Asklemmy

Its a drop in the ocean and I'm going to come off negative here but your up against jets, deliveries on demand from across the globe, mass meat industry and oil companies that will lobby against their destruction and in tern for mass extinction. If you really want to fight climate change move somewhere that won't see the effects, install solar learn to live off the land. An alternative if not too late become a revolutionary topple capitalism the system that allowed us to get to this point and beyond.

Aside from solar panels, as others have mentioned, I have a few other suggestions for things to get/do:

• Hydroponic garden
• Sewing machine
• Heat pump water heater
• Heat pump a/c
• Induction stovetop
• Upgrade insulation
• Compost bin
• Tools to repair common items
• Promote the use of libraries and support their growth into other communal resources
• Only buy things when needed

As others have said, there isn't much that a single individual can do against climate change, but let me explain my suggestions. Some of the most carbon intensive activities include the transportation of items like food, clothes, and other goods. To reduce your impact, you need to reduce your reliance on this carbon intensive logistics network. By growing your own food, learning to repair what you own, and learning to sew, you're making a large impact on your personal contribution to climate change. By supporting the library, you're encouraging the use of a shared pool of communal resources, which also reduces your community's climate impact.

The other items are what you can do to improve the efficiency of your house, if you own it. Induction stoves are incredibly safe and a highly efficient cooking surface. Heat pumps are crazy efficient at both heating and cooling, so slowly replacing old appliances with high efficiency options as they fail will maximize the use of what you own before it gets replaced. Compost bins and insulation certainly aren't glamorous like the other tech options, but they'll also go a long way: Landfills create an anaerobic environment, meaning food that gets thrown end up producing methane, and single family homes consume a lot of energy because heat escapes from every wall open to the air.

While this isn’t a suggestion, just want to say don’t let other people saying one person doesn’t make a difference discourage you from doing what you can anyway.

“What is any ocean but a multitude of drops”? If a million people each don’t bother because they alone don’t make a difference?

Similar to the Starfish Story.

Actual suggestions:

• Aid education. Lots of illiterate youth is going to be a problem when they can’t even read to research on their own.
• Encourage increasing plant-based agriculture and the reduction of animal agriculture. Animal agriculture is terrible for the environment, and ironically the “green” version of it is even worse for the environment than factory farming if it were done to scale with the same product output. (Hunting is also not good to promote as an alternative, because if we hunted as much as we eat we would absolutely cause mass extinction very fast.)

A website with detailed steps on eco-terrorism.

Spending and consumning less could help more. Espicially gas and meat.

If you truly don't need the money, donate it to an org that's doing political advocacy.

10k of solar isn't going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things. Changing laws and regulations will.

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.

Invest it into a mutual fund fighting climate change. My bank has one. I guess many banks do. Some relevant terms in their fund names: fossil-free, climate, forest, sustainable agriculture.

Several funds in my bank have ESG in the name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social,_and_governance

As a few people have said, buying something like solar panels, or the deposit on an electric car would probably be the best - reducing your impact is probably the most you can do.

The other option could be green investment.... They do exist, ignore 'transitional energy' funds (90% oil majors), look at the individual shares that any fund that looks interesting. I have some money in EdenTree funds. That way your money is hopefully helping do good, while (hopefully) growing so you can do something that will have a bigger personal effect.

Your time and energy is far more valuable than your money.

I would recommend using that money as an emergency fund, and getting involved with an activist organization working to stop climate change. There are a wide range of them, with tactics ranging from legislative pressure to property destruction and civil disobedience. Believe it or not, there are lots of small local problems that a small group can meaningfully impact, and will add up.

While there are systemic problems that cannot be solved by an individual, they can be solved by collective organization. You have to be part of that collective if you want to stop climate change.

Children of Kali

Send it to me, I’ll grow some trees and hemp and shit.

Buy second hand, don't buy new unless you know that the company is trying to solve climate change. Example, at Honolulu there's a company that is setting up water filling stations on some hotels and providing these hotels with aluminum bottles for the folks staying in the hotel so hotels can provide water to their guests and stop plastic pollution.