I’m speaking from my personal experience with people I personally in Pakistan who could not afford a motorcycle in the 1980s who are now living is gigantic houses with staff of servants and being driven around in large SUVs. The upper middle class and “higher” people I know in Pakistan, Singapore, UAE, Turkey and Australia seem to be in pretty much full pursuit of consumption as the typical American of the same income strata.
The one guy I know personally who has been trying to reduce his carbon footprint for 20 years even though he could afford to jet around the world is in the US. It’s true that he is not a white American, but he thinks he is.
I would wholeheartedly agree if it weren’t for the pretty well documented fact that power brokers whose enormous profits have depended on non renewable energy sources have worked very hard to retard the growth of renewable energy. After all, you can’t put a meter on the sun and charge for it.
Yes its completely a contradiction. It would only not be if those evil agri-mega-corps were taking all the meat and eating it themselves at big banquet surrounded by huge vats of burning fossil fuels. Show a pic of that and I’d totally agree global warming is their fault and not ours.
The meat industry is generating that carbon as us westerners (and, yes, our pets) want to eat meat. If you deny that while feeding your dog meat you are being a denialist.
It appears to me that the two claims are completely uncontradictory. Again, I ask you to prove the Vox article contradicts the Guardian article.
~Max
ETA:
Yes, so what? That does not contradict the Guardian’s claim that ‘Just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988’.
I was pitting the Twitter poster (and the point of view generally) who was implying that because its those 100 companies that causing global warming not us, then your dog is not causing global warming.
If you are a dog owner in the western world then you are absolutely he cause of global warming. The fact that there is a big bad corporation providing your dog food (and producing carbon while they do it) doesn’t make it any less your fault.
As I said in the OP I’m not denying that. What is utter and completely irresponsible BS is saying “oh its those 100 companies fault, not ours!”, which is clearly what that Twitter post and those like are saying.
You might as well say “We aren’t causing global warming the ground is!”
Put aside the concept of moral responsibility for a minute. It’s not utter and complete irresponsibility to focus regulatory efforts on the supply side of carbon emissions rather than the demand side.
But saying “oh its those 100 companies fault, not ours!” isn’t saying “we should regulate carbon emissions”. Most the regulations which would have an effect on global warming are about reducing how much carbon we use (e.g. regulating the minimum MPG of cars, taxing products based on carbon usage, mandating solar panels in new homes, etc. etc.)
Saying “oh its those 100 companies fault, not ours!” is saying we shouldn’t regulate any of those things, as its not us that’s emitting the carbon, why should we? Invariably (if my social media is anything to go by) what follows is “there’s no ethical consumption in capitalism” or some variant of it. Whereby all the rich woke folk in the western world can merrily go on destroying the world until such a time as we completely tear down the global economic system and replace it with something else that will make everything better.
But that’s true. There is no ethical consumption in capitalism. Effective policy should rely on economic incentive and not consumer ethics. It is strictly not the government’s job to regulate consumer ethics.
While consumers bear ultimate responsibility so far as demand drives supply, conversation about regulating greenhouse gas emmissions should be framed so as to hold the actual emitters responsible for their emissions. Regulation must target the emitters as a matter of practicality.
Consumers will take responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions when businesses pass on the costs of regulation.
I’m sympathetic with your pitting of the twitter poster. But only a little. Individual actions to conserve energy and reduce greenhouse emissions (which I engage in and support) won’t solve global warming, and therefore can’t properly be said to cause global warming. What does cause global warming is a collective failure to reduce emissions. If you want to parcel out virtue and vice, parcel it out to those supporting and opposing green-inclined politicians. Because that’s really the bottom line.
And insofar as that is the bottom line, we should allow for a measured amount of hyperbole and even nonsense, while still bearing in mind that it will be science, technological advance, and well crafted policy that will make the difference. Exxon is culpable because it supports science internally while sabotaging it publicly. Correctly stating facts (albeit misleading ones) isn’t anywhere near as pittible, viewed objectively.
That’s the insight of the Green New Deal. We had a chance for slow, steady, and cost-minimizing policy starting in the early 1990s. We didn’t take it. That ship has sailed. Now we need to go hard and fast. Greenhouse damage is baked in. The question becomes what package of policies are politically viable and will get the job done. A little narrowly accurate corporate vilification here and there is probably a net utilitarian win.
