Reply to How do you justify your desire for travel & leisure with going green?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Honestly, I stopped worrying when I had the epiphany that the earth will be fine. The earth doesn’t care whether it’s a few degrees warmer or there’s more natural disasters. It’s the people that will care. The earth won’t be destroyed. People will be. So if I’m going to be punished either way, I may as well enjoy exploring the world while I can. Staying at home isn’t going to change the trajectory of anything.[/quote]

"A few degrees" is the best-case scenario. A more likely scenario is that we will gradually extract all fossil fuels from the ground and burn it all. This will send atmospheric CO2 from its current level of 420 parts per million (ppm) to about 2000 ppm. With this level of CO2, it isn't just a few degrees of warming. It is a minimum of 10F. Much of the earth will be uninhabitable to humans, and aggregate crop yields and fish harvests could plummet.

However, changing our lifestyles most certainly can change the trajectory of climate change. I've reduced my CO2 footprint by 50%, and it hasn't sent me back into the dark ages. I do live very compactly, but I haven't lost any happiness or as a result of the changes I've made. I think most UMC Americans would find that they can still have a satisfying life without emitting 15 tons of CO2 per person per year.

Of course, cutting CO2 by 50% is simply going to slow down the rate of warming, rather than stop it. But this will buy us valuable time in which technology can continue to improve our renewable energy capabilities. And perhaps society will gradually come full circle with respect to nuclear power, resulting in a future energy mix of solar, wind and nuclear.
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