Unless you have no friends and family or coworkers or people you interact with, this is untrue. Hypocrisy definitely influences other people, and you’re lessening the chance that others will vote based on environmentalism.
Bizarrely your argument is also very close to the standard argument of non-voters, downplaying individual action, although I admit substantially different because it involves still doing something with an effect.
It’s not hypocritical if you discuss with them the underlying rationale. Basically, individual environmentalism is misplacing blame on relatively powerless people. It’s just another form of greenwashing, a sort of masturbatory environmentalism that mainly serves to reduce guilt. Mathematically it does fuck all without systematic, large scale change driven by policy or policy led market forces.
It really doesn’t matter what you do unless we reshape American politics. Period. Full stop. Individual behavior change is neither necessary nor sufficient.
There is research showing that people who do some small environmental thing, like recycling or flying less, can be less likely to do a bigger action (like campaigning against Republicans) because they feel they’ve done their part. They haven’t done anything, they’ve just been blindsided by the greenwashing. We all have, for generations. That’s how we got here in the first place.
And to be clear, it’s not that individual action is unnecessary, but that directing that action towards personal lifestyle changes is futile. Maybe it’s helpful as some sort of awareness-building exercise, a step on the ladder of engagement, but it doesn’t build power and it doesn’t meaningfully address climate change at all. Every tax dollar you pay, every terrible vote you cast (or don’t) in that one hour every so often, is then centralized and amplified through economies of scale not available to you as an individual, furthering industrial and capitalist needs that will outpollute anything you can do in your own life. You’re a peasant in a world polluted by fat lords.
Individual action is great, but it’s effective only when organized into collective power, not when it just serves as a cathartic escape for some sort of individual purity test.
Think of it this way: If minimizing personal carbon footprints were enough, then 100,000 environmentalists can just kill themselves and fix everything, right? But it wouldn’t even begin to make a dent in the margins of error. It’s far easier to pollute than to clean up pollution, and you can never keep up with the polluters by minimizing your individual impacts.
Conversely, if you get 20-30 individuals to meaningfully challenge a municipal grid mix in a city, or work with some sort of large institution (a university system, a bank, a corporation) to divest from fossil fuel investments, or lobby your state for stronger renewable energy mandates, or work to actively subvert the Republican agenda in some way, your impacts will mathematically outweigh any changes you make in your own life.
Yes, you should do something in the face of climate change. That “something” is unequivocal: Stop the Republicans or work to bypass their agenda at the regional levels. They are the only reason the United States is not driving meaningful climate policy, and without the US, China will not follow suit, and without those two, no other countries mathematically matter enough.
This isn’t an either/or. It’s perfectly possible to work on both the political level and the individual level. Most people I know who take the issue seriously do some of both.
And neither of those is going to fix the problem alone. If people see no examples of anyone happily living while lessening their contributions to the problem, and continue to think that the only possible way to live comfortably is by using increasingly large amounts of resources per person, why on earth do you think these people are actually going to support societal solutions?
Neither can you outvote people who think that the cost of reducing emissions are too high if you don’t work on changing their attitudes.
So now we’re no longer talking about just voting out the Republicans, but to engage in public activism. And it will only outweigh the changes if you succeed. In the mean time you cement the idea that this should be painless for the individual. You change the grid mix and prices go up, businesses chose a different city to establish themselves in. (And if renewables are cheaper you don’t need much activism in the first place.)
You get a large institution to forgo profitable investments based on ethics? Corporate pollution is driven by consumer demand and there is no way you can convince a large enough portion of capitalism uber alles investors so that you’re not just selling the polluting golden goose to someone who doesn’t care where their profit comes from.
You lobby your state, tax money goes to something the average voter is not willing to fund, Republicans get more money.
Institutional changes are necessary, but they are mostly driven by consumer and voter choice.
Yes, there is an unfortunate effect where mildly effective interventions such as recycling make people waste more, but that’s because the people who run recycling have massively inflated their importance and because the PTB are willing to say “We must recycle” since that doesn’t cost them donations and votes, and not “We have to cut back on high pollution consumption” because that does.
