> I mean, if it's true I feel like my coworkers who talk about this kind of stuff all the time would trade in their SUVs and start carpooling... You know, actually try to do something about it.
The problem is that no amount of "personal responsibility" is going to put a dent in the problem. The overwhelming majority of emissions come from industry, and the only way industry is going to change is by fiat, and a carbon price is probably the most efficient class of solution.
And this "personal responsibility" mythology is intentionally cultivated by polluters. They want you to think that we can just change our lifestyles, because the actual solutions will invariably curb their profits.
This means that the most effective thing you or I can do is vote, advocate, write our representatives, and donate to political causes, but 3/4 of those aren't outwardly visible to you and the other looks like "comments on the internet" in many cases.
That said, I doubt 7 is the right number. I'm of the impression that the error margins are so large that we're not sure if we're already in "irreversible runaway global warming" territory or whether that remains decades off. Certainly "7" is too precise. In whichever case, urgency is absolutely warranted.
>Also, actually doing something about it takes effort/investment from everyone, not just government and corporations.
This is pretty much the standard line corporations throw out to try and shirk responsibility. This is why they've always been so keen on recycling relative to other, more effective methods, for instance.
The implicit message is that rather than the company being forced to change by fiat, "people" just need to take more personal responsibility.
The latter is a pipe dream and the former (e.g. carbon taxes) is the only way of dealing with climate change but they don't care, of course - their profits are at stake.
Hence they always prescribe more personal responsibility.
> Even the most environmentally aware people around me pretty much just eat less meat, but they haven't actually changed their ways. So I don't expect the average F150 driving steak eater to suddenly start changing their ways.
What do you expect people in general to do? Granted, driving an F150 is not an environmentally friendly activity, but suppose they all cut their "carbon footprint" [0] by 50%. How much would that help?
The answer is actually "not much." It turns out that 70% of greenhouse emissions have come from ~100 corporations. [1] Until we, collectively, do something about their practices, there's precious little that individuals can do to get us to net zero.
Individuals have no power to influence corporations in this way, either. It needs to come from things like carbon taxes -- and not just from one country, but worldwide.
There's far more that can be said here, but I think I've successfully conveyed the point: feeling hopeless in the face of all this is actually pretty logical. At this point, we really are basically doomed to suffer the effects of 1.5 degrees of warming, and possibly much more, no matter what we do right now.
I don't want to oversell this to the point of saying we should all just roll over and die; by all means, we should all work on reducing our consumption, because at this point, the choices that are going to provide us a better future in the next couple of decades are essentially those that reduce consumption. The other alternatives are reducing the number of people on Earth, or drastically increasing energy efficiency across the board. A couple decades' worth of energy efficiency increases isn't going to do it, and if we choose not to reduce consumption, the effects of climate change will ensure that the number of people on Earth decreases, whether we like it or not.
So, we're essentially left at reducing consumption. But, as you've mentioned, people don't seem to want to do that. I don't know how to deal with that at a personal level, myself. Do you? Is it any wonder teenagers don't?
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[0]: Make no mistake, this is just a propaganda term intended to blame you and not the actual (mostly corporate) actors responsible for making most of the emissions.
> Every person on this planet has the power and responsibility to change and act now
What more power beyond, say, recycling and using public transportation can an individual person have? Note how this narrative is literally shifting the blame from corporations, industries, and governments to individual people. "It's your fault you're not doing enough".
Meanwhile, Germany alone, thanks to the actions of its government, is responsible for more carbon emissions on a single night than I can even theoretically reduce over a milion lifetimes.
They shut down their nuclear reactors, and right now even on a windy night they burn coal and gas to make up for the difference: https://imgur.com/a/3bYudyd
> You could sort your yogurt pots in to separate boxes from now until the end of days... It still wont offset the carbon cost of one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference.
I find this type of attitude baffling. Of course the actions of an individual wouldn't be able to offset the emissions of a private jet or whatever, but that's not a reason to not take individual action. Your individual actions can't solve global warming because global warming isn't caused by one person driving their car to work, or even one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference. It's caused because there's hundreds of million of people driving their car to work. "You can [insert some sort of lifestyle change to reduce carbon emissions] but it still wont offset the carbon cost of one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference" is a great way to ensure hundreds of Americans continue to drive SUVs to work, buy meat at the grocery store, and take their annual trans-US/atlantic flight, all of which adds up to 5 billion tons of co2 produced per year.
