Agreed if you mean WE as a hypothetical union of all individual humans and human institutions. But all of this makes a lot more sense to me if you distinguish between individuals and institutions. Institutions (companies / governments / Unions / HOAs / PTAs w/e) seem like they're impossible for any individual to control except by collective action which is just more institutionalization thats impossible for individuals to control. Individuals can make decisions to do things like install solar panels on their house, invest in a heat pump, buy an electric car, live in walkable areas, plant a garden, NOT work for or purchase things from institutions they disagree with, build an underground house etc within the confines of what institutions will allow. I don't think theres any more that we can do, the rest seems like subjugating guilt narrative bs and self-satisfied collective action virtue posturing.
There is no WE imho, its individual human beings against global industrial institutions. Collective action just propagates more destructive / uncontrollable institutional behavior. Federated / decentralized individual action propagated through federated / decentralized communication networks.
Anyway I can barely remember to brush my teeth or buy groceries so what do I know.
Living underground tackles the one issue that no green revolution is going to fix - space. Above ground space is fixed and the population will continue to rise. We can build upwards or downwards but upwards blocks light, which is also a fixed quantity.
living space isn’t remotely a concern, if we all (the whole world) lived in a single mega-city as dense as NYC it would be about the size of Texas
light also isn’t much of an issue, we could power the world with a solar array the size of New Mexico
fertile farm land, stable temperature, and distribution are much much much larger issues
living underground might be good for reducing electricity needs for heating and cooling, or avoiding certain natural disasters… but probably isn’t very useful for much else
Also the buildings themselves still get the light and can funnel it into living/working spaces or just turn it into electricity. Sure it’s shadier at ground level in a tall dense city but like, I’m pretty sure it’s more feasible to build km-ish tall buildings that still manage to post some light down to street level than it’ll ever be to build living space that goes equivalently deep.
I fully support tackling the root causes. That said I can not do that by myself and my experience interacting with governments has unfortunately made me a bit cynical.
What I as an individual can most certainly do is install a modular home under ground if a company were inclined to make one, preferably out of recycled material. I could rent an excavator tomorrow as they are closed on Sunday.
I have a theory that if enough homes were underground that would substantially reduce the load on the power grid from a lack of HVAC use, freeing more capacity for EV vehicles and buying more time for power companies to upgrade the power grid and reducing overall carbon emissions world wide. Perhaps power companies could lobby governments to make under ground homes affordable, modular, carbon neutral and most importantly safe. The wealthier and more influential people could even have underground garages to protect their expensive toys from the environment and theft.
thing is the root cause is a coordination problem, it's impossible to get 8 billion people to tackle any issue unilaterally, so we are left with solutions that allow individuals to opt in to a future where survival is not dependent on everyone else
I kind of agree, but on the other hand we are so far along that we won’t be able to stop climate change but merely restrict it. So apart from restricting it we also need to adapt.
Soon enough people will work on de orbiting earth further away from the sun rather than stopping living unsustainable