Don’t just pick on octopus, I’m fairly sure I’ve done more to help fight climate change than you have and I won’t go Vegan either. It is a terrible sacrifice I will not make.
And why poison your own thread bringing up another very divisive topic like cats? The quickest retort to you, is my cats don’t go outside and don’t kill birds.
Fully agree, and I would go further to say that most efforts at individual level are nothing more than virtue signaling, and in-fact may hurt the cause. They may hurt the cause in the following ways :
Coca Cola / Pepsi / Soft Drink manufacturers shifted the burden for recycling to Individuals by stopping the use of glass bottles. Earlier glass bottles worked perfectly and were better than plastics for the environment, but because of virtue signaling on recycling, they could pass it on to the consumer.
Oil companies came up with a marketing / PR campaign with triangles marked on plastic bottles and what not to tell people what can be recycled … It was /is just a big scam - till date only about 10% plastics in the US has actually been recycled. But the virtue signalers religiously fill up recycle bins and even wash plastics before putting them in recycle bins thereby wasting previous water.
Many software companies will claim that they are “carbon neutral” with very creative accounting. There is very little scrutiny into this and most are not really genuine. You can buy carbon offsets from third world countries with very little government or technical oversight. For example websites like https://terrapass.com/ sell carbon offsets for as little as $30 for 10,000 lbs and they sell gimmicks like gifting carbon offsets for weddings, birthdays etc etc
Bottomline : If climate change virtue signaling gets popular, greenwashing and passing the buck will become that much easier for the Industry. Activism at the social and political level is needed to make the right changes.
The best way for individuals to address climate change is to go after big corporations like Oil and Gas, Power Industry, … Ask your politicians what legislations they are passing on big industry. Form an organization like Sierra Club that is present at all government policy meeting.
Do not let the Industry greenwash itself out of this one. That’s the best you can do, IMO.
It seems to me that these examples are ex post facto PR by the companies themselves, which would engage in their other activities regardless of if they were able to greenwash them or not, but I might have my timelines wrong on some of them.
I do think, however, that people who publicly claim that massive individual sacrifices are needed can hurt the cause, because people will think they only have two choices, and will choose the less-painful one. This is regardless of whether massive individual sacrifices are needed to prevent climate change, because a small amount of climate change is better than a lot.
On the other hand, people who do make massive individual sacrifices can also result in the cause being hurt unwittingly, even if they don’t proclaim it is necessary, because anti-environmental groups will focus in on them and claim that that is the future environmentalists are advocating, but that is more the fault of right-wing groups than the individuals themselves.
good for you!
I am not poisoning my thread, I am pointing out the parallels. I’d be much more okay with people saying, as they won’t, “I don’t care about my cats’ contributing to the staggering decimation of songbirds” instead of them saying that despite the overwhelming evidence it just isn’t true.
I’m not becoming a vegan any time soon either. But I’m not going to pretend the evidence away.
The refusal to look at and accept what is true, because it disturbs (someone’s) comfortable habits, is a huge, lifelong, trigger for me. In every facet of life. I will drop the cat hijack though.
So very this.
So if the entire human race of omnivores switched over to the complicate diet of veganism it would have an effect similar to switching to EVs or cleaning up ships and reducing air travel?
Energy efficiency and actual regulation of new construction can have a huge factor also. We still do not build housing efficiently. We do not require enough insulation and for new construction proper attic insulation is pretty cheap. Basically a one and done cost that pays off hugely in reduced energy needs.
Wind and Solar can make a huge impact. We’ve been very slow doing this. Especially outside of Western Europe.
Veganism is not going to work. Most people are willing to reduce their meat and dairy intake but not stop it. Evangelical Vegans turn off those that would otherwise support efforts to stop climate change.
Maybe some are. And some are gestures of effort trying to break a little light into an enormous overhanging pall of helpless grief. I’d guess that most people who do make any effort are aware of how little it does. But they desperately want to do SOMETHING.
