This, except the industrial performers won’t curtail their damaging impacts until compelled to do so by government regulation. They may engage in greenwashing to appease consumers, but the average consumer will have a difficult time seeing through their advertising to understand whether or not the advertisers are actually doing a good thing or not. It took the EPA 50+ years ago to get industries to make cleaner products and make those products more cleanly, and it’ll take further government action to fight climate change on a wide scale.
With vanishingly rare exceptions, this is true, both because the cost of the ‘externalities’ is unpalatable and will render a company unable to compete with other players who do not make such concessions, or in many cases because it would force the company to just go out of business. One can understand why the Ethyl Corporation fought so vigorously about the clear evidence of the harms of tetraethyl lead additive in gasoline; it was their primary product and source of essentially all of their profits, despite the fact that it did manifest harms even to those who produced it. Companies will spend more money “greenwashing” their practices than they would remediating them just on the basis of making that concession once will result in fear of a slippery slope that might force them to entirely change their business model and production methods.
Stranger
Childless non-car-owner here, who adopts most of the other mentioned measures to at least some extent. But as other posters have noted, I didn’t make any of those decisions specifically for the sake of climate change mitigation.
We need to adjust our social structures so that these more sustainable behaviors can be seen as advantageous in their own right, not just as sacrifices we reluctantly make in order to combat climate change.
Yes, but it isn’t beyond the capacity of a town or even a village. We are so atomized, so enculturated to believe that decisions can only be made and implemented at the level of a single person, when that is so patently untrue.
That’s like saying no one should bother helping another person in need or donating to a charity, because it’s society’s responsibility.
I don’t buy it. The two scenarios are not mutually exclusive.
They aren’t “mutually exclusive”, and doing a bit of personal charity brings more compassion to a world that could desperately use it, but your five bucks isn’t going to solve world hunger. Structural problems—and climate change is perhaps the most fundamental structural problem in terms of an existential threat—requires systematic solutions, not piecemeal fixes. Which isn’t to say that coming together as a community and revitalizing a wetland area isn’t beneficial, both in and of itself and as an example of what could be done on a broader scale, but when such efforts are constantly undermined by indifferent or obstructive bureaucracy and corporate interests which, if they respond to it at all, try to leverage it into an opportunity to “greenwash” their real emissions, the benefit is so localized that it doesn’t address those structural problems.
Stranger
A problem with responding to the idea of personal sacrifices with the “these are structural issues”, is that a lot of people see it as a personal sacrifice to vote for structural changes that will inconvenience them. And in convincing people of the seriousness of climate change showing you walk the walk is more effective than saying there’s really no point in doing anything other than voting green.
Structural changes don’t all come from the top down, and the reason they aren’t happening now isn’t that people are focusing too much on individual measures, it’s that an insufficient number of humans actually want the drastic changes required to keep warming below 1.5C. So they neither walk the walk nor talk the talk.
Llama, what DO you do for a living? I agree that having fewer children is only a good thing for our planet.
I personally believe that massive equatorial deforestation has been the biggest factor in human-caused climate change.
continuing hijack so hidden {WE?}
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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.
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I fly bizjets, which are about the most indefensible thing possible in terms of being bad for the environment. They are incredibly wasteful in the fuel they burn, they transport very few people and yet still take up a “slot” within the national airspace system that might otherwise be used by an aircraft carrying many people.
That’s not to say they shouldn’t exist in some form. Small jets have a place in emergency medical transport (patients, organs, practitioners - all of which I’ve had on board at some point). But if you ask me to justify them for moving rich people around… I don’t think I can.
I haven’t yet encountered climate activists in person, but it will happen eventually. They have been known to protest at airports I use. Frankly, I don’t know what I would say to them if confronted.
I like my job, and I need a job. In my personal life, I’m actually quite low impact. I have no children and I live a fairly minimal lifestyle in a small home. I tell myself that by not having kids I’ve done my part, but the fact is I don’t know that for a fact. It seems less and less a valid rationalization.
With regard to my earlier comment, I of course wasn’t suggesting NOBODY should have children. But maybe we should have fewer kids. I’d like to hear some good evidence for what effect that might have.
Well, at least around here, people have been having fewer children. Even people who want children. My son is an only child, and I know lots of other families with only one child. When I was a kid, that was much rarer.
