Most of us live in an economy that is still largely powered by fossil fuel. The golbal production chains can be spread out over large areas, mostly to source labour from places where its cheapest. If you try to make a “living” you are facing a challenge, because most of the things you do have an impact on the climate. What jobs are absolutely off limits?
Working at a fossil fuel company is obviously a bad idea, at least as long as the company is private and trying to sell as much of the stuff.
Working at a bank is also suspect, because most banks invest in projects that drive fossil fuel consumption. Credit is fossil fuel credit, because if a bank invests and the entrepeneur buys machines and other parts of his business, this usually involves using fossil fuels.
If you work at a logistics company rail seems to be the best choice, this can become wind/solar electric freight logistics. Electric semi’s trucks will replace the diesel ones soon, they are simply more cost effective. But working at an airport or any place where planes take off is both unhealthy and indefensible. Flying is not for the elite, but for those that absolutely need to, the number of which is quickly shrinking. Jeff Bezos should make an Earth to Earth hydrogen spaceliner.
If you work in an abbatoir, you might as well go home. Killing animals is bad karma and if you refuse maybe less people can afford meat.
Stores that sell a lot of plastic? Don’t work there. Don’t sell dumb products like diesel cars or BBQ sets. There are so many jobs that are really off limits for anyone that wants to put his conscience first. what are the obvious winners?
A job that you can’t fault would be that of biological farmer, or someone that farms sheep without abusing the animals. You can build EV’s which doesn’t mean you don’t emit, but you do reduce emissions by taking IC cars off the road. If you build solar panel parks you obviously reduce emissions. If you organize logistics so the distance stuff travels is reduced you also have a positive impact. Maybe you run a clothing altelier using fabrics that didn’t come from dried out child slave labour using cotton farms..
Most workshops could be fine to work in if the energy they use was from renewables. Steel and aluminium are energy intensive materials, both in terms of mining, production and logistics, but companies like Tata Steel are moving towards using renewables to cut cost. Maybe a good way to look at your job is in terms of EROI, or Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Many of our activities could be ranked in terms of distraction or fossil cashflow value, because they return no new resources in the form of energy or otherwise. Of you are an organic farmer you produce more calories than you consume. If you run a solar park you produce more kWh than you consume, and stuff can be made that could not have been made otherwise.
Because our economy serves the profit and cashflow of the fossil credit banks, and NOT the wealth or happiness of the general population, so many jobs are merely to cause more cashflow, without producing anything of value. Adding raw materials or resources is NOT what the fossil economy does. Therefore most jobs are just a distribution of credit and waste of people’s time (even if they enjoy it). The fidget spinner ratio of many products is large, the entertainment industry is absolutely enormous. For example, we could all gave our non streaming collection of music and play them using a small solar panel and no emissions would result, but the economy arranged it so we all stream from servers that are still very inefficient. How to deal with that if we want more responsible jobs.
Conservatives say “We don’t want any loss of luxury, we need to act smarter, more innovative”. This is just french for “Go piss off for a while, we don’t want change!”. Of course this goes for all fossil fuel lakeys. The people that do want change have to accept that at least in the short term it means NOT having all the luxury. You actually can feel devine luxury using very little energy. Sit on a mountain top or by a lake in Italy with some cheese and a glass of wine. That reality is a balm, and it is there for the taking for free (lucky italians!). The thought process on how to make our environment more pleasant WITHOUT constantly paying and feeding the beast that is destroying us will hopefully start and bear fruit soon..