Multifamily housing is generally cheaper in high land cost areas. It helps solve the housing shortage.
More bikes and transit and fewer cars means cleaner air and fewer traffic deaths.
Less fossil fuel usage in general means less pollution.
Cities that use land more efficiently tend to be more walkable, pleasant, and don't gobble up things like farmland or forests outside the city.
Come to think of it, less beef is probably better for your health, too.
Won't matter when it's 120 degrees F every day.
Exactly. That's why it's ineffective to evangelize this as individual effort. If you want to live in a multifamily home, they have to be zoned, funded, and built. That requires lobbying the government, moral rectitude.
These are things that ordinary people without a lot of money or power can work on today in a country like, say, the US, where the federal government is in the hands of evil people and is not going to be doing much in terms of climate change in the near future.
The federal government may be a lost cause for the moment, but your city or state might provide an avenue to get some things done. Those things won't fix the whole problem, but they're still progress, and the connections you make while doing those things will be useful in future, bigger fights.
I agree: people can work on this individually. And it won't make a lick of difference.
How many items on this list require government action? How many require corporations' cooperation. What am I going to do, build the bike lanes myself as a hobby?
This can't be said enough. It simply cannot be said enough. It cuts right to the heart of how we view the world in the west: as autonomous, separate individuals, with no communal counterweight and certainly no model of power (some entities in the world have vastly more power than others) We assume that because our constitutions grant us equal rights or whatever, we all have equal responsibility and equal power.
But polluters, the biggest sources of emissions, have way more power and way, way less responsibility. And yet we continue to tell ourselves to focus on our own individual behaviors to combat global heating. The effects are real, but tiny, and our elites continue getting away with our annihilation.