In terms of regrets, we recently replaced both our furnace and AC - and installed an aux heat pump. Though we installed efficient units, I wish we had been more creatively aggressive, likely incorporating solar or geo.
I think energy should be priced progressively. Some base level of gas, nat’l gas, electricity would be very reasonable, with prices ramping up rapidly. (I’m sure it would be unworkable!) And companies should definitely pay a carbon tax.
Solar is fairly easy to add.
Geothermal is very hard to add, far easier to include in a new build.
I am personally willing to give up a lot, but to crudely rephrase a concept some others have already mentioned, I am not interested in being the moron who watches everyone else enjoy the things I’ve denied myself while the world continues to melt anyway.
I feel fairly hopeless about our ability to make choices as a society that prioritize long-term sustainability over short-term profit and short-term dopamine hits.
I surmised correctly that you were in the transportation industry.
I don’t disagree that setting an example encourages other like-minded people of the possibility. But as a climate-conscious occupant of our planet, even the modest reductions in emissions (and unless you are living in a sod house “off the grid”, eating algae pancakes and reading by candlelight, the maximal reduction you can achieve in a developed nation is pretty modest indeed) are offset by every yahoo “rolling coal” down the highway in a truck that from which the owner proudly gets single digit gas mileage, and for the tech crowd every data center and cryptocoin farm that is burning gigawatts of power to perform hash calculations to the precise benefit of no one. Your personal sacrifices, even multiplied across your community, do not counteract the emissions that are embedded in the way we live, work, and conduct commerce.
I recently had a discussion with someone who was insistent that we should stop building orbital telescopes (and curiously fixated on space astronomy while still being a massive enthusiast of ‘colonizing’ Mars) on the basis that building and launching such systems is so carbon-intentive. He was correct that these are individually large expenditures of carbon budget but pale in comparison in terms of what what an average person in the developed world will be responsible for in their lifetime while producing nothing as beautiful and contributing to human knowledge as Copernicus, Hubble, Chandra, Swift, Webb, and dozens of other space telescopes. In terms of “doing everything we can” to combat climate change, shutting down any NASA space mission that isn’t about climate modeling is kind of an obvious step but like telling people to not have children it is selling all the cows to save the farm. That is kind of piecewise austerity that gains an almost infinitesimal benefit in exchange for dramatic loss. And yet, convincing people to sacrifice enough to make a bigger difference than cancelling the next space observatory would be unpalatable to nearly anyone, even people who believe that we must do “everything” to reduce the effects of climate change.
And let’s be clear on this point: there are no “drastic changes required to keep warming below 1.5C” which can be effected regardless of the degree of austerity that you could theoretically get people to sign up to. That ship has almost certainly sailed regardless of what radical steps we might hypothetically take, and we need to acknowledge that. Frankly, a 2 °C limit is probably unattainable without measures that would result in the deaths of tens or hundreds of millions of people by famine, and no political leader is going to fall on that sword even if they somehow had the power to make that happen. We are at a point of needing to look at ways of adaptation and mitigation rather than correction and abatement.
Stranger
Buy fewer things, use less energy for AC and heat, try to avoid unnecessary driving, and buying energy efficient appliances are things I do. I won’t change my diet for climate change.
One thing not on that list that I’d like to do is have a yard that requires less maintenance and fertilizers.
- Vote for/ support politicians that take this shit seriously. You personally are not building renewable energy sources to make a difference: We need collective action.
Other effective measures are so inconsequential in comparison that they are a different list.
- Don’t fly.
- no meat / dairy
- go live somewhere where you can go to your work, the bakery or the pub without needing a car.
- insulate your house.
All other stuff is not even a rounding error.
Polar bears don’t care if you drive an EV or a normal car. (Although marginal gains are still gains and definitely better than doing nothing).
I agree, but didn’t want to lay the grounds for a derail on what the current predictions are.
And there you have it. Looking at the NYT list, changing your diet is one of the largest effects you can have.
(and though it is more complex than a pop quiz is able to describe, I believe they are essentially correct). People who say “it can’t be true, I will never admit it’s true, and I refuse to change”) are very similar to people who love cats and will not acknowledge that all evidence shows that cats are the number two cause of the songbird decimation, after habitat destruction. They don’t want it to be true, so in their minds, it isn’t.