> Think of this problem in terms of how many people would need to change the way they do things.
Looking to the future, virtually the whole of humanity will drastically need to change the way they do things to cope with the changes in climate. It's likely too late now, but there would be far less changes needed if we stop pumping out so much CO2 into the air and thus reduce the likelihood of climate catastrophes.
> And how many financial interests (with the resources to actively lobby against change) would be affected too.
Putting financial interests ahead of the health of our environments is how we got into this mess.
> If you have an obvious answer that takes those two things into account I'd love to hear it!
You've framed the problem in an unhelpful way - you're asking for a solution that perpetuates unsustainable practices.
>In the absence of that, individuals aren't taking actions that could help (or reduce harm) either.
There is no way for individual action to solve climate change, that's just a way for business to place the blame and guilt on us. Solving climate change is necessarily a collective action problem, which is why I believe we aren't going to solve it. We're too selfish and unwilling to take the drastic steps we need to take and it's only going to get more difficult to solve the problem. We're all trapped in a car that's starting to smoke and make unsettling noises, yet we're cheerily driving along hoping that it will be cheaper to fix later if we ignore it now. The car is going to break down soon enough and we're all going to be stranded in the desert until we expire.
> Nobody, and especially not politicians, want to do what's required to keep it below 1.5C.
This is essentially the crux of the issue, no matter what anyone says. If we all wanted to, we could easily stop the pollution, at a possibly great expense to our privileged standard of living, yet that's just not happening.
Even if society wasn't all on the same page in regards to this decision, there are still plenty of actions that could result in such an outcome - think along the lines of protests at an unprecedented scale, both inside of the industries and outside of them, civil disobedience etc.
Yet that clearly won't happen until the living conditions get really tough and people are pushed over the edge in one way or another (consider the protests around 2008 in many countries, or something like Euromaidan in a different context). Until then, it's easier for companies and politicians to ensure that they won't be held responsible through lobbying and misinformation (as an example, consider what the tobacco industry did in the last century) and for most people it's easier to share whatever pro-environmental posts they like on social media to feel good, without actually doing anything.
The problem is that the legal things that you can do to oppose this trajectory are relatively limited (voting isn't entirely working) and many like myself would prefer not to do the illegal things (protests, depending on jurisdiction might be illegal) to not throw away their careers or not risk their livelihoods.
On a more positive note, there are initiatives out there where you can at the very least donate some money towards improving the climate situation: https://www.wren.co/ (can't comment on their integrity in detail, though)
Of course, this probably doesn't matter much when large corporations can just pollute more than private individuals will ever be able to make up for in any meaningful way. It's kind of sad to see this, here's hoping that better people are voted into the office, but sadly I'm too cynical to genuinely believe that.
> Buy less stuff, travel less, turn down your heating/AC, eat less meat and dairy.
I'm going to repeat this again -- the vast majority of emissions are from industrial processes. Optimising the industrial processes to reduce emissions (as opposed to reduce costs) will result in emissions improvements.
Yes, in theory if the entire planet reduced its meat intake by 50% this would be a massive improvement -- but so would killing 50% of people. If your proposed solution to the problem is not viable from the outset you aren't proposing a solution, you're just deflecting blame.
Also -- contrary to popular belief, personal transport like cars (or commercial planes) are far from the largest emitters.
> Airline companies don't burn kerosene for the hell of it, they burn it because people keep buying plane tickets and keep shipping things by air freight. If we stop buying plane tickets and air freighted goods, they go out of business and so they stop burning kerosene.
Planes are actually more fuel-efficient than cars per-head. And planes are far from the largest polluters in "transportation" -- that would be trucks (especially older trucks that are under-maintained).
> The blame game over climate change is just blatant buck-passing.
You are buck-passing by arguing that it's the sole responsibility of the public to solve this crisis. Not corporations which knew about the effects of climate-change in the 60s and tried to hide it from the public and government. Not governments which are placating their donors by passing (or abolishing) milk-toast regulations to fix the problem.
I do my best to reduce my carbon emissions but that is not going to make any palpable difference.
If we wanted to go to war, then it would be the government's responsibility to organise the war effort. But if we want to stop humanity from going into war due to resource shortage all of a sudden it's about "personal responsibility".
Do we (as a society/species) though? If we cared about climate change we'd be doing something about climate change. And we're really not.
Everybody cares about somebody else making changes in their life to reduce pollution but how many people actually make meaningful change in their own lives?