Yeah, I endorse this, with the large qualification stated in my previous post. We have to assemble a wide coalition, one that includes leftie sloganeers.
You may need to improve your follow list. Recommended:
@drvolts (My GND spiel lifted from this guy, basically.) @Noahpinion @joshtpm @mattyglesias (Terrible tweets, but great blogging/writing.) @ezraklein
My personal bug bear. Giving up capitalism and the nation state would reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by exactly zero grams.
The global 10% (i.e. pretty much everyone in the developed world, if you earn over 100k you are in the global 1%) needs to actually start changing their lifestyle not just complain about “there’s no ethical consumption in capitalism”.
The atmosphere does not care if the oil that was burnt to increase it’s physical properties was produced by a big bad oil company or an artisanal employee owned cooperative.
Well, first of all, any industrial society is inherently “capitalist” in the sense of consolidating capital resources to build and sustain infrastructure. While the profit motive of corporo-capitalist societies provides a perverse incentive to ignore ‘externalities’ that don’t have any near term consequences on profitability or stock valuation (for publicly held companies), supposed non-capitalist nations like the Soviet Union and a pre-‘Nineties Peoples Republic of China certainly didn’t hold environmental protection as any kind of priority, and the lack of transparency in those societies permitted by the centralized control of information let them hide all manner of “mistakes” in biological, chemical, and nuclear catastrophes to an extent still being rediscovered today.
If the expectation is that “the 10%” of the developed world are going to volunteer to a substantially more austere lifestyle to “save the planet”, that is unrealistic and essentially impossible. There are certainly efficiencies that can reduce waste and excess use of energy and non-renewable resources (or renewable resources beyond sustainability) but there is a limit to what can be done. A battery electric vehicle, for instance, will have fewer and more fungible “tailpipe” emissions even tracked back to the energy source, but it is still a highly industrialized product made of energy-intensive materials and components, and unless you live in an urban center or the rare suburban area with mixed use development, functioning in modern society without access to a motor vehicle (whether your personal use, or paying others to transport you to goods and services and vice versa) is essentially impossible. The days in which you lived in a village or town that provided for all of your essential needs are long gone except in the pages of Mother Earth News, and even then exist mostly as a kind of fantasy lived by a handful of iconoclasts and influencers rather than a viable way of living for most people.
Aside from population reductions—which traditional capitalist industry that is dependent upon indefinite growth is going to have to cope with as developed societies tend toward fewer children and more voluntary childlessness—the only way to effect real reductions in resource overuse and pollution of various kinds is either government regulation or the ‘voluntary’ agreement by industrial producers to relinquish the use of cheap non-renewable resources and external “reservoirs” in favor of developing more sustainable methods of material recycling/reuse and controlling their emissions even at greater cost. Consumers have the ostensible choice of selecting more ecologically-sound products and services but even when consumers are willing to pay more for sustainability they’re often not well informed (and frequently deliberately misled) into the true impact of their choices. Expecting people to forego washing machines and cars in favor of handwashing their clothes and riding a bike everywhere through inclement conditions and a lack of dedicated bike paths is really not a viable alternative.
I think we need to recognize that industrial society is on an RCP 6.0 path that will likely lead to a 3 °C or greater increase in average global temperature by 2100 and the near-catastrophic impact that will have globally (and absolutely apocalyptic for anyone in tropical latitudes). Unfortunately, any practical mitigations will also have catastrophic impacts in terms of food production and other essential goods, and with greater impact upon the developed nations that would have to curtail industrial society to an enormous extent (give up most long distance travel, cheap consumer and high technology products, suburban lifestyles, et cetera) which just isn’t going to happen without draconian measures and probably can’t happen in a timeframe to provide real mitigation anyway. Basically, we’re fucked however we go.
But here’s the thing. The targets that would have significantly reduced the severity of global warming (and we as a society utter and spectacularly failed to meet) were not “lets abolish industrial society and live in a cave” they were “let’s shave a few percentage points off the carbon our industry and lifestyle emits”. Just things like widespread adoption of less carbon-intensive cars would have got us a good chunk of the way there.