The only reason we’re seeing changes in institutional policies is because of changes in individual attitudes, and your individual choices are all your are morally responsible for.
45 post and not a mention of the most simple and effective solution to the problem: reduce population growth.
Every couple has a child or less each and in three generations the job is done.
In three generations climate change is on track for such massive impact we cannot even imagine the changes the following few generations will experience in their lifetimes.
Then I guess my flying to London in a couple of days to see Bob Dylan and Neil Young won’t make much difference.
What a relief, the guilt was eating me up inside.
One thing that can help is get rid of the idea that any option which is better in a non-cost-related regard will automatically be worse cost-wise.
A few examples:
A factory using two trucks of solvent every month set up a distiller to recover the solvent from their residual water. The general manager had been against this, perceiving it as an unnecessary cost and a case of treehugging stupidity on the part of the Production Manager and the Maintenance Manager; after the company got a fine for the quality of their wastewater he finally authorized it. The amount of residual water was reduced to less than a quarter and its quality was now “officially drinkable”, the amount of solvent they needed to purchase went down to a 5L bottle every 3 months, and because the system had specifically been built on the southern side of the factory it only consumed electricity for less than half a year.
Preventive maintenance reduces the amount and cost of breakdowns, the amount of hurried purchases and the amount of overtime; every company which has bothered do a “before” and “after” study through the implantation of preventive measures has seen a clear financial cost.
One of my projects had 12 people flying from 5 different locations in Spain (but only 3 airports) to a single final location in France. It took us months to convince the people purchasing the tickets to try and send us all to a single airport, with arrival times as close to each other as possible: initially we’d even have two people flying in the same plane under two different banners, or people landing in 6 different airports all over Northern France and Belgium. Grouping the tickets so we’d be able to rent only two vans actually meant less work, lowered costs and less gas spent.
And yet, many companies look at any improvement to the factory that’s not to a production line as “it’s going to be a waste”, and feel the same way about preventive maintenance or about having quality-control personnel which actually understands what they’re doing; the idea of managing group travel as a group appears to be some sort of dragon, the way most of the people working in corporate travel react when asked to. Only, when a company looks at something it’s not some vague corporate ghost who does so: it is human beings. Not all of us are corporate deciders, but many of us make business decisions daily: getting out of our mental ruts of “we do it this way because we do it this way” requires mental effort but it can mean both financial benefits to our employers and environmental ones for all of us.
Sure, but one set of actions (individual behavior change) isn’t as effective as the other (movement building, political power, policy changes, etc.).
Let’s see… hybrid/electric cars, bicycles, vegan foods, LED lights, better insulation… all that collective behavior change, fuck all has it done? Climate change is still raging on. At best, individual behaviors are symbolic virtue signaling and awareness-building. At worst, they’re a complete distraction of time and resources. If we had better CAFE standards instead of Priuses, that could (and has) actually make a huge difference. The Clean Air & Water Acts of the 70s cleaned shit up pretty much overnight, way more than a million hippies driving less and going to farmers’ markets.
Insofar as personal attitudes require personal investment, sure, I get it, but my point is that turning that personal attitude into action is only effective when it’s focused into collective power, not individual lifestyle changes.
If you think of climate change as “How can everyone keep living like middle-class Americans on TV?” the problem is likely incurable. Part of policymaking is forcing those tradeoffs, reducing some short-term luxuries in favor of longer-term social planning. But that’s a far cry from the OP’s primitivism. Really it has to do more with dealing with industry, again things like CAFE standards, but also pollution controls, cap and trade, grid mixes, etc. Insofar as the average household is likely to feel it, it would be from increased prices (more expensive cars, more expensive power), but that’s only the case when the Republicans block tax reform and force market forces to regressively punish lower-middle-class households.
It’s not about trying to convince half the population to give up their pickup trucks and cattle. America is too selfish and individualistic for something like that, except possibly in wartime. It’s more about seizing power and forcing change through, even if many Americans don’t understand the implications. As a country, we’re too poorly educated and our democracy is too captured to work in favor of climate change. By the time your average Republican is on board with climate action, their legislators would have already done the damage, having been paid off for years if not decades of purposeful stalling, and the rest of the world will have suffered disproportionate impacts due to American stonewalling.