And if you ask somebody to consider drastic change in their own life – driving as little as possible, never flying in airplanes, buying significantly less stuff in general, not having kids, not eating meat, living in apartments rather than single-family homes, etc. they'll just say the corporations are the problem and anything they do wouldn't matter at all.
I'm kind of at the point where I say we just all let our own metaphorical 4x4 engines run and see what happens. Most of us reading this will be long dead before anything heinous happens to us (or we're wealthy enough to be insulated enough from the effects to where we'll get by OK).
> Every person on this planet has the power and responsibility to change and act now, we do not need to wait for government and corporations to change.
Acting responsibly makes us feel better, but little else. The fact of the matter is the problem is not individuals, it's government and industry. What can any individual do to stop the burning of fossil fuels? To stop deforestation? To curb industrial agriculture? To stop the concrete and glass industries? To clean up shipping?
I'm not being cynical, you're just focusing on the wrong people. Every individual on earth could begin to reduce their carbon contribution to nothing, and it wouldn't make a dent on Climate Change, It isn't us, it really isn't. We can only elect so many liberals and environmentalist conscious politicians, because the stupid is very strong in our country. To fix the problem, we need to focus on the problem, of which more than 99.9% are the list of major carbon and greenhouse gas contributors. I think we need to start with energy production, and silence the entitled energy hogs insisting on more and more energy no matter the consequences. Then work down from there, agriculture, construction, glass, shipping, etc. And that will make a difference if we could just target the top 10 greenhouse gas producers.
>...individual incentives aren't aligned with group incentives... IMO human society simply isn't mature enough to deal with this problem.
I think it's an hypocrisy issue primarily. The people shouting for us to make a change won't make it first.
If even a majority of the people that say we should lower our carbon foot print bought only food and clothing produced without dirty electricity sources, didn't fly in private planes and only drove Prius/hybrid/electric cars, etc... (for starters)
Then maybe, just maybe they could convince everyone else it's even _possible_ to do what they expect everyone else to do to save the planet.
> Apparently I've done the opposite, because that's more than I drive in a week now. ;)
Ha! Pandemics, eh? :)
> But not to be trite, yes I would have
This feels to me like over-egging the pudding - but getting into this discussion is really more of a question of philosophy than climate science, so it's a bit of a distraction.
It seems that, beyond the semantics of what constitutes "individual action", we seem to agree with what's needed:
> advocating for individual action has always meant making changes in the aggregate behaviour of individuals.
> Make it so that the opportunities to commute start to disappear.
> Preventing climate change is going to take massive changes that no companies or goverments actually want to do
In the most polluting (directly and indirectly) wealthy democracies, the blame can mostly be placed on us as individuals. The politicians and businesses are mostly catering to what individuals want, a systemic problem that we seem to struggle to solve. A country’s pollution is approximately proportional to its wealth. To fix the problem requires huge changes to our individual wealth.
Few individuals want to make the required changes: individually we buy into cheap denial narratives, green-washing. No democracy can act as a benevolent dictator to force us to make the radical changes required to our priorities, our wants and needs. The majority of us are sold on deception, because we want to buy into the deception.
Edit: a few simple assumptions means for a me to capture my carbon with trees, I need to plant ˜1 Hectare (4 acres) of trees, and never harvest the trees. I do intend to do it (it will mean some belt tightening), but it doesn’t address the problem of removing my past CO2 emissions, and would use up 20% of New Zealand’s land to do it if all 5 million of us wanted to. “New Zealand has a total of 10.1 million hectares of forests, covering 38% of the land. 2.1 million hectares are plantation forest.”. “The yearly carbon dioxide balancing rate varies between 21.77 and 31.5 kilogram carbon dioxide for each tree. To offset one ton of Carbon dioxide, between 31 and 46 trees are required. One should use a ratio of 24 kilograms of carbon dioxide per tree and an estimate of five hundred trees per hectare to get the values.”. “New Zealand's gross carbon dioxide emissions in 2018 were 7.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, (CO 2-e) per capita.”. Edit 2: Belt tightening because it isn’t cheap to buy one hectare - far far cheaper if I can find another few tens of people that want to do the same thing).
> The vast majority of people absolutely 100% do not care about their carbon output. They care about their wallets and quality of life.
This. The abject failure of airlines' "pay an extra $XX on your ticket to offset the carbon emissions of your flight" showed that the vast majority of people are virtue-signalling about climate change but not prepared to make any actual changes to their lifestyle for it.
