This comment seems at odds with one you posted yesterday, which said that individual responsibility for climate change doesn't extend beyond the voting booth. But unless I'm misunderstanding this latest comment, it suggests that we individuals are wrong to want private transportation, that we should be happy with taking whatever public transportation is available and walking the rest of the way. Even when public transportation is expanded as you say it should be, that still won't be the same as taking a car all the way from one building to another. Assuming that the point is to put an end to the negative impact of private transportation on the climate, this suggests that we are in fact responsible for changing our lifestyle to address climate change. Am I misunderstanding?
The obvious contrapositive to this is what happened during the pandemic: everyone stopped driving for a couple months and it had... Almost no impact. The curtain is pulled back now: the call for "individual responsibility" is exposed as cynical the PR tactic it is... Much like "plastic recycling". The fact is 1) Big corporations 2) Big corporations and 3) Big corporations in concert with the legislators they've captured are responsible for climate change. As an individual the most effective behavior you can exhibit to limit climate change is to vote with 1) Your Democracy while you still have it and more importantly 2) Your wallet.
One can believe in the reality of a problem and rationalize one's own contribution.
I'm a prime example - I don't need to run a vehicle, I could take the bus to work. Of course, I'd spend two more hours every day commuting, get behind on my sleep, and my health and work performance would suffer. It might be the best thing I could do for the climate. But I'm convinced enough that I'm on the side of the better angels that I do this harm to my fellow organisms in hopes it will make me more effective where it counts.
If I was an Oligarch or world leader commuting to the biggest professional convention of the year, my considerations - and I daresay my decision - would be identical, just on a larger scale.
I wasn't suggesting we solve this problem through individual action. I'm not sure how you got that impression from my post. For what it's worth I agree with you: the focus on individual responsibility and personal guilt over climate change is the great distraction that has allowed corporations to continue polluting unabated.
The problem, and the point of my post, was that collective action can only be done by legislation, and in a democracy politicians are beholden to the electorate. Most people don't want to suffer higher prices for goods and services, so most people won't vote for any politicians that support policies that will have real impact on climate change.
This is probably an unpopular opinion amongst liberals like myself, but I personally think the idea that the "average joe" is going to be able to change their lifestyle and solve climate-change to be somewhat of a pipe-dream. If you want to live in an ecologically more-sustainable way (using renewable energy, becoming a vegetarian, avoiding disposables, etc), that's great! I honestly encourage that, and it's probably a good thing, I won't try and stop you.
However, I think it's unreasonable to expect everyone to do that on their own. For every person doing an ecologically responsible thing (taking trains instead of planes, taking public transit instead of driving, etc), there is just such a huge magnitude of people doing the "wrong" thing to cancel it out, largely because that (from a short-term-pragmatic-standpoint, the "wrong" thing is better) or at least cheaper. If you value your time at all, flying across the country is cheaper, meat is readibly available and inexpensive (and typically taste good), and driving to work is substantially easier than biking.
I don't know anything about ecology so I'll admit that I might regret writing this entire comment in a year, but it seems to me that the only way we're going to make a dent in climate change is to a) create technology that provides an experience that is competitive with the dirty version of something (electric cars could be a good example), or b) to start artificially taxing things that are really hurting the environment. If we started charging an extra dollar-per-gallon tax on gasoline, it would probably discourage people from driving as much, and put more economic incentive on point a).
I can commend someone not flying to conferences anymore, but I am afraid to say that I dont have the same self-discipline.
Sadly, these individual contributions don't move the needle much. Like you, I've made many personal choices to mitigate my impact on the climate and environment, but humans are fickle and driven by game-theoretic pressures. If everyone stopped driving, we would see change, but without a law or forcing function, people will act selfishly, causing a chain reaction of inaction.
This idea that fighting global warming has to start from individual behavior disregards the fact that lifestyle choices have social implications and are likewise constrained by social situations. Individuals are tied to their environment and free will meets constraints in reality. There are people who wish to adopt more sustainable lifestyles, but can't because it would make them unable to find a job, see their family and friends, move around, etc. Individual choices have a marginal impact. And this impact ofter comes with a high cost in terms of comfort.
The idea that change must come from individuals has been around for a long time, without much effect so far. I hope governments can support people who want to live in a way that is closer to their values (sustainability) by actively disincentivize irresponsible and destructive behavior.
Nature did not state that you personally should do any particular thing. They only pointed out that travel accounts for 8% of global emissions and growing (and at current carbon emissions levels the world will be altered dramatically and irrevocably).
Individual people’s personal sacrifices are barely going to dent global carbon emissions. We need to tackle these enormous global problems systematically. For example, we might be able to substitute less carbon-intensive means of long-distance transportation, impose significant taxes on jet fuel, figure out ways of discouraging business travel by plane, or raise public awareness of closer-to-home vacation destinations.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with taking personal steps, but by themselves they are largely worthless. It’s like optimizing an I/O bound program by speeding up some of the arithmetic operations not on any critical path.
