No amount of money can stop climate change, it’s a naturally occurring pattern. We’re coming out of a small cooling period.
You’d have to stop the earth from rotating to stop climate change, which of course, would drastically change the climate all at once, and then never again.
You’ll need 100 Musks and way more than 10k for that.
Use it to free your own time to plant trees or contribute in another way. Spending 10k isn’t gonna reduce climate change, but being able to work on the problem yourself will.
Pay to have someone shoot EM.
Considering we live in a conflicted world where capitalism has ruined everything, I’d say donate a few thousand of it around, but also save it and just make the right choices on what you buy:
- buy zero waste, local and bio
- buy fair and repairable phones
- buy fair and ecological clothing
- etc…
So many people don’t realize that every time they buy something in a store, they are casting a little capitalistic vote. We have to speak the language of what these evil sons of bitches speak, money. So I think for individuals, it mostly starts with us.
As I havent seen a single actually effective answer:
Donate it to organisations fighting climate change. For example FCA (researching climate friendly ways of producing cement, steel, fuels), gfi (researching food alternatives), CATF (tries to influence political changes)
Delay, deny, defend.
You could get a decent boomstick for 10k
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.
I’d also suggest a career in or adjacent to alternative energy.
So buy land, dump trash on it. Got it.
No. Build an Earthship home by recycling and reusing inexpensive, rejected materials that don’t break down easily to affordably construct an off-grid structure that will gather and generate electricity, water, and food for potentially centuries.
https://youtu.be/wgUkjbMhF18?si=T08Ks0-iPDOoe2dl
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.
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.
Fund journalism and media against fossil fuel
You’re not funding anything important for 10k
You can blaze a whole lot of posts in tumblr for that kind of money.
You would be so very surprised how far a little money gets public opinion.
Especially when you cut out the middlemen and fund independent creators you find impactful, instead of big megacorp news with CEO salaries in the millions.
Comrade! I like the way you think.
Enjoy the money and tell yourself its not your fault.
Or alternatively, become an eco-terrorist.
Think of:
-
Pipelines - buy explosives
-
Certain individuals pertaining to the oil industry - buy a firearms
-
Certain politicians - buy firearms
I am not a lawyer, this comment is for entertainment pur-
Hmm, why is there loud knocking on my door?
Why are you making your fed work on the lord’s day?
NO KINGS!
NO GODS!
Ted Kaczynski is still alive it seems.
When did he get out?!
-
The only ways you can fight climate change in any meaningful way with 10k also involve going to prison
10k is cutting it thin… the Accuracy International ACSR is just a hair under $10k USD… and that is before taxes. Then you need the 1,000-10,000 rounds of ammo for training before you become good enough to start taking out card-carrying members of the Parasite Class from a kilometre-plus distance.
Now granted, you can go a lot cheaper than that, but accuracy and range will suffer. Remember, you want to be far enough away that you can reliably pack up and sanitize the scene before you leave.
Alternatively, swarming AI drones in the hundreds, with on-board explosive packages, would allow you to deploy from abandonable emplacements that can loiter for many hours to even days. No-one is going to question a cube van that sits in a paid spot for a week, at least until it’s roof opens up and a thousand tiny drones with facial recognition take off and take out a few oligarchs.
But honestly, you’re likely talking a few tens of thousands for that scenario, at minimum. I would likely bank at it being in the low hundreds of thousands for a truly effective and difficult-to-counter deployment.
10k is cutting it thin… the Accuracy International ACSR is just a hair under $10k USD… and that is before taxes. Then you need the 1,000-10,000 rounds of ammo for training before you become good enough to start taking out card-carrying members of the Parasite Class from a kilometre-plus distance.
Now granted, you can go a lot cheaper than that, but accuracy and range will suffer. Remember, you want to be far enough away that you can reliably pack up and sanitize the scene before you leave.
Alternatively, swarming AI drones in the hundreds, with on-board explosive packages, would allow you to deploy from abandonable emplacements that can loiter for many hours to even days. No-one is going to question a cube van that sits in a paid spot for a week, at least until it’s roof opens up and a thousand tiny drones with facial recognition take off and take out a few oligarchs.
But honestly, you’re likely talking a few tens of thousands for that scenario, at minimum. I would likely bank at it being in the low hundreds of thousands for a truly effective and difficult-to-counter deployment.
