Addressing Climate Change

Personal actions you/I can take.

Rather hypocritical coming from someone who flies airplanes. Working on it, though!.

But seriously, I’m putting multiple hours a day towards reducing the impact of one of my main hobbies.

The biggest impact you can have on affecting climate change is advocating for climate-friendly policies at all levels of government. This is significantly easier on the local level than at higher levels, but is still something I struggle to do (talking with people? That’s terrifying).

As far as spending money (or not), the next best way is to basically not drive places. Ride a bike, walk, whatever. Ebikes, for example, are remarkably cheap nowadays. You can get an acceptable one for less than $500. This’ll still get you going up to 20 miles per hour, which is perfect for around-town errands. Need to carry stuff and/or people? Get a cargo bike. Most cargo bikes nowadays come with some kind of electric assist, and all of them are designed to have electric assist added to them.

If you own a home that has natural gas appliances, replace them with electric equivalents! More so than for climate, burning natural gas in the home has been found to be incredibly bad for your health - turns out “clean burning” natural gas just means it’s less dirty than coal. Natural gas still emits tons of carcinogens that you do not want to breath. You don’t need to go out and replace perfectly good natural gas appliances. But when they need to be replaced, instead of getting a new natural gas stove, get an induction stove. When your furnace needs to be replaced, get a heat pump. Heat pumps are so good right now, and they work down to really low temperatures. Even if you don’t need to replace your furnace, get a heat pump. Most thermostats nowadays will default to the heat pump, and use the gas furnace as an “emergency heat” if necessary.

Lastly, yeah. The big expenses. Replace your gas-powered vehicle with an electric vehicle. Install solar on your roof. Installing solar also has the benefit of encouraging your neighbors to do so. I guess it’s one of the modern “keeping up with the Jones’” things.

Installing something like a powerwall is probably not worth the expense. Unless your grid has otherwise been shown to be unreliable, it’s likely not going to be worth doing. It is cool, though.

Last updated: 2022-08-06 22:23:26 -0700