced or other good deeds, or the mlm path, and continue the doubling cycle, keep earning - with this much money, you can now have actors and fake donations, maybe even fake researches into how you are helping, and keep growing your wealth, and maybe then escape to a tax heaven.
Apologies for the dystopian ending, but realistically a person even going full carbon negative is not even a dent. If you actually want to do good, then you realistically require trillions, and then you feed that money to politicians, and reverse launder your way towards actual green solutions.