Telling people who continue to commute by car or use grid electricity or travel internationally that they don’t really care about climate change is idiotic – not just useless but actively counterproductive because it makes people dismiss you as an arrogant jerk.
What’s needed are large-scale policy changes (international agreements, public investment in research and alternative infrastructure, changes to zoning laws, carbon taxes, regulations of agricultural runoff, crackdown on tax evasion and money laundering and international bribery, ...), which takes significant amounts of political organizing effort, money, and political capital (including flying various leaders around on jets).
I was talking about individuals but thanks for pointing about one of the biggest scams regarding climate change.
It had to be said that I am not at all opposed to the idea of accepting one's responsibility. It's just that how would we implement something like that in a non-dystopian way?
Although personal responsibility is a factor for emissions, my thesis is that it’s not the primary factor.
When I talk about systemic issues, I talk specifically about the distribution of personal choices people can make that lead to outcomes. Taken into context, this means that if I only have one choice for electricity provider, and my investor owned utility makes a decision to burn coal to generate electricity, there’s very little I can do to change that. If the area I live in has only single family zoning, things are so spread out that it means that most people need a car for basic human needs like going to work and getting groceries. In my city electricity and transportation represents 80% of emissions. These systems have big impacts. You can throw all the personal responsibility that you want at that and not make any meaningful changes.
We don’t have to have these systems, you could empower the community to make power purchasing agreements to buy electricity on the wholesale market that would be cleaner than what the utility provides. You could pass mixed use zoning to allow developers the autonomy to build commercial/residential mid rise buildings. People could walk to a lot more stuff. We just choose not to do that.
This is a matter of waltzing into your town hall, state legislature, and congress and demanding that we allow people the ability to make better choices. If people had real choices, we’d have better outcomes.
You can't fix this alone. You can't even lead by example and get results, because a sustainable lifestyle in terms of climate change essentially has you living under a bridge if you account for your share of infrastructure. Personal responsibility is just not going to be the solution, so we need to look elsewhere.
I need to clarify here that I agree with GP that taking personal action is empowering and can lead you down a virtuous path. I just think that the goal needs to be changing society, not changing your own life. So if you want to make a difference, you have to be part of society. You have to take part in the economy, even if that means you will personally directly contribute more to the problem than you would if you went full hermit in the woods. There's no simple solution, but if there is one at all, it has to involve a lot of people working together.
I changed my behaviors a very long time ago, when it was clear that climate change was going to be a full-blown existential crisis.
I reduced my consumption of everything by a lot. I own a car, but rarely drive -- instead, I bicycle. I prefer to do business with companies that are at least somewhat conscientious about environmental effects. I vote.
I'm not sure what more I can really do, honestly. Most of the things we as a species do that are problematic aren't really things individuals have a lot of control over.
As far as I'm concerned, humanity's most fundamental responsibility is to lower its emissions, as much and as permanently as possible.
I am sick and tired of seeing the focus of this task muddied by instead focusing on who's responsible, mixing social justice with climate science, etc. I could not agree more with the spirit of this stuff, but however well-intentioned it may well be, it only serves to distract and fracture and slow us down.
Yes, 10 corporations are responsible for 75% of emissions (or whatever the meme statistic is); yes, celebrities flying short distances on private planes is egregious; yes, your own personal carbon footprint pales in comparison. And yes, it feels nice to abdicate personal responsibility and say "those corporations/rich people should be responsible." Great, now what?
To all of that I say: all of the above. We need everything from sweeping legislation to individual action, and everything in between, with as little bickering or blame-shifting as possible.
You're absolutely right that in the scheme of it all the impact may be small but there is climate change and there is also a huge problem of waste which needs addressing.
I agree that a single individuals actions will have minimal impact, but isn't it the individual that makes up the whole?
"Individuals changing their lifestyle isn’t going to accomplish anything."
Why do you say that?
Does any evidence exist that individuals making changes doesn't do anything?
For example, my partner and I no longer own cars, that's hopefully two whole cars off the road for practically a lifetime. Does this have zero impact ?
Also think of it this way, imagine if all of the people in the world right now who couldn't afford to fly, own cars and consume as much as you, could afford to do so and proceeded to do so without thinking about the consequences, it would be 2050 pretty quickly.
I agree legislation and emissions trading schemes etc are important but i don't see it happening fast enough just yet. So why not take some ownership of your own and do your best in the meantime ?