I've had arguments with "green" friends about their use of cars (I haven't owned a car for >10 years - I prefer walking/cycling). They care desperately about the planet, but they care more about not losing the convenience of their personal car.
I notice the emphasis has shifted recently onto regulation of polluting industries, such as oil companies. I think this is in part because of the complete failure to change people's lifestyles. It's easier to regulate 100 large companies than get 1 billion people to accept responsibility for their lifestyle. But it'll be interesting to see what happens when those companies pass the cost of that regulation onto their customers.
> The biggest challenge in climate change (for example) is that it's simply happening on too long a timescale for the average person to pay much attention to it.
I disagree. This may be a problem, but I think the bigger problem is one that was described in a post on HN a few weeks back. Namely, that most of the folks advocating for action and sacrifice on climate change are themselves unwilling to lead by example, e.g. stop using air travel, give up or very sharply reduce automobile usage, etc.
This leads a lot of people to either 1) Write the whole thing off as some BS cooked up by elites or; 2) conclude that no one, including those who claim to care most about the issue is actually going to do anything about the problem.
You can't have Congressmen and Senators calling climate change an "existential threat" while they're hopping on a commercial airliner every week to fly back home from DC. While these folks may be correct in their assessment of climate change, their own behavior completely destroys any credibility they may have had on the issue.
> People aren't buying electric cars and installing solar panels on their homes out of self sacrifice.
This idea is simply wrong. Many of them are doing exactly that, they are using their brains and making sacrifices in their daily life in hopes that collective action in reducing impact will at least give us the time to course correct or reduce the impact of our collective failure with respect to climate change. If you don't know anyone doing this, that's because of who you know.
> I view the transformation to a low carbon future as happening primarily through the existence of natural economic incentives to do so.
Yes, we will need economic pressures to get everyone overall to conform to a sustainable lifestyle, mainly because we cannot coordinate global human action any other way. No, those pressures are not "natural" ones unless you mean as a result of destroying Earth's climate to the point change is necessary for even day to day survival. We have to choose our future, however hard it may be.
> You could sort your yogurt pots in to separate boxes from now until the end of days... It still wont offset the carbon cost of one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference.
I agree, this isn't a problem that can be solved by a single person's actions. We need large scale solutions, but I'd still caution against the kind of thinking that lets you fool yourself into thinking that your own actions don't have any impact. I hear that sort of argument from people who say "who cares if I throw my trash directly into the ocean or dump my motor oil down the drain! Sure, it's bad but it's nothing compared to the carbon footprint of blah blah blah" yet we've seen how a large number of people acting selfishly in small ways leads to large problems too.
I'm not saying you're doing this personally, but it's one thing to call out the unnecessary waste of others, and another to use the actions of others to justify being a smaller part of the problem.
>Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally, now.
This being effective seems contrary to everything we know about economics. If even a huge portion of people voluntary lower consumption or energy usage, it frees up that energy to be consumed more cheaply by other people and so the overall consumption is hardly impacted. Historically this is the case.
If you don't price an externality into the market with a tax or credit or it's useless.
Put another way: if you're seriously concerned about global climate change, and do not support pigouvian taxes or other policy that will actually have an impact, you're not seriously concerned about climate change - and I can't take your concerns seriously because you don't. You're just concerned about projecting the appearance that you care.
> I believe this is one of the largest challenges when trying to make effective changes in the system to address climate change: those whose actions can create the largest changes are not the ones who have to bear the burden first or directly.
You mean the corporations and companies that continue to produce emissions on a massive scale while trying to constantly shame me and tell me what a bad person I am for having the audacity to drive to the grocery story once a week or so?
The problem is that no amount of "personal responsibility" is going to put a dent in the problem. The overwhelming majority of emissions come from industry, and the only way industry is going to change is by fiat, and a carbon price is probably the most efficient class of solution.
And this "personal responsibility" mythology is intentionally cultivated by polluters. They want you to think that we can just change our lifestyles, because the actual solutions will invariably curb their profits.
This means that the most effective thing you or I can do is vote, advocate, write our representatives, and donate to political causes, but 3/4 of those aren't outwardly visible to you and the other looks like "comments on the internet" in many cases.
That said, I doubt 7 is the right number. I'm of the impression that the error margins are so large that we're not sure if we're already in "irreversible runaway global warming" territory or whether that remains decades off. Certainly "7" is too precise. In whichever case, urgency is absolutely warranted.
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