For some people the potential money they make justifies the change, the environment be damned. They'll bend over backwards to rationalize it with false equivalencies as either being benign or actually benevolent when in truth it is neither.
I can see why seeing someone else making poor choices wasting their own money, making their quality of life worse, and destroying our shared environment, could be upsetting.
In a way it's worse than seeing strip mining, or those people who fish with dynamite, or people who litter. At least all those people are benefiting from their environmental destruction.
Your assertion that people wouldn't damage the environment in the pursuit of self enrichment is possibly the most naive thing I've ever seen written down.
It also flies in the face of 'hard data' like climate change, pollution of waterways and the air, extermination of species and all the other stuff people do in pursuit of money.
I don't believe that's true, it is a valid point: a lot of us talk a good game about caring for the environment, but when push comes to shove we are unwilling to give up luxuries we've grown accustomed to.
Sometimes I think people who blindly continue their enviro-rituals are somehow worshipping — it’s more about what it costs them than how much it actually moves the needle.
Caring for the environment is not a religion, and the earth is not a god who demands sacrifice. But it is a precious resource worth protecting.
It turns out that people aren't great at recognizing that something is clearly unsustainable when there is a billion dollar marketing budget being spent on preventing them from recognizing it.
I'm not sure whether your question is some kind of flippant accusation, but in case you're being genuine: I think the poster you quoted is saying something like:
if I could afford to do the right thing for the planet, I would - but I cannot afford to and am forced to do something which I know is detrimental.
How dare you not accept responsibility for changing your lifestyle for the environment despite the facts of who is actually doing most of the damage?!?! This doesn’t fit the narrative of personal responsibility and allow for the virtue signaling of personal environmentalism.
I’ve noticed this too. There’s a certain religious fervor to it, where the only acceptable options to address a threat to the environment must involve some pain or cost. Solutions that increase abundance, or don’t require suffering, are at best suspect at worst unspeakable.
Consider that your emotional desire to feel smug and contrarian are being quite effectively manipulated by the wealthy industries funding the people whose ideas you’re repeating.
Environmentalism has a long history of scientists sounding alarms which turned out to be accurate, and your uninformed assertion otherwise is doing your credibility no service here.
Some environmentalists are anti-technology types or nihilists, who look forward with pleasure at the idea of humanity suffering for its hubris. The only solution they'll consider is people changing their behavior for moral reasons, which is comfortingly unlikely.
They're not fans of other environmentalists discussing happier ideas, like setting up incentives for economic and technological growth beyond fossil fuels.
I want to (and do) spend money to lessen our impact on the environment, and I want to do more, but I've met environmentalists who unironically wish that humanity would cease to exist. I am not interested in appeasing them.
I am doubly uninterested in environmental policy that encourages bad options over much-better-but-still-imperfect options.
Disclaimer: this comment is not about environmentalism or even the environmental impact. I’m not wading in those waters with HN.
It’s difficult to see this as a net positive given the financial hardship brought about to even make this headline a reality (note that even the headline is misleading and requires context).
It’s a bit like the person who goes out and purchases a vehicle, spends countless hours away from his family working on it, takes out additional loans to modify it, crashes it, repairs it and then wins 2nd place at the local meetup. You have to ask yourself, at what point was this worth it?
Exactly this. Plus some perceived unfairness because people who do not care about the environment have an advantage over you and also a better lifestyle.
People change the environment themselves by choosing that over the alternative. If you don't like the thing that other people chose that's a fair opinion to have, but it's hard to argue that harm was caused by it.
Yet you accused people trying to reduce their impact on the environment as doing it just to 'feel good'; why do you assume they need to feel good about anything?.. I don't think it's constructive to disparage people who are attempting to reduce their impact on the environment.
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