I grew up being taught El Nino isn’t a big deal and it’s just the seasons going through their normal cycle. But with Super El Nino, I finally bothered to read about climate change, and now it’s a rabbit hole I can’t get out of. I calculated my own personal carbon footprint, and I feel disgusted with myself :(
I looked up all the ways to decrease my own footprint- but now I learned that’s not enough, we also need to capture and lockup all the extra carbon that’s in the air now too.
I read about all the ways to do that, and I learned about biochar and it’s relatively the quickest way we have right now that locks carbon up for at least a century if done right.
So I thought about ways to make biochar that’s actually impactful, and of course it has to be a collective action not just the individual.
Now I’m thinking, why don’t cities adopt a biochar bin for their residents just like Stockholm? Is this something I can advocate for my own community?
That makes a lot of sense. I’ll look at my city’s website, maybe there’s some type of residential hearing I can attend or online plan I can read.
I think the most discouraging about this for me is that even though I’ve seen countless headlines about climate change, I’ve never really bothered to be curious about it until now. Now I wish I knew how to tell this to other people without sounding like alarmist.
It’s also not quite right. If you’re burning wood thoroughly for power you get pure ash, which is just carbon neutral. You get charcoal in campfires because they’re inefficient, and even then it’s mostly ash. Carbon neutral is still better than fossil fuels, though!
FWIW, it makes me feel better that there’s people like you out there, who just didn’t know the whole story yet, and who could still change and improve. Way too many people don’t want to know inconvenient things.
The other thing to keep in mind is that it is not simply a matter of personal individual responsibility. The only meaningful way to address climate change humanely is to work toward dismantling global capitalism and building toward a socialist and communist new world.
Okay, so how do you meaningfully do that IRL?
It sounds great, but you get one inch towards the practical end of things, and all the sudden there seems to be a not a lot on offer.
I admit the left in the imperial core has little to offer presently, but we have to start somewhere, and that usually means looking if there are any socialist orgs or anarchist mutual aid groups in your area to get involved in. Also it never hurts to read the theories and accounts of successful revolutionaries and those that inspired them.