What to do?
Lets try a few.
Stop all beef production (btw, it is where capitalism started, capital coming from the Latin cap for head, and our current use of head of cattle. Capital is the surplus or increase)
One and a half billion cows on earth. What are we going to do with them? 3 million are slaughtered eight year old if we kept the current pace and let it run itself out without new production, what would that look like? Also, what would happen to the grazing land up north along the California coast from San Francisco to Eureka there are millions of acres of grass land, but without enough water to grow vegetable crops. lots of infrastructure, such as the trucking to move cows into and out of pastures and slaughter houses, and then of course the distribution of the processed meat. add retail jobs and storage such as meat, lockers and freezers and I think we are talking about something like 4 million jobs in the US and a huge amount of real estate. Hidden, but important, is the culture of killing a white male for the sake of the population. If I’m a mole slaughter was to stop.
Second possibility, we stop all airplane travel as of next Monday. Do you think I am kidding but it’s the scale of such actions that will be necessary if we are to make the 50 percent goal by 2030. If there are over 1 million employees working for the airlines, the supporting infrastructure of energy, food, airport, retail, transportation, to, and from airports for employees and passengers, I would be taking a guess at how many people would be unemployed. they are.FAA estimates 11 million jobs created by the industry. Then there is the problem of how many people are overseas or seriously away from home? Let’s say that anybody who is flying to the country of their passport can fly home? This would be a devastating move, but we need devastating moves if we are to have a chance of cutting fossil fuels.
Curtail the seafood industry . Worldwide 50 million people are employed in and many more dependent upon seafood for food. This would save a lot of energy. What does savings might be lost as people sought alternatives.
Automobiles. During the oil crisis of the early 70s, we allowed people to buy gasoline only on the last digit of their license plate so 3 would allow you to buy gas on Wednesday.(details might not be right, but you get the idea.) we cannot await the transition from gas to electric powered cars, but must accelerate the process of stopping the use of gas powered without being able to replace them with electrical for quite awhile. (If ever).
What is obvious from these examples is that the social impact would be extremely consequential. But then the social consequences of not cutting fossil fuels: like less food and water, major uninhabitable, parts of the earth, and obvious resource wars would be even more socially consequential.
We are going to be forced to think these through. Here in Montenegro where i am we see Gardenworld scenes like;
Thinking about the needed force for these decisions to really take place. Movements from the youth group is already there but taken lightly because they don't have the answers, those who do have the answers do not have the force of the movement. Perhaps a united force from the academia- global economic commission can help?