The only ways you can fight climate change in any meaningful way […] involve going to prison
correct
3 meals and no rent? Doesn’t sound too bad.
Oh there’s rent. Most US prisons charge per diem rates for housing, and they charge for many “services” and they charge literal extortion rates. Prisoners leave US prisons deeeeeply in debt
I wouldn’t even want to be in an Austrian luxury prison. There’s a reason why people have went as far as dying while fighting for their freedom, it’s one of our most precious possessions.
Freedom outside of prison is still a delusion. You are a servant of the rich elite.
solar panels or something? No one is stopping climate change with $10K, I don’t even think $10B would make a substantial dent.
I think they’re just asking, from a categorical imperative perspective, what is the most effective way for all individuals with a bit of savings to help the climate situation.
And tbh, at this point OP is probably better off spending that $10k on preparing for:
- inclimate weather (HVAC, water proofing, warm clothing)
- inconsistent power (battery backups, a generator)
- food/clean water shortages (home gardening skills, rain catching/water purification).
At this point, there’s virtually nothing that can be done to stop the impact of climate change, there is only adapting to survive it. The best we can do is vote and/or hope for our global political situation to finally reach its inevitable crisis point. But I don’t expect that to be a pleasant experience.
10B could make a couple underground metro lines in an otherwise extremely car dependent city with no public transport
Ya its a decent start. My point here is the scale of what we’re facing. Its going to take trillions of dollars, synchronous action taken by many nations simultaneously and a complete restructuring of the current world order. There’s always hope but at this point i’m fairly cynical and don’t have a lot of faith that the right people are in charge to even start the conversation.
I’ve heard a statistic that goes something like: If you were to just not exist, you would only save about 1 second worth of emissions globally. Whatever individual action you do to reduce emissions from your lifestyle only go so far.
And like others have mentioned, there are the other, less legal forms of direct action.
“Whatever individual action” indeed comrade
You cannot have any significant impact with 10,000$ use it to enjoy your life. We are all doomed anyway.
This is bs, please dont spread misinformation like this. With your logic, we should all stop voting because a single vote doesnt have impact.
Every person is responsible for their own decisions and 10k from a single person have a huge relative impact. If every person with 10k available would use those for fighting climate change, we would have overcome it already.
OK I agree that everyone needs to do their part to help environment, but let’s say if OP has extra 10k to throw around then it means one of two things they are already rich and climate conscious so they would already have solar panels and what not.
Or they got those 10k from lottery/inheritance or something in which case he can switch to more energy efficient appliances and stuff but still most of the appliances brought in this century are already somewhat environment friendly like yes there are CFCs in some refrigerators but it is just few grams and it is enclosed it will only damage environment when disposed improperly. There is a cool statistic I read a while back, if a single human being becomes completely carbon neutral since birth in 70years of his life span however much CO2 he stopped from entering environment is equivalent to CO2 emitted by energy industry in 1second so yes, unless OP is a CEO of Exxon or BP or some other evil corp they can’t have any significant impact.
I saw that few ppl suggested to donate that money towards organizations pushing for climate reforms and I’ll be honest I didn’t think about that, but then again, We already broke 1.5°C record last year and we briefly touched 1.9°C so yes we are all doomed and OP will be better off enjoying those 10k by doing what they like.
And what you ars saying like
Every person is responsible for their own decisions and 10k from a single person have a huge relative impact
You need to understand that their are a lot many people for whom 10k USD could be a life changing amount of money, and the only thing they can do is feel bad that they can’t do their part. My own salary is barely above 10k USD and many of my peers are making less than half of that.
Those are all valid points but I dont think thats what OPs question was about. They asked about effective ways to fight climate change. Not doing anything can never be an answer to that. Whether or not it makes sense to spend your hard earned money on other peoples behalf is a different question.
Also, no we are not doomed. Yes, climate change will have a huge impact on humankind, but earth wont randomly explode or something. Humankind will adjust to higher temperatures and more frequent natural disasters, but the extent to which this will affect everyone can still be minimized. The poor will be fucked the hardest, ‘accepting our fate’ and not doing anything will cost millions more lives than it could.
This sounds nice, but what is your actual proposal for how to spend $10,000?
I actually made a separate comment with my suggestions^^. I think political change and research would have the most impact, so my proposal would be donating to organizations like FCA or CATF (which btw I already do with monthly payments to a climate fund because Ive been asking myself a similar question in the past)
