@MonkeyJenga posted this in her journal, I think it’s also relevant here 
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Thank you! I don’t follow her journal and this is excellent to see.
I follow a cyclist in NYC that advocates for car free New York (on committees and such) and it’s been really cool to see their photos of all the space taken away from driving and parking lanes in the past months.
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Portland almost did this right. We were going to turn a bunch of bikey streets, that were already bikey-friendly, into bike only. Instead they settled on signs requesting local traffic only.
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Soooo clooooose
I know this is an old(ish) thread, but thanks again for the Footprint calculator link! It led me to Camfed, and now I have a new place to donate for female education!
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Keeping the thread going as info crosses my newsfeed. This could be a neat way to keep existing coal fired power stations going, which may help a lot with saving jobs, managing retraining and saving existing infrastructure, while turning them from coal fired into zero-emissions battery packs to manage baseload power supply.
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That hurt my brain.
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Which part?
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It took me a while to understand. Magic blocks store energy from solar or wind and then are burned in coal fired powerstations.
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It’s not saying they’re burned I don’t think? Just that they store heat that can be used to power turbines in the coal power stations.
It sounds pretty cool though!
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Yeah I understood it as they store energy as heat. They are also far enough into the project to be getting investor funding so if this works I could see it being rolled out quickly before 2030!
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Well that makes more sense. I had pictured them shovelling these blocks into the furnaces. Possibly mislead by one of the pictures.
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I’ve seen a few different interesting proposals for storing excess production of solar and wind. One of my favorites is using them to pump water up grade to a reservoir and then letting it drain through a water turbine to produce hydro
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People often emphasize tree planting but trees are only temporarily carbon negative. Once established, in most ecosytems forests are carbon neutral or only very slightly negative.
Agriculture based around permanent pasture or (even better) simulated savannah (sylvopasture) has the potential when well-managed to be extremely carbon negative indefinitely through capturing carbon by building top soil
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I guess this thread is relevant given the IPCC’s latest report.
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Thinking about climate change is just depressing for the most part - what good things have we done in the past thirty or so years to even start moving in a good direction? All I can think of are bad examples like curb side recycling is a common thing now, except a lot of municipalities ran out of places to sell their plastic recycling to so it just goes into the dump anyway or it’s sent overseas to go into a dump there instead. 
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You’re not wrong, unfortunately.
My city has actually approved a plastic bag ban (as of the April election). It bans plastic bags and charges a $0.12 fee for paper bags at large grocers, to be implemented May 1, 2022. We’ll see if anything changes before then, but it’s something, I guess.
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- Electric cars and solar have become commercially available (to everyone? No, but much wider than 1991)
- Renewable power infrastructure (esp non-US, see Germany)
- Awareness and marketing… Reusable, plastic free, eco friendly products are marketable at a premium. (I don’t think everything marketed eco actually is, but… An effort is made, and it’s a desirable feature to the public. Collectively, we think about this more. )
- Banning phosphates and CFCs (unless that was 80s?), with positive effects on wetlands and ozone layer.
- Development/spread of compoatable plastics (some) and municipal composting programs (some)
Off the top of my head…
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I think I never answered the original question, so here goes, keeping in mind I don’t expect all of this to necessarily happen, or happen in the US, or have enough political support, etc. But things that could/should…
- I don’t see us giving up our disposable conveniences, especially where there’s some sanitation concern, eg food packaging. But we can get smarter about using short life products (compostable) for short life purposes.
- New recycling technologies and/or landfill mining. Many of these exist but are pricier than virgin materials, which should be taxed to encourage recycling development.
- Methane harvesting from above processes to use where combustion fuel is required.
- CO2/GG recapturing projects, required for industries that must create emissions, eg flight.
- Teleworking and less car centric communities. I think there is a lot of interest in this but layout of metro areas is hard to change! Would need systemic incentives, funding, etc Affordability/gentrification concerns.
- Stop wasting resources on useless landscaping! Replace lawns, municipal landscaping, etc with native plants or food plants (or both). Centralize care/harvesting for public spaces and distribution to community at a discount.
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