Climate change is inextricably tied into ethnonationalism, and the two broad routes we can take are either to cooperatively tackle it as a global society or to shelter in place and fortify, desperately clinging onto our excessive lifestyles while the rest of the world withers. That’s the Republican (and neoliberal Democrat) ideal, to use economic strangulation and our military might to coerce the rest of the world into taking the brunt of climatic impacts. China might have something to say about that, which is why we’re terrified of them now. But frankly, Americans caused this issue, and we have no right to expect unlimited comfort going forward. The next decade or two will force some pretty dramatic showdowns when climate refugeeism overwhelms Europe and China and South America and international pressure mounts on the US to stop polluting so much. If you don’t stop the Republicans before it gets to that point, you’re just setting the stage for violent ethnonationalism; it’s our learned response to international crises: imperialism backed by hoo-rah propaganda.
What is going fix the problem is not a sudden upswelling of popular support, which we’ve had for a long time already, but a decapitation of the political puppet theater that’s long since forgotten about the people – both here and globally. The regional/local policy and energy changes might buy some time. The only long-term fix is to radically regulate American capitalism and make it beholden to the public interest, not the other way around.
There are some who are willing to listen to science, and some who would rather listen to their politicians and preachers. Their religion is their politics, and it stems from a preference for authoritarianism. Those people you will never reach through your appeals to values, because they don’t share your values. You replace their leadership and force change through, even if they don’t want it, for their own sake. shrug We’re just fucking apes, and most of us are not climate experts or social planners, but we will flock loudly and angrily to anyone who professes to protect our in-groups, authentically or not. Those people will suffer no matter who they vote for, and at some point it’s just a question of, well, is it better to give them what they want and watch them die, or to just tell them they’re wrong and to suck it up, for their own sake? Or, if they have it their way, they’ll get what they want and keep it, and the rest of us can go die. I suppose that’s the most American way of all. 
Can you rephrase this, please?
Not necessarily. At some point there’s price parity but still entrenched investments and lobbying. And the whole point is to set regional standards so that businesses have nowhere to flee to keep polluting. I mean even China is ramping up their pollution controls (ever so slowly) and refusing to let us keep exporting our pollution there forever. That’s why this only works at scale.
That would be a misplaced belief that either investment or politics is controlled by popular vote; neither is true. If you can capture government you can regulate industry, and the people who suffer most are those rich enough to take the brunt: institutional shareholders and the middle-upper class with portfolios in the energy and defense sector, vs the increasingly large working class.
It just isn’t the case that climate action has to be paid for equally by all, when it isn’t contributed to equally by all. It’s an Americanism, with a captured government and legalized corporate bribery.
I disagree with this. The institutions in our country, whether political or institutional, or controlled by a startlingly small proportion of the population, and not very responsive to public whim.
So what ISN’T an equivalent of recycling? What sort of individual behavior change do you think is 1) likely to be adopted by a significant majority of the population and 2) able to mathematically impact climate change and 3) easier to force through than top-down policy changes within the few short years we have?
Nonsense. Climate isn’t even in the top 10 most important issues to most voters. We have what little we have because of advocacy groups pushing policymakers, not because there is popular demand for it.
The individual is meaningless, climatically, unless he or she is using it to exercise collective power.
What are your “individual choices”? If you’re saying that personal lifestyle changes are all you need to worry about, then no, that’s absolutely abhorrent to both any sane democracy and any sane moral framework. Where individual choices have predictable outcomes that affect other humans, there is both an ethical and democratic consideration.
In the face of climate change, to do nothing IS a moral choice. It’s also an economic choice and an evolutionary choice. To do some useless thing in the pursuit of personal purity is also moral choice, in that you’re choosing the alleviation of personal guilt over actually reducing harm to others. And at the extreme end, it must be stated that many people, especially at the top, do not operate under any sort of collectivist moral framework at all, and actively fight to subvert any such values system from taking root in America.
When the climate is held hostage by a false and dying democracy, “let’s try harder to convince each other” simply doesn’t work. There’s no time for it, and America doesn’t have the moral framework of social cohesiveness that other, older societies have. E pluribus unum gives way to division among racial and class lines every single time, except during war.
