I should add I wasn’t pitting the authors of the report, I’ve not read it cover to cover, but AFAIK they were not saying “Its not our fault, its these 100 companies!” It certainly wouldn’t be the first or last time that a scientific report was used make completely spurious conclusions in popular press and social media.
It’s weird that you say that shaming Exxon won’t do any good yet you seem to think that shaming people who already believe and want to do something about climate change will. Until I can personally force politicians out of office, I am personally entirely to blame no matter how reasonably carbon-friendly a lifestyle I lead?
I’m not sure how you get that snip above from what I said. If so, I’ve failed to write well. I certainly didn’t mean to shame you or shame any other particular individual. Sorry if I offended you. I’ll try again.
Each of us can and should do what we can to reduce the carbon footprint in our lives. But, as we see now with COVID and masks, 10% who’re actively fighting back and refusing to participate can offset the incremental good works done by 40% of us.
Most people won’t / can’t reduce their footprint voluntarily by enough to matter.
We need to be honest enough with ourselves as humans thinking about humanity that until doing the right thing is cheaper than doing the wrong thing, the wrong things will be what most people do most times. Just as the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, the way to desirable societal change is through economics.
Once we can muster to political will to recognize that and adjust tax and subsidy policy correctly so that doing the right thing is cheaper after taxes and incentives than doing the wrong thing, then and only then, will the majority of humanity reduce / replace their carbon footprint semi-voluntarily enough to matter.
Right now we collectively lack that political will. Which means we each need to look in the mirrror, be a grown-up, and get serious about making this an important, arguably the important topic of politics. The (not a) litmus test of who gets voted for and who gets run out of town… In democracies, as we see in the news, even 48% doing the right thing won’t carry the day. But the only way we get to 51% is to pass through 48%, 40%, 30%, etc.
You may well already be on the right side of history here. Most folks, frankly including me, are not; at least not yet. Getting a plausible anti-climate-change coalition going is really Step 1 to developing a critical mass of followers. That takes leaders.
While Big Oil has behaved poorly in this area, both ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips support the Baker-Shultz plan. It’s no longer a matter of whether they support a carbon tax, but which version they support. No surprise, they like the one that shields them from liability, removes other regulations, and ramps slower than other proposals. But we really have seen a shift in recent years. I won’t tell you it’s enough though.
And yes, Shell seems far ahead of all the other majors.
To the OP, I don’t find the blame to be very useful, but I do still find the data exercise interesting.
We do a lot of things that we shouldn’t because they’re convenient/fun/tasty/easy and have short-term rewards and long-term consequences. Humans are generally ill-equipped as individuals to make choices that are uncomfortable now for a distant greater good. Expecting the guy next door to trade in his truck for a Prius, and to give up plastic-packaged foods and Amazon, well. . . it’s not going to happen. Not enough to change the direction of consumption/environmental impact.
You know what will get him to change? If we required all vehicles to get 50+ miles per gallon (random number I picked; not meant to be informed/realistic). If we restricted plastic use. If we massively taxed fossil fuel.
The solution is not millions of people suddenly developing the inclination and willpower to resist convenience, habit, and comfort. It’s forcing the choice upon them by regulating/restricting industry. And industry fights those changes tooth and nail.
This thread is a joke with no mention of China and India and the developing world. Congrats to the mods for erasing posters with differing views from the lefty extreme.
Feel free to mention them, then…
You mean, congrats to the mods for removing racists and trolls? Yes, well done, mods.
Well, by your “contribution” it is clear that that is not the case now, no?
In any case, your line reaches for the already old canard that we should not do anything because China or India are not doing much. It is a simple and wrong reply to a more complex issue.
But that’s just a small part of the picture, says Noah Diffenbaugh, Stanford University climatologist. “The United States is the largest emitter historically in terms of the one degree [Celsius] of global warming that we’ve already had,” he says.
China’s contribution has increased as its economy has grown, he says. But “in terms of total emissions now, the United States is still a very large fraction.” Beyond that, it’s not like the past damage done by the United States has gone anywhere: the global climate is still about one degree warmer than it was before the Industrial Revolution.
Furthermore, no one country can reduce emissions enough to stop climate change. “This is why climate policy presents some clear challenges,” Diffenbaugh says. “No one country can stabilize the global temperature just by stabilizing its emissions.”
That makes the question of whether China needs to make a move before the U.S. does “ill-posed,” he says. Research backs the idea that all countries need to work together to reduce emissions, regardless of who goes first—or who contributed what to the problem and when.
Why all the talk about China?
Rather than being an issue of science policy, says Erwan Monier, a UC Davis climatologist, “I think the issue is more philosophical.” The idea that the U.S. should wait because other countries like China need to make more reductions than we do is “rhetoric that works perfectly for the status quo,” he says.
But the status quo is costly now, and it’s going to become more costly in the future. “The climate system is going to respond to emissions,” Monier says. Those responses are already having impacts around the United States and around the globe.
By waiting to act, the United States “puts the burden on others” to reduce emissions well beyond their commitments in the Paris Agreement “or it puts the burden on itself later on.” That latter scenario is much more likely, he says.