Really, I believe that a significant minority – and maybe more than I know – want to be part of a real solution. Something larger than themselves. What they lack is a visionary anyone to lead the army. There’s a new groundswell of consensus on both the fact and the danger of global climate change which is different even than a couple years ago. It is waiting to be tapped. The enemies need to be identified and the battle lines drawn. That hasn’t happened. Yet.
I saw that NYT quiz but passed it by.
Buying fewer things is a small effect?
I would’ve thought our gigantic consumerism habits as a nation is detrimental to climate change.
Many the goods we buy, electronics, toys etc are short term disposable.
The video gaming industry for example generates millions of tons a waste every year. That’s entertainment that I doubt a single player would ever give up.
Diet, better insulation, better gas mileage. My house is kept at 62/63 F in winter. 78 summer.
Yada it’s our unbridled enthusiasm for stuff to entertain ourselves that is tanking the planet.
“People” aren’t willing to give up traveling, buying cheap goods from China, redoing their kitchen every five years, having a hot tub, not taking the bus, having huge houses, etc. etc. either.
Our energy mix is changing way too slowly for it climate change to end up anything other than catastrophic, and that will mean we will “need” to maintain our current or higher level of energy consumption and maintain the use of fossil fuels as populations in both the industrialized and developing nations need to move from the most vulnerable areas.
Singling out veganism in particular as a thing that is uniquely unrealistic is disingenuous and seems rather self-serving.
Yes buying things has an energy cost, but our consumption of “things” is small compared to our energy needs for heating and cooling, our energy needs for “all fruits and vegetables all the time” agriculture, our energy needs for individualized transport, our energy needs for long distance pleasure jaunts, our energy needs for building large houses for small families, etc.
But is not most of the climate change effect because oil powers all the mechanisms of consumerism? We wear oil clothes sewn with oil sewing machines packed in oil-manufactured cardboard and transported with oil transportation for sale at oil-powered stores. EVERYTHING is made and run with oil. There is barely a single human-created thing we can touch that is not made or delivered with oil.
We can no longer conceive of the the world we inhabited for 300,000 years, quite successfully as a species. We built enormous cities, created art, music, stories, recipes, developed an endless array of political systems, traded goods over thousands of miles, explored the entire globe, without any fossil fuel at all.
Now we can’t imagine we can survive without it, far less live well.
Isn’t that strange?
Great point. One could counter that none of the advances of the last 200 years – from longer life expectancies and massive population growth to space flight and digital communications – could have occurred without fossil fuels. And then comes the big question: Was it worth it?
IMHO, this can be one of two very different questions.
One question is, what would I do in the world as it currently is, just on my own and not as part of any sort of national comprehensive plan?
The other is, what would I be willing to do as part of a more global plan to address consumption leading to global warming?
As an individual, with no expectation of being part of a larger approach, I’m already:
Small effect: recycling, using energy efficient appliances, buying fewer things, and at least somewhat lowering the room temperature. Car pooling is moot because my commute these days is from the living room and kitchen to the spare bedroom where my desk is.
Medium effect: I’ve had heat pump heating and cooling for the past quarter-century, and at a couple stops before that. I have no idea why heat pump use isn’t much more the norm in the U.S. No way I’m going to a vegetarian diet, but I’d point out that among animal protein sources, beef is by far the most environmentally problematic, and we’ve all but phased beef out of our diet on account of that. And someone would have to explain to me why organic food puts less carbon and/or methane into the atmosphere than conventional agriculture. (Is ‘organic’ even a well-defined term with respect to food labeling standards?)
Large effect: Giving up my car is not feasible. I’d be happy to buy my power from a renewables-only provider if I knew for sure that it was actually resulting in a higher proportion of electricity being produced by renewables, rather than just changing who pays for which electrons. And what’s the deal with ‘long’ plane flights? How long is long? And why is there a special benefit for cutting out ‘long’ flights? Aren’t takeoffs and landings the most energy-intensive part of any flight?
When I’m acting on my own, this shit has to be explained to me.
I’d do a lot more if I were acting within some comprehensive program. I think it would be great to fully price in the carbon and methane contribution of different foods, so that people would treat more environmentally questionable foods as luxury items, or switch altogether to more climate-friendly alternatives. I don’t know if I would go wholly vegetarian and I doubt I’d go vegan, but it would certainly push my choices further in that direction.
