This is feel-good non-sense, in that it ignores the elephants in the room. It's the equivalent of micro-optimization trivia on Stack Overflow, when most programs are bounded by Amdahl's Law.<p>People driving >20 miles a day for work/groceries/school, exponential economic growth, and exponential demand for consumer goods are what's driving climate change. Exponential population growth is, as well, but at least there's some end in sight for it.<p>Whether or not you compost, or throw away your food isn't going to change much - not to mention that most food waste is outside of my control.<p>For instance, I don't throw away 50% of the food I buy - it gets thrown away by farmers, transport companies, and the grocery store long before it gets to my table.
<i>Which would have the bigger impact: encouraging more car-pooling, or the reduced car emissions from electric vehicles?<p>Although the book only looks at ride-sharing in the United States and Canada, it presumes pretty modest gains, so the benefits of car-pooling don’t even come close to the emissions savings from electric cars.</i><p>With the benefit of hindsight the question is more clearly phrased as:<p>"Which would have the bigger impact: simply <i>asking</i> people to do more car-pooling, or <i>actually making</i> the switch to electric vehicles from ICE vehicles?"<p>The question sneakily turns out to be about what's (assumed) easier to get people to do, not which action, undertaken on equal scale, has greater benefits. (But then why are wind farms preferred over solar on a later question, considering how much more frequently NIMBY opposition arises toward wind farms?)
Maybe it's just me, but I think this test avoids some questions I expected there, and does so in a very contrived manner.<p>"Switch to Electric" is favorably compared to "Hitch a Ride", and then "Hop on the Bus" is unfavorably compared to "Ships ahoy".<p>The overall impression I take is something like: "just wait and see, some guys are working on hard engineering problems wrt ships and planes, you save for your Tesla while eating plants and you'll be doing your part".
The sheer number of changes required, and their impact relative to the problem suggests to me the inevitability of serious consequences. I think I may be more interested in investing in technologies that help people cope with the coming changes. Seems more practical than investing in technologies that invite people to spend more of their money to avoid a tragedy of the commons.
A lot of these feel like trick questions. Which offers more bang for the buck: improving airplane efficiency, or building a global network of high-speed rail?<p>It matters a lot how much we are improving efficiency, and how complete the "global network of high speed rail" is.
This list ducks the most important question: "Is it possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without everyone on Earth mastering every technical detail of modern industry?"<p>The answer is, of course, yes.
I'm guessing that these are contentious to some degree, or at least need context. I think this format would work better if it made the case for the right answer, or against your answer.