So, other than driving a Prius and moving to a sardine can style apartment in the inner city, what realistically can people do as something against AGW? There is tons of talk, but all of it seems to just be blaming people.
Ideally, there's a bunch we could be doing if we really wanted to:
1) Do the R&D and start building SkyTran systems in metro areas to reduce the usage of fossil-fuel burning cars and the amount of traffic.
2) Push for more electric and hybrid vehicles. Ideally, non-hybrid vehicles should be flatly illegal for new sales; the tech is out there, and even mild-hybrid systems are available and not very expensive to add at the factory and would make a good difference. Better yet, Prius-style hybrid powertrains (or maybe Volt-style) should be standard. Create tax incentives for more battery-electric vehicles: families with two cars should have one that's all-electric for commuting. And incentives for people to dump gas guzzlers (particularly older ones) in favor of something more efficient. Here in the US, it'd help a lot if stupid states and localities wouldn't charge huge personal property taxes on new cars, which just encourages people to stick with old junkers that pollute more and burn more gas.
3) Push for more solar energy adoption: every big-box store and shopping mall roof should be covered in solar panels, and every large parking lot at those places should be too. (As a bonus, shoppers' cars won't get so hot in the summer.) Same goes for large employers with big parking lots and buildings. There's a lot of wasted rooftop and parking lot space that can be used for this to generate power that'll offset the power used in A/C by those big buildings. Solar power of course works best in the daylight, and in the summer, but that's also when you're using A/C the most in the southern climates. In the north, we could be using solar thermal collectors to collect solar heat in the winter to offset heating costs. Various government/tax incentives can be used to encourage all this.
4) Improve other mass-transit systems. Hire some competent management for the DC Metro, contract the Japanese to build Shinkansen trains (particularly in the Northeast Corridor), etc. If you want to see how public transit is *supposed* to work, take a trip to Japan. Why can't Americans work this competently?
5) Encourage people to move to "sardine can style apartments". You make fun of it, but it's a real solution. The problem is that nice apartments like that also cost a fortune, which is why people move to the suburbs and commute, burning lots of gas. There's got to be a lot that government can do to fix this problem and encourage people to move closer to town. I'd rather live right in the city and ride my bike around, and I really don't care about having tons of square footage (but I want more than a shoebox...) but I'm not a multi-millionaire so it's not feasible for me in many metro areas. You shouldn't have to be rich to live ecologically. Perhaps banning ownership by non-resident foreigners, not allowing any one person to own too many units in an area, not allowing people to own properties without actually occupying them or renting them out, etc. could be tried, along with some kind of policies to encourage building more high-rises, and to prevent SanFran-style NIMBYism from blocking construction.
That's just a few things off the top of my head.
The problem is that we're just too dysfunctional to do enough of this stuff before it's too late, so I think we might as well just throw in the towel and maybe some billionaires should start thinking about buying up some cheap land in mostly lawless countries, hiring a private mercenary army, and building big domed cities.