Similarly with car ownership and avoiding plane flights. We need far better public transportation, both within and between urban areas. Europe and Japan have 200 mph trains, why the fuck don’t we? Are we some fucking backwater? And we need a national housing policy so that more, denser housing is available in and near downtowns. There’s no need to herd people back into the cities; housing in many U.S. cities is expensive because - duh! - more people want to live there than there is housing for. But zoning seems to trump any attempt to mitigate this. The free market can’t provide sufficient housing because the sort of government regulation you never see conservatives protesting against prevents the free market from working.
Sure, I’ll give up my car in a world where it’s not a big deal to get around without one. And my wife and I will stop taking the plane from DC/Baltimore to Tampa when we can hop on a 200 mph bullet train and be there in four hours, rather than taking two days each way by car. Because time is a precious resource.
We really do need systemic changes to address global warming. Individual choices are nice, but they’re not going to move the needle much unless governmental action makes it natural for individuals to make better, more climate-friendly decisions, especially in the ‘large effect’ bucket.
End of rant.
Kurzgesagt has a 16-minute video that covers the arguments in this threads, including the strident ones.
you probably know how I’d vote.
There are some misapprehensions here. The size of pre-industrial cities was limited to about 500k (Rome was estimated to be about 650k but that was exceptional), and for the most part these cities were a horrorshow of sanitation and hygiene, prone to frequent epidemics of easily preventable disease. Most preindustrial urbanites lived in what we would consider abject poverty, with essentially no health care and poor nutrition, and literacy was the exclusive purview of elite leaders and a priestly class. Warfare and raiding were regular occurrences, as were devastating fires. Of course, most people could not travel far from where they were born, had little access or awareness of the outside world, and were largely constrained in knowledge by whatever superstition and mythology that was presented by what were often state-imposed religions.
Hunter-gatherer life may have been better overall, but was even more limited to tribal affiliations with little opportunity to learn or do things outside of that sanctioned by tribal leaders, and the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was subject to the vagaries of changes in climate and biome which could drive tribes to extinction and migration, notwithstanding conflicts with other tribes and groups. The “art, music, stories, recipes”, et cetera are mostly lost to time because even what was recorded was not done in an enduring way, and for the vast majority of people the extent of awareness of any exploration was likely limited to their migratory distance.
For all of the complaints about modern life and a world the resources of which we exploit without consideration for downstream effects, we understand more about the nature of the world and have access to more cultures and widely disseminated ideas than any time in human history. While that has not eliminated superstition and irrational belief, you at least have the choice to seek factual information and make decisions for yourself vice having to accept whatever dogma dictated by your elders.
As detrimental as the obtuse use of fossil fuels is in our immediate future, coal, and then natural gas and petroleum made possible our exploration and advances in science and communication. That we should have been using this to bootstrap into more sustainable fuels is obvious now (and I would argue should have been obvious by the 1970s) but blocked by commercial interests reluctant to change that might compromise their profits and political powers whose endurance hinged on their control of hydrocarbon energy resources. I don’t think a return to the false, nostalgic view of a romantic pre-industrial life (and all of the hardship, famine, and death that would entail) is the solution we should be seeking, but if we don’t find a better path we may be heading there anyway.
Stranger
Does it explain how eating organic helps? There are some other good reasons for doing so but combating climate change?
So I’d vote fossil-fuel-driven industrialization was worth it, as long as the knock-on effects don’t destroy civilization and the world’s ecosystems. Ask me again in 50 years.
Modern industrial society may be humanity’s “Peter Principle”. We could have fixed this problem and collectively (at least, for the people able to make the decision to shift from fossil fuels) choose otherwise in favor of near term profitability. And no, Marxism is not the answer, at least based upon every widescale attempt to apply it to industrialized societies.
Stranger
Working from home should be on the list. I’ve cut my driving to less than half compared to pre COVID.
So should solar homes. We have a passive solar house. It’s 5 degrees Fahrenheit out but the house is perfectly comfortable. Heat stove is not on. Good 'ole Sol sure is though.