I agree that society is far more culpable than any company. Climate change is very difficult to have rational, objective conversations on. I believe the answer lies primarily new innovations in clean energy. But in the meantime, we have to focus on what we can do right now. We need the right incentives and motivations to change our lifestyles. We also need to have better access to more scientific studies that are addressing all aspects of climate change and fossil fuels.
To the extent that we can make credible projections about future climate conditions, a lot of the warming effects are already baked in even before consideration of positive feedback cycles leading to irreversible turning points. Transitioning to a much reduced carbon and greenhouse gas output at the end of the Cold War (and not just “less carbon-intensive cars” that are at most a few percentage points of global atmospheric carbon emissions, and are not going to disappear even if you suddenly start producing battery electric and fuel cell electric vehicles en mass) would have given a path toward mitigation. But instead the United States and the rest of the developed world doubled down on coal, gas, and petroleum, and given the amount of gas and oil that is already ‘leased out’ and that no energy company is going to leave in the ground unused, staying under +2 °C isn’t even remotely plausible, and even staying to the the RCP 4.5 scenario is unlikely without drastic reductions that will result in food scarcity, insolvable transportation problems, and a widescale reduction in global trade that no industrial nation is going to sign up for because hydrocarbon power is baked into industrial society for the next several decades even if we had a magical energy technology available today.
We are firmly on an RCP 6.0 path and toward a +3 °C world by 2100 (and probably more like 2070). The “Just Stop Oil” protesters—if opprobrious and in ways that distract from their message—are fundamentally correct about the need to abruptly stop using any hydrocarbon fuels to the maximum extent possible. Unfortunately, our energy base and utilization is so rooted in hydrocarbon fuels that a rapid transition to…something else…isn’t really plausible without severe austerity and essentially catastrophic consequences to developing nations who have both been kind of forcibly industrialized and are generally in the areas most affected by climate change (tropics/subtropics, low laying coastal regions). Realistically, we need to end the pretense that we’re going to stop consuming hydrocarbon energy suddenly by 2035 or 2040 or whatever arbitrary target and start making what plans can be make to adapt to a hotter and more energetic world. And we for fucks sake need to stop pretending that some scientician-mage is going to come along and fart out enough technomagical fairy dust to suck all of the carbon dioxide out of the air or throw up a Shadow Planet spell or any other geoengineering solution that, even if it was workable will not effect change on a planetary scale in time to avert the worst effects of already baked-in climate change.
How much lobbying to keep society running headlong into the direction of the abyss is allowed?
It is fiction to see “society” and “any company” as separate entities.
Those 100 companies went above and beyond to protect their bottom line, to absolve them by saying “it is society’s fault” is a bit too easy for me.
Getting back to the OP, the reason that the big companies should be held more responsible than the average person is because they have far more power to make big change in things.
A single CEO, or board of directors, at ExxonMobile or some other similar company, changing their minds can make a big difference in carbon emissions - more than a million of us private individuals switching from gas cars to electric.
Exactly so, as @GIGObuster has already pointed out. As another data point on this, I was listening to a CBC Radio documentary just the other day about Imperial Oil, the Canadian subsidiary of Exxon. Going back as far as the 80s, Imperial had been doing their own research on the effects of carbon emissions on climate. It was real science and internally they had as good an understanding of climate change as the academic community.
They also understood that even modest efforts at mitigating emissions would impact their bottom line by at least $900 million annually. So they suppressed the information and, along with parent company Exxon, became complicit in schemes to lie about climate science and try to discredit it. Many other industrial concerns joined them. There is no question that this set back progress in climate change mitigation by decades – time that we don’t have. Even today, what progress we are able to make isn’t because any of these massive vested interests have become any more honest, but only because the scientific evidence is now so irrefutable, and the effects of climate change increasingly visible and undeniable.
This is, as @LSLGuy correctly states, a planetary problem and will take nationally and globally coordinated initiatives to solve. This requires governments to enact strong policy initiatives, and the malevolent legacy of the oil and coal cartels and other industrial interests is that they’ve made such policies politically unpalatable. I’m still not sure, even today, if it’s possible to run as a Republican in the US without being an explicit climate change denier. Probably not. Even enlightened Republicans like Ben Sasse prefer to sidestep the “denier” aspect and argue about the allegedly ruinous costs of mitigation. Outright lunatics like Rick Santorum or James Inhofe are still firmly in the outright-denier camp.