You decapitate the Republicans or billions die. It really is that straightforward. And I don’t think it’s just a matter of not voting red, but seizing power by any means necessary – democratically if possible, via a coup if nothing else.
Not every individual has the same climatic impact, mostly due to the levels of industrialization and the costs of their consumption in a given society. And most developed countries already have slowing population growth. It’s not the populous third world causing most climate change, it’s America and China. Population reduction is both an unnecessary and ineffective way to combat climate change, where other avenues exist (and they do, both through conservation and innovation and decreasing per-capita impacts rather than decreasing the sheer number of people).
I thought this was a helpful way to look at it: I = PAT - Wikipedia
What IS worrisome is the desire for much of the developing world to seek American standards of living, with the same current impacts of American consumption. We’re all fucked if there were 8 billion cars. We’re less fucked, but still fucked, if there were 8 billion electric cars.
But it might be possible for 8 billion to live under standards of living not TOO far from urban American living, with better planning and public transportation and such.
At some point it would be more merciful to just randomly nuke half the population…
Wow! what a sad and cynical view; “Americans are too stupid and selfish to fix the problem”
Change through force is no change at all. Forced compliance is an oxymoron. If you force a policy on a public who is unready or unwilling to accept that change then all you’ve succeeded in doing is creating a country full of individual and corporate scofflaws. And then you spend your time enforcing the rules and trying to stay in power so the next regime doesn’t undo everything.
All change starts with individuals (grassroots, doncha know) If you work to change the mind of the individual you are at the same time working to change the govt.
What the govt CAN AND SHOULD DO, in the meantime, is to provide incentives to those who have already changed to encourage others. Like maybe pass an energy consumption tax and any individual or corporation who can show a reduction in energy use can get some of that money back. Get individuals and corporations involved and invested in the change. Don’t force it on them.
Look, I don’t disagree that the American govt needs some significant change, but the idea that the way to accomplish that change is to somehow take charge and force the minority to comply with your wishes is not a long term solution.
Climate change is happening, and we are past the point of changing that - we’re gonna have to learn to live with some of the changes. The best we can hope for is to mitigate those changes and the only real way to do that is to change the way people think about how we interact with the environment.
mc
There is no silver bullet. Off the top of my head are a few ideas, but likely only the tip of the iceberg of the type of policies that need to be perused to avoid ecological collapse and subsequent rise of fascism that may arise when mass migration of climate refugees
Carbon taxes are a good start but there is a danger of the tax to effectively become regressive. Which may lead to mass protests or right wing demagogues like Trump being elected. So any effective carbon tax will need to be used in conjunction to improving public transportation and building more affordable housing (so the working class won’t have to commute so far to get to their workplace). Shorter work weeks would also reduce carbon emissions. Four day workweeks should become the norm.
We need to eat a lot less meat. Ways to do this are of course increasing costs through taxes, more investment in lab grown meat, and promoting healthier diets by introducing healthier and tastier options in school menus. Our society is terrible about introducing vegetables to children. Need to introduce children to properly prepared fresh vegetables and not come from a can.
Need to have job programs for workers displaced by the loss of jobs in the fossil fuel industry. Needs to be far more substantial than just hoping the free market sorts it out. Maybe pay older workers (55+) a publicly funded pension so they can retire early. Makes no sense for older workers to retrain just so they can work for a few more years. Would be less economically destructive to pay such workers to do nothing than for them to continue working in an industry that is destroying the planet.
Need to make incredible effort into replanting forest and recovering lost top soil. Need to clean ocean and find a way to combat ocean acidification. Need to increase renewable and nuclear technology, but ultimately need to learn how to get by with less energy. Need to restrict fishing and allow aquatic species populations to recover.
The scale of mitigating the worse aspects of climate change is likely going to take the greatest effort mankind has ever expended and even with the greatest of efforts we might still fail.
I gotta say, if the future of human civilization depends on the United States of America fighting against an entrenched and powerful system supported by the richest people on the globe, then I think all we can really do is relax and wait for the tide to come in.