“What you see in the U.S., anecdotally, is people denying a problem,” says Chris Barrington-Leigh, an economist at McGill University in Canada. “You see people not thinking rationally because they are afraid.”
That mentality helps explain yesterday’s subcommittee meeting, where the Paris Agreement and its targets were referred to a number of times. President Trump announced withdrawal from the Paris Accord as far back as 2017, and the United States presence at crucial climate talks related to the Paris Accord in December was minimal.
Powered by the need to address air pollution, China is “essentially moving forward faster than anyone else,” Barrington-Leigh says. With that comes green energy innovation, something that House subcomittee members on both sides of the aisle said should be a priority for the United States. In China, that innovation, and air pollution reduction, are being driven by the totalitarian government, which has control over many of the energy enterprises.
In the United States, getting innovation on green energy mostly lies with the market—a system that doesn’t work in the absence of strong leadership, Barrington-Leigh says. Strong federal guidance on climate change would “give the people who are trying to choose their investments… clarity.” Without that clarity, the fate of the United States as a world technology leader—and as a major contributor to climate change—remains uncertain.
At least as to my posts, the only “we” I’m talking about is all of humanity.
I wish this were true. We had an initiative here in Washington state in 2016 to replace a full point of the state’s sales tax with a carbon tax. The opposition from the left was enormous. While I’m not sure that was enough to sink the initiative*, it’s certainly conceivable that a coalition of sane liberals, leftists, and moderates/conservatives who realized that a revenue-neutral carbon tax was the best they’d do could have won. But when the leftists team up with the right, they can pretty much sink anything here.
*There was a later initiative that the left crafted that fared slightly better, but probably lost some support among those supported the revenue-neutral version.
Not disputing you, but what was their predominant opposition narrative? “Too little too late!”, “Not hair-shirt self-flagellating pure enough!”, “Unfairly regressive!”, or what?
The wrong people wrote the initiative. Quoting from the wikipedia article:
Posting here rather than flaming Twitter.
Yeah your pets (if you are living in the developed world feeding your dog brand name pet food) are causing global warming. Stop being a denialist, complaining about those nasty corporations is just a way to salve your conscience.
Is blaming the top 100 companies part of the problem? I think so. Is blaming Joe Citizen for not conserving energy enough part of the problem? Yes. It is.
This problem can’t be solved with voluntary actions. It needs governmental action to a) develop the proper technologies and b) share them/impose them on the 3rd world later. Big Oil (eg Exxon) is to blame for denialist propaganda, those who vote for Republicans are to blame for supporting denialist and bad faith politicians, and a good chunk of the Dems are to blame for considering curbing greenhouse emissions just another box to check along with curbing nuclear energy and insisting on union labor for renewable energy. It’s all (feel) good. Or more articulately:
Global warming fixes:
- New tech
- Government mandates
Relying on individuals to be more environmentally conscious individuals…won’t work.
Sir Cool, are you Mad?
Well yes, in an ignorance fighting sense.
Quite frankly though, the world is going to burn. If blaming the corps gets us a big GND package (thereby delivering green tech, shared tech, free green tech for corps, governmental mandates, and maybe a modest carbon tax someday) so be it. We’ve been scratching our asses for over 30 years now: I’m way beyond the tut-tut stage. Blame the scapegoats, let’s get a little done, however late.
Nah, I think it’s more accurate to say that every impoverished person living in the DRC (and the rest of the developing world for that matter) would choose some less-impoverished lifestyle somewhere between SUV-and-huge-house overconsumption and low-carbon-footprint sustainable comfort, depending on personal taste and principles, if he or she could.
Not everybody who can afford SUV-and-huge-house overconsumption chooses to live that way even in the developed world. And it’s a gross overgeneralization to assume that being impoverished in a poor country automatically means that you wouldn’t care about the environment or anything else except satisfying your greediest desires for overconsumption, if only you had the money.
(There’s a faint whiff of something even grosser when white Americans in particular project that kind of single-minded greedy ostentatiousness onto black Africans in particular, by the way. I am absolutely sure that you didn’t intend your remark to suggest any such thing, and am not in any way accusing you of any premeditated insult, but it’s just part of the background smelliverse constructed by the history of race relations in the US.)
I can absolutely afford a huge SUV. I drive a small, very gas efficient car. I don’t like blowing my money on gas on principle, and I like the fact that my vehicle is very easy to steer, maneuver, and park.
A few years ago when I realized my car of 17+ years was long in the tooth and I wanted a new one, I just Googled which cars had the tightest steering radius, because that was the one feature I loved most about my previous car. I then looked over the models that had the best steering, and eliminated the ones that were cost-prohibitive, or just seemed impractical (I am not driving a Smart Fortwo) and found one that had really good features. and then went to a dealership and bought it. Getting an SUV never crossed my mind and I don’t expect I’ll ever buy one.
This isn’t an attempt to virtue signal or anything. I also wasn’t picking a car because it was “responsible”. I’m not a saint. It’s just the kind of car I prefer to drive; it’s comfortable and at the time I was commuting to an office in Seattle that has insanely small parking spots so it’s pretty much essential to have a car that’s undersized.
There are countless reasons not to drive an SUV, and like you said cost is only one of them.