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Comment by cfarm | Hacker News Reader

These articles always leave me wondering what I can do today to contribute. Not money, not scientific research, just daily change like not using plastic bottles (or something).

This problem is always presented as a massive unsolvable thing that the government or someone with deep pockets needs to contribute focus to.

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A few weeks ago I was outright downvoted right here on HN (edit: and also right now, within literally the first 30 seconds of posting this very comment!) for merely suggesting people start by getting their companies and coworkers to see business travel as a carbon liability to be minimized rather than a work perk to be maximized. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to how much we're genuinely willing to even consider entertaining the remote possibility of sacrificing from our own lives.

i upvote you because i agree with you.

5 year Oxford Ûni study concludes not supporting the meat & dairy industry is the single best thing an individual can do

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...

Well, to a degree, that's precisely right. Only a massive movement will fix this systemic problem. Throwing out plastic bottles won't fix the problem, although I wish it would.

A movement starts with a small number of people who believe in it. If an article convinced me to change something in my daily life, I'd probably tell other people to change it too.

Better than an article that leaves me with no action points.

Why not money? In a capitalist society, it's the one thing that really counts. Money represents resource allocation.

Trying to solve the problem by changing your own behavior, and only your own behavior, is low-order thinking. The real problem is that the cheapest behaviors are not also the most eco-friendly behaviors. Sure, you personally might be able to afford to (for example) pay more for glass containers, mentally chalking up the difference as an unaccounted externality in plastic bottles. But until that difference is accounted in the price, society's behavior will not change.

If you really want to solve the problem properly, it's better to spend your money on things that will change everyone's behavior, not just your own. That means things like lobbyists and scientific research. It's less personally satisfying but more effective.

Not everyone has money to give.

Not everyone has the freedom to make arbitrary lifestyle changes either, if they don't make economic sense. This isn't about only taking action that's available to everyone. It's about each of us doing all that we can.

Forgive me if I misread, but you seemed to exclude monetary contribution as an option on principle, not out of poverty. What principle?

I'm always left wondering what every person regardless of socio-economic standing can do to contribute.

There's going on 8 billion people in the world. Whatever little things you do to make yourself feel better and shed the guilt they created in your mind isn't going to fix or slow down anything.

This is what they want to do--program your head so that you will accept a more totalitarian form of permanent global government that you can't question because it is all based on an un-provable environmental need. It is a brilliant tactic, to be sure. Every solution I have seen for this includes some kind of neo-serfdom where I have no rights. If I were in charge I would take every leftist and globalist I could find and hang them from the nearest lamp post. That would be a very carbon-neutral solution not only to overpopulation but also to the mind plague that dreams this crap up.

Also, hasn't the earth been warming since the last ice age 10,000 years ago? It is disingenuous to start graphs in the 1880s and then blame human industrialization. Oh hey, didn't Marxism also get started in the 1880s? Maybe Marxism caused global warming?

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