This attitude is exactly the problem. You twist it around to pin the blame on green activists somehow not doing enough in their personal lives, and no matter what they do, it's never enough. If he had given up his car, you'd ask when he'll give up meat. If he'd given up meat you'd ask when he'll put solar panels on his house, or whatever other excuse you can come up with to feel superior and justify doing nothing.
These things only work if everyone does them. If we want people to give up their cars we need massive investment in electrified public transit. Without that it is impossible for most people to survive without cars. A few people who have the freedom and the will to suffer under public transit choosing to give up their cars will do nothing to stop climate change.
I think there's a stronger argument for personal responsibility with carbon emissions than for voting. If you buy one new car, that increases the demand for cars by 1, which increases the demand for steel by about 1 tonne, which increases the production of steel by almost exactly 1 tonne. (It also increases the price of steel slightly, but probably not enough to decrease the demand for steel by even 1 kg.) Producing a tonne of steel emits 1.85 tonnes of CO2, so in a year or two, there will be 1.85 tonnes of CO2 more in the atmosphere than if you hadn't bought that car.
By contrast, the result of any one person's vote in the 02020 election was nil. I don't think there's any person in the world whose vote in 02020, if you'd changed it to some other candidate, would have resulted in a different candidate winning. Whether this is valid consequentialist moral reasoning or not is related to, for example, whether participants in a firing squad are killers.
On the other hand, if you live in Los Angeles, your life is going to suck pretty hard without a car; you won't be able to go to college and you probably won't have a job. Good luck convincing anyone in LA to follow your example after that! Unilaterally opting out of car culture mostly hurts you, though it also has a first-order effect of helping the planet a little bit, in a way that giving your vote to a marginal candidate doesn't. Substantially reducing your carbon footprint requires not self-sacrifice but some kind of collective action, like the massive installation of solar panels across California over the past few years, which in turn was made profitable by the mostly Chinese research and development that has dropped the resources required for solar panels by over an order of magnitude over the last decade.
Or, for example, like the collective action in which NCL (owned by Firestone, General Motors, Standard Oil, and Mack Trucks) bought up the nearly-bankrupt Los Angeles public transportation system in 01944, an act for which they were convicted of antitrust violations in 01949, and converted it from electric to internal combustion engines over the following 19 years, completing the job in 01963.
Corporations are organs of collective action—"coordination", as you put it—so they can sometimes achieve things that individual efforts cannot; because all the people in a corporation can act together (for example, under the command of management) to do something that would be counterproductive if only a few of them were doing it.
Also, though, there are better uses of computers than congratulating yourself on seeing through "obvious sophistry" and not being so "dull-witted" as to think [insert obvious strawman argument].
I strongly disagree here. How are individuals not to blame if they refuse to bear the costs for all the negative externalities they cause?
We still live in a democracy, and have known about climate change for over 40 years- the central problem is just that people are (still) NOT willing to pay the price to avoid/mitigate emissions.
Because the options are plentiful, like just taxing CO2 emissions and imports, throwing massive funds at low-CO2 energy sources + storage, but taxpayers are simply unwilling- blaming corporations and politicians NOW is the absolute height of hypocrisy.
Again, I honestly don't give a shit about your personal choices, I just think that, collectively, we should disincentivize general behaviors that are exceptionally bad for the climate. The fact that you care that I care is exactly the type of anti-partisanship hostility that makes organizing on this subject so difficult.
Any theory of moral sentiments must be universal (this is my background in academic philosophy talking), so an moral sentiments I have must apply to you as well, otherwise they wouldn't actually be moral sentiments. That doesn't mean that I think anyone making different choices than I do is a "bad person" or anything (my other comment in this thread specifically discusses how difficult the tradeoffs for urbanism have become in this country), I only mean that I think that you should generally care about other people, even people that aren't born yet, at least collectively (gasp: how pearl-clutching of me).
Again, I'm a fatalist at this point, simply because the level of push back to any non-symbolic change has been much more than I thought it would be for all collective changes needed. We have a few tricks up our sleeves in the form of geoengineering, and the eventual dominance of effectively free electricity in the future, but as it stands, I think it's going to get much worse before it starts getting better, and caring about whether someone lives in the suburbs isn't worth the energy.
No, that's clearly not what I'm saying. I'm not arguing that people shouldn't do these things, I'm arguing that we should be clear about what they actually accomplish. I do all of these things, but I don't kid myself that it's making a lick of difference, because it's not.
The individual action idea is dangerous because it:
- Blames the victims. This problem is being caused by fossil-fuel companies and the policies that support them. We must stop them from emitting and from poisoning the public dialog on these issues
- It's classist and priveledged. Only rich people have these kinds of choices - poor people can't always make these kinds of choices in their lives.
The only solution is massive collective action that drives us towards a net-negative world.
I'd rather have somebody drive a Yukon and vote for people who will put in a Green New Deal than someone who eats vegan and votes for Jill Stein.
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